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Modernity, Authenticity, and the Blues in Sterling Brown's Flood Poems
Ist Teil von
Melus, 2017-07, Vol.42 (2), p.115-135
Ort / Verlag
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2017
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The 1927 Mississippi River flood was one of the worst natural disasters in American history, and it also left its mark on popular music, as several hits that year by singers including Bessie Smith and Bing Crosby referenced rising floodwaters. The blues and the flood are two central themes of Sterling Brown’s 1932 book Southern Road, and in the poems “Cabaret” and “Ma Rainey” he explores his vexed relationship to both modernity and modernism in poems which extensively reference popular flood songs from 1927. The poems are formally ambitious, and as such they have often been discussed in critical accounts of Brown’s relationship to high modernism, but a deeper connection to modernism lies in Brown’s exploration of the role of the artist in modernity—what, in short, will happen to the work of folk art in an age of mechanical reproduction? Would African-American music, as Brown suggests in “Cabaret”, be warped into a source of titillation and escapism for white audiences, or could there be a way, nodded to in “Ma Rainey”, that mass-marketed popular music could still present what he called “genuine Negro blues”? These poems express Brown’s despair at the suffering of African-Africans, his concern that blues and jazz will be exploited and debased by the music industry, and his hope that, even when commercialized, African-American music will still offer something genuine, transformative, and epiphanic to its audiences.