"That Evening Sun(g)": Blues Inscribing Black Space in White Stories

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Peek, Charles A

Scholars seem to agree that the aim of African music has always been to translate the experiences of life and of the spiritual work into sound, enhancing and celebrating life through cradle songs, songs of reflection, historical songs, fertility songs, songs about death and mourning, and other song varieties. (32)

There is an obvious application of these elements, inscribed from African sources on African American music, to the story's themes of promiscuity and prostitution.

Of how much of this cultural context was Faulkner, or for that matter Handy and other black musicians, aware? Their immediate knowledge of the music, the proximity of white and black communities, varying degrees of acquaintance with black culture Faulkner nurtured, and some presupposition of artistic insight are sufficient bases on which to assume what Philips maintains: "as much African culture survives now among whites as among blacks in the United States" (qtd. in Floyd 271).

Of course this is a debatable opinion. LeRoi Jones (Imamu Baraka) insists that "The materials of blues were not available to the white American" (148), while Baker contends that the blues may well be "a vernacular trope for American cultural explanation in general" (14). Jones notes that the rise of the blues coincided with largest mass exodus of blacks from south, which he credits to "a reinterpretation by the Negro of his role in this country . . . the discovery of America or its culture as would-be Americans" (96), reminding us that, "For the first time, Negroes began to feel the singularity of their plight as American black men" (113).

Regardless, as Faulkner writes it, the story is, as Stephen Hahn has suggested, a story of an "unbridgeable cultural difference." These differences are accentuated by less obvious cultural contexts for the blues and for black life as a whole, contexts focused by how the sounds Nancy makes are like and not like singing. ' ' Floyd notes the possibility of not responding "positively to the music" of the blues if one doesn't grasp the significance of the "bent notes, blue notes, coarse vocal delivery, moans, and grunts of the genre" (229), calling attention to

some of the primary features of African and African-American song expressions, making wide use of call-and-response figures, elisions, repeated short phrases, falling and pendular thirds, timbrai distortions, ululations, vocables, hums, moans, and other devices typical of music derived from the ring. (74-75)12

Naturally, ambiguities in the ear's perception are not unusual. Thomas Higginson, comparing the spirituals to Scottish ballads, said the Negro songs were "more uniformly plaintive" (197) and comments that "Almost all their songs . . . were in a minor key, both as to words and music" (202). Even to his sympathetic ear, his soldiers' songs presented the "queerest oddities of phrase and pronunciation . . ." (22). Similarly, Frederick Douglass decried those who heard in the slave songs "evidence of their contentment and happiness" (15) when, to his ear, "the mere hearing of those songs would do most to impress . . . the horrible character of slavery"; he credits the difference to his being "within the circle" so that he "neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear" ( 14). And W.E.B. Du Bois notes how "Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real" (183). Higginson also notes that