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4 / Haunting: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” By claiming in the previous chapter that James Baldwin’s writings not only transmit but also create musical meaning, I have proposed a reciprocal relationship between black music and literature. In this view, black music is not a stable authenticating source of inspiration for black writers ; instead, it is a force that writers such as Baldwin use their own literature to re-create. Indeed, this may be precisely what it means to say that writers are inspired by music: that they are moved or instigated to use their literary art to shape how music is heard. I want to turn now to Gayl Jones’s 1975 tour de force Corregidora to elaborate the implications of this view. Jones calls Corregidora a “blues novel,” and the designation works on several grounds. Not only is Jones’s narrator, Ursa, a blues singer, but blueslike repetition, ambiguity (such as Ralph Ellison hears in Jimmy Rushing’s blues), and themes of love and trouble are key components of this text.1 Blues-oriented interpretations of the novel focus on these elements, which are stable structural and thematic elements of the blues genre. Critics suggest that the blues is a healing, affirmative expressive medium for Ursa and, indeed, that the blues are an enabling force for Jones as a writer. Jones herself has fostered these ideas about her work, as I explain. What would it mean, however, to reverse the formulation and ask not what the music “does for” Corregidora but what the text does with or for the music? Here, rather than read Jones’s “blues novel” through predetermined and abstracted ideas about the blues, I reverse and specify the methodology by using the novel to reexamine Billie Holiday’s changing performances of her signature song, “Strange 138 / haunting Fruit” (1939–1959). In this reading, black literature is not authenticated by a stable image of black music but instead serves to make music newly, productively, strange. One reason to pair Jones with Holiday in particular is that Jones cites the singer in her novel. As Baldwin does with Ida in Another Country, Jones has characters compare her narrator, Ursa, with Holiday. Critics have followed that lead. Toni Morrison, for instance, describes Ursa as “a kind of combination Billie Holiday and Fannie Lou Hamer.”2 But here I compare Jones, rather than her narrator, with Holiday, and I do so on the basis of the discourse that surrounds both artists: both Jones’s novel and Holiday’s music are consistently called “haunting.” I ask what listeners and readers might be describing when they use this term, I theorize haunting as a formal strategy that both Jones and Holiday deploy, and I use Jones’s “haunting” narrative performance to reread Holiday’s “haunting ” vocal art. In my view, Corregidora invites us to untether Holiday’s music from the mythos of her painful life and thus reveals new facets of Holiday’s power and mysteries about her work. What I am saying, more broadly, is this: that the point of questioning idealized conceptions of black music and its relation to African American literature is to invite new readings of the literature that in turn enhance our apprehension of black music’s power. Every arena of national culture has mythologies that are repeated so often as to become clichés. Fans of black popular music, for instance, will tell you that you could hear Billie Holiday’s tragic life through the audible wear in her voice. They will say that you could hear Miles Davis’s sullen personality in his playing; that gospel-turned-pop artists like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin “took the church with them”; that Luther Vandross sang better at a heavier weight; and that Bobby Brown destroyed Whitney Houston. (Such narratives are common enough in the realm of literature, too: Richard Wright’s work suffered when he left the States, James Baldwin’s did the same when he overextended himself as an activist.) In addition to revealing certain truths, these stories fulfill important functions—for instance, they help create community and serve as cautionary tales. Yet Corregidora asks what additional stories such commonplaces about Holiday obscure. Jones raises this question in the twilight of Black Arts but on the brink of a lasting Holiday revival. She publishes Corregidora just three years after the 1972 Holiday biopic (and Diana Ross vehicle) Lady Sings the Blues appears and just as Holiday ’s recordings are...

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