The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry
248
The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry
248Overview
The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly—and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.
Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 738 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
"Don't Like My Ocean, Don't Fish in My Sea"
Blues Muses, Racial Uplift, and Queer Camaraderie
If you don't like my ocean, don't fish in my sea Don't like my ocean, don't fish in my sea Stay out of my valley and let my mountain be.
— Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith, "Don't Fish in My Sea"
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday were some of the first black women celebrities, gaining fame during the pre–civil rights era, a time when the majority of black women were struggling to make ends meet performing menial labor. These blues women also became artistic inspirations, subjects of praise, and vehicles through which poets Sterling Brown, Myron O'Higgins, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O'Hara express their personal and sociopolitical outlooks. Their poetic portraits register blues women's newly iconic stature, while suggesting concerns (and even anxieties) about what Rainey, Smith, and Holiday represent. In particular, Brown, O'Higgins, Hayden, Hughes, Bishop, and O'Hara track the development of a discourse of blues authenticity that will continue to shape blues reception and criticism across the twentieth century and into our own era. Within this discourse, the musicians portrayed are revered not for the performative aspects of their recordings and stage personae but for their personal connections to hardship, especially those faced by African Americans.
Moreover, while this chapter spans three decades — beginning with Brown's 1930 "Ma Rainey" and concluding with O'Hara's 1959 "The Day Lady Died" — the poetic portraits that follow are remarkably consistent in their avoidance of the aspects of their muses' personae that risk confirming the caricatures circulating about black women as hypersexual and/or deviant. As Angela Y. Davis notes of Rainey's and Smith's music, "One of the most obvious ways in which blues lyrics deviated from that era's [1920s and 30s] established popular musical culture was their provocative and pervasive sexual — including homosexual — imagery." Bold and bawdy lyrics such as those of the epigraph, for example, were common in Rainey's and Smith's repertoires. Although these deviations from sanitized (read: white) music helped these blues women attract an avid listening public, the poets examined here omit any reference to such illicit material. Furthermore, while Holiday was not overtly sensual in her music and was widely admired for her elegant star image, her glittering gowns and iconic gardenia flowers, her lifestyle cut against the grain of middle-class social mores, fascinating the public through tales of her narcotics addiction, troubles with the law, and masochistic relationships with men (and women). Yet the poetic portraits of Holiday examined in this chapter do not mention Holiday's risqué life. Instead, the poets involved frame the three singers' importance in terms of racial uplift (Brown, O'Higgins, Hayden, and Hughes) or interracial, queer alliances (Bishop and O'Hara) and avoid the racy aspects of their lives.
In addition to their shared elisions of blues women's risqué behavior, this chapter's portraits are bound by significant and previously understudied dialogic relationships. For example, O'Higgins's "Blues for Bessie" represents Smith and the blues tradition more generally in ways reminiscent of his former Howard University professor Brown's "Ma Rainey"; yet O'Higgins's urgent tone regarding Jim Crow racism indicates a shift away from the optimism of the New Negro period and toward the galvanizing spirit of sociopolitical resistance that would launch the civil rights movement. At the same time, O'Higgins sets the stage for his contemporary Hayden, who first published his tribute to Smith, "Homage to the Empress of the Blues" in O'Higgins and Hayden's 1948 collection The Lion and the Archer. In the poem, Hayden portrays Smith as a much-needed source of inspiration, "a favorite scenic view," for impoverished African Americans, thereby ensuring that she will be remembered for more than just the tragic death that O'Higgins mourns in his poetic tribute.
Similar dialogic relationships link this chapter's three poetic portraits of Holiday. For instance, the initial "song" in Elizabeth Bishop's "Songs for a Colored Singer" was included in Hughes and Arna Bontemps's 1951 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949. Presumably around the same time that Hughes was collecting the material for this anthology (including Bishop's poem), he published "Song for Billie Holiday," which offers a notably more tragic representation of Holiday than Bishop's. (In the poem, Hughes foreshadows Holiday's death a decade later, while registering anxiety about her enervated image being broadcasted through the white-dominated medium of television). O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," arguably the most famous "Billie Holiday poem" to date, echoes Hughes's elegiac tone, as O'Hara marks the singer's untimely death at the age of forty-four. Yet, where Hughes characterizes Holiday as the epitome of the tragic black woman (both self-destructive and socially oppressed), O'Hara emphasizes her resilience. For Bishop and O'Hara both, Holiday, an unabashedly bisexual woman, is a touchstone through which they forge cross-cultural alliances and obliquely express their queer identities.
For all of these poets, then, blues women do much more than add grist to the creative mill. They are honored for their art and often the sway they hold over their audiences, while functioning as avatars by which these poets impart their own outlooks and the structures of feeling of the era more generally. Reading their poetic portraits alongside one another, we are able to examine the ways in which these writers revise each other's interpretations of both the blues and of famous black women singers across three decades. At the same time, readers are invited to reimagine our understandings of these figures and their music with these distinct poetic representations in mind. Perhaps most importantly, we see the ways in which American poets (black and white) were becoming engaged not only with black vernacular forms, a trend that had been occurring for quite some time, but also in blues celebrity and the discourse of authenticity that informs it. Indeed, the portraits by Brown, O'Higgins, Hayden, Hughes, Bishop, and O'Hara that follow not only register blues women's increasing symbolic significance but also elucidate these poets' interest in showing readers how and why the artists their poetry invokes matter.
The Classic Blues Woman Tribute
The first invocation of a blues muse, Brown's "Ma Rainey," is best appreciated by considering the New Negro sociopolitical and cultural context in which it was produced. Although it was Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" that ushered in the era of "classic" blues singers, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith certainly became the most famous of these, while many of their counterparts, including Mamie Smith herself, have been largely forgotten. As Paige A. McGinley avers, "Seizing on artistic flamboyance that codes sexual 'deviance' and economic ambition, Rainey and Smith refashioned the image of the black woman on stage."
Born in 1886, Gertrude Pridget married William "Pa" Rainey in 1904. The pair traveled with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels for the next several years, billed as the "Assassinators of the Blues." Later, Rainey was marketed as the "Mother of the Blues," for she was one of the first to perform the genre, incorporating it into her tent-show performances beginning in 1902. After she began recording with Paramount Records, the company also referred to her as the "Paramount Wildcat," reflecting the fact that she recorded nearly one hundred songs and was their "most recorded female star" during the 1920s.
Eight years Rainey's junior, Smith met Ma and Pa Rainey in 1912, at which point, as legend has it, Rainey "discovered" Smith and taught her to sing the blues. Most critics agree that Rainey may have given Smith singing advice and taught her a few songs, but by the time they met Smith was already a skilled singer with a style all her own. As with Rainey, Smith was a deft negotiator of stardom, creating a celebrity persona that defied prevailing stereotypes of black women performed routinely on the minstrel stage. Her moniker, the Empress of the Blues, evokes the glamour and regal stature that characterized Smith's fame. At the same time, she cultivated a down-to-earth public persona. As Buzzy Jackson notes, "Smith's voice was part of the fabric of everyday black life in the 1920s, entertaining and inspiring her audience in the parlor, in the barrooms, and onstage." This widespread appeal, especially the part of it based on Smith's personal experience with the hardships the black community faced as a whole, was not lost on poets, as O'Higgins's and Hayden's tributes demonstrate.
While Rainey, Smith, and their colleagues maintained large and devoted fanbases, the architects of the New Negro Renaissance — W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson, for example — were less certain about the sociocultural role they should play. As Jayna Brown notes, "Promoters of the Renaissance were bound in some respects to an uplift ideology — the idea that the race could be uplifted — through the cultivation and modernization of their less fortunate brethren, and the vernacular forms they brought with them." Put another way, "fine arts had an inseparable relationship to the low down, funky, dirty jazz and blues," but "these profane forms had to be controlled, channeled, cleansed, and straightened, used only to infuse the finer arts." Given the anxiety surrounding vernacular culture, many New Negro writers and artists either invested in Euro-American art forms, Countee Cullen is one of the most frequently cited examples of this aesthetic outlook, or, in the interest of proving the value of black folk forms, sought to marshal the creativity of these forms to the production of high art.
Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, however, were unequivocal in their enthusiasm for the blues and, in Hughes's case, jazz. As Hughes writes in his oft-quoted 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," "Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand"; moreover, "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. ... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either." Similarly, Brown championed the blues on its own terms. Both men sought to link their poetry and poetics to this indigenously African American musical style and, as is clear in Brown's "Ma Rainey" and Hughes's "Song for Billie Holiday," the legacies of iconic blues women. Nearly a century later, Brown and Hughes are still heralded for this foundational work in "establishing the complex crossroads of the blues inscribed in the history and tradition of the written word." Nonetheless, there remains much more to examine in terms of their representations of blues women. For instance, what do Brown and Hughes privilege and elide in regard to blues women's personae, and how do their sociopolitical commitments, especially in regard to racial uplift, inform their portraits? The same questions may be asked of the oeuvre of O'Higgins and Hayden. Taken together, what do the poetic representations examined here suggest about the discursive intersections between race, gender, and celebrity in the pre–civil rights era, as well as the conceptions of blues authenticity emerging during this period?
For Brown in particular, Rainey becomes a vehicle through which he emphasizes the significance of the blues for fostering community and resisting white dominance, qualities that he worries are under threat. In "The Blues as Folk Poetry," an essay published alongside "Ma Rainey" in the 1930 edition of the journal Folk-Say, Brown announces his concerns about the commercialization of and perceived turn toward vulgarity in the blues: "The poetry of the Blues deserves close attention. Crudities, incongruities, of course, there are in abundance — annoying changes of mood from tragedy to cheap farce. This seems to be entering more recently, a sophisticated smut, not the earlier breadth of Rabelais, but the snickering of the brothel. Blues are becoming cabaret appetizers. Perhaps the American public, both Negro and white, prefers this to the simpler, more poetic phrasing of burdened folk. But at their most genuine they are accurate, imaginative transcripts of folk experience, with flashes of excellent poetry." Warning of the "cheap face" and the influence of "brothel" vulgarities, Brown privileges an unadulterated blues uncorrupted by the "crudities" of "cabaret" culture despite the fact that the art form from its beginnings was replete with frank references to both heterosexual and homosexual relations that, while not necessarily consummated in brothels, were not all within the bounds of heterosexual marriage. In a 1974 interview with Charles Rowell, Brown reiterated the importance of maintaining the purity of the blues: "I think the blues should be kept authentic. And then again the qualities of the blues are so strong and distinctive that it's easy to recognize the fake blues." This decades-long interest in distinguishing between genuine and "fake" blues was predicated on Brown's desire to preserve the collective spirit of resistance undergirding the music, while simultaneously demonstrating the beauty and sophistication of African American folk art as a counternarrative to claims of white superiority. These were not merely critical interests; they are manifest in Brown's own representation of Rainey as a star whose allure is predicated not on her glamour and panache but on her "authentic" connection to the black masses in the rural South.
In fact, Brown shows this connection strengthening as the poem develops across its four parts: "Ma Rainey" progresses from the speaker's description of the audience's arrival to Rainey's tent-show performance; to the speaker's own homage to Rainey; to Rainey's rendition of "Backwater Blues"; and finally to the audience's tearful response. Through this narrative framework, which calls upon multiple speakers, Brown elucidates the profound effect of Rainey's performance on her audience as it is transformed from an initially heterogeneous group, "some jokers keep deir laughs a-goin'" whereas "some folks sits dere waitin' wid deir aches an' miseries," to a unified collective by the poem's end. Moreover, since everyone in the poem speaks the same language, there is no hierarchy of linguistic registers that could potentially degrade the audience members' vernaculars. Thus, while Rainey is ostensibly the subject of the poem, "Ma Rainey" is focused primarily on the audience, particularly Rainey's male fans, and her identity is determined almost entirely by the qualities that they, via Brown, invest in her.
Though "Ma Rainey" does not replicate a blues song structure, Brown formally alludes to several commonly employed blues techniques. The poem's final part begins with a two-line aa rhyme, reaffirming the community's admiration of Rainey through vernacular phrasing frequently quoted by critics in their descriptions of Rainey's legacy: "I talked to a fellow, an' the fellow say, / 'She jes' catch hold of us, somekindaway." Employing the caesura in the stanza's first line, Brown gestures toward the singing of a standard blues song in which the beat would serve as the natural pause between two lyrical phrases, such as in the epigraph's "Don't like my ocean, don't fish in my sea." Next, the speaker recounts hearing Rainey sing "Backwater Blues one day," some of the lines of which the poem incorporates:
'It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night, Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
'Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll Thousan's of people ain't got no place to go.
'Den I went an' stood upon some high ol' lonesome hill, An' looked down on the place where I used to live.'
In transcribing these lyrics, Brown allows the song to stand on its own terms and voice the suffering and injustices of black life in the Jim Crow South. Though the song refers to a natural disaster, it exposes the racism that left thousands of black Americans stranded while their white counterparts were rescued from the flooded riverbanks. Yet, as Tony Bolden points out, Brown "does not so much incorporate Smith's song ["Backwater Blues"] as riff on it," altering slightly the verb tense, the stanza structure, and the opening word in the first two lines. Affiliating himself with Rainey and incorporating this revised version of "Backwater Blues" into "Ma Rainey," Brown signals his desire to be part of this communal blues tradition.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Blues Muse"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Blues Muse Tradition
1. “Don’t Like My Ocean, Don’t Fish in My Sea”: Blues Muses, Racial Uplift, and Queer Camaraderie
2. “Never Was a White Man Had the Blues”: Blues Icons and Black Power
3. “I Ain’t Gonna Marry, Ain’t Gonna Settle Down”: Blues Women and Intersectionality
4. “Blues Falling Down Like Hail”: Blues Men and the Second-Wave Blues Revival
5. “It’s Gonna Carry Me through This World”: The Post-Soul Blues Muse
Coda. Repetition with a Difference: Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Muse
Notes
Bibliography
Index