Two Steppin': Richard Wright's Encounter with Blue-Jazz

Abstract

Tf HE Black American writer's relationship to folk idioms and ex. pressions has been a crucial feature in the development of modern Black American literature. Preceded by Frances E. W. Harper and James Campbell, Paul Laurence Dunbar attempted to retrieve Black dialect as a literary medium from the clutches of minstrelsy. He was joined in this effort by Charles Chesnutt, especially with Chesnutt's pioneering The Conjure Woman (I899). Early critics and commentators, such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson, moved to embrace folk expressions, particularly the spirituals, and urged younger writers to explore the possibilities of applying folk forms and themes to more formal literary modes. Johnson helped to show the way in his God's Trombones (1927); DuBois did not in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (i9ii) and Dark Princess (1928). Much of the energy of the Harlem Renaissance writers sought to extend and refine the literary applications of the Black American vernacular. Essential to many of the experiments during the 1920S and early 1930S was the recognition that understanding and projecting the core Black experience in literature demanded a respect for the eloquence of folk expressions. Such a respect was rooted in an ultimate faith in the range and complexity of those experiences to work beyond simple background, beyond the picturesque. In the case of the blues idiom, an idiom central to the secular Afro-American world-view, the result of its application in poetry and creative prose could be the development of a tone as often irreverent, ironic and comic as it was melancholy. Put another way, the result could be a narrative and lyric voice grand enough to capture the ambiguities, ambivalences, and frequent heroics in the modern Black experience. The often dazzling successes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown brought this idiom to a central position in a developing literary tradition.