[In the following essay, Oliver contends that there is no interrelationship between blues music and black literature, for, as Oliver illustrates, while it is true that many black poets imitate the structure and content of blues songs, cultural and economic barriers prevent most blues singers from acquiring even an awareness of black poetry.]

Lord, the reason why baby, I been so long writin' to you
I say, the reason why baby, I been so long writin' to you,
Because I been studyin' so hard, Lord how to sing these blues.

Sleepy John Estes' verse may not summarize the whole issue of the relationship between ethnic song and literature, but it does give us a hint of where the folk composer's priorities lie. Estes was a blues singer from Brownsville, Tennessee, one of the hundreds of such singers whose recordings have constituted one of the largest reserves of a folk literature among any ethnic group. He was Black, he was a poor farmer, and he was nearly blind; if he had sent a letter to his woman, it would have been very probably through the hand of a friend.

"Got me accused of forgery, I cain't even write my name …" sang another blues singer, Eddie Boyd—sang several other blues singers, in fact, for blues has its traditional stanzas and phrases which express succinctly ideas that can be drawn into new compositions. Though he lived in Chicago and eventually settled in Sweden, and though he was more sophisticated a blues singer than some, Eddie Boyd wrote with great difficulty; even as famous a blues singer as Muddy Waters, with numerous international tours behind him and many a college appearance in his yearly calendar—even he signs his name with a rubber stamp. Literacy is not unknown among blues singers: Whistling Alex Moore, who drove a junk cart and horse around the streets of Dallas for decades, had a flowing "copperplate" hand when he wrote his pencilled letters on pages of an exercise book, filling in the loops with indelible pencil to improve their decorative appearance. But he was an exception. When Garfield Akers sang his "Cottonfield Blues"

I'm gon' write me a letter ooh, I'm gon' mail it in the air …
Said, I' know you'll catch it, mama in the world somewhere …

he probably was referring to his own singing.

Blues is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down. Sometimes the poetic qualities of a blues verse survive the transfer to the printed page and the stark economy of the words, the occasional touches of sardonic humor or the bleakness of a despairing stanza stabs home:

They sentenced me to ten years on Big Brazos,
 picking cotton and corn
 and listening to the big bell tone (twice)
Now every time I hear a street light jingle, I start
 aching all in my
 bone …

sang Mercy Dee Walton in a long blues, "Mercy's Troubles."

Baby next time you go out, carry your black suit along (twice)
Coffin gonna be your present; Hell gonna be your brand new home …

—the words of King Solomon Hill in "Whoopie Blues" are no more and no less poetic, laconic or ironic than those in countless other recordings.

The elusive poetry of the blues has been the subject of separate studies by Samuel Charters and Paul Garon, anthologized by Eric Sackheim, analyzed for their formulaic structure related to meaning by Jeff Todd Titon, and as binary systems of expression by myself. But they stand as what they are: stanzas that are sometimes new, sometimes traditional, composed in forms that are predetermined, most frequently to a threeline, twelve-bar structure, sung to a solo accompaniment of guitar or piano or to the playing of a small group of instrumentalists. Blues can be analyzed on the printed page, but they do not exist there: blues are essentially performed—they exist in the singing and the playing. The music of the blues is inseparable from the words when considered as a totality, even though the words considered in isolation from the complement of the instrumental accompaniment may still have powerful messages to convey.

So where does this leave blues in relation to an ethnic literature? The question begs others, and though they have doubtless been discussed in these pages often before, some comments on them must be made. In the first place, there is the considerable problem of whether there is such an entity as an ethnic literature, or indeed an ethnic art form at all, if by ethnic is meant "racially identifiable." Culture is not a quality of race, and races do not automatically produce identifiable cultural traits. Racial groups, by their need to retain their identity, or sometimes because of their visible separation from others of different races (by skin pigmentation or hair type), may keep together as a discrete group and in so doing evolve as cultures. In the process, an "ethnic culture" might be identified both by the group itself and by those outside it, a product of its separate life within the larger society. Whether that culture is made evident by the food it eats, the clothes it wears, the argot it speaks, the rhythms it beats or the songs it sings, it gains its strength from the reinforcement of its own identity which the cultural expression manifests. But it is not inherently racial in origin, but cultural.

Cultural here may mean, however, not merely the mores and material artifacts of a racial group, but of a part of it—of a culture within the culture. Blues is not the music of all Black Americans, many of whom consider it of low class and status, lewd, irreverent and unsophisticated. All of which it is, as a folk culture or as a popular culture, from which many middle-class Blacks are, or choose to be, alienated. Blues is an expression of a working-class subculture, or rather, of several. For the blues in the cities is different from that of the rural regions; and the blues of the 1950s is different from the blues of the 1920s. The latter issue is complex, but there is a substantial literature available for those who wish to study the regional and temporal distinctions further. Moreover, blues is not representative of the whole of Black culture in the lower economic brackets: it is regarded as the music of the Devil by the members of churches of all denominations. Even the relationship of the blues singer to his (the majority of blues singers in the folk tradition are male) group is itself ambivalent. He is often regarded as dissolute, irresponsible, and something of a clown while being admired for his music making and his capacity to speak through his blues songs for the community. And, it must be said that such opinions are often justified even though many blues singers in no way fit such stereotypical descriptions.

Because blues singers have been drawn generally from among the poorest in the Black communities, in an ethnic minority which is itself largely disadvantaged, they have frequently been illiterate, educated only in the experience of a hard life. Whatever ideas may be in the literature of middle-class Black Americans, whatever poems may have been written under the inspiration of blues of one kind or another, remains entirely unknown to them. If the issue of "inter-relationship of ethnic music and literature" is the one that concerns us here then it must be accepted that any such relationship is not "inter-" but one-sided. There is no inter-relationship in the sense that the blues singer and creator of this form of ethnic music has any awareness of, or seeks any inspiration from, Black literature.

So, the position is one of the educated, literary poets and writers within the Black community looking to the blues for a source of ideas, and perhaps for a means of identification with what they may perceive as the roots of their culture. Such a perception may be romantic and insecurely based, but it is one that several Black writers have believed in. In passing, it should be mentioned that such a romantic identification is no less evident among white writers, and that literary narratives of the life of fictitious blues singers from Howard Odum's Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Blue Trail of Black Ulysses (1928) to Peter Guralnick's Nighthawk Blues (1980) have been by authors who could claim no ethnic links with their subjects. But, that is another (in some ways, more fascinating) issue.

Blues-related poetry appeared first in the 1920s "Negro Renaissance" when the experience of blues by Black poets was mainly through recordings or the stage presentations of Harlem shows and the vaudeville performances of Bessie Smith and Clara Smith. Langston Hughes (born 1902) and Sterling Brown (born 1901) were the most sensitive to the idiom and Hughes, in particular, closely followed it:

I'm gonna walk to de graveyard
'Hind my friend, Miss Cora Lee,
Gonna walk to de graveyard
'Hind ma dear friend, Cora Lee,
Cause when I'm dead some
Body'll have to walk with me.

Brown also essayed the three-line blues form with "Tornado Blues":

Black wind came aspeedin' down de river from de Kansas plains,
Black wind came aspeedin' down de river from de Kansas plains,
Black wind came aroarin' like a flock of giant aeroplanes.

Destruction was adrivin' it and close behind was Fear,
Destruction drivin', pa'dner at his side was Fear,
Grinnin' Death and skinny Sorrow was abringin' up de rear.…

Both Hughes and Brown seem to have felt their detachment from the folk community while working in the idiom and sprinkled their verses with "ma" and "de" as liberally as any plantation memories of the 1890s. The long lines of the blues form were divided by Hughes, and in "Memphis Blues," Sterling Brown shattered it:

Was another Memphis
'Mongst de olden days,
Dome been destroyed
In many ways …
Dis here Memphis
It may go.
Floods may drown it,
Tornado blow
Mississippi wash it
Down to sea—
Like de other Memphis in
History.

As poets, both were developing concepts that would not occur in blues. Personification of Death, Sorrow and Fear are alien to its imagery, though possibly because personification of "the Blues" embraces them all in the traditional idiom. Both poets wrote longer works like Brown's "Long Gone" in Southern Road, or Hughes's "Ask Your Mama" which has "the traditional folk melody of the 'Hesitation Blues' (as) the leitmotif for this poem," but Hughes's rightly termed it "Twelve Moods for Jazz"; poems to be read between or against jazz improvisation and not poems that simulated blues form or expression. Like Sterling Brown's "Ma Rainey," which was a poem about and to the singer, not an attempt at recreating her song composition, it was far more effective as poetry.

Myron O'Higgins (born 1918), a student of Sterling Brown, also wrote of one of the great figures in vaudeville blues, Bessie Smith, keeping approximately to the blues form:

Bessie lef' Chicago
  in a bran' new Cad'lac Eight
Yes, Bessie lef Chicago
  in a gret big Cad'lac Eight
But dey shipped po' Bessie back (Lawd)
  on dat lonesome midnight freight.
Lawd, let de peoples know
  what dey did in dat Southern Town,
Yes, let de peoples know
  what dey did in dat Southern Town
Well, dey lef' po' Bessie dyin'
  wid de blood (Lawd) a-streamin' down.

Like Edward Albee in his play The Death of Bessie Smith, O'Higgins was making both a political and poetic point. Blues singer Booker T. Washington merely mourned her passing with the curious specific details that often occur in blues, but without the background of "de thunder rolled an' de lightnin' broke de sky," which O'Higgins felt necessary to his poem. Sang Booker T. Washington:

Bessie Smith went out ridin', went out ridin' in a limousine (twice)
Well that poor girl died suddently, it was the worst I ever seen.
Well they took poor Miss Bessie way down some lonesome road (twice)
Well that poor girl gone this morning, yessir, she ain't gonna sing no more.

Bessie Smith wore pearls, and she wore diamonds, gold (twice)
Well that poor girl gone, Bessie Smith won't no more.

It is arguable whether Myron O'Higgins makes a more effective comment—or poem—than does Washington with his reflection on wealth and mortality. Another poet who also wrote of Bessie Smith's death, or rather, the popularly believed version of it, was Oliver Pitcher (born 1923) in his bitter poem "Salute." He, too, has been drawn to the blues as in "Harlem: Sidewalk Icons."

Man, in some lan
I hear tell, tears wep
in orange baloons will
bus wide open with
laughter
Aw, cry them blues Man!

—but the last line strikes a false note. Other poets have felt the challenge of the blues and have—like James C. Morris (born 1920) tried to describe them:

These are the blues:
a longing beyond control
left on an unwelcome doorstep,
slipping in when the door is opened.

These are the blues:
a lonely woman crouched at a bar,
gulping a blaze of Scotch and rye,
using a tear for a chaser.

The blues are fears that
blossom like ragweeds
in a well-kept bed of roses.

(Nobody knows how tired I am.
And there ain't a soul who gives a damn.)

In 1924, before James Morris had started school at Talladega, Alabama, blues singer Ida Cox had recorded her own definition:

Oh the blues ain't nothin' but a slow achin'-heart disease (twice)
Just like consumption it kills you by degrees.
Oh papa, papa, mama done gone mad (twice)
Oh the blues ain't nothin' but a good woman feelin' bad.

Few Black poets have tested their work by having it sung by a blues singer. One that did was Richard Wright who made the mistake of getting Paul Robeson to sing "King Joe" with the Count Basie Band. Robeson was too much of a concert singer to sing blues and Wright too much of a poet to write them. Its folksiness struck the wrong note when Joe Louis was the theme:

Black-eyed pea said "Cornbread, what makes you so strong?" (twice)
Cornbread say, 'I come from where Joe Louis was born.'

Bull-frog told boll-weevil, "Joe's done quit the ring," (twice)
Boll-weevil say, "He ain't gone and he is still the king."

Among Black poets, Wright was unusual in having been born on a plantation (1908) and having educated himself. His contact with blues was far closer than most, but he rarely essayed the form. His great poems like "I Have Seen Black Hands" or "Between the World and Me" are all the more impressive because they do not affect an artificial naivete. All the other poets quoted here had a good education; several went to Universities and one or two have University appointments: very appropriate for poetry and literature, but far removed from the milieu of the blues. Poets are trained to structure their compositions, to understand the rhythms and the resonances of words; they develop critical ears and write with fastidious hands. But the ears of blues singers are atuned to the sounds of freight trains and Martin guitars, and their hands are calloused by hoes, ice-picks and metal guitar strings.

There is little point in making further comparisons between the poets' use of blues form or the blues singers' language, and those of the blues singers' themselves. Ethnically, they may well be related, but in terms of literacy, world-view and cultural milieu, they are separated by a gulf which may perhaps be bridged, but will not be closed. Of course, this is not an argument for rejecting the blues, nor is it a way of saying that poets should not turn to blues, or anything else, for inspiration: the poet should have the creative freedom to draw his resources from where he chooses. All the same, it is worth emphasizing that this kind of choice is seldom the luxury of the blues singer.

Is there a future for an ethnic poetry of Black writers inspired by the blues? Maybe, but just as there seems little to look forward to in blues with literary pretensions, so there is little to be said for a literature with pretensions to being folk composition. The beauty of the blues resides so often in the relationship of the vocal and the words expressed to the music that is a part of it. As folk art in its origins and popular art today, it is remarkable, but, to date, it has not been a convincing source for an ethnic literature.