Woke Up This Morning, the Blues was in My Bed

The title of this tableau references “Empty Bed Blues,” a song recorded by Bessie Smith in 1928. The cot can be seen as a spirit bottle bed, akin to the traditional bottle tree used by the Kongo civilization in west-central Africa to ward off evil spirits. Saar used the cot, which she bought at a secondhand store on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, in at least two earlier installations (in 1990 and 1994); she loves not only using recycled objects but also recycling them herself. In a February 2001 sketch—the first of four she made for this work—Saar introduced the idea that the cot would sit on a bed of coal, a material that evokes energy and change.