“I Don't Like the Blues.”: Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository “I Don’t Like the Blues.”: Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional Futures from the Mississippi Delta B. Brian Foster A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Karolyn Tyson Kenneth “Andy” Andrews Mosi Ifatunji Marcus Hunter Zandria Robinson © 2017 B. Brian Foster ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT B. Brian Foster: “I Don’t Like the Blues.”: Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional Futures from the Mississippi Delta (Under the direction of Karolyn Tyson) This dissertation is not about the blues—about the music’s origins in the Mississippi Delta, or its evolution from field holler and work song to Bessie Smith and B.B. King. I do not wish, here, to chronicle or update the record on black American music preferences, and I draw few references to the blues lyric tradition. Rather, this dissertation positions the blues as muse and metaphor; indeed, as an interpretive framework for understanding the racial attitudes, placemaking logics, and folk epistemologies of black southerners in the post-Civil Rights Mississippi Delta. Extending the findings of existent commentary citing the social and sociological capacities of black aesthetic cultures, I demonstrate that black Delta communities imbue the blues with social, cultural, and historical, as well as aesthetic, meaning. I find that while earlier generations embraced and embodied the blues to navigate daily life in the Plantation and Jim Crow South, black southerners today are reimagining the blues—variably as an environment of social memory, site of racial meaning and experience, and arena of regional futurism—and ultimately dispensing with it as they negotiate the emergent realities of the post-Civil Rights Mississippi Delta. I argue that such claims embody a broader way of seeing and negotiating the social world that minds the enduring importance of the past while holding to a transformative vision for the present and future. Indeed, the account offered here, logged during two years of ethnographic iii fieldwork in Clarksdale, Mississippi, straddles, blurs, and crosses boundaries between remembering and reckoning, vigilance and aspiration, front porches and back roads, New South and Old. iv To all them people and all that time, still making the Country South. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Daddy used to lecture my brother and I all the time. “Use three hands if you ain’t got nothing but two,” a demand that struck me as odd. It was never quite suitable for the moment, and it always seemed to come from a place of frustration and impatience. Daddy died a while back, but I still hear his words clearly. “Use three hands.” Now, though, I like to imagine them—Daddy and his words—not merely as the fruit of dissatisfaction, but also as a show of remarkable belief. “Use three hands,” a call to do that which seems beyond the scope of human possibility, a demand to yield to the forces of will and imagination. I did much of this work with three hands. I did much of this work in isolation, holed away in my office or some darkened corner of wherever I happened to be, with Big K.R.I.T. instrumentals in the background. And, I am grateful for those moments, that darkness and solitude (and Big K.R.I.T.). But, what I know for sure is that I—and this work—would not have made it through without the nurturing of a beautiful network of advisors, mentors, compatriots, and friends. To my dissertation committee—Drs. Karolyn Tyson, Kenneth “Andy” Andrews, Mosi Ifatunji, Zandria Robinson, and Marcus Hunter—thank you. You made me better. You made this work better. You were patient. You were thoughtful. You were critical. Most importantly, though, you recognized that I wanted to tell a certain kind of story in a certain vi kind of way, and even when I was unclear on both the story and the way, you allowed me space to figure it out. That is cause for thanks of the highest order. To the numerous organizations and institutions that provided financial support for this work, thank you. In particular, thanks to the National Science Foundation (Grant No. DGE-1144081), the American Sociological Association (Minority Fellowship Program, Cohort 42), and the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Special thanks are also due to Kathy Wood and the Initiative for Minority Excellence at UNC. To the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, thank you. Transitioning to a job while writing a dissertation was overwhelming at times, but it never—not for a second— outweighed the patience, support, and guidance of my colleagues. Especial thanks to Drs. Kirsten Dellinger, Ted Ownby, Kirk Johnson, Willa Johnson, and James “JT” Thomas. To Dr. Robert Reece. You read more drafts of more parts of this thing than anyone. Thank you for your timely, focused, thoughtful, nuanced feedback. Like you always say, “we in this together.” Like we used to always joke about saying, “we made it.” To Dr. Allison Mathews, Joey Brown (the “country scholar”), Kimber Thomas, Dr. Willie Wright, and Mia Keeys, y’all really are the ancestors living and breathing. I am fortunate to know you and fortunate still more to have shared in and benefitted from your brilliance. To Blake Foster, Tiffany Mayfield, Nicky Woods, Princeton Echols, Travis McGowan, Jonathan Nevol, Carlos Wilson, Derrick Bledsoe, Savannah Trice, Tieryaa Metcalf, Tamzen Jenkins, Lorenzo Hopper, Dr. Enoch Claude, Dr. Steven Harris, Dr. Rufai Ibrahim, Felicia vii Arriaga, and a legion of others, thank you for being family, for letting me be distant when I needed to be distant, for bringing me back when I got too far. To two vanguard black women—Jazmine “The King of the South” Walker and Amber “The High Priestest of Black Joy” Phillips—your work on The Black Joy Mixtape saved me. It’s easy to forget to be whole and human in this thing sometimes, to see beyond the gaze and fog. You reminded me. To Ms. Demetria Hereford and the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program at the University of Mississippi, thank you for pushing (and sometimes pulling) me to this point. I needed you. We need you. They need you too. To the late Dr. Jesse Scott. I have kept all those papers from your senior capstone course. I revisit your written comments often. I still read Baker and Shelby and Iton. You were a force. I miss you. We miss you. They should miss you too. To momma, you know I did much of this work at your house, sitting on one of the “good chairs” in the dining room, often with daddy’s favorite Bobby Bland record in the background. You always told me, “just do what you have to do to get it done.” You didn’t really know what I needed to do, or what it might look like to get it done. That did not matter. You let me cry—you let me be whole and human—by myself but next to you. That is cause for a gratitude and love of the highest order. viii PREFACE “I wonder if I’ll be able to say something beautiful.”—the first words in my first journal on my first night in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Exactly what I could say, and how it might be beautiful, I was not entirely sure. Still, I wanted to say something beautiful, to write the thing that I had wanted and needed to read but could not find, a monograph about black folks whose lives played out in “the country”—not Chicago, not New York City, not Atlanta, but the country. I wanted to write about race and inequality in and from a place at the bottom of the margins: the Mississippi Delta. I wanted to give a retrospective on a place long thought to be left behind, to tell about how the people there were striving forward, bearing hopes and dreams for the future. I knew they were striving. I knew they were striving forward because I had read—Zora and Zandria, Richard Wright and Raised Up Down Yonder. I knew they were striving forward because I had lived—most of my life in a little country town in Mississippi, about 120 miles East of that unfamiliar place where I had sat to write my first words in my first journal on my first night. Two years later: the story that emerged was disappointing—maybe there are better words, but for now disappointing, which isn’t to say that it was surprising. It wasn’t surprising because I had read—the Census and Clyde Woods—and found what they had foretold: arrested development; limited opportunity; and big mansions with big yards in the distance. I saw in plain sight the persistence of the colorline, which followed, ballast- for-ballast and mile-for mile, the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad, ix literally and figuratively splitting the town in two. Yet, I also found, as Zora once urged us to see, black folks leading ordinary lives. In the summertime, people liked to be outside. Children laughed and played like children do, with boundless energy and wide smiles, jumping in and over ditches, riding bikes, waving sticks, throwing balls through all manner of hoops. Women and men worked long days, cursed and went to church, drank beer, smoked weed, and played dominos on all manner of tabletops.