Birth of the Blues
Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you?
Or the musical memories of our mutual histories?
Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering the piano keys
on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen
while Black men danced a close sweating two-step
with their women in Harlem jook joints?
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars?
Come into this world between dark southern thighs
while our ancestors danced to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps
and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines and drums?
Men and women dancing to words become songs:
work songs
praise songs
kin songs to the blues?
Were the blues born with the birth of “The New Negro?”
Or “the flowering of Negro literature”? Or were the blues
more hidden, ever more subtle in the eyes and in the voices of Harlem?
In the lyrics of Billie Holiday crooning “Strange Fruit” at Café Society?
Or the crackle of Louis Armstrong’s accent?
Or the clarion call of his trumpet?
Was it in the unstoppable Trane: a love supreme flowing from his horn?
Or in a Black child’s first giant step?
Black man, my lover, I held your newborn in my arms
wondering just what he would make of this world,
a world he gazed on with sad eyes innocent at sunrise.
Black man, my lover, do not ask me
how long you will survive without the blues.
——
Blue: A Sonnet
He asks for a song, so sing one just for him.
I sing of these unholy gifts stolen from within
the refuge of music. A pale moon loiters
under a geometry of stars. They know about us:
Together joined under the white moon’s angle of light.
Gossip spreads like shards of broken glass at our feet
We stroll along the harbor of another night without sleep,
a festival of dreams awaiting us on the other side.
My song seems to be filled with other poets’ songs more generous.
They know about us: the way a simple riff rules our evening moods,
or the tattered silences between us. Each night
a quiet desperation. The stars measure the breadth of my love.
I cannot be for him whom I never have been.
I will wait for him…
——
Collage
-After Romare Bearden
Gather out of star-dust:
memories of tender Harlem evenings where portraits filled
my young mind with jazz. And we stayed awake late nights,
in our rented rooms on West 131st, laughing and talking
the talk. DuBois, Hughes, Ellington. The gatherings
where I heard their stories, the abstract truth, scientific in grandeur,
yet ever so real, down to earth stories of Time and then,
the soothsayers, the truthsayers, singing their jogo blues.
Silence willfully broken. Scrapbooks of faded brown photographs,
clippings from Ebony and Jet. Folks dancing the original Charleston,
the fine old step, the swing and the sway.
Gather out of moon-dust:
There were crisis and opportunity. Black new voices, new forms.
Voices of folks singing out loud, or soft and mellow.
Lessons on how to become a “real poet,” while Claude McKay
joined the Russian Communist Party. Fire from flint.
Letters were penned by Countee Cullen to Langston Hughes.
Shadows reigned over the evening skies of Harlem.
Gather out of sky-dust:
a time for the “new negro.”
For Pullman porters to unionize
and for Josephine Baker, chanteuse extraordinaire, to float
on her wings of gossamer silk and satin.
Blues warbled from ebony flutes,
while poor folk sold their fine clothes to the Jews.
Was Christ Black?
Did angels really play trombones for God
in a black/brown heaven?
Gather out of song-dust:
Do we owe it all to Spingarn, Knopf or Van Vechten?
Or was originality and improvisation our sacred creed?
As I gazed from the windows at the skies
of my fading youth, all I could see was fire.
I wanted to hear the Blackbirds Orchestra wild on a Saturday night.
To hear “Go Down Moses” sung in church on a Sunday morn.
Wanted a style of my own.
To become Emperor Jones.
Daddy Grace.
——
Poetry: © Beth Brown Preston
Image: MS Copilot AI remixed