The Blue Note Gospel

[Editor's note: This article is adapted with permission from Otis Moss III's book Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair, published by Westminster John Knox Press, 2015.]

IF WE ARE to reclaim the best of the preaching tradition, then we must learn what I call the blue note gospel. Before you get to your resurrection shout, you must pass by the challenge and pain called Calvary.

What is this thing called the blues? It is the roux of black speech, the backbeat of American music, and the foundation of black preaching. Blues is the curve of the Mississippi, the ghost of the South, the hypocrisy of the North. Blues is the beauty of bebop, the soul of gospel, and the pain of hip-hop.

Before we can speak of the jazz mosaic or the hip-hop vibe for postmodern preaching, we must wrestle with the blues. In his song “Call It Stormy Monday,” T-Bone Walker laments how bad and sad each day of the week is, but “Sunday I go to church, then I kneel down and pray.”

Walker’s song unintentionally lifted up the challenge that the blues placed before the church and that black religiosity still seeks to solve. “Stormy Monday” forces the listener to reject traditional notions of sacred and secular. The pain of the week is connected to the sacred service of Sunday. There is no strict line of demarcation between the existential weariness of a disenfranchised person of color and the sacred disciplines of prayer, worship, and service to humanity.

This blue note is a challenge to preaching and to the church. Can preaching recover a blues sensibility and dare speak with authority in the midst of tragedy? America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. The world is experiencing the blues, and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses of non-prescribed prosaic sermons with severe ecclesiastical and theological side effects.

The church is becoming a place where Christianity is nothing more than capitalism in drag. In his book Where Have All the Prophets Gone? Marvin McMickle, president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, asks what happened to the prophetic wing of the church. Why have we emphasized a personal ethic congruent with current structures and not a public theology steeped in struggle and weeping informed by the blues? McMickle’s book is instructive for us. He demonstrates the focus on praise (or the neo-charismatic movements) coupled with false patriotism—enhanced by the reactionary development of the tea party, the election of President Barack Obama, and personal enrichment preaching (neo-religious capitalism informed by the market, masquerading as ministry).

The blues has faded from the Afro-Christian tradition, and the tradition is now lost in the clamor of material blessings, success without work, prayer without public concern, and preaching without burdens. The blues sensibility, not just in preaching but inherent in American culture, must be recovered. We must regain the literary sensibility of Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and James Baldwin; the prophetic speech of Martin Luther King Jr., William Sloane Coffin, and Ella Baker; along with the powerful cultural critique of Jarena Lee and Dorothee Sölle.

The blues, one of America’s unique and enduring art forms, created by people kissed by nature’s sun and rooted in the religious and cultural motifs of West Africa, must be recovered. The roots are African, but the compositions were forged in the humid Southern landscape of cypress and magnolia trees mingling with Spanish moss. It is more than music. The blues is a cultural legacy that dares to see the American landscape from the viewpoint of the underside.

Ralph Ellison, the literary maven and cultural critic, states, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness. ...As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

My muse for understanding the blues is rooted in two organic theologians and non-traditional homileticians, August Wilson and Zora Neale Hurston. This may sound strange. We are used to names rooted in the theological canon and given the stamp of approval by an elusive and sometimes mythical cabal of men whom we have never met, who give legitimacy to our thought. Both Wilson and Hurston capture the essence of blues speech and are chroniclers of black religiosity and the healing power of God-talk, articulated by people who preach and sing in minor keys.

The antidote to the blues

August Wilson is arguably America’s most celebrated contemporary playwright, having created a cycle of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century. Wilson’s work is written with an overt blues sensibility. He believed blues speech, carried by his characters and embodied by actors, has the power to save. For Wilson, speech wrapped up in the blues is the antidote to the blues. The only way to get rid of your blues is to speak to your blues. His character Ma Rainey, based on the real life blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, speaks of the blues’ prophetic power to release the individual from spiritual isolation:

The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world. Something’s been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.

Ma Rainey becomes a prophetic preacher with a deep blues sensibility. She is not seeking tragedy, but with a womanist vibe and a blues sensibility she is stating, “I refuse to fall into despair.”

Through Wilson, I learned, and the preacher learns, a new definition of preaching. Here it is: Blue note preaching, or preaching with blues sensibilities, is prophetic preaching—preaching about tragedy, but refusing to fall into despair. That is blues preaching. “And they could not distinguish between the gospel shout and the blues moan” (my version of Ezra 3:13).

All of Wilson’s plays create and envision a world that royal speech, status quo speech, supremacist speech, cannot imagine. In this world, autonomous, artistic women control their destinies, as in the person of Ma Rainey. In this world, a mentally ill man, such as the character Gabriel in Fences, demonstrates that he may be the angelic messenger of God, disguised in mental illness.

The preacher’s call

It is through August Wilson that I am pulled into the world of the blues, and through Zora Neale Hurston that I find the power of prophetic conjuring. Hurston, Harlem Renaissance writer, folklorist, and novelist, spent her life recording the blues speech and patterns of displaced Africans. Her body of work dares to claim that people of African descent do not need external cultural validation; they have a rich culture, whether or not it is acknowledged by Western scholars.

Hurston takes the speech of Southern storytellers, preachers, and singers and peppers her fictional work with the wisdom gathered from these people, creating a rich tapestry of speech where blues sensibilities and call-and-response moments are the norm. Hurston’s famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God gives a theological perspective informed by her blues sensibility. The main character of the novel, Janie, who has taken hold of her destiny by marrying the much younger Teacake, seeks to find her place in the world. In one stunning section, Janie and Teacake take refuge from a hurricane and Hurston’s blues theology emerges:

The wind came back with triple fury and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others and other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

The preacher’s call is to stand through storms after all the lights have gone out and the tourists have left the land. The call of the preacher is to stare in the darkness and speak the blues with authority and witness the work of God in darkness and even in the abyss. Blues speech and blues theology change the gaze of the preacher.

The blues is more than renaming of existential darkness; it is a way of seeing, a strategy of knowing, and a technique to empower.

All about our troubles

Jesus is central to blue note preaching. Howard Thurman speaks of how we must view Jesus as the liberator of the disinherited. In his classic text Jesus and the Disinherited, he speaks of Jesus as savior and liberator of those who have their backs against the wall. Scholar Obery Hendricks borrows from Thurman and expands our understanding of Jesus. In his powerful book The Politics of Jesus, Hendricks makes the compelling argument that we should view Jesus not solely as the sociological savior of oppressed people; rather, our normative view of Jesus must be of a person who lived life as a colonized individual. Jesus understands the pain of terrorism and is acquainted with the structures of disenfranchisement that rob people of their humanity.

In other words, Jesus knows all about our troubles.

The preached word, when played, performed, and preached with the blue note sensibility, has the audacity to reclaim Jesus as savior and liberator of marginalized people. The God of the blue note empowers men and women and refuses to be categorized by puny, inadequate definitions created by humans and concretized to and by the academy. It is the role of the prophet/preacher to harness a portion of this divine energy.

The prophet seeks to paint a new world with the toolkit of oral performance, imagination, and keen intellectual investigation. In the process of painting this new world, the prophet is altered by the weight of the heavy, elusive nature of the word she or he carries. We cannot help but be bruised and blessed by the weight of the sacred task before us. The word is so heavy that it leaves marks upon our shoulders, just as bruises were left upon the Israelites who carried the ark across the desert of Canaan. The word cuts and leaves scars upon our body, fissures in our minds, as we seek to handle what cannot truly be handled.

Blue note preaching is a way of knowing. We refuse to turn away from the beauty in the ashes; neither shall we turn from the ashes that were once a bouquet of beauty: I am African, I am black, I am woman, I am displaced; yet I pull from my sacred toolkit a palette of colors capable of beautifying the decaying walls of my prison. In the process of preaching, we unlock the gates of the prison with a word the world cannot comprehend.