Blues Lyrics Research Articles

Blues lyrics in teaching music and Czech at the grammar school

My study is entitled: “Blues lyrics in teaching music and Czech at the grammar school” and now I will outline its fundamental contents, the basic conclusions of my study and the meth- ods used to help me reach these conclusions. The study is conceived as a comparison of five American and five Czech blues compositions, which are considered the most popular and basic works of the genre. I did this by analyzing several available charts focused on foreign blues songs and then compiled my list of the five “most popular” American blues songs based on the number of occurrences and locations of the songs in specific charts. For Czech songs, this procedure was more difficult, because I could not find any survey, discussion or ranking that focused specifically on blues songs. So, I proceeded here more or less intuitively and I put together a list of five songs according to my own knowledge of songs, according to the popularity of songs on the youtube music portal and the popularity of the artists who presented the songs. I analyzed the compositions mainly from the textual point of view; however, I did not forget the musical aspect. I was mainly looking for basic identical and different elements in the text area. I found several identical elements, not only in terms of themes, but also in the construction of texts and poetic turns. However, I also found certain textual differences in the Czech and foreign compositions. I will discuss these identical and different elements in more detail in the following text.

Lyric Formulas as Traditional Compositional Processes in the Folk Blues: A Case Study of Furry Lewis

Abstract The spontaneous combination of traditional, borrowed, and original lyric formulas is the central process by which traditional blues lyrics are composed. Building on theories of formulaic composition first developed by Milman Parry (1930) and Albert Lord (1960) and later adapted for the study of the blues by David Evans (1982, 2007, 2010), this article maps and compares blues lyrics by Furry Lewis as a means of better understanding this process. The article also identifies how Lewis’s idiosyncratic approach to this process makes his lyrics simultaneously typical and extraordinary.

Charting Aminata Fall's Cosmopolitanism: A Comparative Study of African American and Senegambian Blues Lyrics

While examining the sonic, cultural, and historical meaning of key Senegambian and African American blues songs’ lyrics, this article attempts to provide a comparative study of their circum-Atlantic and cosmopolitan features. The article explores crucial connections between circum-Atlantic and cosmopolitan songs of Senegalese blues singer Aminata Fall and those of African American blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, and Bessie Smith, among others. These blues songs have lyrics that thematically and technically resonate with one another. The songs share aural and cultural patterns demonstrating the strong ties between circum-Atlantic and Afropolitan traditions, which have historically influenced one another. These relationships reveal strong affinities between the music and cultures of blacks of Africa and the diaspora. Moreover, they register the resilience of local and specific black cultures that, however, share transnational and cosmopolitan dimensions that continuous circum-Atlantic flows and cross-fertilizations between African-derived and other musical traditions have influenced. Fall was a major symbol of such black circum-Atlantic and Afropolitan musical crossbreeding. Her songs remain Afropolitan since they reflect key elements of African American blues while being steeped in Senegambian blues traditions. Without denying the great influence of African American blues on her life and music, Fall, however, recognized the strong impact that Senegambian blues and cultures have had on them. Therefore, Fall embodied the complexity and richness of Afropolitan Senegambian blues and traditions that spread their wings toward strong black diasporic blues cultures while preserving unique forms of timelessness and authenticity that also deserve scholarly attention.

Male blues lyrics 1920 to 1965: A corpus based analysis

This study examines corpora comprised of 795 lyrics from 35 male blues singers, recorded between 1920 and 1965. The study uses the concept of literary foregrounding (Leech, 2008) and the computer program Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009) to identify key semantic domains and key words in the lyrics before engaging in a qualitative analysis of concordances to analyse patterns of language use. Lyrics recorded in the pre-World War Two period (1920 to 1941) are contrasted with those recorded in the post-war period (1945 to 1965). The results suggest that the male blues lyrics of the period under investigation, and in particular the way in which they differ between the pre- and post-World War Two eras, might reflect the demographic changes of the African-American community of the time and their relationship with aspects of the dominant ideology.

Civic Jazz

Civic Jazz

Fishbone’s Song by Gary Paulsen

Reviewed by: Fishbone’s Song by Gary Paulsen Karen Coats Paulsen, Gary Fishbone’s Song. Simon, 2016 [160p] ISBN 978-1-4814-5226-7 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 The unnamed narrator of this lyrical tribute to living off the grid has at least four different origin stories explaining how he came to stay with his elderly guardian, Fishbone. However he came to belong to Fishbone, the boy is cherished there, and he grows up listening to Fishbone’s stories about serving in Korea, running ’shine and racing stock cars after the war, falling in unrequited love, and eventually coming to live alone in the small cabin in the woods, where he passes on his stories along with simple blues lyrics that distill the experiences into tight nuggets of hard-earned wisdom. The boy’s narration has a touch of blues rhythm as well, with simple repetitions that expand and flow into reflections on how to make a working bow, what it means to be a hunter, how it feels to be one with the surrounding woods, and how one day his life will go on without Fishbone. It’s a cadence that not every reader will appreciate, but those with an ear for poetic prose and an appreciation for natural beauty unmarred by screens and other technologies will find gems of oral history and enduring lessons embedded in Fishbone’s tales. A readaloud is perhaps the best conveyance; a masterful performance would include careful development of character voices and perhaps even old-timey musical accompaniment, and the results would fully transport listeners to another place and time. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley Patricia R. Schroeder Paige A. McGinley. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. 304pp. $24.95. In Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism, Paige A. McGinley takes an inventive approach to studying the blues. Weaving her analysis from the varied threads of blues history, theatre history, and performance studies, McGinley argues convincingly that attention to live performance has been understudied in existing blues scholarship. Her aim, as she explains in the Introduction, is to “trace a linked but discontinuous genealogy of theatrical blues performance” (3) in which tent shows, touring shows, and the early touring performers, many of them women, played pivotal roles, despite their near-erasure in the many blues histories that valorize wandering male musicians in the rural Delta. She highlights the way that all performance, whether on a proscenium stage with lights and glitter or on a seemingly innocent front porch, is always already “theatrical,” featuring a mise-en-scène, costumes, props, and interaction between performers and audience. She notes that blues emerged along with (and partly from) various other forms of Southern black popular entertainment, such as tent shows, vaudeville theatres, and minstrel shows, and laments that the role of popular theater has been “marginalized in blues scholarship.” While she insists that she is not trying to create a new master narrative for [End Page 478] blues history, she does intend to “shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practices as central, rather than secondary” (7). A second, complementary goal of Staging the Blues is to deconstruct the notion of “authenticity,” which has gone a long way to privileging those male, rural blues singers working in a folk tradition and underrating the historical significance of classic female blues artists. In McGinley’s persuasive argument, the notion of “authenticity” valorized by folklorists like John and Alan Lomax is itself a staged construction: overalls are as much a costume as a feather boa when worn by an entertainer. In fact, noting the persistent first-person speaker—the witnessing “I” of most blues lyrics—McGinley sees even the most apparently untutored blues artist as a ventriloquist (22), since he or she is already performing a character whose experiences and attitudes do not necessarily match those of the artist. Her emphasis on “theatricality’s and authenticity’s intertwined and interdependent stage histories” (9) helps her establish blues “authenticity” as a construct. This recurrent theme, reiterated in various ways in each chapter, is perhaps the most significant contribution of the book. After the provocative Introduction, Staging the Blues comprises four chapters, each one focused on a pivotal moment in the history of live blues performance. Chapter one, “Real Personality: The Blues Actress,” centers on the careers of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both of whom had long histories of performing in traveling road shows as well as in the theaters on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. For McGinley, these touring performance shows worked as travelogues, with the performers relating to their often migratory audiences through the idiom of travel and representing the enormous cultural shifts in African American experience during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their glamour also offered black audiences a new possibility for black womanhood that depended neither on plantation stereotypes nor on the strictures of the racial uplift movement. A highlight of this chapter is McGinley’s nuanced exploration of various publicity photographs of Rainey and Smith, where she notes that the photos, like the stars’ musical performances, suggest a consciously “theatrical self-fashioning”: the photographs are another site of performance (56–57). Chapter two, “Theatre Folk: Huddie Ledbetter on Stage,” is especially compelling, as it divides Ledbetter’s career into three stages: the first forty-five years; the six months he spent touring with John Lomax; and his late international touring career. Seeing Ledbetter as “the hinge” between the theatrical traditions of Southern touring shows and the postwar emphasis on the folk blues tradition, McGinley effectively demonstrates that white folklorists created musicians in a theatrical image just as powerfully as the minstrel and...

Pragmatic acts of love

This article is a pragmatic examination of the manner in which early American female blues artists talk to their audience about love. It is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who examined the lyrics of male blues singers, and Watson (2006), who applied a revised version of Tyrmi’s (2004) model to investigate the expression of love and sexuality in the lyrics of pre-1950s’ American female blues singers. Kuhn’s (1999) study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus. This article aims to extend upon Kuhn’s enquiry, by examining, in greater detail, the seductive strategies and other acts of love expressed in the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, perceived that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and that they are more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. Watson (2006) disproved this assumption. I found that these women were direct in stating their needs, either for love or sexual gratification and had no qualms about stating these needs. In this article, I further investigate how these women express their needs and wants by applying Searle’s (1969, 1976, 1979) speech act theory to the lyrics of early female blues singers. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the use of assertives, directives, and commissives. This methodology is applied to a representatively selected computerised corpus of 111 songs by 39 different American female blues artists, who pre-date the 1950s. Like Kuhn (1999), I am particularly interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of how it is that as we listen to the blues we feel that these lyrics ‘talk’ to us and I am especially interested in proposing a pragmatic taxonomy of these lyrics

Effects of Music Therapy on Change and Depression on Clients in Detoxification

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of music therapy on readiness to change, depression, and treatment perceptions during a randomized effectiveness study utilizing psychometric instruments and 1-month follow-up. Participants (N = 140) wereinpatientsinadetoxificationunitandwererandomlyassigned bygrouptoamusictherapysongwritingconditionoraverbaltherapy condition. At immediate posttest, results indicated no significant between group differences in change readiness or depression, althoughthemusictherapyconditiontendedtohaveslightlyhigher mean change and slightly lower mean depression scores. At immediate posttest, the music therapy condition had significantly higher perceptions of helpfulness, enjoyment (both p < .001), and comfort (p < .04) than the control condition. Results at 1 month follow-up indicated that participants in the music therapy condition tended to have higher perceptions of mean enjoyment but slightly lower mean perceptions of helpfulness than the control condition. Furthermore,althoughnotsignificant,themusictherapygrouptended to have slightly lower depression scores at follow-up. Emerging themes from participants’ comments at immediate posttest and follow-up indicated the experimental group made more statements concerning enjoyment, thanks/appreciation, continuation of the music therapy program, and positive cognitive changes than the control group. Emerging themes from composed blues lyrics included consequences of using and insight/change. From the results of this study, it seems that music therapy can be as effective as verbal therapy in measures of change readiness, depression, and treatment perceptions for consumers in detoxification.

Formulaic Composition in the Blues: A View from the Field

Abstract Recent publications by Robert Springer and Michael Taft have brought renewed attention to the subject of the formula in blues lyrics. This article critiques these works. Drawing insights from the author’s fieldwork in the blues tradition, it agrees with Springer that a blues formula can be a half-line, whole line, or couplet unit and suggests that the blues formula should be understood, as Parry and Lord understood the oral epic formula, to be a lexical rather than semantic unit. The author offers a method of structural analysis of highly formulaic blues texts and discusses the relationships of folk blues to commercially recorded blues.

Formulaic Composition in the Blues: A View from the Field

Recent publications by Robert Springer and Michael Taft have brought renewed attention to the subject of the formula in blues lyrics. This article critiques these works. Drawing insights from the author's fieldwork in the blues tradition, it agrees with Springer that a blues formula can be a half-line, whole line, or couplet unit and suggests that the blues formula should be understood, as Parry and Lord understood the oral epic formula, to be a lexical rather than semantic unit. The author offers a method of structural analysis of highly formulaic blues texts and discusses the relationships of folk blues to commercially recorded blues.

Review of Miethaner (2005): I can look through muddy water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR)

Preview this article: Ulrich Miethaner. 2005. I can look through muddy water: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR), Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/eww.28.2.08her-1.gif

"The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters": Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan's Verbal Art

It may seem to be stating the obvious when pointing to the fact that Bob Dylan’s songs carry the voices of master blues singers. Vocal texture and color, singing behind the beat, and the use of twelve-bar rhythms might very well prove sufficient indicators for qualifying Dylan as a blues musician. Unfortunately, however, the elaborate and fascinating details of blues verbal artistry continue to remain a mystery to many scholars, as well as many musicians themselves. In this paper, we will take a closer look at the poetics of traditional blues lyrics within the particular context of their strong influence on Dylan’s songwriting. In doing so, we will focus on language use. Our goal is a deeper understanding of tradition, transmission, and personal creativity. By poetics, I mean that function of language that serves to enhance, embellish, and in any way focus the attention of listeners (or readers) on what could be called the “message for the sake of the message.” This definition is a direct borrowing from Roman Jakobson’s description (1987:62-94) of the interworkings of poetics in all speech genres, from everyday forms to the most complex and calculated of written poetries. Ethnopoetics, 1 which has been used most widely to treat Native American oral traditions, have contributed to the knowledge that poetic structures, motifs, and devices are culture-specific. Versification, narrative technique, sound patterns, metaphors, symbolic matrices, imagery, characterization, grammar use and all other such techniques derive from cultural uses of the

The bedroom blues: love and lust in the lyrics of early female blues artists

Blues lyrics have long been recognized for their earthiness, their apparent directness and their ability to make the listener feel as if they are being directly and personally addressed. This article pays particular attention to the manner in which female blues artists talk to their audience about love, in both an ethereal sense and a more down-to-earth sense, and is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who briefly examined the lyrics of male singers. Kuhn’s study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus (five songs, by three artists). This article aims to extend Kuhn’s enquiry by examining the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, intuitively assumed by those less familiar with the blues that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. This article investigates this assumption, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by applying an amended model of Tyrmi’s (2004) typology of love. This is applied to a corpus of female blues artists totalling 111 songs by 39 different artists, who predate the 1950s. The results show that these women were as forward as men in stating their needs, often in a most direct and colourful manner, and that sexual metaphor abounds in the lyrics of early female blues artists.

When I started to using BLUR

This article introduces BLUR, an electronic corpus of Blues lyrics from the early twentieth century, as a valuable resource for the study of syntactic phenomena in Earlier African American English and investigates the properties and origins of a peculiar construction found in it. The design of the BLUR corpus is presented, and methodological consequences resulting from the nature of the texts are discussed. Subsequently, a few noteworthy syntactic structures documented in it are briefly illustrated. The most challenging of these, a sequence of inchoative verbs (notably begin, start, or commence), the particle to, and a verbal –ing form, as in begin to falling, is then analyzed in some detail, considering syntactic constraints and historical documentation in potentially related varieties, represented by electronic corpora and other sources from Late Middle English to present-day dialects. Based on these findings, a hypothesis on the likely origins and diffusion of this construction is developed.

Elaborate Versionings: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets

Elaborate Versionings: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets Kenneth Sherwood Indiana University of Pennsylvania [*eCompanion at www.oraltradition.org 1 ] From Page to Performance The significant influence of oral literature, song, and vernacular speech forms on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature is generally recognized by scholars, teachers, and editors. The authoritative, four-volume American Poetry series published by the Library of America serves as an index of this consensus, with sections on anonymous ballads, blues lyrics, popular song, Native American poetry (song and narrative), folk songs, and spirituals. 2 These and other popular teaching anthologies that represent poems from oral contexts effectively subsume the poems within an economy in which they are appreciated, taught, and analyzed as though they were originally written, literary texts—according minimal attention to the mechanisms of transposition (from performance to print). 3 [End Page 119] Given the general lack of appreciation, within literary criticism, of the oral/textual dynamics relevant to orally produced poetries, it should come as no surprise that little attention has been paid to the analysis of the oral delivery of poems composed on paper. Should a "poetry reading" be classified as a dramatic reading, a recitation, or a performance? Can the oral delivery of a written poem constitute a significant or primary means of publication and reception? These have not often seemed like fundamental questions or meaningful distinctions for literary criticism. The very phrase "poetry reading" shows how criticism marginalizes performance, tending to see it as subsidiary, a secondary mode of presentation. 4 The reluctance of literary criticism to conceive of orality as a medium for modern poetry is at least partly a reflection of the success, over a half-century ago, of New Criticism in casting a focus upon the autonomous text. Scholars of oral poetry have derived useful interpretive guidance from focussing on "performance as the enabling event" (Foley 1995:27), with a consequent emphasis on the "radical integration, or situatedness, of verbal art in cultural context" (ibid.:30); New Criticism moved literary study in the opposite direction: towards an approach to analysis as an interaction between reader and text, with a minimization of cultural, intertextual, or authorial context. 5 This essay considers the implications of situating literate, postmodern poetry in a performance context. Using recordings/transcriptions of "poetry readings" by Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Cecilia Vicuña, its aims are: 1) to demonstrate that each event constitutes an emergent performance; 2) to explore how the performativity draws upon classically oral dynamics 6 ; [End Page 120] and 3) to show how the emergent qualities of the performances are achieved through the specific means of "elaboration" and "versioning." By means of elaboration and versioning, these poems break through into performativity; literary criticism cannot be content to receive them as conventional texts but must consider their emergent dimensions. Looking at print poetry within a performance context implicitly creates a friction with the lingering, teleological narrative (of the passage from orality to literacy), but it explicitly challenges the habitual privileging of the written text in literary studies. Scholars of both written and oral traditional literature have often operated, perhaps under the guidance of the paradigms of their fields, as if boundary questions belonged properly to the other's domain. The literary critic who ventures into the terrain of oral tradition and orality frequently finds such exploration discouraged. Beginning with a classic text in the scholarship, she or he finds Albert Lord claiming that "once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained" (1960: 129). Reflective as it may be of the situation of the oral epic in Yugoslavia, the extrapolation to oral art more generally serves as a rebuff to the literary critic. Committed to a strict definition of oral poetry—centered on the use of formula and composition-in-performance (the necessity for which, he quite rightly observes, is obviated by literate technologies)—Lord holds that there can be no transitional texts, because literacy impels oral composition in the...

Interview with Paul Oliver

DH: Perhaps I could begin in the present and ask you how you see the status of the blues today in the black community in the US.PO: There are a number of black writers who are interested in the arts, but I don't think blues has any significance for the black community as a whole, as gospel still has. Gospel is held together by the religious side, it's a different kind of structure. Rap seems to have taken over, at least as far as the younger generations are concerned.DH: Do you sense any connection between rap and hip hop and the blues?PO: There are connections, certainly, but I don't know how significant they are. There are superficial connections – for example the ‘Stackolee’ theme runs through several rap songs – but I'm not sure that is of any depth of significance. But rap songs do provide opportunities for people to express themselves as individuals; otherwise, there isn't a music that does that. As much as anything it's a functional connection, therefore, rather than a stylistic one.DH: Rap lyrics are more outspoken in many ways than blues lyrics.

In a Different Chord: Interpreting the Relations among Black Female Sexuality, Agency, and the Blues

Sometimes the lyrics mock and signify even as they pretend to weep. (Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues) Black feminism is not a monolithic enterprise. But it starts to look that way critical treatment of the intercourse among the blues, black female sexuality, and cultural agency. Angela Davis, for example, drawing from the lyrics of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, theorizes that the blues has helped to construct an aesthetic community that validates capacities domains assumed to be the prerogatives of males, such as sexuality and travel (120). Davis follows Hazel Carby's lead identifying the late 1920s and early 1930s as especially progressive periods the history of the blues because black women, as at no other time before, used the medium to manipulate and control their construction as sexual objects (333). Carby likewise reads Ma Rainey's and Bessie Smith's performances subversions of the stereotype of black as down-trodden and forlorn traditional blues matrices. (1) Michelle Russell and Sandra Leib argue similarly that black female blues developed at the turn of the twentieth century as a distinguishable idiom precisely because it enabled black to own their past, present and future by confiscating and reconstructing their identities (Russell 130). Like Carby and Davis, Russell and Leib portray female lyricists of the 1920s and 1930s as ideologists of the notion of black female self-determination, out of which black feminist thought emerged the academy the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of these scholars considers the possibility that musical and literary blues lyrics written by both men and and lacking explicitly emancipatory features might nevertheless afford black similar opportunities for self-formation and self-expression. (2) All take the same formulaic approach toward classifying empowering blues texts, isolating, almost exclusively, lyrics or performances which female singers assert male prerogatives or reject and exact revenge against their oppressors as the loci of liberating and, hence, feminist moments of expression for black women. By focusing exclusively on celebratory black female performances, black feminist blues scholars suggest that the liberating potential of the blues is a primary function of the performer's gender identification. They forget that, while Clare Smith, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday were singing and stomping the blues the '20s and '30s, black male writers and entertainers such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Louis Armstrong were also producing blues texts for mass consumption. Limning Ma Rainey as both feminist foremother and prophet, Leib insists that the body of Rainey's recorded material constitutes a message to women, explaining quite clearly how to deal with reverses love and how to interpret other areas of life. Leib points out that, in striking contrast to the popular concept of the blues as a music of sorrow and despair, Ma Rainey's performances reveal women aggressively confronting or attempting to change the circumstances of their lives (xvi). By contrast, this essay, I work from the belief that the practice of dichotomizing black male- and female-authored blues constructions of black and black female sexuality vitiates the life of the medium--the fluidity of the blues and its ability to circumvent diametrically opposed categorical analyses. Attending exclusively to works that paint only overtly positive images of black women, other words, produces stereotypically negative interpretations of those passive female singers that have historically been condemned or ignored. The scholarly focus inadvertently dismisses a cross-generational body of musical and literary blues texts that, fact, celebrate the multi-dimensionality of black women's characters. By cross-examining blues works by Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Mari Evans, and Natalie Cole, I aim to represent the blues' metasexual dimensions as well as the possibilities the blues have historically created for black American to achieve actual and symbolic liberation within the constraints of white- and male-dominated societies. …

African-American Proverbs in Context (review)

Reviewed by: African-American Proverbs in Context Jacqueline Fulmer African-American Proverbs in Context. By Sw. Anand Prahlad. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Pp. xiv + 292, preface, appendix, notes, references, index.) Sw. Anand Prahlad's African-American Proverbs in Context builds on the best work done so far in the study of proverbs, in general, and of African American proverbs, specifically. More importantly, this study provides a well-crafted approach that I think will inspire further work. Combined with an overview of pertinent scholarship, the book offers comprehensive theory balanced with fieldwork. Prahlad provides a structure for a contextual analysis of proverbs that will aid many in this field of study. The opening chapter reviews past African American proverb studies, then introduces a blueprint for a more context-sensitive investigation of proverb use and function. Divided into two parts, the body of the book demonstrates the flexibility and effectiveness of Prahlad's theories. In the first section, he applies them to WPA records of interviews with ex-slaves, then to blues lyrics. The second section is devoted to analysis of materials gleaned from either Prahlad's fieldwork or the Folklore Archives at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of Prahlad's theoretical suggestions may strike readers as new, but he grounds them thoroughly in the context of past studies. Following the direction of recent work in proverb studies, he focuses on the "creativity of proverbial usage and . . . the opinion that proverbs should be considered creative performances rather than merely quotations" (p.5). He also eschews as unproductive the approach that treats proverbs as indices to national character. This approach, he finds, is based on "a priori notions and stereotypes rather than on any scientific or ethnographic investigation of cultures and behaviors" (p. 6) and underestimates the often paradoxical, contradictory, and iconoclastic nature of proverbs. Prahlad proposes a four-part model with which to discuss all the dimensions of proverb meaning, rather than treating them separately as others have done. The first three dimensions are (1) the "grammatical" or literal level; (2) the "situational" level, which is derived from a term used by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and "designates the intent of the speaker in the particular context in which the proverb is spoken" (p. 24); and (3) "the group, or social, level," which involves shared social knowledge of the general meaning of a proverb. The fourth or [End Page 496] "symbolic" level extends beyond all the other dimensions, encompassing the personal and psychological importance of the proverbial item. Prahlad notes that this dimension has received little attention from proverb scholars, primarily because ethnographic and contextual work is essential to it. An example of the symbolic level of analysis is applied to the proverb, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop." For a woman who became pregnant before marriage, and heard it from her mother at the time, this proverb "might involve feelings of shame, fear, or abandonment" (p. 28). Another woman who remembers the proverb spoken laughingly by her mother "about a parent down the street," however, may recall a symbolic meaning dealing with "feelings of closeness and bonding," as well as a sense of being in the "in-group" (p.28). Prahlad notes that the WPA ex-slave interviews to which he applies his analysis necessarily lack the data for discussing this symbolic level of proverb meaning, since the informants are no longer available for questioning. In spite of this, "a knowledge of the other levels can assist in determining symbolic meanings when we encounter the same items later on in our study" (p. 44). While Prahlad considers it may be possible to compare instances and thereby ascertain the symbolic level of meaning, with these WPA transcripts, he mostly confines himself to the grammatical, situational, and social levels of analysis. Presumably, he has left the examination of the symbolic level of the ex-slave texts for some other project that could encompass a greater number of proverb texts than this introductory volume. I found the next section, "Proverbs in Blues Lyrics," not quite as persuasive a demonstration as the first and last two segments, as it contains even less data on those listening to the proverbs. However, I was...

Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

Understanding the connections between culture, race, politics, and disease This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an invisible malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, where one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics was founded in the 1950s, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's discovery by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.