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Songs from the Moon: The Mythic Howl of the Mississippi Delta Blues
- Teddy Hamstra, PhD
- Mar 1
- 6 min read
Three voices from the late nineteenth century miraculously reach out to us through crackling, hissing, scratchy recordings: Charley Patton, Henry Thomas, and Blind Willie Johnson. Blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta and scattered towns of Texas, the recordings of these African-American troubadours strike the modern ear like dispatches from a distant moon. When I first encountered these recordings made in the first decades of the 20th century at fourteen, I intuited but could not yet name an overpowering mythic quality in their “lunar” sound.
Jazz bandleader Oliver Nelson titled an album The Blues and the Abstract Truth. Besides being an incandescent record, the title is also one of the best unintentional six-word haikus, that phrase locating something at the heart of this unofficial fellowship of the blues between Patton, Thomas, and Johnson. Their unvarnished and unadorned recordings—only the strings of a single guitar, the hums and moans from a lone throat and pair of lungs,and the eerie dust of early recording technology—are songs of separation in the key of mythology. The blues taps into deep emotional reservoirs in our being, encounters with naked pain and regret’s sorrowful shadow. Yet the blues also reaches towards that place of “abstract truth,” a collective unconscious of rhythm, timbre, and the human voice in confrontation and communion with eternity’s AUM.
Yet the blues also reaches towards that place of “abstract truth,” a collective unconscious of rhythm, timbre, and the human voice in confrontation and communion with eternity’s AUM.
Songs of Saturday Nights, Songs of Solitude
Mythology was music for the African American ancestors of bluesmen like Patton, Thomas, and Johnson. The mythological and musical traditions of West Africa fused with those of the indigenous Caribbean, and in turn, those of the American continent. Gospel music, born from the Christianity of enslavement and colonialism yet also the source for a new mythology of freedom all its own, became the “sacred” sounds of the black experience. The blues, gospel’s “profane” nocturnal trickster, soundtracked Saturday nights before the call and response gospel spirituals of Sunday mornings in the black American south. Blues music is not exclusively solitary (the later Memphis and Chicago styles of blues were usually in bands presaging rock groups), but figures like Patton, Thomas and Johnson reveal the mythic power of their phonographic solitude.
Joseph Campbell illuminates this power in one of his most stunning (and indeed symphonic) passages:
But, on the other hand, there have always been those who have very much wished to
remain alone, and have done so, achieving sometimes, indeed, even that solitude in which the Great Spirit, the Great Power, the Great Mystery that is hidden from the group in its concerns is intuited with the inner impact of an immediate force. And the endless round of the serpent’s way, biting its tail, sloughing its old skin, to come forth renewed and slough again, is then itself cast away—often with scorn—for the supernormal experience of an eternity beyond the beat of time. like an eagle the spirit then soars on its own wings. The dragon “Thou Shalt,” as Nietzsche terms the social fiction of the moral law, has been slain by the lion of self-discovery; and the master roars—as the Buddhists phrase it—the lion roar: the roar of the great Shaman of the mountain peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomless abyss. (Primitive Mythology, 240)
A Lunar Blues Trio
When I hear Charley Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues,” I think of the Desert Fathers, Julian of Norwich, and those other mystics who wrote of the unquenchable thirst for their Christ, their ever-flowing yearning for their God. Shifting the call-and-response of a literal gospel choir and preacher into the interplay between unfinished lyrics and his guitar playing, Patton summons the paradoxical euphoria of eros that comes from the soul’s deep longing for its distant beloved. In the pleas of Henry Thomas’ “Don’t Leave Me Here,” we hear the unbridled ecstasy of that communion with what Campbell calls “the Great Spirit, the Great Power, the Great Mystery”—or perhaps, more aptly, the Great Frequency. Thomas’ desperation carries an unexpected joy, borne from the shamanic humility of those whose separation in the solitary zone of trials and healing leads them in a jubilant choreography back to their community. Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” feels like a musical adaptation of Campbell’s prose about “the roar of the great Shaman of the mountain peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomless abyss.” Stretching out the syllables of hums and moans above his guitar plucking into a meditation on the Crucifixion, Johnson becomes the great shaman of Central Texas, softly roaring a divine darkness into the great horizons of the Lone Star skies. Not for nothing was Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” included on the “golden record” placed aboard the Voyager space probe sent into the outer reaches of the galaxy to greet our extraterrestrial kin with the sounds of the earth and its inhabitants.
The heartland of the blues is indeed that battlefield of which Campbell spoke, where the “dragon” of restriction and limitations is slain, guitar string by guitar string, by the howling mystery nestled deep in the leonine vocal chords of a Henry Thomas, a Blind Willie Johnson, a Charley Patton. It is lunar music because it is everpresent, like our moon, in the DNA of all subsequent “popular” music, a beacon at times dimmed and at others effervescent in the songbook of modern life. And it is lunar, too, in its eerie comfort and strangeness of inspiration: the blues is a musical mythology of those sleepless “daimonic” full moons, energetic, erotic, and exhausting in equal measure. I hope that when you listen to these missives from the moon, as it were, you enter into relation on those terms that all mythology demands, those exhortations to boogie-woogie with the eternal.
Solitude, as the medieval mystics to the Mississippi Delta blues singers to Joseph Campbell have intuited, is not synonymous with isolation. Instead, a shamanic solitude, with its rhythms of courage and melodies of daring, is the song of our innermost being when faced with the necessary separation that all spiritual quests demand.
MythBlast authored by:
Teddy Hamstra is a writer and seeker in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a PhD from the University of Southern California, where he completed and successfully defended a dissertation entitled 'Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism.' Recently, Teddy has been working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, spearheading their Research & Development efforts. As an educator and research consultant for creatives, Teddy is driven to communicate the wonder of mythological wisdom in ways that are both accessible to, and which enliven, our contemporary world.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Separation stage of the hero's journey.
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"The still point is the firmly burning flame that is not rippled by any wind. When you find that burning flame within yourself, action becomes facilitated in athletics, in playing a musical piece on the piano, or in performance of any kind. If you can hold to that still place within yourself while engaged in the field, your performance will be masterly."
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