B B King: Secrets of a Bluesman's Longevity

Throughout the years, I've seen B. B. King performing live mostly through either television shows or, in the more recent years, footage of live concerts diffused via Internet. I could gradually see him transitioning from playing mostly standing, to sometimes sitting, then finally to sitting most of the time, as he slowly conceded to the demands of his fight against diabetes and, as a boy from 1925, to those of his age. A few features of his appearances, however, never changed: the sweetness of his guitar riffs and solos, the intense spark of joy emanated from his charismatic stage attitude and the power of his inspiration over his public.

I always admired that B. B. King was still that active and inspiring after so many years on the road. This week, I was finally able to unveil some of the secrets behind the longevity of this man and his music. The insight came after watching another documentary from a series about The Blues, organized by Martin Scorsese. This time, in the film "The Road to Memphis", director Richard Pearce reconstructs the life threads of "second-generation" Bluesmen B. B. King, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner, Bobby Rush and others, using as a focal point for their lives a concert they gave in Memphis for the Handy Awards, in 2002.

Pearce interweaves the individual threads of the Bluesmen onto a fabric that he unfolds to reveal several layers of musical history, which is also shown to reflect the history of American society itself. But the human dimension that the director is able to extract from his main characters, and their life on the road from town to town, and, finally, back to Memphis where thing all began, is to me what stands out most from the film. And that is where the secrets are revealed about the incredible longevity shared by all these Bluesmen at the time of footage (sadly, Rosco Gordon and Ike Turner are now deceased).

First, Pearce shows how these men grew out of poverty and oblivion to become immortalized through their music, because of their determination to change their world without having to sell their souls to the devil, like their predecessor founding fathers of The Blues -- many of whom died quite young -- were forced to do, due to the circumstances of the cotton fields. This determination, and persistence in not letting a light at the end of a very dark tunnel be extinguished, gave them a deep meaning to life.

Second, through the Blues, B. B. King and his mates were given the opportunity to form a fraternity, which opened a huge umbrella for all Black Americans to "freely" exercise their culture. Pearce's film shows that his main characters were on the center of this fraternity, which resonated loudly throughout the entire community. In between the lines, the film suggests that one of the main foundations of their "movement" was a strong camaraderie, and a generally non-violent kindness which reflected the attitude of their main source of inspiration and leading voice, Martin Luther King. Such ethos centered on camaraderie gave these men a deep sense of engagement.

Finally, BB King and his mates found in the Blues music the perfect environment to have fun. Fun which the film pictures as a contagious pleasure that the Bluesmen have had and shared selflessly with the public since starting their musical careers, some five decades ago.

At the end of the film, I was amazed to see how much its narrative unveiled, through the lives and achievements of B. B. King's "fraternity", some of the more fundamental concepts underlying recent scientific inquiries on the factors that make people believe their life is worth living. In fact, meaning, engagement and pleasure, which form the strongest threads of Pearce's narrative line, are also the three strongest indicators of the perception a person has of its own well-being. The interplay of such indicators, and their consequences to a person's mental health, satisfaction with personal and professional lives, and even longevity, are explored in works such as the paper "Three Ways to Happiness: Pleasure, Engagement and Meaning", in books such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow", Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", and, more generally, in some of the fundamental paradigms of the recent science of Positive Psychology.

The high levels of meaning, engagement and pleasure achieved the Bluesmen in Pearce's "The Road to Memphis", are consistent with those achieved by other, "ordinary" people like us, who were not only very successful, but also inspiring to their peers, and able to live very long and healthy lives. Such cases are vastly reported in compilations gathering recent Positive Psychology investigations.

All this seems a strong enough call to get out there now and do something constructive for our lives. Perhaps such an attitude would lead us not only to the secrets of B. B. King's longevity, but also to those of a life better worth living.

The cashew tree: Blues, maracatus and self-similarity

After watching, earlier this week, Martin Scorsese's documentary "The Blues: Feels Like Going Home", a multiplicity of images and thoughts came to mind bonding the film, to my memories and experiences as a musician. The documentary was first released in 2003 by American PBS TV, as part of a series of seven films portraying the Blues through the eyes of seven famous directors (Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders), and is now being revisited by Australia's ABC Blues Festival Project through its iView website

Prompted by the immediate recognition that one of the first clips of Scorsese's documentary, showing the Fife & Drum Music of the Mississipi, had a very similar musical "feel" to that of the Brazilian Bandas de Pifano and some of its maracatus, I was immediately taken back a few years, to a memory of visiting one of the most amazing sites in the world: Pirangi's cashew tree, today one of the biggest tourist attractions in the NE Region of Brazil. In my vision, Pirangi's cashew tree and the subject of Scorsese's documentary -- the Blues and, more generally, modern western popular music -- suggested some sort of self-similarity in both their genesis and geometries.

After being planted in 1888, Pirangi's tree suffered from two genetic mutations. First, the branches grew sideways, instead of upwards like other sister cashew trees planted in nearby patches of soil. Then, the sideways branches became so heavy, they touched down and grew into the ground. At that stage, buried branches suffered a second mutation, its trunk cells changing into root cells, which originated "new" trees, growing initially upwards, then again sideways, into the ground and so on, so forth. Now, more than 80 interconnected tree "units" cover an area of about 8,500 m2, with a perimeter of some 500m, altogether forming the biggest cashew tree in the world.

In terms of genesis, both Pirangi's cashew tree and the African musical origins of modern western music have initially suffered influences from degenerative-type "disorders", which blossomed into something that became not only generative, but inspiring and unique. In the Blues' case, the imposed "mutation" was provoked by the crime of slavery committed against African families, and the slave trade routes which ripped Africans from their homeland and culture centuries ago. After being transported in horrific conditions to several parts of the "New World", African slaves were forced into new soil. They then suffered cultural transformations that were responsible for the appearance of the Blues, and ultimately grew in all directions, to resurface as several different styles adding up to a substantial chunk of what is generally called today modern western popular music.

The amazing unifying vision that appeared in my mind's telly, while riding my bicycle to work the next day, was that of a "musical" tree, reflecting Pirangi's, but growing out of Africa, dipping its branches in the Atlantic Ocean, resurfacing near the coasts of North and South Americas, and the Caribbean, then dipping into the fertile soils of the Mississipi Delta, of the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, and the islands of Barbados, Trindad and Cuba. In these new places, they grew roots, new trees, and then branches that expanded and dipped back into the soils of virtually every country on earth today, where new roots, trees and branches continue to grow further, without losing their link to the original tree in Africa.

What a bike ride! Lucky Perth's traffic isn't anything like my hometown Rio de Janeiro, so my daydreaming wasn't a problem, and I did finally arrive safely at work.

After going back home and surfing a little more the net, I figured that such contagious expansion process, that I visualized in my "dangerous" bike ride, explains, according to musicologists, much of how most modern musical genres and styles have developed from their classical western, African or Indian, folk, sacred/canonical and pop musical ancestors. At every new stage of evolution of a "mother" genre or style, some parts of the genetic code of the ancestor is kept, in a way that some degree of self-similarity is held throughout the development process. So much that the Pirangi cashew tree now became, for me at least, an analogy for music and its evolution process throughout human history.

(Image: Celtic Tree of Life, borrowed from Welsh artist Jen Delyth ©1990: kelticdesigns.com)