Storyville: Discourses in Southern Musicians' Autobiographies
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W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2011 Storyville: Discourses in Southern Musicians' Autobiographies Matthew Daniel Sutton College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, History Commons, and the Music Commons Recommended Citation Sutton, Matthew Daniel, "Storyville: Discourses in Southern Musicians' Autobiographies" (2011). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623346. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-wnm2-z287 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Storyville: Discourses in Southern Musicians' Autobiographies Matthew Daniel Sutton Georgetown, Kentucky Master of Arts, University of Kentucky, 1999 Bachelor of Arts, University of Kentucky, 1994 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary May, 2011 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ~ ~&\w~ Sutton Approved by the Committee, April, 2011 Associate Profe Professor Sus V. Donaldson, English & American Studies T~e olle e of William & Mary ~ Associate Prole~~lfn~ & Southern Studies The University of Mississippi ABSTRACT PAGE This study utilizes many of the tools of the literary critic to identify and analyze the discursive conventions in autobiographies by American vernacular musicians who came of age in the American South during the era of enforced racial segregation. Through this textual analysis, we can appreciate this seemingly amorphous collection of books as a continuing conversation, where descriptions of the South and its music by turns confirm, contradict, and complicate each other. Ultimately, the dozens of southern musician autobiographies published in the last fifty years engage in a valuable and revealing dialogue, creating a virtual "Storyville"; ostensibly disparate works share themes, ideas, and literary approaches, while each narrative is distinguished by unique motifs, idiosyncrasies, and digressions. From this crosstalk emerges a rich history informed by local knowledge as well as a larger, multifaceted portrait of now-vanished musical communities, such as Storyville-era New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta juke-joint circuit. In collaboration with co-authors, southern musicians typically employ a hybrid discursive style that attempts to balance personal subjectivity with historical authority. This narrative approach encompasses literary devices-such as free indirect discourse and paralepsis-and the "thick description" common in the social sciences. Through this reportage, musicians establish themselves as uniquely positioned organic intellectuals and citizen-historians of their respective places and times. Read collectively, musicians' published reminiscences provide important and overlooked first-person reflections on life in the Jim Crow South. TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication 11l Acknowledgements IV List of Figures VI Introduction 1 Chapter I: When It's Story Time Down South 25 Ethel Waters- His Eye Is On the Sparrow 27 Autobiographical Collaborations 41 Paratext 72 Reception 88 Conclusion 93 Chapter II: I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle 95 W.C. Handy - Father of the Blues 103 Echoes of Handy 140 Nina Simone- I Put a Spell on You 149 James Brown- The Godfather of Soul 162 Conclusion 177 Chapter III: In Pursuit of Happiness 180 Louis Armstrong - Swing That Music 183 Louis Armstrong - Satchmo 193 Authorship and Citizenship 240 I Conclusion 248 Chapter IV: Crescent City Blues 251 Sidney Bechet- Treat It Gentle 256 Reviving Storyville 274 New Orleans Crosstalk 293 Conclusion 323 Chapter V: Blues from the South 327 Cotton Fields and Juke Joints 334 Delta Crosstalk 354 David "Honeyboy" Edwards- The World Don't Owe Me Nothing 362 Going North 373 Conclusion 391 Chapter VI: Just One of Those Things 396 The Feminization of Accident 412 Loretta Lynn- Coal Miner's Daughter 417 Taking Control 429 Conclusion 438 Epilogue: Fence-Breaking Blues 441 Works Cited 458 Vita 500 11 DEDICATION To Chris L. Sutton, Musicianer iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "My heart is not weary/ It's light and it's free I've got nothing but affection for all those who've sailed with me" -Bob Dylan, "Mississippi" My sincerest thanks to my dissertation committee for their time and efforts on my behalf: Dr. Charles McGovern, Dr. Susan V. Donaldson, Dr. Arthur Knight, and Dr. Adam Gussow. I also wish to acknowledge my debt to Dr. John Cawelti, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, who, many years ago, helped out a law-school dropout with an interest in literature; his kindness and example will never be forgotten. For a freelance writer, time is money. Therefore, I am doubly gratified at the time and care Kurt Loder, David Ritz, George Vecsey, and Ellen Wright spent in answering my (occasionally impertinent) questions about their writing and collaborative methods. Colonial Williamsburg Productions provided me with valuable on-the-job training. The students I taught in William and Mary's American Studies and Literary and Cultural Studies programs were exceptionally good sounding boards for many of the ideas advanced in this study. The American Studies Program's awarding of a summer research grant and two conference-travel grants opened up some important doors, and for that I am grateful. Above all, I appreciate the unflagging support of my parents, Chris and Pat Sutton, and the encouragement of family and friends everywhere. This project was iv bookended by the joyous arrivals of my nieces, Madison Nicole Smith and Embry Kate Sutton. My heart was lifted by, among many other things, their pure love of music. I await the day I can pass on to them the music and writings discussed in the pages that follow, and look forward to what they can teach me in return. I am grateful for all the support I received during the long period of researching and writing this dissertation. To circle back to Dylan's "Mississippi": ''Things should start to get interesting about now." v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Ethel Waters- His Eye Is on the Sparrow 28 Figure 2: The Autobiographical/ Musical Persona 34 Figure 3: Types of Collaborative Writing by Musicians 46 Figure 4: W.C. Handy- "St. Louis Blues" 134 Figure 5: Louis Armstrong "Nation Builders" Plaque 181 vi 1 INTRODUCTION "In the swift whirl of time, music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that which we aspire. Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee."- Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music" A few weeks after research for this study commenced in 2002, Commentary's Terry Teachout augmented a positive review of jazz great Oscar Peterson's autobiography with a blindside assault on the authorship of jazz autobiography. The critic found fault with some books' emphases on the darker aspects of musicians' private lives, while other works were disparaged for "shed[ ding] little light on the inner lives of their nominal authors, and still less on the music made by those remarkable men" ("Music" 67). On the whole, Teachout accused musicians who author books of being inarticulate, lacking introspection and historical consciousness, and leaving their life stories to the literary mercy of hack ghostwriters. By misrepresenting over half a century of largely well-received jazz autobiographies as either sensationalized confessions of addiction or contrived Horatio Alger stories, Teachout overlooked the reality that these autobiographies have served as informed, eyewitness accounts of the world(s) of jazz to a knowledgeable reading public. First person works as disparate as Louis Armstrong's Satchmo (1954), Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog (1971), Art Pepper's The Straight Life (1979), and Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland's Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life (2001) demonstrate 2 the range of jazz musicians' subjective experiences, and the ability of autobiography to articulate both the music and its milieu with insight and sophistication. Elsewhere, the respected Journal of Country Music qualified an overall complimentary review of recent country-music autobiographies by asking in a headline, "What Hath Tom Carter Wrought?"-a reference to the journalist who has co-authored the best-selling life stories of George Jones, Reba McEntire, and broadcaster Ralph Emery, among others. The mock-horror of the headline is significant, signaling an anxiety that such autobiographies were undermining authority in country-music historiography by unleashing something new and out of control into the field. Both Teachout and the Journal's argumentative premises illustrate some of the misconceptions and misreadings of the content and context of American musicians' autobiographies. Yet given this assumed lack of reliability, as well as the sub literary status of celebrity autobiography, it is remarkable how extensively and unquestioningly they are cited in some quarters, with great leeway given to their provenance and intention. Autobiographies now regularly shape the narrative structure and content of popular studies and histories of vernacular music, like