EarCandy #8 - The Blues (Trouble In Mind by Richard M. Jones)

The Blues: nothing but depression, drinking, loneliness, and feeling blue. Life can only be as beautiful as its most ugly parts. And the Blues are here to help us bare the weight of those parts. We don’t turn to beauty when we’re feeling beautiful, but we do when we’re feelings down - and the Blues is an example of this. The Blues is a live example of the pursuit of happiness. The Blues process how we cope with some of life’s most brutal feelings.

Within in the Blues, is also hope. Hope that one may outgrow their deficits and live in happiness.Trouble In Mind by Richard M. Jones is a perfect example of this:

Trouble in mind, I’m blue

But I won’t be blue always

Oh the sun’s gonna shine

In my back door someday

A common theme in the Blues, is once happiness is caught, you can lay [your] head, on some lonesome railroad iron, as Jones says. In other words, you can rest. Whatever that means, is up to the audiences’ interpretation. I’ve always felt like this meant death. That a life over-following with sadness, only can ask for one thing: a little but of the opposite. And once that is felt, there is no need to feel anymore. Almost an avoidance of the return of feeling blue.

One thing is scarier than catching the blues, and that is returning to them. Blues music acts as a guide in our negivation of intense emotion. We can learn how to process our blues, by listening to how others processed theirs. Again Trouble In Mind by Richard M. Jones is a perfect example of this. As Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Louis Armstrong, and Lightnin’ Hopkins all have their own version of Trouble In Mind. And whether or not you know it, so do you.

Trouble In Mind by Richard M. Jones