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McAteer, Kevin

English

2006

MA

James Baldwin's life work of essays, plays, novels, interviews and poetry are punctuated with numerous references to blues and jazz, yet his position within the cultural crossroads of African-American music and literature is overshadowed by other African-American male writers such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka. With few exceptions, the blues/jazz aesthetic in Baldwin's writings has been largely ignored by scholars and critics. This omission of Baldwin forces us to ask what exactly constitutes our collective memory of blues/jazz? How does the link between blues/jazz and literature reinforce the centrality of music in African-American culture? Who is left out of the critical discourse about blues/jazz? And how do these absences influence our understanding of the truth? Through close readings and textual analysis of three of James Baldwin's later novels - Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, and Just Above My Head - this thesis reveals a strong association between Baldwin and the recognized tradition of African American blues and jazz, particularly its roots of early 20th century female blues performers and their lyrics of sexuality and gender. Baldwin's use of the blues in its various forms gospel, traditional blues, jazz allows for a number of important achievements. First, Baldwin challenges the metanarrative of the masculinist and (hetero)sexual blues hero. Second, Baldwin's use of the blues does not essentialize race, but instead offers a much broader platform to explore race alongside gender, masculinity, and sexuality. It is precisely because the rich references to blues and jazz in Baldwin's novels complicate and, in some ways, stigmatize the sacred spaces of black music that he deserves a closer look.