What Every Trump Supporter Has in Common is Their Having Been Fooled

Donald Trump is ahead of us on a thing that PT Barnum figured out a century ago; that there is a sucker born every minute. HL Mencken was all over it too: "No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

I am not suggesting that all of Donald Trump’s supporters are stupid. Many are, make no mistake about that. Many, many, many of them are. And not just good old folksy, C-student stupid either. I mean full-on ice cream cone to the forehead stupid. And while there is plenty of stupid in the Trump camp, it does not compose anywhere near the entirety of Trump’s following. What all Trump supporters do have in common, however, is that every one of them has been fooled. The more you support Trump, the more you have been fooled. If you more or less like what he says and might vote for him, you’ve been a little bit fooled. If you have four Trump signs, one in each of the four windows of your dismal apartment, you’ve been completely fooled.

And Donald Trump knows how to fool people. He has been connecting with the reality TV demographic for more than a decade now; he knows how big it is, how unfulfilled it is, how simple it prefers its truths, and how it aches to identify the architect of its frustration. Take terrorism, for instance.

Trump’s solution to foreign terrorism in the US is to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This idea resonates with the Honey Boo Boo demographic, because most of the people who like this idea don’t fly internationally. The disruption involved in banning Muslims from entering the United States on airplanes would cripple entire airlines, disrupt commerce and pleasure trips to an unprecedented level, and cause phenomenal ill will across the world, all to a net result of zero. It would be a bold gesture, yes, but oftentimes, as in this case, boldness has stupidity as its concomitant. The idea of banning all Muslims from travel into the United States is breathtaking in its stupidity, and yet, it resonates.

The loyal Trumpster will stand arms akimbo with shaking head and muttering, “Whatever it takes, man, whatever it takes.” This despite the fact that more people are killed by armed toddlers in America than are killed by foreign terrorists. This wildly disproportionate and illogical approach is attractive precisely because of its boldness. Its implausibility is born of inexperience with international travel and an understanding of how the United States fits into it. Wholly apart from the financial, political and family disruptions, assuming such a program could be implemented, what would be the verification methodology? Where does it take place? Would there have to be a new global norm for passports? Would they all need to be recalled and stamped with the individual’s faith now? Or does the interrogation happen at the airport?

“Mister Mohammed, are you Muslim?”

“No ma’am, I am Zoroastrian.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Um, quick, what’s the Avesta?”

“It is the chief Zoroastrian text.”

“Right this way, sir…”

Let’s be serious. Anyone who was trying to get in by ducking the ban could claim to be Bahá'í. Might you encounter a discussion with an Alawite as to whether the syncretistic aspects of the Alawites places them outside Mr. Trump’s definition of what a Muslim is? Who is going to arbitrate all of these theosophical quibbles? Who is going to determine that so-and-so is or isn’t a practicing Mandaeist? There are a fair number of Yarsanists and Samaritans in the Middle East, as well as pockets of Shabakists, Ishikists, Ali-Illahists. How do you tell a sunny Christian from a Sunni Muslim? Okay, I’m being ridiculous, but you get my point.

This all makes sense to Trump’s television audience though, because if you reduce it to the rubric of “Ban All Muslims,” it takes on a simplistic, feel-good sense of having made a bold step after all of this mealy-mouthed pussyfooting we’ve been doing. It quickly identifies itself as a stupid idea once you even begin to think about it, but that’s the other side of the coin Trump traffics in; the seeming fact that it doesn’t quite sound stupid until you actually do begin to think about it. The trick then becomes to keep people from thinking about it.

Give people an idea, a big, stupid idea, and then quickly move on to the next big, stupid idea. Like the wall. Which sounds good to some people. Again, until you actually start to think about it. And once you do, you quickly realize that it is as stupid as the idea of trying to identify one and a half billion people as being ineligible for air travel to the US. With immigration currently at sum zero, it is something of a solution without a problem. Add in the mass deportation component, and people like the idea even better. The reality of a crumbling farm industry alongside parents being ripped away from their children and loaded onto railcars is part of the not-thinking-it-through that Trump is counting on. Again, the trick is to sum up the big, stupid idea in three words, and then move on to the next big, stupid idea. Ban all Muslims. Build the wall. Deport the illegals.

Trump’s trick of getting people not to think works because it’s easy and it can feel good in the moment if you are sufficiently angry and resentful. A powerful personality has identified the enemy and boldly pledged that he would do something to vanquish it. Something big, something bold. And they have faith that he can and will, because they’ve seen him perform forcefully in boardrooms. 

Episodes of “The Apprentice” have availed them fly-on-the-wall status, and they saw firsthand the prowess of a powerful leader. Of course it’s just a silly cardboard replica, a Potemkin village of an office environment with no actual consequences in the downside and a sudden and unrealistic return on the upside. No one learns a thing from it, and the only winner, as always, is Trump himself. But this is the lazy thinking of Trump’s audience: the desire for easily identified heroes and villains, for predictable justice in terms of consequence and rewards.

It is easy, binary thinking. People need either to be fired or hired. Not developed, managed or educated. Countries need to be thought of as either good or bad and deserving of either subsidy or invasion, and not much else in between. Through his rhetoric, Trump has instructed his slack-jawed, doe-eyed, zombie-like followers to appeal to their basest instincts for guidance rather than any long-codified core ethics and morality.

As rooted a thing as civic education, sports environments and academics are, those places where most Americans learned how to get along and work in teams, it can all fall to dust in an instant with the right appeal to fear and resentment. Trump understands all of this. He is exploiting it, and it is irresponsible and I think highly detestable of him. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t always mean you should, and in this case I believe he shouldn’t have, and that he has orchestrated all of this is to his great shame. He has reawakened a sleeping giant of racism and hatred that was on its way to across-the-board social unacceptability.

The real damage is that Trump has fooled a lot of people into thinking that it’s okay to be judgmental, prejudiced, unforgiving, violent and cruel. And it’s not. Trump is wrong, and his followers have been fooled. The other piece of bad news is that when this has passed, with Trump not being president, he is going to betray every single one of his supporters and return to business as usual. And where will they go then?

Trump's Poly Sci 101 Machiavelli Lesson

 

Trump’s decision to exploit the misery that he pretends to know how to assuage speaks to his depraved level of indifference to the health of the nation, and now quite literally to the health of the supporters and protesters who attend his rallies. The methods he is employing are classic, textbook, and frankly, a little hackneyed. They represent the techniques you find in Machiavelli’s The Prince, and you can hear them echoed almost literally in any State University freshman political science class.

He follows the recommendation of “native troops” being the most desirable (read that as disaffected whites), far better than a mixed army, or one coopted on loan from other sympathetic kingdoms (read that as the Republican establishment). The hardcore Trump people are Trump people alone, and indeed in calculated obeisance to their leader’s rhetoric, are being transformed into a mobile army as much as they are a political support group. Fistfights are common, encouraged from the podium, and are now viewed by Trump supporters and the ghoul media as a requisite feature of a Trump rally.

What would a hockey game be without the fights? It is now an expected part of these events, and will remain so from now forward. If at this point you attend a Trump rally and there aren’t a few ejections for you to scream and swear in the direction of, you’d feel like you got ripped off. If there’s a fight, so much the better, and imagine, just imagine if you got to tell people you were at the one where the guy got killed.

Other pure Machiavelli is to articulate very few and very large themes, and keep them in the people’s minds throughout The Prince’s command of them. These themes are grand in scope and are not spoken of in detail, and are not essential to be acted upon at any time, yet they must be maintained as ideas.

There are provisions also for managing mass disillusionment once this kind of promissory governing style becomes unconvincing, but as Trump’s bluff hasn’t yet been called and potentially wouldn’t be until the third or so year of a presidency, if he sticks to the book, he’ll force his faithful to find their faith again, or at least act as if they do. Your heart won’t matter as much as your obedience will. Deceit, brutality and betrayal are not only in the toolbox, they are all enthusiastically recommended.

It has taken a great deal of courage on the part of Trump supporters to finally give in to their long-held beliefs rather than suppress them in the name of social unacceptability. I am serious when I say that. They possess a very real sense of resentment of large groups of people whom they perceive as having a common characteristic that works to the detriment of their own reality, and of the general reality of the country they love. They have stifled this disdain for a long time because they understood that it was not civilized to do otherwise.

Trump has told them being civilized is not the way to look at that social pressure. He advises instead it be characterized as “political correctness” and that now rather than a virtue, it was a thing to be rejected and even vilified. With Trump’s wind at their backs they stand and deliver, unapologetic of their racism, bigotry, antipathy and hatred. It is like a group of cockroaches in a tenement kitchen whose leader has told them they don’t have to scatter when the kitchen light comes on anymore.

It has taken some courage for them to step out into the light with their darkness, and they are still suspicious of the new world Trump has given them, but they love it, and they are ready at a moment’s notice to defend it violently. They feel this hatred at the bogeyman in their hearts and when their leader says it’s okay to express it with fists and rage it is game on. The saddest part of this whole spectacle is that when Trump goes away, which I honestly think he will, he’s not going to take them with him. He’s going to do business as usual and find some other way to stroke his limitless ego, but this ethnocentric, xenophobic and quick to violence strain into which he has single-handedly breathed a newfound sense of personal credibility will remain, and it will be seeking a new sync for its energy.

Blaming the poor, immigrants, other races and religions and maintaining second-class citizenship for women has always been an integral part of many modern Americans’ personal codification. It is sad, but it is true. In addition to these deep-seated prejudices, however, in most parts of the country there has always been an understanding that this kind of talk in social circles and this kind of  attitude informing public policy were both bad ideas. Whereas bigotry, xenophobia and racism lite were once upon a time a lot of people's dirty little secret, for many, Trump has released that Kraken.

This now almost nostalgic unspoken social pressure created a cognitive dissonance in a lot of people, and as such had a prayer of initiating internal dialog on the matter.  That erstwhile dynamic of there being an understanding that prejudice by law and by creed had been rejected by society probably changed some minds to a more progressive disposition, as it is well known that the way someone reshapes their viewpoint on a subject is by coming to it themselves. Browbeating rarely gets you anywhere past the brow. Still, brows are beaten, and that is what a failing Trump presidency would require. The authoritarian streak of his concept of governance is, to his credit, being laid out frankly and without circumspection or apology in this primary season.

Another Machiavellian old faithful is to create unrest as a pretext for quelling it. According to the Chicago Police and according to the University Police, last night’s event was not cancelled on their recommendation. It was purely a call from the Trump campaign. The cancellation was made via a terse, two-sentence announcement from the podium, and that was it. Witnesses to the event and video documentation indicate that the unruliness only began after the cancellation announcement. Any professional events management company would have their best talker take the podium to try and manage hostilities and initiate calm. It may be an already circulating conspiracy theory, but it strikes me that the Trump campaign favors newsworthy events, and here was a beauty that might have been avoidable. Did they orchestrate the fracas? In a word, yes.

I am inspired to reread The Prince, though I no longer have it. I must, and I shall order it soon. Between November 11^th and January 20^th, if worse comes to worst, we all should read it, just so as to know what to expect.

Some Thoughts on Replacing Scalia

Regarding the GOP stonewall on Scalia’s replacement, by my amateur reading of it there is no “use-by” date in the Constitution that precludes the president’s right, indeed his obligation, to nominate a successor in the event of a sitting court member’s death. It’s not a carton of milk. There are eleven months left in Obama’s presidency; he was elected twice, the last time by five million votes and an electoral landslide. This is a thing he gets to do.

Offended by a rash of executive actions in recent months, McConnell et al are determined to slog through one more tough year of maintaining zero output from the legislative branch, with this item being the chief remaining prize. The closing of Guantanamo bookending Obama’s presidency as a campaign promise in 2008 and now with its remaining 90 prisoners proposed for relocation, they would love to stifle that as well if only for its symbolic effectiveness as a yoke of failure the punditry could lay across his presidency. But still, keeping the Supreme Court of the United States in a non-functioning state is the current prime directive of the Republican senate. I can barely grok how sick this is.

Displaying all the maturity of a schoolyard spoil sport who takes his ball and goes home so none of the kids can play, McConnell and the gang of eleven members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have signed a letter stating their intention to kill the process with inertia. Now that’s leadership. Obama could nominate the hangin’ judge of the GOP’s dreams, a full-on Adam’s rib, Noah’s ark death penalty enthusiast and brutality apologist and they wouldn’t even know it because they won’t meet with him or her, nor will they schedule a hearing. It’s outrageous.

I imagine Mitch McConnell as a little boy when his mother told him to clean his room, with his little fingers jammed into his ears and saying “blah blah blah” as his even in youth prodigious wattle shook like Jell-O in the mold. What an infuriating bunch of jerks these eleven members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are. They are the whores and hirelings of some number of dozens of fat cat donors, and the goal of obstruction for obstruction's sake that was plainly stated in 2008 is now in its endgame. Whether it’s pandering to fundamentalists, industrialists, militarists or racists, if it impedes the president, the answer is always going to be the same: “Yes sir, right away, sir, whatever you say, sir.”

Dog Thoughts

Debra gets home after I do on Tuesdays and Fridays now, which means I feed our beagle, Sam, when I get home. He has been in the house, with doggy door out to a small yard for the day, which combined with some pretty swanky sleeping arrangements constitute the criteria typically imagined when invoking the phrase, “a dog’s life.” Still, from the dog’s perspective, it must bear some equivalency to an open-air prison of sorts, a kind of Palestine in the Los Angeles suburbs, weirdly lorded over by an irreligious Jew and a similarly disposed Catholic. By the time I park and get to the door, his toenails are tapping a novel in Morse code across the vertical panes of glass that flank our front entance. He doesn’t stop until I am inside the door, at which point he launches himself at me in a series of corkscrewing trajectories and emitting a river of continuous yelps. I bow to him and extend my arms, and he calms enough to place his front paws on the insides of my forearms and we bury our heads next to one another and we wriggle in calm nonsense for a moment. He breaks our clinch and darts toward the kitchen. He will be fed.

He eats a half of a can in the morning and a half of a can at night, and after dinner (about fifteen seconds later), he begins a second Saint Vitus dance, one that cajoles me to get the leash and climb the local hills to a dirt mound with a view, a journey with incline enough to get us both panting. The trip up those hills, while largely single or double story suburban ranch houses with drought-resistant lawns, stone arrangements and cacti, also features a few sudden small conifer groves with dirt patches, and it was in one of these that Sam found a dead rat tonight, probably having staggered away from a nearby house in his death throes after eating the D-Con, a front paw on an opposite breast, tearfully sparing his family the piteous sight of him dying, “Ma, they got me, they got me good this time ma, take care of the kids, ma, I can’t…let them…see me…like this!”

I had been letting Sam lead the way to that point, rushing when he rushed, having picked up a scent, and stopping when he stopped, having lost it. So he had his snout well into the maggoty rat by the time I figured out what he was onto and drew him away with the leash. He launched a loud, focused hound bleat and I praised him for his excellence as I led him away from the carcass. I had a tissue so I scrubbed his gob of death bugs and we continued on up the hill. The next adventure in the mighty quest for a tired beagle was the dump. And of course I had forgotten the bag. But what this animal did for me, what this magical creature did, was to pull over into the next little miniature pastoral area between houses for his sworn duty. He chose a spot in loose dirt below, with an ample supply of more loose dirt and fallen leaves right nearby. There was a steep embankment that tumbled down a good fifteen feet just another foot away. I covered the Los Angeles Steamer in loose dirt first, then in fallen leaves and gave it a sweet little boot over the lip of the ravine. 100% biodegradable, and with an El Niño predicted, I guarantee that thing will not see the springtime. On we went.

Sam went berserk at the next little forested area, and it was something really special. Another dog’s shit. Here he had just made some, so it was only natural he review the work of his peers, see where he might need to sharpen his game a bit, maybe get some ideas about style or content. Who knows what goes through a dog’s mind? Not me, certainly, as I have never had a dog call me Dad so I’m pretty new to all of this. I have a suspicion though about the opinion dogs have regarding the way things smell. They don’t qualify them per se. They identify them, but even though their sense of smell, especially hounds, is around forty times more sensitive than a human being’s, they don’t establish nearly the spectrum of nauseating to intoxicating that humans ascribe to smell. The difference between suddenly presenting someone with a fly larvae-ridden rat corpse and a cup of freshly brewed coffee is dramatic. The beagle makes no such value judgments. I see the beagle’s sense of smell as being able to differentiate what a thing is and where it is with a stunning accuracy, the way most people see colors or the way Mozart heard music, vividly, in great detail, without question. What does not particularly exist within the beagle purview is much of a qualitative assessment. The gradations boil down to good, better, best.

Better would be what food smells like, best is what people food smells like, and good is everything else. I don’t think anything smells bad to a dog. Shit smells like shit, dead rats smell like dead rats, and both can be filed under “good.” Sam is a not only a good dog, he is a springboard for endless ruminative amusements.

A lamentation for Paris

Why write if you don’t have answers? It’s like forgiveness I guess, of which I have none right now. It’s like forgiveness in that it’s for the forgiver. Writing is for the writer. A lucky and uniquely skilled few writers have legions attuned to each word, but those must be the writers with answers. After all, who needs more questions, especially from a writer? Readers have plenty of their own. So I’ll write some thoughts on it all just to pass some time with it, to be still with it for a moment. I’ll post it I’m guessing, but for now it’s for now.

Squad terrorism describes this thing I guess. That’s its type, its genus, coordinated and simultaneous, kind of in the Mumbai tradition. Commandos. Death squads. So damn sick. Arranged, but scattered, an assault on bars and restaurants and a young band. So I guess that was it. Youth. Kill a bunch of kids. It seems to be a fierce jab with a spear of so dull a point as to mean nothing. Is this the new version of the new warfare? It’s asymmetrical and now it’s nonsensical as well? Enough of looking for poetry in murder, I suppose.

What is it then? Maybe I’ll try a few answers. Politically it is born of our love affair with the House of Saad and our indirect funding of the tools of oppression against the average Saudi schmuck, who runs for solace to the Saudi mullahs preaching a uniquely Gulf State Wahaabist Islam that extolls violence against the infidel. Historically, it is born of a century of capricious blunders in the Middle East that have not taught us either how to partner with or exploit the region. Economically it is born of reliance on oil. Practically, with Iraq now gone to the dogs, or the Russians anyway, our most potent ally in the Middle East (besides Israel) might be Iran. That’s how inside out the Middle East is right now. East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. But we keep trying. The urge now is for vengeance, but that’s been tried before. We in the US are experts in blind lashings out in vengeance’s name, and it does not work. The one thing that has not been tried, disengagement, is impossible absent a dramatic social shift in the West and a dramatic intellectual shift in the East.

So those are my answers. And they’re not answers at all. They’re thoughts. I recommend you be suspicious of anyone with definitive answers on this. People better informed than me might have the next level past a thought, which is an idea. Ideas are good. The next level past an idea though, is an answer, and as pertains to the Middle East, anything characterized as an answer should be suspect. But, if you’re bound and determined and you’re looking for answers, you can go on Twitter and find more than 140 characters who have it all figured out in less than 140 characters. Most of what I have here is more questions, and a parting thought that apart from its rich cultural heritage, France has a noble history of the greater good eventually prevailing in politics, so let’s hope she can begin to make sense of this and find a way to mend her greatest city. Mon coeur est brisé.

Load the 12-guage and batten down the bulkhead: there's a war on Christmas.

Just how prepared are you for the war on Christmas? It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, and as evidenced by the new Starbucks holiday cup design, already the first salvos of intercontinental ballistic mistletoe have been fired. Go ahead Starbucks. Take the Christmas trees off the cup. Take the snowflakes off too. We know what CEO Howard Schultz means by that. Starbucks and the other foot soldiers in the war on Christmas are already poisoning poinsettias and putting the “no” in Noel. Will the forces of Islam, Judaism and irreligiousness turn your Christmas sleigh into a Christmas slaying? Will the nice cede to the naughty? Or will you be a proud Christmas nutcracker and meet these Yuletide challengers with cup of hot chocolate to the face? Only by fortifying your manger with gingerbread army men will you be able to fend off the Scrooges and fruitcakes that mean to crash your crèche and wassail you with songs of apostasy. Put a lump of Koch brothers coal in the stockings of those turkeys who encourage the snowballing anti-Christmas sentiment and shove a Yule log where the sun doesn’t shine. If these Rudolph and Jesus naysayers want their next stocking stuffer to be a body bag, that’s a Christmas wish I can be joyful about. And if you want to ring someone’s bell this Christmas, strap on your Santa boots and knock the chestnuts out of some candy cane trying to make mince meat of my merry. To put a bow on it, get a noggin full of eggnog and go caroling in Crown Heights. The blizzard of anti-Jesus, anti-wise men bluster is already pouring down your chimney, so don’t get caught with your decorations in your hand. The only way to fight the war on Christmas is with a preemptive strike. Figure out what myrrh is and get some. Figure out what frankincense is and get some. And yes, buy gold. Knock back a couple snorts of Christmas cheer, stock that fireplace and put on your cap because we’re trading shifts at the lookout and it’s going to be a long winter’s night, especially with no Starbuck’s. Be prepared to share your cider and cookies or tidings of piping hot lead from your Christmas Glock, but remember to have your toboggan ready for a fast getaway. You don’t want your Christmas goose to be delivered from behind.

Things You Should Know When You Go to a Blues Jam

When you go to a blues jam, you should know some standards, you should know how to hear and play through common progressions, and you should know how to communicate with the rest of the musicians. The first two items on the list must be developed over time, but the final item, communicating with the band, can be learned quickly. There exists a pretty graceful nomenclature for laying out a road map for the band, and it’s worth taking a few minutes to learn these terms and how they work together.

The first things you’re going to want to communicate are the feel and the key of the song you want to play. Your basic choices for rhythm are as follows: Texas shuffle, Chicago shuffle, swing, 12/8, Latin, rock and roll, funk or slow. When you step up to the mic and turn to the band to let them know what you’re looking for, here are a few samples of how to call songs, along with some examples of songs that fit the description:

Texas shuffle in E: Pride and Joy, SRV

Chicago shuffle in A: Every Day I Have the Blues, BB King

Swing in G: See See Rider, BB King

12/8 in F: Bring it on Home to Me, Sam Cooke

Funk in D: Help the Poor, Robben Ford

Rock ‘n’ Roll in A: Keep Your Hands to Yourself, Georgia Satellites

Slow blues in B: Red House, Jimi Hendrix
Latin in A: Teeny Weenie Bit, Jimmie Vaughn

Tempo is vitally important, and it is critical that everyone in the band has a clear understanding of the intended tempo. Don’t be shy when you stomp it off. It might be a good idea to cut the time on the first bar of your two-bar count-off. Get the tempo straight in your head, and then in clear and authoritative voice, count it off: “One, two, one-two-three-four…”

A lot of blues songs have what is commonly referred to as a “Fast IV.” What that means is that instead of riding on the first chord for four bars before going to the IV chord, you go to the IV on the second measure, then back down to the I for two more bars, then back up to the IV chord on bar five. Good examples of this are Bo Diddley’s Before You Accuse Me and Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago.

Some blues songs start on the IV chord. In this case, it usually goes four bars on the IV, then four bars on the I, followed by two bars on the V and two bars on the I. Buddy Guy’s Mary Had a Little Lamb fits this description.

There is also a tradition of the “Long I,” in which the progression stays on the root tonality of the key for eight bars instead of four. BB King’s Better Lovin’ Man and How Blue Can You Get, also by BB King fit this description.

Another common variation is the “Long V,” in which rather than playing V-IV-I-I for the final four bars of the twelve bar progression, you sustain the V chord for an extra bar, making the final phrase, V-V-I-I. There are other such variations, and for the most part, they are easy to hear and feel coming if you are sitting in, and also easy to telegraph if you are leading.

If you want to lend a bit of arranging to your performance, you can embellish the intro considerably by starting from bar nine of the 12-bar progression. The typical shorthand is “From the V.” When starting from the V, you essentially start the tune with the final four bars of the progression, V-IV-I-I. It is also quite common on the final (12^th) bar to go back to the V.

Here’s a typical call, incorporating several elements of this blues patois: “Before You Accuse Me, Chicago shuffle in A with a fast IV. Take it from the V, right about here (snap your tempo). One, a-two, a-one, two, three…”

So that’s how you kick it off. Once the jam is on, if you are leading the tune, be bold. Pick the order of solos and communicate them unambiguously to the players. Don’t feel like you’re being bossy. Players infinitely prefer being directed to not knowing what’s next and trying to decide by committee at the turnaround. On that subject, maybe you need to look at your hands while you're playing. Keep playing and eventually you won't but maybe you still do. You need to pay attention at the turnaround. Maybe the leader will be wildly gesticulating for you to solo but you are so buried in your fretboard, you miss the cue. At bar eleven or so, pick your head up and watch for a transition from soloist to vocalist, from vocalist to soloist, or from one soloist to another.

The other important arrangement opportunity for you is the ending. Typically the most graceful ending is achieved by repeating the final four bars. Sometimes it is repeated once, sometimes twice. It is easily called for by a signal from the leader, very often an index finger twirled in the air in a sort of a “whoopee” gesture. Your attentive band will already be looking for it if you’ve sung, cued solos and then returned to a final vocal verse. If they seem a little out-to-lunch, communicate with the bass player and the rest of the band will get dragged into your arrangement whether they like it or not!

There are several standard blues endings, and most of them you can direct, either by jumping in with confidence and getting the band to follow you or by gesticulation. Check out the ending of Ellington’s Take the A Train for one standard up-tempo ending, and check out the Allman Brothers’ One Way Out for a slow ending to an up-tempo tune.

There is a vast canon of material within the blues catalog, but there are some hundred or so songs that you run into pretty regularly. I have culled a list of 25 songs that are a good idea to have in your repertoire when attending a blues jam. Some are male vocal pieces, some are some are female vocal pieces, some are instrumentals and some are guitar oriented. The songs appropriate for female vocalist are denoted with an asterisk. You may notice that a lot of songs specifically oriented toward the female vocalist are more song-oriented and less based on common blues form.

I Got My Mojo Working

Killing Floor

Teeny Weeny Bit

Next Time You See Me

Before You Accuse Me

See See Rider

Summertime*

I’m a Man

Yonder’s Wall

Walkin’ the Dog

Love Me Like a Man*

Hoochie Coochie Man

Cross-Cut Saw

Ball and Chain*
Handy Man*

I Just Want to Make Love to You*

Born Under A Bad Sign

How Blue Can You Get

Key To The Highway

I'll Play The Blues For You

Tell Mama*

I'd Rather Go Blind*

Wang Dang Doodle*

Bright Lights, Big City*

Baby What You Want Me to Do

Big Boss Man

Stormy Monday (as overplayed as it is, it's necessary)

Mustang Sally (See Stormy Monday)
Help Me

Caledonia

That’s about it! The blues are a deep and sacred music form, and a lot of people have a lot of themselves invested in it. Thinking that “it’s only three chords” is a great way to become an average to bad blues musician. Thinking about economy of musical language, tone, phrasing, grace and restraint, and marveling at the beauty of a single perfectly placed note is a great way to become a fine blues player. Enjoy the music, enjoy your instrument, and we’ll see you out at the jams!