Yes, this is a picture of a very young B.B. King. He is now 76 years old and still going strong. He 'got the blues' - musically speaking - from the many blues artists that preceded him. Where, however, did the blues get the blues?.
The blues is more than a musical art form. It is about periods of powerlessness, regret, poverty, racial exclusion, pain and hope inside catastrophic circumstances. There is one more factor, one of which is often overlooked, the fragility of life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the face of raging epidemic disease.
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Two contagions in particular, yellow fever and cholera, had the capacity to end thousands of lives without little warning. In 1793, yellow fever took the lives of approximately 5,000 residents in Philadelphia or 10% of the population. In 1798, the disease hit New York and claimed between 1,600 and 2,000 people.
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A century later (1878), yellow fever devastated the South. A incomprehensible total of more than 9,000 succumbed in New Orleans (4,046) and Memphis (over 5,000). Due to a resistance extant from their African roots, the number of black deaths was minimal. When it came to cholera, known as 'the poor man's plague' however, African-Americans, the poorest of the poor in the South, were its most vulnerable victims. In 1873, an outbreak of cholera ravaged the Mississippi valley and claimed 3,000 lives while yellow fever hit New Orleans and Memphis in a prelude of the horrific tolls taken by the same disease in these cities five years later.
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Considering that blacks were being subjected to Jim Crow, excluded from jobs with living wages and frequently subject to the appalling effects of epidemic disease, it is no wonder that the blues originated in the South.
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African-Americans did not give up. They endured and eventually won their rightful place in American society as equals after a long, hard and bitter struggle. While racism still exists, the disease of prejudice is melting away with the passing of each and every year. Indeed, the thrill of living is not gone.
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(Photo: B.B. King)
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Listen to B.B King's classic 'The Thrill is Gone' by clicking the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFChQUQihE
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J Roquen