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

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Lorenzo Thomas

That the type of reclamation effort Arthur Huff Fauset prescribed for African American folktales should also be required for the blues - a form that only emerged in the first decade of the century - should not surprise those who consider the carefully built and well-maintained mechanism of racism that was running at full throttle before World War II.

Texas A & M College professor Will H. Thomas's Some Current FolkSongs of the Negro was the very first publication of the Texas Folklore Society. While this essay provides evidence that the blues was a widespread and authentic form in Texas in 1912 - two years before W. C. Handy published "The St. Louis Blues" and launched its commercial development-the paper also offers disturbing documentation of white academics sitting around enjoying their own genteel version of "darkie" jokes. Sympathetic song collectors were also somewhat tainted by the general paternalism of the region and era.

Folklorist John A. Lomax, one of the earliest commentators on the blues, characterized them as "Negro songs of self-pity" in an article published in The Nation in 1917. Even when employed by a liberal, such terminology supported the negative social construction of the African American image that James Weldon Johnson succinctly summarized as the view that black people were, at best, "wards" of American society.

Benjamin A. Botkin, writing in 1927, accepted the Texas folklorists' idea that self-pity was "a trait of the Neg expressiveness of his reading/performance.

Part of Sterling Brown's effectiveness as a poet lies in his ability to reproduce the dialect of black rural folk. When Brown began writing poetry in the 1920s, there was a tendency among many writers to discard dialect and indict it because of the spurious, often demeaning conventions that had come to be associated with it. In 1922, James Weldon Johnson, writing in the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, recognized that black writers were breaking away from the use of conventionalized dialect and called for originality and authenticity in racial expression that would not limit the poet's emotional and intellectual response to life. Ten years later, Brown, with the publication of Southern Road, came as close to achieving Johnson's ideal of original racial expression as any American poet had before. Johnson, introducing Brown's poetry to the American public, said that Brown "infused his poetry with genuine characteristic flavor by adopting as his medium the common racy, living speech" of black life (Poems 17). What Johnson applauded in 1932, we treasure today as we hear Brown exploring with uncompromising honesty the range of folk responses.

If we are fortunate to hear a recording of Brown reading his poetry, the genius of his achievement is amplified. The poems assume an added dimension because of his voice. I will never forget the first time I heard Sterling Brown read "Old Lem." It was in the spring of 1972 when I met Sterling and Daisy Brown. I felt at once in the presence of two people who carried the mantle of the past as gossamer. Their brilliance, infectious humor, and great depth of feeling and understanding endeared them to me. They shared with me their stories, anecdotes, and personal legends in the cozy setting of their home at 1222 Kearney Street on the northeast side of Washington. I still remember their eyes, with one telling, the other listening, and both remembering so many unspoken things. That is the way I first experienced "Old Lem." Brown's voice intones: