The 21st Century Hesitation Blues
Musical Interlude No. 6
Liner Notes - Hesitation Blues
There are so many loudmouth, liar and bully politicians around the western world. Power seems to attract them like moths to fire or like flies to dog-doo. In business, finance, and high tech, there are so many nutcases - albethey occasionally intelligent and hardworking - who are also the top dogs
Why so?
It is probably so because, lacking empathy and compassion, these folks can move fast, go far and break stuff... our stuff... totally sans souci.
Their "edge" is that they behave without any of the social and civilizational inhibitions that most people feel when faced with the unethical, the immoral or the illegal. The liars and thugs are impulsive and they never feel the need to look in the rear view mirror. That kind of what-me-worry attitude can bring individual material rewards for two dimensional peeps. And it makes nervous wrecks out of the rest of us.
The two dimensional peeps are attracted to more than just power and control. It's also the theater. It's also the show. They live in a world of TV wrestling and Captain America Marvel Comic Book movies. The two dimensional cartoon types boast and abuse and act as if born to rule, born to conquer and born to dominate. They distort reality as though they are always right. Even when they are usually wrong.
And utterly bonkers.
I've run into folks like that in my decades long practice of law. Some were opposing counsel. Egads, some were judges and law professors! Some were opposing counsels' clients.
Not my clients, however. Since I was old enough to realize that life is short and life is terminal, I've tried to make it my business to choose who I work for. That might be the minimum any of us can do - withhold our services - when what we really ought to do requires more courage than we have and more years in prison than we are inclined to sacrifice.
Certainly, the professional classes - lawyers, engineers, computer geeks, scientists, administrators, technicians and others - have at least that vestigial free will to simply say 'no.' We have the vestigial free will to resist serving or being employed by power and wealth when the power and wealth are evil. For sure, all of us professionals are the ones who make the whole freaking system work. For sure, by withholding our labor and services - a kind of professional strike, if you will - the lawyers, engineers, computer geeks and scientists have as much power to arrest as to accelerate the out-of-control locomotive. Even if only minimally. Even if only symbolically. Of course, that exercise of free will comes at a personal price. But such does everything truly worth doing.
For now, however, we still have the freedom to write and speak what we think. For now, we still have the power to write and speak what we've come to understand - even if only a few read and listen and converse - so that others, like-minded, won't feel so completely alone. Alone, as the loudmouths, liars and bullies intend us to be. Or so it seems.
My conjecture is that the political, economic and military abusers - all psychopaths to one degree or another - naturally evolve as "leaders" because the rest of us, honestly speaking, are nagged by rational and persistent self-doubt.
Those who believe their own propaganda, or who, at least, seem to believe it, can twist and contort and distort reality with a straight face. The rest of us, constrained by conscience, who are at least dimly aware of history, who are minimally sensible of the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong… we cannot even imagine doing what our "leaders" do.
Thus are state terrorism, famine and genocide narrated as the victims' just deserts.
Thus are inflationary tariffs and lay-offs mislabeled as freedom for those who must scrape and scrabble for a living.
Thus is war equated with Nobel Peace Prizes; economic coercion equated with economic freedom.
Thus are governments overthrown and societies destabilized and all equated with the spread of democracy.
Those of us who are "normal" (whoever and whatever that might be), are encumbered with the very human trait of incertitude. We "normies" are never really sure. With personal experience as our guide, our incertitude is certainly legitimate. Thus, we might defer to those who seem to be utterly and fearlessly self-confident... precisely because we are not. And besides, they are dangerous and we are not. Or are we?
Burdened with fear, uncertainty, doubt and all of the heavy economic fetters of economic serfdom, we’re not sure what to do, and we hesitate.
We get the Hesitation Blues.
The Hesitation Blues is keyed in A minor. I finger-picked it on my Gibson SJ200 acoustic with AR Rare strings. Originally, I wanted to record this playing my 50+ year old Yamaha FG 300 "red label" acoustic guitar because it has good jangle. The Yamaha looks and feels like a 3/4 size Hummingbird with a narrower fingerboard. It has good jangle because the delaminating pick guard buzzes against the wood, the bridge is loose and the Martin silk & steel strings set the bridge to rattling like a tambourine! Yeah - that vintage amateur bluesy soundscape of sawdust, cigarette butts, sweat, spilled beer, yakkety yak and peanut shells! Not exactly the Vienna Opera, but, you know, whatever.
Anyway. The old Yamaha didn't cut it. My Gibson has a very fine Fishman pickup tucked inside the sound box. With the Yamaha, however, I needed to insert an old Dean Markley pickup into the hole. The Dean Markley uses an aluminum-nickel-cobalt coil. The pickup is almost as old as the guitar. Or me! The magnet that converts the physical string vibrations to electrical impulses has likely degaussed over time and it barely picked up the motion of the strings. Due to age, the felt rim has hardened (which is kind of how I feel sometimes!). As a result, the Dean Markley pickup kept popping out of the sound hole and plopping inside the body of the guitar. Not good. Not good.
So. Back to the Gibson SJ200 jumbo acoustic!
Nobody knows exactly who composed Hesitation Blues, but a lot of people claimed they did. It's been covered by nearly every blues musician from Lead Belly to Jelly Role Morton to Janis Joplin to Hot Tuna. Whether it's a song of love or of street-walkers or of life's tribulations is debatable. But I won't go there. The song has lyrics, but the lyrics change - as does everything else - depending on who performs it.
With a song like this you have great license to bend and twist it as you like. Like the headpiece photograph at the top of this post.
Playing the Hesitation Blues is not reserved to virtuosos. To slightly paraphrase the words of John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful: “There's thirteen hundred and fifty two guitar pickers in Nashville; And any one of them can play this song twice as better than I will."
So, with great inartistic license and humility, I concocted something of my own with bits and pieces assembled from everywhere. I plugged in some of my own riffs and added snippets of what I might have heard elsewhere. It's not polished and not really true to the original, but neither are Nature, Life, and Evolution.
Like all blues, this is supposed to be something you can hum or tap your feet to. Feel free to do either. No one's watching... other than Big Brother, the many intelligence gathering agencies who monitor you to keep you free (ahem), and all the Big Tech companies who value your privacy. They value your privacy because your privacy (as marketed by them to others) is, indeed, very, very valuable (ahem ahem).
The recording is imperfect. I thought about doing various things to "heal" the blemishes and the notes that got clipped outside the recording range; but then... naaah, why bother? Hesitation Blues is a jug band blues standard best performed live. As such, it's better au naturel than something finely crafted as a studio production. I did add just a touch of reverb in Audacity, however, to round out the notes.
Below are two recordings. One is a .wav file and the other is in the .mpv format. Click and play whichever one suits you best.
.Wav File - Hesitation Blues
.Mpv File - Hesitation Blues
One of your best articles Steve. Politics and music always mix well!