Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature
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University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2019 Rambling blues: mapping contemporary North American blues literature Josh-Wade Ferguson Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ferguson, Josh-Wade, "Rambling blues: mapping contemporary North American blues literature" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1752. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1752 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RAMBLING BLUES: MAPPING CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN BLUES LITERATURE A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by JOSH-WADE FERGUSON August 2019 Copyright Josh-Wade Ferguson 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT “Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally, this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926), August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods (2015), Kiese Laymon’s Long Division (2013), Joy Harjo’s “Everybody Has a Heartache: A Blues” (2014), Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), Richard Wagamese’s Keeper’n Me (1994), Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999), The Buz’Gem Blues (2002), The Berlin Blues (2007), and Cerulean Blue (2015) and George Elliott Clarke’s Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983) and Whylah Falls (1990). In contemporary African American literature, the blues, through representations of music, musicians, and aesthetics, enables a cross-generational connection that focuses on how precarity in the wake of slavery and its afterlives continue to plague black working-class communities; the blues in contemporary African American literature animates a cultural memory. Understanding the development of the blues as a form of cultural remembering as well as an idiom of resistance and self-expression provides an important critical framework to articulate the allure of the blues for Indigenous and ii African-Canadian writers. What develops across these multiple voices, are representations of the blues as a musical form, a way of reckoning with personal and collective pain, an expressive mode of resistance, and a means of articulating socio-economic precarity in the wake of slavery and settler colonialism. Ranging from the US Deep South, and Indigenous reservations, to black Nova Scotia, Canada, this dissertation provides a remapped understanding of blues writing, outlines the debt English North American literature owes to African American culture, and articulates the blues as a contemporary and global form of expression that resists cultural and social elision. iii DEDICATION For Dad, I did it. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would never have been able to complete this project without the guidance I received from my committee. My deepest gratitude to Adam Gussow, Jay Watson, Leigh Anne Duck, Derrick Harriell, and Tony Bolden for their suggestions, comments, and guidance. This project was supported by a generous summer fellowship from the University of Mississippi English Department and the chair, Ivo Kamps. I’m indebted to Dan Stout and his inexhaustible patience. Thank you to Martyn Bone for the careful reading. Eve Dunbar gave me the support, mentorship, and friendship I needed to get through some of the more difficult stages. Stephen Monroe kept me afloat and at home—thank you. Thank you to my friends and family as they supported me over these many years. Jacob Agner, Scott Obernesser, and Brendan Steffen listened to me when I needed it and distracted me when that was a better option. David, David, Dave, and Ashton reminded me there was life beyond the dissertation. Bobby gave me a home in Mississippi. Mack never quit believing in me. Thank you to Dr. Thai Tran and Kim Loan Ta. Your support and love have meant the world to me. Jan-Leigh, thank you for all the phone calls. Mom, I hope I can keep making you proud. And, to Lizzie Tran, I was blessed the day I met you. Thank you for your patience, kindness, and tough love. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. ii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION: RAMBLING BLUES ................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE: BLUES, HISTORY, AND MEMORY …………….................................... 17 CHAPTER TWO: BLUES, PRECARITY, AND REMEMBERING ....................................... 58 CHAPTER THREE: BLUES, SOVEREIGNTY, AND INDIGENEITY ................................. 96 CHAPTER FOUR: BLUES, BLACKNESS, AND AFRICAN-CANADIANITÉ ................... 140 LIST OF REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 185 VITA ......................................................................................................................................... 206 vi Introduction: Those Rambling Blues It’s not only what happened to you—it’s what happened to your foreparents and other people. And that’s what makes the blues. Yonder Come the Blues, John Lee Hooker (2001) Contemporary blues and jazz women come from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, and certainly the audience for this music resides not only within but far beyond the borders of black culture. With the globalization of music distribution—indeed, with such developments as unauthorized CD production in some countries—the scope of black music and its historically broad implications can no longer be confined to African American communities. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis (1998) The blues went traveling and wound up in every corner of the world. When I Left Home, Buddy Guy (2012) For the 2019 Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago, IL, I organized a panel entitled “Sweet Home Chicago? Rethinking Blues Literature.” Chicago, one of the most famous urban homes of blues music, was an appropriate location to interrogate how we read for the blues through place, space, ethnicity, national identity, and narrative aesthetic. In the same city where Muddy Waters, Etta James, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, and numerous other black southern migrants made names for themselves as stars of the blues, I asked my panelists to present papers that provided new and dynamic ways of conceiving how we recognize, discuss, and analyze representations of blues music, musicians, and aesthetics in literature. Considering the disciplinary changes in the humanities, I asked them to discuss how blues literature can be 1 read through critical race theory, regional studies, transnationalism, post-colonial studies, music studies, activism, and popular culture. The goals of the panel were to work through the current state of blues literature; assess its (continuing) disciplinary value; articulate the literature’s function as cultural memory and national history; investigate the blues’ ability to express cultural experiences beyond the US and black experience; and reconsider the future of the literature as a whole. A tall order, to be sure. In my call for papers, I provided two necessary areas of inquiry that would help illuminate contemporary readings of blues literature: First, I wanted papers that examined the role of the blues, both a music and black working-class expressive idiom, in contemporary African American literature. With the turn to what the cultural critic and TV personality Touré deems “post-blackness,” where individual expression no longer constitutes the voice of the black community, the blues lose their power to, as Black Arts intellectual Larry Neal put it, “reach way down into the maw of the individual and collective experience” (425). Because they are no longer a black popular music that expresses the de jure experience of black life under Jim Crow, the blues become, to paraphrase Kenneth Warren’s argument concerning the change in African American identity after the Civil Rights Act, either history or memory.1 Leaving us to ask, is blues an artifact that once held prominence but no longer holds any cultural weight, or a part of a cultural past that still informs the African American literature produced today? What, if anything, do the blues offer contemporary African American literature? The second area of inquiry was meant to expand the generic boundaries of blues literature by asking the panelists to examine the myriad blues novels, poems, and plays