The United States of the Blues An Ethnography -The Blues Form

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2022

Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic that includes the visual arts and literature. Reasserting the significance of the blues as a form of Black vernacular music grounds the idea of a blues aesthetic in both a specific history and a performance practice. The genre was shaped by racialized socioeconomic conditions that influenced its formal and stylistic components. As a key feature of the blues, repetition delimits a field of creative activity. Despite formal and stylistic constraints, the blues models resistance to domination aesthetically, as the genre challenges the idea of the work of art as a fixed product. Valorizing process, the blues models a practice of resistance to domination using repetition with a difference as a form of agency.

2019

Written by: Arthur Akang'o Blues and Cultural Appropriation

Southern Cultures, 2013

Popular Music, 2010

Chapter in C. Partridge & M. Moberg, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook for Religion and Popular Music (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

It is unlikely that [the blues] will survive through the imitations of the young white college copyists, the 'urban blues singers' whose relation to the blues is that of the 'Trad' jazz band to the music of New Orleans: sterile and derivative. The bleak prospect is that the blues probably has no real future; that folk music that it is, it served its purpose and flourished whilst it had meaning in the Negro community. At the end of the century it may well be seen as an important cultural phenomenon -and someone will commence a systematic study of it, too late.

has been lauded as one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the blues. In his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Blues Music (1975), he creates a fantasy of the origins of this music and the players themselves, not seeming to fully understand the scope or significance of his subject. In his 2013 book he argues that we "cannot know. . .the identities of most of the authors"-and that this anonymity is to be valued. Josh Garrett-Davis points out that he "leaps from this fact to the conclusions that certain songs give voice to a historically rooted yet timeless 'bedrock' of America, that the songs are "transcendent" (5). The lack of knowledge about individual authors leads Marcus to argue that "we are free to tell any story we like" regarding blues. The myth he has created around the blues changed the way we perceive this music and its restorative power. I would argue that in his assessment of the blues, he omits a time, a place, and a people. As we know them, the blues they created can transcend time to speak to us today. Now, more than ever, we need to listen. In 1959, Richard Wright declared that "The American environment which produced the blues is still with us.. .[and]still falling upon us" (Blues Fell This Morning xvii). His words ring as true in 2018 as they did in 1959-blues is "still falling upon us." As I read the words of Richard Wright, I think about what they mean today. I wonder what Americans have learned in the nearly 60 years since he

Giulia Pellegrinotti, 2024

This essay explores the differences between urban and rural blues, focusing on their thematic differences through the analysis of the journey that this fascinating genre took, from its African roots into a variety of different genres, from jazz to rock.

In this paper I show how in the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, the marginality of a"hitherto little-regarded corner of the black Diaspora"-the history of the so-called Rhineland Mischlingers-is put in the center of a story that concerns itself with specific memories of the Second World War of a Black American jazz musician. In order to do so, I focus on the different forms of liminality-or in-betweenness-that these memories present: temporal, spacial, ethnic and musical, as well as generic and finally linguistic. I show that these liminalities-at the very margin of marginality, or beyond-will reveal the horrors of war but will also create a Deleuzian ligne de fuite that allows the protagonist to come to terms with this painful period in his life as a musician and as a man. Key terms Black diaspora; World War 2; Rhineland Mischlingers; Blues; Jazz; liminality; marginality; ligne de fuite The In-Between of Jazz and the Blues: Beyond Marginality in Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues Seldom have I read such poetic words of praise as there are on the introductory pages of the novel Half-Blood Blues by the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan. As The Seattle Times puts it, "the story hurls us from Baltimore, to Berlin, to Paris, to an obscure Polish town-as breathlessly as that trumpet player finishing a long heartfelt riff. From bleak, violent cityscapes, it shifts to the troubled souls of the musicians as they tend the pure flame of art and the impure fire of jealousy." Indeed, the book, which won many prizes in Canada as well as in America and Europe, features an old bass player, Sid, who basically tells the story of the group of Jazz musicians he played with at the time of the Second World War, presenting, to quote Newsday from the introductory pages to the novel: "A bold imagining of a hitherto littleregarded corner of the black Diaspora." As this paper will show, this marginalized little corner of the black Diaspora is centralized in memory, here, through a palimpsests of liminalities: temporal, spatial, racial and, most gloriously, musical, as well as generic and linguistic, which in the end turns out to be a veritable ligne de fuite, to use the term of Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, while the Blues, as a musical genre, represents an endeavour to overcome-or at least live with-racial injustice and grief, Jazz, in its turn, is an overcoming of the Blues towards a brighter future. The symbolics of this transformation is important and can be seen, for instance, in Toni Morrison's well-known novel Jazz. But in the context of a war-ridden Europe, the celebration that Jazz represents is returned towards the suffering of the Blues, the plot of the novel centering