LLW Lite: Bluest of the Blue

Ancestry, Cultural Memory, and Red Dirt

Contrary to popular opinion, the Blues was not born from oppression but instead, it was born in spite of it. The complexity & nuance of the Blues is stored in the DNA of a People from the flatlands of Mississippi by way of the Motherland that we call Africa. The innate genius of Blues men and Blues women is experienced through the elongated, dialectal vocal delivery as it is uttered from the soul; to call it style is erroneous. It is a sonic demonstration of the metaphysical and the spiritual.

They sang of the human experience in the most human of ways and that's why the Blues sticks to our bones. From the dirt red Delta to my stomping ground of Northeast Mississippi, I know all too well the love language of the Blues. From my great uncle living down the road from BB King and calling him Riley to being raised and loved in a neighborhood marked on the Blues Trail, I have inherited the passion of those hymns, the richness of Black truth, and the magic that raises a simple life of dirty feet in cotton fields to mythical, folkloric proportions.

I am who I am, not because oppression dictated it. I live by an ancestral creed that demanded thriving by going around it, over it, or through it if there is no other choice. I am a Child of the Blues.

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