"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen to This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations of Music in Ficti
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2008 "I will learn you something if you listen to this song": southern women writers' representations of music in fiction Courtney George Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation George, Courtney, ""I will learn you something if you listen to this song": southern women writers' representations of music in fiction" (2008). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3748. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3748 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “I WILL LEARN YOU SOMETHING IF YOU LISTEN TO THIS SONG”: SOUTHERN WOMEN WRITERS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF MUSIC IN FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English By Courtney George A.B., University of Georgia, 1999 May, 2008 For my mother (the writer), my father (the drummer), and my three dogs (the listeners)… “I love old songs and what they know/ Just turn ‘em up and let ‘em go.” -Yonder Mountain String Band ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are so many people to thank for help with this project. First, thank you to a very supportive director, Katherine Henninger, and committee, John Lowe, Joyce Jackson, Rick Moreland, and David Smyth. I am especially indebted to Katie, for pushing me harder with every draft and for allowing me use of her chapter on post-southerness before its publication. I also want to thank John Lowe, who granted me access to his Hurston microfilms and other Hurston materials, and Brannon Costello, who gave me access to his Hurston chapter before publication (I am ever thankful for the wonderful southern literature faculty here at LSU). Dr. Susannah Monta also deserves kudos for her encouragement and for her excellent courses in Renaissance literature, which introduced me to new historicism and provided a special impetus for this study. Add an exceptional thanks to Erica Locklear, who has been the best reader and dissertation- process partner a girl could want. Keith Moody also deserves a million thank yous for bearing the brunt of my moods during this process. I thank all of my peers, friends, and family who have offered their support—whether in the form of reading for me, talking with me, cheering for me, or calming me down. Here’s the short list: James Ayers, Brooke Champagne, Patrick Chaney, Jennifer Kelso Farrell, Colleen Fava, Andy and Becky George, Carrie Green, Ashley Hill, Blake Hocutt, Andy and Kate Hoefer, Casey Kayser, Greg Molchan, Ioanna Panos, Peggy Trenta, Shane Wallace, Tiffany Walter, and Scott Whiddon. I love you all so much and would not have accomplished this without your help. A final thanks goes to my students at LSU whose comments on literature (and music) taught me more about this project and often inspired me to rethink my own ideas. Geaux Tigers!! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………....v Introduction: Southern Women Writers’ Musical Formulations of Identity, Community, Memory, and History……………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: “Explaining the Blues” : White Women, the Black Community, and Southern Musical Culture in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee .…………………….………………..23 Chapter Two: “My Man Treats Me Like a Slave”: The Triumph of Womanist Blues over Blues Violence in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple …………………………………………………...67 Chapter Three: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”: Musical Salvation in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina …………………….100 Chapter Four: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”: Lee Smith’s Country Music Post-South in The Devil’s Dream ……………………………………..133 Epilogue...……………………………………………………………………………...181 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………183 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………..195 iv ABSTRACT This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the South. I examine novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, and Lee Smith to explore the many ways these women employ blues, gospel, and country music through tropes of female musician characters, song lyrics, or musical structures in order to re-imagine a South less constrained by paternalist ideas about sexuality, race, class, and religion. In its unique combination of music history, literary analysis, and cultural theory, “I Will Learn You Something” models a productive interdisciplinary approach to understanding diverse women writers’ rhetorical strategies for “learning” readers about female voices often neglected in American literary and musical history. v INTRODUCTION: SOUTHERN WOMEN WRITERS’ MUSICAL FORMULATIONS OF IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, MEMORY, AND HISTORY Let me tell you, girls, if your man ain’t treatin’ you right/ Let me tell you, I don’t mean no wrong/ I will learn you something if you listen to this song/ I ain’t here to try to save your soul/ Just want to teach you how to save your good jelly roll/ Goin’ on down the line a little further now, there’s many a poor woman down/ Read on down to chapter nine, women must learn how to take their time/ Read on down to chapter ten, takin’ other women men you are doin’ a sin/ Sing ‘em, sing ‘em, sing them blues, let me convert your soul… -Bessie Smith, “Preachin’ the Blues” (Davis 328) In her song, “Preachin’ the Blues,” Tennessee-native Bessie Smith assures her female audience that her blues can “convert your soul” and teach women how to “save” their “good jelly roll” from mistreating men. Smith’s words offer one example of what Alice Walker, writing about race and class oppression in "Coming in from the Cold," invokes as "the conflict between us and our oppressors and the centuries it has not at all silently raged" (63). While Walker calls for remembering the "vibration of souls" that can be found in the "idiosyncracies" of suppressed, vernacular speech, Smith's song invokes specifically gendered vibrations of memory in a far more public realm: the performed and published song. When Smith tells other women—and any men that might be in the audience—that she “will learn [them] something if [they] listen to this song,” she summons the power of expression that music as both a private and public performance has held for southern women, as well as how sharing this expression builds a southern community that challenges patriarchal control. Calling attention to "the line" and chapters of an already existing, or "written," collective memory, Smith uses literary and religious metaphors to proclaim her blues as an instructional book of "not at all silent" women's resistance, communal cooperation, self-determination, and empowerment. This dissertation continues Smith's project from the opposite angle, by analyzing southern women writers’ invocations of women’s popular music to "learn" their readers about 1 southern formulations of women's identity, community, memory, and history. In their novels, these southern women writers "teach" (if not "preach") about the diverse ways women’s musical culture can be used to illuminate, resist, and revise gender, race, and class discriminations in a patriarchally imagined, yet contested, southern social system. My choice of authors and texts seeks to challenge critical and literary barriers by revealing the interdisciplinary cross-cultural influences of four black and white women writers from different regional and sexual backgrounds, writing about a diverse southern popular musical culture that includes blues, gospel, and country. 1 Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream (1992) exemplify the varied use of musical tropes (lyrics, structures, and characters) in fiction to depict white and black, male and female, secular and religious, gay and straight, privileged and underprivileged southerners inhabiting different southern spaces and time periods. I argue that these writers recall the complex and underexamined history of southern women's musical expression to reclaim the power of those voices in a literary frame—to show how lower-class black and white women have been "speaking back" unsilently all along, even if it was unrecognized in dominant histories at the time—and to reveal when and how that power can be exploited, manipulated, and in some cases used to reinforce the very gender, race, and class lines it threatens. What brings these authors’ diverse works together is the foregrounding of the interrelationships among music, gender, religion, and the South. As Bessie Smith’s song 1 In its project of deconstructing boundaries, this work participates in what has been termed the “new” southern studies, especially following in the traditions of Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire , Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie , and Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson’s collection Haunted Bodies —works that foreground gender construction and women’s writing as a way to break down barriers between diverse southern peoples and varied discursive forms.