Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Anatomy of Melancholy

     The power of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s singing made him one of the most popular black artists of his day and has attracted a constant stream of admirers and covers in the century since. Jefferson’s “Dry Southern Blues” is a classic visionary statement of the blues, anatomizing the depression that might arise from life’s hardships, social inequity, and lack of love against a background of mortality and existential anxiety. Every sort of suffering -- physical, social, romantic, and spiritual -- is acknowledged, but the bluesman sings on with a resilience and equipoise born of suffering. The singer cannot find satisfaction. His eloquently formulated response to his own unease, while it does not resolve the contradictions of life, is, like all great art, nonetheless sufficiently redemptive, with its aesthetic mastery, its abstract play of musical form indicating a nobly tragic response to the intolerable conditions of life.
     The use of the word “dry” in the title is never justified (and thus limited) in the lyrics. Waves of association spread outward from this single term, among them hard times, a parched season, a useless well, an unsatisfying meal, a lack of alcohol, sex without passion, no sex at all. Connotation may spread far enough in the end to suggest the poet’s dry wit, his signifying indirection, his pose of artistic abstraction from his own woes.
     The opening words of the song locate its action in the subjective consciousness: “my mind leads me to take a trip down south.” Yet he finds no rural Eden. Even in reverie serenity escapes him. Though the Southern climate may be warmer, it may be “dry” as well, violently racist, for instance, or romantically unrewarding. Indeed, the assumption that the lover is seeking out his beloved on the way to a happy ending is deflated by the conclusion of the first verse. The speaker expects to call at “a fatmouth’s house.” The counterweight to love’s charms seems to be a companion who will not stop talking, one of the oldest negative stereotypes of women. Experience has taught the singer that the quest for joy is doomed to be frustrating.
     The second verse contains a painfully sharp image that expresses in epitome the tone of the whole.


One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind


     Whereas in the similar image of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” the train is associated with a departing lover, here the signification is wholly psychological. The speaker is caught in an insoluble dilemma with both signals indicating depression, and the training pulling inexorably out of the station, associated with the phantom-like evanescence of every hope as the individual seeks to grasp and hold it. It is always “gone,” like the words “under erasure” in Derrida, gone far beyond as in the parasamgate! at the end of the Heart Sutra.
     This pain is then countered by stanza three’s recoiled redirection, warning “sugar” “t'ain't nobody there,” questioning thereby the possibility of love and in fact questioning all sense perception. The strophe ends more modestly, pulling back from the metaphysical cliff’s edge to the sociological with a cynical commentary on the South: “if a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere.”
     Yet the nagging existential woe proves unshakeable. The speaker awakens dissatisfied, restless, and unstable, “rambling” while still in bed. The beloved recognizes the symptoms: "It's all the world-weary blues." What more can be said?
     The next two stanzas provide some historical context. Since the verse specifically refers to the draft which was active only in 1917 and 1918 (reinstated in 1940) the song must refer to that time. The reference to “women on the border” suggests the 1910-1919 US-Mexico Border Conflict, yet this background sheds little light on the meaning of the verses. While the perspective had been male earlier, it is now the woman’s worries that engage the singer. The American military stole the woman’s lover away just as a rival might have done. She mentions no concern about his danger in combat, but instead imagines him faithlessly carrying on with “them good-lookin' womens on the border” who, apparently an unruly bunch, are “raising sand” or causing disturbances. They are said, in fact, to be “drinkin' over the water trough,” emphasizing their bestial nature. She is anxious for the day he might be discharged, leave such temptations, and return home: “I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off.”
     “Dry Southern Blues” concludes with four verses expounding the near-impossibility of untroubled love which has become a figure for all suffering in life. The poet approaches his frustration from every angle and finds it equally intractable. Just as the railway lights had allowed no way out of his depression, he now says “I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea,” leaving him without caffeine, but more generally indicating the inability of male and female to get along.
     He fears “my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me.” A “hoodoo,” of course may explain any misfortune and the power of sexual desire has to many felt like a magic spell. Though the phrase “sweet mama” lengthened and sensuously deepened as “soul sweet mama,” promises pleasure, the speaker fears the loss of will of one possessed. Sexual failures are even more likely than successes to be attributed to magic intervention.
     When the beloved confesses that she does not love the singer, in fact does not even “know how,” he “commentates” (the elongated formality of the word similar to blues usage of “declare” or “signify”) with a paradoxical affirmative: "Yes, I love you sky high." Their feelings are always at cross purposes, it seems, one way or another.
     Even the physical encounter is fraught with tension. By itself the line “she had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear,” is part of the description of women as animals dating back to Semonides. The compound sounds rather like a monster. While monkeys are considered wild, dirty, and lusty, a teddy bear (as we know from Elvis) is adorable. But a punch line remains. The rhyme line notes that that cute head comes with “a mouth full of lip,” linking back to the “fatmouth” of the first stanza. This verbal aggression overcomes the singer and dominates his world. There is no escaping. “I guarantees it's everywhere.”
     In the final stanza the focus moves back to consider the entire globe. It seems as though the singer is boasting of his success as a lover with a girl in every port until he mentions the one realistic woman, “a brownie yonder in Dallas.” Of this one, whom he might in fact visit or court, he says, “I'm afraid to call her name.” Thus the song must end as the singer is reluctant even to speak of this woman. Ambivalence and contradiction have tightened to silence.






Blind Lemon Jefferson – Dry Southern Blues

My mind leads me to take a trip down south
My mind leads me to take a trip down south
Take a trip down south and stop at a fatmouth's house

One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
One train's at the depot with the red and blue lights behind
Well, the blue light's the blues, the red light's the worried mind

I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
I hate to tell you, sugar, it t'ain't nobody there
If a man stay here, he'll stay most anywhere

I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
I got up this mornin', ramblin' for my shoes
The little woman said to me, "It's all the world-weary blues"

Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Uncle Sam was no woman, but didn't he draft your man?
Tell me them good-lookin' womens on the border's raisin' sand.

Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
Well, women on the border's drinkin' over the water trough
I wished Uncle Sam would hurry up and pay these soldiers off

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
I asked the girl did she love me, said, "Lemon, I don't know how"
Caught me commentatin', "Yes, I love you sky high"

She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
She had feet like a monkey, head like a teddy bear
And a mouth full of lip, I guarantees it's everywhere.

I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a girl in Cuba, I've got a girl in Spain
I've got a brownie yonder in Dallas, I'm afraid to call her name

A Brief History of Negritude

     Négritude is a movement of Francophone writers of Africa and the African diaspora who sought to develop a literature reflecting distinctly African values and sensibility. Of course, traditional African poetry, largely oral, but sometimes written, had long existed, as well as a scattering of individual authors in European languages, but the fact that a flowering of literary thought and work arose first in French rather than English or Portuguese was influenced by differences in techniques of colonial rule.
     Though all colonial governance was exploitative and often brutal, significant variation existed. The English preferred “indirect rule,” in which they found cooperative traditional rulers who would work with them, in this way maintaining control while leaving much indigenous culture intact. On the other hand, the French sought to educate selected Africans in the French curriculum, and regarded a colonial subject who had mastered not only their language, but who could write explications of Corneille and Racine as a sort of fellow countryman. Thus residents of the motherland’s départements et territoires d'outre-mer have long had French citizenship and representation in the National Assembly and Senate.
     Among the promising young students brought to Paris for higher education were Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal. These three produced the journal L'Étudiant noir in 1934–1935 where the word négritude first appeared in a piece by Aimé Césaire.
     Yet négritude’s trois pères did not work in isolation. [1] They admired Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro and met American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom, including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, spent time in France. [2] Sisters Jane (or Jeanne), Paulette, and Andrée Nardal from Martinique hosted a literary salon and published the Revue du monde noir. Jane Nardal’s article “Internationalisme noir,” one of the earliest expressions of pan-Africanism, was published in 1928. Etienne Léro, René Ménil, and Jules Monnerot from Martinique published a single number of a radical journal titled Légitime défense in 1932 in which Léro condemned as dodoism (that is to say, obsolete) poets such as Daniel Thaly who imitated French literature and advocated instead a poetry influenced by black Americans, Surrealism, and Marxism. Ménil later served as editor of Aimé Césaire’s 1941 Tropiques which had a thoroughly Surrealist program.
     Légitime défense, a legal term roughly equivalent to self-defense, had been used by Breton in a 1926 pamphlet declaring Surrealism’s revolutionary autonomy. The Surrealists as a group had also spoken on the specific issues of race and colonialism. In 1932 a manifesto titled “Murderous Humanitarianism” [3] was signed by the principal white figures in the movement such as Breton, Char, Crevel, Éluard, and Tanguy, as well as by Martiniquans Pierre Yoyotte and Jules Monnerot. “Murderous Humanitarianism” was predominantly anti-capitalist, calling exploiters “slavers” and supporting the Communist Party. [4] The few comments on culture per se remain governed by political considerations, and jazz itself seemed to the authors merely a “distorted” vogue like chinoiserie.


“Those Blacks who have merely been compelled to distort in terms of fashionable jazz the natural expression of their joy at finding themselves partners of a universe from which Western peoples have willfully withdrawn may consider themselves lucky to have suffered nothing worse than degradation. The eighteenth century derived nothing from China except a repertoire of frivolities to grace the alcove. In the same way the whole object of our romantic exoticism and modern travel lust is of use only in entertaining that class of blasé clients sly enough to see an interest in deflecting to his own advantage the torrent of those energies which soon, sooner than he thinks, will close over his head.”


     The solidarity extended to the colonial subjects by the Surrealists on political grounds was returned by all the important négritude writers, though in varying degrees. In the introduction to Légitime défense, Léro wrote, “we accept without reservation surrealism, to which—in 1932—we bind up our future.” Césaire explicitly identified as a Surrealist; indeed, he regarded himself as a Surrealist before Surrealism.
     

I was ready to accept surrealism because I already had advanced on my own, using as my starting points the same authors that had influenced the surrealist poets. Their thinking and mine had common reference points. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. . . Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor . . . if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. [5]


     Damas’ first collection of poetry was introduced by Robert Desnos and illustrated by Frans Masere, both closely associated with Surrealism. In a revealing hedge, Senghor insisted on the distinction between European reason and African intuition, saying “Negro-African surrealism is mystical.” [6]
     The alliance was furthered by other factors, both in Communist politics, and Surrealist theory. It is surely significant that at this time, Stalin’s line encouraged ethnic identification and every recognized minority in the USSR was granted its own national territory such as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East. [7] Apart from (and even in a sense in opposition to) revolutionary aspirations, Surrealism shared with négritude writers the celebration of magic and the subconscious. The fetishization of the primitive by European avant-gardists is well-known, [8] while African and African-American authors found the Surrealist rejection of European rationalism and other values attractive, allowing them to view what had seemed superstition as a sort of higher wisdom.
     In 1945 Damas’ Poètes d'expression française 1900–1945 appeared with an anti-colonialist introduction quoting Léro's “Misère d'une poésie” (“Poverty of a Poetry”). The book included writers from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Indochina. In 1948 the definitive anthology of the movement was published, Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. The book’s introductory essay by Sartre titled "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus") guaranteed that the volume would receive widespread attention.
     Though Sartre had grown to be sympathetic to the politically revolutionary aims of many négritude poets, he had been actively hostile to Surrealism, most notably in his “Situation of the Writer in 1947” which calls them “victims of the disaster of 1940,” noting that, for all their revolutionary rhetoric, their emigration and solipsistic endeavors in the face of fascist occupation signaled their fecklessness. Indeed, like this condemnation of the white Surrealists, his motives for endorsing writers of color seem primarily political.
     Négritude has been criticized from several angles. Wole Soyinka’s jibe "The tiger does not proclaim its tigerness, it jumps on its prey" [9] is doubtless the most well-known. The fact is, of course, that, unlike humans, the tiger proclaims nothing whatever in words, but only in actions. Soyinka later moderated his opposition, saying “When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.”
     Tension arose between black writers to whom Marxism or a similar political orientation was primary and those who pursued a specifically Afrocentric art. Stanislas Adotevi from Benin condemned the assignment of racial characteristics even by fellow Africans, and, in particular, objected to the projection of a special intuition or mysticism on Africans. [10] He described the movement contemptuously, saying that, négritude was the “soporific of the Negro. It’s opium.” By its tenets, "in the great orchestra of the Universal, mankind will have Europe as its conductor, white. The Negro will hold the rhythm section. " [11] For some such as the Cameroonian Marcien Towa [12], Senghor in particular was guilty on the one hand of accommodating and finally accepting colonialism and on the other of cultivating a “biologisation du culturel,” which amounted to a sort of racism. Paulin Hountondji, student of both Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser, objected to what he called “ethnophilosophy, implying that different concepts were applicable for different peoples.” [13] Perhaps most influential was Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary theoretician, and former student of Césaire's, who claimed not only that that négritude was simplistic, but also that the notion of the "black soul was but a white artifact." [14]
     The influence of these poets is profound. Without attempting further detail, here it will suffice to note that among the groupings and individuals which would not have been the same without their example are political figures such as Harry Haywood, Maulana (Ron) Karenga, and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), artists such as Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Amiri Baraka, the Afro-Surrealism and Black Arts Movements, Larry Neal, Ishmael Reed and Neo-Hoodoo, Etheridge Knight, Henry Dumas, Jacques Stephen Alexis’ Marvelous Realism, D. Scot Miller, the Last Poets, and, in academia Henry Louis Gates and Molefi Kete Asante.
     Whatever evaluation a critic may make of their work in itself, the place of the négritude movement writers is secure in literary history. Their work marked an end of the slavish imitation of European literary models and the beginning of the construction of a modern African literature in European languages. It was Senghor, Damas, Césaire and their fellow-countrymen, not the colonialist overlords, as Sartre’s phrase suggests, who “removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut,” [15] changing and enriching both social and aesthetic thought.



1. All literary history is continuous, but the historian must begin somewhere. Apart from earlier African writing in European languages, Arabic (and Swahili and Hausa) and Bantu, I omit here the earlier movements in the Caribbean of Indigenism in Haiti and Negrism in Cuba.

2. Damas said that McKay was the movement’s spiritual founder and dedicated his first book of poetry Pigment to McKay. Lilyan Kesteloot found that even in the sixties all three of the pères could “still cite entire chapters” of McKay’s Banjo. See Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d'une littérature.

3. Later published in the remarkable Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology (1934).

4. Revolutionary politics had, of course, been an essential part of the Surrealist program as of Dadaism before it. This element is routinely neglected by more recent theoreticians, practitioners, and scholars.

5. From an interview of Aime Césaire by Rene Depestres at the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1967.

6. By far the best general treatment of the topic is Jean-Claude Michel’s The Black Surrealists.

7. With their tailing of Stalin’s line expressed in the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the American Communist Party during this era suggested the creation of a similar black national state in the South. This was never a popular notion in American black communities, though in general the Party enjoyed disproportionate support from blacks, for instance electing Benjamin J. Davis, the editor of the Communist Party’s journal The Negro Liberator, to the city council from 1943 and served until he was jailed for his Party membership in 1949.

8. See for instance, my own “The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art.”

9. Apparently first said in Kampala in 1962. Soyinka’s second comment was from a 1964 talk in Berlin.

10. See, for instance, his “Léopold Sédar Senghor : Négritude ou Servitude?” Poésie de la Négritude: Approche structuraliste, and Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l'Afrique actuelle.

11. “Dans le grand orchestre de l’Universel, l’humanité aura pour chef d’orchestre l’Europe, le blanc. Le nègre tiendra la section rythmique. La négritude doit être le soporifique du nègre. C’est l’opium.” See also his Négritude et négrologues.

12. His critique is repeatedly restated, including in Poésie de la Négritude and Identité et Transcendance.

13. See Sur la philosophie africaine.

14. See Peau noire, masques blancs.

15. See the opening line of “Black Orpheus.”