The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll (review)

On the cover of his 1965 album, Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues, Ray Charles shakes hands with himself: Ray in white cowboy hat and cowboy shirt on the left, Ray in purple crushed velvet dinner jacket on the right. He is, in Perry Meisel’s terms, both “the cowboy” and “the dandy,” the African American blues link between two poles of Anglo outsiders: western cowboy drifters and Northern dandy urbanites. But in his web-like, channel-flipping exploration of cultural and stylistic synchronicity, Meisel does not stop there. The doubled Ray Charles shakes hands with a third figure, his romantic cousin across the Atlantic—Oscar Wilde, the Wilde whose dandyism resonated with nineteenth-century miners in Colorado, the Wilde who Meisel argues is a cultural midpoint between Afro- and Anglo-America and the ghostly grandpa of rock and roll’s revolutionary electricity.

Meisel’s theoretical anchor is the historical phenomenon of crossing over—not in racialized, music-industry terms of crossing an artist over from a marginal into a mainstream genre but in terms of the chiasmus so central to Afro-diasporic arts, the crossroads where cultural and philosophical vectors overlap, meet, grapple, and then embark forever changed. Meisel’s crossing is the crossing represented by Charles’s album had it been a duet with Wilde, the crossing of blues and romanticism, of country and city, of North and South, and, in one pairing that Meisel does not name outright, the crossing of music and literature, of blues sound and romantic, modernist word. His examples are rich and plentiful: King Curtis and Buddy Holly honking and twanging their way through a recording session in New Mexico in 1958, Miles Davis perfecting trumpet-blown “black urbanity,” Virginia Woolf “crosswriting” between interiority and exteriority, and Willa Cather’s literary modernist versioning of blues crossroads loopology.

Meisel is an established literary scholar, yet The Cowboy and the Dandy is at its most compelling when tracking its musical loops. While the book’s literary excursions raise the most convention-blasting questions, their relationship to the cowboy-dandy chiasmus often feels less urgent than the action going on in the recording studios and on the concert stages that Meisel visits. Not until the book’s finale does Meisel give us the most emblematic figure, Jimi Hendrix, who with his psychedelic Wildean getups, feedback aestheticism, and urban blues trips into Joycean self-exile is “proof that the British Invasion was the return of the American repressed.” Of course, we don’t need Joyce, Wilde, Woolf, or even Cather to explain or understand the dynamism of African American mergers of Southern country and Northern city, of juke joint dandyism and urban R & B cowboyism. But what Meisel’s loops and crossings into romanticism and literary modernism bring to an already rich table is the potential for an even bigger crossroads, one that stretches out to follow threads, reversals, and mirror images among strangers and unlikely allies that contemporary scholarship too often keeps separate. “Crossover is the enabling precondition and active modality of American life,” Meisel writes. “It is not just a hidden discursive mechanism. It is in your face.”