Notes from a Room

X and I sit in my room and nod with tiredness, look around at the walls, at each other, at nothing. We’ve reached the point where only black American roots music will help us, I tell him, sitting up. Sit still and listen for once, I tell him, as I look up Alan Lomax Archive. We sit and sip, smoke and sway as I put on song after song, from field hollering to prison chants to call-and-response preaching. Pure music, I tell him, the most moving music ever made, the voice of the body and mind in deep pain and joy. Country blues played on homemade instruments in raw recordings. A capella gospel. Shouting blues, soft plaintive blues, piercing harmonica blues. We go back and forth, listening to various versions of Cocaine Blues and Stack-O-Lee. I put on Appalachian songs and bluegrass, but return to black music. Black music conquers all, I tell X, it’s as powerful as a bottle of whiskey, if this doesn’t help us nothing will. I put on Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I put on the blind bluesmen, the ones who couldn’t work and learned to play the blues instead, the few who got recorded, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Gary Davis and the great Blind Willie McTell, and here we take a detour to Dylan’s homage song and his two great cover albums from the 90s as I read the liner notes of World Gone Wrong aloud to X, neither of us understanding them. We go from The Mississippi Sheiks to Skip James to Tommy Johnson, the tortured Robert Pete Williams, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.  We go from Son House to Big Bill Broonzy to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Willie Brown and back again, then to Ali Farka Touré who gives us a glimpse of where it all came from – tomorrow it’s African music, I say, tomorrow we’ll sit here all day and listen to African music… Then back to Robert Johnson, the greatest of them all, the one who transcended the genre once and for all, the one with the purest cry, and we feel buoyed and even allow ourselves a smile. What was it about the Delta? I ask X. Was it the heat, the swamps, the suffering?