The Blues as “Secular Spirituals”: James Cone on B.B. King

Last updated on: May 15, 2015 at 10:01 am by Kyle Roberts

The Blues as “Secular Spirituals”: James Cone on B.B. King 2015-05-15T10:01:14-05:00 Kyle Roberts

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Blues legend B.B. King died on Thursday, at 89 years, after an announcement several weeks ago that he was receiving hospice care.

This morning, I pulled out my copy James Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues. Cone unpacks the historical context of the emergence of blues music, showing how it is both similar to and different from its antecedent in the spirituals, and then gives us a “theology of the blues” by connecting it to God, Jesus, suffering in the black experience, and to black eschatology–the particularized hope and anticipations of liberation and of heaven in black religion in the context of slavery and deep suffering.

In his intro, Cone writes:

No black person could escape the reality they expressed. B.B. King, Johnny Lee Hooker, and Mahalia Jackson created essential structures that defined my blackness. I affirmed the reality of the spirituals and blues as authentic expressions of my humanity, responding to them in the rhythms of dance. I, therefore, write about the spirituals and the blues, because I am the blues and my life is a spiritual. Without them, I cannot be” (7).

Cone describes the blues as a “secular spiritual”:

The blues depict the “secular” dimension of black experience. They are “worldly” songs which tell us about love and sex and about that other “mule kickin’ in my stall.” They tell us about the “Black Cat’s Bones,” “a Mojo hand,” and “dese back-bitin’ womens tryin’ fo’ to steal my man.” The blues are about black life and the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive in an extreme situation of oppression (97).

The blues, Cone explains emerged out of the backdrop of slavery, and are “closely related to the ‘slave seculars,” which were non- or even “occasionally anti-religious” songs (called “‘devil songs’ by religious folk”)

While seculars were not strictly atheistic as defined by modern Western philosophy, they nonetheless uncover the difficulties black people encountered when they attempted to relate white Christian categories to their situation of oppression.

And the blues, Cone explains, “reflect the same existential tension” as the slave seculars. They,

invited black people to embrace the reality and truth of black experience…Implied in the blues is a stubborn refusal to go beyond the existential problem and substitute otherwordly answers. It is not that the blues reject God; rather, they ignore God by embracing the joys and sorrows of life, such as those of a man’s relationship with his woman, a woman with her man (99).

As “secular spirituals,” the blues differ from the spirituals of the slave experience in that they came out of a new situation of freedom: “the blues express conditions associated with the ‘burden of freedom'” (101). But the blues differed from western philosophical explorations of “freedom,” as in existentialism, by focusing on the “factual, not conceptual” aspects of the challenges brought by a new kind of freedom–which was still a limited freedom.

The blues, while not denying that the world was strange, described its strangeness in more concrete and vivid terms. Freedom took on historical specificity when contrasted with legal servitude. It meant getting married, drinking gin, praising God–and expressing these historical possibilities in song (101).

Cone moves on from there to unpack a definition of the blues and its function in black life, in relation to the particular experience of black suffering:

The origin and definition of the blues cannot be understood independent of the suffering that black people endured in the context of white racism and hate. Therefore, the question that gave shape and purpose to the blues was: How could black people keep themselves together, preserving a measure of their cultural being, and not lose their physical lives? … The blues tell us about black people’s attempt to carve out a significant existence in a very trying situation. The purpose of the blues is to give structure to black existence in a context where color means rejection and humiliation (110).

Suggestion: Buy Cone’s book and read it while listening to some B.B. King. Maybe you’ll have both a new appreciation for the blues–and for theology, too.

Previous Post

May 13, 2015

Five Metaphors for a Constructive Approach to Scripture: Responding to Scot McKnight

Next Post

May 17, 2015 Who are the "Least" in Matthew 25? Baptist Bakers, Fundamentalist Florists, or the Poor and Oppressed?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month December 2020 November 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 December 2018 July 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz