Historical Suffering and Experience Term Paper

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Music and cultural traditions are quintessential aspects of American life. This essay will explore the relationship between experience and suffering. Our discussion will examine the life and work of Bessie Smith and the Native American custom of "vision quest." The conclusion of the essay will illustrate how suffering creates good blues musicians while vision quest reveals the future so that "the blues" can be avoided.

The Blues and Vision Quest

You gotta pay the dues if you wanna sing the blues," so the saying goes. (Whitney) Orphaned at a young age, growing up in a racist and anti-feminist era, Bessie Smith definitely paid her dues.

Bessie began her career at a very early age singing on street corners for loose change. Bessie's extraordinary voice brought her great fame in the black community. Yet her personal life was plagued with turmoil. She was an alcoholic whose notorious temper always got the best of her. To make matters worse, her second husband Jack Gee was physically abusive and unfaithful to her. Many of her songs detailed her roller-coaster relationship with her husband. This is especially evident in the words to 'Please Help Me Get Him Off My Mind":

It's all about a man who always kicks and dogs me aroun;

And when I try to kill him, that's when my love for him come down."

Yet all the while singing about her problematical relationship with her husband, she reveals her own promiscuous tendencies, In "Young Woman's Blues" she says:

I'm gonna drink good moonshine and rub these browns down. See that long lonesome road, Lawd you know it's gonna end, And I'm a good woman and I can get plenty men." (Whitney)

In addition to her issues with men and alcohol addiction, historians note that she also had a disdain for white people. Bessie's contempt for the white race existed in spite of the fact that she was very popular with whites in certain regions of the country.

The blues singer disliked the attitude that many whites had towards blacks and she had experienced these attitudes first hand.

Bessie's music was greatly influenced by the experiences that she had as a child growing up in Tennessee.

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Much of her music did not address racism directly but it did address the chasm between the classes. For instance, the song entitled "Poor Man's Blues" asserts;

Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind

Give the poor man a chance, help stop these hard, hard times.

While you're livin' in your mansion you don't know what hard times means

Poor working man's wife is starving your wife is livin' like a queen.(Whitney)

Bessie Smith lived her life to the extremes, she drank too much, fought too much, engaged in numerous extramarital affairs with men and women, but nonetheless she was considered the Empress of Blues. Even though she had acquired great wealth for a black woman in the early twenties, she was a black, performer that many working class blacks could identify with.

It is evident that Bessie Smith used her own life experiences to form the blues that she sang. The singer speaks of her suffering at the hands of an abusive husband and chronicles her bout with alcoholism and promiscuity. The popularity of her music was due in part to the conviction with which she sang. Conviction that could only come from a woman who was telling the story of her experience -- her suffering.

While blues songs relay the past experiences and suffering of the singer, vision quests serve to aid boys in discovering the experiences that they will have in the future. The ritual involves pubescent boys going on a spiritual journey of enlightenment. During this journey no food is eaten and the young boys do not sleep but spend the time in deep meditation, prayer and observation. During this period of solitude they are seeking a vision which will grant them meaning and direction….....

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