The University of Chicago Underground Sounds: Oral
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO UNDERGROUND SOUNDS: ORAL TRADITION AND RECORDING CULTURE IN AMERICAN POETRY, 1917–2008 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY ANDREW PEART CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2018 Contents Illustrations . iii Acknowledgments . iv Abstract . vi Introduction . 1 Chapter 1: Carl Sandburg, John Lomax, and the Modernist Revival of Folksong . 31 Chapter 2: Saying the Blues in and after the Chicago Black Renaissance . 100 Chapter 3: Soul Poets of the Black Arts Movement . 170 Coda . 261 Bibliography . 294 ii Illustrations Figure 1: “The Boll Weevil” and “Negro Spirituals,” by Carl Sandburg (1926) . 57 Figure 2: Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues, by Josh White and Waring Cuney (1941) . 111 Figure 3: Caught Up, by Millie Jackson (1974) . 212 Figure 4: Just a Lil' Bit Country, Millie Jackson (1981) . 224 Figure 5: How I Got Ovah: A Gospel Tribute to Carolyn M. Rodgers, featuring Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Billy Preston, and Community First Baptist Church Choir of Dallas (1982) . 234 Figure 6: Ruby Dee, in How I Got Ovah: A Gospel Tribute to Carolyn M. Rodgers . 236 Figure 8: Black Encyclopedia of the Air: A Big Black Beautiful History: Stories of the Rise and Spread of Black Culture in Africa and America (1968–1969) . 251 iii Acknowledgments If there is a special joy to writing a dissertation, it is the opportunity it affords to reflect on the individuals and communities who made it possible. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, Bill Brown, Jennifer Scappettone, and Kenneth Warren, whose commitment and engagement clarified the vision for this project and created openings at every turn for new interpretive possibilities. Their support and guidance has been unwavering since the early years of my graduate school career, and it will be a credit to this dissertation if it reflects the influence they have had on my thinking. My thanks also to Elizabeth Helsinger and John Wilkinson, who provided constructive input on earlier projects that helped nourish the early seeds of this dissertation. The student and faculty members of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop in the Division of the Humanities have sharpened, and sometimes shaken, my thinking about the problems addressed in this dissertation. Over the years, Stephanie Anderson, Joel Calahan, Michael Hansen, Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Patrick Morrissey, Eric Powell, Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz, and Chalcey Wilding have been invaluable interlocutors, while Chicu Reddy and John Wilkinson have been both generous and judicious with the Socratic method. My colleagues at Chicago Review inspired me every day for seven years. Outside the University of Chicago, I owe thanks to several individuals who offered their help to this project at crucial moments. Jahan Ramazani and Herbert Tucker, the editors of New Literary History, provided indispensable commentary on the article version of Chapter 1 that reverberated throughout the entire dissertation. Meanwhile, Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress and Marten Stromberg at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, opened my iv eyes to archival gems that enriched large portions of this project. I thank each one of these scholars for the genuine interest they took in my work. I was especially fortunate in the course of my doctoral research to meet folks who became like family to me. Ed Roberson and Nina Rodgers Gordon welcomed me into their homes, made their personal collections available for my study, and provided warm encouragement over many months for me to finish this dissertation. Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my family, especially my wife Rory Pavach, to whom this dissertation is dedicated, for her boundless love and support and for always, as The Dells sing, staying in my corner. v Abstract “Underground Sounds” examines the roles played by folklore collecting, sound recording, and popular song in twentieth-century American poetry. What was it about the age of mechanical reproducibility in sound, this study asks, that drew poets to the world of folklore, oral tradition, and vernacular song? In recent decades, influential studies of modern poetry and modern media have emphasized experiments with the graphical and graphemic dimensions of language— whether it be the verbal plasticity of poetic texts or the sound patterning of poetry performances—as the sine qua non of modernism. This study, however, highlights a subterranean tradition of collaboration and exchange between American poets and folklorists that contributed to a very different kind of modernism predicated on explorations into the cultural and technological substrata of poetic expression as such. Folklore scholarship in the twentieth century appealed to American poets, I argue, because its theories about cultural identity and cohesion put tools in the hands of poets as the makers of song to address problems of social conflict and anomie. After the First World War, the most salient of these problems for poets and folklorists fell along lines of race and class. The advent of phonography in folklore collecting only deepened poets’ interest in the field, as the medium’s acoustic amplitude and affective resonance seemed to give an aura to song that exceeded the communicative powers of language itself to produce the various forms of cohesion that folklorists upheld as cultural ideals. Since the late nineteenth century, American folklorists found a matrix for theories about cultural identity and cohesion in the ballad. Through readings of Carl Sandburg, Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Rodgers, and others, this study shows how poets in the twentieth century urged folklorists to consider genres of song beyond the ballad—the folksong, the blues, and soul—as cultural concepts with similarly deep social and political stakes. Like the vi ballad, these genres also served folklorists and poets alike as models for the democratic political processes that they thought were capable of solving problems of social conflict and anomie. This study challenges a prevailing view in the current field of ballad studies, however, that sees vernacular song in general as a canon of artifacts expropriated from non-elite cultures and used as vehicles to further elite political ends. In demediating vernacular song from the forms of textual artifactuality in which such reduction could occur, I argue, phonography introduced a new kind of abstraction—acousmatic and imitable voices proliferating throughout recording culture—that also expanded vernacular song’s social and political horizons beyond mere ideology. This study builds on a growing body of scholarship on American literature and popular song by focusing on the ways poets and folklorists made vernacular song a crucible for the politics of racial segregation during Jim Crow, of racial backlash after the Civil Rights Movement, and of class conflict in the postindustrial era. This study makes the case that folklore scholarship was central to the making of modern American poetry. It tells a story of collaboration and exchange between poets and folklorists that is part and parcel of an overarching narrative about the cultural politics of American pluralism and the fate of folk culture in particular as a vehicle in its quest for social and economic equality. This story of modern American poetry begins in Chicago in 1917, where Carl Sandburg debated John Lomax about the status of folksong as a model of cultural hybridization rather than homogeneity. It then explores the folklore-oriented Chicago phase of the Negro Renaissance and finds in Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright a theory of the blues as an expression of critical race consciousness. The story then concentrates on a post-Eurocentric moment in the postwar countercultural avant-garde, when the Black Arts Movement and a new anthropological turn in folklore scholarship used the dual musical and lifestyle concept of soul to vii put black culture at the center of American ethnic pluralism. The story closes with the poet and folklorist Jonathan Williams, who died in 2008 after turning the cultural politics of folklore back on the kinds of class conflict that this year in American economic history would bring to the fore. viii Introduction In 1910, John Avery Lomax, the first literary folklorist to use phonographic recording technology in the field, published his first folksong collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Lomax sensed how the new technology would reshape the media ecology in which folksong collectors gathered materials for assembling what were essentially literary texts, or what he would later call “composite ballads” formed from a combination of recorded performances and manuscript or print variants.1 In the late nineteenth century American philologist James Francis Child had claimed the prestige of oral tradition for his canon of ballads but, like eighteenth-century British antiquarian Thomas Percy, had turned to manuscript sources rather than oral informants because of a distrust of the folk’s own methods of preservation and transmission. For his part, though, Lomax had refashioned the Romantic notion of the “popular ballad” in a form more amenable at once to a backward-looking sense of unmediated, primordial orality and to a forward-looking sense of modern, objective technological capture, apparently rendering transparent the relationship between what he recorded from the mouths of the people and what he ultimately printed on the pages of his songbooks.2 What Lomax did not sense at the time he transcribed his first wax cylinders was the formative role that such a use of phonography would come to play in the development of modern American poetry, beginning in the years just prior to the First World War. Folksong collecting, loosened from the stronghold of philology and realigned with ethnographic and popular modes of literature through the emergence of field 1 John A.