Introduction
Delta Blues is first and foremost an expression of the heart. The lyrics in Delta Blues speak of deep meaning and expression. They reveal the inner self and share intimate feelings and experiences. Musicians express stories of love, loss, and hardship in their lyrics. Songs of the Blues reveal Mississippi Delta life’s struggles, dreams, and human experience. The depth of these themes is imbued in the simplicity of the lyrics. An understanding of these central themes will bring you closer to the music. For this piece, we cover the central themes of Delta Blues lyrics and explore how real-life experiences find their way into songs of the South. We take a closer look at the ways in which personal stories can become universal truths. We uncover the stories behind the music. We look at the vital emotional impact of lyrics and how they bring Delta Blues to life. As we come to understand these themes, we can both increase our appreciation of Delta Blues and gain insight into the lives of Blues artists. By putting the lyrics under the microscope, we can take stock of this great music. Join us as we continue to explore the inner life of Delta Blues.
Hardships and Struggle
Delta Blues was created, in part, as a result of so much hardship, so much struggle. The Delta Blues was born in Mississippi, of the Mississippi Delta. It was an expression of the pain, of lots of pain … you look at the times of the Great Depression. The period of sharecropper times and laborer times was a period of great hardship. During the Great Depression, people were poor and economically exploited. For blacks, the Great Depression was an even more challenging experience than it was for whites. During the Great Depression, there was a lot of poverty, no jobs for people down there, I’m talking about the Delta … a lot of poverty, no jobs … Blues lyrics often show the crushing weight of financial despair. ‘I got enough bills to keep me chasing every week, chasing every day …’ Songs talk about the struggle to make it through.
Personal suffering is a key tonal element within the Delta Blues. Countless laments exist about loss of ones’ dear, health, daily struggles, and more. Many artists experienced poor health conditions caused by their living conditions. TB thrived in the slums. These ailments figure prominently into many songs, often mentioned, and sorrow and anguish personal to the artist is placed onto the musical palette, raw and palpable through song.
The situations African Americans faced during this period contributed to the more realistic takes on life’s challenges. Segregation and racial injustice cut deeply into the lives of many communities and individuals. Moreover, Jim Crow laws resulted in a system of cruel, overt, and institutionalized racial oppression. Segregation acts were applied to limit the movements and freedoms of African Americans, promising further suffering for generations to come. Particularly, these inhibitions purposefully drove the Blues, with feelings of oppression replaced by cries for freedom. This is clear in many lyrics, with songs crying out for freedom and deprivation from oppression.
For example, in ‘Cross Road Blues’ (1936) by Robert Johnson, He’s in a state of urgency, insisting that he is alone and must make desperately difficult decisions at a crossroads while asking for mercy to see how vulnerable he is, the desperation he is in. There is the feeling of hauntedness or fear written into the tune itself. The sense of ‘aww shucks’ bleeds strongly through the lyrics, the struggle this man is in because he is a have-not. He shares this with every other man on the planet, in particular those of African American descent.
Others include ‘Death Letter Blues’ (1930) by Son House (‘The mailman brought me a death letter yesterday,/It sent me down to my bended knees’) or ‘High Water Everywhere’ (1934) by Charley Patton (‘High water everywhere,/Caused many people to take to their heels/Made many people leave their home, and go to…Birmingham’) – floods that came on the back of tragedy in Mississippi. It feels a long time ago to talk of those incredibly bleak years, and it can like a long way from today’s life to the lives of Mamie Smith, Son House or Charley Patton. Delta Blues still speaks to the human experience of suffering.
Music expresses their experience and their hope, and why the form has endured is that it is true. The form lets you see and hear some of those people’s pain. It provided a solid base for many of our modern forms of music. The Delta Blues, for instance, inspired rock ’n’ roll and jazz. Blues musicians like Muddy Waters took these themes into their work in Chicago Blues. Their music, like the physics of their listener, expressed the culture around them: struggle and hardship. These are themes everyone in the world can understand.
Love and Heartaches
Love and heartbreak dominate the music of the Delta Blues. Romantic relationships are a major focus. Artists sing about both the joy and pain related to loving someone. They sing about love, joy and happiness. They sing about sadness, loss and pain. They sing about infidelity, being cast out and being deserted. The stories they tell are heartfelt tales that show the hardships of life and love. Emotion is a critical element of blues. Heartbreak brings emotion to life. The raw expressed feeling connects to the listener on an emotional level.
Some of the key songs illustrate the point with exemplary vividness and force. For example, Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain’ (1936) expressively portrays the anguish of unrequited love and yearning. In ‘Death Letter Blues’ (1930) by Son House, the bluesman’s raw and haunting moans of loss and grief are illustrative, and in Bessie Smith’s ‘Empty Bed Blues’ (1925), she captures the anguish of being alone and loving deeply. ‘There’s an empty bed and no one to put it up for …’ she sings, all purring and raging pain, ‘How alone I feel, the tears fall from my eyes.’ The song is instantly descriptive and richly evocative, painting a picture of sexual betrayal, desolation, and the trammeled emotions involved.
With a minimalist melody line, the Delta Blues speak to the complexity of the heart. The expressions of the artist are direct and authentic. And their authenticity, it seems, connects with just about any listener from any era. There is a universal human experience in love. In its ecstasy, it is a joy supreme but there are deep sorrows within love. The blues lets you hear it. The artist sings from their heart about what matters most. In music, they vocalise their story. In song, the catharsis of brokenheartedness. This – whatever it is – is the blues. It is American music. And it still informs music today. The blues remains our collective soundtrack, a sonic arena for enduring human themes.
Love and loss will never stop inspiring and involving artists, nor will the Delta Blues. Bessie Smith’s work is especially important because she was so clearly a blues singer. The so-called Empty Bed Blues stay classic. Heartache shows how to be popular and last. The blues are so satisfying and likable in part because they are so sincere. It’s heartache for you and heartache for me. That seems very real. When we sing the blues, we share in each other’s pain, and we change it into universally appreciated music. Why is the genre still so vital and resonant?
Freedom and Oppresson
Starting in the Mississippi Delta at the beginning of the 20th century, Delta Blues developed in an environment marked by Jim Crow laws that established legal segregation and discrimination against US citizens, all of whom were African American. Delta Blues artists played music to express desperation, suffering and a search for freedom.
Life under Jim Crow, sheltering grottoes, wrongs, and systemic racism, with few avenues of escape for African Americans, made for the perfect subjects of the song. Pain, hope, loss, yearning, and anger all ended up in a Blues song. Reflecting the pain, sadness, and lost options of those people for whom life itself was ‘blue’, the genre came to be known as the Blues. They were the people that Really Were.
A sense of longing for liberation in Delta Blues is palpable. Musicians sing about escape on the run. They long for social as well as personal freedom. Both the mournful lament of Mississippi Blues and the wistfulness in the sweetest song have an uplifting impact. In The Sublime Symphony of Blues, the musicologist John Storm Roberts wrote about Blues expressing every kind of pain: ‘Where there is no speech, or words that can’t be uttered, there Blues are heard.’
The protest was one of the many forums in which expressing through music occurred. Song lyrics were often veiled in metaphor or other forms of subterfuge. Artists criticized social injustices through the lyrical content of their songs. Music provided an arena for experimentation so that cultural resistance arise. It allowed the protest to be expressed from a place of safety. Music also provided inspiration for communities to endure suffering.
Son House’s ‘Levee Camp Moan’ (1930) is a key Delta Blues song that captures the brutal labor of the levee camps and expresses the struggle and suffering of the African American laborers within this context. House’s galloping, impassioned vocals articulate deep sorrow and endurance. The power of the blues to articulate the truth is palpable in this song.
In ‘Levee Camp Moan,’ Son House employs imagery that clearly illustrates oppression. The moaning in the song is meant to depict mass suffering. Through the song, Son House articulates a longing to be released from harsh society. Son’s music holds a special significance in progressive music. It has inspired generations of artists in the decades since his rise to fame. His music continues to pay homage to the fight for liberation.
To conclude, Delta Blues music reflected a sense of freedom and oppression. Under Jim Crow laws, artists spoke of their reality through song. Blues was a form of protest and hope, and songs like ‘Levee Camp Moan’ carry its legacy on to this day. The Delta Blues will forever be celebrated for its poignant message.
Travel and Wandering
Then, too, travel and wandering are major lyrical themes in the Delta Blues. The Open Road symbolized freedom, better horizons, and better fortunes. Men sang about moving to find new, better livelihoods. Travel means opportunity. Then there’s the hiding and ‘runnin’ halfway ‘cross de country’ motif—a form of persecution out of the Jim Crow South that reflects the continuation of the themes of caste, slavery, and persecution.
The Open Road promised change and a new version of oneself. Leaving meant literal and figurative distance from dire poverty and racial discrimination. Wandering opened up new towns and new possibilities—an escape from social boundaries.
The motif is beautifully expressed in a song like Tommy Johnson’s ‘Big Road Blues’ (1928). Johnson cries out to hit the road: I hate to stay in one place, And you know that I got the Big Road Blues. Gonna leave these troubles behind meYeah, somewhere where I can ride easy: Ramblin’ ’long around the Big Road. Quit your hangin’ round my businessWon’t be good for nothin’ but business. Walkin’ slow and talkin’ fastI’m just as lonesome as I am lank. Move through factories, down back roads, fields, hobo jungles, and shanty towns, commuting on the road, hopping freight trains, walking, or hitchhiking. Sometimes, you have money; other times, you have nothing. The life of the beggar is akin to that of the hobo. Originally meaning one who journeys on foot, pickpocketing and shoplifting, the activity of hoboing merged with the figure of the wandering individual, the poor pilgrim, the godless wanderer, the churchless free man, the eccentric mutterer, solicitor, road musician, campfire preacher, and seer of dreams.
In ‘Big Road Blues’, the road symbolizes freedom. Travel is a desperate try at seeking liberation and dignity, and the song’s lyrics show this struggle – and aim – of many African Americans in the South. It isn’t coincidental that the very music created in the South as a form of resistance against universal slavery and dehumanizing slave-ship is called blues. And yet, this music itself is also a result of the process of commodifying and generalizing – that is, depersonalizing and alienating – as it is the expression of the wish and aspiration of people to go to the North, to a better life, to liberation, and a dignified existence. Jazz completed this process with all reifying implications. This does not mean that migration, inherently pathological, makes a person a victim, for it does not. Migration is a decision made by people out of their own free will. But, there is a fundamental difference between using migration as a way to liberation and migrating aimlessly but with hope for improvement and doing it as a result of explicit or implicit pressure. Johnson’s guitar work echoes the theme of travel and movement. Moving and migrating, he has lived a restless life. Seeing and believing, he has truly lived and learned. In his vocals, the combination of desperation and longing is palpable.
Other songs deal with feelings of travel and wandering as well, like Robert Johnson’s ‘Ramblin’ on My Mind’, or Charley Patton’s ‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’. The persona of the travelling song lists journeys, the objects brought along, poetry, temptation, ennui, books, open communications, other people, free spirit and the ‘American way’. Mostly, the urge to get out is primary.
Travel and walking, here as much as in City Blues, stand for hope and survival. The Open Road continues as a path to a better life. Travel became a way for musicians to project their hopes and dreams. These continue as powerful tropes in Blues. They create a syntax for the art that lives on today.
Supernatural and Spirituality
Supernatural themes permeate Delta Blues lyrics. It’s common to find lyrical references to folklore and mythology in them, with mentions of the devil, hoodoo and other legends.
Religious themes are also prominent, which show believers’ struggles with salvation and sin. Supernatural references add complexity and help to create a mystique around the blues. They embody internal conflicts and external societal challenges.
In Skip James’s ‘Devil Got My Woman’, the devil signifies temptation and loss; the narrator broods: ‘Now she went to the devil, know you can feel bad.’ Losing his lover, one senses the narrator’s anguish and moral dilemmas. But he also mentions hoodoo, trying to influence the outcome.
Such supernatural references cover internal and external themes; they subtly stitch layers of meaning into the everyday details of the song. Other lyrics reference religion, too, implying personal struggles and supernatural themes that refer to soul preservation.
There is a traditional gospel theme that suggests musically inspired prophecy. Lyrics underscore the importance of faith, which seems more relevant than ever given the rise of secularism. Religious lyrics also highlight the tension between worldly temptations and spiritual goals, tropes that are preparatory to blues drinking and sexual liaisons.
This is also where the devil shows up at the crossroads, willing to trade musical talent for a soul. According to legend, Johnson went to the crossroads, met the devil and sold his soul. ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ by Robert Johnson (1939): God, look-a my woman done left me Yes,she’s lef’ me lookin’ like a fool Yeah,my lady look-a crazy and she does and my crazy from you city way Well,I went to the crossroads, baby,I didn’t know what I should do Well,I shed my tears, baby,at that crossroad Welbounded, I’m going down that muddy road yeah babe, got one more thing to say before I got I went to the crossroads, babies Why,I didn’t know whatI should do Well,I shed my eye, babies perhaps some other old thing to say beforeI’m goin’ away babe, maybe my baby is true Well,well, well just lock me for convicted, sentenced off Yeah,I don’t care what Below, there’s a graphic that provides further context.
Work and Labor
Work and labour occupy an especially prominent role in songs of the Delta Blues. Lyrics contain vivid descriptions of toil, hard labor, and even the exploitation of sharecropped workers. Economic impoverishment threatened many African Americans, and the Blues is often a key that opens a window into these hard realities. Musically, the Blues can even offer implicit critiques of unjust labour practices. Songs of labor and toil capture and voice the pain of many of those who do the work of the Blues: the journey of people on foot, horseback, or train to a labour job; the backbreaking physicality of the job; and the shared sense of individual and community identity that is derived from doing that work together.
Lead Belly’s ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’ springs to mind. With lyrics like: “Pick a bale of cotton, Tall and soft and white Pick a bale of cotton, Tall and soft and white Well ah, pick a little, lay down some, Pick a little, lay down some You know no matter how you do, Ah, Lord, The week’ll be over before you Pick a bale of cotton, Tall and soft and white … “we’re left to do some guesswork about the nature of this strenuous activity. The song seems to be about cotton picking. It describes this activity as difficult, monotonous, exhausting, and strenuous. It does so in a voice of struggle, but also of resilience. Again, music helps us sing in the face of oppression. This song emphasizes solidarity in work. Singing helped reduce the burden of this hard manual labor. Competence with vocalizations preserves culture under conditions of hardship.
Delta Blues called out injustices. Musicians sang and worked to sustain themselves through oppressive states. Work songs linked people together as they engaged in toil. They continue as a testament to the unbroken nature of the human spirit. The Blues is arguably the most resonant and continuous expression of the lives of the people who work. Some notable tracks from this period that continue to permeate music and social consciousness are ‘Big Road Blues’ and ‘Mule Skinner Blues’.
The Blues as Catharsis
As an emotional catharsis, the blues are truly powerful. The genre exists for the tragic expression of personal instability and societal alienation. Music is a coping mechanism, a method to use pain and hardship and make sense of it. As many won’t have seen the performances discussed, it is helpful to give a single example of the emotional expression in the blues. For this example, I’ll turn to the side-stepping, dramatic and slow song ‘I Feel Like Going Home’ (1948) by the seminal artist Muddy Waters. Released on a 78 rpm single via Universal, this song acts as a kind of blues prayer conducted by a troubled man.‘I feel like going homeI woke up this morning, I feel down and lowI feel like going home, I know I can’t be wrong. Got a long way to go. In a literal musical sense; this song is sad. You can hear this in his sorrowful voice beyond the musical aspect, the words of this timeless blues song connect the musician with his audience, as follows:‘Drifting and stealing, the road is so road, I choose to be southbound whenever I goI feel like going home, I know I can’t be wrong,. Got a long way to go.’ The effect is that of a Louisianan longing for directions in his own state. But the most haunting aspect of this song is his seeming wish to be gone forever.‘I look around this railway station for a place to lay my head. I’d like to be going home today but I know what it’s all about. I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ Listeners who have been down and depressed deeply relate to – if not feel completely understood by – Muddy Waters in these moments. Now also listen to him again. In the early narration, he prepares the audience to empathise and ride with him as he sings them through a descent deeper into depression. But then, at the halfway point, with the invitation to share the weight of blue sadness with him, he flips the flowers; the sorrow turns to joy.’I get four-ply cotton inside my shoesI’ll get on that summer breeze, I feel good oh Gonna ride that’m on my way to Louisiana. I’m sure gonna be out on parole.’ Artists sometimes comment on the potency of such music. They can speak to its value. And when asked about such things, performers often point to this representative song.
Conclusion
To sum up, Themes in Delta Blues can very much be identified. There’s a vast amount of lyrics surrounding the hardships of life and the deepest of emotions. A central theme revolves around love and its subsequent loss. Poverty and the hardships that go along with this theme are just one extremely prevalent theme. Other related themes include the fantasies of escape by train or down a straight lane. Supernatural occurrences reveal much about the beliefs and fears of the people and their time. Dealing with The Devil asks questions about the morality of situations and the decisions taken. Religious references are found throughout many of the songs but are usually offered as a glimmer of hope for the hopeless. The wave of Racism and Oppression is just one of the most profound themes that underpin a great many of the songs. Often, Themes of Love and Hardship are interwoven in the songs themselves. The loss of love, for instance, increases feelings of isolation and loneliness that can become overwhelming and lead to despair. The huge influence of The Spirituality that is revealed in these songs often acts as the counterpoint to the themes of sin and temptation. Personal Struggle mirrors Sociological issues, and the themes of freedom, whether literal or metaphorical, are pivotal elements of the songs. Hardship in love to Hardship in society reflects Themes of suffering. The Supernatural and Religious themes that also run through many songs mirror Internal and External Conflict. This complex interwoven combo gives this music its grit and emotional capacity. Themes of the Delta Blues can mirror so much of the human condition gracefully.