[In the following essay, Gartner explores William Faulkner's portrait of a blues singer in “That Evening Sun Go Down” in the contexts of Handy's “St. Louis Blues.”]

When Faulkner published “That Evening Sun Go Down” in the Spring 1931 American Mercury, his readers would have immediately recognized the reference to W. C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues.” When the story appeared that fall with the shorter title, “That Evening Sun,” in Faulkner's first short-story collection, readers must still have picked up the allusion, thanks to America's “blues craze” (Bakara 148). From its beginning, like Faulkner himself, they could have heard Handy and his band, or other singers or bands, playing the popular new blues. At the height of the craze, the radio and phonograph brought Bessie Smith and other blues singers into homes all over the country. For “the first time in our history … we developed a national consciousness about a popular music” (Eberly 4).

Faulkner's use of the blues, with the “St. Louis Blues” as a specific referent, gives “That Evening Sun” a context with its own set of images and symbols. Other writers, most notably Thadious Davis, have studied Faulkner's use of the blues in the development of black characters. Davis shows how blues and jazz provide an emotional framework which becomes “a mode of development” (84). For me, not only the music, but blues music and lyrics together form a cultural matrix for the fiction, imbedded with moods and emotions, stock characters and characteristic themes and events. Faulkner points the way with his title, and the tuned-in reader responds.

Nothing in biographical sources documents a strong connection between Faulkner and music, but there are references enough to convince us that he knew Negro spirituals, jazz and blues well, and frequently associated black people, especially black women, with music. As a young man in a university town, he heard popular danceband music, including W. C. Handy's blues. When he traveled to Memphis and New Orleans, he heard “barrel house music, alongside rags, jazz and blues” in the Memphis Tenderloin and listened to jazz in New Orleans's Storyville (Davis 76).

Clifton Bondurant Webb recalled Faulkner asking a choral group from all the colored churches to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and two other selections at the funeral of Callie Barr Clark, slave then servant of the Faulkner family. He also remembered a dance at the university where W. C. Handy played and Faulkner led the grand march (126). Joseph Blotner describes these same university dances with W. C. Handy's band down from Memphis to play “fox trots and one-steps … interspersed among the jazz numbers. A year before, Handy had composed a popular piece which he had called “The St. Louis Blues.” Late in the evening he might launch into its melancholy, syncopated strains” (1:175). Faulkner remembered the dances and Handy's music well, describing both and quoting lyrics of Handy and others in the dance scene in Soldier's Pay.

David Krause states that “William Faulkner listened compulsively to the music of Afro-American experience” (80). Faulkner certainly listened, but the only evidence of compulsion I know is Faulkner's claim that he wore out three recordings of “Rhapsody in Blue” while writing Sanctuary (1931), to help get the rhythm and tone (Blotner 1:754). Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” itself incorporated and adapted jazz rhythms and tone, but it is even farther removed from traditional “music of Afro-American experience” than the W. C. Handy commercial blues Faulkner introduced vividly into Soldier's Pay, and then drew on later. The many layers of adaptation and authenticity here further complicate the effects of Faulkner's protrayals.

In Soldier's Pay, Faulkner describes the music his characters hear coming from a black church as “something pagan using the white man's conventions as it used his clothing” (312). In the closing scene of the novel, he emphasizes this point again. From the church “welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race” in music that took “the white man's words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him” (319). For Faulkner, spirituals amalgamated linguistically adapted white words and concepts with pagan tradition. This corresponds with scholarly views of the “‘raw materials’ used by the originating artists of the spirituals,” which included “Protestant theology” and “traditional African beliefs” (Brown).

Faulkner carried the adaptation spiral one turn further. He used already adapted black language and music as a mode of getting inside his black characters. This borrowing earns him positive comments in discussions of Faulkner and race, as evidence that unlike most authors, he accepts the humanity of these characters and tries to understand them on their own terms. In “Tell Old Pharaoh: The Afro-American Response to Faulkner,” Craig Werner states that “Faulkner, as Sterling Brown recognized, helped break down traditional stereotypes and introduced Afro-American folk materials into American modernism” (713). “Faulkner realizes,” Werner believes, “that whites frequently fail to recognize the depth of black humanity” (718). Faulkner is one of the “few white writers who adapts aspects of the Afro-American voice, rather than expecting the common language to be essentially Euro-American in structure and content” (719).

In a more negative construction, Krause comments, “Throughout his fiction, Faulkner takes and remakes the black man's words and music.” Krause then quotes Faulkner's 1956 comment to Russell Howe: “Already his music and poetry have passed to the white man, and what the white man has done with them is not Negro anymore but something else.” Although Faulkner's comments to Howe were part of an argument against the existence of a separate “Anglo-Saxon heritage and an African heritage” (81), it is clear that he was well aware of the many turns in the adaptation spiral. This understanding contributed to his sense of the complexity and ambiguity of the position of the American black.

Just as Faulkner recognized spirituals as an appropriated form, he may have recognized the adaptive nature of the popular Handy blues he heard. These were not examples of what the “white man” did with “Negro” materials, but they were produced and sung by blacks (and later whites) for largely white consumption. That would not have lessened their usefulness for him in portraying black characters and stories for a white audience. LeRoi Jones (later Imamu Baraka) wrote in Blues People that the “classic singers brought this music as close to white America as it could ever get and still survive. W. C. Handy, with the publication of his various ‘blues compositions,’ invented it for a great many Americans and also showed that there was some money to be made from it. … But the music that resulted from this craze had little, if anything, to do with legitimate blues. That could not be got to, except as the casual expression of a whole culture” (148). Nonetheless, Baraka claims that what Bessie Smith sang was a “version of the American Negro and of America” that is “accurate and informed with a legitimacy of emotional concern nowhere available in, say, what is called ‘Negro literature’” (131). Thus Faulkner was using an adapted yet “legitimate” source.

Handy himself mined “legitimate blues” for his materials, building his lyrics around “snatches, phrases, cues and idioms” from folk-blues and other folk materials (Father of the Blues 142). Accurate dialect was important to him. Language was a “real problem at the time I wrote ‘St. Louis Blues [1914],’” he commented in his autobiography. “Negro intellectuals were turning away from dialect in poetry,” but Handy believed that certain words of dialect provided more music and expression than standard English (143-44). Faulkner does not use Handy's dialect, turning “de evnin’ sun” into “That Evening Sun.” Handy himself points out that many popular singers did the same thing (Blues 82). Faulkner similarly modifies the dialect in his black characters' conversations, putting back all the ending “g's,” as in “evening,” but including enough unfamiliar locutions so that white readers believe they are reading black speech, but can understand it. Popular singers similarly wanted their white listeners to understand not only the emotions but the words as well.

The earliest existing version of “That Evening Sun” consists of six leaves of manuscript with one or two additional pages, now missing. It was titled “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh.” Norman Holmes Pearson, who described the unpublished manuscript in 1954, suggests that Faulkner chose the title “with some unknown Blues cadence in mind,” but if so, it remains unknown (61, 62, 64).¹ This title captures the tone and message of familiar blues songs, even if it was not a direct quotation. As early as this version, Faulkner may have intended to bring in blues associations to develop Nancy's character and situation. When he expanded and retitled the story, he clarified his intentions by choosing an easily identifiable quotation.

The most striking change from fragment to story is the shift in point of view. In “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh,” he tells Nancy's story directly. In the longer magazine and book versions, he has an adult Quentin Compson remember an incident from his childhood. This is a story about a woman told by a young male narrator who is most interested in what he himself perceived. The cultural matrix of the blues song brings economy and amplification, allowing the narrator to maintain his distance, yet provide a pithy tale with considerable emotional impact. Not only does Nancy's character emerge from the blues, but those of Jesus, her man who left town and is probably in St. Louis, and Dilsey and Mrs. Compson, her black and white female opposites.

Various writers describe their reactions to the blues associations. For Krause, “That Evening Sun” “swells with the submerged passion of Bessie Smith crooning (wordlessly and far away) her ‘St. Louis Blues’” (81). Krause, like Davis, reacts to the music alone, drawing on it for emotional content. Ken Bennett moves in the opposite direction, dismissing the music, and the “St. Louis Blues” altogether. He disputes the assumption that Faulkner took his title from “St. Louis Blues,” arguing that the evening sun is a common image in black religious music, as well as blues music.² Bennett believes that Faulkner's title “conjures up a far richer range of associations than an identification only with Handy's ‘St. Louis Blues’ would suggest,” drawing from blues language, especially the use of sexual double-entendre, and from the images in both blues and spirituals (339-42). Faulkner does indeed bring in a broad range of associations, but his title clearly comes from Handy's “St. Louis Blues.”

Nancy's character is framed by that of the traditional blues singer. “The blues,” for Ralph Ellison, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (“Richard Wright's Blues,” qtd. in Krause 80). One sings the blues to transcend the blues.

The woman blues singer is tough and strong. She often sings of love and loss, but she sings to surmount the loss. In most traditional blues stanzas, she only flirts with ideas of death. She is open, exuberant and unashamed in her sexuality. After the white Baptist deacon, Mr. Stovall, kicks Nancy in the mouth with his heel, Nancy is “lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, ‘It's been three times now since he paid me a cent.’” When Mr. Compson asks if Aunt Rachel can do anything with Jesus, Nancy replies, “Cant nobody do nothing with him. … He say I done woke up the devil in him and aint but one thing going to lay it down again” (291, 294-95). Although she sometimes seems to passively bemoan her fate, the blues singer is still there singing about it afterward. In his introduction to Handy's Blues: An Anthology, Abbe Niles writes that the “philosophy between the lines” of the blues “chooses laughter, instead of tears, as the reaction to trouble” (14).

The original title, “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh,” reflects this spirit. When Faulkner chose his new title, he omitted the first part of the blues line, the first-person “I hate to see.” Although this could suggest that Nancy is unable to act as an independent agent, that she is unable to save herself, that she is, in fact, an ironic reversal of the blues singer, it more likely simply reflects the transfer of viewpoint to Quentin. The basic question is whether Nancy can and does sing her blues.

We are told repeatedly in the story about her “sound that was not singing and not unsinging.” This is the sound the Compsons hear as they head home from Nancy's cabin at the end of the story (309). W. C. Handy told an interviewer that blues voice the Negro's “secular interests and emotions” (Scarborough 270). Nancy's crisis is not only secular but spiritual, as are the origins and components of the blues. When Quentin first hears Nancy's “sound,” he says, “It was like singing and it wasn't like singing, like the sounds that Negroes make” (296). In his 1990 introduction to a new edition of Handy's Blues: An Anthology, William Ferris describes another kind of music Handy heard in the black church, early in his life. “He especially loved baptismal and burial hymns that were typically accompanied with vocalized moans and chanted prayers” (1). Faulkner may have heard this music emanate from churches like the one he describes at the end of Soldier's Pay. This music, one of the many precursors of the blues, and one of the many traditional sounds that influenced Handy, may be the origin of Nancy's “not singing and not unsinging.”

Unlike Dilsey, Nancy is a peripheral participant in the Compson family life. She picks up and handles the laundry, she fills in, often unreliably, as cook when Dilsey is sick. She seems isolated from the black community as well. In her time of trouble no one is able to help her. Faulkner intensifies our sense of her isolation through incorporating blues techniques. Blues are an adult form of communication. Children don't understand their language, their emotions or the experiences they reflect. The counterpoint between parallel conversations of children and adults throughout the story develops a syncopated rhythm as they interrupt each other, even though Faulkner gives each comment its full form. It feels as if they are speaking at the same time.

“Let what white men alone?” Caddy said. “How let them alone?”

“He aint gone nowhere,” Nancy said. “I can feel him. I can feel him now, in the lane. He hearing us talk, every word, hid somewhere, waiting. I aint seen him, and I aint going to see him again but once more, with that razor in his mouth. That razor on that string down his back, inside his shirt. And then I aint going to be even surprised.”

“I wasn't scaired,” Jason said. (295)

Despite her isolation, however, and despite her proud upright carriage when she walks and bends with her bundle of laundry, Nancy is dependent. She depends on Jesus for support. When she believes he is threatening her, she looks to the white Compsons for protection. Even when they are willing, however, they are unable to help her. She questions her own worth and her ability to take on responsibility even for herself. Nancy's actions seem counterpoised against those of the “I” in “St. Louis Blues,” ready to pack up and go after her man. At the end, though, when there is nobody left to protect her, Nancy, like the blues singer, must take sole responsibility for herself and confront her fate. She must try to sing, even though her dependence has almost weakened her too much. She is still trying at the end of the story. Her “not singing and not unsinging” may be her primitive attempt to sing and survive.

Nancy's situation introduces broader questions about black-white relationships in the post-Civil War South, never far below the surface of Faulkner's novels or stories. The results of the system of slavery, more than present conditions, lead Nancy to seek the Compsons' help, and induce Mr. Compson to do his limited, ineffectual best to help her. Finally however Mr. Compson is as powerless to protect Nancy as Jesus is powerless to stop Nancy's white predators. “When white man want to come in my house,” Jesus says, “I aint got no house” (292).

Racial relationships, and the injustice of the black situation, are often identified as themes of “That Evening Sun.” Kenneth Johnstone interprets it as a commentary on the plight of emancipated blacks in the South a generation after the Civil War. Nancy, with “fatalistic resignation,” tries “to evade all moral responsibility” because of her race. Mr. Compson, as the former white master, no longer feels responsible, so abandons her (94, 97). Although Nancy repeats that she is “just a nigger. It ain't no fault of mine,” she feels deep guilt for some unspecified crime. “I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine,” she says (309, 307). Mr. Compson is more powerful than either Nancy or Jesus, but no longer powerful enough to control Nancy's life. Each has a residual burden. This is their common plight, and part of Nancy's blues.

By omitting the “I hate to see” from the “St. Louis Blues” line, “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” Faulkner appropriates the “I” of the story for Quentin. Does that perhaps raise even further the issue of white responsibility and guilt, both for Nancy's individual situation and for the South's racial heritage?

Both Dilsey and Mrs. Compson are characters antithetical to Nancy. Both are opposites of the blues singer and take on opposite characteristics in the blues context. Dilsey is stable and enduring in “That Evening Sun,” just as she is in The Sound and the Fury, with no reference to the novel needed to establish her character. Her words and her insights are matter-of-fact, her speech unmusical and passionless.

“Drink some coffee,” Dilsey said. She poured a cup of coffee for Nancy. “Do you know he's out there tonight? How come you know it's tonight?”

Nancy's cadences respond with their blues rhythm and sense.

“I can feel him,” Nancy said. … “I know,” Nancy said. “He's there, waiting. I know. … I hellborn, child,” Nancy said [to Jason]. “I wont be nothing soon. I going back where I come from soon.” (297-98)

Mrs. Compson provides a similar contrast. When Mr. Compson says “I am going to walk down the lane with Nancy’. … 'she says that Jesus is back,’” Mrs. Compson replies, “‘Has she seen him?’” (293). Her fear is passionless and contrived and her husband knows it: “‘You'll leave me alone, to take Nancy home?’ mother said. ‘Is her safety more precious to you than mine?’ ‘I wont be long,’ father said.” Mrs. Compson tries unsuccessfully to dramatize her position. “‘I must wait here alone in this big house while you take a Negro woman home.’ ‘You know that I am not lying outside with a razor,’ father said” (293, 299).

Jesus too takes on characteristics from the blues context, becoming the prototypical aberrant lover. He leaves in the night without notice. He is potentially if not actually unfaithful. He is romantically violent and possessive. It is only to the child Quentin that the razor scar on his face was ordinary, “like a piece of dirty string.” Jesus is gone but still loved and wanted. Nancy talks of how good he was to her, how if he had two dollars, he always gave her one. Jesus is still sexually desirable. Nancy reacts with violent jealousy to the thought of him with another woman (292, 294, 295). Nancy would presumably like his shoes back underneath her bed, in the best blues tradition, but what she gets instead is a hog-bone with blood meat on it, one of the many sexual symbols in Faulkner's fiction. We must be aware, however, that only Nancy sees this bone, and when the children, and later their father, are in Nancy's cabin, the narration gives no evidence of the presence of any bone or trace of it (307).

The title, “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh,” suggests both a positive attitude toward Nancy's situation and a positive outcome for the story. Various critics believe the “St. Louis Blues” reference makes us expect a negative outcome. They suggest a tragic answer to the question of what will ultimately happen to Nancy after she is left alone in the cabin, or, in fact, what has happened, since Quentin is narrating fifteen years later.

Pearson, giving an ironic twist to the blues quotation, writes that Nancy “hates to see the coming of dark, not because her sweet man has left this town, but because he has returned to it to take a revenge which Nancy knows she cannot escape, nor the Compsons prevent” (61). Pearson does not question the accuracy of Nancy's perceptions of the situation or assumptions about the future. He refers to “the animal-like fury” of Jesus, but no such fury is evident in the story, even though Nancy fears it.

Both Nancy and Jesus indulge in extravagant descriptions of potential violent retribution straight out of the world of the blues. Jesus uses typical blues innuendo to tell the children that Nancy has a watermelon under her dress, but not from his vine. He then claims with bravado that he “can cut down the vine it did come off of,” but he does not threaten Nancy (292). When Mr. Compson tells Nancy that Jesus is “probably in St. Louis now. Probably got another wife by now and forgot all about you,” she responds, “If he has, I better not find out about it … I'd stand there right over them, and every time he wropped her, I'd cut that arm off. I'd cut his head off and I'd slit her belly and I'd shove—” (295). This is a more graphic and prolonged version of such behavior as Frankie's in the folk-blues “Frankie and Johnny,”³ a title Faulkner borrowed for a sub-story in his “New Orleans,” a group of sketches published in “The Double Dealer,” and then for an unpublished longer version.

Unlike the singer in “St. Louis Blues,” however, Nancy does not talk about going to St. Louis “tomorrow.” “Feelin' tomorrow lak ah feel today, Feel tomorrow lak ah feel today,” the song goes, “I'll pack my trunk, make ma git-away” (Handy, Blues 83). Even the singer will go to St. Louis to get her man back only if she still feels the same way “tomorrow.” By then she may have gotten over the loss and may be ready for something new. Neither Nancy nor Jesus, as they are portrayed, seem likely to carry out these threats.

Kenneth Johnston also uses the song to project a negative outcome. He finds the blues “deepened” when Mr. Compson says that Jesus is probably in St. Louis with another wife, and sees the death of the blues singer foreshadowed by the chorus that begins “Oh ashes to ashes” (98). In Handy's lyrics, that chorus continues, “and dust to dust, I said ashes to ashes and dust to dust, If my blues don't get you my jazzing must,” hardly a serious death reference (85). A possible source for Handy's lines, however, is a traditional blues stanza which goes, “Ashes to ashes, an' a-dus' to dus', Ef de whiskey don't git you, den de cocaine mus” (Handy, Blues 14). If Faulkner knew this version from his visits to Memphis, we would have background for the children's suspicions of Nancy's drinking and the jailor's imputation of the use of cocaine. This would deepen Faulkner's picture of the self-destructive behavior among former slaves and descendants of slaves, but still would not imply the likelihood of potential violence by Jesus against Nancy.

Reading the story-line of “St. Louis Blues” into “That Evening Sun” we should anticipate a positive outcome, once Nancy gets through this psychological crisis. Not only does the singer in Handy's song anticipate packing her trunk, but the Gypsy fortune-teller has told her to “wear no black,” but to “Go to St. Louis, You can win him back” (83). It is not likely that Faulkner expected readers to know all the verses and choruses of the song, especially since different singers added and subtracted verses of their own. Most readers familiar with the song, however, would know that after its plaintive beginning, the mood, like that in many woman-based blues, becomes aggressively positive.

Faulkner is deliberately ambiguous about what happens to Nancy, even though Quentin tells the story fifteen years later. When Mr. Compson says to Nancy, just before they leave her, “You'll be the first thing I'll see in the kitchen tomorrow morning,” she replies, with the suggested rhyme and rhythm of a song lyric, “You'll see what you'll see, I reckon. But it will take the Lord to say what that will be.” The story ends fifteen years earlier than it began, with no return to the voice or narration of the older Quentin (308-09.) As in the textbook example of an open-ended story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” the outcome is less important than the situation, both for Nancy, if she indeed survives, and for Quentin. Quentin recounts the story as a memorable formative experience. Had what happened next, outside the story, not been anticlimactic, had it been violent and melodramatic, surely Faulkner would have had Quentin include it. James Carothers believes that the outcome of the conflict between Nancy and Jesus is unimportant, that “the narrator Quentin deliberately makes the reality of Nancy's danger ambiguous” (12). Perhaps for Faulkner this is also Quentin's blues: he too has faced painful truths and survived to tell about them. Perhaps the white man has appropriated both Nancy's experience and her blues.

Close reading of what he sees as the facts in the story makes E. W. Pitcher opt for survival. Writing about motive and metaphor, he states: “This conclusion seems forced upon us by the allusions to events whose relative sequence can be reconstructed with considerable accuracy.” Specifically he demonstrates how Quentin's memories of Nancy crawling through the fence with her laundry bundle, with face sunken where her teeth were missing, had to be later than “the night of terror” (133). We must also remember that a twenty-four-year-old Quentin⁴ is recalling the observations of a nine-year-old Quentin. The nine-year-old might well misunderstand the implications of Nancy's statement that she is scared of it happening in the dark. Keeping a lamp burning in order to face one's fate in the light fits with the frequent blues insistence that after the sun goes down it will indeed come up again. This is the message of a later Handy song, “Sundown Blues,” with its lines, “Tomorrow I'll be a-racing with the rising sun / Hurry, sundown, and let tomorrow come” (Blues 151).

Each reader must decide personally whether Nancy has survived. When we see through the blues, however, when we pull together all the clues, images and symbolic suggestions from the blues context, the portrait of the blues singer singing to survive, inviting but surmounting pain and crisis, seems the strongest element. Personal and social forces have brought Nancy to a point near total weakness and collapse, but I see her at the end bravely facing what she perceives as terrible danger with her door open and her light on, trying to sing.

At first, seeing “That Evening Sun” through a blues context seems to thrust us into a story focusing primarily on human relationships. Certainly that is the focus of the “St. Louis Blues” and many other lost-love blues. An early critic, Evans Harrington, wrote that Faulkner “has portrayed the mental and emotional disintegration of a human personality under the pressure of tremendous fear” (54), but he too suggested deeper political implications. Nancy's is the “characteristic attitude of Southern Negroes that nothing they do matters.” For Harrington, “In portraying Nancy, Mr. Faulkner implies that the lack of moral conscience among the South's Negroes is a result of the lack of self-respect on their part, a self-respect which the South has not helped them to gain” (58-59).

This simplifies Faulkner's layered portrait. The blues context and Nancy's words remind us that southern blacks were still capable of acting as independent moral agents. Although Nancy repeats that she is “just a nigger. It ain't no fault of mine,” she feels painful guilt for some crime or sin Faulkner never identifies. Like Kafka's protagonist in The Trial, she awaits, even invites, her punishment. After calling on the heavenly Jesus, she anticipates immediate punishment from his earthly namesake. “I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine,” she says (309, 296, 307).

The blues context helps us see through Quentin's narration, through Quentin's own story, to Nancy's story. Faulkner's contextual symbolic network makes sure Nancy's story is securely there. In a revealing insight into Faulkner's fiction, Werner writes: “Faulkner realizes that whites frequently fail to recognize the depth of black humanity and that a black who fulfills the endurance narrative pattern by depending on external aid may wind up at the bottom of an abandoned well” (714). In this case, if Nancy remains dependent on external aid, she may end up at the bottom of a ditch. At the end of the story, Nancy is forced to realize that she has no resource beyond herself.

W. C. Handy told an interviewer that blues voice is the Negro's “two fold nature, the grave and the gay, and reveal his ability to appear the opposite of what he is” (Scarborough 270). Nancy seems to be a victim. The blues say that she is a survivor. The blues context allowed Faulkner to recognize what Thadious Davis describes as the integrity of black culture, amalgamated yet separate and private (82). The use of cultural context helped him introduce into his fiction some of the social complexity and moral ambiguity he saw in the world around him, especially in his own southern world.

Notes

1. Ken Bennett also says this title “has the sound of a blues song” but indicates that he has not found a source (340). Nor have I. The manuscript fragment was published in 1983, edited by Gail Moore Morrison.

2. Bennett writes that “Kenneth G. Johnston first cited Handy's song as the probable source” in 1974 (339). The first identification of the song in print that I found is Pearson's 1954 reference to the “well-known Blues derivation” (65). Francis Lee Utley wrote in 1964 that “Faulkner knows his Southern songs: the ‘Go Down Moses’ of the novel; ‘That Evening sun,’ from ‘St. Louis Blues,’ with its tragic implications for Dilsey's daughter Nancy; Dilsey's own endurance which owes much to various spirituals; and the widely-known song ‘Old Blue,’ which mingles rite with humor.” Utley sees this last song as a possible source for the relationship of Boon and Lion in “The Bear” (175).

3. W. C. Handy classified “Frankie and Johnny” as the kind of song that to folk musicians was what we now call “blues,” even though in form it is a ballad (Handy, Father of the Blues 143; Niles, “The Story of the Blues” in Handy, Blues 18).

4. The death of a Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury is of course irrelevant to the reading of this self-contained story.

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