BLUES MULTIVOCALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND SONG As A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University £o K In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree • Lt3 Master of Arts In English: Literature by Collin Ludlovv-Mattson San Francisco, California January 2016 Copyright by Collin Ludlow-Mattson 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Blues Multivocality in Twentieth-Century Literature and Song by Collin Ludlow-Mattson, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Concentration in Literature at San Francisco State University. Lois Lyles, Ph.D. Professor of English Geoffrey Green,'•'Ph.D. Professor of English BLUES MULTIVOCALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND SONG Collin Ludlow-Mattson San Francisco, California 2016 This thesis argues for the existence of blues literature, a type of literature rooted in the ethos and aesthetic of blues music that, like blues music, is communally multi vocal and does very real work for its African-American creators and audience— serving as keeper of both cultural memory and habits of mind for psychological well-being. The kernel of each of the thesis’ three chapters is the reciprocally explicative rhetorical and philosophical comparison of a work of blues literature with a blues song. By looking at Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Blues Is a Feeling” in conversation with August W ilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first chapter argues that the singing of blues songs can be a sort of self-psychoanalytic “talking cure” useful for processing and moving past race-based trauma and that one can acquire this potentially salutary knowledge by reading Black Bottom. The second chapter, in which Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” are analyzed side-by-side, asserts that the reason that the blues is an effective vehicle for life lessons is that blues works impart life lessons in a way that is not abstract and moralistic but life- based and practical. The third chapter looks at Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man through the lens of Jimmy Rushing’s, Count Basie’s, and Ed Durham's “Good Morning Blues” in order to argue that a depreciatory, Hobbesian type of comedy aimed at abusive whites, typically found in the blues, is psychologically cathartic and inoculative againsi future race-based traumatic stress injuries. All three chapters argue that blues literature and blues songs preserve time-tested techniques African Americans can use to maintain psychological salubrity and cultural connection in the face of the iniquity and hostility they have historically encountered in their own country. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my parents, Jon T. Mattson and Maryann Ludlow, without whose love and support I would not be in the enviable position I am in today. I would also like to thank my two thesis readers, Dr. Lois Lyles and Dr. Geoffrey Green, without whose guidance and encouragement I would not have been able to realize this piece of work. v TABLE OF CONTENTS The Blues as Folk Medicine in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.....................1 The Blues as Work Songs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.......................................... 31 The Blues as a Comedic Tonic in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man..................................... 68 Bibliography............................................................................................................................98 1 The Blues as Folk Medicine in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom I had to look at black life with an anthropological eye, use language, character, and image to reveal its cultural flashpoints and in the process tell a story that further illuminated them. This is what the blues did. Why couldn 7 1? I was, after all, a bluesman. —August Wilson, Preface to Three Plays August Wilson was not a musician. He did not finger guitar strings or piano keys but typewriter keys. Still, he identified as a bluesman. He was much influenced by Amiri Baraka, who contends that the blues is not just a musical style but a total way of life and a consciousness. Wilson expressed the idea in his plays and in interviews, associated with the Black Arts Movement, that in all aspects of life “blues people manifest a blues sensibility . [which] has been culturally codified into an aesthetic that shows out in everything done, not just in the music” (Salaam 10). To view the music as its own independent, isolate entity, apart from the culture it is an expression of, to see B.B. King in the spotlight and fail to see the rest of segregated Mississippi along with him, is to ignore the fact that the blues is folk music; and folk music is intimately related to the folkways of the community from which it springs (Asch 29). August Wilson, hov/ever, was not from the South—the wellspring of the blues. The grandchild of a woman who walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania during the early years of the Great Migration, he grew up in Pittsburg during the fifties and sixties—the years when the blues was waning in popularity (Elkins xix). Lacking a direct connection to the source of 2 the music, his relationship with the blues was more mediated than that of a B.B. King or a Muddy Waters (both Mississippians)—but not less real for that. Coming of age in the mid-sixties, after soul music had overtaken the blues as the music of the working-class black community, Wilson discovered blues music (and, through blues music, himself) not through what we might, in the language of anthropology, call “blues informants” but through records—starting with a Bessie Smith seventy-eight from the early twenties called “Nobody in This Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine”1 (Wilson, Three Plays ix; Crawford 31). Wilson, reminiscing years later about how his thoughts upon first hearing that record contained, in nuce, his future literary themes (the importance, for America, of African-American identity and history and the struggle for African Americans to remain connected to both), asserted, “With my discover) of Bessie Smith and the blues I had been given a world that contained my image, a world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle” (ix). In a crystalline moment with a forty-year-old record, Wilson realized two things that would be foundational for his future writings: there were others who felt like he did (both profoundly blessed and profoundly cursed to be black in America), and they had been feeling that way for a very long time. Hearing Bessie Smith gave his feelings the validity of identification and the weight of history —the psychological roots and shoots Wilson would need to write the plays he would come to 1 In a move typical of the blues, “Nobody in This Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine” links sustenance and sexuality through double entendre. call “[my] 400-year autobiography . the story of myself and my ancestors” (Shannon and Wilson 540). Wilson was a very self-conscious sort of bluesman. W'e might call him a meta- bluesman, a bluesman who talked about the blues as much as he talked through the blues. In this, too, he was following after his forebears. Fittingly, as blues lyrics tend to be meditations on personal relationships, the primary way that blues musicians have traditionally talked about the blues in blues song is by personifying the blues—as Big Bill Broonzy does in “Conversation with the Blues.’* Broonzy sings, “Yeah, now, blues, why don’t you give poor Bill a break? [x2] / Now why don’t you try to help me live instead of tryin’ to break my neck” (qtd. in Gussow, Seems Like Murder 24). Perhaps the most insightful meta-blues song in the tradition is Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Blues Is a Feeling,” a song that addresses a central blues theme (which is the theme of Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)—the blues as psychological sickness resulting from trauma (i.e., posttraumatic stress disorder). The song’s insight issues from its iteration of what Adam Gussow calls “the blues dialectic,” the superficially contradictory but profoundly intertwined nature of what we might call the thesis and antithesis at the heart of all blues songs and works of blues literature. Because blues texts are always dialectical and never univocal, meaning is always negotiated, nuanced meaning in blues texts.3 2 Adam Gussow’s reading of “blues” here is as a metaphor for violently oppressive Southern whites, who were breaking the necks of African- Americans through lynching—a signification of "‘blues” that Angela Y. Davis, likewise, argues for (Gussow, Seems Like Murder 22; A. Davis 113). 3 As a rule of thumb, if a song can be boiled down to an unequivocal statement, it is not a biues song. It is a pop song. Multivocality is a hallmark of blues works. 4 In “Blues Is a Feeling,” Hopkins asserts that the blues is both psychic illness and psychic illness’ cure. Sharing an ecosystem, the cause and the cure of psychological illness have an obverse relationship (that is to say, they are different sides of the same coin), and must be treated as such. This is a view that jibes with Freudian psychoanalysis and its main therapy, the “talking cure,” which involves the patient limning his psychic injury in order to heal it.4 During the song’s spoken introduction, Hopkins says, in dialogue with his guitar (which answers each half of the line with a flutter of bluesy notes), “The blues will give you sickness [guitar response] when there was a pain that you never had.” Posttraumatic stress disorder (which Freud calls traumatic neurosis) is caused by a painful experience that is not truly experienced, not consciously processed and assimilated to one’s psyche—an experience that is so shocking, so sudden, that one does not have the time or psychic resources to make it one’s own (Caruth 59; Freud, Beyond 10).