Blues Synthesis Essay, Ellison

A key topic explored by those interested in the development of culture across a time period has been the music of that particular culture. As the culture changes, so does the music, the two becoming more and more entwined until traces of the music can be found in other cultural works. For black culture, the genre of the blues provides a perfect archetype for such a study. With its origins steeped within the communal sufferings of blacks in America, and its evolution spurred along by their oppressed emancipation, the blues became a model through which the sufferings of an entire race could be rationalized and expressed as a community, both musically and through other types of cultural expression. In their respective novels and essays, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Warren, Lawrence Levine, Robert O’Meally, Carmen Kynard, and Shelby Steele, and Adam Gussow all use the blues, both as a musical device and a literary aesthetic, to describe how blacks faced racial oppression in the Jim Crow Era through catharses.

In his book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Levine links the origins of the Blues to their later use as a device of catharses. Levine identifies the origin of the Blues as field hollers, “calls and cries . . . a form of self-expression, the cry of an individual attempting to verbalize, or, more properly, vocalize his feelings” (219). Comparing this to the spiritual hymns of the same slave era, Levine finds that the call-response structure, so defined as the audience responding to a vocal leader, remains in the Blues, but at a more personal level. Levine finds that the Blues as music signified a development of the individual mentality, argued to have been crushed out by the hands of slavery, arguing, “there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual . . . and the rise of the Blues” (223). Yet, Levine also finds that the communal response remained from the Blues’ origins as field hollers. In his novel, Levine quotes a...