Modernity, Authenticity, and the Blues in Sterling Brown's Flood Poems

In April 1927, the Mississippi River flooded so severely that 120 levees failed across seven states (Quarantelli 99-100). It was one of the worst natural disasters in American history: 250 people were killed and 700,000 were displaced as flooding spread over an area roughly the size of New England (Rivera and Miller 505). African Americans were hit especially hard, as 330,000 displaced blacks were placed into 154 relief camps, and levees in primarily black parishes south of New Orleans were intentionally destroyed in a last-ditch effort to spare the city from flooding (Rivera and Miller 507). In Greenville, Mississippi, hundreds of African Americans were rounded up by police to serve on work gangs and then forced at gunpoint to continue working on failing levees as part of a futile repair effort (Barry 200). Most of the major tributaries of the Mississippi topped their banks as well, and in Jefferson City, Missouri, a young professor at Lincoln University named Sterling Brown watched the Missouri River rise (Callahan 245).

Earlier that year, Bessie Smith, "The Empress of the Blues," recorded two songs about rivers that would become popular in the months following the flood. "Backwater Blues," her own composition, was recorded in February, and then in March she recorded "Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)," which had been published a year earlier by Harry Richman, Jo Trent, and Peter DeRose (Evans 99-100).¹ Many artists besides Smith tried to make a hit out of "Muddy Water," including Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, whose version was the first record to feature Bing Crosby on lead vocals. The two songs are quite different from one another. Smith's "Backwater Blues" is sweeping and tragic, while the versions of "Muddy Water" arranged by white band leaders such as Whiteman and Ben Bernie are jaunty almost to the point of giddiness. Both are important historically, as "Backwater Blues" would go on to become a blues standard (Evans 100), and Crosby's performance marks one of the first recordings of a white singer using "swinging" jazz phrasing (Giddins 157). While neither song was directly inspired by the April 1927 flood, both became associated with the disaster due to the timing of their releases and subsequent marketing efforts in the late spring of that year (Evans 100-01).

In his memoir and travelogue, A Negro Looks at the South (2007), Brown jokes that by the time he joined the faculty at Lincoln he had already "started [his] hobbies of collecting theme papers, books, and phonograph records" (37-38). It was the latter obsession that endeared him to his students, who would drop by in the evenings to discuss the latest in blues and jazz. Brown recalls that "our tastes ranged wide in the good records of that time: we liked Whiteman's semiclassic arrangements" and a number of other recordings. Brown told his students tales of growing up near Duke Ellington while they introduced him to the work of Ma Rainey and Pete Johnson. One record, Brown notes, stood above the others: "[W]hen Bessie Smith's 'Backwater Blues' came out in that bad flood year of 1927, we solemnly agreed that this was the best" (38).

All of these threads—the tragedies and melodies of 1927, the swapping of songs and tales, the ways that music can create both communal enthusiasm and meditative solemnity—are woven together in Brown's first book of poems, 1932's Southern Road: Poems. Six poems in the book deal with the 1927 flood, and two of the most important, "Ma Rainey" and "Cabaret," describe performances of "Backwater Blues" and "Muddy Water," respectively. Southern Road is often thought of as a preservationist book, in which Brown chronicles a Southern and rural black-folk culture that was at risk of disappearing as the Great Migration reshaped American life. Most of the other major poems in the book, such as "Odyssey of Big Boy," "When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home," or the Slim Greer poems, draw on tall tales, mythic figures, or African American religious traditions.² "Ma Rainey" and "Cabaret," however...