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Introduction: Black Resonance
- Rutgers University Press
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Introduction: Black Resonance Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new . . . in order to find new ways to make us listen. —james baldwin, “sonny’s blues,” 1957 Just listen to what the woman can do with a line. —nikki giovanni, speaking to margaret walker about aretha franklin, 1974 Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues; Billie Holiday, Lady Day; Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel; Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. As these artists’ titles suggest, black women singers have dominated the major forms of twentieth-century American music. Revered as black royalty and also cited with the familiarity of kinship—as simply “Bessie ,” “Billie,” “Mahalia,” “Aretha”—these singers occupy a unique place in the national imagination. This book centralizes their place in the African American literary imagination. It highlights the fact that, ever since Bessie Smith’s improbably powerful voice conspired with the emerging “race records” industry to make her “the first real ‘superstar’ in African-American popular culture,” black writers have memorialized the sounds and detailed the politics of black women’s singing.1 And it uses these engagements to tell a new story about how the African American literary tradition is made, who makes it, and how it sounds. I show that black women singers are not just muses for writers but innovative artists whose expressive breakthroughs illuminate literary works, which in turn reattune us to music. So the mode of analysis, and indeed the relationship between black music and literature that I propose here, is profoundly reciprocal. Black Resonance chronicles two generations of African American artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing on five writers’ respective engagements with Smith, Holiday, Jackson, and Franklin. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and Gayl Jones have explored the non-narrative logic of Smith’s blues, the unmistakable 2 / introduction timbre of Holiday’s voice, Franklin’s signature style, and the way Jackson ’s gospel singing could make an audience feel like a congregation. Beginning with Smith’s and Wright’s landmark achievements in the recording and publishing industries—two moments when black artists spectacularly desegregate the cultural landscape of a segregated nation— I isolate the shared expressive strategies through which these artists perform new relationships to audience, community, race, gender, and each other through the end of the Black Arts Movement. As I discuss at more length in what follows, this trajectory allows me to trace and trouble the exaltation of music over text that is one of the Black Arts Movement’s most enduring literary and critical legacies. This study is illustrative, not definitive; I aim to offer new directions for reading any number of writer-singer engagements not highlighted here. And there are several, for black and white American writers have cited the singers in this book and their peers with uncanny frequency throughout the twentieth century . In fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, writers have consistently figured black female singers as inspiring voices, cultural heroes, beloved mothers , imposing icons, radical stars. Langston Hughes hails “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith” in his seminal essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926).2 He recounts meeting Smith with Zora Neale Hurston in his memoir The Big Sea (1940) and includes an “Ode to Dinah” (Washington) in Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961).3 Carl Van Vechten writes a startling review of a Smith performance in “Negro ‘Blues’ Singers” (1926).4 Sterling Brown and Al Young write poems for Ma Rainey (1932, 1969).5 Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise sings Holiday’s “Lover Man” to himself in a California vineyard in On the Road (1957).6 Edward Albee stages The Death of Bessie Smith in 1960.7 Frank O’Hara elegizes Holiday in 1964.8 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) famously imagines Smith’s desire to “[kill] some white people” in Dutchman (1964); he writes several poems for Holiday, as well as one for Sarah Vaughan (1999).9 Holiday is featured in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Alice Adams’s Listening to Billie (1977), Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979), and Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (1982).10 Sonia Sanchez writes a poem for Nina Simone in 1970.11 Sherley Anne Williams writes a poetic meditation on Smith and a poem for Franklin “to set to music” in 1982—the same...