From Syria to Detroit, we are all migrants, bluesman Bibb sings
hard to understand. Have we really forgotten our history?”
The album’s most contemporary subject is to be found in “Prayin’ for Shore,” a blues about the plight of millions of Syrians and others who have fled civil wars in the Middle East on sometimes fatal journeys to Europe across the Mediterranean.
“In an old leaky boat, somewhere on the sea / trying to get away from the war / Welcome or not, got to land soon / Oh lord, prayin’ for shore,” run the lyrics.
The song, Bibb writes in an accompanying booklet, is about remembering the drowned.
But the fleeing migrants of today are nothing new.
For Bibb, an AfricanAmerican, another key moment in history was “The Great Migration” of millions of southern blacks away from the segregated South.
By some estimates, more than 6 million left the rural areas for industrial places such as Detroit, New York and Chicago from 1910 to 1970.
“(They were) not just looking for jobs but fleeing racial terror,” Bibb said.
Such a point is made in his mellifluous rendition of “Delta Getaway” about a man fleeing a lynch mob to Chicago.
“Saw a man hanging from a cypress tree / I seen the ones who done it / now they coming after me.”
The album is being released as anti-immigrant politics is on the rise across much of the world, including the United States where President Donald Trump wants to build a wall on the Mexican border.
Bibb said his album was all laid down and finished before Trump’s election, but that he was nonetheless “astounded by the synchronicity of it.”
Most of the songs on the album are Bibb’s, although he offers covers of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” originally an angry riposte from the dispossessed, and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” about the merchants of destruction.
Bibb said that apart from “Prayin’ for Shore,” his favorite composition on “Migration Blues” is “Brotherly Love.”
He said it reflected his personal belief. It offers more hope for the future, one in which people can live in peace.