"You Just Can't Keep a Good Woman Down": Alice Walker Sings the Blues

Abstract

Oh - Just can't keep real good woman down Oh - Just can't keep real good woman down If you throw me down here Papa, I rise up in some other town (Miller) Alice Walker has been profoundly influenced and inspired both by African American music and musicians and by writers whose work is grounded in music and in expressive folk traditions of African Americans. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and blues music of blues women like Bessie Smith rank among Walker's most significant musical/literary influences.(1) In her words, Music is art I most envy... musicians [are] at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious. I am trying to arrive at that place where Black music already is; to arrive at that unself-conscious sense of collective oneness; that naturalness, that (even when anguished) grace. (In Search 259, 264) Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in tradition of black women singers, rather than among the literati .... Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from common people. (In Search 91) These influences are most clearly seen in works like short story Nineteen Fifty-five, from her 1981 collection You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down, and in her novel The Color Purple. In Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple, Walker talks back to blues musicians and writers, signifying extensively on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as on specific musical pieces of several singer/composers. In signifying, following Henry Louis Gates's usage, Walker with difference (xxii-xxiii, xxvii) material, revising and personalizing it, giving, in words of Sherley Anne Williams, a statement about situation new response (37). In Nineteen Fifty-five Walker begins to explore significance of female blues singer and blues she sings - for creative artists like herself, for others in community, and for society as whole. This exploration is continued in The Color Purple, where Walker probes in more detail role of blues woman as model and catalyst for change in her community. In Nineteen Fifty-five and The Color Purple, Walker employs character, language, structure, and perspective of blues to celebrate lives and works of blues women, to articulate complexity of their struggles, and to expose and confront oppressive forces facing Black women in America. In her portraits of blues women, Walker shows us vitality, resiliency, creativity, and spirituality of African American women, illuminating core aesthetic concepts which have been crucial to their survival in society that has largely used and abused them for its own purposes. Indeed, in Walker's works, African American women performers and their performances symbolize vitality and aliveness, and will and spirit not only to endure but potentially to flourish. The blues woman, whose song is true to her own experience and rooted in values and beliefs of community, empowers those who love her and effects change in those around her. Her outer struggles and inner conflicts reflect issues of oppression in society as they have been internalized within community. In addition to blues characters, Walker employs blues forms, themes, images, and linguistic techniques. Her forms - letters and diary entries - are like blues stanzas in their rich compactness and self-containedness; like blues pieces, her works take shape from repetition and variation of these core units. Walker's focus on complexities and many-sidedness of love and relationship repeats subject of many blues. As in Their Eyes and blues, paradox and contradiction are explored in context of relationships, projected via responses to traditional situations of these relationships and articulated using contrast and oppositional structures. …