The English Beat - The Tears of a Clowne

The blues is generally understood as a secular music of loss: lost women, lost jobs, regrets, and defeat. But it has a more profound, spiritual side, defying despair. In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison, while writing about flamenco, another Islamic influenced music, remarked that the blues voice mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth, that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again... the blues is a secular spiritual. In this spirituality, perhaps one may find an echo of one of the blues’s roots in Islamic practices and music.

The blues is not African music; there is no traditional African blues. Nor is it Islamic music. The blues is an African American creation, born of American circumstances and various influences. What makes it unique is the prevalence of a number of Sahelian/Islamic stylistic elements that became dominant due in part to historical events particular to American slavery... Among these were the soulful tunes of the hollers and the blues. Though largely unrecognized, they are some of the most enduring contributions of West African Muslims to American culture.

Source: What Islam Gave the Blues by Sylviane A. Diouf

The English Beat - The Tears of a Clowne

• Released in: 1979
• Genre: Rock, Reggae
• Duration: 2:41

"The Beat, also known as Paul Collins' Beat, was a power pop band that formed in Los Angeles, California, United States in 1977. The band has been led through several incarnations by singer songwriter and guitarist Paul Collins."

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