Rhetorische Mittel des Bluessängers
The blues as popular music is unique but it is popular poetry as well; this aspect has often been disregarded in modern blues research.
Pre-war Country Blues lyrics were used for this analysis because these provide equal importance of music and word within the blues message as a whole; results may, however, be transferred to modern blues as well, which is based upon tradition.
Blues is more a living feature than an abstract attitude of mind. Besides its various functions, such as catharsis or means of communication, the lyrics contain certain rules of style, language, and structure, which become even more important considering the fact that they were often made by fairly or even uneducated people.
There are certain parallels, without further analyzing them, to various literary forms, especially of the Middle Ages but also of modern poetry.
The following rhetorical means are used by the blues singer: rhyme (often phonetic only), imagery such as metaphors, similes, and personifications as well as contrasting and emphasizing structures formed by thesis, antithesis, and repetitions.
Improvisation during the recordings allowed the singer free association of the verses in his mind and caused another main feature of the blues: discontinuity, which may be compared with the stream-of-consciousness-technique of modern lyricists and novelists. Last but not least, blues must be regarded as fiction, as the role of the author/singer/lst-person-narrator is seldom clearly defined, and otherwise as verification, double talk, discrepancy of the blues mood, and the call-response-scheme could not be explained.
One of the main purposes of this essay is to help teachers of English in Germany by supplying basic material for better understanding and popularizing the blues idiom, being either useful for interpretations of poetry, or as an important part of American civilisation in teaching English. It should also stimulate further literary research of the blues.