Big Bill Broonzy, Martin Heidegger, and the blue note

OK. I guess I haven't stayed on task the way I would have liked to. It's been a while since the first real post--while I was reading Camus. But I have had a few thoughts that I might like to share.

This post idea came to me while I was running (about 5-miles) with earphones in, listening to Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy played what we call country blues--if you know Taj Mahal's playing and singing, then you know Broonzy's influence. Broonzy was important in the 1950s as part of the folk and blues resurgance in the U.S., but his legacy has been overshadowed by Pete Seeger (with whom Broonzy played), Woody Guthrie, and, later, Bob Dylan. Broonzy had a wonderfully inventive blues picking style, and a clear and resonant voice--listen, for example, to his "Key to the Highway" or "When Things Go Wrong."

The song I want to comment on is called "Joe Turner Blues." This is a ballad of the post-Reconstruction years that tells about Joe Turner, a folk character who helped "all poor people, the white and the black," leaving them food, etc after a flood in the 1890s. It would have resonated for Broonzy's audiences who had a living memory of the Great Depression.

The song is a ballad with a rolling guitar part that just stays on the same groove and backs up a kind of narrative spoken part punctuated by a chorus--"Joe Turner been here and gone."

What is amazing musically about this very simple song is a part that introduces each chorus. Broonzy keeps the bass line going with his right hand, but uses his left hand to ACTUALLY TURN THE TUNING KEY to bend the high note on his guitar. Bending notes is a key part of blues playing, but usually players do this by bending the string with a finger on the fretboard. Tuning up and down during a song was amazingly inventive and bold.

I love this from two standpoints: as a guitar-player myself, but also as a literary/cultural critic who has read Martin Heidegger on technology. Broonzy's guitar playing is an example of the distinction Heidegger makes between technology and techne in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Here's a huge oversimplification of Heidegger: Technology is all the material, physical and mechanical parts of the invention of tools and man-made innovations. Techne is, we might say, the spirit of creativity and invention that goes into the human-technological relationship. The tuning pegs of a guitar are such a wonderful piece of machinery. Guitar players--especially those like me who are in their 40s and older and love guitar gear as much as guitar music--appreciate the way the simple gears and pegs work to tune the guitar. But few guitar players appreciate the spirit of the human-technological trapped within those tuning gears.

Broonzy, in a way, liberates the spirit of techne from the actuality of technology when he plays the blue note (the note that fluctuates between the separate tones that make up the Western European musical scale) by turning the tuning peg as part of the song itself.

So--read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," or, better yet, listen to Big Bill Broonzy.

Here's the album I've been listening to: _Trouble in Mind_. Reissued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2000.