"I only write about what I do, what happens to me"
About this Quote
A bluesman insisting on autobiography isn’t being modest; he’s drawing a hard boundary around authenticity. “I only write about what I do, what happens to me” reads like a plainspoken rule, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that songs are just entertainment, detachable from lived stakes. Brownie McGhee is telling you the material comes with fingerprints on it: the body that worked, traveled, hustled, got mistreated, got by.
The intent is practical as much as poetic. In the blues tradition McGhee came up in, “write” doesn’t only mean put words on paper; it means shape experience into a form you can carry from town to town and make legible to strangers. The line sells credibility, yes, but not in today’s influencer sense. It’s a claim that craft is earned through proximity. If you didn’t pay some cost, you don’t get to cash the check.
The subtext is about ownership. For Black musicians in the early-to-mid 20th century, whose work was routinely extracted, repackaged, or outright stolen, writing from personal experience becomes a way of staking a moral copyright even when the legal one fails. He’s also dodging the trap of spectacle: the audience may want a stock “blues” persona, but McGhee frames the songs as testimony, not costume.
Context matters: McGhee moved between street-level reality, recording studios, and the folk revival’s often romanticizing gaze. This sentence is a compass in that crosscurrent, insisting the song begins where the life actually is.
The intent is practical as much as poetic. In the blues tradition McGhee came up in, “write” doesn’t only mean put words on paper; it means shape experience into a form you can carry from town to town and make legible to strangers. The line sells credibility, yes, but not in today’s influencer sense. It’s a claim that craft is earned through proximity. If you didn’t pay some cost, you don’t get to cash the check.
The subtext is about ownership. For Black musicians in the early-to-mid 20th century, whose work was routinely extracted, repackaged, or outright stolen, writing from personal experience becomes a way of staking a moral copyright even when the legal one fails. He’s also dodging the trap of spectacle: the audience may want a stock “blues” persona, but McGhee frames the songs as testimony, not costume.
Context matters: McGhee moved between street-level reality, recording studios, and the folk revival’s often romanticizing gaze. This sentence is a compass in that crosscurrent, insisting the song begins where the life actually is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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