Linking the blues with racial violence

When Adam Gussow, a white graduate student who’d played amplified harmonica as part of an interracial blues duo, wrote a column for Blues Access magazine in the 1990s on the correlation he found between the emergence of the blues tradition and the horrific Southern legacy of lynchings, he was surprised at the feedback. Gussow, now an assistant professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, believed the blues tradition evolved as a way for black southerners to voice their anger, grief and fear in the face of the ongoing threat of lynching in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. Many of his readers, though, saw in Gussow’s perspective a case of flagrant projection. “The blues were about a lot of things, they protested -- broken hearts, bad luck, going to Kansas City, hungering for love -- but lynching wasn’t one of them.”

“Seems Like Murder Here,” a book that takes its name from the Charlie Patton blues song, is Gussow’s answer to those skeptics. Gussow considers the sublimated imprint that spectacle lynching had on the advent of the blues; he also looks into the role played by black-on-black violence common in jook joints as well as black retribution against whites. Finally, he probes how these forms of violence made their way into blues lyrics and blues narratives, including novels by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, poetry by Langston Hughes, and blues biographies and autobiographies.

“Lynching, I propose, casts such a broad shadow across the blues lyric tradition because it was one of the prime social catalysts -- even, debatably, the prime social catalyst -- for the emergence of blues song out of a welter of pre-blues black musics,” Gussow writes. To make his point, he explicates the lyrics of many blues songs, including “Crazy Blues,” the 2 1/2-minute 1920 recording that ushered in the “race records” boom, and compares the written words with the experiences of those who wrote them. Often, he succeeds in making a case -- not always an airtight one, though many aspects are convincing -- for his theory. In so doing, he gives an extensive overview on the indignities of the Jim Crow South during the post-Reconstruction period (1890 to 1920), employing many factual examples to back his argument.

“[T]he narrative histories of spectacle lynching and early blues song are essentially coextensive,” Gussow writes. “Both are ‘born’ as recognizable cultural phenomena in the 1890s, and are particularly associated with Mississippi, Georgia and Texas.” The blues, he tells us, echo lament over the lynched victim’s dismembered body and are a rallying cry on the part of those who witnessed (or were affected by) the violence. That these atrocities were not addressed in a more obvious way -- most blues lyrics speak only of generalized “troubles”: the man who won’t be coming home, the “blues” that take hold at midnight, never mentioning the act of lynching itself -- Gussow explains, is because candor might have brought the same tragedy to the doorstep of the musician. By sublimating the experience into the blues, he contends, people were able to serve as vocal witnesses to acts of terrorizing white violence, “to confess the blues,” while protecting themselves against the dangers of speaking out.

Though his theories are fascinating and the background he gives on the Jim Crow South chilling, the text, unfortunately, reads like an academic treatise, speaking clearly to those ensconced in the field of blues music and cultural history and offering scant openings for lay readers to enter. A typical sentence: “This study is premised, in sum, on a conception of blues textually that understands blues literature and blues orature to be an expressive continuum rather than a self-evident binary.” This jargon-heavy form of writing is insular and exclusionary, requiring general readers to wade through excessive theoretical chatter to access his compelling material.

Gussow also makes a handful of debatable statements, assertions that raise more questions than they answer. Writing of B.B. King’s love for his guitar Lucille as depicted in King’s autobiography, “Blues All Around Me,” for example, Gussow writes that King’s relationship with his guitar “takes the form of a bodily exchange: the bluesman hungering for, embracing, and publicly declaring his love for the pristine feminine body of Lucille and her surrogates as a way of displacing the abject masculine body of the lynching victim he is unable to embrace.... “ (The italics are Gussow’s.) Whether King would agree Gussow’s perception is another matter.

For a book focused on such a passionate and heartfelt form of American music, the writing in “Seems Like Murder Here” is about as far from lyric and rhythmically interesting as one could find. The material Gussow mines is absorbing, but his academic approach dries the subject out, leaving little of the profound emotion necessary for a compelling immersion in the blues.