Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry

by Mike Mattison, Ernest Suarez

Poetic Song Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock―biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies―to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry.

Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.

254 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2021

Reviews

[Rick Jackofsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains some well-researched and detailed analysis of mid to late 20th-century songwriting, some of it common knowledge, and some more obscure (Miles Davis’ wife, Betty Davis is a singer-songwriter!), it has some five-star observations, but also some points that really miss the mark. First off, the whole thesis statement, or premise for the book, is a bit absurd. Poetic song verse was first manifest in 1960s rock music? What about the Child Ballads, hymns, and psalms, not to mention the bards of the oral tradition going back to Orpheus? The authors are correct, something special was happening in American music during the '60s and ‘70s. Rock and roll, which began as dance music aimed at a white teen audience was growing up and expanding along with the targeted demographic. The music and lyrics were both becoming more sophisticated along with the audience. Thanks to some forward-thinking A&R men, (like John Hammond), and the rise of album-oriented FM radio, a new generation of poets were introduced to a widespread audience.

“Poetic Song Verse" covers a lot of ground, from Nina Simone to Bobbie Gentry, to Joe Strummer, and Grandmaster Flash, but it begins and ends with Bob Dylan. The poetry of Bob Dylan was a major force that elevated and expanded folk and rock lyrics to a higher level and this book is, basically, a love letter to him. A few other rock icons, like Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Stones, and The Beatles; get some acknowledgment, but it’s Dylan that, perhaps rightfully so, gets most of the ink here. So why not call the book "Bob Dylan the Father of Modern Rock and Roll Lyricism”? He certainly didn't invent "Poetic Song Verse."

I also think the authors vastly underestimate the influence and effect that hallucinogenic drugs had on the changes that were taking place at this time. Dylan, Hendrix, Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, Morrison, . . . were all partaking of the forbidden fruit. To gloss over the importance of, or to imply that the cultural renaissance of the 1960s happened independently, or in spite of psychedelic drugs, is an attempt to re-write history.

Another thing that I found curious, and perhaps connected to their view of psychedelia, is the authors' treatment of The Grateful Dead. One, or perhaps both of the authors, seem to be harboring some kind of grudge against the band. The poetic lyricism of The Grateful Dead's primary songwriter, Robert Hunter, is casually glossed over while they go out of their way to dis Garcia and company, at one point referring to them as a "serviceable bluegrass band” (???!!!) and as "pointless noodlers.” They go on to say, "To the jazz or classical ear . . . the basic pentatonic scales the band employs and the general lack of rhythmic ingenuity and/or agility–their music certainly does not swing—that can be a turnoff.” Mattison and or Suarez level this criticism while at the same heaping praise on the music of Dylan, The Stones, and Chuck Berry, who are/were not exactly paragons of harmonic and rhythmic sophistication. Meanwhile, I think saxophonist and jazz icon, Branford Marsalis who occasionally sat in with the band, would beg to differ with their analysis of The Grateful Dead’s music. When talking about his experience playing with The Grateful Dead, he said: “Those guys can play music. They’re much better than most people give them credit for. They have big ears and real chops. They’re fantastic.” - Branford Marsalis (McNally, What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead p. 582)

All in all, I enjoyed reading this book and appreciate the work that went into it, but I couldn’t resist chiming in with my “two cents” worth of quibbling that made me give it a four-star rating rather than five.