Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature by Steven C. Tracy (review)

Steven Tracy’s book is a highly original study that applies fresh ideas and perspectives to an aspect of modern American literature and culture that has often been discussed, but never adequately examined and understood. Tracy’s unique credentials as an accomplished blues performer and distinguished literary scholar enable him to explore “[t]he emergence of the blues into American mainstream culture” (59) in ways that are both comprehensive and penetrating, clearly surpassing previous studies.

The book examines the period from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression when “hot music” (ragtime, blues, and jazz) emerged as a major force in American music and exerted strong influence on both African American and American literatures. Tracy begins with an extremely detailed and nuanced history of the music, carefully explaining how it developed and why it became such an important literary influence. An early chapter on the Chicago Renaissance focuses on how poets Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay pioneered the uses of jazz techniques and blues themes, and in the process, played an important role in the development of Langston Hughes’s poetry. Tracy then studies how “Lost Generation” poets e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, were inspired by jazz improvisation and blues language to rebel against Victorian literary norms and create a radically new kind of American poetry. (Ironically, Eliot and Pound were able to do this in spite of their consciously held racist attitudes, which, fortunately, did not interfere with their literary judgments.) The book then investigates how Harlem Renaissance figures, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Carl Van Vechten, and Zora Neale Hurston, transformed African American literature by centering it in a black folk tradition grounded in the blues and jazz. Hot Music concludes with a discussion of how playwrights of the 1920s, such as Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, and Howard Lawson, were inspired by black music and folklore as they laid the foundations for a truly modern American theatre.

Tracy argues persuasively that blues and jazz not only changed American music and literature but, even more important, also helped us to move from a rigidly segregated society to a much more racially integrated culture attempting to become much more consistent with its democratic ideals. As he stresses, “The wheels of many social breakthroughs for African Americans in this country have been greased by the music and its ability to draw people together” (86). He adds “the music kept us dancing, and singing, and eventually thinking” (423), and as a result, it helped to make all Americans more visible to each other and less likely to become trapped by walls of fear and mistrust. The “exchange of musical cultures” (86), therefore, had many more than purely aesthetic benefits.

Tracy’s experience as a seasoned blues performer adds a vitally important dimension to this book that cannot be found in previous studies. While literary scholars have for many years explicated blues language, Tracy at many key points shows how this language is actually performed and thus captures meanings and nuances that elude academic scholarship. And he also explains better than most students of “hot music” the complex dynamics between singer and audience, examining how call-and-response techniques are essential not only to a jazz and blues performance but also to the poetry of Hughes and Brown. Moreover, his encyclopedic knowledge of blues lyrics, which he has mastered over the years as a singer, enables him to match particular lines from songs to individual poems, thus demonstrating how the two forms resonate against each other, enriching their meanings. The book also draws some stylistic benefits from Tracy’s skills as a performer when his formal academic discourse is refreshed occasionally with snatches of vernacular language rooted in the blues tradition.

Not surprisingly, Tracy regards Hughes as “the central figure related to literature touched by the blues” (305), and his treatment of The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew is...