Blues Tribute Poems in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Poetry Emily Rutter

Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2014 Constructions of the Muse: Blues Tribute Poems in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Poetry Emily Rutter Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Rutter, E. (2014). Constructions of the Muse: Blues Tribute Poems in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1136 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE MUSE: BLUES TRIBUTE POEMS IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Emily Ruth Rutter March 2014 Copyright by Emily Ruth Rutter 2014 ii CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE MUSE: BLUES TRIBUTE POEMS IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY By Emily Ruth Rutter Approved March 12, 2014 ________________________________ ________________________________ Linda A. Kinnahan Kathy L. Glass Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ Laura Engel Thomas P. Kinnahan Associate Professor of English Assistant Professor of English (Committee Member) (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ James Swindal Greg Barnhisel Dean, McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Chair, English Department Professor of Philosophy Associate Professor of English iii ABSTRACT CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE MUSE: BLUES TRIBUTE POEMS IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY By Emily Ruth Rutter March 2014 Dissertation supervised by Professor Linda A. Kinnahan Moving chronologically from the New Negro Renaissance into the contemporary era, my dissertation examines poetic representations of five blues artists: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), and Robert Johnson. Despite extensive scholarship on the blues and these icons, blues tribute poems have remained un(der)studied. Filling in this critical gap, I draw attention to the valuable sociocultural work that poets perform by continuously breathing new life into the blues in general and these artists in particular. At the same time, I contend that poets transform readers’ understandings of blues men and women by investing them with mythic and symbolic qualities that correspond with their own (and often the era’s) aesthetic and ideological concerns. Blues tribute poems, I argue, constitute a distinct and influential subgenre of American poetry—one that combines the mythic and the historical, the oral iv blues tradition and the written poetic one and invites readers to imagine, listen, and ultimately to internalize the images and narratives that poets advance. Although there have been numerous blues figures invoked as muses, I maintain that Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Leadbelly, and Johnson possess what Joseph Roach terms an “it” quality that makes them compelling to generations of poets, historians, and music fans alike. Poetry offers a medium through which artists during any era can put forward their own interpretations of what these icons symbolize. Since the poets in this study are typically invoking these artists posthumously, they are also able to utilize poetic license to a much greater extent than would have been possible if these men and women had still been alive and performing. Indeed, the poet-muse relationship is not a one-sided affair, for blues tribute poets both document and produce sociocultural histories. Ultimately then, my project demonstrates that twentieth- and twenty-first century poets not only engage popular culture and sociocultural history but play significant and often unacknowledged roles in shaping readers’ understandings of them. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my gratitude to Drs. Linda A. Kinnahan, Kathy Glass, Laura Engel, Thomas Kinnahan, and Magali Michael for their wisdom and guidance. This dissertation would never have been completed without the support of my family and friends, particularly Michael S. Begnal, Laura Rutter, Whitney Rutter, David Rutter, Diane Rodelli, Ginger Carter, Cynthia Finch, Mary Parish, Maureen Gallagher, Marianne Holohan, Lindsay Griffin, Lora Klein, Lauren Bennett, and Rachel Bachenheimer. Because of you, I always knew which way to go. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgement .......................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1: Blues Tribute Poems, 1930-1959 .................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: The Black Arts-Era Tribute Poem ................................................................ 58 Chapter 3: Late Twentieth Century Blues Tributes by Male Poets ............................... 110 Chapter 4: Late Twentieth-Century Blues Tributes by Women Poets ........................... 172 Chapter 5: The Twenty-First-Century Blues Tribute Poem .......................................... 230 Coda............................................................................................................................ 288 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 295 vii Introduction When asked to describe the Mother of the Blues, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, in an interview, her one-time bandleader “Georgia Tom” Dorsey recalled a spectacular performance: Ma was hidden in a big box-like affair built like a Victrola. A girl came out and put a big record on it. The band picked up “Moonshine Blues”; Ma sang a few bars inside the big Victrola, then she opened the door and stepped out into the spotlight with her glittering gown that weighed twenty pounds, wearing a necklace of $5, $10, and $20 gold pieces. The house went wild. Her diamonds flashed like sparks of fire falling from her fingers. The gold piece necklace lay like golden armor covering her chest. (qtd in Wald 24) Later in the interview, he notes her remarkable ability to emotionally connect with her audiences: “She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her” (24). These divergent aspects of Rainey’s legacy elucidate her artistic complexity and help to explain why she has remained a larger-than- life figure decades after her death. Accordingly, in his eponymous poem “Ma Rainey” (1930), Sterling Brown stages a Rainey performance and pays tribute to the cathartic relief and inspiration that she provides her African-American fans and, by extension, Brown. With this poem, Brown established a precedent not only for mobilizing historically African-American musical forms to the printed page—a practice that several viii of his New Negro and modernist peers were already engaged in1—but for invoking specific performers as muses. “O Ma Rainey, / Li’l an’ low,” Brown’s speaker cries out, “Sing us ’bout de hard luck / Roun’ our do’” (III. 7-10). Calling for inspiration from a contemporary figure, not a mythic one, Brown blurs the line between literature and biography as his poem transforms Rainey, the dynamic and provocative blues star, into a symbol of African-American folk authenticity. Following Brown, poets from a variety of backgrounds have invoked blues icons as muses and, in the process, participated in the mythmaking surrounding the figures that they honor—whether it has meant constructing Rainey and Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) as embodiments of folk authenticity, Bessie Smith as a helpless victim of Jim Crow racism, Billie Holiday as the epitome of tragedy, or Robert Johnson as a man who made a Faustian bargain in order to gain musical virtuosity. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis maintains, muses “are projected inventions of the imagination inside poems and have historical status as cultural tropes; they can involve actual historical persons attempting to fill these support roles. There is a two-way exchange between the projection and the actuality” (86). Further, Gayle Levy observes, “poetic inspiration works solely on the author, whereas the muse, like the poem, is actually formulated by both the reader and the poet working together. The muse can be considered the product of a cooperative act between the poet and the reader in the same way that one’s close reading of a given poem is the result of the poet’s creative act and the reader’s analytical work” (21). Given this interdependent relationship among poet, 1 In Cane (1923), Jean Toomer references formal and thematic tropes of spirituals, blues, and jazz. Moreover, by the time Brown published “Ma Rainey” (first in the journal Folk-Say in 1930 and two years later in his collection Southern Road), Langston Hughes had already published blues- and jazz-inspired poems in two collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes for a Jew (1927). ix muse, and reader, tribute

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