In his 1945 essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ralph Ellison defines the blues as “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” “Ralph Ellison and the Blues” will examine the ways in which Ellison frames the blues as a quintessentially American form in which its makers tell individual stories that resonate for the collective, while simultaneously creating improvised, self-fashioned American identities. This chapter will consider Ellison’s engagement with the blues through his character Jim Trueblood in Invisible Man; his incisive recollections about Jimmy Rushing, and other blues people; and his own cohered identity created out of (American) cultural chaos.

Ellison’s first collection of essays, Shadow and Act, contains several of the most important pieces in the canon of jazz writing, and first and foremost among them are those based on his childhood and adolescence in Oklahoma City. It was there that Ellison was encouraged by many of the men who were to become iconic national figures and have a profound influence on the music: Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, and Jimmy Rushing. This chapter will explore not only the way that Ellison captured the particularities of their Southwestern swing, but also how it may have influenced his writing style.