“The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Abstract

Faulkner Journal .Tim A. Ryan “The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem W hile F. Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for having defined Americas metropolitan Jazz Age in his novels and stories, Faulkners ear­ ly fiction emphasizes instead the vernacular music of the rural South, most especially the blues. Soldiers’ Pay boasts the appear­ ance ofa band performing such staples as “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Shake It Break It,” as well as the singing of a gospel choir (156-59, 255-56).1 In Flags in the Dust, the Sartoris family’s black servants croon blues as they work, a street musician performs in the town square, and young Bayard enlists a Negro band to help him serenade the unmarried women of Jefferson (560, 573-74, 638-39, 659, 664-65). Erich Nunns recent analysis of Sanctuary, meanwhile, highlights the previously unappreciated centrality of both black and white popular music in Faulkner’s most notorious novel. Finally, “That Evening Sun” famously derives its title and some ofits plot elements from that celebrated adaptation ofSouthern musical traditions, W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”2 Although such early works established Faulkner’s enthusiasm for South­ ern—and, especially, black—popular music, references to the blues, gospel, and jazz largely disappeared from the author’s fiction after 1931. H. R. Stoneback suggests that “Pantaloon in Black” alludes to the lyrics of the blues song “Easy Rider” (241-43), and Handy’s band gets a passing mention in The Town (64), but Faulkner largely ceased portraying black singers and vernacular music after his first few novels and stories. Consequently, some readers have been more sur­ prised at “the scarcity ofblues description” in Faulkner’s work than intrigued by its presence (Evans qtd. in Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 54). Critics have tended to explain the disappearance of the blues and other Af­ rican American music from Faulkner’s fiction as a form of growth on the part of the author: instead of including black musicians in his stories for mere local color, the later Faulkner presents black people whose bluesiness is an inherent qualityofcharacter. In other words, ifsome ofFaulkner’s early African American characters play and sing the blues, his later black protagonists have the blues. Following Thadious M. Davis’s pioneering work, for example, Adam Gussow ‘See Adam Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations and Meaningless Strains: Faulker’s Blues Understandings,” and Thadious M. Davis for examination of these elements in Faulkners early fiction. 2For analysis of blues elements in “That Evening Sun,” see Ken Bennett, Carol B. Gartner, Charles A. Peek, and Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations.” 3 4 Tim A. Ryan Faulkners Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular persuasively argues that the blues in Faulkners early fiction is largely “ener­ getic, repetitive, sexualized, and profitable background music made by black performers to support dramas of white self-articulation.” In later instances, however, Faulkner uses the blues to create “dramas of black self-articulation ... in which overwhelmed subjects suffer” because of the inability ofwhite people to understand black experience (“Plaintive Reiterations” 64).3 If Faulkner was generally familiar with the blues as a folk tradition and pop culture phenomenon, it is unlikely that he knew the specific artists and works of the Mississippi Delta blues that we now think of as canonical. Al­ though the mainstream adaptations of black music purveyed by the likes of Handy in the 1910s and 1920s were popular with diverse audiences, the con­ sumers of country blues records were almost exclusively African American, at least until World War II. Faulkner enjoyed Handy’s commercialized ver­ sions of the genre, listened to the singing of black farmhands on his Green­ field Farm (Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 62-63), and even played records by the “Empress” of the urban blues, Bessie Smith, on an old windup Victrola at Rowan Oak (Haynes 441). Like most of the nation’s white population, how­ ever, Faulkner probably was not aware of the now-legendary recorded works of such country blues avatars as Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Son House, or Robert Johnson—even though they were virtual neighbors of the Oxfordbased author. Such artists were largely...