The Church of Etta James

I always tell myself I know better than to question the meaning of life. Life, like outer space, is too infinitely large to contemplate as a whole. And when things get too large, I tend to ignore them as people generally do. Sometimes though I get this weird feeling—like when you know somebody is staring at you—and lifting my eyes becomes unavoidable. Take the other day, for example, when I was listening to the radio and heard Etta James sing “Drown in My Own Tears”: Suddenly, the world became alive—living, breathing and totally mad—and my heart pumped like a speeding metronome; all at once life’s essence seeped through my skin as if by osmosis from the radio. Moments like this are utterly terrifying, if only because they are so rare. W.H Auden wrote, “We must love each other or die,” but Etta James makes you believe it.

This wave of emotion begins when Etta drops the very first word of the song: “It.” She says it with such a commanding anger, making it almost volatile; from that point she sounds like she’s ready to explode. But she controls herself, or at least attempts to, and as the following words waver out of her mouth—“Brings a tear, into my eyes”—she becomes vulnerable, transparent, desperate. All of a sudden you’re right where she is. She goes on to tell us “she’s cried so much” and how she doesn’t want to be all alone, and truthfully, Etta’s not charting territory that hasn’t been explored before. But that’s what makes her rendition of “Drown in My Own Tears” so compelling. Etta is able to evoke all the spirits of the universe, putting fire behind words that seem stale on paper. Her pain is the story’s narrator and, just like all good storytellers should, she doesn’t tell you what happened, she shows you, managing to convince you that this song is the be-all and end-all, that when the three minutes are up, so is she.

So when I heard “Drown in My Own Tears” the other day, I realized in those three minutes that love is the brutal essence of life. Only such an emotion can drag you to the bottom of the darkest abyss and to the top of the highest plateau, completely starve you and fill you, break you, and then mend you. And yes, I realized that I wasn’t exactly exploring uncharted territory either, but love, like war, means nothing until you can actually feel it. The thing about music is the possibility that it may evoke the ineffable; a feeling of being overtaken by something unique and true to you.

Not too long ago a friend asked me what my definition of “the blues” is. I gave him a pre-packaged answer steeped in technical language, full of structures and scales and rules or, in other words, bullshit. Blues, as the name suggests, is a state of mind, an experience, a line that stands between life and the precipice of what’s beyond our understanding. It’s human and spiritual; the rhythm of existence and all that it encompasses: love, sex, laughter, hatred, spite, seduction, happiness, sadness, loneliness, leaving, betrayal, greed, sunshine, moonshine, the dark, and the light.

These days, people say that the blues as we traditionally know it—the Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters blues, the “real” blues—is dead. After all, special circumstances produced the old blues: People coming up from the Delta were still bound to the church, they worked in the fields and barely retained a tenth of their earnings if they were lucky. Back then there was desperation to leave the South, to move north, to find something better. People went to church to feel the presence of the Divine, and they found it there. Preachers (many of which, like Son House, doubled as blues singers) packed their sermons with an emotional intensity that was almost mythical—they got inside of you. And the churchgoers were driven into frenzy, overcome with the spirit, with something way beyond tangibility, and their bodies shook and convulsed in what looked like psychotic fits. Every Sunday in church they lost it, they confessed, they found the something that went beyond their arduous, thankless fieldwork, their sweating, their burning, their sorrow. However, the blues was taboo in church; sex and love and passion were for the sinners. The blues became a discourse for the things not discussed in church, and just like the preachers, the bluesman were looked upon as truth-tellers or advice-givers, but of the other side. Son House, Charley Patton, and Muddy Waters were all direct descendents from the church; they grew up in it, and were able to bring that same gospel, preacher charisma to the bandstand. They created an experience for their audiences, and even now, when you hear Son House say “I got a letter this mornin’, how do you reckon it read? / It said hurry, hurry, yeah your love is dead” you shiver. And, when you hear Muddy say, “I’m a man,” you believe he’s at least ten feet tall.

Musicians may not be coming straight out of the fields anymore, but contemporary, urban concrete jungles are no more forgiving. People still get lovesick and enjoy sex as much as they ever have—just look at your record collection. Too often the blues gets recognized only by its form, which isn’t its most relevant part. Whether a song encompasses seven-chords, a pentatonic scale or a shuffle rhythm isn’t nearly as important as if it’s believable. Those forms by which we are accustomed to recognizing the blues are only avenues for the soul the blues musicians put behind them. As musical resources expanded, so did the blues—when it was able to go electric, it did. Muddy Waters is a perfect microcosm: He started off in the rural Mississippi Delta as a one-man acoustic band until he made his way up to Chicago like so many other musicians and began to play with a full band, embracing the electric sound, writing songs like “Mannish Boy.” Then the blues reached musicians like Hendrix, who turned it completely on its head. But it was still blues. As the blues is passed down from generation to generation, it’s constantly changing form and being rearranged, but its intent is always the same. The next great bluesman is probably already here; people just need to adjust their vision to see him.

Generations of musicians were brought up in the church of Robert Johnson or Son House or Bessie Smith or Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf or B.B King or, of course, Etta James. They trained a whole new group of musicians who testified for a whole new group of people—and the cycle continues, it’s ever-evolving. The blues is in hip-hop, it’s in rock ‘n’ roll, it’s in soul, it’s in jazz, it’s in R&B—it’s in all the things that do more than just tell you the story, it’s in all things that give you glimpses of truths about being human. Just listen to the melisma of D’Angelo or even Christina Aguilera, the street beat of Nas or Mos Def, the stories of Springsteen, the angst of Jack White. In short, the blues, like race itself, has been so much mixed and expanded that it’s no longer possible to pigeonhole it as one distinct thing. It’s everywhere, alive, breathing under everything. At some point, if you listen to music, you’ll have your own religious experience, your own Etta James moment; it’s just inevitable. The blues is a special kind of church that takes form in concert halls, bedrooms, cars, anywhere. As humans we sometimes have difficulty sorting things out, or expressing ourselves. We don’t always cry so well or laugh so well or, for that matter, understand ourselves so well. The blues can do this for us in a way that no other art form can: It allows us to confess on our own terms.