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Mahalia Jackson - Jesus Is With Me

What the blues expresses, of course, is not just feelings, most blues songs, from Back Water Blues and Sweet Home Chicago to Sweet Rough Man and Mean Old World, spend considerable lyric energy representing the conditions, the challenging, despair and/or euphoria inducing situations, that give rise to the feelings. Blues songs often state a problem, let it simmer and intensify, then pose a provisional solution. What generates the solution, as often as not, is the blues ethos: the blues philosophy of life. The blues ethos, as a concept, is multipronged, not unitary. It is a handful of attitudes and strategies for coping gracefully with the worst that life can throw at you... How do you generate an elegance of earned self togetherness, so that you have a stick to it ness in the face of the catastrophic and the calamitous and the horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous?

The blues condition undergirding the poem is failed or unrequited love, the you in the first line who does not, or no longer continues to, love the poem’s speaker. Superadded to that condition and reinforcing it in the speaker’s mind is a more general condition of unluckiness, one affirmed by the gypsy’s fortune telling... Blues expressiveness shows up in a range of ways, including the black vernacular language deployed by the speaker and the autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.


Mahalia Jackson - Jesus Is With Me
  • Written by: "Traditional song"
  • Genre: Gospel
  • Released on: Jesus Is With Me

"Mahalia Jackson became one of the most influential gospel singers in the world and was heralded internationally as a singer and civil rights activist. She recorded about 30 albums"

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