Big City Blues: a Novel with a Critical
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BIG CITY BLUES: A NOVEL WITH A CRITICAL PREF ACE EXPLORING BLUES FORM AND THEME IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE By PHILIP HELDRICH Bachelor of Arts University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 1988 Master of Arts Kansas State University Manhattan, Kansas 1993 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May, 1997 COPYRIGHT By Philip Joseph Heidrich May, 1997 BIG CITY BLUES: A NOVEL WITH A CRITICAL PREFACE EXPLORING BLUES FORM AND THEME IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Thesis Approved: ~v-is-er-.--- Dean of the Graduate College ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In preparing the critical preface, I wish to thank Dr. Brian Evenson for his direction and support, Dr. Edward Jones for his valuable critical eye, Professor Mark Cox for his guidance, and Dr. Patricia Long for her valuable criticism from a vantage point outside the department of English. In helping me throughout various stages in the writing and the editing of the novel, again, I wish to thank Dr. Brian Evenson. I must also give a special thanks to Dr. Steve Heller for his encouragement, direction, and criticism. Likewise, Dr. Gordon Weaver provided support in numerous ways. Let me also thank my wife, Christine NeiB, for her inspiration and patience. My mother, Constance Bellisario Heidrich, also provided continual emotional support, and Donna Neill broke all mother-in-law stereotypes with her encouragement. I wish also to thank the Department of English, especially Dr. Jeffrey Walker fot his guidance, and I wish to note the important financial contributions of the Oklahoma State University Foundation Endowed Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Lastly, I want to give a special thanks to all those not specifically connected with the project that made my years of study at Oklahoma State enjoyable and memorable. Lisa and Rob, if you met The Man, give him my regards. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Part Page I. PREFACE ........................................ V II. WORKS CITED . xlviii III. DISCOGRAPHY . lvi IV. NOVEL ......................... ' .................. 1 iv PREFACE "Now this trouble I been having, I brought it all on myself": A Critical Preface Exploring Blues Form and Theme in Contemporary Literature I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees, I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees, Asked the Lord above "Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please". I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west, I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west, Lord, I didn't have no sweet woman, ooh-well, babe, in my distress. --Robert Johnson "Cross Road Blues" On Friday, November 27, 1936, Robert Johnson entered a San Antonio recording studio and finished laying down the tracks to what was to become the legacy of half his recording life. The songs he recorded during the first scheduled session of the day would come to express more than simply Johnson's feelings. The music recorded that day would prove to become some of the most significant recordings of the twentieth-century, impacting blues artists for years to come. Even Johnson's death, a suspected poisoning by the jealous husband of Johnson's lover, on August 16, J· 1938, would become legendary. In many ways, Johnson's music and mysterious death V create an anchoring point from which to explore the influence of the blues on twentieth-century literature and cultur~ Although such a discussion could certainly become a study of substantial proportions, the objective here is not to duplicate the already established, comprehensive histpries of blues artists, movements, and music but to find a workable definition of the form and theme of blues music and examine its impact upon contemporary literary fiction, including my own. As my study will show, the blues novel, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, is a form using a self-conscious, self-critical lyrical voice emphasizing themes of improvisation and survival. In such a novel, the blues hero fights against inconsequentiality and against self-annihilation in the struggle to have his or her voice be heard. The blues constitute one of the twentieth-century's most prolifically produced, commercially successful, and musically innovative art forms; however, few studies explore the literary influence of the blues. Though important authors and scholars such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Houston Baker, and Phillip Brian Harper have taken up the discussion of blues and literature, few have followed their lead. What emerges from this discussion are many definitions all pointing to the blues' multi-:-faceted nature. The origin of the term "blues," according to Murray, can be traced to Elizabethan England where "blue" was a reference to changes in skin pigmentation brought on by changes in emotion (Stomping 63). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the term "blues" from "blue devils"--a "baleful demon" or state of "despondency" (328)--to a letter by David Garrick dating from 11 July 1741: "I am far from being quite well, tho not troubled wth ye Blews as I have been" (326). By vi 1807, Washington Irving's Salmagundi uses the phrase "a fit of the blues" (OED 326). As both Murray (64) and the OED show, the term "blues" began to be used more and more frequently throughout the nineteenth century, especially in America, where it denoted a state of melancholia. The birth of the blues can commonly be traced to the historical and social circumstances of African Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. As scholars William Barlow, Stephen Calt, Albert Murray, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) point out, the blues has its genesis in a combination of musical and cultural developments of that time. Barlow's work, one of the most thorough and well documented studies to date, describes how the blues can be traced back to African American field songs known as "arhoolies" or the "whoops, hollers, calls, and cries, as they were called, that had been commonplace among southern African Americans since the antebellum plantation days" (17). Barlow further suggests that African American spirituals, work songs, and ballads also contributed to what later became known as "the blues." Calt notes this genre of music evolved more directly from the spiritual "Roll Jordan," which was one of the earliest spirituals learned by slaves (38). Murray confers with both Barlow and Calton such influences; however, he also points out that the development of the blues as a distinct and recognizable musical form has its genesis in the combination of African "sensibility" (brought to America by slaves) with European musical tradition (63). More importantly, for Murray, the blues are an indigenous music native to American culture and a product of the Reconstruction period, where ex-slaves were free to experiment and even earn livings as musicians. In Blues People, LeRoi Jones similarly traces the genesis of the blues back to the forces of African and European culture. He suggests, like Murray, that African Vll music, particularly its polyrhythmic patterns, combined with European traditions influenced the birth of the blues. )According to Jones, African Americans adopted European practices as a result of forced acculturation. In the blues, the European desire for regularity in their musical tradition conflicts and contrasts with the African movement toward irregularity or atonality with respect to European musical scales: "It was also during these years [at the end of slavery] that the Negro's music lost a great many of the more superficial forms it had borrowed from the white man, and the forms that we recognize now as the blues began to appear" (59)J As Barlow, Calt, ( Murray, and Jones show, the blues as an indigenous music grow out of the very historical circumstances of African Americans in the antebellum and Reconstruction periods. The pioneering field work of John Alan Lomax and John Work, who recorded blues artists in the first half of this century; the influential writings of scholars Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson in Negro Workday Songs; and, the film works of William Ferris, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, further the ideas of Barlow, Calt, Murray, and Jones. As a musical form, the blues has a relatively simple structure with complexity arising from stylistic variation and a musician's ability to improvise. Though there are many variations, a typical blues song uses a twelve bar, three line AAB verse structure in which the first two lines repeat and the third responds in rhyme, as in the following example by Skip James from "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": If I ever get off this killing floor, If I ever get off this killing floor, I'll never get down this low no more. viii Many blues also make use of a pentatonic scale with a flattened third or seventh, which give the music its "bluesy" quality. As Richard Middleton describes, a suggestion which echoes Jones' description of the contraries of blues music, the "pentatonic, inflectional musical language" is "antithetical to the functional-tonal language of bourgeois [European] tradition" (77). Another factor contributing to the distinct sound and to the antithetical nature of the blues is the tendency for musicians and vocalists to bend notes above or below the tonal center, creating a "blue note. " As William Tallmadge notes, such practices have their origins in African pitch play (159), where "a pitch which, according to European expectations, would be a natural, is flatted; a flat would be double-flatted; a sharp would become natural" (156). Often times, the vocalist works together with the musicians to create the unique blues sound. Such "accompaniment" gives "structure to the song" (Burns 222).