THE LANDSCAPE OF THE BLUES

by Wim Wenders

Let's imagine for a moment that the Blues had all but disappeared and had just vanished from musical history. Let's say we had lost any trace of its legendary performers from the Twenties and Thirties. Let's assume that the hardships of the Depression years had erased all that memory. Now, by chance, someone would dig up a few of these old recordings! Necessarily, the one fundamental question immediately arises: Where did this music come from? Where were the roots of these plaintive laments, these mournful rhythms, this steady, relentless beat?

If that determined researcher wasn't deaf or blind, he or she would quickly come to the conclusion that this music just had to have been born in the south of the United States, probably in Mississippi, Louisiana or Alabama. Of peculiar interest would soon emerge what the local residents of Mississippi call "The Delta", that expanse of wet flatlands that fan out from the river just south of Memphis.

Actually traveling through Mississippi in the early twenty-first century, looking for traces of two of my blues heroes, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir, my real life quest didn't feel all that different from that researcher's imaginary mission. I seemed to be crossing a territory out of synch with our modern times and lost in a daydream of itself. The river moved slowly as ever, in its very own timeless dimension. Still, the muddy current had its own ominous momentum, a latent power to rise up and overflow its banks and its man-made barriers built to contain the waters. Even today, these levees seem to reverberate with the work songs and field hollers sung by the slaves who built them. And going even further back in time, the chants of the Algonquian Indians resound. All we understand is that they name their mystical stream is "Mississippi", meaning simply "big river". It still has an air of eternity about it. Its domestication, then as now, seems a temporary, futile effort.

The white puffs of cotton in the bushes here or there, are they left over to remind us of the past, before the big harvesting machines came in? When was that? In the thirties? Or was it only recently? And what's that growing over there, all of a sudden? Rice? Could that be right or am I dreaming? And those still waters over there? "Aquaculture" the signs say. How does that song go, the "Catfish Blues"? "I wish I were a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea…" But "catfish farms"? No Blues song ever dealt with those…

A lonely shotgun shack here and there, the same old metal chair in a faded blue or green forgotten on the porch. If I had to just say the first word that would come to my mind about houses in Mississippi I would say "corrugated iron." In hindsight, that seems like the surface of choice - rusty, patched together, trees growing out of the roofs of these huts. Close your eyes, and in a flash, you can still see smoke coming from the chimneys in the back. A guitar starts, joined by a harmonica… even the soft breeze of the wind here sounds like the blues.

Once I entered one of these places. There were still plates on the table, covered with dust. A fork and a knife. Form behind the broken cupboard I pulled a newspaper that was sticking out. The headlines were about the war. No, not Vietnam, not Korea. The year was 1944.

Those men in the striped suits out there, they must be shooting a prison movie. What do you mean? They are what? Really?

Whole forests, riverbanks, even buildings and abandoned sites are overgrown with the thick impenetrable green of Kudzu. Early in the 20th century, locals brought the plant in from Japan to forestall erosion. But the weed had no enemies here in the South and it spread everywhere quickly, wrapping trees and rusting tractors alike, as if on diabolical instructions from nature's own demented Christo. Kudzu has created mysterious landscapes of leafy castles, hiding enchanted palaces of the past underneath. All of it frozen in time. Arms stretched up in despair, reaching for the sky, heads bowed. Half fairytale territory, half giant graveyards. You park your car here and fall asleep, a few hours later you will be covered and suffocated as well. Cinderella country, sleeping in the sun, forgotten, forsaken, waiting to be kissed awake.

Once, these places had a voice. The blues was that voice. The blues spoke powerfully and proudly and with confidence. But the blues moved away. It went to the big cities. It became electrified. It turned into Jazz and Rock'n roll and Punk and Rap. Here, where it was born, it is history. Kudzu growing over it.

We're so far away from Africa, light years away. That continent is on another planet. Yet its music moved here, on the slave ships. It grew in this heat, and with the blood and the sweat and the tears of generations of exploited and oppressed people it became the music of America, its most authentic and powerful expression. Now it has transformed into the world's most popular and widespread sound, has turned into the best-understood universal language. Only here, at its origin, time has stood still.

We were shooting scenes in this landscape that were supposed to take place in the Thirties, during the Depression. No need to dress anything. Mississippi is still depressed. It is the poorest state in the Union. But how friendly, how generous, it is! Give me any of these sleepy towns anytime?-with their high sidewalks, the stark shadows, the deafening sounds of the crickets?? over any of those shopping malls, that theme park no-man's-land everywhere else. Give me those Sunday mornings, with everybody walking to church, in white shirts, pressed suits, abundant colors, gorgeous hats. People look at you, yes, look at your eyes, smile, and invite you in.

Poverty is certainly no privilege, cannot be glorified, and must not be stylized to be what it is not. But poverty is no shame, that's for sure. Wealth can easily turn into a shame. Poverty can be worn with dignity. Wealth is only too often an ill-fitting suit.

Mississippi is like the music it brought to life. Like the blues, it is honest and pitiless and patient and sad and relentless. Like the Blues, it is broken without ever losing its pride. Like the Blues, it speaks of misery and pain and suffering, but it also knows about the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Blues is utterly worldly and profane, and yet able to transcend our lives. It can get to the bottom of it, but can also lift us up to the highest heavens. The landscape in which this music was conceived had these contradictions in its genes to begin with. It is embracing them still.