Jamie Sue on why she loves blues dancing

My friend Jamie Sue, on the swing dance website that I administer, made an eloquent statement about why she loves dancing to the blues. I have to quote it in its entirety:

I love blues. Blues music reflects a lot of my life view. It lives big
and loud. It’s passionate and large. It’s about loving…women, or men,
or drugs, or drinking, or dancing, or small towns, or big cities, or
sex, or family, or anything, really. It’s about living and loving it
big and loud because it will be gone. Blues is loss. It’s deep,
passionate, mournful loss. It’s living it all, even though you know
you’re going to lose everything. In fact, it’s about living it all
*because* you’re going to lose everything. Because under it all, under
the joy, and the heat, and the intimacy, and the passion, the music of
blues – that whining guitar, or slurring harmonica – the music of blues
is mournful.
 

That dichotomy makes me want to move – and more specifically, to move
with someone. It makes me want to find any stranger and say “here is my
joy and here is my loss, show me yours.” It makes me want to sink down
into the floor, collapse into a puddle, and then stretch up, stretch
every muscle because a horn is doing that, warbling at me and lifting
me back up. It makes me want to sit into the tension, feel supported
and supporting, feel the weight of movement, the heavy perfection of a
shared axis. It makes me want to hold someone’s hand and when the
vocals moan, ‘late last night, I sold away and cried’, I want to
stumble step that emotion into a movement that is something we created
between us for just this one dance, this one song, this one moment of
connection that even while it is still happening it is already gone.
Joy and loss. Blues.

Such a powerful and beautiful quote about one dancer’s love of the music and dance. Thanks, Jamie Sue.

[Photo by D-Rod.]