Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Six. Beyond the Sahara of the Bozart: Creativity and Southern Culture

6 Beyond the Sahara of the Bozart Creativity and Southern Culture In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty gives a superb portrait of the creativity nurtured in her by her family and community in Mississippi. Her parents embodied a creative dialogue. The inspiration from her father came in the form of technology — the telescopes around the house to look at the moon and stars, the clocks that taught her the importance of time, the Kodak camera that gave her a visceral sense of imagery. His creativity with such things looked toward the future, toward the progress to which creative inventions could lead. Welty’s mother’s creative gifts were different ones. She loved books, reading, and artistic beauty. Every room in her home was one in which young Eudora could hear stories read from books, books for which her parents scrimped and saved. Her mother sang to her, resulting in Welty developing an inner voice, so that when she read, she heard a voice. Her mother sent her to preschool art classes, where she learned to associate the smell of flowers with the pictures she drew. Fannie, the black sewing lady, came around weekly, and young Welty heard from her stories, stories of black people and white people, of good people and bad people, of gossip, rumor, wild exaggeration, and truth. Conversation was a simple daily art but an important one. A friend of 118 Chapter Six Welty’s mother would go with them on Sunday afternoons for a ride. “My mother sat in the back with her friend,” Welty writes, “and I’m told that as a small child I would ask to sit in the middle, and say as we started off, ‘Now talk.’”1 Eudora Welty, of course, is one of the premier embodiments of creativity in the American South, and her reflections suggest some of the forces promoting the different kinds of creativity that existed there — the role of parents, the creativity often associated with men and women, the folk culture of storytelling and conversation, the role of community institutions that present opportunities like preschool art classes, the importance of books, the centrality of individuals who serve as teachers. Welty is certainly not typical, but she is prime evidence of the South as fertile ground for the creative spirit. One might gain a different picture of creativity in wondering about the origin of the blues. After all, it was working-class music. Delta blues performer Bukka White once noted that the blues started “back across them fields . . . right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp. That’s where the blues sprung from.” Mississippi bluesman Eddie “Son” House agreed: “People wonder a lot about where the blues came from. Well, when I was coming up, people did more singing in the fields than they did anywhere else.” Folklorist David Evans concludes that near the end of the nineteenth century, the vocal expressions of traditional southern black field hollers “were set to instrumental accompaniment and given a musical structure, an expanded range of subject matter and a new social context” that gave birth to the blues. The field hollers had been vernacular group music among African Americans on farms and plantations, but the blues especially encouraged creativity among performers, who worked for individuality of expression and timeliness, while also drawing from oral tradition. The emergence of this new creativity in the blues in the 1890s was surely directly related to the social context, as the first generation of African Americans born under freedom came to maturity. Their extraordinary musical innovations would include not only the blues but the cakewalk, jazz, ragtime, barbershop quartet singing, and gospel music as well.2 What is creativity and how is it related to the broader culture in which creative people, whether writers or musicians or others, live? Creativity Beyond the Sahara of the Bozart 119 is bringing something new into existence. The most honored individuals make the big leaps — like Charley Patton, who came as close as anyone to defining a new art form, the blues, out of the folk ingredients of African American music in the Delta; or like William Faulkner, who took the stock characters of earlier southern literature and more deeply than anyone before explored their humanity. The modern world often sees creativity in terms of psychology, identifying such personal qualities as...