Blues as such in Black Literature

Introduction

Black Literature is one of the most significant research efforts in African American studies. Black Literature not only expands vastly the black literary tradition, this fascinating collection, full of vitality and imagination, is of immense social and historical significance in understanding the African American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. It could be safely argued that the status of existence for persons enslaved in the United States was a condition of the blues. Having little power against the forces of oppression, little knowledge of or opportunity to escape to better conditions, such persons could think, talk, sing through their troubles (Hamilton, 135-151). Even in the absence of song, their condition was definable as the blues, for they could not control the circumstances of their existence or have an appreciable impact upon the forces that prevented them from becoming self-determining.

Like many blues people, they were "buffeted" by the forces of life. They could cry out their troubles to the Lord when loved ones were sold away from them or belt out their anguish in the privacy of their cabins. What consolation did they have in this world other than their own voices, and even those could be externally controlled? The stories and songs they were able to pass on, however, make it clear that the ties between their conditions and those of blues people of the twentieth century are striking. As musicologist Eileen Southern points out, "The antecedents of the blues were the mournful songs of the stevedores and roustabouts, the field hollers of the slaves, and the sorrow songs among the spirituals. Such spirituals as 'Lay This Body Down,' for example, would probably have been called blues had the term been in use at the time" (333-34).

Discussion and Analysis

Scholars have long observed that African American writers have drawn upon the experiences of their enslaved ancestors in developing their creative works. Before and after Langston Hughes, the ethos of the blues pervaded black literature. We can find it as solidly in the works of Charles Waddell Chesnutt in a book like The Conjure Woman, published in 1899, as we can in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), or Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986). Throughout black literature, we find the themes, the form, and the structure of the blues. Certainly the connections to enslaved persons, as just indicated, focus on the themes of the blues. So too do works like Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, in which many instances of loved ones being separated from each other by forces beyond their control pervade the text (Bernheimer, pp. 23-29). Although it might not be exactly the same thing as a bluesman slinging his guitar over his shoulder and hopping a freight train, as Albert Murray's Ole Luze does in Train Whistle Guitar (1974), or the painfulness of Bessie Smith finding another mule kicking in her stall, it nonetheless is on par emotionally with those experiences, and the sense of loss dominates more than ...