African American Folklorists - Blues, Hoodoo & Ancestral Memory

What happens when a Blues song carries something deeper than the words being sung? Tonight on Jack Dappa Blues Radio / WBPR — We The Blues People Radio Network, I begin with something that happened after my recent performance and workshop at the Southern Indiana Blues Festival. After hearing me perform “No Enemies Blues,” a Patreon supporter approached me and asked, “Who sang that song first? What year was it written?” She was surprised when I told her: I wrote it. “No Enemies Blues” is an original song based on a true story. But then the conversation took an unexpected turn. She told me that during the performance, she saw and felt the presence of someone she believed I was channeling, though she couldn't identify who it was. That encounter becomes the starting point for tonight’s conversation. What is the relationship between the Blues, Hoodoo, Black folk belief, ancestral memory, sacred practice, and the divine? We’ll explore how the Blues emerged from a Black cultural world where the sacred and secular were not always neatly separated, a world of prayer, scripture, roots, herbs, signs, dreams, protection, conjure, healing, testimony, family memory, and ancestral knowledge. We’ll also consider the Blues through my framework of Blues Ecology: understanding the music as part of an interconnected cultural environment of land, labor, family, migration, belief, sound, memory, spirit, and survival. And we’ll ask an important folkloristic question: Can a story carry a person? When we sing somebody’s story, repeat a family saying, perform an inherited musical phrase, remember an elder, or give voice to experiences that came before us—who enters the room with us? Because the archive doesn’t always sit on a shelf. Sometimes the archive performs. We’ll also discuss the upcoming Hoodoo Heritage Festival in Nashville, and why conversations about Hoodoo should move beyond commercialization and sensationalism toward African American folklore, cultural history, spirituality, community knowledge, and survival. Tonight, I want to hear from you: Have you ever heard a song and felt the presence or memory of somebody who was no longer here? Did your family practice traditions, remedies, prayers, signs, dream interpretations, or other forms of folk knowledge without ever calling them “Hoodoo”? And perhaps the biggest question of the night: Who came into the room when we sang it? Jack Dappa Blues Radio WBPR — We The Blues People Radio Network The African American Folklorist and the Blues