The Blues: ‘The Soul of a Man’

PBS broadcast the extraordinary fourth episode of The Blues documentary series The Soul of a Man. It was directed by Wim Wenders with astonishing creative ambition and flair. The episode features musical biographies of three of the Blues greats: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and James Lenoir.

The Soul of a Man (soundtrack)

I have been familiar with the blues as an important American musical idiom since I was a young adult. I first heard old blues around 1969 when my best high school friend played me a Skip James album recorded sometime after his Newport Folk Festival appearances in 1963-64. I remember my first impression was ambivalent. The high nasal voice with pristinely spare guitar accompaniment was the antithesis of music as I then knew it. I knew and appreciated that Skip James was a blues legend, but I could not find a way into the music. That same friend also played the early Ry Cooder blues-soaked albums (Paradise and Lunch, etc.). Cooder too played in a unique and inimitable style but it was one that I found easier to understand. I’ve loved Ry Cooder’s music ever since.

I’ve admired much blues music but never found ‘a way in’ until hearing Win Wenders’ take on the blues. He treats his three blues legends as great and wise spiritual healers. He sees them as Delphic blues oracles whose lyrics speak to the deepest, most profound emotions of the human race. All the joy, all the suffering is encompassed in their songs. Wenders more than any other has made me understand the profound connection between the blues and the other great artistic forms which plumb the human experience.

Skip James, for instance, should not only be examined in the context of the bluesmen of his era; rather, he should be seen on a par with the great artistic temperaments like Shakespeare or the Biblical authors. In this sense, James’ otherworldly vocal and instrumental style make perfect ‘sense.’ My mistake as a young listener was to compare him to what I knew musically. But James is best appreciated as an out of this world musical phenomenon. He is not of this world, but rather he is of it and beyond it at the same time.

Wenders captures this otherworldliness beautifully in his characterization of Blind Willie Johnson’s profoundly spiritual, The Soul of a Man (Listen to It Here):

I’m going to ask the question
Please answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

Won’t somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

I’ve travelled different countries
Travelled to the furthest lands
Couldn’t find nobody could tell me
What is the soul of a man

Won’t somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

I saw a crowd stand talking
I just came up in time
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
That a man ain’t nothing but his mind

Won’t somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

I read the Bible often
I try to read it right
As far as I can understand
It’s nothing but a burning light

Won’t somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

When Christ taught in the temple
The people all stood amazed
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
How to raise a man from the grave

Won’t somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won’t somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

Can there be a deeper, more profound examination of the nature of the human soul and experience than this? That is why I place artists like James and Johnson alongside Shakespeare or Dostoevsky in their understanding of the what it means to be human.

In a brilliant cinematic capstone, Wenders ties The Soul of a Man to its universal significance by noting that it was included in recordings packed on the Voyager space capsule as it plied outer space to map the heavens. According to the online notes about the documentary, The Soul of a Man:

The rasping voice of Blind Willie Johnson, who earned his living on street corners and sang the title song, was sent into space on the Voyager in 1977 as part of the CD recording The Sounds of Earth, which had been placed onboard for posterity and/or examination by extra-terrestrial beings.

The fantastical image of Johnson’s visage floating disembodied in space as he sings the song with the spacecraft sailing into the background provides a cinematic expession of Wenders’ understanding of their music and its significance.

In doing online research for this post, I came across the Bruce Cockburn site which lists the song lyrics and background information on how Coburn came to record it on the 1991 Nothing But a Burning Light (itself a quotation from the song’s lyrics). Apparently, Coburn had known of the song for some years, but never put it on an album because it didn’t seem to properly fit the tone of whatever album he was working on at the time. But when he shared it with T-Bone Burnett, his producer, they both decided it should be on that recording. I’m guessing that since Burnett is a featured performer in Wenders film that he must have introduced Wenders to it, which explains how this brilliant work of art made its way to the forefront of this documentary–a fate it so richly deserves.

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