This paper is a study of how the blues can be understood as an avenue to express traumatic experience through various cultural signifiers, which allows for community to develop between those who can recognise the signs. Part of the trauma of the blues is the loss of home and the nostalgia for that lost place. Ultimately, through the use of trauma theory, the blues can be understood as a testimony of traumatic experience that asks for an attentive audience. To support this assertion, this paper discusses two of Elmore James’s songs, “Dust my Broom” and “I Believe,” in his search for a way to “go back home.”
