"Leaving All the Time": Signifying Departure in the Early Blues

“You can read my letter; now you sure don’t know my mind, When you think I’m loving you, I’m leaving all the time.”

—Rubin Lacy, “Ham Hound Crave” (1928)

“You can’t ever tell, what a woman’s got on her mind, You might think she’s crazy about you; she’s leaving all the time.”

—Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got The Blues” (1926)

The blues were the most important and the most widely disseminated African-American vernacular genre of the early 20th century. Subsequently the blues have become one of the dominant tropes of African-American criticism and literature. What is curious is that the blues as a set of texts and “the blues” as a trope have taken largely separate paths. Literary scholars, who have brought blues texts into the canon of U.S. literature, have come to possess and to deploy the idea of the blues, while the task of making sense of actual blues lyrics has been left largely to folklorists and blues historians, who tend to emphasize compositional formula, textual history, or cultural reference rather than the hermeneutics of textual interpretation. In contrast to their work on a form such as the slave narrative, literary critics have only begun to consider individual blues lyrics apart from their generic identity within “the blues,” worthy of the same critical openness to particularity and to more narrowly focused forms of motivated intertextuality.

“Signifyin’” originated as a term for particular African-American vernacular forms of verbal indirection, in which one means something more than and different from what one seems literally to be saying. These traditional forms of signifyin(g) include the Dozens, loud-talking, toasts, boasts, and a variety of tales involving the dissemination of disinformation. In the 1980s, literary critics developed “signifyin(g)”as a more generalized and more nuanced term for an identifiably African-American tradition of multi-registered intertextuality that allowed a host of more formal literary texts to speak in new ways. African-American literary history has been significantly rewritten with signifyin(g) as central to its intertextual genealogy. In particular, Henry Louis Gates broadened the theory of signifyin(g) by marrying the vernacular practice to poststructuralism, revealing that the play of differences in signifyin(g) has much in common with theories of language that assert the impossibility of a stable signifier. Gates provided a graphic model of this multi-valent meaning-making, in which a supposedly fixed, literal meaning constitutes a horizontal axis, and the play of differences—the signifyin(g) difference—is a vertical axis, cutting through and destabilizing the horizontal with playful substitutions (49).

This elaboration rendered signifyin(g) a much more subtle and far-reaching trope than it had been in the folklorist/linguist tradition, but the direction of this development was not fully reversed to carry this broader understanding of signifyin(g) back to vernacular forms such as the blues in order to see what difference it might make; rather, “the blues” became a site for further tropic generation aimed at non-blues texts. In short, what we are still lacking is a reapplication of the traditional tropic categories to discrete blues lyrics in the aftermath of the theoretical detaching of those tropes from their original, limited vernacular manifestations. This critical gap is tantalizing for two linked reasons; the first is the simple fact that most blues are or interpolate tales about communication, often presented as the back and forth of dialogue between at least two parties and including as commentary direct addresses of singer to audience. The blues lyric tends to be an impaction of discursive modes, and so it is not only a rhetorical form in its own right but a catalogue of rhetorical forms, performed, reported, and commented upon. Embracing all the more topical concerns of the blues, communication is indeed the genre’s overarching subject. By itself, this observation suggests that signifyin(g) might well be a fruitful lens through which to view the blues lyric. What makes this potential more compelling is the fact that blues experts have judged a huge number of early blues lyrics...