RELENTLESSLY WRITING THE WEARY SONG: BLUES LEGACIES IN LITERATURE

Abstract

Houston A. Baker, Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xviii + 122 pp. Illus. Daphne Duval Harrison. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. xv + 295 pp. Illus. Pleasant "Cousin Joe" Joseph and Harriet J. Ottenheimer. Cousin Joe: Blues from New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xi + 227 pp. Illus. Nathan W. Pearson, Jr. Goin' to Kansas City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xviii + 252 pp. Chronology. Illus. Steven C Tracy. Langston Hughes & the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xiii + 305 pp. Performing the blues translates emotion into art; writing the blues traps the music in an alien environment, for the music is necessarily linked to performance. As Langston Hughes laments in his poem, "Burden," It is not weariness That bows me down, But sudden nearness To song without sound.* Despite the difficulty of capturing blues on paper, the five books reviewed here demonstrate that blues must be written, rewritten and preserved— whether through musical notation, poetry, fiction, non-fiction or photography. Writing the blues captures the spirit of the African-American community, as well as the memory of folk blues and jazz musicians. As Houston Baker notes in his eloquent and moving essay, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, blues legacies in literature sound "from fields burning under torpid Southern suns, or lands desolately drenched by too high rivers" (93). Blues also tell the story of a socially marginal urban black community which created a "culturally specific" (93) and resilient voice in modern intellectual history and literature, as well as in music-leading to the birth of jazz. Writing the blues recreates and preserves the "black bottom boogies, fish fries, frenzied church-going, and furiously loving" (103) people in the black community as they resist racism and demand to be heard both as cultural critics and as artists.