thrill is gone thrill is gone away
[Music]
thrill is gone baby thrill is gone away
you know you dummy wrong baby and you’ll
be sorry one day BB king is cool right
he’s got soul when we say stuff like
this we know these are American ideas
like they didn’t come from Europe but do
we understand that they’re West African
West African people who came to this
country as slaves brought incredible
ideas about art and consciousness that
shaped American culture but in school
you know we hear that the Dutch name New
York and that the French influenced our
ideas about individual liberty but you
know some 60,000 West Africa captives
arrived in the new world per year during
the transatlantic slave trade and they
actually outnumbered European migrants
by nearly 5 to 1 but we hear very little
about their influence and in fact when I
was writing for Blue’s magazines
sometimes I was told you know blues fans
really don’t want to hear that Africa
stuff and that really bugged me from the
wall afford Baga which means to annoy
the wall off in the 1600s had a wealthy
fabulous empire in western Senegal and
in 1670 there Fulani neighbors invaded
and the Fulani sold wool of prisoners to
British slave traders who shipped them
to South Carolina plantations there wolf
slaves were highly prized for their
blacksmithing leather work and butchery
skills and wellif words like banana yam
and sugar are passed into American
English we say I dig that from the wall
afford egga which means to appreciate
we say that cat can really sing from the
wall of cat ka TT which means an
accomplished singer we are hip and have
hippies and hipsters because of the wall
of adjectives hippie which means someone
who’s open eyed and aware some slaves
came from Kim bundu in the Angola region
and they brought an instrument with them
call them Avanza that became our banjo
and this was a black instrument until in
the 1800’s minstrel shows used it in
their mocking representations of black
people and this prompted black musicians
to abandon the banjo leaving it for
southern whites to use in country and
bluegrass music by the 1700s the slave
trade had gotten to the Bakongo region
we got words like jiffy from their word
chippy which means in a second we got
bubu from their mabu boo and as a slave
trade reached your ruble and which today
encompasses Nigeria Benin and Togo we
picked up a lot of powerful influences
in Yoruba culture the ability to connect
with one’s inner divinity and express
that in art and music is called a 2/2
which means coolness and that
characteristic is displayed by
generosity which is considered the
finest quality that a person can exhibit
so that’s why we say if someone’s nice
to us that they’re cool that’s why we
say VV Kings got soul and we admire
southern hospitality William Farris
experienced this firsthand when he was a
young white scholar roaming around the
Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s
looking for blues musicians as he wrote
in blues from the Delta black family’s
constantly extended their hospitality to
me offering to house and feed me for as
long as I was in their neighborhood a
blues musician said to him you know next
time you come by my house if I’m not
there just walk in if I eat a piece of
bread you eat too that’s the power of
cool so I actually didn’t know any of
this when I fell in love with the blues
at age 16 I was raised in a white
Milwaukee suburb and I had a crush on
this slightly older guy who was in
band and he was booking a club downtown
and snuck me in there one summer night
to see Koko Taylor and son seals and I
kind of flipped out like I’d never heard
the Blues I’d never dance but I flew out
of my seat onto the dance floor and just
kind of went nuts and on the dance floor
I’ve met Mike a hyperactive blues
fanatic from the south side who looked
like a freckled teenage paul mccartney
and a couple weeks later we drove to
this cornfield in the middle of nowhere
and there are honest plywood stage was
BB King with his guitar Lucille resting
on his belly on a sweltering August
afternoon the generator kept cutting out
cutting off King and mid solo and I can
personally attest that that’s one of the
best excuses for a guitar player to
pitch a fit but King was cool he’d just
drug and smile at Lucio and just wait
until they got the power fixed once they
did there was no stopping King in his
band they were in full dinner jackets in
the heat and they just rocked and a
crowd of people were kicking up dust
dancing in front of the stage and Mike
and I looked around and realized we were
probably the look like we were the only
white people but we we just really still
couldn’t stop herself from dancing so we
sort of started like our little shy
thing and we’re getting into it and we
look up and we’re surrounded by a circle
of people who are smiling and clapping
and cheering us on and that was my first
experience of coolness from people that
I had been conditioned by my own
upbringing to kind of fear and be wary
of so a few years later I was working on
my book the language of the blues and I
got to interview wonderful blues legends
like Robert jr. Lockwood and Henry gray
little milton Campbell and Howlin Wolf’s
closest friend and longtime guitarist
uber someone in 1960 Willie Dixon wrote
spoonful for Helen Wolfe which was a hit
for wolf and a huge rock hit for cream
and I’d always heard that song was about
drugs but Hubert Sumlin sent me straight
he said no what what would happen was
Dixon and wolf would get together and
wolf would talk to Dixon and give him
ideas for songs so one day they were
talking about how when wolf was growing
up people would come over and borrow a
spoonful of this and the teaspoon of
that and wolf was taught that no matter
how little you have you don’t just give
a half inch you give the whole inch you
give everything that you’ve got
and as Hubert said wolf put love in
there too it could be a spoonful of
coffee it could be a spoon for tea just
a little spoon of your precious love
it’s good enough for me that spoon and
spoon that spoon
[Music]
so as I dug more into this concept of
coolness I discovered that it’s really
it informs your group and morality but
it also informs art and music and in
flash of the spirit an elder tells art
historian Robert Thompson Judy is a part
of coolness but Beauty doesn’t have the
force of character that you need for
really powerful art and the elder said
this is a shade divine nature and
ethnomusicologist John Chernov learned
more about this when he was studying
drumming in Ghana and his teacher said
you know that young inexperienced
drummers they haven’t yet learned to
cool their heart and take their time so
they’re playing is Yoli Yoli nothing
nothing and the teacher added if a
student over placed to a really
obnoxious degree we just grab a stick so
it doesn’t play again and that cracked
me up because many flashy young blues
players have heard the similar
admonishment from their band leaders Bob
Margolin was a young white guy who
joined the Muddy Waters band in Chicago
and Bob told me that when he would play
something that muddy found you know less
than tasteful muddy would say don’t play
it like that it makes my dick sore and
that’s because blues artists are looking
for that right note you know that
spiritual connection Texas blues guitar
player Jimmy Vaughn explained it to me
like this
he said the Blues contains these values
the space is as important as the notes
because without that space you don’t
allow the listener time to feel what’s
been said as flavors penetrated deeper
into West Africa they reached the
Dahomey Kingdom stronghold of the vote
and religion vota means Great Spirit or
God and is represented by the giant
snake done carrying the universe in his
coils and today in voodoo strongholds
like Haiti in New Orleans
Don is worshipped as the grand zombie
from the word in the zombie which means
God and when voodoo practitioners
gathered a drum and dance they’re
seeking to experience that holy divine
spirit
but Allah was only going to descend the
post of the the center post of the
temple to worse to possess or ride a
worshipper who’s achieved a holy state
of consciousness through the strumming
and dancing as the Haitian proverb
states great gods cannot ride little
horses and in the blues you find a lot
of this writing language with writers
and writing and this is where it stems
from African drums can also be used to
talk because African languages are tonal
so you can kind of mimic speech and this
was discovered in South Carolina in 1739
after a deadly slave rebellion and the
slaves had organized this rebellion by
communicating with each other with drums
after this the Black Codes were passed
laws in different colonies that were
severely repressive slaves caught
drumming speaking their languages
practicing their religions even praying
were often summarily executed on a spot
in the face of this extremely harsh
repression slaves turned to another
aspect of coolness silence in Yoruba
culture a cool person in silent unless
he’s got something important to say
his mouth is cool anyway tutu is how
they would say he fell silent and slaves
in their descendants used this form of
coolness silence both to avoid trouble
with white people and also to subtly
resist them and as a married Baraka
wrote in his great book blues people in
1963 in the ghetto coolness took on an
edge to be cool was to remain calm even
unimpressed with what horror the world
might daily propose so this actually
this very stoic aspect of coolness has
long been tested in West Africa in
raucous verbal duels that are the
origins of our rap culture opponents use
obscenity and slander their mothers each
other’s mothers because they’re trying
to get the other guy to losers cool and
in the United States this survived it’s
a game called
dozens and in 1930 Memphis Minnie
recorded her song new Dirty Dozen which
is just a song loaded with insults
basically come on folks and start to
walk I’m fixing to start my dozens talk
what you think about it on my mind that
stuff you got is a story’s kind we’re
sorry miss Streeter robber and a cheater
piss you in the dozens you Papa and your
cousin your mama was lordy Lord so
another important concept that survived
the severe repression of slavery was
this idea of divine repression and it’s
surfaced in black sanctified churches in
the 1800s where parishioners would do
kind of a shuffle dance following the
deacon around the table the deacon was
holding a standard which was like a
vestige of the temple center pole and
parishioners would cry drop down chariot
and let me ride and ride on King Jesus
and this was called rock in the church
from like 1916 to 1970 some 7 million
African American people left the south
and they carried these musical
techniques and spiritual ideas about art
out to the rest of the country so guys
like Muddy Waters and Howlin wolf who
had been delta folk singer started
electric blues bands in Chicago and they
you know they would have to shout to be
heard over these booze bands so they
relied on gospel singing technique and
developed this new shouting blues that
radio beamed all over black America you
had performers like Little Richard and
screamin Jay Hawkins who performed as if
possessed Elvis Presley started shaking
and shouting and even white teens
started rocking as Africans became
Americans they had encoded in the blues
not only their pain and suffering but
also these profound ideas and musical
techniques and concepts about
consciousness
that informed the way that we listen to
music today and the way that we
appreciate it and this stuff was so
potent but at birth rock and roll and
jazz within decades of its own
conception because you know sometimes
from our own pain we create a fortress
of music so impenetrable that other
people just walk away and leave us alone
but sometimes we create a sound so
universally compelling that people
outside our own are struck in their
hearts suddenly they see us they feel us
and we’re not any different than they
are and they realize that maybe for the
first time the culture and the ethics
that West African captives carried with
them survived the shock of their
transplantation to an entirely new world
and invigorated a young nation although
ill-fate brought so many West African
people here in Chains we’re blessed that
they arrived because it’s their
influence that makes us uniquely
American and uniquely cool thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
thrill is gone baby thrill is gone away
you know you dummy wrong baby and you’ll
be sorry one day BB king is cool right
he’s got soul when we say stuff like
this we know these are American ideas
like they didn’t come from Europe but do
we understand that they’re West African
West African people who came to this
country as slaves brought incredible
ideas about art and consciousness that
shaped American culture but in school
you know we hear that the Dutch name New
York and that the French influenced our
ideas about individual liberty but you
know some 60,000 West Africa captives
arrived in the new world per year during
the transatlantic slave trade and they
actually outnumbered European migrants
by nearly 5 to 1 but we hear very little
about their influence and in fact when I
was writing for Blue’s magazines
sometimes I was told you know blues fans
really don’t want to hear that Africa
stuff and that really bugged me from the
wall afford Baga which means to annoy
the wall off in the 1600s had a wealthy
fabulous empire in western Senegal and
in 1670 there Fulani neighbors invaded
and the Fulani sold wool of prisoners to
British slave traders who shipped them
to South Carolina plantations there wolf
slaves were highly prized for their
blacksmithing leather work and butchery
skills and wellif words like banana yam
and sugar are passed into American
English we say I dig that from the wall
afford egga which means to appreciate
we say that cat can really sing from the
wall of cat ka TT which means an
accomplished singer we are hip and have
hippies and hipsters because of the wall
of adjectives hippie which means someone
who’s open eyed and aware some slaves
came from Kim bundu in the Angola region
and they brought an instrument with them
call them Avanza that became our banjo
and this was a black instrument until in
the 1800’s minstrel shows used it in
their mocking representations of black
people and this prompted black musicians
to abandon the banjo leaving it for
southern whites to use in country and
bluegrass music by the 1700s the slave
trade had gotten to the Bakongo region
we got words like jiffy from their word
chippy which means in a second we got
bubu from their mabu boo and as a slave
trade reached your ruble and which today
encompasses Nigeria Benin and Togo we
picked up a lot of powerful influences
in Yoruba culture the ability to connect
with one’s inner divinity and express
that in art and music is called a 2/2
which means coolness and that
characteristic is displayed by
generosity which is considered the
finest quality that a person can exhibit
so that’s why we say if someone’s nice
to us that they’re cool that’s why we
say VV Kings got soul and we admire
southern hospitality William Farris
experienced this firsthand when he was a
young white scholar roaming around the
Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s
looking for blues musicians as he wrote
in blues from the Delta black family’s
constantly extended their hospitality to
me offering to house and feed me for as
long as I was in their neighborhood a
blues musician said to him you know next
time you come by my house if I’m not
there just walk in if I eat a piece of
bread you eat too that’s the power of
cool so I actually didn’t know any of
this when I fell in love with the blues
at age 16 I was raised in a white
Milwaukee suburb and I had a crush on
this slightly older guy who was in
band and he was booking a club downtown
and snuck me in there one summer night
to see Koko Taylor and son seals and I
kind of flipped out like I’d never heard
the Blues I’d never dance but I flew out
of my seat onto the dance floor and just
kind of went nuts and on the dance floor
I’ve met Mike a hyperactive blues
fanatic from the south side who looked
like a freckled teenage paul mccartney
and a couple weeks later we drove to
this cornfield in the middle of nowhere
and there are honest plywood stage was
BB King with his guitar Lucille resting
on his belly on a sweltering August
afternoon the generator kept cutting out
cutting off King and mid solo and I can
personally attest that that’s one of the
best excuses for a guitar player to
pitch a fit but King was cool he’d just
drug and smile at Lucio and just wait
until they got the power fixed once they
did there was no stopping King in his
band they were in full dinner jackets in
the heat and they just rocked and a
crowd of people were kicking up dust
dancing in front of the stage and Mike
and I looked around and realized we were
probably the look like we were the only
white people but we we just really still
couldn’t stop herself from dancing so we
sort of started like our little shy
thing and we’re getting into it and we
look up and we’re surrounded by a circle
of people who are smiling and clapping
and cheering us on and that was my first
experience of coolness from people that
I had been conditioned by my own
upbringing to kind of fear and be wary
of so a few years later I was working on
my book the language of the blues and I
got to interview wonderful blues legends
like Robert jr. Lockwood and Henry gray
little milton Campbell and Howlin Wolf’s
closest friend and longtime guitarist
uber someone in 1960 Willie Dixon wrote
spoonful for Helen Wolfe which was a hit
for wolf and a huge rock hit for cream
and I’d always heard that song was about
drugs but Hubert Sumlin sent me straight
he said no what what would happen was
Dixon and wolf would get together and
wolf would talk to Dixon and give him
ideas for songs so one day they were
talking about how when wolf was growing
up people would come over and borrow a
spoonful of this and the teaspoon of
that and wolf was taught that no matter
how little you have you don’t just give
a half inch you give the whole inch you
give everything that you’ve got
and as Hubert said wolf put love in
there too it could be a spoonful of
coffee it could be a spoon for tea just
a little spoon of your precious love
it’s good enough for me that spoon and
spoon that spoon
[Music]
so as I dug more into this concept of
coolness I discovered that it’s really
it informs your group and morality but
it also informs art and music and in
flash of the spirit an elder tells art
historian Robert Thompson Judy is a part
of coolness but Beauty doesn’t have the
force of character that you need for
really powerful art and the elder said
this is a shade divine nature and
ethnomusicologist John Chernov learned
more about this when he was studying
drumming in Ghana and his teacher said
you know that young inexperienced
drummers they haven’t yet learned to
cool their heart and take their time so
they’re playing is Yoli Yoli nothing
nothing and the teacher added if a
student over placed to a really
obnoxious degree we just grab a stick so
it doesn’t play again and that cracked
me up because many flashy young blues
players have heard the similar
admonishment from their band leaders Bob
Margolin was a young white guy who
joined the Muddy Waters band in Chicago
and Bob told me that when he would play
something that muddy found you know less
than tasteful muddy would say don’t play
it like that it makes my dick sore and
that’s because blues artists are looking
for that right note you know that
spiritual connection Texas blues guitar
player Jimmy Vaughn explained it to me
like this
he said the Blues contains these values
the space is as important as the notes
because without that space you don’t
allow the listener time to feel what’s
been said as flavors penetrated deeper
into West Africa they reached the
Dahomey Kingdom stronghold of the vote
and religion vota means Great Spirit or
God and is represented by the giant
snake done carrying the universe in his
coils and today in voodoo strongholds
like Haiti in New Orleans
Don is worshipped as the grand zombie
from the word in the zombie which means
God and when voodoo practitioners
gathered a drum and dance they’re
seeking to experience that holy divine
spirit
but Allah was only going to descend the
post of the the center post of the
temple to worse to possess or ride a
worshipper who’s achieved a holy state
of consciousness through the strumming
and dancing as the Haitian proverb
states great gods cannot ride little
horses and in the blues you find a lot
of this writing language with writers
and writing and this is where it stems
from African drums can also be used to
talk because African languages are tonal
so you can kind of mimic speech and this
was discovered in South Carolina in 1739
after a deadly slave rebellion and the
slaves had organized this rebellion by
communicating with each other with drums
after this the Black Codes were passed
laws in different colonies that were
severely repressive slaves caught
drumming speaking their languages
practicing their religions even praying
were often summarily executed on a spot
in the face of this extremely harsh
repression slaves turned to another
aspect of coolness silence in Yoruba
culture a cool person in silent unless
he’s got something important to say
his mouth is cool anyway tutu is how
they would say he fell silent and slaves
in their descendants used this form of
coolness silence both to avoid trouble
with white people and also to subtly
resist them and as a married Baraka
wrote in his great book blues people in
1963 in the ghetto coolness took on an
edge to be cool was to remain calm even
unimpressed with what horror the world
might daily propose so this actually
this very stoic aspect of coolness has
long been tested in West Africa in
raucous verbal duels that are the
origins of our rap culture opponents use
obscenity and slander their mothers each
other’s mothers because they’re trying
to get the other guy to losers cool and
in the United States this survived it’s
a game called
dozens and in 1930 Memphis Minnie
recorded her song new Dirty Dozen which
is just a song loaded with insults
basically come on folks and start to
walk I’m fixing to start my dozens talk
what you think about it on my mind that
stuff you got is a story’s kind we’re
sorry miss Streeter robber and a cheater
piss you in the dozens you Papa and your
cousin your mama was lordy Lord so
another important concept that survived
the severe repression of slavery was
this idea of divine repression and it’s
surfaced in black sanctified churches in
the 1800s where parishioners would do
kind of a shuffle dance following the
deacon around the table the deacon was
holding a standard which was like a
vestige of the temple center pole and
parishioners would cry drop down chariot
and let me ride and ride on King Jesus
and this was called rock in the church
from like 1916 to 1970 some 7 million
African American people left the south
and they carried these musical
techniques and spiritual ideas about art
out to the rest of the country so guys
like Muddy Waters and Howlin wolf who
had been delta folk singer started
electric blues bands in Chicago and they
you know they would have to shout to be
heard over these booze bands so they
relied on gospel singing technique and
developed this new shouting blues that
radio beamed all over black America you
had performers like Little Richard and
screamin Jay Hawkins who performed as if
possessed Elvis Presley started shaking
and shouting and even white teens
started rocking as Africans became
Americans they had encoded in the blues
not only their pain and suffering but
also these profound ideas and musical
techniques and concepts about
consciousness
that informed the way that we listen to
music today and the way that we
appreciate it and this stuff was so
potent but at birth rock and roll and
jazz within decades of its own
conception because you know sometimes
from our own pain we create a fortress
of music so impenetrable that other
people just walk away and leave us alone
but sometimes we create a sound so
universally compelling that people
outside our own are struck in their
hearts suddenly they see us they feel us
and we’re not any different than they
are and they realize that maybe for the
first time the culture and the ethics
that West African captives carried with
them survived the shock of their
transplantation to an entirely new world
and invigorated a young nation although
ill-fate brought so many West African
people here in Chains we’re blessed that
they arrived because it’s their
influence that makes us uniquely
American and uniquely cool thank you
[Applause]
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