496 Making It New: 1900–1945“We real cool. We / Left school,” begins this jazzy litany of disaffection, recording all
the habits and routines these kids adopt to assure themselves that, if nothing else,
they can enjoy the security of the disaffected. “We / Jazz June. /” it concludes. “We /
Die soon.” There can be few tougher, truer accounts of what it feels like to be young,
poor, and black in America.
Like so many African-American writers of this and later periods – like so many
American writers generally – Brooks was influenced by African-American musical
forms, and in particular by the blues. The blues has been described by Ralph Ellison
as “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” Other
writers, James Baldwin for example, have tended to see it not so much as a personal
but as a communal or species experience: a sound expressive of the “bleeding,...
cracked-open heart” to be heard everywhere in black life. Either way, it articulates
what Ellison has called “an impulse to keep the painful detail and episodes of a brutal
existence alive in one’s aching consciousness” and “to transcend it, not by the
consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism.” And, as a form, it emerged at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Its grounding influences were many. Socially, historically, those influences
included the conditions of Southern farms and plantations where black singing
flourished, the experience of a nominal freedom that brought with it continued
racial discrimination and little economic success, and, later, the impact of the great
migration northwards. Culturally, musically, they included the harmonic and
structural devices and vocal techniques from work songs and spirituals. Like those
earlier forms, blues involved a compulsively rhythmic sound that relied on patterns
of call and response. Unlike some of them, however, it was decidedly secular in tone;
unlike all of them, the blues was usually sung not by a chorus but by a single voice
accompanied by one or more instruments. The creation, like other, older African-
American musics, of a people often unable to read or write, the blues was passed on
orally. When songwriter and bandleader W. C. Handy (1873–1958), often called “the
father of the blues,” began to transcribe the blues songs he heard, and compose some
of his own, those songs existed in a variety of stanzaic forms. The text of a blues
stanza might consist of one line repeated twice (AA), one line repeated twice or three
times with a rhyming line to complete the thought expressed in the first line (AAB,
AAAB), one line followed by a rhyming line sung twice (ABB), or a number of other
patterns. What characterized all blues forms, however, was a fluid sense of measure
and the feeling, the impulse described by Baldwin and Ellison. And, as the blues
began to be recorded in the 1920s, the AAB pattern tended to become the predominant
form. Not only that, with the original performance context in the community
removed, the traditional, often nonthematic or associative texts were replaced by
more deliberately thematic ones. There was more trace of an author determining the
tone and content of the song, although different performers still allowed themselves
plenty of room for maneuver, even reinvention.
Sometimes, blues songs are about just that, the blues. “Good, mornin’, blues, / ”
begins a song composed by Jimmy Rushing (1907–1972), then sung and reinvented
by Huddie (“Leadbelly”) Ledbetter (1888–1949) as “Blues, how do you do?” EvenGGray_c04.indd 496ray_c 04 .indd 496 8 8/1/2011 7:54:05 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 05 AM