Topical Guide 95
Mark Dorset
Misery; The Blues
Porky took a swallow of beer and ate another onion ring before he spoke.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like this.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “I suppose it happens to all of us from time to time: we feel utterly miserable for no clear or sufficient reason, you know what I mean? Even those of us who think of ourselves as essentially happy people find that our essential happiness is, at these times, in danger of drowning, as it were, in a sea of misery.”Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
Matthew lets himself start feeling blue, encourages himself to feel blue. He hasn’t done this to himself for quite a while, but he’s a past master. He cultivated this kind of self-abuse in high school, when he used to sit in the dark, evening after evening, listening to jazz and learning to feel blue. He got good at it, and he thinks the skill served him well in college. He felt intimidated by his roommates because he didn’t seem to have any talents that measured up to theirs. He began to brood. His roommates would come home from the library late at night and find him sitting in the dark, in a corner, listening to jazz and brooding. They began to think that he was deeply troubled, possibly dangerous. He enjoyed something like respect for this moodiness. He has brought with him from that period a bittersweet affection for the big, breathy saxophones of Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, and Ben Webster.
One movement of Duke Ellington’s magisterial composition Black, Brown, and Beige is called “The Blues.” The link below will bring you to that movement, which lasts until 13:40. The singer is Joya Sherrill. Al Sears is the featured tenor saxophonist. The lyrics, by Ellington:
The Blues . . .
The Blues ain’t . . .
The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a cold gray day,
And all night long it stays that way.
Ain’t somethin’ that leaves you alone,
Ain’t nothin’ I want to call my own,
Ain’t somethin’ with sense enough to get up and go,
Ain’t nothin’ like nothin’ I know.
The Blues . . .
The Blues don’t . . .
The Blues don’t know nobody as a friend,
Ain’t been nowhere where they’re welcome back again . . .
Low . . . ugly . . . mean . . . Blues!
The Blues ain’t somethin’ that you can sing in rhyme,
The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a dark cloud markin’ time.
The Blues is a one-way ticket from your love to nowhere,
The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a black crepe veil ready-to-wear.
Sighing . . . Crying . . .
Feel most like dying . . .
The Blues ain’t nothin’ . . .
The Blues ain’t . . .
The Blues . . .
[more to come on Thursday, September 23, 2021]
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