Reading: America Sings the Blues

Okay, at first I was wondering why in the world are we reading this? After I realized what it was about I definitely began to engage more and become interested. I liked reading this because I enjoy poetry and I did like 5 projects about Langston Hughes in Elementary and Middle School. It basically talked about blues music and how slaves use to sing these songs to make them "feel better". I guess it made them escape reality for a little. Blues also influenced several genre's of music such as rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and gospel.

Although I read all of the poems, there were only a couple that made me actually think and want to reread. Bessie Smith's poem reminded me of a new age R&B song. The second to last line of the poem made me think like that, it was "Take me back baby, try me one more time". It seems like she is begging him and I don't think this is a "feel better" song. As I read Robert Johnson's poem, I began to think of his as a prayer, he said the Lord's name and it seemed like he was trying to tell more of a story from the time he woke up in the morning until whenever he wrote that poem.

Now I got interested when Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poems came up because he is by far one of my biggest poetic influences. His poem seems more like a blues poem that a slave would sing because he used the language and also words and actions that they could relate to. His use of broken English may throw some people off, but I could understand. In line 1 he says, "standing at de winder", although some people in the new age would not understand this, I bet slaves and blacks in his time did. I liked the short biographies above their poems and I saw that Paul was the only African American in his high school class and I think this was an amazing accomplishment for him. In W.H Auden's poem, I did not feel the sense of "feel better", it would have made me sadder to hear it. In Line 6 of his poem, he says " Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead". This makes me think of death, but in the reading it does say that blues was used to express death sometimes and I guess this did fit the category.

This Johnny Cash poem that he performed for Folsom State Prison was actually on CMT a couple of days ago and I think he related to the prisoners. I also think it was a good thing to see that white people could also sing blues too because it seemed to usually be associated with the slaves and with blacks. In his poem he says "not to play with guns" and similar phrases and I think that is brave to sing such a song in front of prisoners.