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

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Lorenzo Thomas

There is nothing "degraded" about dialect. Dialectical peculiarities are universal. There is something about Negro dialect, in the idiom, the turn of phrase, the music of the vowels and consonants that is worth treasuring. ("Our Literary Audience" 45)

In "The Blues as Folk Poetry," Brown finds that the images presented in this dialect form are "highly compressed, concrete, imaginative, original" (383). He cites beautifully conceived lines such as

My gal's got teeth lak a lighthouse on de sea. Every time she smiles she throws a light on me.

But Brown was not primarily interested in collecting poetic, or the more numerous quaint, expressions. As he noted in 1946, his interest in folk materials "was first attracted by certain qualities that I thought the speech of the people had, and I wanted to get for my own writing a flavor, a color, a pungency of speech. Then later I came to something more important - I wanted to get an understanding of people, to acquire an accuracy in the portrayal of their lives" ("Approach" 506).

Brown's work also participates in the creation of an African American "national literature" by endorsing and contributing to a project carefully outlined by Alain Locke in the 1920s. This is not a Modernist program but a modernized replication of the model first articulated in Europe by those who saw a national literature as the refinement of indigenous folk expression. Locke and James Weldon Johnson applied this nineteenth-century model quite specifically to music, seeing in the spirituals the material that - in the hands of gifted black composers - would escape "the lapsing conditions and fragile vehicle of folk art and come firmly into the context of formal music" (Locke, "Negro" 199). The Fisk Jubilee Singers, performing concert settings composed by R. Nathaniel Dett and others, represent the first movement of Locke's envisioned symphony.

Folklorist Arthur Huff Fauset applied the same principle to literature. Writing in Locke's The New Negro (1925), Fauset decried the derogatory misrepresentations of authentic African folklore in its American survivals, called for a more professional ethnographic study of it, and predicted that "Negro writers themselves will shortly, no doubt[,] be developing [the folktales and oral traditions of the South] as arduously as [Joel] Chandler Harris, and we hope as successfully, or even more so" (243-44).

While Locke foresaw a great classical music born of the folk forms shaped by slavery, James Weldon Johnson surveyed Broadway's stages and declared a victory for Negro genius, citing the rhythmic impulse of African American music as "the genesis and foundation of our national popular medium for musical expression" (American Negro Spirituals 31). Johnson's political interpretation of this development was not hidden. In the preface to his 1926 collection of Negro spirituals, he noted that "America would not be precisely the America it is except for the silent power the Negro has exerted upon it, both positive and negative" (19). Johnson also asserted that authentic folk art posed a serious challenge for any academically trained artist who aspired to transcend, or even match, its distinctive qualities of honesty and emotionally overwhelming beauty.