Happiness and co-creation of value: Playing the blues

Little has been written about co-creational aspects of happiness. Happiness is generally treated in the marketing literature as an individual outcome of exchange. However, the notion of value in exchange has been challenged by service-dominant (S-D) logic. To stimulate the research discovery process, an account of co-creation of happiness is offered, based on the experience of the lead author, in playing blues music. We propose value is co-created in a context when it is perceived by an individual to be adding to their happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). Thus, the concepts of value and happiness/SWB are closely linked and interconnected. The contribution to S-D logic is in recognising the interconnectedness between value co-creation and happiness/SWB. In particular, this article draws attention to the co-creative role of the artist, in cultural ecosystems. This is relevant to the development of the field and has potentially significant implications for policy in allocating society’s resources.

La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Turnaround

The twelfth and final “bar” of Whose Blues? offers a handful of thematic and anecdotal explorations: a prismatic view of the blues in the second decade of the third millennium, as Black bluesist heritage claims wrestle with the music’s postmodern condition. What happens when we add Asia—a sampling of younger bluesmen from Japan, China, and India—to our reckoning? Is there a significant statistical disparity between African American and white blues performers in contemporary American blues festivals and awards ceremonies, and at what point does that disparity become objectionable? What might a white blues scholar have to learn by attending the all-Black Jus’ Blues Music Foundation’s annual awards ceremony in Tunica, Mississippi? What sort of blues is being played and sung by the best younger African American bluesmen when they get together in Cleveland, Mississippi—the town where W. C. Handy first had his revelation about the power of the blues more than a hundred years earlier? This chapter ends with a capsule portrait of Akarsha “Aki” Kumar, a Silicon Valley bluesman from Mumbai and former software engineer at Adobe who has reinvented himself in the age of Trump, blending jump blues grooves with Bollywood lyrics and costumes.

The Blues Revival and the Black Arts Movement

This chapter, which originally appeared in somewhat different form in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006), places that Black literary and cultural revolution in dialogue with another cultural earthquake of the 1960s, the emergence of a mass white audience for blues music. For some Black Arts writers and thinkers like Ron Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), the blues savored of black southern abjection and were, in Karenga’s dismissive judgment, “invalid,” an outmoded form without the political utility urgently needed in a time of Black revolution. Yet for many others, led by Larry Neal, the blues were a cherished ancestral rootsock and inalienably Black cultural inheritance—“the essential vector of the Afro-American sensibility and identity.” Even as the blues were being debated within the Black intelligentsia, a white blues revolution was transpiring, one in which white fans imagined themselves forming a beloved community with aged Black blues players who had been brought back into national circulation at festivals and college gigs, and in which white blues artists like Paul Butterfield and Janis Joplin, enjoying mass popularity, drew the fierce condemnation of Black Arts writers Ron Welburn and Stephen E. Henderson.

W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues

Where do the blues come from, when do they come into being, and why has the metaphor of blues “birth” proved so irresistible over the years to music historians, tourism boosters, and others who traffic in the blues? This chapter offers some answers, beginning with a survey of revisionist scholarship that sources early blues music in a range of places other than the Mississippi Delta. Sheet music, much of it composed by white songwriters, is a part of the story; so is early black vaudeville, epitomized the unrecorded and forgotten star, Butler “String Beans” May.” W. C. Handy, as songwriter, autobiographer, and foundational mythmaker of the blues, is another key figure. By finding a sheet music analogue for the tensed major-minor tonality of Black southern blues singing, he introduced that bittersweet and compelling sound into American popular music through his best-known composition, “St. Louis Blues.” He also crafted a myth, with the help of two episodes in Father of the Blues (1941), through which the Mississippi Delta becomes the primal scene of blues music’s national emergence and the Black male musicians who make “weird” music there become the carriers of the tradition that Handy will later popularize and profit from.

Starting the Conversation

Beginning with a reading of Black cultural documentarian Roland L. Freeman’s poem “Don’t Forget the Blues” (1997), this chapter explores a pair of opposed slogans, “Blues is black music” and “No black. No white. Just the blues,” that together constitute the principal ideological conflict within contemporary blues culture. At a moment when blues music has been thoroughly globalized with the help of events like the annual International Blues Challenge in Memphis and when African American players and fans represent a greatly attenuated minority within that global cohort, who speaks for the blues? What role do the burdens of Black history, including slavery and segregation, which critically impacted the blues’ formation and development, play in this new global blues order? Seeking to honor the complexities and dialectical thrust of the blues as evoked by the line, “You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover,” the author asks readers to suspend their ideological reflexes and attend to the music’s paradoxes, even while using writings and interviews by August Wilson, B. B. King, and Honeyboy Edwards to illustrate the way in which the blues—as racial feeling, not just music—emerges from Black lives in the Deep South.

The Voice of the Southern Diaspora: Muddy Waters and the Multi-Layered Influences Associated with the Diffusion of Blues Culture

This paper focuses on the dynamic nature of the Southern Diaspora, the twentieth-century mass migration of African-Americans in United States from the rural south to the urban north and west. The significant migratory links between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, Illinois, and the influences it had on the larger diaspora, are emphasized. The music of famed blues artist Muddy Waters is used as a lens to demonstrate both the causes and the significant impacts of this diaspora. By exploring the multi-layered circuitry of change associated with the evolution and diffusion of Delta blues music, this paper reveals the transnational and transcultural dimensions of the Southern Diaspora.