Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature
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Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature
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Overview
Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American “hot” music influenced American culture—particularly literature—in early twentieth century America. Steven C. Tracy provides a history of the fusion of African and European elements that formed African American “hot” music, and considers how terms like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature.
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature begins by highlighting instances in which American writers, including Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein, use African American culture and music in their work, and then characterizes the social context of the Jazz Age, discussing how African American music reflected the wild abandon of the time. Tracy focuses on how a variety of schools of early twentieth century writers, from modernists to members of the Harlem Renaissance to dramatists and more, used their connections with “hot” music to give their own work meaning.
Tracy’s extensive and detailed understanding of how African American “hot” music operates has produced a fresh and original perspective on its influence on mainstream American literature and culture. An experienced blues musician himself, Tracy draws on his performance background to offer an added dimension to his analysis. Where another blues scholar might only analyze blues language, Tracy shows how the language is actually performed.
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is the first book to offer such a refreshingly broad interdisciplinary vision of the influence of African American “hot” music on American literature. It is an essential addition to the library of serious scholars of American and African American literature and culture and blues aficionados alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388133 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 576 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature
By Steven C. Tracy
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8813-3
CHAPTER 1
Pro cess', Pro' cess
Shifting the Accents on the Way In
I
All of us have been touched by the blues. That statement, of course, can mean many things, experienced with various intensities and levels of feeling, from the wistful whish of wispy duckling fuzz to the shocking thump of a charging rhino's horn. What imprint it leaves on us is as important as the nature of the approach. If we think of "having the blues" as being synonymous with feelings of sadness, then its alpha to omega fingerprints are all over each of us, from helpless wail at birth to solemn tears at death. If we think of our exposure to the genre known as the blues in all of its various incarnations and formal and technical elements, then again its worldwide fame and reflections in a variety of other artistic genres makes its presence ubiquitous. If we think about the performance or recording of the blues, as understated as Leroy Carr or explosive as Big Maybelle might be, and how it has affected us emotionally, then many people will acknowledge the ability of the blues to describe and produce feelings of loss, isolation, loneliness, and yes, joy, and even indifference and ambivalence — a broad range of emotions. The ability of the blues to express for us and to us testifies to its power to unify through expression: "If you've ever been mistreated," Eddie Boyd sang in "Five Long Years," "you know what I'm talking about." This power to draw together local and international communities through its dramatic, performative spirit in its own very local, vernacular manner, obliterates arguments that deem it impossible for African American expression to be universal.
The efficacy of the blues for American literature became known to a number of artists in literature, music, and visual art soon after its presence became more broadly known through a variety of print, audio, and visual media around the turn of the twentieth century. Just a look at the career of one figure, Miguel Covarrubias, demonstrates the interconnections. Covarrubias was an ethnologist, caricaturist, painter, and art historian. His studies as an ethnologist led him to consider subject matter related to African American culture. He plied his trade as a caricaturist for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. His work for those magazines also drew on his passion for the New Negro Renaissance scene in the 1920s, which was manifested in a variety of ways. Having befriended novelist and bon vivant Carl Van Vechten and playwright Eugene O'Neill, both of whom helped usher him around Harlem, he developed strong friendships with Langston Hughes and other black writers. He was set and costume designer for La Revue Nègre(1925) starring African American phenomenon Josephine Baker. He illustrated works by famed "Father of the Blues" W. C. Handy, as well as for masterful blues poet Langston Hughes and folklorist/writer Zora Neale Hurston. He worked with classical composer-avant gardist George Antheil (referenced by Hughes in his 1945 story "Who's Passing for Who" [170]), himself a close friend of and collaborator with Ezra Pound. From high-brow magazines to cabaret revues, book illustrations for musicians, poets, and folklorists to associations with the extreme cutting-edge classical music composers, Covarrubias demonstrated how widely the arms of the blues might reach, and the variety of disciplines they might embrace. This volume attempts to chart the emergence of the blues into a broad variety of arenas, especially American literature, attending to as many sources and examples as possible, and attempting to characterize the uses to which the blues have been put. It is frequently a very subjective and impressionistic exploration, especially given that "hot" music and "the Jazz Age" were frequent descriptors, likely because of the more sad and low-down connotations of the word "blues." I hope to pick up at 1930 with a second volume that will likely run about thirty years' worth of literature, and then follow with a third to bring things up to contemporary times. For now, a discussion ending at 1929 is plenty to cover.
Writing a volume dealing with the interactions of the blues with American literature is a daunting task. We live, after all, in a world where literary history is not viewed as a stable and continuous tradition where cause and effect relationships are easily determined and trusted, and chronology weaves a deceptive web that must be avoided by the critic who would fly in the face of old conventional notions of mechanical rather than the Bergsonian notion of a dramatic time, influenced by factors of the levels of interest and excitement. We live in an era that is distrustful of words like "meaning" and "influence," and perhaps quite rightly so, since determining such things out of the complicated welter of issues, influences, and modes of expression can be extremely difficult. Perhaps notions of the complementary nature of influence and intertextuality can assist in sorting through the dilemmas:
Strictly, influence should refer to relations built on dyads of transmission from one unity (author, work, tradition) to another. More broadly, however, influence studies often stray into portraits of intellectual background, context. ... The shape of intertextuality in turn depends on the shape of influence. One may see intertextuality either as the enlargement of a familiar idea or as an entirely new concept to replace the outmoded notion of influence. In the former case, intertextuality might be taken as a general term, working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation (for example, by archetypes or popular culture); modes of conception (such as ideas "in the air"); styles (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer. In the latter case, intertextuality might be used to oust and replace the kinds of issues that influence addresses, and in particular its central concern with the author and more or less conscious authorial intentions and skills. (Clayton and Rothstein 3)
In the case of the blues, we are dealing primarily with oral "texts," the authors of which are frequently indeterminate, and the transmission of which is frequently informal, undocumented, and variable in form — "tradition based communicative units informally exchanged in dynamic variation through space and time," as Barre Toelken articulates it (32). While I intend as much as possible to root ideas of influence and intertextuality in concrete and specific instances, those instances may in fact be individual examples of numerous variants that represent a more common occurrence in the tradition. The value of looking for them, or rather for the possibilities of them, by turning our world every which way but loose to try to approach understanding blues interactions with literature, should be clear.
I do not intend to fix anything pinned and wriggling on a specimen board. Surely that would violate the spirit and polyvocality of the blues. But I do intend to provide a backdrop against which I will discuss how various writers have been exposed to African American culture, either in itself or in its expression in white popular productions in a variety of media. In this way, the blues may provide examples of black art that are analogous to other techniques or ideas upon which writers (and other artists) of the 1920s were drawing. These blues may reinforce or extend analogous points, or reveal new possibilities for poetry, fiction, and drama that are directly connected with exposure to expressions of African American artistry.
My aim is to attempt to prepare a broad and specific social, cultural, aesthetic, cross-racial context that may render "evidence" that seems individually merely possible or even far-fetched more reasonable or convincing. Not everything will seem convincing to everybody. I will attempt to acknowledge significant possible alternatives to connecting points to the blues tradition. I hope, however, that the comprehensive details and close discussions that I provide will convince (yes, I know "con" is the first syllable of that word) readers that the perspective I am providing is viable and potentially illuminating, both about the era and the literature.
Most importantly, arguments or points about literary works that are sometimes individually unconvincing or seem far-fetched may, in combination with other observations about those literary works, help produce an aggregate argument that makes the blues a palpable presence. No, such things as loneliness and heartbreak are not exclusive to the blues. But given their ubiquitousness in the blues, to leave them out of a more extensive case for the presence of blues in a literary work would clearly be a mistake. Other blues elements, of course, must be there, but it makes no sense to leave out potential pieces of a puzzle.
Material from other genres that I will marshal in support will be drawn as much as possible from contemporary works and, preferably, works that antedate the era of the literature. My focus will be as concrete as the city streets on the soles/souls of the jobless, so that the likelihood of what I am saying about the uses to which the blues are put will stand out like calluses on the cracked outer edges of big toes. Is it problematic that author choices may have been limited by what they were exposed to that prevented them from making other choices? Certainly. Would it have been possible for them to explore other possibilities? Certainly again. Might there have been something about the time and place in which they lived that influenced those choices? Indeed. My intention is to get around to all of those issues and try to sift through the materials to make as intelligent a guess about the conscious or unconscious uses of the blues in their works as I can. Will someone disagree? Of course. Might they be right? Of course again. Can we discuss the possibilities? Indeed. And we should.
II
In "Gambler's Blues," B. B. King sang, "I don't know what love is, but let me tell you I must have it bad." Frequently it happens that we can identify feelings that are complex and quite discernible and clear to us, but can't articulate them definitionally. So with the blues. Some might think it odd that we compare the feelings of the blues with feelings of love, but that seems to be the result of an incomplete knowledge of the African American blues tradition — whence it comes, when it emerged, what it has gone through, how it functions, and, finally, what it represents. Viewed in such contexts, the blues is a multifaceted constellation of feelings, and a genre that has much in common with the nature and function of love. Although many people associate the word "blues" with sadness, the blues, as both music and feeling, actually express and evoke a variety of emotions. The primary subject matter of the blues deals with a variety of relationships between mates — overwhelmingly straight, sometimes gay, bisexual, or transgendered — experienced during the cycle of life, but mostly from the time of sexual maturity onward. Since the blues as a genre is frequently viewed as presenting honest emotions and scenarios rooted in real life, it makes sense that we would encounter a variety of emotions and subject matter associated with relationships, not just sadness, expressed in a variety of ways. And, indeed, we do.
The blues is rooted, rootless, loving, sensual, repulsive, combative, welcoming, yearning, hating, isolating, uniting, objectifying, idealizing, protesting, questioning, affirming, and more, and more. Robert Johnson declares, "I'm gonna beat my woman 'til I get satisfied" ("Me and the Devil Blues," 1937) and Jimmy Rushing gushes "I love my baby better than I do myself" ("Boogie Woogie Blues" 1937). Big Joe Turner celebrates fidelity with "My baby's my jockey she's teaching me how to ride" ("Roll 'Em Pete," 1938), while Texas Alexander laments unfaithfulness in "she cooks cornbread for her husband, biscuits for her back door man" ("Corn-Bread Blues," 1927). Bessie Smith sings the "Young Woman Blues" (1926) in the present, while Memphis Minnie reminisces about "In My Girlish Days" (1941). Lucille Bogan sings the lesbian "B.D. Woman's Blues" (1935), Charlie Manson his hyper-heterosexual "Nineteen Women Blues" (1936), which was based on Trixie Smith's "Sorrowful Blues" (1924). And then there is the almost paradoxical "compliment" offered in Georgia Tom Dorsey's "Pig Meat Blues" (1929), "folks may call you pigmeat, and you may be pigmeat, but you're built on an old hog frame." On the one hand Joe Pullum sang a smooth "Blues With Class" (1935), and on the other Curtis Jones barrelhoused his "Blues in the Alley" (1939) and "Down in the Gutter" (1939). Perhaps Memphis Minnie, miscredited under the pseudonym "The Yas Yas Girl," said it best in "Blues Everywhere" (1937), lamenting that the blues are ubiquitous — in her house, mailbox, bread box, meal barrel, and bed — since her "good man left town." As we will see, the blues were everywhere in several senses: in the racially delimited lives of African Americans and others of comparable class status; in a world rocked by war; in the aesthetics of the intelligentsia in America and Europe searching for a style adequate to their expression of ennui and irony on the one hand, and gayety with rollicking, syncopated abandon on the other; in those rejecting and rebelling against bourgeois values; and indeed all media from race records to pop culture to Broadway to art galleries to films to concert halls, and back again to the individual subconscious of the human mind. Indeed, the recent reissue Black Europe, a 44 CD set, contains 1,244 tracks recorded by people of African descent in Europe between 1890 and 1930, from rags, to coon songs, to spirituals, to pop songs, to African songs.
Saying that we have all been touched by the blues implies that we have an understanding of what the blues are, and by extension we ought to be able to define the blues. Problem: the oral and visceral nature of the origins of the African American blues tradition render definition too complicated for casual consideration. The blues come from obscure and mixed origins though clearly influenced by socio-political circumstances. They emerged at an indeterminate time. They were labeled with a term that implies one type of emotion that is inadequate to the breadth of experiences described. They encompass an array of formal patterns that are sometimes loosely employed but at other times entirely unnecessary to expressing the elan vital of the blues. And they evolved in combination with other elements over time, though maintaining their essential original nature. The moaning, groaning, cooing, and bellowing — the emotional vocalization of the blues — almost seems to necessitate a despondency of expression to match the frequently unhappy subject matter, or a rhapsodic effusion to express the cathartic feeling it evokes. The printed word is insufficient.
When Memphis Slim commented to Alan Lomax that "[t]he blues came from slavery" (Blues in the Mississippi Night, 1947) — echoed later by James Butch Cage in conversation with Paul Oliver (Conversation 22) — he was recognizing a unique and tragic set of historical circumstances to which was traceable a series of events that over centuries resulted in the emergence, after Reconstruction, of the musical genre called the blues. Had the greed and rapacity of the transatlantic slave trade not existed, violently disrupting the history and culture of two continents, the transnational and diasporic changes wrought by the economic enterprise would have not have existed in their present state. One of the darkest chapters in human history would not have been written, but neither would one of the most remarkable stories of human survival and transcendence have emerged from such horrors, nor would the blues genre have come into existence. Any attempt to understand African American culture, Slim is telling us, must take into account the manner of kidnapping and enslavement that characterized the arrival of most Africans to these shores up to the nineteenth century. And any attempt to understand and describe the lives of those captive Africans and their ancestors must confront the ways in which unique, syncretistic artistic production continually renegotiated the earliest and continuing legacies of African American chattel slavery. As David Evans has suggested, "through syncretism and reinterpretation, including consolidation, substitution, subversion, and accommodation, African musical characteristics have not remained static and frozen in time but live on vigorously in ever-changing, ever-adapting ways" ("Patterns of Reinterpretation" 214). These patterns extend to literary artists, both black and white, in the twentieth century.
The blues music genre, then, does not merely express instances of hardship and sorrow that characterize the etymological meaning of the term that predates the genre. Certainly blues can deal with those emotions, along with other shades of feeling along the gamut of emotions. The blues is a feeling. Further, though, the blues music genre is a cultural and historical mode of creation, expression, and survival that encompasses crucial elements embedded in the transnational diasporic experience that generated it — the African slave trade.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature by Steven C. Tracy. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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