Time & Perspective Quote by Ruth Brown

Brown is pushing back on the polite museum version of “the blues” as a genre with a fence around it. She starts from lived history: there was a time when the blues felt inseparable from a specific Black Southern background because it came out of specific pressures - poverty, segregation, exploitative labor, the daily grind of being denied softness. That “we decided” is doing sly work. It’s not an academic taxonomy; it’s a community drawing a boundary for self-recognition, a way of saying: this sound wasn’t invented as an aesthetic, it was forged as survival.

Then she pivots, and the pivot matters. “Nowadays” isn’t a surrender of ownership so much as a hard-earned expansion. Brown doesn’t romanticize suffering; she makes it practical. The blues becomes a technology of expression: if you’ve got a need, and you can name it, you’re eligible. That phrasing - “have a need” and “find the need” - suggests introspection as the admission price. You don’t get the blues by copying vocal tics or guitar licks; you get it by locating the bruise you’re trying to sing through.

Culturally, this lands in the tension between roots and reach, especially as the blues was being packaged for broader (often whiter) markets and credited to everyone except the women who carried it. Brown’s generosity reads as confidence, not erasure: she widens the door while quietly reminding you who built the house, and why it was built in the first place.