2. The Blues—the Song of the Walking Wounded

Jazz is the art of surprise, producing always the sudden and unexpected. But the blues is something else. Jazz has been developed into one of those intellectual art forms that scares people away. The blues can be faked. It is faked more today than ever before. But it is an emotional song and even the finest of blues singers cannot always possess true emotions, the real grief which is at the heart, in the soul.

Of course, I had heard the blues all my life. I had heard it all as a teenage jazz fan in America, travelling long distances to sit, perfectly still, listening with religious reverence to the great progressive jazzmen of the day. But I was never moved by the blues until I was a young soldier, marching along one long, desperately hot afternoon under a south Texas sun. We were marching four abreast, rifles slung, singing as we swung along.

An officer marched at the head of us. He did not sing. God knows how we hated them, the officers. We all hated them. The officer was only there for show. Like a fancy motor car radiator cap. Suddenly on our left there appeared this ghostly vision. All in white. Pure white. It was men. A prison work-gang. All black men dressed in white. They sang as they worked. They were not in chains, but men on horseback watched over them.

The men on horseback were unmoved, bored by the singing of the prison work-gang. Maybe they heard too much of it. But the beauty of their singing stirred us. We stopped singing our own silly song as we drew near them. Many of us were university graduates. Being soldiers in the infantry was the closest we would ever come, with luck, to joining the down-trodden of the earth.

The prison gang were singing some work-song. We all, all of us felt it; knew the feeling of the song for we were prisoners too and knew something at least of the longing that went into that song.

Without ever stopping their work the black convict gang saw us. The scene, the beauty of their singing, of these black men who were the grandsons of kidnapped African men and women, the descendants of slaves, burned our eyes. The blues, sung like this, in the condition of penal servitude which was its true roots, and set against this dusty lonesome Southern backdrop, was the real thing. All the concerts, jazz sessions and recordings I had listened to again and again—none of them was like this.