Authenticity and elevation: Sterling Brown's theory of the blues

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Lorenzo Thomas

Sterling Brown's contribution to this effort was to identify and analyze the stereotypes - derogatory in varying degrees but never "just clean fun" - that proliferate in literature and the media. This he did in both scholarly and popular arenas - as both critic and poet. The urgency of Brown's efforts derive from his understanding, as stated in The Negro Caravan (1941), that "white authors dealing with the American Negro have interpreted him in a way to justify his exploitation. Creative literature has often been a handmaiden to social policy" (3). As critic Brown exposed these vicious and persistent stereotypes; as a creative artist, he sought to counter them with a social realist portraiture based on forms indigenous to the African American community.

The need for this type of work should not be underestimated. Although minstrelsy began in the 1830s, it was - incredibly - still going strong a century later. In 1922, for example, George Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva wrote Blue Monday Blues, a one-act "jazz opera," for a Broadway musical production. As a run-up to Gershwin's classic Porgy and Bess (1935) this was more like a stumble. The review in the New York World called it "the most dismal, stupid and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself" (qtd. in Goldberg 122). As late as 1932, George White's Scandals filled seats on Broadway with songs such as "That's Why Darkies Were Born." Writing in Opportunity, Brown acknowledged the popular and degradingly inaccurate depictions of the Negro from Stephen Foster to AI Jolson as an "epidemic" which spread its contagion anywhere money was to be made: "Tin Pan Alley, most of whose dwellers had been no further south than Perth Amboy, frantically sought rhymes for the southern states, cheered over the startling rediscovery of Alabammy and Miami for their key word Mammy . . . "("Weep" 87). It is against this tide of doggerel that Brown built a levee of authentic African American folksong.

As poet also, notes Stephen E. Henderson, Brown's subtle and insightful understanding of the folk forms "extends the literary range of the blues without losing their authenticity." In fact, Brown approaches the African American folk forms of spiritual, shout, work song, and blues exactly as he had used "the formal measures of the English poets" in his earliest attempts at writing poetry (Henderson 32). It is clear that, for Brown, these stanzas had achieved an equal dignity and utility as literary models.

Among the formal qualities of the blues, Brown's study also focused on language and dialect. Brown's important essay "The Blues as Folk Poetry" (1930) is not so theoretically elaborate or ambitious as the archetype of "Ebonics" offered in Zora Neale Hurston's "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934). While the dialect recorded in folklore is integral for Brown, it is not of mystical import: