Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Let Me Be wid Ole Jazzbo": An Interview with Sterling A. Brown

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1998.0233

1080-6512

Charles H Rowell, Sterling A. Brown,

Race, History, and American Society

“Let Me Be With Ole Jazzbo”: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown * Charles H. Rowell An’ all dat Big Boy axes When time comes fo’ to go, Lemme be wid John Henry, steel drivin’ man, Lemme be wid old Jazzbo, Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo. . . . —From “Odyssey of Big Boy,” Sterling A. Brown This interview was taped in two sessions at Professor Brown’s home in Washington, D.C., during April 1974. ROWELL In an essay on the blues, you say that Irving Berlin’s “Schoolhouse Blues” and Jerome Kern’s “Left All Alone Blues” are not the form or feeling of true blues as sung by the people. BROWN That is true. That is true. I think they’re not blues at all. It’s just that they used “blues” in their titles because it was popular to do so. A Tin Pan Alley title. It entered the language of popular music, but they are not blues. They are not blues feeling. Actually they are the opposite of blues. Berlin’s “Schoolhouse Blues”: when you think of schools for Negroes in the South (and you’re thinking of this as a writer), you can see that Berlin was just a Tin Pan Alley writer. Critics talk about him as a poet of ragtime, but “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” became a popular number at the conclusion of the ragtime period. The blues and ragtime still belong to the Negro. I call the kind of thing Berlin and Kern were doing “bluing” instead of “blues.” What they were doing is very much diluted, and some of them don’t even have much blue in them. We have the same thing in many of our bands; many of the good jazz bands play music that is not blues—unless you’re going to just say blues means anything that has a slightly sad tint. I think that blues should be kept authentic. And then again the qualities of the blues are so strong and distinctive that it’s easy to recognize the fake blues. Now, when I started to write poetry, I used the word “blues” sometimes for forms that weren’t blues in structure, but I thought the feeling was the important thing. For instance, “Memphis Blues”: in that poem I was trying to give the picture of Memphis life that I thought was soaked in tradition, and so I used the word “blues.” But the poem is not true blues form. I’ve also written poems in blues forms. [End Page 789] ROWELL What is your reaction to the recent rage, beginning a few years ago, over Janis Joplin as a blues singer? BROWN I think her songs are adaptations of the blues, and I think they appeal largely to a white audience rather than our audience. There is an excellent essay that [Julius] Lester has written in which he denies that the blues are dead. And he denies the inference that at concerts you have a large number of whites and not many blacks. He says that you can’t infer from that that the blues are dead. He says that if you go back to the source you’ll find that people are still playing blues and listening to them, and a lot of people have a longing for them. Lester has written a very good essay. . . . Then you get an Englishman like Tom Jones coming over (and Elvis Presley farther back). There’s something about Tom Jones that appeals . . . appeals to a free-er generation. There’s something about the artistry of true blues. There’s something about the beauty of the word that separates it from that time to this, and I think the blues have established themselves as an important thing in the music world. But I wouldn’t speak of Joplin and the others as blues singers. I don’t know too much about them; I know that they don’t appeal to me too much. And Tom Jones—I’ve got too many blues artists to hear; I don’t have the time or place to listen to him. Much of his appeal is his being some sort of sex symbol. ROWELL When...