essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. blues, the article argues, signify not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that undercuts, that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's form but in its matter, its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, The Thinker as Poet blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come falling down like rain. blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the impulse. Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: The blues is healing. blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels happy instead of blue. Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in Ya Da Do, It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains. Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in the sense of more deeply, more fully, more mindfully. As Ellison's words suggest, the blues might be called a moving realization of the lyrical in a raw but pure form. In making just this identification of blues with the impulse, Hummer writes that this is music that strives to say tell you the true story of humankind: I'll tell you your own (115). Charles Simic wrote: Like all genuine art, the blues belong to a specific time, place, and people which it then, paradoxically, transcends. secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude. Lyric poetry has no closer relation anywhere than the blues. reason people make lyric poems and blues songs is because our life is short, sweet, and fleeting. blues bear witness to the strangeness of each individual's fate. It begins wordlessly in a moan, a stamp of the foot, a sigh, a hum, and then seeks words for that something or other that has no name in any language and for which all poetry and music seek an approximation. …