Beyond Musical Notes: Retentions in Worldview
The Tennessee Institute of Blues Phenomenology approaches the question of African retentions not merely as a musicological hunt for rhythmic or melodic patterns, but as an investigation into the persistence of fundamental structures of consciousness. The Middle Passage and slavery attempted to strip enslaved Africans of their languages, religions, and social structures. However, deep-seated ways of perceiving, feeling, and organizing experience—a phenomenology—proved more resilient. These retentions, subtly transformed in the New World, provided the foundational template for what would become the blues. To understand the blues attitude is, in part, to recognize these West African roots in the very fabric of its being-in-the-world.
The Concept of Nommo: The Power of the Word and Sound
In many West African cosmologies, particularly among the Dogon and others, 'Nommo' is the generative power of the spoken word. Sound is not merely descriptive; it is creative and transformative. This concept survives powerfully in the blues. The blues performance is not a report on reality; it is an act that seeks to alter reality. By singing about trouble, the singer is not just describing it but actively engaging with it, attempting to shape its power through rhythm and incantation. The moan, the cry, the bent note—these are not just expressions of emotion; they are sonic forces deployed to affect the world and the community. The blues shares this belief in the constitutive power of sound.
Call-and-Response as the Structure of Sociality
The call-and-response pattern is perhaps the most obvious and profound retention. It is the fundamental organizational principle of much West African music, religious ceremony, and daily communication. Phenomenologically, it structures a world where the individual is always in dialogue with the community. There is no isolated 'artist' and passive 'audience'; there is a continuous loop of call (testimony) and response (affirmation). This creates the blues' distinctive intersubjective field. The 'I' of the blues singer is always anticipating and depending on the 'you' of the audience's response. This format reinforces a communal identity and a distributed sense of responsibility for the emotional content. The solo country blues singer often internalizes this dialogue, with their guitar providing the 'response' to their vocal 'call.'
Cyclical Time and the Ritual Present
Many West African traditional cultures conceive of time as cyclical rather than linear—a pattern of recurring seasons, rituals, and ancestral returns. This stands in contrast to the Western, Judeo-Christian model of linear, eschatological time marching toward an end. The blues inherits and adapts this cyclical sensibility. The 12-bar form is a musical cycle. Lyrical themes repeat and recur. The performance is less a narrative with a climax and resolution than a ritualistic circling around a central emotional truth. The goal is not to reach a conclusion, but to achieve a state of being—catharsis, connection, possession by the spirit of the song—within the cycle. This creates the 'blues time' discussed elsewhere, a qualitative, present-focused temporality deeply linked to African concepts of ritual time.
Polyrhythm and the Multi-Layered Self
West African music is famously polyrhythmic, weaving multiple independent rhythmic patterns into a cohesive whole. This is not just a musical technique; it reflects a worldview where multiple forces, spirits, and layers of reality coexist simultaneously. In the blues, this polyrhythmic sensibility manifests in the complex interplay between the vocal line (which often has its own rhythmic freedom or 'rubato'), the guitar's bass pattern, and its treble melody. Even in a solo performer, one can hear this layering. Phenomenologically, this creates a rich, multi-dimensional experience for the listener, who can focus on different layers at different times. It also mirrors the 'double-consciousness' described by W.E.B. Du Bois—the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of another, of holding multiple social realities at once. The blues body is a site where these multiple rhythms intersect.
The Aesthetic of the 'Cool' and Emotional Mastery
The West African aesthetic of 'coolness' (as described by Robert Farris Thompson) values composure, balance, and emotional mastery in the face of adversity. It is not the absence of feeling, but the sophisticated control and channeling of intense feeling. This is the essence of the blues attitude. The blues singer faces devastating loss, but does so with wit, irony, and artistic control. They do not break down; they bend the note. They channel the heat of anger into the cool precision of a lyrical insult. The performance, no matter how emotionally charged, maintains a sense of rhythmic and formal control. This 'cool' is a survival strategy and an aesthetic ideal, a direct descendant of African philosophies of self-presentation and resilience.
Ancestral Presence and Spirit World Immanence
The belief in the active presence of ancestors and spirits in the everyday world is a core West African retention. While the blues is largely secular, it is deeply haunted. Ghosts, haints, and supernatural forces populate its lyrics. The music itself is often described as a way to conjure or commune with spirits (as in the Robert Johnson mythos). Phenomenologically, the world of the blues is not a disenchanted, materialist one. It is a world where invisible forces act upon the visible, where the past (in the form of ancestral memory or personal trauma) actively haunts the present. The blues performance can be seen as a way to navigate this spirit-filled world, to appease, confront, or harness these unseen powers through sound.
Conclusion: A Syncretic Consciousness
The Institute's work concludes that the blues consciousness is a unique American syncretism, a fusion of West African phenomenological structures with the brutal realities of the Euro-American experience. The African retentions provided the underlying 'grammar' of feeling, time, sociality, and sound. The specific historical content—slavery, Jim Crow, poverty, love, travel—provided the 'vocabulary.' This syncretic consciousness allowed a people to process an unthinkable new reality using ancient tools of mind and spirit. The blues is not 'African music,' but it is inconceivable without the African template at its core. To study its phenomenology is to trace how a way of being survived the Middle Passage and found a new, potent form of expression in the red clay of the American South, forever shaping the sound of modern global music and the very concept of soulful expression.