In conclusion, blues music in America—as an identity of its own—is not just roots music. Its musicians have masterfully and consistently worked against the restraints of an existing genre, molding the music to new meaning and new potential. The blues, along these same lines, have always taken an interest in what an audience requires: in the prevailing popular taste, in what is profitable, in the influence from outside which can actually make the music more true to itself. And, by meeting these ends, blues music has become the music of masters, proficient in the roots of the genre and in its extending possibilities—prone to the sort of bold and enterprising experimentation thought to be beyond the realm of roots. Thus, this playlist has been about music which changed the blues life and therefore the American life. No American music, after all, can accurately and unsentimentally be more about “roots” than “routes”; the bouncing around and conflict between ideas and forms is precisely what is American about America. And what is bluesy about the blues is its assertive force, as music which is more than static reaction.
This assertion—of the positive black voice which, though inspired by circumstance, is capable of taking from circumstance an interest in something new—seems to parallel an emerging black political identity. As Josh Kun writes, the potent presenting of an oppositional voice is key to self-reflexive racial identity; yet white revisionism avers that the more assertive the voice, the less authentic the music. Pride in blues is something not often discussed, pride being an opposition to the pitiful sound of roots and rural music; yet pride is exactly the artistic life force of the blues. In other words, the blues is about artistic othering, by which an “othered” underclass of the prevailing society (namely, black people) offers itself positively as an alternative to that society simply by engaging in the invention of its own art. And invention, again, is what has always and pridefully moved the blues forward, pushing against itself and against the history which that self has come to represent. What is left for the caretakers of the blues, politically, is to retake the meaning of the blues as something existing outside of political projection.
There is, lastly, the question of how this blues identity both fits into and affects the identity of America and American music generally. If this playlist has proven the existence of an identity, or categorization, marked by its movement within and against genre, its understanding of the broad commercial audience, and its forceful and improvisational assertion of itself in order to change the political life, then what can be said more consequentially about music in America? First of all, according to Adelaida Reyes, America exists primarily in difference and diversity—forms, ideas, sounds, candidates coexisting and competing without an obvious process of roots becoming something superior. Secondly, American identity is partly given by the drive for individual innovation, voiced correspondingly in the creative commercialism blues has always been indebted to. But, most of all, America is about the politics of race living nonracially: histories merging, styles drawing on one another even while in brutal opposition, the whole of this place running into itself and into an idea that will not die.
That idea, that something can be made of oneself if only by an act of reimagining, lives on in the blues, the music of experimentation, imagination, and eventual profit despite the fact of race.
