Student Sample Essays

 

Please feel free to look at the student samples below as possible models for your own writing as you begin working on your own essays. Please note as well that these samples are not "perfect" (one of the most slippery of terms), nor are they meant to be, but they advance an interesting thesis, support their argument with sufficient evidence and research, and are generally well written. — Thank you to your fellow students for allowing us to have a glimpse at their work!

 

The Opposite of a Christian: Naturalism in Russell Banks' The Sweet Hereafter

 

Russell Banks' novel The Sweet Hereafter echoes the cynicism toward religion and spirituality manifest in the works of many nineteenth-century realist authors. Although Banks uses unconventional tools such as multiple narrators and non-linear storylines—the marks of a postmodern writer—his approach to realism is very much traditional, mirroring the works of his literary predecessors, from Stephen Crane to Mark Twain (whose classic Huckleberry Finn Banks reworked for his 1995 novel Rule of the Bone). In true realist form, there is no religious pretense in The Sweet Hereafter. Instead, to counter religious ideals, particularly those typical of Christianity, Banks explores theories of naturalism, stripping the text of spirituality and presenting the characters as purely physical and emotional beings. As Banks says, "[Realist] writers are essentially storytellers deeply concerned with the fates of individuals played out against their real contexts, their environments and circumstances. And these are the conventions of realism" (Wylie 737, emphasis mine). This realism is the factor that makes The Sweet Hereafter a true tragedy, in which the characters must face death for what it is, without the convenience and comforts of religion.

Hints of realism and naturalism surface before the narratives even begin, as Banks employs Emily Dickinson's poem as an epigraph:

By homely gift and hindered Words

The human heart is told

Of Nothing—

"Nothing" is the force

That renovates the World—

This bleak sentiment is the harbinger of naturalistic themes throughout the novel, where Nothing is the "force" that drives everything, creating a man-versus-nature mentality; there are no spiritual beings at work here. The word "renovates" is especially ironic in this verse because it implies a bettering of the world, which like the title of the book, is a sad contrast to the true, dire conclusions in the text.

The epigraph's existential tone also depicts the novel's setting: an atheistic or, at best, apathetically religious community. We see this in the fact that Dolores and Abbott, although they occasionally attend the First Methodist church, are "not religious persons" (26). They attend church for traditional and social reasons, which is an accurate portrayal of most of Sam Dent's residents.

Dolores Driscoll

The epigraph's tone blends seamlessly into the first narration, in which Dolores summarizes her morality in taking responsibility for oneself and that "together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell...you've got my philosophy of life" (26). Dolores' "philosophy of life" is purely internal and humanistic, and "you don't need religion for it" (26). This dismisses the need for a divine being. One can live, says Banks, a moral life without being religious. The crux of the novel, however, is whether one can deal with the tragedy of death without being religious. We see Dolores' struggle with this when, after declaring herself nonreligious, she says, "Although, since the accident, there have been numerous times when I have wished that I was [religious]. Religion being the main way the unexplainable gets explained. God's will and all" (26).

This is the sentiment on which the remainder of the book's theme rests. In true iconoclast form, Banks attempts to view and explain a tragedy through a non-spiritual lens, using only naturalistic means and methods. The tone of Dolores' "God's will and all" invokes a sense of foolishness in trying to spiritualize such things. Billy Ansel makes a strikingly similar statement after the accident: "The Christians' talk about God's will and all—that only made me angry" (73, emphasis mine). Herein we see sarcasm directed toward the will of God—if there is one at all.  Later, Dolores says of her relationship with her sons, "You tend to embrace in thought what you're forbidden to embrace in fact" (31). This subtly suggests the tendencies of the religious to embrace their traditions, however unbelievable—a motif we see much clearer in Billy Ansel's narrative.

Billy Ansel

From the start, the reader notices Billy's hatred for religion and spirituality. His narrative style is one that tells the bare, cold facts. Because his personality is practical and, both before and after the accident, disconnected from sentimentality, it's easy to see the accident as being simply that. While others around him claim they saw it coming or that by God's design it was meant to be, Billy only sees that it has happened and that things have changed—an accident in the truest sense of the word.

When acquaintances tell him they harbored some mysterious foreknowledge of the accident, Billy notes that it's merely their "way of living with tragedy...to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand" (38). This statement takes a jab at prophecies so prevalent in organized religion, and to him, it changes the true definition of accident, which should have no ties to a greater, outside power. Because these so-called premonitions are considered supernatural, Billy dismisses them as idiocy: "Some people, when their dreams collapse, turn superstitious in order to explain it" (57). Herein, Banks parallels religious ideals with superstition, eliminating the possibility that things spiritual and things natural can coexist. These thoughts are reasonable for Billy, a widower and a Vietnam veteran, who has now lost both his children, and whose every thought and memory are tainted with death. After Lydia died, he stopped attending church altogether because "the Christian perspective came to seem downright cruel" (80). Thus Billy becomes increasingly naturalistic in his worldview:

"I still believed in life, however—that it goes on, in spite of death. I had my children, after all. And Risa. But four years later, when my son and daughter and so many other children of this town were killed in the accident, I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite, of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality was death." (80)

We see this change more clearly in Billy's comment that "there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now" (67, emphasis mine). Billy's outlook is evolutionistic in that death is "natural and forever," as opposed the Christian perspective in which there was a time before death and there will be a time when death ceases to exist. Billy's view of this notion is entirely cynical:

"Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places." (79)

For Billy, the "green earth in between" is the only reality and the "sweet hereafter," as Bert Cardullo suggests, exists "only in the memories of the living" (Cardullo 107). Billy in no way romanticizes, or tries to cleverly explain away—as he believes the Christians do—the morbidity and finality of death. He says, "The way we deal with death depends on how it's imagined for us beforehand, by our parents and the people who surround them, and what happens to us early on" (54, emphasis mine). The afterlife, therefore, is not a reality, but a social construct to cushion the hard blow and devastation of death; it is a myth entirely learned.

Banks uses spiritual terminology to explain Billy's circumstances, but with a distinctly naturalistic spin. Describing the parents who outlived their children, Billy says, "We, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment...and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone" (73, emphasis mine). This image of an earthly purgatory is an ever-present one in The Sweet Hereafter, symbolized cruelly by the "temporary morgue" where the children's bodies were being stored in a firehouse (69). Furthermore, Billy is twice referred to as a ghost, as is Zoe. Billy persists in telling us how dead he felt; when Mitchell Stephens disrupts his reminiscing behind the garage, Billy describes himself as a ghost, emotionless and stuck. He says, "For me, now, the only reality was death," in contrast to the Christian idea of life hereafter (80). When he is staring at the remains of the school bus, he describes even memories as having more life than he did. Because he had abandoned his spiritual upbringing, he had little to cling to for reassurance, thus thrusting him into this perpetual state of nothingness, or as Mitchell would describe it, "a person who's gone to the other side of life and is no longer even looking back at us"—a secular answer to purgatory (104).

Additionally, when Billy reunites with Risa for the first and only time since the accident, he depicts them as strangers in a "waiting room"—much like purgatory—unable to speak or feel or think (87). At that moment, Room 11 lost all its former sense of pleasure and escape. The two's conversation is expressionless, causing Billy to leave prematurely with a solemn goodbye and Risa whispering, "You go home, Billy," where the word "home" has lost its meaning (88). After that night, Billy says of his relationship with Risa, "we were simply different people. Not new people; different" (88). This contrasts the Christian idea of becoming a "new creation," or receiving a "new body," or there being a "new heaven and a new earth." Ansel doesn't see anything in terms of re-creation or redemption, only in terms of being different, for it is "nothing that renovates the world."

Banks further contrasts naturalism with the Christian worldview when Billy says, "He [Reverend Dreiser] wanted us to believe that God was like a father who had taken our children for himself. Some father" (73). Once again, we immediately sense the sarcasm in Billy's tone. Although his disenchantment with the Christian religion is heightened after the accident, we see traces of it even beforehand, when in Vietnam, Billy says, "To me the religious explanation was just another sly denial of the facts...I couldn't take the Christian line seriously enough even to bother arguing it..." (79). But despite his suspicion of Christianity, Billy still has a difficult time rationalizing the accident in purely naturalistic terms: "It flies in the face of biology, it contradicts history, it denies cause and effect, it violates basic physics, even" (78). This statement brings the reader back to the heart of the matter—not that naturalism is the superior worldview, but that sometimes the "unexplainable," as Dolores called it, must remain unexplained, for when one tries to explain in through spirituality and religion, the reality turns into myth, and pain is only masked.

Mitchell Stephens

The reader sees frequent naturalistic and Darwinistic ideals in Mitchell Stephens' commentary. As Austin Sarat suggests in his analysis of the film version of The Sweet Hereafter, the whole reason Mitchell even comes on the scene is to convince the dead children's parents that what some people call "misfortune" is really injustice (Sarat 23-24). Someone, something tangible is to blame; the parents should not simply rest on attributing the accident to the mysteries of Providence. Margaret J. Fried and Lawrence A. Frolik further develop this point:

Generally speaking, for an injustice to occur there must be an ill-intentioned agent responsible for the dreadful event, while a misfortune is caused by the random action of external forces of nature. Distinguishing between injustice and misfortune, however, proves difficult...because many events are rather obscure combinations of human and natural causes... To many, an unjust universe is more tolerable than a senseless one. Rather than accept random misfortune, we blame ourselves and each other in order to create a coherent and just story about causes and events. (Fried 6, emphasis mine)

As a lawyer, Mitchell must work only with natural, observable facts. So perhaps just as much as Billy, but for different reasons, Mitchell is increasingly unimpressed by the Christian worldview, which is largely faith-based. For instance, far from humans being made in the image of God, Mitchell has learned from working with his clients that "they're like clever monkeys, that's all" (91). Herein we see no small trace of evolutionary theories, which attempt to equate humans and animals, denying people have any divinely unique qualities. Similarly, he calls the mourning parents of Sam Dent "chumps" and "poor saps" (98). He later calls Abbott a "dummy" (152). For Mitchell Stephens, there is little value in human life.

Far from being the center of God's plan for the universe, to Mitchell, the beautiful landscapes through which he was traveling "were places, that's all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet" (92). He removes all spirituality and meaning from nature, much like those of whose books he has read. Mitchell mentions his familiarity with the works of Theodore Dreiser, a naturalist author of the twentieth century, as he drives. It is also no coincidence that the reverend in Sam Dent is named Dreiser—a subtle reminder to the readers that reverends and pastors hold no more legitimate answers than would a naturalist. Of the said landscape, Mitchell says it "controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here" (93). Herein, Banks is attributing great power to the indifferent forces of nature, completing his picture of Sam Dent as an unreligious town, and elevating nature above all things spiritual.

Mitchell believes "there are no accidents" (91). But unlike the Calvinists, who would agree in that sense of attributing everything to God's sovereign purpose for both Himself and mankind, Mitchell only believes that in relation to his practice; lawyers must find someone on whom the "accident" can be blamed. In this small phrase, Banks is cleverly twisting the idea of Providence, claiming that all things are somehow attributed to and caused by humanity, and not to a divine being. He is secularizing a common spiritual thought that is prevalent especially in times of mourning.

Thus far we have only gleaned atheistic ideals from Mitchell's allusions. But like Billy Ansel, Mitchell makes it clear that he is no proponent of organized religion, including the few he believes to reside in Sam Dent: "Religious fanatics and superpatriots, they try to protect their kids by turning them into schizophrenics; Episcopalians and High Church Jews gratefully abandon their kids to boarding schools and divorce one another so they can get laid with impunity" (99). Whereas Billy sees the spiritual children as those who have inherited a learned religion, Mitchell, in his academic superiority, classifies them as "schizophrenics." Once again, this comment serves to highlight the stupidity of the spiritual residents of Sam Dent, as well as emptying humans of all divine attributes. Mitchell says of himself, "Some people, when terrible things happen to them, take strength from believing that other people are better than in fact they are. Not me. I go in the opposite direction" (139). This is reminiscent of Billy's statement that he'd become "the opposite of a Christian" in that they both lean toward the naturalistic worldview, even when it comes to human dignity.

This is more clearly seen when Mitchell attends the combined funeral of some of the Sam Dent children killed in the accident. Although it's understandable that Mitchell has no reason for being emotionally connected to the children, his speech offers a glimpse into his lack of respect for human life in general: "The pallbearers—uncles and older brothers and cousins of the kids inside the boxes—shoved the caskets into the hearses, and the somber black-suited guys from the funeral homes slammed the doors shut on them" (147, emphasis mine). The indifferent language used suggests the children in the coffins are no longer beings, but mere bodies—that there is no longer reason to honor them. This refutes the common Christian doctrine that the body and soul will be reunited in the resurrection on the last day, thus creating again a naturalistic view of death.

It is also interesting to note that when Mitchell attends the funeral and is analyzing his surroundings, he notes that "Dolores was plunking herself down in the exact center of the town's grief and rage" (143). It's fitting that Banks would describe the "exact center of the town's grief and rage" as a church. To the author, grief and rage are intimately linked with the myths of death presented in religions such as the Christianity, which to the naturalist, only disguise the truth.  

When Mitchell visits the Ottos' house, he sees "no pattern" to it—a dome-like structure built halfway into a hill, with wooden shingles and surrounded completely by nature (112). Herein we see a small-scale version of the world in which humans live. For Banks, this is a symbol of the natural earth. The home's nonsymmetrical windows have no order because of the chaotic structure of the house. Through the windows, one can only see nature towering outside. Mitchell says he "felt trapped" (114). Even the furniture is earthy, including the tree-stump chair with its birch-stick back—"twig furniture, they call it, made to look as if it grew in the woods in the approximate shape of a chair or table or set of shelves" (115). The house resembles the idea of a naturalistic world—no design, little order, as is.

When Mitchell sees fourteen tiny crosses set out on the crash site, he thinks, "So much for separation of church and state" (138). One can't help but think that Mitchell wants church separated not only from government, but from his entire worldview. However, like Dolores, who sometimes wished she was religious, and Billy, who wrestled with the failure of biology to explain everything, Mitchell too struggles with the natural worldview when tragedy hits close to home. Of his strained relationship with Zoe, he says, "I had for years been tied to the ground, helpless and enraged by my own ability to choose between belief and disbelief" (157). In context, he is referring to the lies Zoe tells to obtain money from him, but in the greater context, we see that Mitchell has a greater struggle with Truth as a whole. In his profession, he is daily dancing around the lines of where truths end and lies begin, and vice versa. Like his profession, his naturalistic worldview provides few answers and many more questions.

Nichole Burnell

Nichole's narrative reveals the sad abuse by her father, who is a churchgoing man, as well as the apathy of her mother, who is the most religious figure in the novel. Nichole says, "Mom and Daddy are Christians, at least Mom is, and I sort of believe in God myself, so I did not want to appear ungrateful and end up losing what little luck I had" (171). This statement is revealing; it comes as no surprise that the "Christians" in the book are a sexually abusive dad and a flat, detached mom. This further defines Banks' slow-unfurling caricature of religious people throughout the novel, adding the new element of hypocrisy, which thus far has been only hinted at. We see Nichole's parents as those who are using their child's disability to gain sympathy, and perhaps even a modicum of celebrity, for their own selfish purposes. This is likely a commentary on the religious world in general—a testament to the tendency of some to elevate themselves as being holier, more special, than the average person.

Although Nichole "sort of" believes in God, her statement reveals her ignorance in that she doesn't want to appear "ungrateful" for her "luck"—two clearly contradictory ideas (for luck has no place in a universe governed by deity). Herein, Nichole embodies the idea that Banks only hinted at earlier, via Billy's narrative: the ability for children to inherit their parents' beliefs, however distorted they may be.

Through Nichole, Banks takes numerous jabs at Jesus Christ, the central figure in Christianity. Nichole lists a picture of Jesus as one of the many "dumb things" her church friends and classmates gave her after the accident (162). Furthermore, "There was a new picture of Jesus over the dresser that I knew Mom had put up; she'd no doubt left the old one upstairs to keep track of Jennie" (164). Herein is no small hint of sarcasm, emphasizing the stupidity of believing in an omniscient being, or at the very least, the futility of relics—perhaps a commentary on Roman Catholic tradition. Either way, not once is Jesus' name mentioned with reverence, as evidenced by Nichole's statement that her mother believes that "Jesus takes care of everything except your weight" (188). The most striking opposition to Jesus' authority, as held in Christian circles, is found in Nichole's description of her father:

But now I saw him as a thief, just a sneaky little thief in the night who had robbed his own daughter of what was supposed to be permanently hers—like he had robbed me of my soul or something, whatever it was that Jennie still had and I didn't. (180)

The term she uses to describe her father's disgrace is undoubtedly an allusion to the New Testament text in I Thessalonians 5:2 in which Jesus is said to come "as a thief in the night" to rapture His church. Within this text we see a veiled equating of Sam Burnell's taking away of his daughter's innocence to Christ's "taking away" his church, or as Banks intimates, the world's innocence. For the author, the naturalistic worldview is a return to truth that Christianity and spirituality have been denying for millennia.

Throughout Nichole's narration, the reader senses Banks' plea to realize that even a child can see the foolishness of a Christian worldview. Nichole starts to believe that people "just think [her parents] are dumb" and that she feels sorrier for them than herself, even in her condition. Eventually Nichole stops going to church and stops teaching Sunday school. She is able to see through her parents' masquerade and repudiates their hypocrisy, often reminding them of their Christian values by snidely commenting on the rules of "this Christian house" (195). She becomes more and more angered at "Daddy for what he knew and had done, and Mom for what she didn't know and hadn't done" (197, emphasis mine).

Thus Nichole, too, becomes "the opposite of a Christian" in that everything is void of spirituality and meaning; her church "wasn't [hers] anymore" (205). When determining what she will tell her lawyer, she thinks, "It was an accident, that's all. Accidents happen" (181). Like Dolores, Billy, and Mitchell before her, she concludes that accidents, death, and in essence, bad things, are simply natural and forever—a part of existence to be tolerated.

Dolores Driscoll

In the closing narrative, which circles back to Dolores Driscoll, we get many naturalistic images. Firstly, we see images of resurrection and "second life" attributed only to the inanimate. Boomer is the only thing that is said to be "still alive" (250). Also, the chapter begins in the end of summer, whereas Nichole's narrative ended in the winter; Banks completely passes over spring, the season of renewal and resurrection. Secondly, we see images of evolution in the derby in that "the strong cars quickly [drive out] the weaker" (251). This harkens back to survival-of-the-fittest, which fit in nicely with the novel's other naturalistic themes. Thirdly, we see images of naturalism in the repetition of circular objects in the novel's closing pages: "Over by the midway, the Ferris wheel spun slowly, rising and falling in the distance like a gigantic clock. The faint music of the merri-go-round..." (256). This "circle of life" motif symbolizes the circularity of time, as opposed to the Christian worldview in which time is a temporary creation.

As the events of the county fair die down for the night, Dolores says of the residents of Sam Dent, "it was as if we were the citizens of a wholly different town now, as if we were a town of solitaries living in a sweet hereafter" (254). Once again, Banks paints a picture of an earthly purgatory—of life after loss. Dolores continues: "We were absolutely alone, each of us, and even our shared aloneness did not modify the simple fact of it. And even if we weren't dead, in an important way which no longer puzzled or frightened me and which I therefore no longer resisted, we were as good as dead" (254).

The irony of Sam Dent's "sweet" hereafter lies in the fact that there is no renewal, no rebirth, no resurrection for its people. As symbolized by the circles spun throughout the novel's final pages, the events, accidents and deaths that characterized the winter months will likewise continue to occur naturally, forever. Thus Banks, like his realist predecessors, ends his novel with a bleak image of repetition, symbolizing the onward march of nature into "familiar darkness" (257). And like his postmodern contemporaries, Banks does not intend to provide answers for his readers, as many world religions claim to do, but is content to end sentences with question marks and ellipses.

Works Cited

Cardullo, Bert. "Blood, Snow, and Tears." The Hudson Review 52 (1999): 107-114.

Fried, Margaret A. and Lawrence A. Frolik. "The Limits of Law: Litigation, Lawyers, and the Search for Justice in Russell Banks' The Sweet Hereafter." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7 (1995): 1-29.

Sarat, Austin. "Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter." Law & Society Review, 34 (2000): 3-46.

Wylie, J.J. " Reinventing Realism: An Interview with Russell Banks" Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (2000): 737.

 

Fate, Scapegoats and Accident — Oedipus Rex and The Sweet Hereafter

 

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks is a modern tale about the way in which a small town reacts to a terrible tragedy. It can be viewed as a contemporary morality lesson in the same vein as the classical Greek play Oedipus. There are obviously big differences; however, the themes and the idea of catharsis through being a scapegoat are present in both works. Banks has recast the scene from ancient Thebes to the fictional upstate New York town of Sam Dent, but there is a chorus, a sage, incest and someone who shoulders the blame for the entire town. The sin of hubris has been replaced with the sins of greed, wrath and litigiousness as these sins are much more relevant to contemporary America. Banks takes a classic tale and recasts it for a modern audience. By doing so, he spans Oedipus over four characters instead of just one man. We are given the story more like modern court depositions rather than in the form of a drama. This paper will show that although many years and place separate these two works, they are actually very similar stories with only a few minor differences.

So why would a contemporary author revert back to ancient themes? Is it just that every story has been told? There seems to be more at work with The Sweet Hereafter. It seems as though he needs to use large mythological structures in order to relate a story of this magnitude. He is not the first author to do so. According to T.S. Eliot in his article, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," James Joyce also used these structures in his modernist novel Ulysses. He states that "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity...it is ...a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history...It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art" (177-178). The use of an ancient story retold in a modern way is a way of providing meaning and structure to an otherwise meaningless story. Just as James Joyce uses the Odyssey to convey a modern story, Banks uses Oedipus.

The narrative structures of The Sweet Hereafter and Oedipus Rex are in many ways the same. Both stories are told from the point of view of the narrators, which means that there is an inherent bias already built into the tales. As Margaret Fried and Lawrence Frolik state in their article, "The Limits of Law: Litigation, Lawyers and the Search for Justice in Russell Banks' 'The Sweet Hereafter:'" "...the 'real' story is composed of subjective experience, self-serving motivation and conflicting interests" (2). In much the same way, Oedipus constantly makes us think he is smarter and better than he really is. The Chorus, too, is swayed by Oedipus' statements about his own self-worth. Even after the prophet Tiersias reveals him to be less than what he seems, the Chorus says, "But I, for my part, will never join those who blame Oedipus...We all saw how the Sphinx came against him—there his wisdom was proved. In that hour of danger he was the joy of Thebes. Remembering that day, my heart will never judge him guilty of evil action" (33). Oedipus has convinced the Chorus of his innocence, just as each narrator in Banks' novel convinces us of his or her innocence. Dolores Driscoll, the driver of the bus, states on the first page, "...when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels." We have no idea whether or not she is guilty, because like the Chorus in Oedipus, we have only what we are told upon which to base our assumptions. The reader is left to cobble a composite truth from what we are told. There is no omniscient narrator to give us the entire story.

The circularity in both the world of the ancient Greeks and in Banks' novel is another reflection of the connection between these two works. According to Michael Fowler the Greeks, especially Plato, believed that "the world was constructed with geometric simplicity and elegance" and that "the sun, moon and planets...would have a natural circular motion, since that is the simplest uniform motion that repeats itself endlessly" (1). These circular ideas are demonstrated in many ways within The Sweet Hereafter. The first and most obvious way is the way in which Dolores Driscoll both starts and ends the narrative thus forming a circle. Another more subtle way is the way in which many of the characters have double-letters in their names. This causes an echoing effect. For example you have Delores Driscoll, Billy Ansel, Abbott Driscoll, Mitchell Stephens, Nichole Burnell, Wendell Walker, and Harley and Wanda Otto.

There is also all of the circular imagery that appears at the end of the novel when the town has the carnival. Delores describes the scene by saying "the Ferris wheel spun slowly, rising and falling in the distance like a giant clock. The faint music of the merry-go-round...was strangely sad to me; it was like the sound of childhoods that were gone forever but still calling mournfully back to us" (256). The circular universe that the Greeks described is very much present in the modern world of Sam Dent. It is also evident within Oedipus as Oedipus liberates Thebes from the menace of the Sphinx when he first arrives and once again liberates Thebes from the plague that he has caused in the end. As McDonald says, "The intent to move beyond a present or evade a deadly future, merely traces the path back towards the end" (147). These ancient circular structures work in both texts to provide the idea that we are all bound to some larger universe. The idea is also present in the word disaster itself – literally meaning out of sync with the stars. The cosmos are misaligned in both of these texts and the people in them are constrained to fix the problem that is causing this discord within their respective universes.

In many ways these are both the stories of the loss of innocence. Sam Dent loses its innocence when the children die. The character of Billy Ansel feels that "A town that loses its children loses its meaning" (78). In much the same way, Thebes loses its meaning as a powerful city state whose ruler defeated the Sphinx. The priest tells Oedipus that Thebes is "...like a ship rolling dangerously; it has lost the power to right itself and raise its head up out of the waves of death" (2). Both towns are floundering in the wake of tragedy and both are at a loss of what to do. Thebes looks to Oedipus to save it again, and Sam Dent is eventually saved by Dolores Driscoll through a ritualistic, pre-Christian, pagan scapegoating.

The stories are also similar in that they both begin after the major event associated with the plot has occurred. The accident in Sam Dent has already occurred, the plague that affects Thebes is already in motion. We are introduced into the stories and shown how the various characters are left to deal with the aftermath of these tragedies. In Oedipus, the beginnings of the story are revealed as the action continues, and it is the same way in The Sweet Hereafter. The story is not told in terms of a beginning, middle and end, but rather as a series of flashbacks and steps forward that intermingle. It seems that whenever the tragedy is this great, telling the story in the traditional manner is inadequate. An event like the bus accident or Oedipus' sin must be revealed in pieces or the emotional impact is too great. Our psyches prevent us from absorbing that much grief and sorrow at once. Both Sophocles and Banks understand this and thus present their stories in bits and pieces. This is an echo of the circularity that is in both works; Sophocles and Banks circumlocute around their subjects. Banks doubles this circularity by having Dolores narrate both the beginning and ending chapters of the book. This narration completes the circle of the novel.

Instead of one centralized tragic hero, Banks presents us with the stories of four everyday people. Perhaps this is because in modern times a man like Oedipus, who is a hero, a king, and the representative for his town, no longer exists. Or because, as David McDonald puts it in his article "The Trace of Absence: A Derridean Analysis of 'Oedipus Rex,'" "Oedipus of course is a non-person, a semiopoetic structure, a purely mythic figure and hence is both a demigod and a reification of a living consciousness, and as such a projection of the self-deconstructive forces inhabiting the self and apperceived by the self" (157). Because Oedipus is this way, Banks must create four characters that each embody some aspect of Oedipus' character. The idea of a non-person will not work in Banks' realist setting. Mitchell Stephens represents his pride, Nichole Burnell the incest, Billy Ansel the attempt to defy fate, and finally Dolores his pain, suffering and his eventual scapegoating (in many ways similar to a medieval morality play). In fact, Dolores becomes the key character, repeated twice within the narrative structure. Her name comes from the old Latin root word for pain, dolor. She represents many of the mythological structures that are at work in Banks' novel. The Chorus of Greek drama becomes all of the other citizens of Sam Dent that are not given individual voices, but are none the less felt and heard. So that while there are differences between the Greeks and Banks' story, the character structures work in much the same way.

The idea that incest is among the worst sins you can commit is prevalent in both stories. In The Sweet Hereafter, Nichole Burnell uses this idea to punish her father for committing incest with her. She lies at her deposition so that her parents will be forced to drop the lawsuit and lose out on the money they would have received. She says, "I suddenly realized that I myself—and not Daddy...could force Mr. Stephens to drop the lawsuit. I could force their big shot lawyer to walk away from the case. And Daddy would know that I did it...And because of what I knew about him, he wouldn't be able to do a thing about it afterwards" (199). As Bert Cardullo puts it in his article "Blood, Snow and Tears," "Nichole is lying but her lie, in her view, is a malignant means to a benign end: the killing of the lawsuit, for now there is no one with 'deep pockets' to sue for malfeasance" (113). Nichole knows that because of the incest her father has committed, he will be unable to speak up. Oedipus also realizes that this sin is horrible. He says, "If there is any evil worse than the worst that a man can suffer—Oedipus has drawn it for his lot" (98). In other words, Oedipus has committed the worst evil possible. Both Nichole (in terms of her father) and Oedipus realize that the sin must be punished. Nichole prevents her family from suing the town and Oedipus puts his eyes out. In both cases, the person who commits the incest is severely rebuked.

In both tales advice comes from a person who is disfigured. In Oedipus it is the blind prophet Tiresias who truly "sees" Oedipus for what he is. The Chorus leader comments that Tiresias, "The man who sees most eye to eye with Lord Apollo...and from him you might learn most clearly the truth for which you are searching" (17). In The Sweet Hereafter, Dolores's husband Abbott represents the soothsayer. Confined to a wheelchair following a stroke, Abbott is the one who pronounces the great wisdoms of the story and prevents Dolores from joining the lawsuit. Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer in the novel, says that Dolores takes Abbott's words "like Delphic pronouncements" (149). This is an obvious echo back to the Greeks and Oedipus the King in particular, since it is the oracle at Delphi who commands that Thebes be cleaned. Also Dolores feels that "he's passed so close to death he has a clarity about life that most of us can't even imagine" (3). In other words, his stroke has given him insights that the average able-bodied person lacks. It seems that both Sophocles and Banks recognize that in order to truly see the world around you for what it is; you must be physically handicapped in some way. It is only when your world is restricted physically that you become fully mentally aware of your surroundings in a manner which elevates you to a prophet, in Tiresias his blindness becomes the ability to see, in Abbott lack of clear speech leads to pronouncements.

The reactions that both Mitchell Stephens and Oedipus have to Tiersias and Abbott are the same. They both look upon the prophet with disdain and disbelief. As Robert L. Kane points out in his article "Prophecy and Perception in Oedipus Rex," "...the circumstance which has the greatest effect on his [Oedipus'] destiny is not simply that he is ignorant of the facts but that...he often acts as if he knew what he does not" (190). Mitchell Stephens's thinks that Delores heard, "what she wanted to hear" (149). Stephens acts like he knows what is best for Delores and the town of Sam Dent, just as Oedipus acts like he knows what is best for Thebes. Neither of them realizes, of course, that they are the source of the relative plagues affecting both of these towns. As Kane puts it "Believing that the situation contains what he [Oedipus] sees in it (and nothing more), he not only fails to recognize the truth when it is placed before his eyes (i.e., his guilt), but ends up 'seeing' what is not there (e.g., the 'treason' of Creon)" (191). In the same way Stephens sees that "Dolores was the ventriloquist and Abbott was the dummy" (152). Stephens is so convinced of his knowledge that he dismisses Abbott as a puppet, just as Oedipus dismisses Tiersias as a traitor.

Both the ancient Greeks and Banks share a distaste for lawyers and unnecessary litigation. In many ways Oedipus is a demonstration of the failure of the law to produce a story that satisfies all parties that are present in the story. While waiting for reliable witnesses to verify or deny his story, the plague upon Thebes continues. It is the process of the trial that leads to Oedipus accusing his brother-in-law Creon when he has committed no wrong. As Fried and Frolik point out, the great Greek philosopher Socrates felt that "a lawyer's power to persuade is merely instrumental; it is not a virtue in itself. It brings happiness to no one, not even to the lawyer, because it cannot instruct us how we ought to live" (11). Billy Ansel, Banks' grieving father, describes the lawyers' arrival:

Naturally, the lawyers fed off this need and cultivated it among people who should have known better. They swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City, advertising their skills and intentions in the local papers, and a few even showed up at the funerals, slipping their cards into the pockets of mourners as they departed from the graveyard, and before long that segment of the story had begun—the lawsuits and all the anger and nastiness and greed that people at their worst are capable of (74).

The lawyers represent the greed and the worst of human nature for Banks. They are akin to parasites, feeding off of the tragedy of the bus accident. The lawyers become the catalyst for the community of Sam Dent turning on one another. They are become representative of the evils of litigiousness. The hatred for lawyers and what they do is obviously present in both works. We see that the system has failed both the people of Sam Dent and the people of Thebes. In the end, the courts and lawyers cannot provide the closure that these towns seek. It must come from the sacrifice of an individual. Abbott Driscoll sums it up when he says, "The true jury of a person's peers is the people of her town. Only they, the people who have known her all her life, and not twelve strangers, can decide her guilt or innocence. And if...she has committed a crime, then it's a crime against them, not the state, so they are the ones who must decide her punishment too" (151). This is in many ways similar to how the Chorus functions in Greek drama. Both Banks and Sophocles realize that the town is the ultimate decider in these matters. Since they are the ones that have been wronged, they are the ones that have to pass judgement.

The idea that society must be righted in the face of crisis also comes through in both of these stories. In the article "Oedipus Pharmakos? Alleged Scapegoating in Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King,'" R. Drew Griffith states that, "Society must respond to the crisis in order to return to its normal state, and this response...inevitably takes the form of the scapegoating mechanism" (96). In other words, the plague in Thebes and the bus accident that kills the children must both be answered by the creation of a scapegoat. Someone must take the blame for these tragedies. The idea of a blameless accident is one that cannot be accepted. A world without reason is intolerable: "To many, an unjust universe is more tolerable than a senseless one" (Fried and Frolik 6). According to Mitchell Stephens, Banks' lawyer, there are no such things as accidents (91). Thus someone is always to blame. We need the psychological release that a scapegoat provides.

One of the biggest similarities comes with the punishment, both literal and figurative, of the scapegoat of these two stories. According to R. Drew Griffith, "It is of prime importance that the scapegoat is chosen 'for inadequate reasons...and that he is completely innocent of the charges brought against him. This is true even though his persecutors are acting in good faith and believe him to be guilty" (97). This is part of the This is especially true in the case of Dolores Driscoll, who becomes the scapegoat in The Sweet Hereafter. In the case of Oedipus the scapegoat is himself. David McDonald says that "Oedipus is the scapegoat for Apollo...Oedipus stands in for the guilt as well as the glory of a god" (156). Although he is indeed guilty of killing his father and marrying his mother, he commits these acts in ignorance; therefore, when he chooses himself as a scapegoat he does so out of a sense of duty to his subjects, rather than a sense of guilt. He accepts the blame for his misdeeds and puts his eyes out. By doing so, he alleviates Thebes of its curse and life goes on. In The Sweet Hereafter, Dolores becomes the scapegoat, but it is her car, Boomer, who, in a form of displacement, receives the punishment. Boomer is entered into a demolition derby and as the car is battered, the townsfolk cheer. Boomer becomes the symbolic equivalent Oedipus' eyes and he is the recipient of the physical punishment that Dolores, the scapegoat, cannot receive in modern times. As Fried and Frolik put it:

Through the microcosm of Sam Dent, Banks reveals the fundamental belief that justice means the punishment of the guilty. Without an identifiable guilty party, there can be no justice, no resolution, and no healing. Someone must be guilty and therefore punishable if life's equilibrium is to be restored. By the identification of the car Boomer with Dolores, the demolition derby achieves a communal satisfaction beyond the law proper. The derby in all its ritualism proves to be a cathartic, quasi-legalistic purification that is a formal outlet for the town's pent up emotions (18).

Dolores becomes her namesake. She becomes the representation of pain for the entire town.

What both Sophocles and Banks make clear is that there is a catharsis to be had by being the scapegoat. After Billy Ansel reveals that Dolores has been blamed for the accident, she says, "I remember feeling relieved, but that's a weak word for it. Right away, without thinking once about it, I felt as if a great weight that I had been lugging around for eight or nine months, since the day of the accident, had been lifted from me" (247). Oedipus too, takes comfort in his suffering. He says, "The evil is mine; no one but me can bear its weight" (100). There is an understanding that by accepting the blame, Dolores and Oedipus have both freed their towns from further destruction and ruin. In an interview, Russell Banks said about Dolores's scapegoating:

If you look at in terms of archetype and ritual and universal concepts of social order, you can see that a scapegoat, from the point of view of the scapegoat, is a legitimate and ultimately relieving and transcendent experience. It resolves conflict rather than creating it. If the conflict is one that produces anxiety and suffering, such as the one Dolores is in, then becoming a scapegoat is a way of eliminating that suffering. And that's what occurs at the end of The Sweet Hereafter: Dolores becomes a scapegoat; the town recognizes her as such, and that relieves her of a kind of suffering that she's experienced up to that point (Wylie, 9-10).

In the case of Thebes, ruin from famine and plague, and in the case of Sam Dent ruin in the form of lawsuits which would have eventually caused the town to fall apart.

The description that Mitchell Stephens gives of the plagues that are affecting the youth of America is similar to a description that the Chorus in Oedipus gives of the suffering that is affecting Thebes. Stephens speaks of the modern pestilence "violent on the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV" (99). There is also the idea that Stephen's daughter Zoe, suffers from the biggest plague of our modern world—AIDS. In the world of Oedipus, these plagues include sickness, pain, death and unripe and unharvestable crops (12). While the pain is different, the message is the same. Something is causing these infections in society.

The idea that fate and/or the greater forces of nature manipulate man is evident in both works. Mitchell Stephens feels the pull of the world that surrounds Sam Dent: "...you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you've dealt with before. It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here" (93). Fate and the Gods operate in much the same way in Oedipus. The Chorus states, "May destiny be with me always" (60). The main lesson of Oedipus Rex is that destiny is with you always. All of the things that Oedipus does to prevent himself from fulfilling the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother (leaving Corinth, going to Thebes), lead him to doing just that. Just as the landscape of Sam Dent seems to control the people, so does the fate of Oedipus control him.

There are some significant differences between these stories as well. While the people of ancient Greece seemed resigned to accept their fates, the same is not true of modern New York. One of the lessons that Sophocles seems to want to illustrate is that once the Gods design your fate, you are committed to that ending. It is when Oedipus tries to resist his fate that he ends up fulfilling the prophecy. The residents of Sam Dent are not willing to believe that everything is predestined. Many of them question whether or not a God exists, let alone many Gods. As Billy Ansel, who loses his twins in the accident, says, "...the Christian perspective came to seem downright cruel to me, because I learned that death touched everyone...I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian" (80). Yet the idea of a pure accident is an uncomfortable one. Mitchell Stephens explains, "There are no accidents. I don't even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does" (91). The idea of a random universe is unsettling, but the townspeople are also not willing to accept the notion that everything is predetermined. Thus, Banks' reveals what is at the heart of the modern dilemma. We do not want to believe that fate controls us, but we also do not want to live in pure chaos. This is in part what the novel addresses; our need to make sense out of the horribleness of life in the absence of the fate that directs Oedipus. This is also addressed in the film The Sweet Hereafter, in the opening scene in which Stephens is stuck in a car wash. By accident of it breaking down he is now at the mercy of modern technology. He may not believe in accident, but that does not make him immune to them.

Even though fate directs Oedipus, Apollo himself is noticeably absent.  Yet as McDonald points out, "The god who remains absent throughout is a decisive force in shaping the form of the whole: shaping the timely presence of appearances, entrances, prophecies and reports from the spaces beyond the present" (151). So that even though he is absent, Apollo's presence is very much felt. This is very different from the God that may or may not exist for Banks' characters. They feel no presence of a God. The absence of Apollo does work to make Oedipus a more human drama, rather than one that relies on a deus ex machina to continue the action of the plot. In this way, Oedipus is a much more modern drama than many of its contemporaries. Fate is a an unavoidable in the world of the Greeks, while accident is out of the control of everyone, including the Gods. Accidents are random and fate is not. This is the major difference between these two works.

So what is the point? Why should we care if these two stories are similar? Because it proves that within the scope of human tragedy, the things that mattered thousands of years ago still matter today. In the end, as different as these two stories are, they are also very similar. The themes of incest, punishment, scapegoats and catharsis are present in both of them. In many ways, The Sweet Hereafter is a retelling of the Oedipus story, with the protagonist divided among four separate characters. The modern tragedy is in, of course, the loss of the lives of fourteen children in a bus accident, but the same basic principles are there. The wrongs of a town cannot go unpunished, yet there is relief in the unburdening. Oedipus feels it after he puts his eyes out, and Dolores feels it after Boomer is battered. They have achieved the protection of their town and their community at the cost of bearing the brunt of the blame for its downfall. They achieve the catharsis that Aristotle insisted was the key to a tragedy. Somehow, we too also feel a sense of relief in their unburdening. This modern, realist novel and ancient Greek drama are connected in the end result that they produce. They force us to see that society needs a scapegoat in order to deal with the tragedy of accident or the plague of sin.

 

Works Cited

 

Banks, Russell. The Sweet Hereafter.  New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Cardullo, Bert. "Blood, Snow, and Tears." The Hudson Review. Spring, 1999. 107-114. Weber State Library, Ogden, UT. 10 Jan 2008. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-702X%28199921%2952%3A1%3C107%3ANSAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B

Eliot, T.S. "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1975.

Fowler, Michael. "How the Greeks Used Geometry to Understand the Stars." Greek Astronomy. 1995. University of Virginia. 21 Apr 2007. http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/greek_astro.htm

Fried, Margaret J. and Lawrence A. Frolik. "The Limits of Law: Litigation, Lawyers and the Search for Justice in Russell Banks' The Sweet Hereafter." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature. Spring — Summer, 1995:1-29. Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 16 Jan 2008.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1043-1500%28199521%2F22%297%3A1%3C1%3ATLOLLL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6

Griffith, R. Drew. "Oedipus Pharmakos? Alleged Scapegoating in Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King.'" Phoenix. Summer 1993: 95-114. JSTOR. Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 9 Apr. 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1088579

Kane, Robert L. "Prophecy and Perception in the Oedipus Rex." Transactions of the American Philological Association. Vol. 105, 1975: 189-208. JSTOR. Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 9 Apr. 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/283940

McDonald, David. "The Trace of Absence: A Derridean Analysis of 'Oedipus Rex.'" Theater Journal. May 1979: 147-161. JSTOR. Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 9 Apr. 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3219732

Sophocles. Oedipus the King. New York: Washington Square Press: 1962. Translated by Bernard M.W. Knox.

Wylie, J.J. "Reinventing Realism: An Interview with Russell Banks." Michigan Quarterly Review. Fall 2000: 1-16. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.acct2080.0039.409

 

Black and White Blues:
The Othering of Blues Music through Romantic Racialism

 

Blues, jazz, and other black musical genres have arguably received more critical attention than other black art forms. Critic bell hooks claims that while postmodern theorists focus on black music and its expression of the Other, it hardly makes up for those same theorists largely neglecting the censorship the white majority placed on “other forms of cultural production by black folks—litearary, critical writing, etc” (2515). While it is true that much attention has been paid to black musical forms, it is wrong to assume that simply considering black music in its Otherness makes it unaffected by white censorship, much the same as the other cultural productions she mentions.

Indeed, we might better look at the Othered narrative in terms of what is not told rather than what is told—the story of blues music as something that goes beyond the white romantic racial viewpoint blues has been painted through. The narrative that has been truly Othered in blues music is musicians’ careers in regard to their engagement with different ethnic communties. The lack of discussion outside of a racial dichotomy created from historically romanticized racialism in blues music has disabled broader conversation about blues music, its musicians of many races, its history, and its evolution. Through my research and discussion, I hope to demonstrate that blues scholarship needs a closer, ethnically oriented discussion of the blues and its culture and a less racially romanticized look for theorists to truly claim due diligence in dealing with the subject.

The stereotypes established in the early years of blues scholarship about both blues music and blues musicians exist to this day. Until quite recently, they have rarely been challenged in blues scholarship, even by black scholars, who are also stuck in the racially dichotomized scholarship. Black music, particularly blues, has been Othered again by the pressing of white musical standards upon music with African roots, and even arguably been Othered from its roots by insisting that blues is a racial music instead of an ethnic one. While the difference between the words racial and ethnic are subtle ones, the term ethnic allows for a broader definition of community than the term racial does, which I will explore throughout this paper.

In order to deal with this deeply ingrained racial history, we must first understand what that racial history is and how it came about. As the conversation stands, the majority of blues scholarship comes from white men, many who were historically music collectors or ran the music business in the early and later 1900s. By contrast, black musicians were cast in the role of wandering musician to fill the stereotypical and expected role of the black musician in the white public mind.

Since the discussion of the Othered in blues music in terms of romantic racialism and its history could encompass a much larger work, I will focus my paper on the image of two blues musicians, Eric Clapton and B.B. King, under the white racially romanticized gaze. To give a basis for this racially romanticized history of blues as folk art, I will introduce Jacques Ranciére’s theory of art, community, and the police that determine artistic value. Then, I will describe how the precursor figures to modern blues scholarship, particularly John A. Lomax and Howard Odum, perpetuated racially romanticized blues scholarship through what Ranciére describes as policing. Finally, I will discuss how the policing of blues under a white romantic racial paradigm has made it difficult for postmodern theorists to ever talk about the blues as an Othered art form or entity. Until the blues is considered under its own artistic paradigm, one of an ethnic instead of racial African American heritage, it cannot be truly dealt with as Other; neither can it be dealt with as a valid art form on its own separate of the white, romanticized, historical view of blues as folk art.
JACQUES RANCIÉRE AND THE ARTISTIC PARADIGM
While scholars such as Michel Foucault have written about how communities decide what constitutes values in an artistic community, Jacques Ranciére has a concise and useful outline of how community determines aesthetics in his work The Politics of Aesthetics. His determination of aesthetics in various communities makes it easier to determine how a Western artistic paradigm became the tool used to assess and label blues music as folk art.

Blues music, as an African American art form, has been grouped together with many other American arts from many different ethnic groups. Each of these ethnically different art forms follows artistic rules for that ethnic community, However, those artworks, like the blues, have been generally been aesthetically assessed under the Western, white majority community’s racial definition of art. This Western assessment and restriction for what can be determined art is what Jacques Ranciére would describe as a community choosing what aesthetical values to place on art, because those aesthetical values will in turn have an effect, for better or worse, on the community that decides upon those values.

Ranciére asserts that art falls into the category of aesthetics in the Kantian sense, which determines that “aesthetics can be understood . . . as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (13). In other words, our senses limit what we see, do not see, hear or do not hear, and this determines how we interact with the world around us, particularly in regard to art and politics, as both art and politics depend on what we see and how well we can iterate descriptions of what we see to those around us.

Ranciére’s definition, however, is not all-inclusive. As the sensory experience of each community may differ slightly, sometimes drastically, from another community, the definition of art under Ranciére’s theory changes, because his artistic philosophy is based within the distribution of the sensible. The real emphasis, then, should be placed not on the art itself but on the values, laws, and choices of the community, for it is the community, or police, that determine the laws, which determine who gets to participate in the community and therefore have a chance to create what that community would call art based off of the laws, expectations, and politics of that community.

The problem that blues encounters with this definition is, then, that its creators and their communities were unable to determine the rules that came to define blues as folk art. White folk music collectors—among them the precursors to blues scholarship, Lomax and Odum—recorded the songs for future generations, and with those songs, made commentary on the art form using the white, Western artistic paradigm. While the information we have because of these blues and folk music collectors is invaluable, the values of the blues community were determined by whites who did not have access to the knowledge of the blues community’s values, laws, and choices. Therefore, the community that determined the value and aesthetics of the blues was not the community that created and largely participated in the musical genre.

The community determines laws and therefore aesthetics through the distribution of the sensible. This type of community—one which determines its own laws (and therefore government) and specifies who can participate within society based on those laws—gives a considerable amount of power to the individuals allowed to participate in such a society. For if an individual, say an artist, within that society decides a law needs changing, he or she can demonstrate that need for change through an artistic medium. Yet, for the blues, the people who determined the aesthetics in the first place were not part of the ethnic community that had the right to determine those aesthetics, meaning that instead of a way to institute change for the ethnic minority and their art, art becomes an instrument for maintaining the status quo.

Before the Western aesthetic paradigm was applied to the blues, and even after, the blues was set on the trajectory to create change for the better through an artistic medium; many blues songs speak of injustice, and if they do not call it out as injustice, at least call them hard times, and have at the heart of the songs a spirit of endurance to deal with that inequality—in love, in politics, in everyday social situations. The themes of injustice and endurance were not unique to blues: work songs and field hollers, as precursors to the blues, often contained similar themes.

Yet these themes of injustice with no hope of resolution or betterment conflicted with American community ideals: the pursuit of happiness, rags to riches, lift where you stand, etc. Those American community values along with continued Western artistic ideals came to define how the white American community looked at art, and it was a vision that could not include the messages portrayed by these work songs, field hollers, and especially the blues, at least not on an equal playing field. The blues and its proponents were doomed to inherit a racialized value system that diminished the art form in the name of furthering a racial status quo. Blues scholarship reflects the racial romanticism instilled through the collections of early blues and folk documentation.
PRECURSORS TO BLUES SCHOLARSHIP: FOLK MUSIC COLLECTORS LOMAX AND ODUM
The two main men considered precursors to blues scholarship that are credited with the documentation of Negro folk music are John A. Lomax and Howard Odum. Their collections and compilations of blues and Negro folk music came to define how we view the blues today: as a pure, authentically American musical format of an oppressed (or even possibly submissive) culture that offers a way toward redemption available to its practitioners in no other way. Upon a close examination of the themes of redemption and American authenticity, the real problem with viewing the blues in this light is that it entrenches blues scholarship in a romantic racialism that disenfranchises the Other from their musical art form, instead giving it over to white musical and political ideals that reaffirm the majority.

Collectors like Lomax and Odum had the power to determine the portrayal of black music, and their work established the social functions black music had for both the minority and majority, because the aesthetic paradigm they prescribed to the music led to the racial definition of the music scholars, listeners, and practitioners hold today. Several examples from the works of Lomax and Odum help to illuminate the aesthetic standard set for the blues during this crucial value establishment period: the chosen musical examples for both Lomax’s and Odum’s work, their commentary on the works they chose, and for Odum, commentary on the social traits of the Negro. For the sake of ease in showing the influence of Odum’s work in particular, I will start with examples and analysis of Odum’s work, and then follow with the influence Odum’s work had on Lomax and his portrayal of blues music.
Howard Odum
Professor Howard Odum devoted much of his time to studying blacks and their culture and society in what he saw as an effort to bring more scientific knowledge “to interpret the Negro Problem and to some extent to suggest means by which the heart of the problem may be reached” (Odum 5). While he readily admits that there are difficulties in working toward the completion of such a study, among them getting blacks to speak honestly and openly to him and to get any reliable information out of whites, Odum’s work paints a detailed portrait of black cultural life, a life that always contains music.

His book portrays many bleak, commonplace situations in black society, such as the high, informal divorce rate and the poor state of black education, but stops to highlight both Church attendance and song, and secular enjoyment through music. According to Odum:

The Negro has a song for every occasion; yet the song is adapted to all groups. It may well be said that the Negro sings on all occasions, and that he should sing it in as many ways and on as many occasions as there are different scenes in his life. Wherever the negro is seen he may be heard singing, chanting, humming, or whistling a tune at some stage of his activity. . . . The laborers sing and whistle . . . . The children sometimes sing continuously for hours . . . . Loafers and vagrants sing as they wander . . . . Women sing while working . . . . “Music physicianers”, “musicianers” and “songsters” add much to the total of negro gayety and satisfaction. (231–3)

This passage and later commentary indicates that despite all of the less than satisfactory conditions Odum describes, the black community seems overall satisfied with their situation, or if not satisfied, at least willing to accept the hardships through singing about them.

Odum would go on to build collections of negro folk music with Guy B. Johnson, providing further commentary on this prevalent musical culture as he strove to document it for future generations. In the book The Negro and His Songs, he described the various songs he documented as “poetry of unusual charm and simplicity” and “parts of the story of the race” that held great importance to folk history (8). And yet, in the same book, the social songs Odum comments on all portray two main features: the lone, wandering black man with no friends who is consistently thwarted in love and adventure. The wanderer, in his songs, is always in search of sympathy, pity, and help from listeners, especially women.

The songs Odum and Johnson chose to record have a decent range from sad to sexual, with themes that reaffirm the problems and contentment of blacks’ social situation outlined in Odum’s earlier work, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro. Songs such as “Po’ Boy Long Way From Home” with its lyrics of “You brought me here an’ let ‘em throw me down. / I ain’t got a frien’ in dis town. / I’m out in de wide worl’ alone” (170) highlight the call for sympathy for the vagrant wanderers; songs of sexual infidelity such as “I Couldn’t Git In,” with its lyrics of “Lawd, I went to my woman’s do’, / Jus’ lak I bin goin’ befo’; / ‘I got my all-night trick, baby,/ An’ you can’t get in” (189) reaffirm the stereotype of hyper sexuality of blacks that would be considered inappropriate listening content for more sophisticated, white audiences. Instead of portraying a black social atmosphere of great variety in its musical creations, the collection of social songs seems particularly crafted to reaffirm racial stereotypes. Indeed, Odum even goes so far as to leave out many of the verses of “Honey, Take A One On Me” because the Negro variations on the song “are not suitable for publication” (193). By the end of their chapter on social songs of the Negro, Odum and Johnson have allowed enough vagrancy to show through in social songs to solidify Odum’s earlier portrayals and discussion of the Negro Problem.

However, a year later, Odum and Johnson would publish another collection of songs titled Negro Workaday Songs, which would continue to strive for what they defined as “authentic pictures of the Negro’s folk background” (1). Here, they denote blues music as an underappreciated and poorly documented art form, one that, given its “distinctive contribution to American art” (17), needs to be more closely looked at. Odum and Johnson note that their chapter on the blues is not a complete history, but they do mean to make a significant statement with it.

They qualify the blues as sorrow song, a musical form going back as far as the Negro Spiritual, even if the blues at that point was uncultured and naïve. They determine that “the original blues were so fragmentary and elusive—they were really little more than states of mind expressed in song” (19), and then go on to define the blues more modernly. The main points they determine are as follows: the blues is melancholy in both words and music, which give the blues its name; blues’ main topic is male–female relations and love, with some variation for tough times and homesickness, but the dominate topic is lovers’ complaints; the blues will generally express self-pity, which is often “the outstanding feature of the song” (20); the blues singer wants to draw sympathy from his or her listeners by bringing tough times to the forefront of the listeners’ attention; and the blues songs are unconventional—naively expressed.

The songs Odum and Johnson go on to highlight in their 1926 collection reaffirm the criteria they set out for blues music, with titles such as “I’m Tired of Begging You to Treat Me Right,” “Poor Man Blues,” and “Bleedin’ Hearted Blues.” At the end of this presentation of these workaday songs, Odum and Johnson discuss the problems of notating the music, stating that “there are slurs and minute gradations in pitch in Negro songs which it is impossible to represent in ordinary musical notation. . . . they cannot be shown on a musical scale which is only divided into half-step changes of pitch. . . . It is what the Negro sings between the lines and spaces that makes his music so difficult to record” (242). What’s more, they note the struggle to get the singers to ever sing something the same way twice. Catching the harmonies between multiple singers and the proper caesura cannot be accurately notated, and neither can the variation between the words against the consistent down-strokes.

Odum and Johnson’s commentary on the problems of blues notation builds on their musical format prescription in The Negro and His Songs, which provides the lyrical format of these social songs: “the song not only begins and ends with the regular chorus, but each stanza is followed by the same chorus, thus doubling the length of the song” (168). Between this lyrical description and the outline of the makeup of blues music, Odum and Johnson provided the base upon which even their contemporaries would come to build.
John A. Lomax
When it came to the blues, John A. Lomax readily admitted his indebtedness to Howard Odum’s work on the subject and its people (Lomax 189). In his work American Ballads and Folk Songs, the blues section’s introductory text is particularly telling: it documents the blues as something that negroes just sing for something to pass the time, something to keep their blank minds occupied

My blues ain’t got no time, ain’t got no place, don’t mean nothin’ to me an nobody else. But good Lawd, I got de blues, can’t be satisfied, got to sing. . . . When I gits ‘bout half hifh as Georgia pine . . . I sings slow blues, don’t know what I’m singin’, don’t know what they mean. Still they has singin’ feelin’ an’ I puts all sorts an’ kinds together. (189)

The words above belong to Left Wing Gordon, and Lomax reprinted them from Odum’s work Rainbow Round My Shoulder. The quote, which is only an excerpt that omits what may have given Gordon’s words more meaning, portrays the blues as something that certainly is not well thought out. If the singer has taken time to compose the blues, he or she cannot know why they are putting the words in the order they are.

From the quote, Lomax has set up the hollers and blues songs in his collection to tell the tale of a drifting people with only sorrow songs to sing. What follows are a series of eleven songs all with a similar theme—the negro man and his appeal for sympathy as he works, is imprisoned, and searches for a good woman to no avail. For example, when introducing the “Cornfield Holler,” Lomax says that if you ask a white person from the South about the song, “any white person who is acquainted with the singing of untrained country Negroes . . . will tell you that ‘niggers are always hollerin’ like that out in the fields’” (191). The songs are interpreted through white eyes despite the direct access to the black blues community’s commentary, if not their values. Through all his travelling and documentation, Lomax continues to choose to portray blacks through a white, romanticized racial ideal that keeps blacks outside of the Western artistic paradigm, instead relegating them to what could be perceived as the lower art of folk music.

Similar commentary on other songs in the blues section follows, documenting the history of the songs, even if much of it is folklore: “Dink’s Blues,” a song from one of the women forced into a levee-camp to take care of the men there; “Woman Blue,” a song of a teenage black girl in prison for murder; “Shorty George,” sung by the women who go out on Sundays to see their men in the prison yard; and “Cholly Blues,” the song of a drifting black laborer looking for a good woman and soft place to sleep. All of these chosen songs and their commentary reinforce the racial stereotypes that delineate blues as folk art and sorrow songs of a lesser race. Not all songs are put to music, but where the music is notated, it is put down very simply and utilizing a diatonic scale.
THE LASTING EFFECTS OF LOMAX AND ODUM
These collectors, precursors to blues scholars, acted as Ranciére’s police; they used their knowledge of what constitutes art in their white, Western community and tried to transfer the same artistic paradigm upon a music that did not come from that same heritage. Hence, the music is often deemed folk or savage in many accounts, for it was difficult, if not impossible, to subscribe the Western musical scales and themes upon a musical form that was not created with those scales or themes in mind.

Instead of using a diatonic scale, they may have looked at the blues as LeRoi Jones would come to define it musically: as non-diatonic. Jones1 says that blues scholars have put “the cart before the horse. There are definite chords which have been evolved to support the blues, but these do not define the blues, and the blues can exist as a melody perfectly recognizable as the blues without them” (25). When collectors like Lomax and Odum documented these songs in Western musical terminology instead of looking at the blues as part of a different artistic community with different ideals, they inherently racialized the music, because it could never reach the classical Western ideals, and could therefore be used to create a narrative that never let the Othered group be anything but oppressed.

The collectors who created a basis for blues scholarship held that black music was important to document the American story, but instead of using the blues to recognize the Othered group as equal participants and inventors in their own right, they simply cared that “the blues was a window on the strange inner mind of ‘the Negro,’” and as Steve Garabedian later states, this “blues image in the white mind shared a basic consistency rooted in the tradition of white racialism” (477). These collectors and observers never got past viewing blacks and their music as anything but an object or tool to use to reach further objectives that satisfied the white majority. Blues people were made exotic, primitive, and erotic; their music was used to tout expressionism from lesser, oppressed classes in the United States; and their music was used to show the way for redemption. All of these viewpoints would emerge and thrive in blues scholarship, particularly evident in how many blues scholarly pieces end up categorizing blues in the 60s and forward.

The irony of solidifying the white romantic racial view of blues is that it has created a seemingly inescapable dichotomy in blues scholarship: that blues can transcend racial boundaries to become the people’s music, and that the blues, in order to be authentic, must be racially defined as sounding “black” in order for it to be authentic. In other words, while anyone may listen to the blues, one can only sing it or participate in the culture if he or she has inherited the tradition through black roots.
ROMANTIC RACIALISM AND BLUES MUSICIANS: ERIC CLAPTON AND B.B. KING
Eric Clapton and B. B. King are two musicians who epitomize the racial dichotomy blues scholarship has created. Clapton throughout the history of his career evidently struggled with identifying himself as an “authentic” blues musician, not only because he is white, but also because he sees himself as inauthentic as he strays from his perceived notion of black music. King, on the other hand, struggles to maintain that same “authenticity” with the black community as he moves toward playing blues for white audiences, thus calling into question his authenticity as a black blues musician.

Neither of these musicians, despite their great contributions to the blues musical canon, can escape the romantic racial dichotomy that blues scholarship created for them. Both musicians struggle to stay within the lines of the acceptable, structured “black sounds” that have come to define blues music, and it has definitively diminished their legacies as innovative musicians because the dichotomy disallows innovation outside of the expected, romantic racial status quo. Under the status quo, anything that strays from the requirements the white, Western musical tradition has defined for the blues cannot be considered innovative, but instead only inauthentic.

As such, the paradigm created for the blues leaves it a stagnant music without room for the innovation that should be rightfully given to it were the music less dedicated to the romantic racial paradigm of black sounding authenticity. Freed from the burden of authenticity, both musicians’ music can be looked at as an evolution of the music, one that accepts both Clapton’s and King’s versions of the blues as valid constructions of the genre.
Clapton’s Blues
Eric Clapton, a white, British man, struggles to fit into the currently defined blues music community because he is not American, does not have any black roots, and has not been exposed to oppression in any form that the community might recognize as valid to give him reason to sing the blues. Consequently, throughout his career he has tried to validate himself as a blues musician by claiming that his childhood abandonment, addictions, and bad relationships give him authority to sing the blues. Ulrich Adelt asserts that this self-marginalizing technique, the creation of the white negro, was a way for Clapton and other white blues musicians to gain a black identity to play the blues by taking “everything but the burden from black culture” (435). For Clapton, it is the black sound that matters, and to play the blues one need not recognize or in any way help bear or take responsibility for the burden of oppression and Othering that African Americans bear.

This is particularly evident in his endorsement of Enoch Powell, whose anti-immigration politics were notoriously harsh toward colored people. With his public support of Powell, Clapton showed that while he was okay with appropriating black music in the form of the blues, he was not willing to use his position to bring awareness of the need for understanding and equality. Even though his reasoning for supporting Powell was that he cared about the British and the need to make sure that immigrants did not take the country’s jobs, the hinge point is on immigrants of color taking jobs from white British men. Racial purity was the name of the game, and as Clapton could never be black, so those immigrants of color could never be white, and therefore could not hold an equal place in British society. If Clapton were to truly interact with the blacks he took his musical inspiration from, perhaps he would have shown more sympathy and understanding to the colored immigrants he spoke out against as he supported Powell, particularly because Clapton’s idea of blues largely included the importance of struggle, sorrow, and loss.

The irony in this idea of black sounds as sounds of burden and sorrow is that there is much more to the blues than sadness and pain and burden; the music is a way to lighten those burdens, and so there were many types of blues songs. Similarly, there is no way to break away from the blues, its cultural heritage, or its community that can provide understanding of unforgiving circumstances: its structure is built off of call-and-response format, and, as Adelt says, “blues singers relied economically and psychologically on community support . . . expressed musically” by that format (437–38). While Clapton’s view of the blues may be enhanced by his life experience, by choosing to discard the heart of the blues community, he has disabled himself from ever becoming fully a part of that community.

In his search of black-sounding, authentic music, without fully recognizing the blues community heritage and culture, Clapton would be constantly dissatisfied with the music he would produce. For example, when playing with the Yardbirds, Clapton met Sonny Boy Williamson, and after hearing him play, “Williamson made Clapton realize that the Yardbirds were not being ‘true to the music,’ because ‘this man was real and we weren’t’” (Adelt 438). Later, he would be unable to accept himself in his most innovative periods because while he could never fully identify as black, he also refused to accept his white heritage, therefore alienating himself from race, and also from the blues community, for he could not accept the possibility of mixing cultures, styles, and experience to evolve the musical form. Even upon meeting Jimi Hendrix in 1966, Clapton recalled “’When I saw him I knew immediately that he was the real thing. . . . I thought, “If I was black, I would be this guy”’” (Adelt 441). By jamming with a black innovator, Clapton felt his music could not be as authentic simply because of his race.

Everything about the conception of the blues community in the sense that Clapton understands it revolves around race and what Adelt calls the “conceptualization of racial purity” (446). For Clapton, this means that as long as the music itself came off as racially pure—or had that authentic, black sound—it was okay for him and other whites to appropriate blues music and form, even if it meant demeaning or suppressing that same form of black expressionism; whites could legitimize the genre even though blacks were who whites considered more natural players of the music, and Clapton would even self-proclaim himself a blues ambassador.

The white concept of racial purity in blues music that is so clearly expressed through Clapton’s vision of the blues might be concisely stated thus: the blues can only be truly “authentic” if it comes from blacks with natural talent for it, and that blacks should have a talent to play the blues because of their race; whites can play the blues, but they will never be as truly “authentic” as blacks because of their racial differences. His viewpoint makes it particularly difficult for himself, or in his eyes any white blues musician, to ever be innovative or evolve their sound, because as they evolve and innovate, they may not stray from the format of the blues, but will stray from that authentic black sound, therefore disabling them from ever fully contributing to the blues community traditions. As Clapton would later come to say in 1966, “’I’m no longer trying to play anything but like a white man. The time is overdue when people should play like they are and what colour they are’” (Adelt 440). And yet, in later years Clapton would state that while he felt he was a qualified blues singer, “I still don’t think I’ll ever do it as good as a black man” and that while it took Clapton many years to learn the blues, “for a black guy from Mississippi, it seems to be what they do when they open their mouth—without even thinking” (Adelt 448). Even as Clapton tries to break away and be his own blues artist as a white man, he is unable to break free of the racial dichotomy set up in blues musical history, particularly the concept that the blues can only be authentic if it comes from blacks with a natural talent to sing the blues. Furthermore, the racially romanticized musical history determines for Clapton that if a person is black, he or she should have the natural talent to play the blues because of his or her race.

By defining the blues community as an art bound by race, both blacks and whites would come to limit the art form we know as the blues. It may seem, after a brief look into Clapton’s career, that the racially romanticized blues history would mainly affect whites vying for authenticity, and yet it would also cause blacks to struggle with the need to create an authentically “black” sound. We can see how this racially romanticized view of the blues as a purely black art form would hurt black blues musicians as well in the career of the late B. B. King.
King’s Blues
B. B. King, one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, would upon quick glance have every right to be considered an “authentic” blues musician by a person of any race. And yet, when B. B. King evolved his sound to play to a more urban, white audience, his authenticity as a blues musician in his own mind was undoubtedly thrown into question. He says of his reaction to the Fillmore show, where he played to a largely white audience, “’It’s almost like going to another country where people don’t understand what you are trying to say. . . . Well, I felt lost. It is kind of like looking at a baby that’s crying, and you want to help it but you don’t know how to’” (Adelt 199). For King, this would come to signify some sort of loss that he arguably never felt he was able to regain, and that loss came from the blues community as defined racially. As King gained more success with white audiences, he seemed to feel he had lost one of his connections to the blues: his black audience.

The move from black audience to white audience was a necessary financial decision for King, as the blues was becoming more and more unpopular with black audiences who were tired of the misery the blues supposedly represented. With the changing times, the musicians had to change with them in order to stay relevant, and King’s manager, Sidney Seidenberg, felt that the move toward a white audience was the correct move. Seidenberg’s stated goal was to make King “a big recording star,” and with some modest success in that field, Seidenberg moved him on to popular clubs that had become “the main attractions for the burgeoning hippie culture” (Adelt 198). Yet the move was an inherently racial change, not a musical one.

Adelt states that when viewing King’s move toward a white audience it can be looked at as a statement about the prosperity of the races: “An ‘all-black’ audience represents obscurity and failure, whereas a crossover to ‘mainstream’ or ‘white’ audiences equals the ultimate success in America” (201), and therefore King’s decision to cater to white audiences paint the picture of a progressive “move from ‘black’ past to the ‘white’ future” (202). And yet this change in audiences from black to white also affected how blues scholars and critics, particularly Charles Keil, saw King. He became, in effect, too commercial and no longer “authentic” enough to be considered a true blues musician. In switching racial audiences, he in effect leaves the blues community as it is defined racially. Those who still saw King as a blues musician, such as Charles Sawyer, one of King’s biographers, generally find him more respectable when he makes the switch from a black to a white audience, reaffirming white values as he leaves the black ghettos behind (Adelt 202).

The romantic racial definition of the blues alienated King from the community in a similar way that it would forever exclude Clapton. In his autobiography, King says of playing for white audiences, “I wasn’t comfortable. It was another new situation that had me worried about fitting in. I felt like I was being forced on the fans, like I was going to someone’s house without being invited” (260). Yet despite his discomfort with playing to white audiences, King’s music did not radically change with the audience shift. He was still playing the blues as he had always played it, but it was not the music that defined his place as blues musician in the community; it was his race and the race of his audience that mattered and came to somewhat exclude him from the blues community.

This categorization of the blues as bounded racially is something Adelt calls “a problematic but powerful fabrication” (205), for King catered his music, both performances and albums, to both blacks and whites. King evolved his sound as a blues and rock musician while still hearkening back to the old blues tunes. As King’s career progressed he would become more and more an ambassador for the blues across the races, leading me to believe that it is a possible and necessary step to try to redefine the blues community as something that transcends romantic racial boundaries while at the same time respecting the African American heritage the blues evolved from.
REDEFINING THE BLUES COMMUNITY
Changing the community from one that is racially based to one that is ethnically based may seem a small change, or indeed like no change at all. Ethnocentrism has in the past been as harmful as racialism in regard to communities of people. Yet, I stand with Joel Rudinow in believing “that different ethnic groups use music in different ways and that members of different ethnic groups tend to make and respond to music in ways that are characteristic of their respective communities” (135). This definition of music in regard to the blues community in particular opens up the blues to multiple ethnicities, for it implies that if a person will take the time to learn the musical idiom of the community, then they can perform an authentic form of the blues. The community then becomes defined by a set of cultural customs, techniques, and histories that can be mastered by those who would take the time to respect them and learn from the blues community—therefore superseding the romantic racial boundary that affected authenticity from the early precursors of blues scholarship to how we view the blues today.

In conclusion to this deconstruction of a racially romanticized view of the blues, I would like to briefly reiterate several points which I find could aid in the construction of a more inclusive, uplifting narrative to the racially exclusive narrative that tends to exclude even the community who the blues belongs to. These points are some that Rudinow brings forward in his article “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” which I find beneficial in starting to redefine the blues in a way that allows for it to evolve and thrive as a community without the currently defined racial boundaries.

The three main points are the need for the flexibility of the definition of authenticity; the need to redefine the necessity of credentials; and the need for initiation into the blues community in order to appreciate and validate the blues community and its culture. Using these three points as a skeleton structuring, the blues can constructively redefine its community in a way that values the preservation of the old blues tradition and the evolution of that tradition as new experiences and ideas are brought to it through people of different races.

 

Works Cited

 

Adelt, Ulrich. “Black, White, and Blue: Racial Politics in B. B. King’s Music from the 1960s.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 195–216. Print.

“Trying to Find an Identity: Eric Clapton’s Changing Conception of ‘Blackness.’” Popular Music and Society 31.4 (Oct 2008): 433–52. Print

Garabedian, Steven P. “The Blues Image in the White Mind: Blues Historiography and White Romantic Racialism.” Popular Music and Society 37.4 (2014): 476–94. Print.

hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism Second Ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2010. 2509–16. Print.

Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. 1999. New York: Harper, 2002. Print.

King, B.B. and David Ritz. Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King. 1996. New York: William Harper Publishers, 2011. Print.

Lomax, John A. and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan Co, 1934. Print

Odum, Howard W. Social and Mental Traits of the Negro. 1910. New York: AMS Press, 1968. Print.

Odum, Howard W. and Guy B. Johnson. The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1925. Print

Negro Workaday Songs. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1926. Print.

Ranciére, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. 2004. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Rudinow, Joel. “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.1 (Winter 1994): 127–37. Print.