The term “blues” is conventionally used to refer to a state of sadness or melancholy, but to conclude from this that the musical genre of the same name is merely an expression of unrelieved sorrow is to miss its deeper meaning. Despite its frequent focus on such themes as suffering and self-pity, common reservoir of experience, tapping into an aesthetic that underlies many aspects of African American culture.
Critics have noted that African American folk tradition, in its earliest manifestations, does not sharply differentiate reality into sacred and secular strains or into irreconcilable dichotomies between good and evil, misery and joy. This is consistent with the apparently dual aspect of the blues and spirituals. Spirituals, like the blues, often express from oneself, or rather from one’s background psychological state and from one’s centered concept of self.
Working in this tradition, blues songs serve to transcend negative experiences by invoking the negative so that it can be transformed through the virtuosity and ecstatic mastery of the performer. This process produces a double-edged irony that is often evident in blues lyrics themselves; consider, for example the lines “If the blues also in order to coax from these experiences a lyricism that is both tragic and comic.
What this question is testing
Your task
Identify why the author included the referenced detail at that point in the passage — its function, not its content.
Common trap
Answers that merely repeat or summarize the topic of the detail instead of describing the role it plays.
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Ask what job the detail does for the paragraph, then for the passage's broader point.
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