The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.

Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

Jazz is a music that did not merely inspire works of literature; in many cases it aspired toward the literary. Drawing from Ralph Ellison’s impulse to praise the jazz rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as containing a “range of allusion [that] was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong,” this chapter offers an overview of the aesthetic, thematic, and political motivations of jazz and modernist literature from blues and ragtime to the emergence of bebop. In exploring jazz as one of the “forms” of American modernism, I attend to the experimental formal variations in the poetry and prose of a wide range of authors, including Sterling Brown, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and others, but also to the radical form of the blues by Louis Armstrong, W. C. Handy, and Bessie Smith.

The rise in prison populations in the 1980s coupled with the silencing of the voices of those in prison compromised the visibility of some Black writers.Writers who were not incarcerated began to write about the prison experience, especially in terms of its effect on families.Although that trend can be seen earlier and later, the neoconservative 1980s catalyzed the need for a new approach to Black prison writing that would enable prisoners’ stories to be told by family members.At the vanguard of that movement is John Edgar Wideman whose willingness to tell the story of his incarcerated brother changed the trajectory of contemporary African American literature and its intersection with prison writing.This chapter utilizes the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago in order to advance a broader literary/cultural critique.Foucault enables us to extend Wideman’s inquiry outward from prison into a series of institutions designed to preserve and promote the idea of racial hierarchy despite mythological national claims of opportunity, democracy, equality, and equal justice for all well after the abolition of slavery and the end of legal segregation.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

In the 1930 novel Not without Laughter, Langston Hughes represents Black life in the Midwest through the experiences of Sandy Rodgers and his family in small-town Stanton, Kansas (a stand-in for Hughes’s childhood home of Lawrence, Kansas). Much of the criticism on Not without Laughter focuses on the influences of Sandy’s grandmother and aunts, but this chapter centers his father, Jimboy. While he rarely instructs Sandy on how to be a man, Jimboy models a Black blues masculinity that draws together multiple aspects of early twentieth-century American culture. By reading Jimboy within the novel’s Midwestern cultural and historical context, this chapter foregrounds him as a consequential figure within both the novel and Sandy’s life. Jimboy’s demeanor, musicality, and mobility suggest how Sandy might learn to cope with life in the modern Midwest – notably, however, in ways that do not align with the conventionally respectable aspirations of his female relatives.

This chapter explores Albert Murray’s diagnosis and refusal of key elements of 1960s-style Black cultural politics. In books like The Omni-Americans he repudiated the pessimism and particularism that he found in figures like Baldwin and replaced it with a life-affirming concrete universalism rooted in the blues as a mode of phenomenology and in the sense that a fully American Blackness could stand as an instance and emblem of universal human experience. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Murray’s life; discusses the intellectual commitments he shared with his most important interlocutor, Ralph Ellison; explains how Murray turned these shared commitments into his own distinctive philosophical apparatus; and explores what may be the clearest difference between Murray and Ellison: Murray’s willingness to cultivate followers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, pivotal culture workers in the post-civil rights shift in U.S. racial politics.

It’s hard times. The stock market climbs to a precipitous height while farmers sing, "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Cotton prices are down, and they sing about it. Railroad strikes fail, and they sing about it. The Scopes Monkey Trial pits science against superstition, and they sing about it. The musical Show Boat breaks the Broadway color line, but Black blues singers still sing of their own invisibility in a racist culture. Arguments rage over primitivism in Black musical culture. Blind Lemon Jefferson takes on the inhumanity of capital punishment, and many more sing against the unjust execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. There is trouble sung on the Ford production line and in rural holdouts resisting the coming dominance of the automobile. But modernity has arrived with a vengeance – not least in the form of the “Flapper” and the “New Girl,” a subject of worry in the more macho sectors of song. On the Gastonia front line, the striking textile worker and balladeer Ella May Wiggins takes a fatal bullet in the chest, and in Spanish Harlem, Rafael Hernández Marín composes his “Lamento Borincano,” Puerto Rico’s own “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

This chapter traces one of the formative transitions of the Harlem Renaissance in its literary encounter with jazz and blues culture, arguing that its aesthetic was not only shaped by the music’s vital expressive forms but also its means of production, the technical recording apparatus itself. Many Harlem Renaissance writers were motivated in their artistic efforts to preserve the folk culture they felt was rapidly being lost. To do so, they paradoxically harnessed the very recording technologies they believed were hastening the demise of folk culture. Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others engaged with popular music and its processes of recording – its possibilities of preservation, representation, and collectivity, but also displacement and alienation – in part, as a way of understanding the craft of writing as a related technology and their own predicament as writers within commercial literary markets requiring specific kinds of raced performances.

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.

Richard Wright’s relationship with African American music was fundamentally paradoxical: he was both thoroughly immersed in and profoundly detached from such genres as blues and jazz. While he listened to black music avidly, its presence in his fiction is minimal, and—like other progressives and literary figures of his time—he tended to see blues and jazz not as art in themselves, but as vital and raw folk material out of which the literati might create art. What is more, Wright emerged as an author and produced his most canonical works during a relative hiatus in blues history, as well as at a moment when jazz existed primarily as mainstream entertainment in the form of big-band swing. Although critics conventionally focus upon the few fleeting references to African American music in Wright’s fiction, revisionist scholarship might bring the music to bear on the author’s work instead. There are, for example striking parallels of topic, theme, language, and imagery between Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” (1938) and Charley Patton’s song about southern flooding, “High Water Everywhere” (1930). Critics, then, can fill in the blues and jazz gaps in Wright’s work that he was unable to complete himself.

This essay argues that at the center of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetics, is a commitment to Gnosticism, a quest to find alternative ways of knowing. As an analogue to his sense that poetry at its best poses questions rather than seeking facile answers, Komunyakaa’s gnostic poetics is built around the impulse to embrace oppositions in which his poems endorse “critical values such as the virtue of transgression and the unity found in oppositions.” This essay argues that Komunyakaa’s poetics pursue a heuristic posture reminiscent of the emotional interiors revealed in blues music. Komunyakaa’s poems seek to explore the “strange debts we owe to others” along with “the strange debts we owe to ourselves, our imagination.”Looking at his later volumes of poems engage a variety of European landscapes and tropes, the influence of jazz and the blues on the poet’s oeuvre remains consistent. Employing Edward Pavlíc’s reimagining of James Baldwin’s notion of the “dark window” as a critical frame, this essay endeavors to provide a nuanced appraisal of Komunyakaa’s career, situating his poetry at the intersection of gnosis and improvisation.