Delta Blues

Death Letter Blues is Son House's signature song. It's a detailed saga of grief and reflection. I listened to it three times in a row, captivated by the slow, sticky process the singer goes through after his lover dies.

The first time I listened to it, the line 'I didn't have no soul to throw my arms around' really struck me because I thought it meant that the singer had literally lost his soul - knelt down to pray and noticed his soul was gone. Soon I realized what it actually meant: he had no other person to love. My initial reaction stuck with me anyway. I started to see the entire song as the process of the singer losing his soul and dealing with the numb space left behind. That's what it would be like to lose the most important person in one's life. It's even more tragic that he only realizes he loves her when she dies. So he spends his entire life up to that point in uncertainty and the entire time afterward in sorrow.

I thought about the actions of the man in the song. Standing, crossing his arms, taking his suitcase down the road, looking, praying, having no one to throw his arms around. In my sketchbook, I tried to follow this process in a series of figure drawings.

The blues, according to William Ferris, are defined by pain and suffering. But just these words don't carry the true color of the music, so instead I am writing with the shapes and the movements of the human body to express my experience of this song, hoping to capture a little more of what the blues are about.