For many commentators, some of the most distinctively African American elements that readers encounter in African American novels are reflections of the blues tradition. However, the phrase “blues novel” might seem to some to be so incongruous as to approach the level of oxymoron. After all, the two terms comprise widely different genres stylistically. The novel as we know it today, though it has roots in the XIIth Dynasty Middle Kingdom Egyptian prose fiction and appeared in embryonic form in Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Arabian Entertainments, emerged most forcefully in the English literary tradition in the eighteenth century with the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Novels are traditionally extended written prose narratives with some amount of plot and character development, though the genre has proven very pliable over the years.
The blues as a musical genre, though it has its roots in African modalities that are centuries old, first emerged in America during the period following Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century. The term was applied to the songs of itinerant and frequently illiterate singers whose work was noted and transcribed by folklorists and commentators from outside the tradition in which they were generated until the first blues were recorded in 1920. The blues are traditionally pithy oral lyric works using a variety of loosely fixed structures into which are poured the subject matter of an individual experience that reflects communal interests. The notion that a lengthy, written, narrative work in the European tradition is based upon a brief oral lyric one from the African American tradition thus raises a number of aesthetic, social, and political issues regarding the mixing of these genres that need addressing.
First, we must establish the characteristics of the blues tradition, and then determine in what ways the strategies, styles, and purposes of the blues may be reflected in a written narrative. Since the term “blues” refers to an emotion, a technique, a musical form, and a song lyric, its influence can be manifested in a variety of ways, from the very concrete to the very impressionistic. Though as an emotion “blues” is most frequently associated with sadness, a sadness crucially related to African American experiences in slavery and the Jim Crow era, there are in fact many celebratory, “happy” blues songs that suggest that the blues are not just laments or complaints in their surface content. As such, the blues performance may well not be an expression of sadness but a creative celebration of not only the overcoming of hardship but of the nature of human existence in an imperfect world. African scholar Janheinz Jahn identifies the central theme of the blues as “an individual’s right to life and to an intact ‘perfect’ life,” and blues lyrics as reflecting “the attitude caused by the loss of life-force or leading to the gaining of life-force.”1 The blues, then, is an assertion of autonomy and a consolidation of power in the context of a world that wishes to diminish or eliminate that power. When the blues singer sings, “When you see me laughin, I’m laughin to keep from cryin,” or “The sun gonna shine in my back door some day,” the blues philosophy of endurance in the face of impossible odds, hope in the face of adversity, receives its most direct and forceful expression.
The technique of the blues is the way that the instruments, style, and structure of the music are manipulated to produce and express such ideas. African influences abound: percussion and percussively played instruments; syncopation; call-and-response patterns; growling, buzzing, and straining inflections; blue notes; improvisational predilections; community orientation and function. Of course, these influences are planted squarely into the American environment to help produce art that is not only African, not only American, but African American. The musical form of the blues roughly follows most frequently a 12-bar pattern with a chord progression of I-IV-V. Because the blues is an oral genre practiced in its earliest days for the most part by illiterate or semi-literate, informally trained musicians, performers frequently did not adhere to strict time boundaries but followed their own technique, intellect, or emotions in creating their blues patterns. Therefore, songs frequently tended toward the 12-bar length rather than rigidly following it. The same idea applies to other blues musical stanza patterns such as 8-bar, 16-bar, and 32-bar patterns. Lyric patterns achieve a looseness or freedom in the same way. For example, in a 12-bar blues pattern a singer may follow what has been termed the AAB pattern: one thought sung in roughly four bars, then repeated, not necessarily with identical wording, in four more bars, followed by a thought that somehow wraps up the sentiment in the final four bars, usually with end rhyme. Changes in wording in the repeat lines can serve to add variety, emphasize particular ideas or emotions, or extend the original meaning in some other way. Of course, there are a variety of other lyric patterns, even just for 12-bar blues. Other stanzas of varying musical lengths have similar possibilities for lyric variation. The point here is that the blues provide a basic structure free enough to accommodate individual temperament, abilities, and creativity. Far from being a limited genre, it provides a structured but expansive place for the individual to relate to and express the community, and for artists to touch home base but still express themselves individually.
How such elements as discussed briefly above may find expression in a novel must be considered in as broad a fashion as possible, since creative artists by their very natures employ the resources for their works in a great variety of unique and creative ways. Most immediately, a novel may itself be called a blues, or use some part of a blues lyric in its title, as in Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues (1996), John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues (1999), or James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968). In this case, the author provides a clear clue that the reader should be considering the way that characteristics of the blues might be utilized in the novel. The novel may refer to the color blue or use it as an image pattern to evoke some kind of emotion or tradition. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for example, Tea Cake expresses five times the desire to dress Janie in blue. A novelist may make use of language associated with the blues in the language of the narrator or characters, as Zora Neale Hurston did in Their Eyes Were Watching God. A novel such as Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream (1995) might attempt to define or portray the blues and its philosophy through story and technique, or through that definition of the blues ethos attempt to portray its various implications – aesthetic, emotional, psychic, spiritual, communal, and political.
The portrayal of the social and historical context that led up to the birth of the blues as a major expressive African American form that was part of and necessary to its times reflects the spirit of the blues as well. Other novelists might use blues singers as characters or utilize selections from songs or performances, including musical notations, lyrics, or descriptions of performances and audience reactions, as in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Such references to performances might help to highlight the relationship of the performer to the community, or portray social attitudes of one class toward another based on their response to the music. Real blues performers might be named in the text, as either real characters or touchstones or symbols of some idea or spirit, as Langston Hughes uses W. C. Handy in Not Without Laughter (1930). Jane Phillips’s Mojo Hand offers a barely disguised portrait of Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Mosley’s RL’s Dream places bluesman Robert Johnson at the spiritual center of the novel.
The traditional subject matter of the blues, which deals most commonly with personal relationships between men and women (though there are blues about or dealing with homosexuality), or the form of the blues lyric, with its call-and-response structure, can also find expression in the novel. Loneliness, frustration, isolation, sexual desire, and such common emotions portrayed in the blues might also find their way into novels as a result of the influence of the blues. In fact, the novelist might employ any number of characteristics associated with the blues in literal or symbolic ways: call-and-response patterns; off-beat phrasing or unexpected accentual patterns that suggest syncopation; techniques of melisma and glissando reflected in the way an author “worries” or handles variously an issue or emotion in the text; the blues singer’s “voice masking” techniques that create a persona with a different or alternate voice from the everyday speaking voice; progression by the type of associational thought patterns sometimes found in folk blues.2
There are numerous ways in which blues might be utilized in a novel beyond even this brief listing, indicating that a thoroughgoing knowledge of the possibilities of the blues genre and an open-minded consideration of the possibilities for influence is necessary. In all circumstances, the reader must measure the elements the novel portrays against the use of such elements in the blues tradition itself to determine how the novelist accepts, modifies, or alters the occurrence of those elements from the blues tradition in the novel, and why they are employed as they are.
Of course, as always, there are interpretive dangers in making impressionistic connections. Indeed, there are limitations to the discussion provided above. After all, a number of the elements named above may be found in places other than the blues. Such phrases as “easy rider” or “sun gonna shine in my back door some day,” though frequently encountered in blues songs, in fact likely originated in communal speech and then found their way into blues songs. Since the philosophy of hope and perseverance in response to overwhelming conditions that usually produce despair is found in places other than the blues, the presence of that philosophy is not necessarily an instance of blues influence. Further, though we encounter call- and-response patterns in blues music, lyrics, and subject matter, antiphony is present in other African American and non-African American music as well. The same could be said of other elements such as percussive techniques, syncopation, and the like. James Weldon Johnson makes prominent use of ragtime in Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Its syncopation and improvisation are brought to bear on his protagonist’s attempts to escape his African American hardships, as he plays his practical joke on society while hiding behind the mask of their illusions. When he thinks of embracing his African American-ness, it is through what he believes he can do with ragtime to convince whites of its value, and through it the value of African Americans generally. Thematically, surely loneliness and isolation, while they are encountered in the blues, are subjects dealt with widely.
The question becomes, how can one determine whether novelists are deliberately evoking the blues tradition rather than simply making use of elements that might be found in other sources? And might it be more appropriate to say that novelists are invoking a vernacular music tradition, since African American vernacular musics can share similar subject matter, techniques, and functions? A number of those elements enumerated above, such as synco-pation and call-and-response, are found in spirituals, jazz, and gospel music, as well. How many of those elements need to be present, and how crucial must they be to the meaning of the text, before we can call a work a “blues novel”? It is impossible to say definitively. Critics have pointed to the notion of a “blues aesthetic” that informs African American art, as Richard J. Powell explores in a discussion of Aaron Douglas:
What Douglas sought to tap was a reality that was often raw, unpolished, and marginalized. A reality that was variegated and multifaceted in character. A reality that could be both spiritual and material. A reality that, if we had to come up with a metaphor for all of the above, would be embodied in cultural expression like “the blues.” Surely, in an effort to define African American art and/or culture, scholars should acknowledge this thematic and expressive vein within the production of selected twentieth-century works which, by virtue of their respective artists, have a predetermined, conscious, basis in a “mystically objective” African-American reality such as in “the blues.”3
Raw, unpolished, marginalized, variegated, multifaceted, spiritual, and material: indeed the blues can be all of these things (and it can be smooth and polished as well, as evidenced in the work of Lonnie Johnson, Charles Brown, and others). And yet one can also find these elements elsewhere in African American expressive culture. The point here is not to deny the blues as an important force that can embody these ideas. Certainly it can. But we should not automatically think “blues” or “blues music” when these kinds of elements are apparent, when they can occur elsewhere in African American culture, especially in segments of the community that might not embrace the blues as a proper art form (as is sometimes the case in the Christian community that prefers spirituals, jubilees, and gospel music). We must dig out the specific references to the blues as a genre in order to make a firm and reasonable assertion of its presence and influence. Ultimately, to call a work a “blues novel,” the blues should likely be present concretely and substantively in its social, historical, political, musical, and/or aesthetic context, its presence necessary to the central meaning of the work. But readers should take care not to rule out other African American music as a source of these elements, and, in fact, be prepared to see how creative artists may be blurring the “boundaries” among the various genres to make a social, political, and aesthetic point.
One other point we must consider is whether there is a differentiation between a blues novel and a jazz novel. There can be an overlap between the two. This is partly because the blues is considered by many commentators to be the soul of jazz, one of its important wellsprings. Early jazz soloists, for example, would play bluesy solos on the chord changes of popular songs as well as in the traditional blues music patterns. Clearly, many of jazz’s most important performers have been talented blues players – Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane – and many have rooted their originality and innovations in the blues tradition. Therefore, when writers utilize jazz in their works, they are often by extension referencing the blues tradition as well. However, frequently the jazz tradition is, or jazz performers are, employed to portray or champion the spirit of improvisation, which is by extension a reflection of the quest for or achievement of spontaneity, immediacy, and ultimately, freedom. That intellectual, spiritual, political, and cultural freedom, of course, is firmly planted in the African and African American communal roots that produced African American culture, including spirituals and the blues. But those two genres frequently signify a more “down home” – earthy, direct, lower-class, rural-oriented – connection to African American culture, whereas jazz, in its improvisatory flights, often becomes a symbol for breaking the mental and physical bonds of the slave mentality. This is not to say that the blues cannot be vocally and instrumentally improvisational, but that jazz players tend to emphasize melodic or harmonic improvisation to a broader, more extensive degree. As such, “blues” frequently stands for “down home” tradition, the wisdom of the ancestors made manifest in the contemporary world, still operational and functional. Jazz launches from that dock, still connected by a tether, but with a more intellectually probing journey in mind. This “down home” connection of the blues makes it an obvious and valuable resource for African American novelists seeking to appropriate and personalize the novelistic tradition for themselves and African Americans, without recourse to the traditions of white Christian religious denominations that might be evoked by the spirituals.
Shortly after the first recordings of African American blues artists inaugurated by the release of Mamie Smith’s first recordings with jazz accompaniment, authors began to employ blues and jazz to represent, on the one hand, the primitivism and exoticism of African Americans or the lower-class segment of the African American community; and on the other hand, the strength, individuality, and integrity of the folk. Such primitivism and exoticism are represented in part by blues and jazz in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), with blues lyrics later replaced by some blues penned by Langston Hughes when copyright infringements ensued. Van Vechten also included snatches from spirituals, folk songs, pop songs, and blues, like “My Man Rocks Me” and “World in a Jug,” in his panoramic portrait of Harlem. Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), with its references to lesbian “bulldiker” blues and “melancholy-comic” blues in a Harlem basement, and his use of such songs as Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing” in Banjo (1929), as well as Wallace Thurman’s evocative description of blues music and dancing in a Harlem night club in The Blacker the Berry . . . (1929), demonstrate this primitivist bent with regard to using blues and jazz to portray African American “low life,” as well.
In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), the jazz and blues of the Harlem nightclub evoke feelings of the primitive in the protagonist, Helga Crane. Crane is unable to confront the frank sensuality in her life, as is clear from her near-manic inability to acknowledge and deal with the power she could wield over men through her sexuality, especially her fear of facing her feelings for college president Robert Anderson, though her thoughts about him are sexually charged. Helga rushes from the music of the Harlem club fearing that she had not only heard but actually enjoyed the primitive interlude, clearly indicating how society has limited her ability to accept and rejoice in her sexuality. Crane is able to accept that sexuality when it is sublimated, as evidenced in another sexually charged episode. She meets Reverend Green in a storefront church, where religiously ecstatic, writhing women mingle touch, sweat, and passion with God and ceremony before being brought to an exhausted climax. Rebuffed by the cowardly and hypocritical Anderson, Crane runs into the arms of Green, her physicality legitimized in her mind by religion and the institution of marriage, even as it imprisons her in a narrow social role for which she is ill suited. In the end, social conventions render her biologically trapped in a station so different from the place where she began that the ending is nearly unbelievable. However, her status as a middle-class African American woman trained to deny or ignore the joys of sexuality, symbolized in part by the blues and jazz of the novel, make her rapid, seemingly irrational descent plausible. While the novel is not dominated by references to blues and jazz and frequently finds itself in middle- to upper-class surroundings, this central use of the music, as well as Crane’s attempts to remain hopeful in the wake of nearly overwhelmingly despairing conditions, especially at the end, suggests the propriety of the label of blues novel in the tradition of the lyrics of women blues singers struggling to achieve social and sexual autonomy.
By the time Langston Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter was published in 1930, Hughes had been writing poems under the influence of blues and jazz of “the low down folks”4 for a decade, and had made them central to the aesthetic he described in his 1926 manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Thus, it was no surprise that his first novel was imbued with the spirit of the blues in a variety of ways. For example, Hughes’s title may well have specific reference to the blues lyric “laughin to keep from cryin,” which Hughes used later as the title of his 1952 short story collection. Hughes’s definition of the blues in a review of W. C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology as “hopeless weariness mixed with an absurdly incongruous laughter”5 further associates Hughes’s title with the blues tradition. Additionally, a number of characters in Hughes’s novel utilize phraseology associated with the blues. So does the narrator, who employs the traditional blues lyric “mailman passed and didn’t leave no news” (162), which associates the narrator very closely with the people he is describing in the text and thus closes the gap between artist and community. The speaker comments on and defines the blues explicitly in a variety of places and also characterizes various people in the novel through their responses to blues music. There are, in addition, references to blues songs such as “Jelly Roll,” “Careless Love,” “Circle Round the Sun,” “Easy Rider,” and “St. Louis Blues”; blues singers who are main characters in the text: Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Aunt Harriett; the historical blues figure W. C. Handy; and the loneliness of Sandy and Annjee, Sandy’s isolation, the frustration of Annjee, Harriett, Sandy, and Hager, and frequent expressions of sexual desire by Annjee, Jimboy, and Sandy that all serve to connect the text to the blues tradition.
Still, since Hughes is attempting to unite various elements of the community in his text, he uses songs and subject matter from both the sacred and secular African American music traditions in tandem to demonstrate how the community is or should not be fractured by its folk heritage. In fact, the sacred and secular are portrayed as being closer to each other than the characters or readers might think. For example, though the blues are associated with sexuality and sin in a number of places in the novel, Hughes portrays Harriett’s and Jimboy’s bawdy singing and dancing in the yard as being innocent fun, unsullied by the kind of thinking that would make it dirty rather than the celebration of life. Sandy, in fact, finds himself the benefactor of two traditions represented by Hager, on one hand, and Aunt Harriett, on the other. Like the proverbial motherless child of the spirituals, Sandy needs the guidance of a parental figure that is clearly not provided by his own mother and father. He receives it in the form of a call-and- response relation to the two women most important to his life and success. He finds it on the sacred hand from Hager, whose biblical name refers to the long-suffering servant who provides Abraham with a male heir, and is then turned out into the wilderness to bear Ishmael, a wild and embattled outcast who will eventually become the patriarch of a great nation. It is not difficult to see in the protective and committed Hager a history of embattled African American females in slavery, or in the prophecy for Ishmael a prediction of greatness for Sandy as he emerges into adulthood by the end of the text. On the secular hand, he finds nurturance from Aunt Harriett, who has lived as a prostitute, but by the end of the novel, is using her knowledge of the blues traditions and experience in the world of the “bottoms” (a common blues sexual euphemism) to make enough from blues singing to offer Sandy the money to stay in school and raise his social status. Thus, Hughes portrays the coordination of the sacred and secular, oral and written traditions in offering Sandy improved social status in his life. Sandy, for his part, embraces both Hager and Harriett and what they have to offer as valuable, life-affirming figures. Indeed, Hager never loses her love for Harriett, nor Harriett, her love for Hager; nor Sandy his love for both. Hughes brings the two women and traditions together in two important ways. Through his employment of W. C. Handy, with whom Hughes collaborated on the blues song “Golden Brown Blues,” as a reference in the text, Hughes conjures the Handy–Tim Brymn composition “Aunt Hagar’s Children’s Blues,” a song which itself mingles sacred and secular traditions in its lyrics. Near the end of the novel, Sandy’s memories deliberately juxtapose his grandmother’s “whirling” at revival with Harriett’s “eagle rocking” in the back yard. By novel’s end, Sandy has received sustenance from Hager and Harriett in the form of the important values of support, love, and forgiveness, and has learned to embrace whatever is good in the sacred and secular traditions as a way of making the world more unified and loving.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is another quintessential African American blues novel, rooted not only in the blues but in the female blues tradition, one that considers the ways in which women are socialized to accept certain physical and emotional limitations in their lives.6 A primary emotion portrayed in the text is a “cosmic loneliness” (20) and “infinity of conscious pain” (23) that stems from the types of burdens women such as the sexually abused grandmother and mother of Janie endure. The blues is often described as originating in the lowlands, the bottoms, the muck, down home. Therefore, to embrace the blues is to embrace the muck as the wellspring of honesty, directness, and creativity and to cherish one’s origins. This is something that Janie learns to do despite the attempts of her grandmother and her first two husbands to acclimatize her to a somewhat more rarefied life. From her initial embarrassment regarding living in the white folks’ yard, she “ascends” through Logan’s acres and Joe’s wealth to the real pinnacle of her happiness on the muck with Tea Cake, her blues-singing husband, who has played his music at juke joints and fish fries as well as on the front porch. Along the way, she avoids the pitfalls of the middle-class Mrs. Turner, who tries to “class off” by disdaining the darker members of the community as riffraff. Significantly, the establishment she and her husband ran, which is far from a juke joint, is happily trashed by Tea Cake and his friends, who resent her condescension and interference in Tea Cake and Janie’s relationship.
The language of the blues is frequently frank, creative, signifying, and poetic, as is the language of the narrator and a number of characters, especially Janie and Tea Cake. Various characters, Janie included, express themselves in language common to the blues tradition: “cool drink of water” recalls the blues ballad “John Henry,” while Janie’s reference to the difference between her internal and external speech and actions recalls the “when you see me laughin I’m laughin to keep from cryin” motif. References to having the “world in a jug” and being someone’s “sidetrack until the mainline comes along” – a common blues double entendre – further recall the language of the blues tradition. In fact, Hurston’s novel elevates and celebrates sexuality with an openness and earthiness common to the blues tradition. References to bumble bees and stingers “as long as my right arm” in recordings such as Memphis Minnie’s “Bumble Bee” and Margaret Johnson’s “Stinging Bee Blues” portray the joys of sex somewhat more directly than Janie’s naïve sexual awakening.
A high premium is placed on individuality and originality, with a requisite connection to tradition, in the blues. This is frequently associated with finding a style that presents a distinctive voice that emerges from a community of voices, expressing the concerns and interests of some segment of the community. Hurston’s novel is in part about voice, the emergence of a woman’s voice, about a woman discovering who she is and expressing herself freely and openly in a language that draws on the idioms and traditions of the community. The effect of Janie’s experiences and achievement of such independence on her friend is to brace her, embolden her, make her feel taller and more important, and to increase their intimacy. There is clear double meaning involved when Janie remarks that her tongue is in her friend’s mouth. Undoubtedly the tradition of the sassy and independent female blues singer, who exposed frank sexual feelings and issues of domestic abuse (like the much-debated beating that Janie allows Tea Cake to give her) in a public forum, is behind the voice and actions of Janie.
It might even be said that the structure of the novel is similar to the common AAB stanza of the blues: Janie makes the mistake, albeit forced, of marrying Logan, repeats her mistake by running off with Joe, but resolves her dilemma by hooking up with Tea Cake, who accepts the blues and the low-down folks and helps liberate Janie into an appreciation of her own mind and body. In the novel, it is this blues singer who encourages or teaches Janie to be independent (playing checkers, driving, and fishing – the latter two activities common sexual metaphors in the blues) connected to her inner feelings; assertive emotionally and physically; and articulate, to speak the maiden language of renewal, directness, and richness. The narrator’s reflection on the experience, something that Ellison describes as fingering the jagged grain of experience, generates a cautionary tale that the audience can identify with and use for relief, advice, and strength. This first-person reflective lament and celebration, presenting communal concerns through personal expression, is blues-inflected throughout.
Finally, the blues philosophy of endurance and hope is reflected in the many references to the horizon in the novel, particularly in looking for transcendence by transforming hardships into personal and artistic triumph. The novel is not only Janie’s triumph, but Hurston’s as well: her most enduring literary success. This is largely due to her masterful employment of a variety of blues devices in language, structure, imagery, voice, and philosophy to portray the triumph of a woman who learns from the African American vernacular tradition to love and elevate herself to the exalted position she deserves, on the muck where the Lords of Sounds rule. While this is clearly not the exalted place where Nanny envisioned her preaching a great sermon, it is a place where she can demonstrate, as Tea Cake says, that she has the keys to the kingdom. The connection between the sacred and secular traditions, though not quite as intricate and prominent as in Hughes’s Not Without Laughter, are evident in Hurston’s novel as well.
In “Richard Wright’s Blues” Ralph Ellison depicted Wright’s novel Black Boy (1945) as the “flowering of the humble blues lyric” in its portrayal of the young boy’s experience, the reflection on the painful realities, and lack of solutions to those problems.7 Wright was, of course, the dominant African American novelist of the 1940s, a literary naturalist whose influence permeated the African American literary scene. The sense of pessimistic determinism, of being trapped and isolated, that is frequently a characteristic of the naturalistic novel fits well with one of the predominant moods of the blues. William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1951)8 combines literary naturalism with the blues to present an early African American migration novel that deals with the loss of connection to rural folk roots in the move to an industrial center. His depiction of the decay and corruption of the city looks back to Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods in its pessimism. Attaway makes a variety of references to the blues, especially in relation to guitar player Melody, in the Kentucky portion of his novel, but once the Moss men reach Pennsylvania, though their troubles do not disappear, the references to blues all but disappear as they are separated from their roots. As one character, the immigrant Zanski, says, “Plant grow if it get ground like place it came from” (112). Not that they had any choice about leaving. Big Mat’s beating of the overseer-like riding boss who has disrespected his dead mother precipitates their departure from an overwhelmingly racist South, clearly no longer viable, for the hope and promise connected with the steel mills of Pennsylvania. However, the predominant images are those of entrapment – in cages, boxcars, and in the dark, in emptiness, by calmness, and on garbage piles. Chapter 2, in fact, can be read as presenting another Middle Passage, the journey to a horrific land and experience where the men have little chance of surviving intact. The North is merely a different setting for the continuing racism. Interestingly, there are a variety of blues songs, such as Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Down South Blues,” that deal with the promise but ultimate disappointment of the migration North. The restless search for “better times,” a euphemism for the escape from racism, is central to the blues. Attaway’s novel explores the fearful and hopeful impulse to escape such a life, and shatters the notion that such escape is possible.
As in the Wright and Attaway novels, Ellison’s own Invisible Man (1952) combines the blues tradition with elements of naturalism, represented by the extreme conditions of control in the “battle royal,” as well as existentialism. Like the blues lyric, the novel is a first-person reflective lament-turned-celebration through the creative force of the speaker. Ellison generates an individual voice and style thoroughly rooted in the African American vernacular tradition, offering communal concerns through the voice of an individual member of the community. The heroes of the novel are all connected in some way to the blues. Louis Armstrong, one of the greatest of blues players, is the matrix through which most of Ellison’s metaphors in the introduction flow. The concept of invisibility; the creation of poetry; the fluid concept of time related to improvisation, boxing, and violation of chronology in the narrative as it flashes back in Chapter 1; the recognition and management of dichotomies, polarities, and uncertainties – all these are explored in the context of Armstrong’s artistry. Armstrong, the preacher, and the boxer are all creators, fighters, and proselytizers as they upset the status quo and push boundaries, syncopators who make observers and listeners aware of the offbeat, the space between the beat, and its importance to overcoming the metronomic regularity and oppressiveness of racist and middle-class existence, as Langston Hughes described it years earlier in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Ellison’s Armstrong is the musician as unconscious trickster figure whose music employs encoded messages and techniques to communicate social, political, and aesthetic messages to the astute listener. Significantly, Ellison refers to Armstrong’s famous version of the Andy Razaf composition “What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue?” as he begins to describe Armstrong’s prodigious talent. Although the song is not a traditional blues in music or lyric structure, it does convey a sense of the hardships faced by African Americans. The clever wordplay of the title, which refers in one sense to the speaker’s skin color (black) and sadness (blue) and in another to the battering and bruising he has endured as an African American (black and blue), is a fitting foreshadowing of the narrator’s experiences as portrayed in the novel. Armstrong’s creative response to the experiences, to make poetry out of his invisibility, is a fitting strategy for transcending such experiences as well, and a positive example for the narrator/protagonist.
Trueblood, the sharecropper who has had children by his wife and his daughter, is somewhat more problematically heroic. It is difficult to see a man who has committed incest in a positive light, especially when he uses the story of his act for material gain. The fact that, after singing the blues, he accepts his responsibility and faces up to his shortcomings suggests that the blues offers a dose of reality that remind him of his fallibility on the one hand, and his need to persevere and “take care of business” on the other. It is likely best to see Trueblood not as a symbol, as the white townspeople and the black community do – someone to be tittered over, affirming racist stereotype, or shunted aside as an embarrassment to the race – but as an individual who uses the blues either to attempt to atone for his sins or to help create a persona that can help him benefit from his transgressions in a society where the opportunities for benefiting, for an African American, are few.
In Peter Wheatstraw, the blueprint man who sings the blues, Ellison offers a man full of “shit, grit, and mother wit,” who is capable of seeing through the illusions and negotiating the deceit present in the urban environment through improvisation – adapting to the changes in the plans. The name itself stems from folk roots related to magic and folk medicine. However, though the name has been connected with a figure in African American folklore, in researcher Leroy Pierson’s interview, Ellison acknowledged both performing in the bars of St. Louis with a blues recording artist named William Bunch, whose nom du disque was Peetie Wheatstraw, and adapting his character for use as the blueprint man in the novel. Significantly, this blues singer demonstrates for the protagonist the value of the folk tradition in passing on the wisdom of the elders (which the protagonist had missed from his grandfather), the advantages of wariness and improvisation, and the uses of creativity to combat the narrow or invisible identities allotted to the African American in urban America. Wheatstraw, after all, creates himself, chooses a persona that will help him negotiate his way through the world, one that embraces the African American folk tradition. Bunch was also known as the Devil’s Son-In-Law and the High Sheriff From Hell (the character actually uses the former in his speech in the novel), positioning himself as an outlaw and authority figure in opposition to the illusory “good” world ruled by white Americans. His creativity extends to his use of language, which is full of syncopated effects as he names himself, and marked by the techniques akin to the melisma and glissando common to the African American vernacular music tradition in Ellison’s employment of typography and spelling in Wheatstraw’s sung passages. Even the lyric that Wheatstraw sings, a traditional blues that was recorded by Ellison’s friend Jimmy Rushing, presents the folk tradition dealing with one of the protagonist’s main faults: the inability to look beneath the surface and escape superficiality. While the lyric focuses on what the woman can do, make love excellently, the protagonist still focuses on the question of how somebody could love someone who looked the way she was described in the song. When the protagonist approaches the yam man slightly later, he is still fixed on how the yams look, and he receives yet another warning about looks being deceiving. Wheatstraw differs from Trueblood in his refusal to “degrade himself for money or goods” or “identify himself in such negative terms as ‘nobody but myself.’”9 He is strength, originality, energy, possibility, and, as the veteran at the Golden Day says, people need to understand the possibilities that exist in the world.
Ellison employs Wheatstraw to connect the blues to existentialist philosophy as it was propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre. In the face of radical determinism, Wheatstraw, the “down home” man of flesh and bone, makes his choices and takes responsibility for his actions. He noughts nought by creating an essence for himself that defies racial stereotypes and thus frees him in some ways from the established structures of his world. In this sense, the character Wheatstraw, and Ellison as novelist, are recreating the world by revisioning it. By the end, the protagonist realizes that other people, especially the whites he encounters, are constantly reordering the world, changing the plan, as Wheatstraw puts it. What the protagonist needs to do is participate in the process of choice, recreating himself and noughting the nought of invisibility. And once the mind has been reoriented, not just for the individual but for the masses of people who populate or read the novel, the flesh and blood man can possibly emerge from his hibernation into full and free participation in the world, a point not quite yet reached by novel’s end.
There are other elements of the blues present in Ellison’s novel, including references to various blues songs. Mary, another positive figure in the text, sings Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues.” Chapter 23 contains a snippet of the blues song “Jelly, Jelly,” and in the same chapter a woman is described as playing boogie woogie in church. Ellison may even be subtly referring to a Peetie Wheatstraw song, “First Shall Be Last and the Last Shall Be First,” in addition to its biblical source, just before the blueprint man enters the novel. More crucially, we encounter call-and-response effects in the echoes of his grandfather’s voice and advice and references to running, vision, and illusion. Armstrong, Wheatstraw, and Rinehart the Bliss Proteus all represent the importance of improvisation. The “down home” connection to roots and earthiness – to community and heritage – which the protagonist unfortunately flees for most of the novel, enters through Armstrong, Jack the Bear, the homeless couple, Mary, Poor Robin (another folk song), Wheatstraw, and the yam man. Finally, the outlook and philosophy of the protagonist is blues-like. The sardonic, laughing trickster who is playing a practical joke on the electric company, and possibly his readers, too (connecting the novel to James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man) is in one sense laughing to keep from crying since he has not quite figured out his strategy for literal emergence from his hole. In another sense, he is sending readers his novel because he believes that, although things have been bad, through reconnection to the social, political, and aesthetic wisdom of the elders as reflected in the vernacular tradition, the sun is gonna shine in his back door some day.
Albert Murray, a compatriot of Ellison’s who has written extensively about blues and jazz, including assisting Count Basie with his autobiography and relating blues and jazz crucially to African American and American culture, similarly emphasizes the viability of blues and jazz as serious and meaningful art. Underscoring the importance of improvisation as a tool to overcoming adversity, Murray posits in The Hero and the Blues (1973) an archetypal blues hero who ventures out to conquer the dragons that endanger human existence with improvisation and experimentation as his weapons. Rooted in age-old community wisdom and traditions, the hero presents not only a victory over adversity, but a path for others to follow in facing that adversity, and, importantly, a self-generated set of standards with which to confront oneself and the world. Murray’s novelistic trilogy of Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), and The Seven League Boots (1995) follows Scooter of Gasoline Point, Alabama, whose own success depends on his ability to replicate in his own life the relationship of soloist to group, individual to community, that is found in the successful jazz band, and to confront the tragedy of life with a perseverance, creativity, and dignity akin to that expressed in the blues. The world Murray envisions, then, is imbued with the spirit, passion, and wisdom of the music and the musicians who create it.
There are, of course, other writers post-Invisible Man who have continued to write in the tradition of the “Blues School of literature” that Ellison announced his intention to create. In Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park (1959), we hear the blues of Muddy Waters and Big Joe Williams against the realistic and naturalistic backdrop of the urban, working-class landscape of Chicago, one of the centers of African American blues and jazz. Brown, a Kansas City native who moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago when he was twelve, was intimately familiar with the jazz and blues of the city, and he published an interview with Thelonius Monk in Down Beat in 1958, the year before Trumbull Park was published. His novel uses the joys, sorrows, and resolve of the blues to reflect the frequently violent and psychologically harrowing experiences of an African American airplane factory employee and his family as they attempt to relocate to an exclusively white public housing project. Significantly, Brown also joins the blues of “Every Day I Have the Blues” with the spiritual “I Shall Not Be Moved” as a way of demonstrating the relationship between sacred and secular traditions and the need to draw on the entire strength of the community and its traditions to succeed. As Maryemma Graham points out, the nature of the first-person narration “allows for ranges in tone and action necessary to achieve a certain musical effect” (291),10 working hand in hand with the references to African American vernacular music to achieve a cohesive vision of the events in Buggy Martin’s life.
Many other more contemporary novels employ the blues tradition in crucial ways. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, for example, returns to the earliest instance of the English novelistic tradition, the epistolary novel, and then reminds us of the prominence of the motif of sending or receiving letters in the blues tradition demonstrated by such blues recordings as “Death Letter Blues” by Ida Cox and “Sad Letter Blues” by Big Bill Broonzy. In another explicit connection to the female blues tradition, Walker explores the oppression and exploitation of Celie, who is finally liberated socially, politically, and sexually at the initiation and under the tutelage of independent, powerful blues singer Shug Avery, who teaches Celie about the sweetness of her own body and the value of embracing her convention-defying sexual orientation. Squeak (Mary Agnes) demonstrates the importance of the voice of the individual through her performance of blues songs, which are initially renditions of Shug’s songs but eventually are replaced by songs that address Squeak’s own concerns and personality.
With the passing of many first-, second-, and even third-generation blues performers, it is the entry of blues music into the mainstream record-buying market, as evidenced by the flood of blues releases and reissues, that helps to guarantee that novelists will continue to be exposed to the beauty of the blues tradition. Walker herself acknowledged listening to and being influenced by the series of LPs of women blues singers released on Rosetta Reitz’s record label, and their inspiration in song translates strongly into Walker’s novel. Novelists will, hopefully, continue to find creative and meaningful ways to syncretize the oral blues and written novel traditions, just as the blues themselves adapted African modalities to European and American traditions to create something new and wonderful on American soil. That improvisatory adaptivity, accomplished while retaining the strength and wisdom of the folk past, is another legacy of the blues.
1. Janheinz Jahn, A History of Neo-African Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1968) p. 172.
2. Glissando, melisma and other musical techniques common to African American vernacular are discussed briefly in Alan Lomax, “Song Structure and Social Structure,” Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, ed. Steven C. Tracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 36–37. For a discussion of voice masking, see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) p. 35.
3. Richard J. Powell, “Art History and Black Memory: Toward a Blues Aesthetic,” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 182–195.
4. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (1930; rpt. New York: Scribner’s, 1969).
5. Langston Hughes, review of Blues: An Anthology, W. C. Handy,” Opportunity (August 1926): 258. Subsequent references to the text are from this edition.
6. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1990). Subsequent references to the text are from this edition.
7. Ralph Ellison. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995).
8. William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (1941; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). Subsequent references to the text are from this edition.
9. Steven C. Tracy, “The Devil’s Son-In-Law and Invisible Man,” MELUS 15:3 (Fall, 1988): 47–64.
10. Maryemma Graham, “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago: A View of Selected Fiction by Richard Wright, Frank London Brown, and Ronald Fair,” CLA Journal 33:3 (March, 1990): 291–292.