The blues contain multitudes. Among the last mysteries, blues music resists not only sentimentality but also easy summary: just when you say the blues are about one thing—lost love, say—here comes a song about death, or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are as innovative in structure as they are in mood—they resurrect old feelings even as they describe them in new ways. They are the definitive statement of that new invention, the African American, though when Langston Hughes first wrote on them and through them in the 1920s, he felt as much resistance from black folks as white. Known by black churchgoers as “devil’s music,” the blues are defiant and existential and necessary. Blues singers describe walking with the devil, or “preachin’ the blues” as Son House did—
Yes I’ma get me religion
I’ma join the Baptist church
Yes I’ma get me religion
I say I’ma join the Baptist church
You know I want to be a Baptist preacher
So I won’t have to work
—then turn round and sing of “John the Revelator.” Both the bluesman and the preacher, whose own story often includes being called to the pulpit after a life of sin, know full well that most folks choose both Saturday night and Sunday morning: one, after all, turns into the other.
Perhaps the best way to describe the blues is to say that they reveal and revel in all our holy and humane contradictions—and that this revelatory quality announces itself not with the book of the seven seals but rather the broken seal on a bottle of whiskey. The same bottle that, poisoned one way or another, will leave you barking at the moon. The same bottle that, broken, you can smooth down to slide over the neck of your guitar.
The blues will surely get you, but offer “Good Morning” when they do.
The rise of modernism parallels the rise and reach of the blues. This is no coincidence—after all, what critic Fredric Jameson identifies as “the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation,”1 could be summed up as simply having them blues.
But as I have said elsewhere, the blues are both a form and a feeling, the one a cure for the other.2 The blues are good-time music after all, meant to make you tap your feet and feel, if not better, then at least comforted by the fact that you are in good (or deliciously bad) hands. The blues offer company, even if only misery’s.
It is in the face of alienation and anomie that the mask, modern and often racial, becomes necessary. This is why the dominant mode of the modernist era is the persona—the mask both as metaphor and means of production. But the mask is not just T. S. Eliot’s blackface, Ezra Pound’s love of Noh drama, or Edvard Munch’s iconic rictus of despair in The Scream, but also the Janus mask of the blues, which laughs and cries at the same time.
The blues, then, are both an approach and a feeling—one that had to wait for former slaves to name. Virginia Woolf tried, declaring “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”3 Woolf’s dating, even in hindsight, of what may be called the advent of modernism has become more true after it was said—just as when asked why his portrait of Gertrude Stein didn’t look like her, Picasso reportedly answered: It will. Such history as a form of fortune-telling was reflected and refracted in the first published blues, W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914), and in the first recorded blues, Mamie Smith’s “The Crazy Blues” (1920). Smith’s very title indicates the vector of this change of “human character” ten years after the fact. Just as Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” would reinvent the jazz solo, forever changing music, ultimately history itself was reinvented by those too often seen as victims of it. From New Orleans on north up the Mississippi, the blues and their offspring, jazz, mark the modern moment as well as anything.
For the “St. Louis Blues” weren’t just St. Louis–born T. S. Eliot’s or Josephine Baker’s; they were everyone’s. When Handy wrote down the first blues lyrics, he was capturing and collaging the common oral culture of African Americans, the “floating verses” that amounted to a shared store of imagery, one as allusive and elusive as The Waste Land, published years later. “I hate to see de ev’nin’ sun go down”: even the iconic first line of the song looks west, and ahead to the “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with its evening sky “like a patient etherized upon a table.” Could hindsight as second sight help us recognize that the love song Prufrock proffers might in fact be a blues? Well before “Ash Wednesday” the “St. Louis Blues” announced
Oh ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
I said ashes to ashes and dust to dust
If my blues don’t get you my jazzing must.
Years later when Eliot placed black song in his Waste Land, “sampling” James Weldon Johnson, the emergence and merging of modernism—our “Shakespeherian Rag”—were complete.
However we date its start, by the early 1920s, the modernism that before and during World War I once proved strange and unsettling, with its many movements and “isms,” and its use of metaphysical wit, irony, and collage, seemed to culminate in the high modernist moment. In literature alone, the publication of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923), H. D.’s Palimpsest (1921), Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Marianne Moore’s Observations (1924), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) all signaled not just a new sheriff in town but that all the “low modernists” and populists who had begun the deputizing of modernism a decade or more before, now had till sunset to get out of town. As the twenties roared, high modernism was in full swing.
Swing would seem to be the operative word, describing not just the music that propelled the Jazz Age but also the quality of change in attitudes and culture that accompanied the advent of the New Negro—who had been agitating for change since at least the century’s turn, and whose rise almost exactly parallels modernism’s. What’s commonly called the Harlem Renaissance had begun by the early 1920s, inaugurated by Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze (1922), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922); by the time of the second of Opportunity’s award dinners in 1925 (from the first had come the anthology The New Negro), the younger generation had been duly anointed.4 This younger group, affiliated with heiress A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower Salon—and with the house down the street that Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and others jokingly termed “Niggerati Manor”—simultaneously continued and rebelled against the strict desire for a “positive” image set forth by the older generation.5 While the era and movement have been greatly explored in recent years, the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance’s importance, intricacies, and intimacies cannot be overstated—if only to reemphasize how the achievement of these African American writers (and artists) should be thought of as one of the heights of modernism.
So, too, should the release of the first blues record in 1920. The popularity and passion of “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith (which, in its first year, sold over a million copies) provide the first full expression, still overlooked, of a black modernist presence previously hinted at by the dialect of Dunbar and realized in the 1910s by the work of Fenton Johnson, a poet equally worthy of further study. You could even say that the storying tradition serves as a true vernacular to the standard borne by modernism, however avant-garde modernism self-consciously (and congratulatorily) thought itself. For now, it seems to me that, alongside Modernism & All, we should place Blues & Thangs, in order to fully appreciate the new, modern consciousness—one urban and urbane, ironic and genuine, cosmopolitan and American, black and white. Mine is an attempt to unmask the blues and see in them a useful rootlessness—and the roots of modernism more generally.
This idea of blackness containing modernism, and vice versa, has been increasingly recognized by critics detailing Harlem’s role in New York’s emergence as a literary capital. But despite Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty (1995), Susan Gubar’s Racechanges (1997), Brent Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora (2003), and many other efforts to reveal the racial and international underpinnings of what Ann Douglas calls a “mongrel modernism,” the whites-only view of modernism still persists.
Perhaps then we shouldn’t be surprised when Peter Gay’s otherwise thoughtful, large-scale study Modernism (2008)—completed after all the other aforementioned studies—fails to mention African Americans at all in its 610 pages. (That is, except for Baudelaire’s “mulatto mistress.”) It is a dizzying, disheartening thing to register such an absence, particularly when critic Christopher Miller’s Blank Darkness has so endlessly detailed the “Africanist” presence in the array of early modernists Gay does consider, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud and beyond. Vous êtes des faux nègres.
Which leads us to the question: Is it better to be misread, as in Africanist, racist white texts? Or unread, as in Gay’s study?
Such separate but unequal—and more or less invisible—divisions continue even in an influential anthology like Modernism/Postmodernism, which starts by declaring, “Both modernism and postmodernism are phenomena, primarily, of twentieth-century Anglo-American and European culture, though with a changing relation to that culture.”6 While there is some debate over terms—to some Anglo means “British,” to others “white”—there is no doubt that for many the true locus of modernism remains far from the juke joint or coldwater flat where blues records spin, or far beyond Langston Hughes circulating the Black Atlantic, writing poems about the Negro and “his rivers.” Though some have explored the interactions and interracialism of modernism, often in terms of racism, I want to go further—locating modernism’s origins specifically in black culture. The change, the roar, the very swing in the “Anglo” culture, might well be said to be exactly this too-often invisible African American influence.
What’s at stake is not just a representation of reality but also one of the counterfeit’s chief aims: to give credit where credit is overdue.
The whites-only view of modernism cuts both ways, obscuring its origins while also leaving modernism open for critique as just another form of imperialism. Take this definition of modernism by art critic Thomas McEvilley:
Modernism—here, let’s describe it loosely as the ideology behind European colonialism and imperialism—involved a conviction that all cultures would ultimately be united, because they would all be Westernized. Their differences would be ironed out through assimilation to Europe. Post-Modernism has a different vision of the relation between sameness and difference: the hope that instead of difference being submerged in sameness, sameness and difference can somehow contain and maintain one another—that some state which might be described as a global unity can be attained without destroying the individuals of the various cultures within it.7
Critics like McEvilley see a dictum like “It is necessary to be completely modern” as akin to European colonialism. To him, “Make It New” might as well be American Western expansionism’s “Go West, young man”—with the same devastating consequences. This anti-imperialist view sees the impulse to modernize in literature not as a response to industrialization but as a colonial desire to update art like just another export or exploit. Oppression is the real reason, or effect, of such an urge to “modernize,” the result not so much fated as fatal.
Yet if the nineteenth century sought either to cure or kill the native, however noble, one crucial way the modern era consistently defines itself is in embracing primitivism. The Freudian modernists, both “high” and “low,” went native precisely (and messily) to avoid being Victorian, separating themselves from the staid past or the chaotic present. Not only was modernism a reaction to the Victorian era and its distanced, defanged romanticism, it conducted much of this reaction in terms of black culture. In the case of an American modernism interested in an everyday language separate from a foreign, European past, the modern artist often turned to the Negro as both symbol and sustaining force.
This occurs not just in the work of high modernists but in that of the “low” or what I call “domestic” modernists quite popular at the time. Witness Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Vincent Benét, whose epic John Brown’s Body (1928) considers the Civil War, its very title a black spiritual; we may discern the telling mix of modernism and nativism in his poem “American Names,” which ends with the famous line “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”:
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
…
I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.8
Putting aside the ways in which “American Names” calls black folks out of theirs, for Benét the surefire antidote to a “foreign muse,” in rhyme and source and sound, not accidentally turns out to be the blues.
Might the “it” in Pound’s dictum “Make it new” mean not tradition but the Negro?
By the Jazz Age of the third decade of the twentieth century, race had already become a metaphor for the modern era, much as Du Bois predicted—one in which black folks functioned as both signs of the changing times (how fresh and lively their music!), and signs of a primal, unchanging past in which history plays no part (how freeing to not be burdened by thought or history!). There is a strangely contradictory notion at play whereby blacks are simultaneously modern and primitive.
The double mask of this conception of blackness is revealed not just in “more literary” high modernists or in the domestic modernists, but in the popular literature of the time. Take Black Sadie, an attractive, art deco–covered 1928 volume I found in a used-book store; the troubling inside flap copy remains all too typical of the time:
“Black Sadie” is a dusky imp who was borne in on the crest of the “negro fad” just before the War. Gradually she learned to speak like the whites, forsake her low-born Southern friends for high-class Harlem “yallers,” pose as a model, and dance at a famous night-club named in her honor.
Skin of soft ebony, eyes like coals, delicately poised head, she dominates this book as completely as she dominated the Black Sadie night-club. Her story is modern, elemental, compelling. The author, who was brought up on a Southern plantation, has flavored it with moments of humor and sharp irony. He has achieved an astounding tour de force which deserves to stand with the very best of the negro novels.9
The lowercase “negro” is here in full swing—low-born but high-class, black in name but “yaller” in appearance, simultaneously “elemental” and “modern.” Such inherent, paradoxical features coexist with each other, separate but not equal. Sadie is not born, but “borne in on the crest of the ‘negro fad’ just before the War.” (In this she seems a bit premature, and in her infancy to have somehow missed the Red Summer of 1919. You could say she Jes Grew.) The flap copy creates quite a flap, conflating not just modern and primitive, but Sadie the character, Black Sadie the novel, and Black Sadie the uptown club. The slippage between the three is only part of the pleasure—one presumes when one is in Black Sadie, who’s to care! Same difference!
Of course, Sadie’s similarities to Josephine Baker’s own story (and storying) should not be overlooked—though we should recall Baker’s fame required, if not exile, then the willed self-exile of expatriatism. Exile, all too familiar to the Negro, is to become arguably the chief condition of modernism. La Bakair both embodied this and disrobed it—her La Revue Nègre managed to be at once au courant, exhibitionistic, and coy. For amidst and in lieu of the ubiquitous, symbolic, and literal Waste Land that the Lost Generation found after the war, Baker offered a Dark Africa—or rather, a brown-skinded one—that you could visit safely, tantalizingly close. A sexual safari of sorts, her danse banane. But as she even participated in the show, Baker seemed to mock it—dancing on the tightrope of race in ways that echo or anticipate black artists from Bert Williams to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
A word here on the Jungle. Just as the idea of Ole Virginny provided a needed “once upon a time” for white Americans before and even long after the Civil War, the Jungle proved a place of refuge, refusal, and rejection of all things modern, while also providing a handy, if static, metaphor for the modern age itself. Eliot himself uses the jungle this way: while The Waste Land as book and place was one conception of the modern landscape, his Sweeney Agonistes is intimately tied to a foreign shore, or rather, an outlying place of foreignness, “a cannibal isle” that is Jungle for all intents and purposes.10 Whether in a Tarzan matinee or “reality television,”11 the Jungle remains a dangerous, alluring Eden that might swallow us up if we aren’t careful.
This Never Never Land, lying in a direction almost opposite a slave-conjured Canaan, is a place rich in contraband. In the endpages of my copy of Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism, where he discusses Eliot and McKay and others in relation to race and representation, are notes I made a number of years back about the idea of contraband, scrawled in pencil:
Some contraband: Berryman, some swing, Cotton Club, minstrelsy, Elvis, Rolling Stones, Melanctha, Moynihan report, “voguing,” Beat writing.
Below this, there’s a quick definition of contraband: not just stealing culture or stealing an image, but mistaking an image for reality i.e. not realizing that many of these are parodies, taken at face value. The problem here is not the “negative typing” of these works by whites, but rather their adopting of black masks and then mistaking them for a face.
The Western fascination with the Jungle can be seen in some of the most famous titles of the modern era, from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, with its tabloid-like story of a boy raised by wolves (not to mention the Disney movie’s wolf-ticket jazz). The Jungle was either symbolic of the unruliness of the city itself or indicative of what innocence the city had lost. French “outsider artist” (okay, let’s call him primitif) Le Douanier’s renderings of the Jungle are clearly imaginary, yet no less filled with a fertile danger. (This was later to be wrested from the modernists—or should I say the colonists—by the postcolonial, Afro-Asian Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in paintings such as The Jungle.) Just as he had celebrated the workers with drinking ballads, Kipling’s Jungle Book, its very title a kind of paradox, was one response to a disappearing “Genteel Tradition” and the worried “White Man’s Burden” he named in its wake.
We see this burden at large in the nostalgia found in the plantation tradition that preceded the modern era. Too rarely discussed in terms of the Genteel Tradition that follows and interacts with it, this Plantation America is the one Pound and Eliot turned to, writing to each other in the voices of Uncle Remus. By signing as “Possum” and “Uncle Ez,” as North notes, the two undergo a deliberate if subconscious racial masquerade to get beyond the social masquerades and mores of their time. We might even say that in looking back at the Genteel Tradition and trying to rebel against it, the two architects of modernism required the somewhat rebellious energy that the plantation tradition, and the blackface of Uncle Remus in particular, provided. The “Jazz Age” as a whole could be said to be responding to this rebellious blackness.
Is it any wonder that—among the challenges and swift changes brought about by modernity—the mask was turned to as a means of resolution? And that the mask was so often black—as a reflection of change even as it was a refuge from that change and a retreat into a primal past?
It’s a short trip from the perfect plantation past to the scary, or symbolic, jungle-filled one. In venues such as Paris’s La Revue Nègre or Harlem’s Cotton Club, the two were, if not directly conflated, then suggestively interchangeable. But what does the Jungle mean for African Americans, who have sometimes played into it, donning the mask of the primitive?
In part it may mean liberation.
Urban in origin, and often conflating the verticality of the skyscraper with that of the Jungle setting (as visualized, say, in the work of Aaron Douglas),12 this idea of the Jungle, if not entirely accurate, is black-made and -masked not to express a real self or an imagined other but to conjure an imagined self. This Jungle self is not so much savage as freed; is not the paradoxical noble savage but a transport back to a lost heritage—the more aggressively or laughably artificial, the better. If not quite the Elsewhere of the Negro spirituals, this transformative Jungle does recognize that the mask is not a cover but a vehicle, a way for its spirit—let’s call it swing—to enter you and your art or music or movement.
The Jungle’s regenerative power is trumpeted by later black artists, from Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” to James Brown’s album In the Jungle Groove, which introduced the world to the break on “Funky Drummer,” and thus to hip-hop. Which in turn gave us the Jungle Brothers, not to mention the form of drum-and-bass music known as “jungle” (often based on a sample of a drum solo fittingly known as the “Amen Break”). The persistence of the Jungle into black-made art forms a half century or century later indicates its defiant appeal.
Much like its seeming opposite, the biblical desert, the Jungle is a place not of lifelessness but renewal. The Jungle is an oasis in a modern world come to resemble a less transcendent sort of desert, a virtual Waste Land; yet the Jungle also provides a metaphor for that same, out-of-control world. Down in the jungle, way down by a creek, the Signifying Monkey hadn’t eaten in a week. We might not be surprised to learn that the word jungle in fact derives from “waste land”: “[Skt. jan˙galam, desert, wasteland, uncultivated area < jangala-, desert, waste.]”13
White readers often brought to the Jungle the image of the Forest, found in European fairy tales as a site of danger, of wolves and lost children, while the black audience and artist seem almost always to have found in Jungle the liberating notion of “going wild.” (Though, of course, by accepting the Jungle, or going “wild about Harry,” some whites in the 1920s would do the same.) As critic J. Lee Greene discusses, “In the wilderness, the English colonists felt a great urgency to destroy what historian [Winthrop] Jordan described as ‘the living image of primitive aggression which they said was the Negro but was really their own.’”14
In contrast, wilderness for the African American in slavery had long meant a place preferable to the plantation and its ornate garden: “Slaves knew that as chattel they were considered part of the property and wilds of nature, which a smoothly functioning plantation could restrain. The nearby woods contained enough birds and roaming animals to provide slaves with geographical and naturalistic references for freedom…. Thus it was hardly a difficult choice for slaves to forsake the pastoral Eden for the unpredictable wilderness.”15 If the garden meant order, and order meant slavery, I’d take wilderness and its freedom too.
For the slave wilderness also meant praise. The slave songs (or should we say freedom songs) were often performed in the wilderness, in what’s been termed “the invisible church”: those services and worship that the slaves conducted in secret. (You might call it the “Amen break.”) “A common practice was to meet in the deep woods, in remote ravines or gullies, or in secluded thickets (called ‘brush arbors’). The preachers and exhorters would speak over a kettle of water in order to drown the sound, or the group would turn a kettle upside down in the center of the gathering so that the kettle would absorb the sound of the singing.”16
My name it is poor Pilgrim
To Canaan I am bound
Travellin’ through this wilderness
On-a this enchanted ground.
This remapping of the wilderness by African Americans, both in praise and in practice, was a direct rebuke of the ways white settlers saw the New World. From the start the colonists, bringing the Forest with them, had pitched their destiny upon the most primal of pasts, invoking either Eden or wilderness as an originating force. In his Blacks in Eden, Greene notes that for the Puritans America was wilderness, a “devil’s land” they were sent to tame. In contrast, white Southerners saw the country as Eden, themselves as descendants of Adam and Eve (with blacks a sign of original sin). If one group saw the New World as after the Fall, the other before it, both worldviews required the conversion or ignoring of Native Americans and African slaves to continue.17 Such a dichotomy—Eden or wilderness—found its way into the contradictions of western expansionism and the frontier. No wonder the West needed conquering.
In contrast, for African Americans the Jungle means both Eden blackened and wilderness redeemed—or better yet, wilderness always proved an “enchanted ground,” a form of home.
If the redemptive black view of Jungle persists, so did the racialized, racist, modern one, from at least the time “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” struck fear into readers of Heart of Darkness to later become a sign of phonetic and other decay as an epigraph to Eliot’s “Hollow Men” (1925). Years later, in Jungle Fever, artist and photographer Jean-Paul Goude would account for his fascination with blacks (and before that Indians) growing up in Josephine Baker’s Paris:
I have been in love with Indians since before I could read or write. I had seen them first in comic books like Tin-Tin and later in Westerns…. I loved the brown color of their skin. Their teeth looked so white by comparison. This is true not only of Indians but also of blacks—of anyone with a color of skin darker than pink…. I’d have an army of Indians and an army of cowboys. To help you understand that the cowboys were crummy guys, I made them all look alike. The good guys, the Indians, were all different. They had nice ornaments. I made one drawing of Womba which is completely black, a black-faced Indian with white tribal marks…. Indians were the first brown people I liked. Black people came later.18
Even his beloved blacks are ornaments, racial profiles of a literal sort. Goude’s entire book traces the way that not just Americans but Europeans spend their childhood as Imaginary Indians, and their adolescence, however extended, as Imaginary Negroes (or wishing to be among them). Goude’s art book is less a personal history than a racial one: images depict not just Womba (drawn in 1947 when Goude was seven, a fascinating image); but also Goude’s mother, a dancer, photographed among whites in blackface in 1927, and seven years later as part of the chorus surrounding a wide-mouthed Ethel Waters. Goude’s often erotic drawings and photographs are “wishful thinking,” as he labels one 1965 explicit depiction of interracial oral sex; he even goes so far as to include photographs he terms “from memory,” made years later in the 1970s, that depict past visions of racial contact such as an Alvin Ailey dancer not so much eroticized as abstracted, literally manipulated, extended, blurred.
All this, no doubt, is meant as praise. So too is his description of his and his fellow audience’s mix of horror and lust watching a black performer: “she was performing wearing just a prom skirt and nothing else. Her tits were bare. The strength of her image, then as now, is that it swings constantly from the near grotesque—from the organ grinder’s monkey—to the great African beauty. You are constantly looking at her and wondering if she’s beautiful or grotesque, or both, and how can she be one if she’s the other?”19 Same difference. The fact that he here is describing Grace Jones, not only one of Josephine Baker’s clear inheritors but Goude’s future common-law wife, should give us pause.
Are we again in the presence again of the fetish? Goude’s manipulation of Grace Jones’s literal image—“I cut her legs apart, lengthened them, turned her body completely to face the audience like an Egyptian painting, and of course, once it was all done, I had a print made which I used as my preliminary drawing. Then I started painting, joining up all those pieces to give the illusion that Grace Jones actually posed for the photograph and that only she was capable of assuming such a position”—is contraband that views the mask as reality, strains to convince us it is. Certainly Grace Jones herself played with her own image in fascinating ways and was as interested in artifice as anything else. But Goude goes further, rendering not just his own memories false but also hers: “The first picture you’ll see of Grace is of her as a child exposing herself. Why not? I show her as the natural exhibitionist she probably was.”20
It is not enough for Jones or Goude’s other blacks (and Indians and Puerto Ricans and gays and Vietnamese who also appear) to be wild in the present, he must also imagine their wildness as primal, prima facie, and a “natural” part of their past. “Wild Things” he calls a photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar from 2009, with black supermodel Naomi Campbell depicted in jungle garb, racing alongside a cheetah (her weave flying) and even jumping rope spun by two monkeys.21 Me Tarzan, You Cheetah: the fetishized white-placed Jungle persists to this day.
This is tricky terrain. In the wrong hands Jungle is reminiscent of Ole Virginny as a site of pernicious nostalgia; in others, it is a call to Africa.
The main idea behind the Jungle is that of home. The home the blues circle and mention, the rootlessness that jazz embodies: both take not just aspects of technique from African music but also solace from the very idea of Africa. I sought my Lord in de wilderness, For I’m a-going home. Basquiat put it this way: “I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live.”22
Just as the idea of Canaan proved a necessary part of the slave’s liberation, an Elsewhere present in the spirituals, Africa persists in the freedperson’s collective memory and as part of the slave’s ever-present past. The danger, of course, is that Africa is a real place—not a mere country, as some still seem to think, but a diverse, populous continent. Even Marcus Garvey, whose agitation for black empowerment and a return to and “redemption of Africa” got him deported to his native Jamaica, offered stock certificates for his Universal Negro Improvement Association that read: “Africa: The Country of Possibility.”23
At its best, Garveyism, which curator Randall Burkett terms a “form of civil religion,”24 does not make this mistake: instead of a physical place, both literary and political Garveyism argues about and for the image of Africa, redeeming it from centuries of its dismissal (and fetishizing) as the Dark Continent. The remapping performed by the enslaved African and the freed artist—turning an Africa of memory, and even of recent experience, into utopia—was pitched against the notion of Africa as “no place” in the European imagination. In his desire to form a black nation, to form the Black Star Line (in direct contrast to the White Star Line), Marcus Garvey’s is a wish to return across the Black Atlantic, boxing the compass by not being boxed in.
Such an image of free Africa is aligned not only with the past but also with the future. Garvey himself is said to have recognized this: “In one of his Liberty Hall speeches, the indefatigable leader of the 1920s warned opponents that he could not be tampered with or harmed because, as he said, ‘I am a modern.’”25
In their more modern remappings—of Africa, of the Jungle—African Americans such as Baker or Duke Ellington or Hughes sought to fight the “colonial memory,” as Deleuze and Guattari termed it, and the rampant “phantasy” found in Eliot’s and other modernists’ encounters with imaginary blackness. Given that the imagination is where the Negro was first questioned and dismissed, why wouldn’t black folks also choose the imagination as the site of this struggle and reclamation?
And why not Harlem? While Harlem certainly does not include all the wings of what might best be called the New Negro Renaissance—which took place in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Paris, and other outposts as early as the 1890s—Harlem had by the end of the 1920s come to stand as a mythic as well as a literal home for those in the African Diaspora. Perhaps the Jungle is not actually found in Africa, then, but America. Or, is Jungle just another word for heaven? As Arna Bontemps put it, “In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable season. In Harlem it was like a foretaste of paradise.”26
Paradise had been promised by the spirituals: I am going to make heaven my home. But the culture black folks made promised a kind of belonging in the idea of nativeness, even in the midst of exile. For black culture, “going native” was less a dangerous excursion than a reclaiming of the home they found themselves in. Native Son, Notes of a Native Son, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, the Native Tongues hip-hop collective: African American conceptions of nativeness mean belonging, a nativity holy and human. It is exactly this nativity that some would seek to deny our first black president.
Taking the A Train meant to bring you home, to Harlem, again. As Cheryl Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance eloquently notes:
The idea of “home” has a particular resonance in African-American expressive tradition, a resonance that reflects the experience of dispossession that initiates it. In the spirituals, blacks had sung of themselves as motherless children “a long way from home.” Images of homelessness—souls lost in the storm or the wilderness—abound. In the absence of an earthly home, the slaves envisioned a spiritual one, a home over Jordan, for example; or they laid claim defiantly to “a home in dat rock.”… The efforts to claim Harlem as home found voice in texts such as James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan and McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis. In the political realm, Marcus Garvey sought through his visionary rhetoric to inspire a New Negro who would fight to redeem Africa, the ancestral home.27
While Wall mentions both McKay’s study, Harlem, and his memoir Long Way from Home, she does not mention here his Home to Harlem (1928), McKay’s first novel and the first best seller by an African American. Certainly the book’s popularity stemmed in part from its tapping into the “Harlem vogue.” Though seen as a misnomer by some, such a vogue is represented by a yellow sticker on the cover of the first edition (with its lovely Aaron Douglas illustration) advertising “A negro’s own novel—for those who enjoyed NIGGER HEAVEN, PORGY and BLACK APRIL.” As with Black Sadie, the selling point (though not necessarily the novel’s) is the accessibility of Harlem, presumably not just for black folks, to cash in on and enjoy. “For those white Americans with the time, money, and sophistication to make the trip, Harlem at night seemed a world apart. In contrast to their own world, discipline, hard work, and frugality were counterfeit coin in the realm of imaginary Harlem. Nothing symbolized its otherness more than the cabaret.”28
Yet Harlem was imaginary, too, at least in part, for the black folks who lived, loved, and visited there—who thought of it as a, if not the, “black mecca.” For them it was counterfeit coin in the best, storying sense: Harlem meant being free both spiritually and economically. However temporary, the power of the migrant and the exoduster’s ennobling dream of homesteading cannot be overstated. For black folks, Harlem/home remains expressive of a black self, however fictive: a place where Hurston could feel her color coming on like a mythic tribesman; or where Ellington could play “jungle music” that was jazz by another name. What the cabaret provides—like the Southern juke joint, or the Harlem drag ball—is not mere tourism but also black agency, no matter how mediated.
In a way, Harlem itself represents a recolonization of Manhattan. Instead of merely breaking from the British Isles, as many American modernists sought to do culturally, black folks recaptured the Isle of Manhattan, and on their own terms. Traveling from the South and the Caribbean, black migrants came north and east to reclaim the island the Indians were lowballed for centuries before, recapturing a Harlem named by the Dutch who once lived there too. Recolonization meant a kind of coming home—rewriting the song Manhattan was sold for—keeping in mind that, especially for those of African descent in exile in the West, the exile finds home wherever she can.
Might we also say that the Great Migration, with its satisfying notion of “feeling at home” in a brand-new, cosmopolitan place, not only counters modernist exile but exemplifies it? Such exile provided less a sense of loss than a look-out. “The maroon community of ‘Harlem,’” Houston Baker reminds us, “conceived as the modern capital of those ‘capable of speaking’ for themselves, is thus source (of insubordination)—haven (for fugitives)—base (for marauding expeditions)—and nucleus (of leadership for planned uprisings).”29
Just as Josephine Baker and jazz overtook Paris after taking Harlem by storm, the Jungle always threatened to spread. (Not that, a generation later, Jean-Paul Goude and others like him would seem to mind.) Such recolonization follows the remapping of the American landscape, and the reclaiming of black dialect by Dunbar and his Harlem Renaissance descendants from the jaws of the blackfaced, white-wide mouth. The transformation of the Island English of Britain into the “nation language” of McKay and company on the northern tip of the island of Manhattan could be said to be another part of this recolonization. Such recolonization may even result in or make use of what Susan Gubar calls “recoloring,” or black artists taking over often restrictive roles that white artists had invented as black.
For now, let’s say that in the hands of the author of Black Sadie, the real Josephine Baker’s hard-won autonomy—much less any notion of Negro authority or autonomy—is quickly displaced by the notion of the “negro novel” as a blackface, “whites-only” form.30 In this, Sadie contrasts only slightly with the Home to Harlem sticker’s citing Nigger Heaven, Porgy, and Black April as examples of similar blackface writing. In such a context, Home to Harlem’s being “A negro’s own novel” is in fact quite novel.
We need only think for a moment of the contemporary young black writer, whether McKay or Hurston or Langston Hughes, wanting to write about “common” folk and Negro life and stepping into the minefield of assumptions created by books such as Sadie. Reading the back flap of Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), for example, and seeing that
these poems, for the most part, interpret the more primitive types of American Negro, the bell-boys, the cabaret girls, the migratory workers, the singers of Blues and Spirituals, and the makers of folk-songs
one might better understand the uproar the book caused upon publication, among black as well as white reviewers, who mistakenly saw it in Sadie’s same dusky, “primitive typed” blackface light. It was a similar view that prompted many, most famously Du Bois, to be angry about Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, a book Hughes and other younger writers defended liking as a part of their artistic freedom and resistance to the burden of a narrowly positive, New Negro representation. Given the importance of heaven = home = Harlem in the black imagination, the outrage over the reductiveness of at least the title Nigger Heaven, a flip phrase that implied settling for far less, may be better understood.
It is in the midst of all the Black Sadies that Hughes’s cry for unfettered expression in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” becomes important, and its perils (especially as seen by the older generation) more clear: for those dedicated to the New Negro, low class meant lowercase. For Du Bois, all art is propaganda, and artistic freedom a luxury the uppercase and uplifting Negro could ill afford.
For Hughes, the New Negro also meant the newness of modernism, a freedom to write about whatever he wished. This also meant a resistance—a poetics of refusal—that characterized Hughes’s complex lifework.
Not coincidentally, much like the people who made them did, the blues see the city as a place teeming with possibility. If in Harlem, black folks sensed “a foretaste of paradise,” in this they were thoroughly modern, American-style—finding delight, even romance, in the challenges of city life. The blues also foresaw the postmodern reaction to the urban environs: the City that seems a “waste land” to Eliot becomes the heroic “Paterson” of William Carlos Williams after the war (or his “Pastoral” written before it); for Hughes, while the city would become a “dream deferred,” it remained still a dream, not yet a nightmare. When, in his long poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes goes on to experience nightmare it is a “Nightmare Boogie,” art made from pain in the blues tradition.
Even in the 1920s the blues enact a citified two-step between acceptance and despair. As Hughes noted:
The Spirituals are group songs, but the Blues are songs you sing alone. The Spirituals are religious songs, born in camp meetings and remote plantation districts. But the Blues are city songs rising from the crowded streets of big towns, or beating against the lonely walls of hall bed-rooms where you can’t sleep at night. The Spirituals are escape songs, looking toward heaven, tomorrow, and God. But the Blues are today songs, here and now, broke and broken-hearted, when you’re troubled in mind and don’t know what to do, and nobody cares.31
If at times, like Williams did, the blues find beauty in the city, the music also knows heartache can follow you wherever you go. As such, the blues are about the crossroads—between good and evil, tragedy and comedy—and also are the crossroads, the exact place where north meets south, city meets country. As befitting a crossroads, the blues shift between two sets of dueling impulses: first, seeing the city as a place of both welcome and betrayal—its landscape as haunted, even helpless—and second, seeing modern life as exile and black life in particular as a delightful survival.
“Poor man’s heart disease,” the blues also describes a particular American—or should I say African American—rootlessness. Where the spirituals used Elsewhere as a comfort, for the blues the very possibility of Elsewhere causes both pain and pleasure. As Hughes says, the blues are “sadder even than the spirituals because their sadness is not softened with tears but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to.”32 Even as what Hughes calls “songs of escape,” the spirituals reiterate their own surety: I’ve got a home in dat rock, don’t you see? But the blues offer an Elsewhere that may never be; even the escape of migration, one of the key subjects of the blues, is not always fully realized.
The difference between migration and exile can be slim. Think of Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” here transcribed by Angela Davis:
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then looked down on the house where I used to live
Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go
Backwater blues done caused me to pack my things and go
’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’
Mmmmmmmmm, I can’t move no mo’
Mmmmmmmmm, I can’t move no mo’
There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go.33
The song, written by Bessie Smith after the disastrous 1927 flood of the Mississippi, not only describes a larger African American condition, but could apply today to the displaced people from Hurricane Katrina and the second Bush administration’s failed infrastructures and sympathy. One hopes it is not still relevant in the wake of the 2010 toxic Gulf oil spill.
Rather than that creeping black, it is the structure of the blues that interests me here: the rootlessness of blues feeling is both mirrored and fought by the restlessness of the form; the form’s constant recasting parallels the singer’s search for meaning, and for home. In the blues the feeling of being displaced—also found in the spirituals—becomes a search for a safe haven rather than its guarantee. Whether “Sweet Home Chicago” or “Kansas City Here I Come,” the blues seek an earthbound Elsewhere, extending the hope of the spirituals while arguing against such hope, foregrounding the here and now. The result is a sustained argument over existence.
Needless to say “the poor girl” in Bessie Smith and other singers’ blues also offers a protest, however indirect, against both class and gender oppression in a city or country that often does not have much of a place for black women at all. Angela Davis’s and Hazel Carby’s studies of blueswomen prove indispensable in understanding this.34 As Carby points out, different, gendered reactions to oppression are revealed by the famous blues lyric:
When a woman gets the blues she goes to her room and hides,
When a woman gets the blues she goes to her room and hides,
When a man gets the blues he catch the freight train and rides.
Riding and hiding: these are not only gendered options but two crucial ways the blues make meaning. For alongside their almost exact contemporary the cinema, the blues provide a shifting space of identity. They provide not just a metaphor for migration—the “kicker” or last line inverting, or finding irony in, all that goes before—but also a migration of meanings.
This floating lyric about hiding and riding is echoed by the often-quoted opening of Hurston’s Their Eyes Are Watching God:
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.35
This recasts the blues trope of the train in terms of the ship—heading where, I wonder? (But then again, I am a man.) Adrift, mocking, the dream as the truth: these are things the storying tradition knows well, and perhaps speaks of best in the blues.
The blues are revolutionary, not just because they are the invention of a black “I” in American culture—versus the powerful “we” of the Negro spirituals—but also because the blues upend our expectations both in the reversals of “kicker” and in their overall aesthetic of the unexpected. The blues revel in their and our dualistic nature, part tragedy, part comedy, all drama. I got a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time. Though often this can sound like two sides of the same tragedy: See, see, rider, see what you done done, Lord, Lord, Lord—Made me love you, now your gal done come.
Even the blues line is doubled and divided, filled with hesitation, caesuras, and, as I hear it, line breaks—note that Langston Hughes always wrote his blues as six-line stanzas, recognizing the importance of timing, and giving the lie, or shall we say counterfeit, to the three-line stanza. Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” is haunting exactly because of its delays, its doubts, its very wordlessness. Perhaps we should say the blues are in constant dialogue—the words with the music, tragedy with comedy, uplift with outrage (and outrageousness), the singer with the audience and the audience with its own past and pain. These are all, as with any crossroads, a form of divining.
Where for Eliot the poet was the catalyst for the work of art, remaining unchanged by the process, the blues singer is forever changed and always changing—one hand on the elixir of hope or celebration or forgetfulness (or cheap wine), the other ready to stir in despair and a past the singer is forever naming, if only to forget. The dream is the truth. Such transformation extends to the audience, who shares in the blues singer’s mad scientist scheme. Even if, as blues well knew, the broken-seal bottle could be poison—our thirst will kill us all.
Besides the revelatory quality of the songs and lives—the storying—of blueswomen well charted by Davis and Carby, the blues also reveal shifting meanings of maleness. Some have written of Hughes’s writing in the voices of black women, but we can see such polyvocal expression even in bluesman Robert Johnson, the bad man of the blues. Despite the overemphasis by certain critics on his short life and death, Johnson may best be defined by double entendre as by elusive autobiography; and double consciousness may prove the true hellhound on his trail: “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”36
For the bad man, as Johnson sings and Hughes points out, is but one side of a double consciousness in which “sad boy” or “poor girl” is its tragicomic counterpart. The blues ain’t nothin but a good man feelin bad. This sad, less braggadocious side of manhood is clearly seen in Johnson’s remarkable “Come On in My Kitchen” in which Johnson’s plea is for a lover to come into the singer’s “kitchen”—a place of warmth and comfort, nurturing and socializing. Johnson’s remapping is personal and metaphoric: in the blues, where cookin’ is usually a metaphor for much more, the kitchen is never only literal; here the kitchen is welcoming and even sexual, the base of happiness and the hair’s nappiness. If today was Christmas Eve, If Today was Christmas Eve, and tomorrow was Christmas Day: Johnson’s lines sing of possibility and pain.
The fact that the blues sing of pain at all helps them resist the sentimentality of the pop music of the times—not to mention the blackface crooners and plainfaced white contemporaries who would attempt to co-opt the blues. “Blues music… is neither negative nor sentimental,” Albert Murray says. “It counterstates the torch singer’s sob story, sometimes as if with the snap of two fingers!”37 In short, blues do resist the popular, even as they represent the first modern popular black culture.
The idea of the blues as popular culture, it should be said, hasn’t proved a very popular notion, largely because the blues are also an important folk tradition. It has proved irresistible for experts (as distinct from music lovers) to dismiss the “classic blues” in favor of “country blues,” to reify the rural bad-ass bluesman over the Empresses, Queens, and cohort of Smiths who first broadened the blues’ appeal. Such a narrow view, however, ignores the fact that the blues mark exactly the transition between the folk and the popular—not to mention that even country blues reject the pastoral mode with its idealized South. The blues care little for purity, except when drinking canned heat.
The blues insist upon the popular even as they reform the notion. Hughes, for instance, engages with the popular by fabricating folk songs at the last minute when Van Vechten could not obtain permission for reprinting the blues songs he wanted for Nigger Heaven. (Which raises a kind of question—is Nigger Heaven a further kind of contraband, not for its stolen images, but for the presence of Hughes’s counterfeit blues? Why haven’t we seen enough written about the ways, in jazz fashion, Hughes performed a sort of collaboration with Van Vechten?) Along with Williams’s wheelbarrow and Lorca’s deep song, Hughes’s blues rebuff and reframe the purist, international notion of high modernism that soon came to be seen as the only forum for great art.
Certainly Hughes was drawn to blues because of their form: the unique ability of the blues to tell a single story (losing love, coming north, loneliness and mistresses and misters and mistrust) while making that story resonant and plural; to tell a simple story (my man left me, the flood took everything) and make it complex (referencing displacement, protesting conditions, echoing biblical undertones); the making of a fruitful music from loss; and in the end, often abandoning story altogether for sound. From their blurred notes to their tension between word and deed, between meaning and moaning, between writing and hiding, between the backing bottleneck sound and the up-front voice—in a word, irony—the blues recognize that even blurring posits its own claim to meaning, storying all the way home.
In Hughes, not to mention Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson, we can see just how the blues move from the “we” of the spirituals to the modern “I”—the blues, as Hughes reminds us, are to be sung alone. The blues are songs about loneliness that somehow, in our listening, turn their “I” into a form of “we”: we listen to the blues so’s not to feel alone. In this “I,” the blues are Whitmanesque and profound—for a moment, the duration of the lyric at least, we experience what the “I” experiences. You could say both lyric poetry and the blues turn us into a city of one.
The blues do offer comfort, no matter how cold.
As plain talk and local metaphor, the blues would go on to influence much of modern literature—if only as a useful example of, or contrast with, such a literature’s own making and masking. While some might argue about the entertainment or popular value of The Waste Land, Eliot’s poem, like the blues from Johnson to the host of Smiths, relies on an implied protest about the modern human condition. If we say one does so by collage, the other by refrain, we are apt to confuse which is which: “Hurry Up Please It’s Time” quickly can seem like a blues lyric, while “I’ve got a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time” fits somewhere between the gossip of the old ladies and the quake of thunder.
As such, the chief difference between high and low modernism may be the mere borrowing of black material by the popular, domestic modernists, versus its outright theft by the more skilled, “high modernists.” Originally called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” Eliot’s Waste Land used the multiple voices found in the minstrel show, America’s first popular entertainment.38 But while Eliot was burying the blackface origins (as well as the autobiographical ones) of The Waste Land, they resurfaced as part of Sweeney Agonistes, not only in its characters Tambo and Bones but also in its being labeled as “melodrama” (which originally meant a drama “with music”).
Not just black, this music was also jazz. Despite his brilliant critique of Eliot’s use of race, Michael North neglects to note how the multifaceted, multivoiced structure of The Waste Land—and by extension the poets whose accolades, criticism, and own poetry cemented its place as the prototypical and certainly most influential modernist poem—could be said to mirror the multiplicity of jazz. Ralph Ellison certainly saw a correlation between Eliot’s collage and the concerted storying of Satchmo: “Consider that at least as early as T. S. Eliot’s creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxtapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a similar technique for jazz.”39 Satchmo would also use collage not just in his music but on the road, as anyone viewing his recently published collages—not to mention his own collage-like letters—may discover.
In further observing Eliot’s upriver technique, Ellison describes finding Eliot’s transcription inclusion of a song written by James Weldon Johnson as transcendent:
Somehow music was transcending the racial divisions. Listening to songs such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and knowing that it was the work of Negroes didn’t change all our attitudes but it helped all kinds of people identify with Americanness or American music. Among all the allusions to earlier poetry that you find in Eliot’s The Waste Land he still found a place to quote from “Under the Bamboo Tree,” a lyric from a song by James Weldon Johnson, Bob Cole, and Rosamond Johnson. During the twenties when The Waste Land was published many readers made the connection.40
Other writers such as Kamau Brathwaite have noted connections across the Americas: “What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone.” For Brathwaite and many more, Eliot’s deformation of language was not a sign of the modern world’s flaws but of a liberating step toward fully acknowledging an English influenced by blacks brought to the Americas—a “nation language” now emergent and pervasive.41
For many black writers, not just Eliot’s poetry but his birth in St. Louis—home to Scott Joplin, Stagolee, and likely the Bamboo Tree—and his invoking of the “strong brown god” of the Mississippi, link him and his voice to a long history of race and music in the Americas. As Brathwaite notes, “For those who really made the breakthrough, it was Eliot’s actual voice—or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council—reading ‘Preludes’, ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land and the Four Quartets—not the texts—which turned us on. In that dry deadpan delivery, the riddims of St Louis (though we didn’t know the source then) were stark and clear for those of us who at the same time were listening to the dislocations of Bird, Dizzy and Klook. And it is interesting that on the whole, the Establishment couldn’t stand Eliot’s voice—far less jazz!”42
Yet why do Ellison, Brathwaite, and those “many readers” in “our segregated schools” see a connection between blackness and modernism, while for some critics and, no doubt, the popular imagination, there is little to none to speak of? And why does what, for Ellison, seems like love, to me feel at times like theft?
You say Waste Land, I say “Crazy Blues”: both declare the madness of the modern moment, with Eliot disguising his personal breakdown as society’s, while Mamie Smith breaks down a song into a breakthrough of black voice, echoing across the land.
We may measure modernism not just by the journey from domestic modernism to high modernism to New Criticism, or from Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” to Eliot’s “The river is a strong brown god,” but also from “St. Louis Blues” to Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” with its redefinition and virtual invention of the jazz solo. The journey from collective folk vision, recorded by Handy, to individual excellence and promise found and re-formed in Satchmo—who played behind Bessie Smith on her “St. Louis Blues”—is no less powerful than Eliot’s notion that the modern era meant the disintegration of not just society but the self. Not to mention his startlingly corresponding view that any effective individual talent must function like a catalyst, as an escape from personality, changed by as well as changing tradition.
Mamie Smith solidified and started a new tradition, one that insists on if not personality, then swing. When she stepped into a studio in 1920, the “Crazy Blues” Smith recorded was in many ways a “recoding”: Smith not only changes the chords, blurring them with the music provided by her Jazz Hounds, but also invents the new form of the blues recording. (Is this another kind of recolonizing?) Those who object to her vaudeville voice, or deny the song because it doesn’t fit the purity of the blues, seem unaware of the blues’ always syncretic nature. They almost certainly fail to hear the coded meanings and implied protest in the song, written by black songwriter Perry Bradford:
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t got no time to lose
I must find him today
Now the doctor’s gonna do all… that he can
But what you gonna need is a undertaker man
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Smith’s high-pitched voice seems to me not a fault but a conduit. For with it she manages to convey simultaneous identification with both victim and perpetrator; its very eerieness evokes “crazy.”
There is a technology at work here, black as wax, a virtual voice speaking for and to the masses who bought and borrowed it. “Crazy Blues” sings of disembodiment, a synthesis of folk and machine found not just in the recording but in Smith’s warbling. Behind the vocal, her Jazz Hounds echo and engulf the singer (and listener) with a clarinet accompanying Smith almost phrase for phrase, the trombone practically looping and swooping behind her. These are the foundational instruments of jazz (before the trumpet and then the saxophone took over) singing their swan song as “Crazy Blues” gestures toward a new one. Much of it is in her tremulous tone: I don’t have any time to lose, she sings, and we believe her. The urgency is palpable, an analogue to diasporic yearning.
Smith’s narrator must find her lover “today” and the doctor’s been called, either for her presumed heartache or for the violence implied against her “baby” or herself. In a way, her “baby” is the selfsame “undertaker man” “you gonna need”: a man the narrator also can’t help but desire; who may send her to the grave; or who, by mistreating her, unwittingly dooms himself. Not just a description of our heroine’s feelings, the “Crazy Blues” is metaphor for modern life as vibrant as the notion of Jungle or Waste Land. Or home.
Critic Adam Gussow focuses on the last stanzas of the song, the first few lines of which incorporate a floating verse perhaps made most familiar in the song “Trouble in Mind”:
I went to the railroad
Hang my head on the track
Thought about my daddy
I gladly snatched it back
Now my babe’s gone
And gave me the sack
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t had no time to lose
I must find him today
I’m gonna do like a Chinaman… go and get some hop
Get myself a gun… and shoot myself a cop
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Those blues43
Where Eliot once wanted to “do the police in different voices,” “Crazy Blues” would have you “do like a Chinaman,” putting on yet another racial mask, and then shoot a cop. Gussow reads the floating verse “snatch my head back” as a reference to the practice of lynching or mutilation by train, and the ending of the song as a protest against police violence, however veiled.
I myself am interested here in several things: not only the way that “Crazy Blues” tapped into an underground set of meanings but also the way it tapped into an underground economy. The two were no coincidence. Many reports have it that the record was distributed informally by black Pullman porters who bought the record in the North for a dollar and sold it along their routes south and west for two or even three dollars. Certainly each copy was listened to by more than just the purchaser and, like any underground classic, got passed around like gossip.
If it might be a protest against lynching, the song is certainly a symbol of the railroad as empowering the porters; as a symbolic means of escaping the South (and distributing the blues, quite literally); and also as an implied protest of working conditions where a railroad, like a bad lover, could up and “give you the sack,” especially if you were a black worker unlucky enough to be hurt on the job.
The train needless to say courses through black and folk expression, where it occupies many stations of meaning. Chief among them for black culture may be the locomotive as a sign of motion and freedom; the Underground Railroad is itself an elegant metaphor for escape. Call it the blues correlative: when DeFord Bailey or Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith refers to the train through lyrics or music, they need not explain the history of railroad imagery, from the Underground Railroad to John Henry’s hammer, in order to embody the locomotive’s crucial complexities as a metaphor for leaving and for life itself. The blue light was my blues, the red light was my mind. Even a song like “The Midnight Special” was originally not the defanged bar-band singalong it has become but rather the words of a prisoner from his cell watching the light of the midnight train go by, and wishing it carried him—and his very wishes—along with it.
Where most modernism sought an objective correlative to describe emotions through the apt symbol, the black artist sought a subjective, blues correlative from the store of shared imagery inherited, changed, and reinvigorated by the latest artist in the tradition. Much the way an abstract artist drawing a horizontal line calls up centuries of landscape painting, the black and blues artist invoking a train—or river or mountain or valley or other remapped landscape—conjures a host and history of meanings. The task is to make it your own, internal and eternal.
The railroad links not just country blues to city blues but also black struggle to the “Chinaman’s chance.” For the railroad, symbol of modernization and East meeting West, was also the site of cultural connection, with black railroad workers literally connecting with Asian American ones. Although it’s troubling that “Chinamen” here represent being “hopped up,” “Crazy Blues” borrows Asianness not merely to signify “crazy” but to help transform the narrator into a “crazy nigger” who would shoot a cop. Smith’s song, then, suggests the shifting identities of the modern era—and of a patently racialized, if masked, rebellion. From the Boston Tea Party onward, American rebellion and rewriting tradition have required not reality but such a mask.
Crazy, as everyone from Gussow to Richard Pryor knows, may not necessarily mean insanity so much as a fierce recognition of the craziness of the world. The “Crazy Blues” of the title may not be the narrator’s view but the view of authorities for whom any uncompromising black (or Asian) response left the colored folks deemed crazy and killable. “Crazy” is another outlaw identity black folks have championed—along with the bootlegger, the numbers writer, the hustler, and the graffiti writer—because when normal means kowtowing to figures of power, “crazy” may not be insane in the least. Where I come from, as I recently said in “Ode to Homemade Wine,” crazy is a compliment.44 Crazy is the tonic in which misbehavior mixes with outright rebellion; the blues ain’t nothin but a bad woman feelin good.
In a crucial sense, Mamie Smith’s achievement mirrors Langston Hughes’s much-remarked-upon innovation in his Fine Clothes—that is, removing the framing device so that instead of being listened to by a narrator (“I heard a Negro play” in his “Weary Blues”), the bellboys, bad men, and sad girls speak or sing directly to us. Smith, as it happens, stepped in to replace a “popular” white singer to sing another song, which then prompted black songwriter Perry Bradford to convince Okeh records to let him record “Crazy Blues” at the session. The recording went on to reveal to record companies a black audience hungry for the blues, and for black song.
Without the removal of the white star’s frame Smith might never have sung Bradford’s blues as the blues, instead keeping it mere novelty. For Smith’s rendition not only begat “race records”—and the promotion of records for a black audience—it also cemented a blues craze first seen in sheet music of the 1910s; from ragtime to cakewalks to boogie-woogie to “Ethiopian Airs” to the blues, sheet music traces the ways in which whites used black forms not just for profit but pleasure.45 This often required, at least on the covers, erasure of the blues’ black origins—substituting white faces on the covers of songs called “blues” in a way later familiar to rhythm and blues and even jazz albums—or defacing those origins enough that they are no longer recognizable, blacking up like “coon songs” that do not picture people but a degraded image. The blackface and white masks the blues and jazz were made to wear also appear among much of the literature of the time. The real framing device that Mamie Smith and Langston Hughes cast off was not only black mores or blackface but whitewash and white pleasure.
Such pleasure often masked a form of anxiety. Rather than a comfort with progress—that American ideal—modernism itself may represent an apprehension about precisely that progress. Part of the blues’ brood, jazz was and remains for many a site of this anxiety. While the music is seen as hectic, jumpy, and symptomatic, jazz is actually the diagnosis: we’ve all come down with a serious case of modernism. In its self-consciousness jazz mirrors modernism; in its willingness to refer to itself (especially later, in bebop), jazz foreshadows the growing self-reflexivity found in the postmodern era and art over the course of the last century.
One example of jazz’s anxiety—and, by extension, modernism’s—is Marie Cardinal’s interestingly titled The Words to Say It. This “autobiographical novel,” mentioned by Toni Morrison in her Playing in the Dark, describes Cardinal’s lifelong bouts of depression and nervous breakdowns—what she calls “the Thing”—a condition first precipitated by hearing Louis Armstrong play live:
My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole. I was not disappointed: the atmosphere warmed up very fast. The scaffolding and flying buttresses of the jazz instruments supported Armstrong’s trumpet, creating spaces which were adequate enough for it to climb higher, establish itself, and take off again. The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those who followed it…. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.46
It would seem the Thing is not only the author’s own anxiety but the modern world’s—the threat of possession tearing at the nerves till fleeing is the only response worth having. (Where for someone like Vachel Lindsay, mislabeled “The Jazz Poet,” the only impulse was to fight.) There’s that Thing, an uneasy “It” again: black and modern and possessed; or should we say dispossessed.
The passage describes Armstrong’s ability so wonderfully, even fetishizing it—but where I see achievement, remapping, a storying tradition, Armstrong’s flights of sound lead the protagonist merely to flee. Faced with such freedom, could she be said to have another choice?
A similar, fetishized feeling courses through the opening of Blair Niles’s 1931 novel, Strange Brother, an important early novel concerning a gay white man exploring Harlem. In its opening paragraphs we find the cabaret as tourist attraction, capturing the venue’s unsettling of the white viewer through a jazz song’s suggestiveness:
Colored lights hung under the low ceiling—red, blue, and yellow lights. There was a dance floor in the center of the room, with tables surrounding it on three sides, and on the fourth side an orchestra. There were saxophones, trombones, trumpets and fiddles, banjos and flutes and drums—a great jazz orchestra. At the tables there were white men and women; and alone on the dance floor there was Glory, standing straight and slender, with the spotlight full upon her, Glory singing the Creole Love Call.
There were no words in Glory’s song. Glory seemed simply to open her mouth and let her heart find expression in wordless sounds which fluttered up from the dark column of her throat and floated through the thick smoke-blue air of the crowded night club.
It was said in Harlem that Glory was the sort of girl who can make a man “see the City,” make a man know joy.
But to June Westbrook, Glory’s voice brought unrest.47
Knowing joy, bringing unrest: these seem the typical, if here well put, poles of jazz for the white viewer. Considering Glory and the “unrest” she and the “colored lights” call forth in the white viewer, we might recall Black Sadie—and her other incarnations whom the scene also evokes.
Actually an Ellington composition, “Creole Love Call” has no words, but is a kind of scatting wordlessness, a blend of language (and love) that is overwhelmingly suggestive, and that little else can name. Unlike the French my grandparents and their entire generation spoke in southern Louisiana, “Creole” in Ellington is not necessarily a tongue but a stand-in for a high-pitched, unsettling, dare I say primitive, wail. Strange Brother’s all-too familiar witnessing of such wordlessness echoes other instances of a white audience used to viewing black art through the scrim of racism—taken to an extreme in minstrelsy’s nonsense, which as Houston Baker recounts, isn’t just linguistic. And yet, the nonsense of minstrelsy did provide meaning, even if it was only to demean.
With Ellington’s “jungle music”—a name reportedly first given it by George Gershwin48—the music provides a pathway far more irreducible and fluid than many white listeners may have first thought. Standing as it does between blues gossip and spiritual thunder, jazz offers not just freedom but another, radical tradition—instead of progress, jazz emphasizes process. Most interested in the past only as a way of riffing toward the future, jazz seems to say we “make it new” only when we make it our own. Negotiating between modern individuality and community, both in its actual form and its ongoing history, jazz and its birth parents, the blues, are in many ways the collective unconscious of African America—and by extension America—offering a firsthand account of risk, redemption, and yearning. No wonder, then, with its sound alone jazz provided both a cure and a cause for anxiety.
If the blues don’t get you, my jazzing must: the conclusion of the “St. Louis Blues” proved less a threat than a promise, the black seduction of modern culture coming true just as did Virginia Woolf’s declaration or Picasso’s portrait of Stein. Still, despite their inventions and predictions—or perhaps because of them—African Americans were often reduced to “It,” a Thing. Such forms of objectification black music would playfully and subversively contest in the very title of one of Duke Ellington’s key numbers, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing).” In its very title the song, which would name swing music, wrested African American music away from the nonsense that threatened us all. Its “It” had no antecedent. Both the “It” and the music, the song insisted, were sui generis. It was not a love call but a battle cry about the direction and meaningfulness of the art.
The “It” here I like to think of as the same “It” in “MAKE IT NEW”—which I take to mean the tradition—but also further, and funkier, a black body, which, for the black storyteller or author, became a body of work. This “It” also happens to be the slippery pronoun Mamie Smith recorded as the other side of “Crazy Blues”: “It’s Right Here for You, If You Don’t Get It, ’Tain’t No Fault of Mine.” At once plainly sexual and more elusively suggestive, the taint is faultless, and right here for you to engage, as tradition. And to make, like the Negro, new.