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Woody Guthrie’s Modern World BluesBeyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues TraditionConjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army”The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-9520278

1527-2117

Daylanne K. English,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Together, these books mark the latest turn in American literary and cultural studies. Focusing on mainland-US and Puerto Rican popular song, they filter arguments about race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality through historical studies, music studies, and sound studies. In the wake of the temporal turn, itself a post-spatial-turn development, turning to sound studies makes perfect sense. As Alain Corbin observed in his classic 1994 study of church bells in nineteenth-century rural France, Village Bells, bells limned both space and time, functioning to forge community and to orient those traveling within their sound-space. Functionality likewise connects these books; all argue for the positive impact of the cultural work performed by their subjects. The books themselves, too, perform a reorienting function in that all aim to correct a historical record. In the words of Fiol-Matta, all four “move to unsettle matters, not affirm them” (5).In Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues, Kaufman moves to unsettle his own prior work on Guthrie, namely his earlier Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011). Kaufman argues that Guthrie’s radical, working-class, hayseed-from-rural-Oklahoma image was just that, a consciously crafted image: Guthrie “perfected his half-literate Okie pose” (21). In thirteen short chapters, the book positions Guthrie instead as a quintessentially modernist figure who engaged with all sorts of technologies and art forms, from atomic power to experimental dance, and who felt at home in New York’s subways and salons. Kaufman understands Guthrie, and folk music more broadly, not as a product of “antique ruralism” but as a complex, syncretic modernist force (23, 32). Kaufman acknowledges that folk music and Guthrie’s politics were, like modernism itself, neither always radical nor always progressive. Despite its at times broad-stroke approach to modernism, the book is exciting for this repositioning of Guthrie, as well as for Kaufman’s innovative work with the Guthrie archive in Tulsa. That work enables him to attend to Guthrie’s “astonishing multimedia output” (36) in addition to his music—for example, the idiosyncratic sculptures Guthrie called “Hoodises” (41) (for “Who dis?”) that were “a mélange of both natural and industrial objects” (42) and that operate as a synecdoche for his modernist complexity.The book does falter in its occlusion of some parts of the record it is revising. First, Kaufman repeats Guthrie’s tale, told to Alan Lomax in a 1940 interview, of learning harmonica from an African American “‘boy that shined shoes’” in Okemah, Oklahoma (15). Guthrie’s “pose” thus originates in notions of Black authenticity, yet the Black-white racial dynamics here and in Lomax’s project as a whole remain unremarked upon (there is, however, a chapter titled “Blacks + Jews = The Blues”). Second, in his exclusive focus on lyrics, Kaufman loses an opportunity to engage with sonic modernism; surely Guthrie’s distinctive voice merited attention.Like Kaufman, Gussow, in Beyond the Crossroads, unsettles a cherished, indeed central, mythology in blues music: that of Robert Johnson’s meeting the devil at a rural crossroads in Mississippi and making a bargain to gain guitar-playing prowess. Gussow likewise understands his subject to be a canny crafter of his own image, “a calculating young ironist” who capitalized on his association with the devil (222). But the devil, at least as he appears in the first four chapters, becomes less Johnson’s exclusive property and more a compelling sonic filter through which to understand African American history, as Gussow exhaustively documents “the blues’ most malleable, dynamic, and important personage” and his significance (10). He wrests the devil from Johnson’s exclusive possession, noting that Clara Smith recorded the first devil-blues song in 1924 (13) and analyzing Bessie Smith’s 1930 “Black Mountain Blues.” A chapter, the shortest one, on urban dance halls extends this analysis of women’s blues. Still, most of the book focuses on the various meanings of the devil for Black male blues singers: as a stand-in for the charismatic power of the singer himself; as a representation of white oppressors; or as a trickster or free agent, again like the singer. Gussow concludes the book with a three-section chapter that painstakingly dismantles the Johnson crossroads myth and complicates common narratives around Clarksdale’s Delta Blues Museum, productively analyzing the class and racial dynamics of “crossroads tourism” (286).Beyond the Crossroads also resembles Kaufman’s book in its less successful qualities. For instance, the book focuses almost entirely on blues lyrics, offering little formal analysis of voice or music, which is especially disappointing given that Gussow is a professional blues musician. The book also fails to fully dislodge the masculinism it aimed to dismantle, as in its repeated mentions of a “primal scene” and in its return to Johnson in its last and by far longest section.In Conjuring Freedom, Jabir explicitly takes Black masculinity as his central concern. He adds to the historical record through rich interdisciplinary analysis of the military, musical, and religious culture shared among the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first all-Black Civil War Union regiment, made up of formerly enslaved men from South Carolina, especially the Sea Islands, and Florida. Jabir invents two concepts, “the collective will to conjure” (viii)—meaning a communal “summoning [of] spiritual power as an intentional means of transforming reality” (2)—and “Black communal conservatories” (viii)—meaning “art-based community making” (17)—to show how the regiment, by singing and performing together, created “new forms of masculinity, solidarity, and social membership” (2–3). The soldiers’ “ring shout,” a traditional African American performance and an African retention, with its “counterclockwise motion of . . . song, dance, and spoken narrative,” established their “distinct temporality and kinship” and as such enabled them to become the “gospel army” of the title (15). This effective formulation encapsulates how all four books signify the sonic/musical turn and how that turn emerges from spatial and temporal turns. Jabir applies it to argue that the soldiers’ songs incorporated both militarism and spirituality, as in the sorrow song “My Army Cross Over” (112), to establish a “black alternative universe” (136). He not only adds nuanced analysis of this understudied regiment and their influences (his consideration of the presence of Islam in Gullah culture is especially welcome), but he also uncovers the racist paternalism of the regiment’s white leader, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, as expressed in his 1869 memoir, Army Life in a Black Regiment. Jabir locates equally troubling attitudes in the 1989 film Glory about the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment under the leadership of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Unfortunately, both memoir and film have served to shape the historical record regarding Black Civil War soldiers, in part because of the sparse documentation produced by the soldiers themselves. The reader keenly feels that, among the subjects of the four books, these are the only singers we will never be able to hear (or see). In this case, then, Jabir’s sustained focus on lyrics, rather than sound, makes perfect sense.This limitation of source material does, however, produce one of the few weaknesses of the book, namely its too-frequent speculation about the soldiers’ interior lives. Also, given its focus on the regiment’s vision of the “future in this world and the world beyond” (4), the book misses an opportunity to engage with Afrofuturism.In The Great Woman Singer, Fiol-Matta taps virtually every possible resource, from archives to album covers to interviews, in her exemplary interdisciplinary study of four twentieth-century popular Puerto Rican women singers, all of whom, as she observes, we can readily hear and see on YouTube (8). In “reconstructing an archive of voice,” Fiol-Matta engages a number of theorists (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, and José Esteban Muñoz most prominently), while she, like all four authors, highlights the singers’ agency, their consciously crafted images, via what she terms the “thinking voice” (7). In chapters on Lucecita Benítez, Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, and Ernestina Reyes, Fiol-Matta uses “critical biography” (6) to correct for the ways that these singers have been marginalized—even largely forgotten—and shows how each, through voice, expresses “singularity . . . despite heterosexism and misogyny” (4). The first chapter focuses on Silva’s 1942 signature song “Nada” (25), and the concept of nothingness stands throughout the book for the ways the four singers advanced their political, personal, and musical projects while resisting the public’s urge to fix them according to conventional social or musical categories (3). As the introduction’s title, “I Am Nothing,” suggests, they become “nothing” that their audiences can pinpoint or discipline: Benítez wore tuxedos in performance in the 1960s and at times used “vocal rasp, . . . sounding muscular and masculine” (175); Silva, in her “queer virtuosity” (30), took a “percussive approach to voice . . . a breakthrough for female singing” (21); Fernández was dark-skinned and had “great [vocal] volume and color” (68); Reyes, with her distinctive “husky” timbre (143), helped make jibaro a popular urban music in New York and mastered male-dominated forms like décima (130, 139). Fiol-Matta’s book stands out for its close attention to such musical and vocal forms (which distinguishes it from the other three books), for its consideration of a rich range of Puerto Rican musics, for its astute analysis of Puerto Rico’s complex history between 1930 and the 1970s, and for its deployment of the overlap between sound and music studies. She writes of “tones, sneers, and scoffs” (41) in Silva’s voice, for example, and engages in “critical listening” (171) throughout, leading to the powerful insight that “voice is a product of culture” (230).Fiol-Matta also provides a kind of thesis tying the four books together. In the Reyes chapter, she writes that the singer “must be restored to cultural memory” (171). The restoration of cultural memory in these books functions to reorient us in what are profoundly disorienting times. Remarkably, we learn from Kaufman that Guthrie once lived in a Fred Trump Brooklyn apartment building and that Trump “came to personify for Guthrie all the viciousness of racial [housing] codes,” leading him to write an unpublished “diatribe” about his landlord (219–20). And Jabir begins his book with a 2013 ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in “the sanctuary of the historic AME Church in Charleston” (vii, emphasis added). Readers may be filled with a dread that the book does not fully alleviate, and yet we may find some solace in the many ways these books, in Fiol-Matta’s words, help “restore the archive to its plenitude” (231).