movement, to the collection of poetry titled Blues
Narrative (1999) by STERLING PLUMPP, a native of
Mississippi (considered to be central in the birth
of the blues). The blues has influenced all Afri-
can-American literary genres, as can be seen in the
works of JAMES BALDWIN, AUGUST WILSON, ED BUL-
LINS, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Ellison, GAY L JONES,
Stanley Crouch, ALICE WALKER, ARTHUR FLOWERS,
TONI MORRISON, ISHMAEL REED, ANN PETRY, LEON
FORREST, SHERLEY A. WILLIAMS, and many others.
Given the dynamic and pervasive influence of
the blues in American and African-American lit-
erature throughout the major monumental shifts
in black people’s lives: enslavement, emancipation,
Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Civil
Rights movement, and the contemporary Informa-
tion Age, many African-American literary scholars
have attempted to identify, design, and define what
some have called a “blues aesthetic.” In doing so,
scholar-critics and writers such as ALBERT MURRAY,
Angela Davis, AMIRI BARAKA, LARRY NEAL, Sherley
A. Williams, HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR. and STEPHEN
HENDERSON illustrate that the blues has the power
to forge not only an individual’s voice but also a
community’s evaluation of what constitutes “art”
and “literature.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-Amer-
ican Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Brown, Sterling. “The Blues as Folk Poetry.” In Folk-
Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930.
Cortez, Jayne. Taking the Blues Back Home. Album.
1996.
Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.
New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage
Books, 1972.
Jimoh, A. Yemisi. Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in
African American Fiction: Living in Paradox. Knox-
ville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.
Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in Af-
rican American Literature. New York: Penguin,
1991.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White
America. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963.
Murray, Albert. The Hero and the Blues. New York:
Vintage, 1973.
Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
———. Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1999.
Ya Salaam, Kalamu. What is Life?: Reclaiming the Black
Blues Self. Chicago: Third World Press, 1994.
Kimberly N. RuffinBoles, Robert (1942– )
Although he has lived mostly in New England,
Robert Boles was born in Chicago in 1942. The son
of an architect who worked for the State Depart-
ment, Boles spent most of his early years outside
the United States. A medic for the U.S. Air Force
from 1960 to 1962, he worked for several years as
a reporter and photographer for the Yarmouth
Register upon his return. These varied experiences
inform the often-exhausting displays of cultural
capital and worldliness in both of Boles’s novels,
The People One Knows (1964) and Curling (1968).
Still, these novels stand as two of the most self-
assuredly cosmopolitan and discursively original
works in 20th-century African-American fiction.
The People One Knows (1964), loosely based
on Boles’s experiences as a medic, tells the story
of Saul Beckworth, the young biracial son of a
white father and an African-American mother, as
he recuperates under psychiatric observation in an
army hospital in France after a failed suicide at-
tempt. Beckworth’s account of this experience is
interspersed with surrealistic dreams and disturb-
ing memories of his experiences in the American
South, where he grappled with the complications
of what the jacket of the first edition describes as
“how it feels to cross the murky division of races.”
Boles’s second novel, Curling (1968), presents the
story of Chelsea Meredith Burlingame, a black man
who is adopted into a wealthy white New England
family as an infant. The novel follows the incongru-62 Boles, Robert