SERMON

Yes, sometimes I feel like a motherless child. I remember lying in a hospital bed as a teenage boy staring out the window into a budding world with the promise of spring and yearning to be free of my undiagnosed, mysterious tormenting illness. That deep melancholy of hopelessness in the face of spring I think carved out a special place in my heart for the blues. Whenever I hear the mournful sound of a saxophone sqeaking out a lamenting riff or the vibrato of a harmonica's wail, I'm called back to the memories of troubled times in my life of days gone by. And for some strange reason, the beauty of the music brings a sweet flavor to the sour fruit of my past. The blues seem to provide a way to savor one's sorrow that can bring reconciliation and healing.

Like Jazz, the blues is an original American art-form born of the experience of African slaves in the south. It is a blending of African and European musical traditions to create something unique and distinct from its parents. The word `blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. Washington Irving has been credited with coining the term in 1807 but the Negro history of the musical form is traced through oral tradition to the civil war.

My references here come from Robert M. Baker's essay titled "A Brief History of the Blues"[1] from which I'd like to quote for you now his succinct description of the origins of the blues:

When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound dispair...They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South." For it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death...Southern prisons [road crews and work gangs] also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations.

After the civil war, the blues moved through an emerging Negro culture mixing with ballads, church music and dance music most often played on the banjo then later the guitar. The blues form was first popularized in the nineteen teens by the black composer W.C. Handy who lived from 1873 to 1958. Handy is credited with the birth of the blues with his popular song "Memphis Blues" which came out in 1912 and the "St. Louis Blues" in 1914. Surprisingly, the blues form was popularized by Southern whites during World War I, a miserable conflict, the torments of which were well expressed in blues music. During the 1920's the blues became a national craze and its place in American music was assured. The blues' influence has spread from jazz to rock and roll and beyond as it has reached out across the world.

Just what makes the blues different from a piece of music written, say, in a minor key? Many people associate a minor key with sadness and depression too. But the blues works with notes in a different way. I've asked Evelyn to help me with defining the blues musically. First she will play something from a major key which we normally enjoy listening to. (Evelyn major) Now she will play something from in a minor key. (Evelyn minor) Can you hear how the music is heavier in a minor key? Now contrast that with how the blues sound in this piece of music. (Evelyn blues) Did you notice the distinctive sound?

It is challenging to fully reproduce the blues on a piano because the blues tradition is so anchored in instruments that allow pitches to move. Often when you hear someone playing blues guitar they slide up and down from note to note. The sounds created don't always fit the even tempered European ideas of pitch. The use of bent pitches and emotionally inflected vocal sounds has been come to be known as blue notes.

Blue notes seem to have a penetrating power to go past our defenses and engage our deeper, darker emotions. And sometimes the people who are most drawn to the blues have deeper and darker emotions in abundance.

I remember when I was going to school in Berkeley, California, I lived up the street from a well known music club and bar that often had famous acts. It was the kind of club I suspect bands enjoy playing because it has a decent size stage, enough room for a crowd but is small enough to prevent the audience from being too far away. Well, one night, a well known blues band, I think it was Muddy Waters, was playing so my roommate and I thought we'd go down and check it out. I'm not much of one for the nightclub scene but I was in college after all and always interested in new and different experiences. My roommate was a much more worldly type that I which gave me a degree of comfort with trying something new.

Like many nightclubs (and one of the reasons I avoid them) the room was dark and the air was thick to almost choking with cigarette smoke without a window to stand near for a breath of fresh air. As the warm up band played, the audience warmed up too by seeing how much they could drink before the main act came on. Even though this nightclub was down the street from UC Berkeley, many of the tattooed audience looked like they'd be more comfortable on a motorcycle than in a museum or library. A fight broke out over the billiard table which was stopped by the bouncers. One obnoxious fellow was booted out by the same. The music was painfully loud and the audience was raucous and rowdy. The whole experience made me wonder whether listening to the blues was really all that healthy if these were its fans.

Blues musicians and audiences are sometimes unhappy people engaged in self destructive lifestyles. There is a sadistic kind of pleasure in melancholy which can pull troubled people into a downward spiral of self-annihilation. The very music which seeks to bring comfort to the afflicted can become the validation which supports their wallowing in their suffering. The blues is strong medicine for the soul which can be abused.

The reason the blues does endure is because it is strong medicine for the soul when measured out for that purpose. The power of the blues to open up the painful experiences of our past and to bring them to the surface to be massaged by the blending together of pleasurable and sorrowful notes can both acknowledge our pain and open the way beyond it. This is the same good work that therapists do with people who have buried their hurts from the past thinking their mind could operate like a landfill. What you don't see and feel isn't there. But like landfills, rotting garbage leaks out and poisons the environment, the mind, the behavior, thoughts and feelings of the individual. Rather than forgetting our feelings, it is much better to let them move through us and out of us like the sweet and sour sonorous sounds of the blues.

Which brings me around to my sermon title: If you don't live it, you can't play it. About two months ago, I heard this song on the radio which I'll be playing for you in a few minutes and was immediately taken with it. It is more than a little provincial to the Southwestern Florida's blues scene yet that is not why I wanted to do something with it. The repeating line I remembered which captured my attention was, "If you don't live it, you can't play it." "There's a sermon in that song!" I said to myself. A few weeks later I tried to get a copy of the music after I had committed myself in The New Outlook to do a sermon on it. And no one had ever heard of a song by this title. I called the radio station I had heard the song on (WMNF in Tampa) repeatedly talking to the different DJ's asking about the song. I didn't have the name of the performer only what turned out to be a line from the song - and even that I didn't have correctly as it turned out. Finally I happened to find the guy who played the song on the radio and he gave me the name of the performer: Rock Bottom, a local Southwest Florida blues artist. Then began my search of music stores looking for a copy of the CD. No one carried Rock Bottom. Finally exasperated, I asked the clerk over the phone where they might look for Rock Bottom. "Try Skipper's Smokehouse. He is sure to play there." Finally the nightclub gave me Rock Bottom's telephone number so I called him and ordered the CD from the performer himself. From Rock Bottom I got the correction to the title of the service. The lyric is: "If you don't live it, you can't give it."

As the song will, I hope, persuade you, you don't learn to play the blues from studying books or taking courses at the university or from another teacher. You learn to play the blues by living the blues, breathing the blues, and playing the blues in the jute joints of black America soaking up cuture. Digging the sounds and grooving to bluesy feelings, touching the gritty reality on the other side of the tracks, putting oneself in danger while pursuing pleasure, struggling with the monkey mind of addiction, Rock Bottom has been there. He has lived it and given it back to the world blue noted.

Perhaps why the lyric appealed to me so much was because this is what ministers do too. We are not theologians or philosophers though some of us might pretend to be. The job of a minister is not to come up with grand theories, visions or insights into the nature of reality - to figure it all out. What I do each Sunday is to take my and this congregation's experience of living to the purifying fire of these grand theories, visions and insights looking for the portion of reality and truth I can give back to the congregation. Ministry is a practical art which brings our common everyday lived experience in contact with these transforming religious ideas to bring healing and direction to our lives. In this way there can be no ultimate sermon. There can only be sermons which touch our lived reality, connect with our feelings, and offer hope which moves us. And a good minister isn't afraid of the dark but is willing to move courageously into the blue night in search of the lost sheep. With both the blues and ministry, if you don't live it, you can't give it.

The same is true for all of us. The greatest gifts we have to give to others come from our life experience. We are more commonly aware of the more positive gifts such as a good education, a talent for music or sports which can be shared with others. Yet the dark realms of existence lived and transformed bring much to a hurting world. Those who have suffered abuse can have a loving ministry with those who have suffered abuse restoring their faith in themselves and their hope for affirmation. Those who have fought the demons of addiction can be of great support to those still caught in its claws. Those who have suffered the silent arrows of depression can give comfort to others entrapped in despair. Those who have endured the thousand cuts of racism and homophobia can lead us out of the dark pit of oppression.

So as I play Rock's talking blues for you, I encourage you to reflect on what you have lived and how you have given that back to the world. Providing a place to live it and give it is one of the functions of this religious community. We aren't talking about saving the universe here or something that requires some kind of degree or expertise, rather something very simple and basic: living and giving. And doing both make for a meaningful life. It's really that simple -and that profound.

In 1966 I heard my first low down blues in Bradenton, Florida at a hep cat's party. By early 1967 I had vinyl by Muddy, Sonny Boy Number Two and Little Walker. I was circulating around in the Black jute joints to dig the sounds. There was The Palms, The Honey Dripper, The Hole in the Wall, Richard Fun Spot, and Paradise 1017 in Bradenton. In Sarasota it was The Brass Rail, The Manhattan Bar and the Club Mary and the Wagon Wheel in Palmetto. Yeh. But you know, if you don't live it, you can't give it.

Well I dug the sound so I stuck around. I got shot at once in The Palms when the Del Ray's were playing. They missed me but they hit the bass player. Man, I got the hell out of there.

I used to gig at The Hole in the Wall when the white cops would raid the joint for gamblers. They would tell me, "Man, you crazy being in here." But the owner, he looked out for me. One night the cat house up stairs from The Hole caught fire and the whole building went up in 15 minutes. I had my harp bag in one hand and my 63 Fender Concert Amp on my shoulder running out with flames around me. This scruffy junkie pulls a knife and says, "Gimme the Amp." I hold the amp between me and him while he's poking the speakers out trying to cut me till some other cat's come over to help me and he splits. But if you don't live it, you can't give it.

On night we played The Wagon Wheel Club in Palmetto and decided to pop some acid while we played. The first break we went outside and our van had been broken into and a bunch of equipment was gone. We were so high that we went back into the club which was a neighborhood club, and went on stage and started telling what had happened on the mike. Now the audience in the Wagon Wheel Club was anybody and everybody from the area: working folks, algees , pimps, hustlers, cross-dressers, and thieves. One large cat came up and said he knew the folks who stole stuff in this neighborhood and he split. Twenty minutes later he came back with all our stuff and a couple things we'd never even seen before. But if you don't live it, you can't give it.

We played a house party one time on the south side of St. Pete and while we were boogying in walked two zeros with pistols, stopped the music, made us all lie on the floor, and took our money, and reefer, plus jewelry. When the cops came they found a pipe and smelled boo so they were pissed at us for partying. But the zeros were eventually caught - are still doing time I guess. Hey but if you don't live it, you can't give it.

During this period of time in the late 60's, early 70's I used to play a lot of hog roasts out in the country east of Bradenton `n Sarasota, Florida. People would hunt wild pigs and roast them in a pit lined with stones in the ground. I was playing in a big time pig party a ways of route 64 east in Manatee County one time, about 300 400 people at this party and a whole squad of cop cars came and put a stop to it. We wadn't bothering nobody There wasn't no one within miles but it was too big for the cops to deal with. They had about eight or nine cars maybe twenty five cops and it started quite a fuss. People was throwing beer cans at the cars and such. The sheriff called for help and more cops just came out of the woodwork. Everybody started running. I grabbed my harps and my amp and ran off toward the river through the Palmetto bushes - never mind the snakes. About half the people got arrested and hauled off. I spent the night with the mosquitoes and snakes in a mangrove swamp. Hitched into town with my big ass Fender amp on my shoulder the next morning. Hey but if you don't live it, you can't give it.

So what I'm trying to say is my first ten years or so as a blues person was spent in jute joints and hog roasts and not only digging the sounds but scooping up some culture too.

So lets fast forward now to 1993. I'm in Memphis for the W. C. Handy Awards playing with Diamond Teak Mary and just hanging out on Beal Street soaking up culture. I'm talking to some Blues industry cats and this one dude with his Blues hat and his attitude informs me that tonight he and some of the other blues mafia are going to a real, live, Memphis jute joint. He asks if I want to string along and I say, "Nah, I want to dig the tourist Blues scene on Beal." And he says, "Well, the jute joint scene is not for everyone." Huh!

I think back over my life. For thirty years I've been doing this through hard times, no money, trash relationships, open heart surgery, and I'm still playing nothing but the blues. I've got a few choice words for the publisher of that big blues magazine. "If you don't live it, you can't give it."

Listen to this chump!

[1] http://www.vivanet.com/%7Eblues/history.html for the entire text of this history.

[2] On Album Tone and can be bought for $12.00 from David York 1142 17^th St. N. St. Pete, FL 33713