Sunday poetry: "Blues Man"

          Twentieth century, go to sleep.
                  --R.E.M., “Electrolite”
 
The 20th century is fast nodding off. The Greatest Generation approaches single digits. Print newspapers have become a relic. VHS tapes and Life magazines line the shelves of antique stores. A centenarian who was born in 1899 could speak firsthand about a century that turned race, technology, and social mores upside down. I am certainly not that person. But as one who came of age in the century’s last two decades, I remember how it more or less stood at the end. (I am focusing on arts and culture here; politics and other matters may be pondered elsewhere.) If I could compare the coda of the 20th century to anything, it would be a painting in which the original pencil marks were visible behind the flamboyant splotches of color; there was a sense that we had accomplished something remarkable, and we could still trace the steps. Movies were barely a century old, and we could view The Matrix at the multiplex and then stop by Hollywood Video to pick up a classic with Rudolph Valentino. The early days of television were a recent enough memory that The Simpsonscould parody them. And perusing a record store, for those with the right knowledge, felt like entering a story that was still giddily in progress.
 
For those who, like me, devoured each edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, the story went roughly like this: At the dawn of the 20th century, recording technology came into being. America was a fledgling country divided into booming metropolitan cities and shadowy back roads, and as brittle 78 records began to circulate, voices from those shadows were preserved on wax. America won the war and its economy boomed. Freeways linked the small towns together. The Civil Rights Movement broke down cultural barriers. And then metropolis met small town, blues met country, and amplifiers birthed a shocking new movement. As Muddy Waters put it, “The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.” For the latter part of the 20th century, we were still browsing the baby pictures. It felt like journey of discovery to go to Tower Records, pick up a recording of the Rolling Stones covering a Robert Johnson classic, and then slap it on the counter with a box set containing Johnson’s original.
 
In 2024, how many people still thrill to an experience like that? Some, no doubt, but probably few of them are teenagers. As time passes, older times become condensed, and the average Justin Bieber fan would likely group Johnson and the Stones, however respectfully, together in the category of “old music.” The styles that first emanated from scratchy vinyl remain the roots, but the tree has grown far above them. The 20th century is going to sleep. Fine, let it. Enough horrible things happened between 1900 and 2000 -- not least the segregation that helped to birth the blues in the first place -- that we can set our sights on doing better. What remains, if we want them to, are the artifacts themselves. Taken out of the context from history, they can still thrill us aesthetically. I am thinking of the last few songs that I cued up on Alexa: “Stop! In the Name of Love" by the Supremes, “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley, “Smoky Places” by the Corsairs. They’re among the gifts that the last century gave us. It would be nice if that were all we could remember, but of course you can’t take the yin without the yang.
 
My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, “Blues Man,” is an elegy for that wonderful and awful century. This is both among my favorite poems and among those that were hardest to write. It started a couple of years into the millennium with the opening lines, which never changed: “One century (which time let go) / lives on stubbornly in this room.” That was the guiding concept, and I quickly sketched an elderly blues musician playing at a club for a young audience. Why was the musician still playing? What did the audience think of him? The answers to those questions varied through years of drafts. In the final version, the club resides in a college town, and the sparse crowd consists of young people who alternately empathize for the musician’s hard-luck songs (“You’re healed now”), feel bad about not being able to tip (“I’m out of change”), dance romantically to the beat, or sit up front and eagerly take notes on their idol. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards once did the same.
 
As for the blues man, he’s glad to be wanted. After another night of validation (“Their pens sustain him”), he heads to the bus for his next gig, noticing the images of his past embalmed around him: the bootleggers of the 1930s painted in the art gallery, Chicago now the subject of a film at the multiplex. Of course, the blues man has no name. He represents an idea, the notion of an era that refuses to die as long as it’s revered. As the twentysomething writer who began this poem years ago, I clearly revered it myself. By now, Tower Records is long gone, and CDs are fast joining vinyl in those antique shops. At the same time, the past endures, and more accessibly than ever; all it takes is a shout-out to Alexa or the punch of a few keys on YouTube to bring up Ma Rainey or Mississippi John Hurt again. Perhaps that's one blessing of this new wonderful and awful age. We let the old centuries sleep, but not die.