In his latest book Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut declares that the blues is his favorite form of music. A jazz historian friend of his told him that during slave times, the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was higher than that of slaves. Vonnegut and friend surmised that the slaves had a way of dealing with depression the slave owners did not. The slaves sang the blues. As Vonnegut stated, “The Blues can’t drive depression clear out of the house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where the Blues is being played.”
Last week I read a post about the Native American poet John Trudell and of the movie of his life being played on Independent Lens on PBS. Intrigued, I made a point to watch, then immediately downloaded one of his albums from iTunes. As a writer and poet I find myself at a loss for words to describe my reaction to the movie. As a poet, Trudell has married his spoken word to the blues and traditional Native American music to achieve a stunning result. I’ll get back to that soon, but first the back story.
Trudell was one of the original leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the seventies. He was involved in the occupations of Alcatraz, the BIA offices in Washington DC, and Wounded Knee. The FBI declared Trudell especially dangerous because of his eloquence and compiled a 17,000-page dossier on him. In 1979, 12 hours after he burned an American flag in Washington to protest the treatment of the Native population, his house on a reservation in Nevada caught fire under mysterious circumstances. Trapped inside were his wife and unborn child, their three children, and his mother-in-law. All perished.
Trudell went into a freefall. Imagine such a loss to a person for whom the family is part of the core of existence. He ended up, in the words of his poem "Did You Ever Get the Blues?" (from the album Bone Days), “…going through the crack in the looking glass.”
Did you ever get the blues,
when dream and reality collided
and you fell
through the hole in your soul
finding yourself looking for something
you lost
and you don’t know what it is?
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