Holy Blues: The 400-year trip of a musical soul

By Richard Koechli

How African American Christian music influenced Western cultural history and forever changed the world of song. What do blues, jazz, soul, R&B, rock'n'roll, folk, country, rock, pop and hip hop have in common? Their origin, their fire! Holy Blues (Gospel Blues) is the source of all the roots music we love. The history of gospel music is 400 years old; its spirit even much older, and without it we simply would not be able to be enchanted by soulful music today.

Reason enough to trace this good spirit, Holy Spirit. The award-winning Swiss musician and book author Richard Koechli embarks on an adventurous journey through American cultural history and shows with countless concrete examples how high the influence of faith on the music and its producers has been throughout the centuries, how decisive and mysterious the divine dimension shapes the music at every moment. Koechli does this in a double package: as a book author with a soul stirring history trip, and as a blues artist with very personal interpretations of timeless Holy Blues songs (free download).

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9783347627529

Richard Koechli

Swiss musician and book author Richard Koechli is a great connoisseur of American roots music and its history. His reference books and music novels, published by AMA and tredition, are renowned standard works (German Music Edition Award 2011); as a guitarist and singer-songwriter, he has been awarded the Swiss Blues Award, the Swiss Film Music Prize, and the Prix Plus (Swiss Arts and Culture Prize), among others. More information: www.richardkoechli.ch/en

Book preview

Prologue

Whether the blues is holy or, as is often claimed, the devil, is something I pondered with a mixture of irony and seriousness back in 2014, in my book Dem Blues auf den Fersen (On the Heels of the Blues). Fred Loosli, the protagonist of that story, searched in vain for an answer to the question of why there has always been a distinction between blues and gospel. Fred never really understood the difference. Understandable - there is no difference.

The inseparable connection between gospel and blues is ignored as much as possible in the music business. The blues has to be dirty, bad boys and bad girls sell better. On the commercial surface, every genre needs its label, I can understand that. But in depth and from a music-historical point of view, such clichés don't last long. Just T-Bone Walker's famous statement the blues is just gospel turned inside out makes everything clear - the two seemingly opposite poles are the essence of our music. Without gospel, the blues would not exist.

In our enlightened world, this sounds strange: Music is inseparable from the divine. It sounds like a metaphor at first, of course. When the German music journalist, producer and jazz musician Joachim-Ernst Berendt spoke of Nada Brahma, the world is sound, he meant it metaphysically, philosophically. Berendt understood music as an expression of human existence in itself, comprehensible in the context of the social and also religious context.

But even on the physical, scientific level, the world is sound. For us, the world-space is a place of silence, but space has its own sound track, says American physicist Janna Levin of Barnard College in New York. It's a composition made up of dramatic events. The big bang is everywhere. Space billows and vibrates. The song of the Big Bang is still ringing around us. Sounds kind of like science fiction, but has long been dry, grounded knowledge. Everyone can hear this spectacular primeval sound, emphasizes Hannes Sprado in his book Der Klang des Weltalls (The Sound of the Universe), because in analog television reception, 1 percent of the noise consists of the afterglow of the Big Bang: At any time of day or year, electromagnetic rays with a wavelength in the millimeter and centimeter range strike the Earth's surface from all directions. Radio waves reach us from the darkest corners and the most remote areas, bringing news from a distant time, from nowhere, so to speak. They tell of the past, they describe the present, and they proclaim the future.

Kind of fits with the creation story in the Bible where God said, Let there be… A good friend of mine, the blind musician Gerd Bingemann, is convinced: To these spoken instructions even nothingness had to react and bring forth the things brought about by God's word.

What is summoned is then not merely metaphysical or philosophical; Joachim-Ernst Berendt also gets very specific when he writes in his multi-part series Vom Hören der Welt (On Hearing the World) - the ear is the way a very interesting example is interspersed: The light waves of the sun, the moon and various planets were measured and then octavated down into the frequency range audible to the human ear - the results were fascinating: The earth vibrates after this octavation relatively sluggishly rattling in a tone close to G; that is, neither in a tonal carpet of sound that cannot be clearly grasped nor as a diffuse noise, Gerd Bingemann adds.

Well, pondering about it can be very inspiring. In this book, however, I would like to focus more narrowly. I am not so much interested in the Big Bang, but rather in the music of our culture: blues, jazz, soul, country, folk, pop, rock. On the one hand as a performing musician as well as someone interested in music history - in the hope of being able to feel and produce songs and sounds even more intensely. On the other hand, as a Christian, in order to understand (according to Berendt) the music in the context of the social and religious context.

Religious context? Doesn't sound very cool to modern ears, as I now. Of all things, the music that embodies the soundtrack of our liberated individuality, the music that began to loosen the shackles of religious constraints in the 1950s and 1960s, that cleared up superstition and false morals - that is supposed to be of divine origin? For the current zeitgeist, such statements are pure provocation. Whereas he, the zeitgeist, is fully betting on the religion-bashing card, stubbornly assuring us that the world would be a thousand times better and more peaceful without religion, that our ancestors are supposed to have been superstitious idiots, and that we are finally entitled to the right to self-realization without a corset. Now, of all times, when this zeitgeist seems to be getting right, the churches are almost empty, the old hocus-pocus stuff is gradually disappearing from our everyday life - now, of all times, Koechli comes along and claims that our music of today would simply not exist without God, faith and religion? Even more audacious: That Jesus not only shaped our western history in general, but that we also owe him, at least indirectly, our beloved Anglo-American roots music?

It seems pretty crazy to me myself, this realization. Sure, I always had in the back of my mind that spirituals and gospel songs exist. It's not that I was never interested in them; even on my very first CD Trains of Thought from 1992 I played an instrumental version of Go Down Moses and Amazing Grace, because such songs seemed somehow sacred to me and made an impression. But in the end, I found them to be a detail of music history, nothing more. As time went on, I dove deeper, I became something of a blues musician, as you know - but I still had the impression during all those years that gospel was at best a pious and therefore not quite as cool sister of the blues. Yes, and now, in the course of researching this book here, I realized that gospel is not the sister, but the mother. And Jesus Christ therefore actually the father, the forefather!

Of course, Jesus is not the only crack; there are other cracks from the spiritual world to blame for our music. The Islamic prophet Mohammed, for example, also had a hand in the Blues, from the very beginning. So did some of the African gods like Papa Legba from the Voodoo religion. Prophet Moses, of course, the founder of Judaism, was there in spirit when Jewish artists and businessmen helped the African-American musical soul make its commercial breakthrough and successful turn on to the pop music highway in the 20th century. And let's not forget the Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism; they played a decisive role in the blues revival, the birth of rock music and the hippie movement in satisfying the enormous hunger for spiritual kicks.

So, peace, joy and happiness in the big spiritual family of the music world? Not quite, no. Let's not kid ourselves - of course a few dark figures were trying to interfere all the time, as they always do. The jamming anecdotes are well known: The famous Crossroads rendezvous of the old bluesmen with the devil, for example, or the occult shenanigans of certain rock stars, who, drug-addled, at times fell defenselessly for the mischievous tricks of Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey and their ilk. But in the end the jammers, as clever as they tried, could not cause any lasting damage - the blue notes remained in the care of good powers and consecrate themselves to this day in the positive sphere of influence of the world religions. Holy Blues, yeah.

It has saved countless lives, these holy blues. And now, as a gift, he's even given me a kick that no LSD trip in the world could - the kick, that is, to write this book. Hallelujah!

You notice, dear readers, I occasionally pack a hint of irony into my narrative. But, I want to make a serious and inspiring contribution to the reappraisal of the history of the blues and its spiritual background. I'm glad you're joining me on this historic journey. I'm not the type of tour guide who has walked the path countless times, knows every stone and blade of grass, and recites the travelogue. I am just as much on a voyage of discovery myself, feeling my way along, being surprised again and again by new discoveries.

That the Blues also has Islamic roots was not clear to me for a long time. The decisive, style-forming inspiration for this music came, as is well known, from the Christian-influenced spiritual and gospel music, but the Africans who were taken to the new world of the colonial powers in the course of the transatlantic slave trade were influenced spiritually in various ways. Africa's religious history is diverse. And right from the start: religion is not a side issue in Africa - it encompasses almost all areas of life and plays a central role for most people. Africans do not like half measures. For them, spirituality is not just wellness or mind games; they often live their faith with uncompromising intensity and devotion, and they know from their ancestors that the relationship to the invisible world is not humbug, but the most natural thing in the world.

Christianity and Islam today share the religious majority in Africa; Islam tends to be more in the north and west, Christianity more in the centre and south. The third largest group is a collection of traditional ethnic religions, and in addition there are of course numerous syncretic religions, i.e. mixtures of ethnic religions with Christian or Islamic ones. Judaism, by the way, also played a role in Africa for thousands of years; Jewish communities lived scattered over the African continent from very early on, the Falasha, for example, whose ancestors were Israelites who emigrated to Ethiopia in the 10th century BC.

The African slaves thus had different backgrounds when they were abducted to their new homeland. Some were of Christian origin (the first historical evidence of a Christian presence in Africa dates back to the 4th century), others were of Muslim origin (shortly after the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632, Islam had begun to spread in Africa), and still others had a mixture of religious baggage. In the course of the centuries that were decisive for the history of the Blues, many Afro-Americans converted to Christianity - and yet, in addition to the already formative African musical traditions, there is most likely also an Islamic component in the Blues: the call to prayer.

Was the Field Holler (call-song during fieldwork) an Islamic call to prayer …? According to historical records, an Ethiopian named Bilal was the first muezzin (caller); in 622 or 623 he is said to have called Muslim believers to prayer for the first time. Not yet from a minaret (minarets were not erected until after the Prophet's death), but from the roof of a house in Medina, in western Saudi Arabia, the second most important holy city in Islam after Mecca. Piquant detail: Bilal was a black African slave, a freed slave, previously tortured by his Arab master, finally freed by Abu Bakr al-Sadiq, a wealthy Muslim benefactor. Out of gratitude and joy, Bilal converted to Islam, climbed to the roof of a small mosque, and with longdrawn-out shouts called the people to prayer. The Adhan was born - the art of the melodious call to prayer. Today, it is sung in the Islamic world in countless regional nuances, in various maqams (modes, keys), rooted in Arabic tradition, with the typical three-quarter-tone intervals of Arabic music.

Bilal's call to prayer from Medina was exported to America about a thousand years later with West African slaves, and finally gave rise to the legendary Field Holler - and thus the blues. At least that is what the New York social historian Sylviane Diouf and the Austrian ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik are convinced of. For Diouf, "the proximity of the Holler to the Muslim call