Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (review)

While going to graduate school at Princeton and playing harmonica with Harlem-based bluesman Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee, Adam Gussow changed his mind about the state of the blues. Entering graduate school, his experiences as a blues performer had helped convince him that "the contemporary blues scene . . . [was] a force for racial understanding and reconciliation" (xi). Gussow knew all along about "the open-hearted joy and optimism about America's multiracial future" (xiv) that the blues uniquely engenders; ultimately, "the music . . . is where the healing is" (xiv). Along the way, though, he became more and more aware of violent strains snaking through the blues, "violences that upheld Jim Crow and pervaded southern lives, black and white, in the early decades of the twentieth century" (xiv).

To cast a wide net for the blues's "submerged history of racial violence" (1), Gussow locates parallels between blues lyrics and actual acts of racialized violence. He finds that the blues works, often with great subtlety and ingenuity, as a form of historical and cultural criticism that is capable of, among many other things, "contesting the narrative of black abjection imposed by the white South" (2). In keeping on keeping on, the blues affirms life and survival without sugarcoating adversity. In fact, Gussow begins his study with an examination of the 1890s, during which decade the number and frequency of "spectacle lynchings" (23) increased dramatically and the blues "began to emerge as a folk form" (3).

One of my purposes, [Gussow writes,] is to theorize this simultaneous emergence of men's and women's blues, reading it as a social response to the grievous spiritual pressures exerted on working-class black southerners by the sudden eruption of lynching-as-spectacle. A central claim of this study is that such violence helped to form what I call a "blues subject," who then found ways, more or less covert, of singing back to that ever-hovering threat.

(3-4)

Resisting both victimhood and dehumanization, blues subjects insist through their words and music that they are—that they remain—somebody.

Gussow discusses not only white "disciplinary violence" (2-3) against Blacks but also the "retributive violence" (3) of black reprisals against violent Whites and the "intimate violence" (4) Blacks visit upon each other. All three forms of violence shape and inform blues culture, and all three are involved in the construction and expression of "black selfhood" (5). To develop his arguments, Gussow draws from a wide range of "blues texts" (8), including novels, autobiographies, and poems, as well as, of course, lyrics and music. Importantly, he argues for "a conception of blues textuality that understands blues literature and blues orature to be an expressive continuum rather than a self-evident binary" (10). By establishing this continuum, he is able to do a refreshing number of things, among them argue that "[b]lues form is a way of waking out of the nightmare of black history by reprising, as cathartic musical repetitions, the traumatic repetitions black history engenders" (104). For example, he presents a vibrant reading of B. B. King's autobiography Blues All Around Me, giving particular attention to King's guitar Lucille, which exemplifies "the bluesman hungering for, embracing, and publicly declaring his love for the pristine feminine body of Lucille and her surrogates as a way of displacing the abject masculine body of the lynching victim he is unable to embrace" (140). And, as he is well aware, "blues literature also proposes women as heroic models" (157); "the blues hero as badwoman avenger" (158) becomes newly and dramatically visible, thanks to Gussow's work. In particular, in an original and exciting rereading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gussow reveals both "Hurston's struggle with the predicament of blues culture" (237) and her character Janie Starks's "violent blues apprenticeship" (253). Not least because Their Eyes with its "Janie had three lovers" structure at times...