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This is part of an authorized online posting of Harvey Reid's important book, "The Troubadour Chronicles," published in May 2020. It is available in paperback from this web site or from Amazon.com.
“Not one word about the magical power of ancient music is improbable to me when a simple song seizes hold of me.” [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe] Chapter 22: Troubadours, Magic and ShamanismA famous illustration appears to many people to be two women’s faces looking at each other, while others see it as a picture of a lamp. When I look at the world of troubadours, so far it feels like I am the only one who sees one of the images, while everyone else seems to see the other. It’s frustrating when your perceptions are invisible to others, though from my lonely observatory I now feel like I understand and can accept things on Planet Troubadour that have remained mysterious all my life. Fortunately I am finding some published academic literature that supports my views, though they are not yet mainstream and are too dense for most readers. That could help convince skeptics, though I am not just looking for rational clarity amid a thoroughly irrational subject, and the struggle to sway skeptical people is hard work and generally not much fun. So I will float some ideas here that lie outside the realm of reproducible scientific experiments and measurable data, and that are not even part of the fringes of “normal” music topics. What I say here may make you think I need what songwriter Kinky Friedman calls a “check-up from the neck up”– though I am not wearing robes or eating psychedelic mushrooms, and I make no claims to be anything but a curious musician. Popular culture gets regular infusions of scientific discussions about the workings of music, and seems determined to demystify or bottle it and make it into something explainable. My intent is to “remystify” things instead, and to take back some turf from the neuroscientists who have long been striving to quantify and explain music. I have a sizable bookshelf full of guitar, banjo, mandolin, folk, celtic, blues, jazz, classical and bluegrass instruction materials that I have been collecting for 45 years, and I don’t think there is as much as a single sentence in any of them that presents the idea that a musician or someone who wants to learn to be one should cultivate any special thoughts, states of consciousness, or even emotions as part of their music training. It’s essentially 100% “paint by numbers” stuff, implying though without ever even saying it that if you tune the instrument precisely, put your fingers in certain places and certain times, and hold yourself and your plectrum, fingers or bow in the correct positions, executing the proper motor skills according to the prescribed regimen– the music will somehow do the rest all by itself. The implication is that the desired results will occur, without any investment of thought, feelings or beliefs. I want to kick at this mindset a bit. The Measurable vs. the Unmeasurable The massive “Forbidden Archeology: Hidden History of the Human Race” is 960 small-print pages that detail countless pieces of evidence and purported discoveries dating back centuries that support a wealth of alternative theories of the origins of human beings. Are all those people crazy, wrong or delusional, who either found or claim to have found this mountain of alternative evidence? All of it has been deemed worthless because it is not consistent with the handful of prehistoric bones of “Lucy” that Donald Johanson found in Ethiopia in 1974, that supposedly “prove” the “official” accepted story of the origins of humans. I have a 1977 first printing of a very thick and delightful book by William Corliss called “Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena,” that is a collection of hundreds of news clippings, reports and even scientific papers all detailing unusual and anomalous things that people have witnessed and carefully described. Its chapters on atmospheric lights, sounds, waves, cloud formations, remarkable rainfall events, even numerous examples of waterspouts raining fish or frogs– all come from the pre-cellphone era, and some date back centuries. Often from military personnel, retired science professionals or from other bystanders or highly credible witnesses, and they all represent faithful, non-crazy attempts by observers to tell us about unusual and un-reproducible events. It’s not one of the most amazing entries in the book, but for some reason I remember the guy with a professional rain gauge in his backyard not far from here in Greenfield, New Hampshire who on August 9, 1966 measured “point rainfall” of 5.75 inches on his property, with no wind or lightning, while no one else, even very nearby, experienced or measured any rainfall. Something unusual seems to have happened; someone witnessed, measured and documented it, yet we are inclined to deny its truth because it was out of the ordinary and not repeatable. There is no incentive or motive to fictionalize an event like that, so maybe it did rain that unusually, though maybe a neighbor kid pranked him by filling his rain gauge with a hose or bucket. Now that so many people have cell phones it is vastly easier for witnesses of unusual things to provide evidence or “proof,” though cell phones don’t yet measure rainfall and we are entering the era of near-perfect fake videos. How do you get people to take you seriously when you are outside the mainstream? Corliss’ chapter on unusual lightning is a good example of the “fringes” of human observation, especially because it contains dozens of accounts of what has come to be called “ball lightning.” This phenomenon has been reported since antiquity, but remains something that cannot be created, explained or predicted, putting it in a special category of things that both science and non-science agree exists, but neither can explain or can claim resides only in their realm. And these books are only about science, where the deepest feeling or occult view that scientists are allowed to have is the famous “intuition” or “hunch.” Imagine if we started discussing publicly or in music schools the trances, visions, euphoria, elation or despondency that various musicians engage with and try to manipulate as they create and perform their musical magic. It is possible that the best thing any of us who practice music can do is to embrace and explore the non-rational aspects of music. In Daniel Levitin’s 2006 bestselling “This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,” he never went anywhere near the troubadour persona or skill set that is so central to my perspective, only discussing popular bands, well-known iconic recordings or hallowed classical composers as examples. He kept his “science hat” on except for page 207 of his 261 pages, where he was imagining what the measurers could do if they could put performing musicians into MRI machines to see what we could “learn,” quantify or document from their brain scans. Thus far, the subjects have to be immobile, so the best they can do is put headphones on various people, pipe music into their ears, and watch on their screens to see what areas of the brain are lighting up and try to guess what the results mean. This might just be gadgetry masquerading as science, and even if they could strap good musicians into the scanners, they might get patterns and pictures, but there would likely be no true understanding other than perhaps a sense of agreement among people who are comforted by scientific processes, especially when they involve gee-whiz technology. But Levitin said lucidly, and boldly for him: Magic, Spells and Music Society has accepted the idea that an athlete might enter some kind of a “zone” or special state of consciousness at crucial times in their contests, but we don’t yet have the language or a proper platform to publicly approach the idea that musicians might regularly do something similar. It seems rather obvious that many musical performers sometimes display a command of invisible forces that seem to connect emotionally and spiritually to listeners via sound waves. If someone announced that they had found a particle, a mechanism or even a machine that could allow us to measure or document these forces or even control them, few would be surprised. Watching a video of Janis Joplin in concert is a very different experience from being in the audience, and being right on the stage or in the band would put you even closer to the flames. If you have ever been to a good concert, and moved from the back of the audience to the front, you know it can be a dramatically different experience. A common reaction from a listener is to be drawn in, to imagine themselves actually being the performer, and it is possible that really good performers make that possible in ways that less-skilled performers do not. Some performers seem to deal in hotter or higher-energy forms of musical power than others, and different performers exhibit different depths of connection and varying abilities to manage and deploy the spiritual, emotional and musical forces. Could musicians be sometimes working a type of magic on human perceptions that involve the auditory senses rather than visual? Of course they could, though it may not rely on sensory trickery. Could musicians be sometimes communicating with their listeners in invisible and unmeasurable spiritual, emotional and perhaps religious ways? Who can say yes or no with any authority? Obviously all music doesn’t do that, but could some pieces of music, performances or performers at certain times have crossed into this realm, into a place that is not purely rational and measurable? Who can say yes or no with any authority? I would like to see someone like Oprah Winfrey devote a TV program to this, and lead a discussion among a group of believers and non-believers who are comfortable explaining and defending their positions. I would very much like to hear an eloquent non-believer try to defend the idea that there has never been and could never be anything in any music that qualified as anything but measurable physics or cause and effect. Science attempts to explain music, but does not have any tools to measure the emotional and spiritual content of music, even when it is embedded in plastic discs or radio broadcasts that use AM and FM carrier waves to transmit their content. Pythagoras himself, the godfather of rationality and mathematics, created the Cult of Pythagoras and the Essene Mystery Schools, where he and his followers practiced something now referred to as Orphism. Thousands of years ago, together with a man named Philolaus, he did all sorts of oddball “new-age” things, including musical healing and “soul adjustments.” He claimed to purify the mind and even heal the body, using certain harmonic ratios and specially-tuned musical instruments. Music using the ratio as 256:243 was the leimma or limma, and 2187:2048 was the apotome or the Pythagorean chromatic semitone. Who can say whether Pythagoras was into deep things or nonsense? It is paradoxical that the man with a reputation for being a founder of mathematics and rational thought, who figured out the Earth was round and coined the terms philosophy and cosmos, apparently put a good deal of effort into what most people today would call irrational, which often involved music. Music and Shamanism For many people the word “shaman” is synonymous with “healer,” “medicine man,” “sorcerer,” or “medium,” while others connect it primarily with primitive or ancient religions or even animism. Until the mid-1900s shamanism was often considered in Western society to be a delusion or form of mental illness far more than a religious or medicinal activity, and it has only rather recently gained popular credibility and visibility. The primary argument in favor of the existence and veracity of the idea and practices of shamanism stems from the startling similarities in the activities of isolated primitive people all over the world, including Asia, the Far East, North and South America, Oceania and Europe, who all seem to do very similar inexplicable things. Scholars of shamanism believe it to be fundamental to the human experience, and something vestigial that was likely known to all of archaic humanity. Religious historian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), in his widely-respected and ground-breaking six hundred page text “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy” (1951) broke open the 20th century field of shamanism. He seems to have been the one who convinced the rationalist Western world that shamanism is not nonsense or fairy tales. He unfortunately does not address my concerns, but on page 253 he made a passing assertion that the Chukchee people, an arctic Russian tribe, who he said were losing touch with their ancestral shamanism, practiced a kind of “family shamanism” and that they, “on winter evenings, set themselves to drumming and singing, and sometimes even attain a parashamanic ecstasy.” On page 398 he reported that the Swedish scholar H. S. Nyberg had documented that followers of Zarathustra (Zoroaster) induced ecstatic experiences by singing ritual songs in an enclosed, consecrated space. Eliade also tells us that forms of shamanic ecstasy assisted by music and hemp smoke were known in ancient Iran and Scythia in Central Asia. Influential ethnobotanist Terence McKenna has argued more recently that the Greek Oracle of Delphi and the Eleusinian Mystery rituals involved trances and ecstatic states that were brought on by hallucinogens and assisted by music. Eliade does not really pursue the idea of the musical para-shamanism or proto-shamanism that I want to discuss, though in the final paragraph of his massive book he unexpectedly asserts Herder’s idea that the origins of lyric poetry itself are in the ecstatic language of shamanism, after barely mentioning art or music anywhere. All accounts I can find that describe shamanic practices exhibit what Eliade called magico-religious content, most of which goes far beyond what modern musicians seem to do. The anecdotes and discussions of primitive shamanism in his and other texts usually involve vastly more dramatic activities, including trances, visions, healing, visits to spirit worlds, and even communications with invisible or deceased entities. Anyone reading this who has ever been in a good church choir or a rock band that could really rock knows that you don’t need foreign scholars describing obscure events in the distant past to find examples of ecstatic or para-shamanic music. It’s everywhere, though there is plenty of unecstatic and un-shamanic music around also. If “true” shamans access mystical states and deal with serpent spirits, perhaps many musicians are learning to access their internal “music plane,” that they can enter and connect their listeners to, just as shamans are said to do with their spirit worlds. Though he was only one person writing seventy years ago, and though his work was inspirational and very influential, it doesn’t mean Eliade understood or saw everything involving shamanism in the modern world. Who knows what kind of music he encountered or didn’t encounter in the intellectual community of Bucharest, Romania in the 1930s where he did his work? Perhaps it was all sight-reading, and perhaps whatever musical training he experienced in churches or schools didn’t involve the same kinds of musical energy that showed up so powerfully in other forms of “peasant music” elsewhere. Maybe if he had been familiar with a shamanic Romanian musician, owned a 1948 John Lee Hooker record, or seen the Reverend C. L. Franklin preach he might have seen the parallels. In 1951 there was no widespread understanding of “world music,” nor were there barely more than a trickle of public discussions anywhere of the depth and value of any folk music. So it is understandable though unfortunate that Eliade, for all his exhaustive study of religion, mysticism and the occult barely hinted at any shamanic components in music, even as he built the framework for most academic discussions of shamanism. In his thorough 2009 paper in the Ethnomusicology Review titled “Parallels of Psycho-Physiological and Musical Affect in Trance Ritual and Butoh Performance” Michael Sakamoto of the University of California went right to what I want to talk about when he said beautifully, “From ancient times to the present, religious and cultural rituals involving trance, ecstatic states, spirit possession, shamanic journeying, and myriad forms of music and sound have gripped societies large and small the world over. Millions of participants throughout history have directly experienced the affects and effects of such practices. However, due to the inherently ineffable nature of what we might refer to as the realm of spirit or universal energies, there has remained from time immemorial a tenuous relationship between these pursuits and intellectual analysis and understanding of them.” Unfortunately, he only applies this thinking to an exotic form of Japanese dancing called butoh, though he mentions the work of Gilbert Rouget, who tried to show similarities with Araucan tribal shamans, Tungu apprentices, Candomblé neophytes, and Ammasalik Eskimos. Neither of them, nor their fellow intellectuals seem willing to admit that all sorts of performing musicians, including the teenager next door writing songs, might also sometimes engage in trance-inducing musical behavior that is similar in many ways to the now academically-accepted practices of primitive shamanism. E. Taylor wrote in “Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America” that in the context of alternative psychotherapy, “drumming, singing, and dancing, have also emerged as popular psychotherapeutic tools for inducing what are believed to be healing states of ecstatic trance,” but like everybody else who talks about shamanism– didn’t mention other musical instruments. Why should a drum be uniquely involved with such activities, but not a rhythmic and resonant autoharp, banjo, fiddle or guitar? Music as “Low-Level” Shamanism Chroniclers of shamanism discuss “white” and “black” (and even “black-white”) shamans, and make other distinctions between “warriors” and “healers,” indicating that there are a number of different levels and categories and considerable diversity among shamanic practitioners. They also repeatedly say that isolated cultures that have no direct connections to each other employ nearly identical shamanic techniques. This implies that the concepts and mechanisms involved apply to or are available to all humans, just as are whatever special states musicians can access. We have brought up the idea that Western society has completely accepted and embraced almost to excess the idea of “genius,” especially in the realm of music, and that it shares with shamanism involvements with individual achievement, creativity and mystery. I want to put the idea on the table that at least some musicians have always practiced a type of shamanic activity, and that solo performers might wield the most potent and focused form of this magic. It is certainly no secret that music can have some inherent mystery and magic without involving direct connections to strange beings or fantastic spirit worlds, and there is a more than reasonable but also unprovable case to be made in favor of accepting the idea that musicians often do something of this sort and always have. Applying the terms “magic” or “shamanism” to music and musicians is not a new idea, and it seems to do a better job of what a science person would call “fitting the data points” than other theories, or the lack thereof. Since antiquity, eloquent people have talked about this sort of thing, and it would be extremely interesting to find out what percentage of people feel like they have personally experienced it. In my world of music, we sometimes don animal skins (leather or wool most often) and attempt to “drive evil spirits away” or indirectly help people heal via music, but no musician I ever met made any claims of the supernatural or of doing hard-core primitive shaman things like animal sacrifice, ascending to the sky, curing diseases, passing through cosmic planes of being and consciousness, flying through the air, swimming through the Earth, visiting the underworld or communicating with the dead. Nevertheless, my guess is that nearly all the musicians and the majority of the music lovers who read this will know exactly what I am talking about, and will have themselves experienced at least intermittent feelings of being part of a connection via musical pathways to something mysterious, unscientific, invisible and powerful. I would also guess that those who have had those experiences and feelings are not comfortable speaking about them publicly for fear of being ridiculed or appearing to be deluded amid our rationalist-dominated culture. Author Graham Hancock reports in “Supernatural” that nearly two thirds of people world-wide claim to believe in the existence of invisible beings such as ghosts, angels, spirits, aliens, fairies or leprechauns, so I suspect that musicians and people in general everywhere might be quite receptive to the idea that musical performers could sometimes be manipulating “special forces.” This is obviously not a purely rational discussion, though quite a number of brilliant, knowledgeable and highly-respected intellectual people have weighed in concerning the intersections of science, mysticism and music, greasing my rails at least indirectly in terms of swaying rational people’s views about music. (It makes me cringe to imagine a carefully-worded questionnaire seeking to pinpoint and log observances of shamanic music energy experiences.) What the highest-level science people like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Stephen Hawking, Henri Poincaré and others have had to say about science itself also tends to be much more vague, cryptic and mystical-sounding that you would expect. Einstein made a number of interesting comments about music, including, “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” Though we didn’t need Einstein to clarify that, it is helpful to have such a respected and intelligent person weigh in on the side of music being fundamentally mystical and unscientific as well as valuable. Shamanism, Music and Religion in Western Society If you begin to learn about the history and practice of shamanism even a little bit, you encounter two basic ideas. The first is that something we can call shamanism has been observed in nearly every society everywhere on Earth, and that it seems to be a universal human thing and not just the work of one region, tribe or people who take a particular drug or engage in a drug-like practice. The other thing you learn is that discussions of shamanism often tend towards one-sided situations where non-believers work very hard to demonstrate that shamanism is phony, and not what it claims to be. Those who claim to be shamans do not seem to be as emphatic in their need to offer counter-arguments, so unfortunately a great deal of what we hear about shamanic practice comes from the “debunkers” rather than participants. Arguments in support of the value and meaning of shamanism come from supporters and believers who tell about the experiences they have, but we hear by far the least from the shamans themselves, especially in the way of rational “scientific” arguments or rebuttals to counter their critics. Since shamans don’t really operate in the rational world, they might feel no need to engage in intellectual debate with those who do, perhaps sensing the futility of such arguments. Discovering Shamanism The most common Western reaction to shamanism was to try to discredit the activity, to reveal its fraudulence, and to detail the gullibility of the believers who took the shaman’s activities seriously. Debunking and demystifying became the standard Western Christian reactions to shamanism encountered by the explorers who filled Western Europe with their popular travel books and ideas about distant and primitive cultures. Shamanism was seen as an archaic form of religious belief and little else, and the explorers commonly referred to the shamanic practices as those of charlatans and quacks. John Bell wrote in 1763, “nothing is more evident than that these shamans are a parcel of jugglers, who impose upon the ignorant and credulous vulgar.” Gloria Flaherty, a professor at Wilmington College, wrote in “Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century” that “information about shamanism continued to inundate Western Europe in such massive waves that intellectuals had no alternative but to come to terms with it…” Then she said that “The arrogance of eurocentric male Christendom was evident in most early accounts of shamanism. Their authors unabashedly referred to native peoples as stupid brutes who believed in evil spirits and worshipped heathen idols because they had no sense of the true god.” As you might imagine, the fear among Christians of witchcraft and of being accused of it was apparently so great that what we now call shamanism quickly became secret and remained underground in Western society until about the second half of the 20th century, when it became safe to talk about it without being punished or killed. Shamans learned to conceal themselves, and to resist the onslaught of Christianity and Western rationalist thinking. I am certainly not the first person to suggest that musicians might have long dealt in at least a type of shamanism, and the European rationalists tolerated a little bit of mysticism, mostly in regards to artists rather than religious people. Flaherty wrote (p.47) that “It is quite significant that Bell, like so many Europeans who dealt with this subject, chose to use the word ‘juggler.’ Magicians, diviners and tricksters as well as minstrels and musicians were often so described.” Then she said (p.365), “since the 1970s, literature and media increasingly have begun to use shamanism to refer to musicians, artists, writers, and poets who in their creative pursuits go beyond the conventional limits established by contemporary European and American societies.” Thank you, Professor Flaherty, for some corroboration from academia. Here we should again mention the once-mighty work of German pastor, theologian and polymath Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), often credited as the founder of ethno-musicology, who long ago declared artists to be the shamans of Western civilization. He believed that language was a vital channel for the poet and the shaman, and was appalled by the widespread attacks on the credibility of shamanism by explorers. Herder even suggested that shamanism was a crucial factor in the formation of all human societies, responsible for magic, music, medicine, writing and even social codes and laws. He identified some of the ancient Greeks as examples: “Tyrtaeus’s war songs are Greek ballads, and when Arion, Orpheus and Amphion lived, they were noble Greek shamans.” Along with Justus Moser, Herder also defended superstition as being crucial to society, even as the growing number of rationalists became increasingly frustrated at how it remained unreasonable and illogical though stubbornly present. Yet despite the voices like Herder’s who urged them in the other direction, the overall Western “educated” musical appreciation of occult components of music tilted steadily away from the mystical and shamanic side of music, toward a mainstream mindset of rationality, science and craftsmanship. Concepts of skill, learning and practice have long dominated the European-influenced parts of our music landscape, pushing aside imagination, genius, improvisation, trance and creativity as being too unmanageable, fleeting and unteachable. This gestalt has been embedded in Western music education for a long time now, and spiritual, shamanic or unscientific ideas still don’t hold much sway in institutional music pedagogy. Everyone knows, though, that those elements lie at the heart of the best music, and we all accept the widely-admired idea that “musical genius” is real, magically giving us, without witchcraft or sorcery, much of the great music we all enjoy while also bypassing mere craft, technique and rational processes. Musical Magicians? If we agree that perhaps something we could call “musical magic” has happened and might happen again, the next cautious step we might take is to ask if certain individuals could have been born with or have learned to cultivate skills that allow them to create or access these “magical” experiences regularly rather than randomly or accidentally. If so, what kinds of conditions could facilitate this magic? We all know the stereotypes about musicians using drugs and alcohol. Could certain musical instruments, voices, scales, tones or rhythms also be tools or pathways that allow a musician to alter their consciousness somehow, or perhaps enter into a “state” that isn’t the same as other everyday moments? Who can say yes or no with any authority? Elvis Presley, not known for being abstract, once said about performing that “It’s like a surge of electricity going through you. It’s almost like making love but it’s stronger than that.” This is where I want to bring in the scientific idea of “fitting data points.” If we assume that some musicians at least sometimes go to some place or traffic in some kind of genuine mysticism, does that help us understand or accept those special pieces of music, magical recordings, compositions or concerts we have experienced or heard about? Does it help us fathom this eternal connection between artists and insanity? Does it help us understand why so many musicians take drugs and drink? Does it explain a little bit of why so many people prefer singing or playing an instrument in a very resonant room or with electronic reverb added? Are our brains wired to enjoy and find meaning in echoes, perhaps dating back to our ancestry in caves? Are churches built to be so reverberant because that adds an ancient and innate element of mystery to whatever words are spoken or music is made there? Does this kind of thinking help explain those things we all know exist in art like inspiration, imagination, improvisation, creativity, or even genius itself? Why is the word “genius” so similar to the word “genie”? Why does the word “imagination” contains the root of the word “magic”? A number of mysteries I have identified in my long troubadour saga come flashing across my windshield here, demanding some airtime. Rhythm, emotion, words, music and usually dancing or some type of performance are very typically involved in shamanism, and they are all common components of troubadour music. Could solo troubadours, who by themselves generate rhythms, tones, resonances, melody, and harmony as they sing their songs and sometimes sway and dance– have long been exploring the same kinds of human mystical pathways that “primitive” shamans have been observed doing with their words, songs, dances, drugs and drumming? Could that explain why troubadours have long been shunned, adored, feared and even outlawed, or perhaps even why musicians have the reputation of being able to captivate, woo or seduce others with their songs? Who can say with any certainty? Could both the Islamic religion and the Christian church have had such difficulty through the centuries with troubadours because some of these musicians were able to do things that felt somewhat religious but were clearly not part of scripture or dogma? Were troubadours and their music perceived as a threat to Christianity and Islam, or merely something they instinctively kept at arm’s length or felt to be “unholy”? Unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions seem to abound, and each of us might need to ponder and perhaps investigate this on our own. Blues Shamans in Mississippi? The “roots music” that so often appeared in socially and economically deprived communities perhaps all grew invisibly from a home-made skill set and a set of conditions that enabled people to explore their own kinds of personal musical mysticism, starting with a mixture of rhythm with words and vibrating objects. It’s not hard to imagine or discern a form of personal mysticism in folk musicians who led lives of hardship, though I have barely found a sentence about this idea anywhere, or about what might have happened once that mystic energy took a physical form in the grooves of a piece of shellac. I have focused often in my troubadour narrative about the appearance of American sound recordings in the 1920s. Those recordings that defined and propagated so many troubadour ideas were instantly embedded in a capitalist society and an entertainment business that was all about monetizing and marketing music rather than enabling magic. Ask yourself what would happen to one of these shamanic rural musicians whose personal magic instantly became a consumer product that was bought and sold. Alan Lomax wrote in 1959 that “the blues might have flowered so much more fully and richly if these men had not been forced to market themselves.” The songs of the rural blues musicians were not treated as the precious glimpses into the human psyche the way record collectors now perceive them; they were sold as songs you’ll love to hear and play for your friends. The 1928 Paramount Records print ad for Lemon Jefferson’s “Cannon Ball Moan” said, “Here’s a red hot one– so hot it smokes! Blind Lemon Jefferson can always be depended on for good records, but here is one that is going over with a roar…” I find it very hard to believe that the white businessmen who signed blues artists to contracts and gave them money and whiskey to make the recordings understood or cared that they were asking people who were used to being exploited and sometimes imprisoned or whipped by white men to make some kind of magic or connect to a spirit world when the red recording light came on. As a performing musician my entire life, I can hardly imagine that publicists, managers, booking agents or promoters made any efforts to facilitate those artists’ musical shamanic experiences. Vast numbers of performers have traveled endlessly and endured everything in hopes of being able to take audiences with them on their own personal music journeys for a few hours a week, facing far more obstacles than assistance in those quests. In his book of essays “How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life” guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) tells a remarkable story of working with old-time bluesman Roosevelt Sykes (1906-1983) at a folk festival when the promoter was being very difficult, and Fahey was getting angry and confrontational. Backstage, Sykes told him a story from the days of Jim Crow, where he claimed that black Southerners developed a technique that Sykes called “thinking about honey” to deal with difficult situations. Honey was something simple, sweet and pleasant, and Sykes recommended using it almost as a mantra, even just thinking about it rather than saying the word. Fahey quotes Sykes: A culture that could devise a technique like that to deal with brutal oppression could easily have also quietly learned to embed similar shamanic and meditative elements into their repetitive, rhythmic music. Natalie Curtis wrote in 1919 as part of her deep fascination and investigations into African-American culture, referring to it as coming from, “naïve, unselfconscious people among whom psychic phenomena are recognized as regular occurrences and important matters of life, [who] might reward scientific investigation with a new angle of light on the obscurer problems of the human spirit.” As he summarized his investigation of the blues art form in “The Blues Fell This Morning,” Paul Oliver (p.283) admitted not understanding quite what it was: “the blues was more than a form of folk song… the reason why Blacks sang the blues and listened to the blues is still not wholly explained…. It was not solely a physical, nor a mental state. It was not solely the endurance of suffering or a declaration of hopelessness; nor was it solely a means of ridding oneself of a mood.” On page 247 of his deep and thorough “Delta Blues,” Ted Gioia says about John Lee Hooker, one of the most obviously shamanic blues players, “Like those shamans of the non-Western world whose magical rhythms caused altered states of mind and a pathway to a higher realm of consciousness, Hooker seemingly channeled at will some cosmic force, a primal boogie, that never let him down.” In “Boogie Man,” the thick biography of Hooker, I waded through endless anecdotes, interviews, discussions of record contracts and factual information from biographer Charles Shaar Murray. He finally called Hooker a troubadour on page 219, then on page 340 went deeper: “Blues is art… blues is entertainment… but above all, blues is an eminently practical and functional set of methods and processes for dealing with the most painful aspects of life. Like meditation or yoga in Buddhist or Hindu societies, it is a discipline, a structure, for the focusing of self.” Murray at last gave me what I wanted on page 369, as he continued to describe John Lee Hooker and his music. “Hooker is thus not only a human exemplar of the most venerable tradition of the blues, but also of a mystical and spiritual tradition that is older still; far older than the blues, far older than African-American Christianity. He is a shaman.” He then stopped abruptly there, and there were no more discussions of musical mysticism; he ended the long book with a lovely description of Hooker’s funeral, and the glowing tributes by the pop stars who attended. For some set of reasons it is difficult for Western culture, especially its intellectuals, who were trained and steeped in rationalism, to embrace the idea of the congruence of musicians and shamans. David Evans has delved as deeply as anyone into the Delta blues, and his “Big Road Blues” is one of the classic texts on the subject. He devoted entire chapters to carefully examining the illogical nature and irregular structure of blues songs, and pondered at length why blues songs seem to just consist of random verses pulled from a “pool” of common lines that appear widely in the song form, and why the singers would improvise verses or scramble their order even when they create confusing results or situations. He suggests that these practices had roots in work songs of slaves, and engages in a laundry list of intellectual constructs like separating “popular blues” on recordings from “folk blues” that happen more casually, or sorting blues by “rural vs. urban” or “acoustic vs. electric.” He even tries to say that “regional” or “local” blues are somehow different from “national” blues, and especially that the Mississippi style belongs in a different bin than Texas or Piedmont. We then get the rationalist’s dream term, “non-thematic,” for blues songs that don’t make logical sense or tell a coherent story. Yet Evans never even comes close to suggesting in almost 400 pages of speculation and analysis of this simple art form that blues musicians are perhaps using the rhythms, melody and language to do something internal and perhaps shamanic, and that other than a basic starting point there was never any real need for the musicians to be logical or rational or adhere to any forms or musical structures. On page 114 Evans came the closest: “For a performer like Robert Pete Williams, the blues seem to exist as an almost spiritual force that enters and possesses the singer.” Blues writers often speculate that perhaps musicians playing for a dance might want to add verses and increase the length of a song to accommodate the needs of the dancers, yet I can’t find anywhere a suggestion that perhaps the musicians (or the dancers themselves) are trying to get into a mood or a trance, and might need some extra time to get there, or rearrange their thoughts. Nor do I find any suggestion that maybe a simple, repetitive yet both rhythmic and syncopated song form like the blues might be a very convenient and effective vehicle for a single person with an inexpensive musical instrument to effectively go inward and upward. It is quite possible, as my fellow modern troubadours and I have found for ourselves, that by establishing a fundamental beat, creating rhythmic, droning and constantly mutating accompaniments with our hands on a fretted instrument, and then singing words against that, while also constantly spreading both the guitar accompaniments and the sung lyrics variously across the bar lines rhythmically– is and perhaps always has been a reliable vehicle for a certain type of self-hypnotic and perhaps somewhat shamanic experience. When I read descriptions in blues books or observe what blues performers do in their performances, I see this sort of thing, where the performers linger for different lengths of times, skip over or add verses or measures, while also constantly adding and subtracting nuances, spoken comments, words, guitar figures and rhythmic elements, as if in pursuit of a mindset, feeling or a brainwave pattern. My personal observation is that instrumental music (though I am known for it) may not be as emotional or as capable of taking me as deep as I want to go sometimes, and that only with the addition of words and singing is the musical matrix strong enough to support what I often want to do. I am reminded of a quote from a Lady Eastlake who wrote tellingly in the late 1800s that “Music is not pure to the pure only, she is pure to all; it is only by a marriage with words that she can become a minister of evil.” Maybe she saw this very thing, but could not frame it any other way other than her revulsion to or fear of the added power that words could give to music. I waited for Guralnick to venture the idea that the blues was perhaps something transcendental, an unconscious but deliberate pathway to some kind of an inner spirit world. Instead he dropped the thread and spent the rest of the chapter and the remaining 200 pages of the book dealing with facts and biography, fame and business. Halfway through, he quoted a lengthy interview David Evans did with Robert Pete Williams, coming teasingly close again, where Williams said, “The sound of the atmosphere, the weather changed my style. But I could hear, with me being an air-music man. The air came in different, with a different sound of music. Well, the atmosphere, when the wind blows carrying music along. I don’t know if it affect you or not, but it’s a sounding that’s in the air, you see? And I don’t know where it comes from– it could come from the airplanes or the moaning of automobiles, but anyhow it leaves an air current in the air, you see. That gets in the wind, makes a sounding, you know? And that sounding works up to a blues.” Those are some pretty “cosmic” and unusual comments from an illiterate, rural self-employed Louisiana laborer, carpenter and scrap-metal dealer who milked cows and even sold their bones. Williams spent ten interminable years from 1949-1959 in Angola Prison for a murder that he said was clearly self-defense, and five more years in near-prison parole bondage that even kept him from performing at folk festivals. What kind of music did this guy play? Listen to “Texas Blues” or “Cane Cut Man.” Williams seems to be a shaman of some sort, or could be trained in a few minutes how to complete his apprenticeship if he’s not there yet. Yet he likely had no idea his entire life what a shaman was, but he instinctively knew, or perhaps learned in a hellhole of a prison, like so many great “uneducated” musicians, how to connect to his own “spirit world” and also how to bring something back to share with listeners in the physical plane. Guralnick is among the most flamboyant of the American music writers, and one of the few who really thinks out loud while kicking up a sizable cloud of dust as he tries to assimilate and digest what he has learned about the music. In his Skip James chapter, he quoted James saying to him, “Why’d I quit? I was so disappointed. Wouldn’t you be disappointed, man? I cut twenty-six sides for Paramount in Grafton, Wisconsin. I didn’t get paid but forty dollars. That’s not doing very good. Wouldn’t you be disappointed?” Then at the end of “Feel Like Going Home” Guralnick reflects that “every singer I met, with the exception of Jerry Lee Lewis, considered himself a failure. Each one was marked to some degree, white as well as black, by the brutalization of an industry and a society that care very little for his gifts. It was saddening to confront each artist’s disappointment with himself and his career, but it was exhilarating at the same time to meet them on their own grounds and to see the source for some of the energy and genius that went into the make-up of the music.” I guess this is the way American culture has long treated our shamans, those musical canaries who help us know what is going on in some of our coal mines. We commodify, package, vend and consume their disembodied magic to feed ourselves something nourishing and healing, which strange smiths have pulled from the air surrounding the magicians and formed into grooves in shellac, shiny magnetic particles, and invisible electrons that turn invisible switches in the phantom universe of digital music. Why in our capitalist world, where the desire and need for money motivates and justifies nearly everything, do we always enslave and often kill the geese who lay those golden musical eggs? Did hunter-gatherer or simple agrarian societies also wring their shamans dry to get what they could of their mysterious elixirs, or is this just a bad habit of capitalism? The questions again start flowing. What if the early recording technology had allowed songs that were longer than three minutes? A ten-inch 78rpm record, and also the 7-inch 45rpm single that followed it, could only hold a little over three minutes of music, and pop songs have remained near that length for 90 years. For about the second half of that time period there has been no technical limitation causing it, though artists and radio DJs have dealt with comparable time limitations throughout the entire history of the record industry. How many of those legendary early recording artists ever played a three-minute song in their entire performing lives before they went to make a record? That is a very short time to expect any musician to go into a proper “zone,” and to connect with the things they like to connect with, especially when it was happening with unfamiliar white men and strange machines surrounding them. (An electric light would come on near the three-minute time so the performers knew to end their songs, though blind recording artists had difficulty knowing when to stop and sometimes were tapped on the shoulder.) My favorite recording of the Indian violinist Shankar, the track “Ragam: Sankarabharanam” is over 28 minutes long, recorded during a concert, during which he builds an impressive trance atmosphere, rooted in an ancient culture that seems to understand that musicians can take a while to make the proper connections to the sacred places they go. When it’s over I usually want to hear it again. I like to imagine that Henry Sloan or Charley Patton did extended and hypnotic things like that with their guitars, in a shack by the smoky light of a cheap kerosene lamp or a pine-pitch torch at the Dockery Plantation deep in the Mississippi delta, before electricity, motors and modern distractions. What would John Lee Hooker have done in 1948 in the makeshift recording studio in Detroit when he recorded “Boogie Chillen” if there had never had been such a thing as a 78rpm record, and he could have had the full 20-minute side of a micro-groove LP to work with as he wove his trademark spell of droning guitar, voice and foot percussion. Anyone who has been to a good folk festival jam session has seen an old-time string band play the same simple 16-bar, two-chord dance tune for ten or fifteen minutes, as they slowly merge their consciousness and levitate themselves a little, late at night when nobody is watching a clock or being anywhere but in the moment. Folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon’s attempts in the 1920s were notable in his New York Times Sunday Magazine articles, when he tried to describe the “primitive” Appalachian old-time fiddle music he observed in his fieldwork. He mentioned the simple, repetitive and rhythmic tunes, inane lyrics, lack of coherence or narratives– indicating that he did not have the slightest idea that the real function of that music might have been the lovely, low-level, lotus-flower shamanism that old-time musicians still practice. This was from the man who founded the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, who maybe never saw any deeper into what he saw as charming but simple folk art. Genie in a Bottle? Musical Bio-Feedback Mysticism and Songwriting Rock legend and songwriter John Fogerty said in his autobiography about the experience of writing his blockbuster song “Proud Mary.” “You’re looking at this shadowy, cloudy shape, you start to go in a direction and whump! The veil is lifted and suddenly there’s a song, a great song. It was like being struck by God. I was sitting there quaking with this paper in my hand.” Floyd Tillman wrote about how he wrote his hit country song “I Love You So Much It Hurts” in 1948: “I was fooling around with my guitar, alone, happy to be free. My fingers lay flat across the last four strings. I strummed and the four notes said ‘I love you so…’ and then I improvised almost unconsciously ‘much it hurts me.’ I suppose if any song ever came to me like automatic writing this one did.” Discussions of mysticism or shamanism are interesting, and though it is probably pointless to try to describe or discuss something that is so personal, intangible and unrepeatable, the troubadour songwriting process lies at the heart of a multi-billion dollar business. Like the old folktale, songwriters are geese that lay golden eggs. Teenagers who learn a few guitar chords sometimes write songs that enchant millions of people. Even the biggest-sounding dance hits and heavily produced pop songs most likely began as something vague and invisible, floating above or inside the head of a musician who was in a near-trance state, almost unconsciously pulling the song in like a big fish on a small line, or tuning in to a distant radio station– humming and singing, tinkering with their instruments, rhythms or electronic musical tools. Software, novels, movie scripts and other types of creative writing are far more intellectual and linear pursuits, and songwriting may be one of the most gossamer and elusive of all types of commercialized creativity. It also may give one of best glimpses into a type of artistic activity that comes as close to being “astral” or “shamanic” as anything we can discuss comfortably. Not that all songs are written this way, nor are all songwriters shamans, but this is one of the hottest-burning, crucial yet elusive parts of what I want to talk about. It is unfortunately as difficult to describe and discuss this as it is to talk about religion, emotions, beliefs, fears, taboos or other spiritual and deeply human subjects. I see troubadours everywhere I look in music, among both performers and creators. Where do all those songs come from? How do all those songwriters put up their antennas and transmitters and pull their songs out of the thin air? They don’t just do it in chain gangs and prison cells. They conjure songs in dormitories, bedrooms, basement apartments, trailer parks, and by the pool in luxurious mansions. I know more than most music journalists or biographers, because I have written songs since I was 14, and hundreds of my friends and colleagues also write songs. Songs often do come from some mysterious or inexplicable place; at least the best ones do. Many of us can craft a song for a birthday party or a special occasion, but the moments when we can put a groove together and pull some words out of the wind even as they attach themselves to a melody are not explainable. But music creators know this skill exists, and it is the basis of the large and very valuable industry of musical intellectual property. The songwriting process is not tangible or predictable, like sawing a board, sweeping a floor or pouring cement. There are fragile moments; nuances, little spells of magic, musical soap bubbles that stretch, float and pop. This sort of language and thinking makes sense to me, and I am certain would make sense to any songwriter, yet it seems to be conspicuously absent from the body of most historical, popular and scholarly writing that I can find about musical creativity or discussions of the craft of being a musician. It is somewhat of a religious problem, since you don’t want to claim that you are connecting to God or your ancestors or an animal spirit, though for a while it was acceptable in Christian Europe to pretend to channel Orpheus and the Greek gods, or at least emulate those long-ago Greeks who told us about those gods. As both a lifelong performer and creator, listener and observer, I clearly see a shamanic element especially present in both the performance and the creative aspects of personal troubadour music, yet there are at best only fleeting references to this perspective in the immense body of writing and observations about music in Western society. These avenues of thinking can perhaps help us understand why so many young artists and performers who discover that they have some abilities or powers that let them into a musical spirit word, so often falter, especially once their art becomes a commodity and something they are asked to reproduce constantly. It is poignant and almost paradoxical that we celebrate and commodify young musicians, who have had the least time to learn to handle their powers, and few chances to grapple with how to overcome the difficulties of conjuring on demand. Creating magic night after night at a precise time and place is difficult even for the experienced, in front of crowds of people who likely are not consciously aware that they are participating in a kind of mass-marketed shamanism, centered around sounds and words made by a hyper-celebrated person or group. Nothing of what I say here should shock you, except for that fact that it is odd that something that seems to make sense to most of us, and that most people have probably personally observed, is essentially never discussed publicly, or viewed as anything other than a mystery. In a workshop at a folk festival I might even be ridiculed if I said that many of the best musicians in my world are doing things that could reasonably be referred to as shamanism, and my fellow musicians might never stop teasing me about it. Being tremendously outnumbered and out-gunned by rationalists, I suppose I should admit in advance some kind of defeat, especially since my theories are illogical, and introduce “crackpot” notions and thoroughly unscientific things like shamanism. Luckily I am writing my own book and not trying to convince the editor of an academic journal that my ideas have peer-reviewable, publishable merit. Yet it seems totally clear to me as I try to understand not only the music I have played since my childhood but also the forces that led me to devote so much of my life to learning and doing it, that I see some kind of pursuit of a state of mind or “magico-religious” content as a central issue in both the creation and performance of good music. I’ll rest my case here, and let you do your own deeper research and thinking if you choose. If you require evidence, it appears to abound, at least to show that there are any number of educated and aware scholars and musicians who in the past and present have understood that there is a connection between music and something we can reasonably call magic or shamanism. Admittedly, as I look around me, this idea is not getting much traction, but I am not the only lunatic making the claim. Lester King wrote presciently in “Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century” that “The relations of magic, animism, mysticism and advanced religious thought, and the stages of naïve, mature and sophisticated science are all intertwined.” So gentle reader, and especially gentle musician, go thou and think more about yourself, and about music, and about all those who make and hear music. Explore your instincts and your feelings as much as you explore the muscles in your hands or the words on your paper. Pay attention to and nurture the divine spirit of music in yourself, and in others– more so than the location of your fingers or the chord being played. Do not pull back from thoughts that might lead you to conclude that music and magic are often intertwined. Above all, do not forget that it is entirely possible that the closest that any of us can go toward the intersection of musical sound and human consciousness might happen when a single musician builds the scaffolding and the altar with their own rhythms, melodies, words and harmony, using their own voices, bodies, souls and emotions. I'm trying to raise issues, questions and awareness in the world of modern troubadours... I want people to find this in web searches and to read it. I don't have a way for you to comment here, but I welcome your emails with your reactions. Feel free to cheer me on, or to disagree... Chordally yours, HARVEY REID ©2021
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