The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry

By Emily Ruth Rutter

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artists
 
The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly—and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.

Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9780817391973

Emily Ruth Rutter

Emily Ruth Rutter is dean of the Honors College and associate professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, published by University Press of Mississippi, and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her numerous essays have appeared in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, African American Review, MELUS, and Aethlon, among other journals and edited collections.

Book preview

THE BLUES MUSE

THE BLUES MUSE

RACE, GENDER, AND MUSICAL CELEBRITY IN AMERICAN POETRY

EMILY RUTH RUTTER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Bembo and Franklin Gothic

Cover image: Ma Rainey and Her Band, ca. 1924–25, 8 x 10 inches, collection of the Columbus Museum, Georgia

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rutter, Emily Ruth, author.

Title: The blues muse : race, gender, and musical celebrity in American poetry / Emily Ruth Rutter.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018007643| ISBN 9780817319946 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817391973 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—African American authors—History and criticism. | Blues musicians—United States. | Blues (Music) in literature. | Music and literature. | American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS153.N5 R89 2018 | DDC 811.009/896073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007643

This book is dedicated to Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Huddie Ledbetter, and Robert Johnson, as well as to all the poets featured here. It is my honor and privilege to write about your timeless art.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Blues Muse Tradition

1. Don’t Like My Ocean, Don’t Fish in My Sea: Blues Muses, Racial Uplift, and Queer Camaraderie

2. Never Was a White Man Had the Blues: Blues Icons and Black Power

3. I Ain’t Gonna Marry, Ain’t Gon’ Settle Down: Blues Women and Intersectionality

4. Blues Falling Down Like Hail: Blues Men and the Second-Wave Blues Revival

5. It’s Gonna Carry Me through This World: The Post-Soul Blues Muse

Coda. Repetition with a Difference: Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Muse

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to Linda Kinnahan, Kathy Glass, Laura Engel, Tom Kinnahan, Faith Barrett, and Magali Michael for their unflagging support of this project. I also want to thank Hortense Spillers, who encouraged an earlier draft of this monograph, and facilitated incredibly useful feedback as part of the Issues in Critical Investigation Manuscript Competition (Vanderbilt University). Participating in that competition, as well as in the 2015 ICI Symposium The African Diaspora in the World sharpened my thinking regarding the influence of blues music on American poetry. Thanks also to the editors and readers of MELUS and South Atlantic Review, journals in which parts of the monograph have previously appeared. Specifically, a section from chapter 1 was published as part of an article titled The Blues Tribute Poem and the Legacies of Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith, which appeared in the journal MELUS (vol. 39, no. 4 [2014]). A section from chapter 5 appeared in my article "‘the story usually being’: Revising the Posthumous Legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly," which was published in South Atlantic Review (vol. 77, no. 1/2 [2012]).

This book was likewise nourished by my former students and colleagues at Oberlin College, as well my current peers at Ball State University. My colleagues Danielle Skeehan, Jenny Sorensen, and Anu Needham at Oberlin, and Katy Didden, Vanessa Rapatz, Molly Ferguson, Debbie Mix, Bob Habich, Pat Collier, Silas Hansen, Adam Beach, Simon Balto, Allison Layfield, and Rachel Fredericks at Ball State have been especially supportive. Paula Weinman, my Ball State graduate research assistant, provided invaluable support. I am also indebted to my family and friends, including Laura Rutter, George and Miles Pelton, Whitney Rutter, Ginger Carter, Dave Rutter, Diane Rodelli, Angie Wallis, Catherine Wallis, Cynthia Finch, Sarah Rutter, Robert and Carolyn Rutter, Kitch Carter, Bruce Lilly, Emma Young, Lindsay Griffin, Rachel Bachenheimer, Lora Klein, Lauren Erickson, Alison Hughes, Kristen Tobey, Rebekah Mitsein, Allie Reznik, Mary Parish, Marianne Holohan, Maureen Gallagher, and the love of my life, Michael S. Begnal.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to University of Alabama Press editor Dan Waterman, and to the anonymous readers whose generous feedback significantly strengthened the book.

Introduction

The Blues Muse Tradition

When asked to describe blues singer Gertrude Ma Rainey in an interview, bandleader Georgia Tom Dorsey recalled a spectacular performance: Ma was hidden in a big box-like affair built like a Victrola. . . . A girl came out and put a big record on it. The band picked up ‘Moonshine Blues’; Ma sang a few bars inside the big Victrola, then she opened the door and stepped out into the spotlight with her glittering gown that weighed twenty pounds, wearing a necklace of $5, $10, and $20 gold pieces. The house went wild. . . . Her diamonds flashed like sparks of fire falling from her fingers. The gold piece necklace lay like golden armor covering her chest.¹ In the same interview, Dorsey also notes Rainey’s remarkable ability to emotionally connect with her audiences: She possessed her listeners; they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her.² These divergent aspects of Rainey’s performances, collective catharsis coupled with demonstrations of flamboyant excess, elucidate her artistic complexity and help to explain why she has remained a larger-than-life figure decades after her death.

In his poem Ma Rainey (1930), Sterling Brown stages a Rainey performance and pays tribute to the cathartic relief and inspiration with which she provides her African American fans and, by extension, Brown himself. With this poem, Brown establishes a precedent not only for mobilizing historically African American musical forms to the printed page, a practice that several of his New Negro peers were already engaged in,³ but also for calling on specific performers as muses. O Ma Rainey, / Li’l an’ low, Brown’s speaker cries out, Sing us ’bout de hard luck / Roun’ our do’.⁴ Brown invokes Rainey as both a creative catalyst and recipient of his tribute, while transforming the dynamic and provocative blues star into a symbol of African American folk authenticity. Decades later, in her 1995 collection Muse & Drudge, Harryette Mullen represents Rainey as an insouciant woman of size who flouted both the respectability politics proffered by many of the architects of the New Negro Renaissance and the subservience demanded by the white patriarchy. Kiss my black bottom / good and plenty, Mullen’s Rainey persona boldly announces.⁵ Arguably, neither of these portraits captures the complexities of the real Rainey, but they do provide a snapshot of the range of values that poets have invested in blues icons. Indeed, an array of poets have invoked blues women and men as 1) poetic inspirations, 2) subjects of praise, and 3) avatars of various sociopolitical and cultural outlooks. It is the tripartite role played by these figures that The Blues Muse examines.

Moving chronologically across more than eighty-five years in American poetry (1930–2017), the following chapters focus specifically on poetic invocations of Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly),⁶ and Robert Johnson. I examine poems that invoke these icons as tributes, homages, and portraits—poetic categories that indicate both admiration and artistic influence. My interest is also in poets’ representational choices, especially as they are linked to the individual poet’s own (and often the era’s) sociopolitical concerns. Poets are not obliged to faithfully transcribe an artist’s biography; rather, their portraits are like prisms, refracting and highlighting particular aspects of their muses’ experiences. Thus, while it is not any poet’s responsibility to represent accurately the icons they invoke, I argue that we need to uncover the ideological and aesthetic commitments undergirding poetic constructions. In other words, how and why do representations of Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Johnson, and Lead Belly shift? To what ends are these transmogrifications linked to the discourse of authenticity that has long characterized interpretations of the blues? How do poets respond to each other as they represent these musicians to new generations of readers? Finally, what do these lyrical constructions elucidate about the conceptions of race, gender, and fame circulating during key sociocultural and literary periods, including the New Negro Renaissance, the civil rights and black arts movements, the black feminist writing and blues revivalism of the 1980s and 90s, and the post-soul writing of our own era? These are the central questions addressed by The Blues Muse.

Pursuing these queries requires distinguishing between blues muses and their Anglo-European counterparts. As Gayle A. Levy writes, As the daughters of the goddess Memory, the Muses preserve the knowledge of the past and use this wisdom to gain a divine view into the future; as the moral beneficiaries of their inspiration, the poet has a parallel gift.⁷ Accordingly, Homer’s Odyssey opens with the poet’s call to the muse to share the epic tale of Odysseus with his audience: Tell me, Muse, about the man of many turns, who many / Ways wandered when he had sacked Troy’s holy citadel.⁸ Many centuries later, John Milton appealed to a decidedly Biblical muse, whose knowledge of humankind reaches back to Eden, to provide the inspiration for his magnum opus Paradise Lost: "Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire / That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed."⁹ On the one hand, the muses of these canonical tales selflessly provide an infusion of creative energy to the poet’s pen and, on the other, sociocultural continuity between the heroic patriarchs of the past and their descendants, including the poets themselves.

Blues muses also provide temporal and cultural coherence, as well as artistic guidance and inspiration. Yet they are not mythical personae but historical individuals, making the stakes of the how and the why of these singers’ poetic transmutations higher and more complex. As Mary K. DeShazer notes, Muses have typically been portrayed as passive catalysts who stimulate lyricism in the active male poet, helping him ‘give birth’ to a new entity.¹⁰ By contrast, poets cast blues women and men in a tripartite muse role, calling on, paying tribute to, and reshaping their legacies in the same stroke. When poets invoke Lead Belly and Johnson as poetic inspirations and artistic ancestors, they likewise defy the gendered process DeShazer describes, whereby men call on goddesses or idealized women for creative stimulation. Even when male poets turn to Rainey, Smith, and Holiday for inspiration, they still subvert the race and gender scaffolding that historically placed black women on the ladder’s bottom rung, unworthy of idealization or homage. This is not to suggest that poetic portraits of blues women escape the androcentrism associated with the muse tradition. However, it is clear that blues men and women function as multifaceted vehicles through which poets implicitly challenge white supremacist ideologies, advance their own sociopolitical perspectives, and testify to the lyrical poignancy of their musician counterparts and predecessors.

While The Blues Muse is the first book to examine blues muses, it builds on a firm foundation of blues and jazz literary criticism, and fills in some significant gaps within that field. For example, whereas Sascha Feinstein’s Jazz Poetry from the 1920s to the Present, David Yaffe’s Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing, and Bruce E. Barnhart’s Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture, among others, enrich our knowledge about jazz-inspired literature, I explore the understudied impact of blues icons on American poetry.¹¹ Moreover, in reformulating the way we conceive of the muse trope, this book expands upon Emily Lordi’s Black Resonances: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature,¹² which illuminates mutually beneficial relationships between African American women vocalists and African American writers (mainly male novelists). Lordi identifies moments of musical-literary reciprocity, when these singers and writers collaboratively enhance each other’s work.¹³ Whereas Lordi’s study concludes in the 1970s and concentrates on the artistic exchanges between five African American writers and women vocalists, I chart the blues muse tradition from the New Negro period through the twenty-first century, considering the poetic constructions of blues singers as expressive of the structure[s] of feeling emerging during key moments in American cultural history. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams glosses this concept as elements of impulse, restraint, and tone that have specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.¹⁴ Further, he observes, art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming, for they are inalienable elements of a social material process.¹⁵ Reading blues muses this way, I show that they serve not only as examples of transgeneric influence and inspiration but also as indices of an era’s various (and at times competing) sociopolitical concerns and perspectives.

Taking a cue from black feminist scholars, The Blues Muse showcases the contributions of women musicians and poets to a field that has historically privileged male voices. Reacting against this tendency to view women as marginal to the production of the blues,¹⁶ Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday champions Rainey, Smith, and Holiday as black feminist trailblazers. Their performances, Davis argues, illuminate[d] the politics of gender and sexuality in working-class black communities.¹⁷ Cheryl Wall’s Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition similarly evinces the influence of blues women on African American women novelists, utilizing the blues trope of worrying the line, the repetition of a line or phrase with a difference, to study the line as a metaphor for lineage and the line as a metaphor for the literary traditions.¹⁸ Wall contends that for many contemporary women writers, the blueswoman is a symbol of female creativity and autonomy whose art informs and empowers their own.¹⁹ Jennifer Ryan’s Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History and Meta DuEwa Jones’s The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word also examine Holiday’s and, in Ryan’s case, Smith’s formal influence on African American poets.²⁰ As with Wall, these critics offer important insights into black feminist writers’ recuperations of blues women as artistic ancestors—insights that I build on in chapter 3.

Yet, while Ryan and Jones place Holiday in particular within a jazz milieu, I follow Davis in considering the ways in which she has been culturally conceived of as a blues icon. Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues and eponymous album from 1956, the 1972 biopic with the same title, and many of the poems in this book elucidate this categorization.²¹ For the speaker in Amina Baraka’s For the Lady in Color (1987), for example, its the blue part / of billies flame / that enchants; more recently, Terrance Hayes’s poem title Lady Sings the Blues (1999) and the first lines to Kevin Young’s Stardust (2005), Lady sings / the blues / the reds, whatever, acknowledge the blues label, even while they challenge monosemous interpretations of Holiday’s oeuvre.²² Comparing poetic invocations of Holiday alongside Smith and Rainey and their blues men counterparts Lead Belly and Johnson, The Blues Muse brings to light the discursive reverberations among these figures, especially in terms of the tensions between public and private personae and agency and exploitation that characterizes the blues in particular and black musical performance more generally during the pre–civil rights and black power eras.

Many critics have also theorized the blues as an interpretative framework for African American literature. Perhaps most influentially, Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory proposes that Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix.²³ In Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, Tony Bolden described the blues network: a trope for critical inquiry in black poetry, the blues network functions as a junction, a (super) conductor, intersecting classes, cultures, and continents.²⁴ The Blues Muse aligns itself with these critics insofar as it approaches the blues as a mode that extends beyond the music itself to encompass ways of knowing that resist white hegemonic power structures; moreover, for the poets (black and white) considered here, drawing on the blues becomes a way to break down artificial barriers between high and low, between the printed page and the blues stage. Yet, where Baker and Bolden are interested in codifying the blues as a vernacular trope that unifies black-authored literature, I view the blues muse tradition through a cultural studies lens, showing how portraits of Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Lead Belly, and Johnson are bound up in evolving conceptions of race, gender, and fame, especially as they intersect with discourses of authenticity.

Reading these portraits synchronically among contemporaries and diachronically across generations, The Blues Muse demonstrates that poetry does not occupy a discrete space cordoned off from blues musicians’ legacies, but instead is a crucial part of the story of their fame.²⁵ While there are other blues musicians who have been invoked as muses, Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Lead Belly, and Johnson possess what Joseph Roach terms It, which is a certain quality, easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people that has assured their place both in the limelight and the poetic imagination.²⁶ In recent years, Roach and other celebrity studies scholars have explored the sociohistorical and cultural complexities of fame and celebrity, as well as the distinctions between these terms. For my purposes, I use them interchangeably, and employ Chris Rojek’s formula: celebrity = impact on social consciousness.²⁷ Using this equation, we can determine that Robert Johnson is a celebrity, while, for example, his contemporary David Honeyboy Edwards, a tremendously accomplished Delta blues man, is not. Moreover, celebrity scholars have written extensively about the transformations that famous individuals undergo as they metamorphose from ordinary to extraordinary (and/or notorious).²⁸ As the many poems that bear their names show, Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Johnson, and Lead Belly have been subject to this celebrity regime.

At the same time, this prototypical narrative of fame is complicated by the de jure segregation and discrimination that these blues singers endured. Unlike later artists, such as the saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist and vocalist Nina Simone, among the many other African American musicians who have been invoked as poetic inspirations,²⁹ Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Johnson, and Lead Belly all lived and died before passage of the key civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the shifts in sociopolitical consciousness galvanized by black power activists, and the heightened awareness of the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality ushered in by black feminists. Because these artists were forced to negotiate overtly white supremacist patriarchal power structures to achieve even a modicum of fame, they lacked the same levels of image control exercised by many of their successors, making them especially remarkable for what they accomplished but also more mutable in terms of their legacies. In fact, their fame has been largely posthumous. And, while Steve Jones contends that in the music business death is a ‘good career move,’³⁰ it likewise entails a significant relinquishing (if not a complete evaporation) of an artist’s ability to shape his or her own image and narrative. As Marko Aho rightly notes, Death is the point after which reality will never again have meaning over image.³¹ In other words, the very ineffable, enigmatic qualities that draw poets to Rainey, Smith, Holiday, Johnson, and Lead Belly also allow these artists to be rather easily transformed to meet the demands of new eras in sociopolitical and cultural consciousness.

Within the varied poetic invocations that I consider, the most durable trend is to superimpose the invoked blues figures’ biographies on their lyrical output (or vice versa). Blues is of course a musical genre driven by vocals, which contributes to the tendency to interpret lyrical monologues as personal accounts of a singer’s travails. However, the intertwining of the I of the blues song and the private self is not merely a byproduct of the musical genre; it is fueled by what Benjamin Filene terms the blues’s cult of authenticity, whereby the blues is the unique expression of black Southern poverty.³² As Kimberly Mack explains, For some of the most influential historians, scholars, and critics of the blues, including Amiri Baraka, Samuel Floyd, Eileen Southern, and Houston A. Baker Jr., . . . one must be black, from a particular geographical region, and of a certain socio-economic status in order to play the blues authentically.³³ For example, in Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Amiri Baraka avers, The idea of a white blues singer seems an even more violent contradiction of terms than the idea of a middle-class blues singer. The materials of blues were not available to the white American, even though some strange circumstances might prompt him to look for them. It was as if these materials were secret and obscure, and blues a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood.³⁴ For Baraka, the blues is a musical response to the subjugation of African Americans, genuine forms of the music may only be produced by black Americans, particularly those who have endured the poverty and indignity of life in the Jim Crow South.

Many white scholars of the blues concur with these race- and class-based metrics, though their interpretations are often supported by primitivist discourses. An apt encapsulation of this tendency can be found in renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s description of watching Son House play: His voice, guttural and hoarse with passion, ripping apart the surface of the music like his tractor-driven deep plow ripped apart the wet black earth in the springtime, making the sap of the earth song run, while his powerful, work-hard hands snatched strange chords out of the steel strings the way they had snatched so many tons of cotton.³⁵ House’s music, for Lomax, is not consciously crafted art but is instead an aural expression of the backbreaking labor of tilling fields and harvesting cotton (likely to line someone else’s pockets). Indeed, many interpretations of the blues emerging from both white and black cultural sectors, including in much American poetry, have maintained that blues musicians simply sing about the events in their hardscrabble lives.

A number of recent scholars have questioned these biographical assumptions, drawing attention to the forces and figures invested in codifying notions of real blues, as well as the performative strategies that singers utilize on stage and in the recording studio. In Blues Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the Texts of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, Ann DuCille writes of Smith’s and Rainey’s music, "There is little evidence to support the assumption that the majority of black women or even many of them—including southern, rural black women—lived the kind of sexually liberated lives or held the kind of freewheeling values refracted in the blues. Like other expressive modalities, the blues invoke the fantastic."³⁶ In distinct ways, Filene’s Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions, Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Paige A. McGinley’s Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism, and Erich Nunn’s Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination illuminate the cultural machinery that engineered the image of blues singers as, to quote Wald, purveyors of a wild, soulful folk art, the antithesis of glitzy pop entertainment.³⁷ Entry into the public memory, Filene explains, depends on the efforts of the cultural workers, who are engaged in revisiting and reevaluating the culture of the past in the light of the present.³⁸ The Blues Muse shows that poets too are cultural workers, who advance their own understandings and/or skepticism about black-cum-blues authenticity.

Elucidating the varied roles into which poets enlist blues figures, this book also provides a model for interpreting blues personae in imaginative literature more generally. In the 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smith, for example, Edward Albee protests antiblack racism by perpetuating the allegation that Smith died because a white hospital refused to treat her after a car accident in Clarksville, Mississippi.³⁹ August Wilson’s 1982 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on the other hand, stages ideological conflicts between Rainey and the members of her band, dramatizing still-lingering debates about the efficacy of a civil rights integrationist agenda versus a black power cultural nationalist one.⁴⁰

Moreover, in fiction, Holiday is the inspiration for the character Geordie in John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, a portrait that focuses rather stereotypically on Geordie’s/Holiday’s tragic love life while suggesting the voyeurism that prevailed among many of Holiday’s white fans.⁴¹ Similarly, Edmund G. Addeo and Richard Garvin’s The Midnight Special: A Novel about Leadbelly narrativizes Lead Belly’s path from convict to folk star, blurring the line between biography and mythology in ways reflective of the ideologies informing the first- and second-wave blues revivals.⁴² Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues likewise casts Johnson as a mythic character in its tragicomic tale of contemporary Native American struggles with institutionalized racism and socioeconomic deprivation, drawing parallels between black and Native forms of resistance to white hegemony.⁴³

We might also look to biopics—such as the already mentioned Lady Sings the Blues, Leadbelly (1976), and Bessie (2015)—and feature films such as Crossroads (1986), in which Johnson serves as a signifier of both the temptation and cost of striking a Faustian bargain for the aspiring, young guitarist Lightning Boy (Ralph Macchio).⁴⁴ In Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture, Patricia R. Schroeder explores these representations of Johnson in fiction, drama, film, and virtual networks. Robert Johnson at the turn of the century, Schroeder contends, is an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl.⁴⁵ As I argue here, the same could be said of Rainey, Smith, Holiday, and Lead Belly. However, much work remains to be done in examining poetry’s intervention in the legacies of all of these artists, including Johnson.

In fact, blues muses in poetry, which originated with Brown’s Ma Rainey, are the logical antecedents to invocations of blues figures in the other genres mentioned above, making a critical examination of poetic portraits all the more necessary. Poetry’s proximity to song makes the art form an obvious choice for invoking musicians as inspirations,