[In the following essay, Davis investigates the influence of Handy's music on William Faulkner's characterization of blacks in his novels.]

Listening to W. C. Handy's 1916 blues song “Ole Miss,” recorded by jazz pianist James P. Johnson in 1922, I am reminded of the way in which blues and jazz intermingled in the music of that period. Southern-born Handy, called “the father of the blues,” and Northern-born Johnson, father of the hot piano, did not single-handedly invent the music that they composed and performed; instead, for creative inspiration, each drew upon traditional black music, secular and sacred, during a time when, following Scott Joplin's successful ragtime compositions at the turn of the century, black American musicians laid claim to all the possibilities of their multicultured heritage. I am reminded, too, that “Ole Miss” is Handy's tribute to the University of Mississippi where, as a Memphis bandleader and cornetist, he frequently played for campus dances and balls.

One of the Oxford youngsters attending those dances was William Faulkner. In describing Faulkner's social activities during the fall of 1915, Joseph Blotner points to dances in the ballroom of Gordon Hall: “There were no tangos yet; instead there were fox trots and one-steps of the day interspersed among the jazz numbers. A year before [1914], Handy had composed a popular piece … called “The St. Louis Blues.” Late in the evening he might launch into its melancholy, syncopated strains or those of another one he had called “The Memphis Blues.””¹ There were also dances given by Sallie Murry at The Big Place, where Chess Carothers would “pump the player piano” for the dancers on the porch, and there were other dance parties at Myrtle Ramey's house, or Estelle and Dorothy Oldham's, where Lucius Pegues's three-piece band would sometimes play.² Faulkner and his hometown friends were already enjoying the kind of social dancing that would become a national phenomenon a few years later when jazz rhythms would inspire the Shimmy, Charleston, and Black Bottom, all dances invented by blacks but popularized by whites such as Irene and Vernon Castle whose arranger was the black musician Fletcher Henderson.

As a budding writer in the decades during and after World War I, William Faulkner of Oxford was not isolated from the changes in popular tastes or from the spread of the “new music.” Like others of his generation, he witnessed the rapid dissemination of hit tunes that, thanks to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Emile Berliner's disc records, and the radio receiver, could arrive in small Southern towns almost as quickly as they appeared in major cities. Radio and records combined with sheet music from Tin Pan Alley and small bands or orchestras to send popular music into every part of the country and into every segment of the population. It was, Philip Eberly observes, “the first time in our history that we developed a national consciousness about a popular music.”³

It was also a period of reverse acculturation, in which aspects of the minority culture moved into the dominant one with an accumulative effect of transforming the majority. Specifically, the new music, rooted in the ragtime of black pianists and in the blues of black folk derivation, progressed into American culture by means of direct contact with black musicians and indirect contact with black music adapted by white composers and musicians. It positioned blacks as referential structures for whites, so that within the dominant cultural constructs blacks became more visible as operatives, even if limited, as opposed to their being seen primarily as respondents. Though it was associated with whites as much as with blacks by the mid-1920s, the new music remained in the public arena very much a product of blacks, and as such it fostered a fusion of black and white cultural references. Cultural diffusion, then, was not simply a one-way street with blacks as the beneficiaries, despite the fact that their increased opportunity and mobility also revitalized black culture.⁴ That revitalization may be witnessed perhaps most vividly in the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The emergent, racially derived music marked a cultural formation that gave expression to new practices, values, and ideologies. As Neil Leonard concludes:

Jazz fulfilled various esthetic needs for those who rejected traditional values. For the jazz men and their close followers it provided a voice of rebellion and a source of positive morality. For its less ardent young supporters, jazz furnished accompaniment to their growing pains and adolescent enthusiasms. Intellectuals found it an exciting new form of art. And in one way or another it titillated the sensibilities of well-to-do members of slumming parties. However differently people responded to jazz, it provided all of them with emotional symbols for the relative values that were replacing the standards of traditional idealism.⁵

The infusion of the new music into white American culture helped in part to bring about changes in artistic images of blacks, at the very least to help drag some ingrained, negative images of inarticulate servers and bearers out of the nineteenth century, and to encourage a marketplace for art produced by blacks themselves. Unfortunately, though servitude was no longer the only viable image of blacks, new sets of conventions for portraying blacks emerged, especially that of their music as an unstudied, instinctive art form conveying primitive passions. Racial stereotyping with a few new twists remained, and it affected conceptions of the music. “Traditionalist concepts of race bore strongly on the opposition to jazz”; however, proponents were not immune to racist beliefs.⁶ Even while influencing European and American orchestrations, harmonic lines, rhythms, and forms, jazz “developed a reputation for being loud, bawdy, untamed and low-class,” simply because it emanated from blacks.⁷ And blues was largely rejected by respectable people, black as well as white, not only because of its early acceptance by the world of brothels and saloons, but also because of its association with lower-class, rural origins.

Despite the fact that acute racial prejudice did not deter cultural borrowing,⁸ the movement of jazz and blues into the larger society did not alleviate cultural chauvinism or racism. Private and public statements by emergent young writers who placed themselves in the artistic vanguard, such as Faulkner himself or F. Scott Fitzgerald, indicate as much. Fitzgerald, who reputedly gave the Jazz Age its name and whose works evidence clear signs of the cultural flow between blacks and whites (see especially his use of jazz, saxophones, and Handy's “Beale Street Blues” in The Great Gatsby), would write to Edmund Wilson in 1921: “The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. … My reactions [to Europe] were all philistine, antisocialistic, provincial, and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man's burden. We [Americans] are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.”⁹ Such statements notwithstanding and despite the new music's inability to democratize ethnocentricism, neutralize racism, or otherwise perform miracles in American society, the expansion of black music up from the supposedly “lower rungs” of race and class hierarchies did begin an exchange of norms and beliefs that at least contributed to modifying and blurring the rigid lines or stratifications between the majority and minority cultures. And if nothing else, the presumed cultural inadequacy of blacks in America had to be questioned—even if only on a subliminal, rather than conscious, level.

The dominant sound of the new music, generally referred to as “jazz” by the mid-1920s, emerged from Faulkner's own region, the American South, and from Southern blacks, whose unique contribution to the national music had already included spirituals before Emancipation and ragtime at the turn of the century. After 1917 commercial blues had thoroughly saturated the popular music that Faulkner and his Mississippi cohorts listened and danced to. In the late teens and early twenties, instrumental jazz incorporated diverse musical elements from black culture, especially the declining ragtime and the ascending blues form, to become the most prominent music not just in the South, but on the American scene. Its mass dissemination was observed on numerous fronts, such as that of folk music collectors Howard Odum and Guy Johnson who, in 1926, remarked what they termed a “disappearing process” of the black folk songs they had heard twenty years before, a process they attributed directly to “the multitude of blues, jazz songs, and others being distributed throughout the land in millions of phonographic records.”¹⁰ By examining 1,320 titles from the catalogs of three leading record companies, Odum and Johnson concluded that over forty per cent of the secular songs had the word “blues” in the titles, but that “upwards of seventy-five per cent” of all the popular songs listed could be classified as blues simply because “the term is now freely applied to instrumental pieces, especially to dance music of the jazz type, and to every vocal piece which, by any stretch of the imagination, can be thought of as having a bluish cast.”¹¹

Faulkner and his university community were in an especially fortuitous position: within W. C. Handy's range for travel with his Memphis-based band. From 1905 when Handy arrived in Memphis to take over the Knights of Pythias Band until 1919 when he moved permanently to New York to set up his music shop in Tin Pan Alley, Handy was one of the leading band directors, musicians, and composers living in the South. He was the first to write, though not the first to publish, a blues composition—the 1909 “Mr. Crump,” a mayoral campaign song for E. H. Crump, published in 1912 as “Memphis Blues” (Artie Matthews's “Seals Blues,” August 1912, and Hart Wand's “Dallas Blues,” September 1912, preceded it in print). And Handy was the first to popularize the blues with songs such as “Yellow Dog Blues” (1914, originally entitled “Yellow Dog Rag”) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914), the classic song that made him the undisputed master of blues compositions, just as Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” had made him the master of ragtime. The Handy Band was actually a chain of bands involving up to sixty-seven musicians sent out to various parts of Memphis and the surrounding states; their repertoire included seventeen different kinds of music (from minstrel shows, circuses, concert companies, vaudeville, and so on).¹² They performed not only for dances and parties at clubs, schools, or homes, but also for picnics, rallies, and meetings. Their most innovative performances were instrumental serenades outside the homes of the sweethearts of young white men who hired them; the serenading was something Handy had begun in his native Florence, Alabama, where he sang as a tenor in a quartet known for its serenades.

Whatever the Handy Band played; however, was marked not only by syncopation, antiphony, and polyrhythms, but also by the use of “blue notes” (slurred thirds or sometimes sevenths) and of “breaks” (filled-in pauses). The syncopation followed the lead of ragtime in which the left hand beat out a percussive rhythm while the right hand played a syncopated melody, and which was made popular after 1896 in works such as William Krell's four-part Mississippi Rag (1897, “Cake Walk,” “Plantation Song,” “Trio,” and “Buck-and-Wing Dance”) and Joplin's Original Rags (1899).¹³ But Handy's blue note and break were new to written composition; they helped to lay the groundwork for the commercial blues and jazz fusion in the 1920s.

Faulkner may well have had Handy's band in mind as a model when he drew a sketch of a seven-piece black jazz band for the 1921 annual Ole Miss. (Only six musicians are visible; the piano player is hidden behind a dancing white couple.) Although the drawing depicts the musicians, as Erskine Peters points out in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha World and Black Being, in a “minstrelsy-like hilarity of … gestures and facial contortions,”¹⁴ it is an early indication of an associative link between blacks and the new music in his art. The association was at that time so widely recognized that by 1925 James Weldon Johnson in his preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals had to resist “discussing the origin of Negro secular music and its development until it was finally taken over and made ‘American popular music.’”¹⁵

During Faulkner's literary apprenticeship in the 1920s, he absorbed many influences from literature and life, as H. Edward Richardson, Max Putzel, Judith Sensibar, and others have shown. His movement from Mississippi to New York, New Orleans, Paris, and back to Oxford was not without stopovers in the Memphis Tenderloin which, like the New Orleans fabled Storyville and French Quarter where he listened to jazz clarinetist George “Georgia Boy” Boyd,¹⁶ was an area where barrel house music, alongside rags, jazz, and blues, could be heard either in phonographic or live versions. In New York there were not only the prolific song writers of Tin Pan Alley (Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and lesser known songsters) turning out white versions of black music, but there were also musicians, such as Vincent Lopez, Ted Lewis, and Fred Waring, performing in clubs, cabarets, stage shows, concert halls, and for radio. And there was Axel Christensen's “system” of teaching rag and jazz, a system which graduated a total of 350,000 mainly white students between 1903 and 1930.¹⁷ All cashed in on the popularity of blues and jazz in the aftermath of two successful black syncopated bands: Jim Europe's 369th Army band and postwar orchestra of sixty-five musicians, who played at the New York Opera House and toured the United States and France in 1919; and Will Marion Cook's New York Syncopated Orchestra of forty-one pieces and nine singers, which in 1919 performed both in the United States and, as the American Syncopated Band, in Paris and London, where part of the orchestra with Sidney Bechet on clarinet played a command performance at Buckingham Palace.¹⁸ Europe's and Cook's successes resulted in more white musicians adapting and stylizing black music; perhaps the most famous of them was Paul Whiteman, who was billed somewhat presumptuously as “the king of jazz.” He fronted a twenty-eight piece dance orchestra that, at different times, featured Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and that imitated black models. His 1922 hit “It's Three O'Clock in the Morning” made its way into Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby (1925). However, his greatest fame stemmed from his 12 February 1924 “All American Symphonic Jazz” concert at New York's Aeolian Hall; the program premiered George Gershwin's “Rhaposody in Blue,” which Whiteman had commissioned.¹⁹ Faulkner claims to have worn out three recordings of “Rhapsody in Blue” while writing Sanctuary (1931), because he used the music to help “set the rhythm and jazzy tone.”²⁰

Before the composition of Sanctuary, Faulkner had already admitted to having a few favorites among the new songs: “Yes, Sir, That's My Baby,” “I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” “Ain't She Sweet,” and “My Blue Heaven.”²¹ And he had already begun to use titles or lines from distinctly black songs in his fiction: “Frankie and Johnny” (The Double Dealer, January 1925) with its title from one of the more famous blues-ballads; “The Longshoreman” (The Double Dealer, January 1925) with its phrases from black work songs, from the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and from the gospel “All God's Chillen Got Wings”; “Damon and Pythias Unlimited” (The Times-Picayune, 15 February 1925) with its title echoing the name of Handy's first Memphis band; “Father Abraham,” an unfinished work with its title from a spiritual of the same name; “That Evening Sun” (1930, earlier entitled “That Evening Sun Go Down” and “Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted to Laugh”) with its title taken from the opening line of Handy's “St. Louis Blues.” He had, as well, tentatively explored music as referential theme affecting characterization (“The Longshoreman,” which mixes black secular and sacred songs in a rhythmic sung monologue, and “The Rosary,” The Times-Picayune, 3 May 1925, which ends with the “excruciating, succulent bray of a saxophone blown by a rank amateur”).²² This early use is largely a typographical assimilation of popular forms which had an expressive base in black music.

In Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), two different styles of black characterization stem directly from the new music. Both are paradigmatic constructions reflecting Faulkner's mediation between art forms and life forms; both have, as a main constitutive element, modern black music. In one, dominated by a sophisticated, modern jazz band, not unlike Handy's, black figures are emblematic of postwar changes and disruptions in manners, morals, and conventions. Faulkner's governing impulse in this style of black characterization is modernistic. An animated band plays for a white dance in the post-World War I South, and its stylized position in the piece depends upon an understood racial differentiation. In a sense, there is an implicit syncopation in which the two races, black musicians and white dancers, play off each other in a dialogical scheme in which music, rather than words, forms the basis for discourse:

Along the balustrade of the veranda red eyes of cigarettes glowed; a girl stooping ostrich-like drew up her stocking and light from a window found her young shapeless leg. The negro cornetist, having learned in his thirty years a century of the white man's lust, blinked his dispassionate eye, leading his crew in fresh assault. Couples erupted in, clasped and danced; vague blurs locked together on the lawn beyond the light.

“… Uncle Joe, Sister Kate, all shimmy like jelly on a plate. …”²³

In terms of the musicians, Faulkner is a minimalist, constructing them largely by inference from the imagined sound of their music. He sketches only a few brief descriptions that lack linear development, but in each he presents the blacks in exaggerated, collective motion that functions within a structure of cultural fluidity and racial interaction. “The negro cornetist unleashed his indefatigable pack anew and the veranda broke again into clasped couples” (210). The exchange of cultural messages is dynamic and repetitious, yet the actual interaction between the musicians and the dancers is limited.

The music, of course, is the common ground of rhythmic response that shapes and orders the chapter through dislocations in time and disruptions of action. “The negro cornetist spurred his men to fiercer endeavor, the brass died and a plaintive minor of hushed voices carried the rhythm until the brass, suspiring again, took it” (204). Faulkner's description of flowing melody and steady rhythm, suggestive of a blues scale and of playing between what Handy called the “breaks,” is part of his dramatization of new sexual mores throughout the dance scene. Dancers “drowned by the music … took the syncopation”; others “locked together … poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, drifting like a broken dream” (195). In spite of Scott Joplin's insistence in his 1908 School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano that “syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music,”²⁴ syncopated rhythm insinuates loose sexual behavior, even to the worldly-wise character Joe Gilligan, who quips: “This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it: I would have been throwed out of any place I ever danced doing that. But I had an unfortunate youth: I never danced with nice people” (196).

Faulkner de-emphasizes the individual musicians, who remain collectively “the pack” or “the crew” outside the spatial configuration of the dance floor yet simultaneously creating it. He emphasizes the procreative, libidinal connotations of their music (“the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones” [195]) and by implication links blacks in general to an overt sexuality heard in the music. He stresses as well the sexual connotations in the motion of the white dancers: “The dancers moved, locked two and two” (197); “The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking it and finding it, losing it again” (197). While dancing, one girl, the flapper Cecily Saunders, is “conscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body … pleasuring in freedom and motion, as though freedom and motion were water, pleasuring her flesh to the intermittent teasing of silk” (199). Freedom, motion, and their relation to popular images of sexual attraction are her concerns, the same concerns that generally accompanied contemporary views of jazz as freeing whites of repressions. This same girl wonders whether her partner is comparing her to Ella Wilcox or Irene Castle, popular dancers of that time (200), and she is subsequently shown “striking her body sharply against [a dance partner], taking the broken suggestion of saxophones” (209).

The white dancers perform in the foreground of a jazz scene replete with “light, motion, sound: no solidity. A turgid compulsion, passionate and evanescent” (200). The blacks are rhythmic echoes in the background; their music “a troubling rumor,” their interspersed lyrics a suggestive undertone: “throw it on the wall. Oh, oh, oh, oh …”; “shake it and break it, shake it …”; “I wonder where my easy, easy rider's …” (200). Even though the refrain, “I wonder where my easy rider's gone,” is from Handy's “Yellow Dog Blues,” little of the private, personal vocality of blues infiltrates the dance sequence, which is rendered here as a jazzy, public, and collective form of moans and riffs interpolated across racial lines, but with the stresses continuously external to blacks and internal to whites.

This style of black characterization is not confined to the jazz musicians in the central chapter, though it is most visible there. Other blacks less prominently positioned in the text are similarly developed. The several undifferentiated porters in the opening chapters function as a backdrop to the rowdy, returning white veterans. Indiscriminately called “Othello,” they fit into a fast-paced, modern arena of cultural exchanges and interaction. And their appearances are also occasions marked by racial differentiation based on stereotypes; one porter's description, for instance, consists entirely of one sentence: “White teeth were like a suddenly opened piano” (16). The same style applies to Loosh, the black grandson of Donald Mahon's mammy, Cal'line; he happens to be one of the returned soldiers, and is suggestively placed in a different relationship to whites than his grandmother. In addition, a black gardener mowing a lawn throughout most of the narrative is as well a development of black character based upon the syncopated rhythms of jazz music (104, 115, 155, 182, 281). At several points, he is referred to as a “languid conductor” (115, 281), and the sound of his mower provides an incessant melodic base for the rhythms of life in Charlestown, Georgia, the fictional town. One fleeting glimpse of this style is seen in the description of black school children whose teacher, “a fattish negro in a lawn tie and an alpaca coat … could take a given line from any book from the telephone directory down and soon have the entire present personnel chanting it after him, like Vachel Lindsay” (116). The implication is one of rhythm devoid of sense, linked to the poet Lindsay whose poems such as “That Daniel Jazz” and “The Congo” were chanted and sung to the imagined rhythms of jazz.

In these examples, there is a projection of intimacy with blacks, but it is a projection external to the blacks themselves and propelled by the observable rhythm or motion of their activities. All of the examples suggest a primarily nameless collectivity, or a lack of individuation, and an implicitly comic portraiture, both of which, I believe, recur in varying degrees throughout Faulkner's canon in very different black characters; for example, Caspey, the young rebellious veteran in Sartoris (1929): “I don't take nothin' fum no white folks no mo'. … War done changed all dat.” (65); T. P., Versh, and Luster in The Sound and the Fury (1929); Tomey's Turl and George Wilkins in Go Down, Moses (1942); Ned McCaslin in The Reivers (1962). (Some characters, such as Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses, are developed in two different styles of characterization.)

I am suggesting that instrumental jazz, as adopted and disseminated into the majority culture, becomes one basis for Faulkner's developing a style of black characterization that is a configuration of collectivity and syncopation, reverberating with meanings of group cohesiveness (particularly in relation to presumed “racial” traits), with meanings of race differentiation dependent upon encounter between blacks and whites, and with meanings of amassed motion and rhythm that, though distinctive, discourage individuation, and forward comic portraiture. This style of characterization is evidenced in what I term a structure of rhythm.

In the second style of black characterization from Soldiers' Pay, dominated by a processional of singing churchgoers, black figures are rooted in a traditional folk culture that defies time while accepting mortality.

Under the moon, quavering with the passion of spring and flesh, among whitewashed walls papered inwardly with old newspapers, something pagan using the white man's conventions as it used his clothing, hushed and powerful, not knowing its own power:

“Sweet chariot … comin' fer to ca'y me home. …” (312-13)

The blacks, isolated in a personal experience symbolized by the sound of their singing the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” remain on an observable periphery of the cultural processes central to the narrative, yet are situated in an active core of their own making. Theirs is an amalgamated culture, yet it retains a basic integrity that renders it uniquely theirs. While Faulkner places some emphasis on the “pagan,” and by extension “uncivilized,” aspect of their voices “filled with all the old despairs of time and breath” (312), he does not forward the notion of pulsating rhythm or primitive abandon. His emphasis throughout is on an elegiac tone in the sound of the voices.

Though there is a validity in reading the processional scene as contrapuntal antidote, it functions more strictly as a self-contained private, but voiced expression. Rector Mahon and Joe Gilligan observe the processional from a distance that is simultaneously spatial and racial: “They are holding services. Negroes,’ the rector explained. … An occasional group of negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. ‘No one knows why they do that’” (318). Ritual and its meanings are bounded by privacy and racial hegemony. Reciprocity is not between the two races (as in the case of jazz moving into the modern white American consciousness in the twenties and in the dance scene), but among the blacks whose autonomous knowing is resolution to the frenetic pace and structures in the dominant world shaped in the text.

Specific cultural formations within the black community become the focus of attention, for the spatial and temporal configurations of whites are no longer central. These formations may once have been partially borrowings, but when subsumed into the specific music, they become new forms of expression. “Within it [the church] was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labor along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man's words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him” (319). Passion, unlike in the jazz dance scene, is synonymous with emotion, not sexual excitement. The depiction of song emanating from the “submerged passion of the dark race” suggests a racial music not unlike that in Handy's description of blues: “In its origin, modern blues music is the expression of the emotional life of race.”²⁵

Cultural transactions are relegated to the past, though there is a residual emotionalism that remains. The present is the vocal music itself as a form larger than the singer, yet capable of individualizing and humanizing them:

Feed Thy Sheep, O Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ; no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women's voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. … The shabby church became beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with to-morrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation. (319)

Without the accompaniment of instruments, the singing blends melody and harmony in the chorus of the spiritual “You Hear the Lambs A-Crying.”²⁶ Sound in the human voice evokes a particular cluster of emotions communally felt and centered in the material rather than spiritual configuration of a secular world. At the same time, there is a distinct individuality to the sound. The soaring voices of the women may resemble “a flight of gold and heavenly birds,” but the singing is grounded in the shared considerations of earth-bound beings—work (“sweat”), sex, and death—and most especially those black human beings who have experienced lives stripped to bare essentials.

These common considerations echo in content and attitude a major subtext in Soldiers' Pay. More importantly here, they are personalized by the signature of black music, and they draw a tonality from the music that encompasses not simply the spirituals heard on the surface, but also the blues reverberating below. Just as musicologist Eileen Southern maintains, “The dividing line between blues and some kinds of spirituals cannot be sharply drawn”; in fact, “some songs have such vague implications that they are classified as ‘blues-spirituals.’”²⁷ Though neither “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” nor “You Hear the Lambs A-Crying” is necessarily in this category, both were standard inclusions in general concert programs of popular black music and both were sung in the call and response pattern that filtered into classic blues during the twenties.²⁸ And the two evidence what Handy calls “the racial traits” shared by blues and spirituals, in particular the one he emphasizes: “groping blues tonality.”²⁹ Further, “You Hear the Lambs A-Crying,” entitled “Listen to the Lambs” by Nathaniel Detts, was one of the main selections of Will Marion Cook's Syncopated Orchestra, an orchestra which was comparable to a modern day Fisk Jubilee Singers in publicizing traditional, though frequently updated black vocal music. But perhaps more importantly, as cultural historian Lawrence Levine concludes, “Given their sacred mentality, [for blacks] the line between purely religious and purely secular songs was not clear,” and moreover, “the musical style of the blues indicates a holding on to the old roots at the very time when the rise of radio and the phonograph could have spelled the demise of a distinctive Afro-American musical style.”³⁰

I am suggesting that in the second style of black characterization in Soldiers' Pay, there is an impulse toward blues as a mode of development. The style is marked by what I term a structure of emotion, a structure grounded in the folk existence of blacks. It magnifies an internal life that is substantially unaffected by the immediacy of the white world, yet simultaneously reflective of that world's past enslavement and present oppression of blacks. And it is primarily elegiac in tone. Functioning in autonomy and relative independence, the blacks exercise some control over their lives, retain their cultural practices and racial values, and withstand the erosion of value or meaning in the white world. Their traditions, though not static, are not subject to the whims or fads of the dominant society. And their aesthetics are not so easily absorbed, or understood, by the white majority, who remain external to the essential quality and substance of black life. Nevertheless, the characters developed within this structure are no less free of the burden of inadequate racial assumptions in the portraiture than those developed according to a structure of rhythm.

Examples of characters developed in this second, but parallel, style are not confined to the final pages of the novel. There is the cook who raises her voice “in comforting, crooning song,” but breaks “off her mellow, passionless song” in order to console a grieving child (298-99). There are the lumber mill workers who sing “snatches of song in a sorrowful minor” under the watchful eye of a white supervisor (157). And there are the three young men shadowboxing on a road and saying “You may be fas', but you can't las'; cause yo' mommer go' slow you down” (313). These examples suggest a style of characterization marked by folk survivals and expressions, rooted in both the material experience of blacks and their expression of it in song—song that bears the imprint of the blues.

In Faulkner's subsequent fiction, there are also numerous examples among minor and major characters, from Elnora and several musicians in Sartoris, to Dilsey and Reverend Shegog in The Sound and the Fury, to Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932), and Charles Etienne Bon in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), to Molly Beauchamp, Rider, and Samuel Worsham Beauchamp (“Butch”) in Go Down, Moses. (Nancy Mannigoe in “That Evening Sun” and Requiem for a Nun [1951] is, like Lucas Beauchamp, developed in both styles.) The characters from Sartoris deserve some attention here because in a novel that might on the whole be termed transitional, they suggest a transition as well to a proportionately larger emphasis on emotion rather than rhythm, on a blues style of characterization, though both styles continue throughout the fiction, sometimes contiguously so. And Rider from “Pantaloon in Black” also deserves attention because his characterization illustrates the substantial development of the blues style, or structure of emotion, and suggests why I have included characters such as Joe Christmas, Butch Beauchamp, and Charles Etienne Bon in that style.

Gene Bluestein in The Voice of the Folk contends that Sartoris “contains some prime examples of the quality, style, and range of black music”;³¹ I would agree, but add that the examples are primarily of a specific black music, blues. Elnora's voice, “rich and mellow,” punctuates much of the early sections of the novel with song:

Sinner riz from de moaner's bench,
Sinner jump to de penance bench;
When de preacher ax 'im whut de reason why,
Say, “Preacher got de woman jes' de same ez I.”
                    Oh, Lawd, oh Lawd!
Dat's whut de matter wid de church today.(32)

She sings secular songs while she works in the Sartorises' kitchen, and her voice either floats “in meaningless minor suspense” or wells “in mellow falling suspense.” The emphasis on minor suggests a blues scale, in which the minor third and seventh degrees are drawn from the minor mode.³³ Though the lyrics might be mistaken for a spiritual, as Bluestein does,³⁴ they are more of a personal expression of her dissatisfaction, masked as a religious righteousness, and, importantly, the song is of her own making. The story she tells is brief, her imagery plain, and her humor plaintive; these are characteristics of the blues.³⁵ After her father's death, her voice is “chastened a little by her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow”; “she sang sadly and endlessly and without words” (296). Here it seems that the emotions associated with blues are dominant; nevertheless, the actual sound of her voice has not changed; it remains a sound conveying the private feelings of an individual singer and a sound marking Elnora's separateness from the white household in which she labors. Houston Baker's apt description of the blues in Afro-American literature might well be applicable to Elnora's singing: “One way of describing the blues is to claim their amalgam as a code radically conditioning Afro-Americans' cultural signifying.”³⁶

The brief depiction of three serenading musicians is comparable to that of Elnora:

The Negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third one held a slender tube frosted over with keys … and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.

The tunes were old tunes. Some … were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost, and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity; and they drifted in rich, plaintive chords upon the silver air, fading, dying in minor reiterations. (129)

The description identifies the music as “plaintive,” “slurred” and the chords as minor; it places the music within the formal context of blues music, and establishes the musicians as bluesmen who sign all of their tunes, old or new, with blues chords.

There is one folk or country blues musician who also appears briefly in a scene dominated by a community of blacks on the streets: “Against the wall, squatting, a blind Negro beggar, with a guitar and a wire frame holding a mouth-organ to his lips, patterned on the background of smells and sounds with a plaintive rendition of rich, monotonous chords, rhythmic as a mathematical formula, but without music” (108). What is described is the blues, which becomes more pronounced when Bayard Sartoris places a coin in the begger's cup: “his tune became a single repeated chord, but without a break in the rhythm, until the coin rang into the cup … then once more guitar and mouthorgan resumed their monotonous pattern” (109). This blind street musician, with his traditional folk instruments, is like those bluesmen who wandered through the South, spreading blues music and their own life stories, which were often stories of hard luck, racial oppression, and lost love. The beggar's worn-out Army uniform, “with a corporal's stripes on one sleeve” and “a small metal brooch bearing two gold stars, obviously intended for female adornment” (108-9), has emblems of the stories that he might tell in his song. When Faulkner describes the sound as “meaningless strains” (109), “monotonous chords” (108), and “without music,” he is at once suggesting the presence of a blues tonality, and missing it. “Primitive blues,” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) reminds us inBlues People, was almost always “a conscious expression of the Negro's individuality and, equally important, his separateness”; its meanings, Baraka insists, “existed only for Negroes.”³⁷

With the character Rider in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner does not miss the blues tonality of his life. In fact, Rider is his most complex (and, I believe, conscious) extended treatment of a black protagonist developed by means of a structure of emotion, in which audible music is absent. The chapter, “Pantaloon in Black,” in which he appears, however, occupies the crucial space of a blue note, the interpolated flattened third or slurred third characteristic of blues compositions. The note denotes “sad or mournful qualities” and is a kind of “semi-tone wavering between major and minor third, or simply the lowering of the third and seventh of a scale.”³⁸ “Pantaloon” is not only the third chapter in the text, but it is also distinctly different from the others. Perhaps the positioning of Rider's story is coincidental, just as perhaps is the placement of the seventh chapter, “Go Down, Moses,” which may function as a secondary blue note, the flattened seventh linked to the stress of the third and often ending blues compositions. And “Go Down, Moses” is not only the title of one of the best known and most performed spirituals, it is also the title that James Weldon Johnson plays off in “Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon” in God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927,³⁹ two years after his Book of American Negro Spirituals appeared with “Go Down, Moses” as the first inclusion. (Faulkner's private library did not include any creative works by blacks from this period, but he may well have read Johnson's books.)

Nevertheless, Rider, whose name is a common one in blues songs, is related to the “easy rider” in Handy's “Yellow Dog Blues” and in the refrain from that song in Soldiers' Pay (“I wonder where my easy rider's gone”). “Yellow Dog Blues” is the lament of Susan Johnson who lost her man and moans “Wonder where my Easy Riders gone?”⁴⁰ Her rider has caught a train, where the Yellow Dog (the Yazoo Delta line) crosses the Southern (at Moorhead, Mississippi), and much of the song chronicles his travels through the South of “Buck shot land,” “cotton stalks,” “boll wevil,” and tough times. “The Memphis Blues” also contains a reference to an “easy rider”: “Crump don't 'low no easy riders here / We don't care what Mr. Crump don't 'low we gonna bar'l house any how.”⁴¹

In “Pantaloon,” Rider's life has the contours of a blues song: he has been a man of the world—a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, generally a “bad” man type such as Dupree or Staggolee in blues ballads; he has found a true love, his wife Mannie; and he has lost her. (“Memphis Blues” ends with the lines: “the Mississippi river's so deep and wide / Gal I love she on the other side.”)⁴² His work environment, a saw mill, is typical of those figuring in the blues of laboring men, and it emphasizes his masculinity. Once his wife dies, he wanders through a night scene, lonely, despairing, grieving, but trapped in a material world. His emotional response to his situation becomes the subject that cannot be shared by anyone who has not heard his personal story, moved with him through the “shadows flitting broken and intermittent among trees or slanted long … across … old abandoned fields upon the hills.”⁴³ The elongated measures in the night-bound world reiterate the submerged themes in Rider's consciousness: suffering, longing, deprivation, and injustice (specifically in regard to his own loss with Mannie's death, but generally in regard to the treatment of blacks by whites, as symbolized by the cheating white gambler).

“The depth and intensity of Rider's feelings,” Lee Jenkins points out in Faulkner and Black-White Relations, are “so paradoxically and ironically expressed,” that “his true attitude is misrepresented.”⁴⁴ But if Rider is related to a blues ethos and embodied in a blues tradition, rather than seen as “the personification of Fallen Man” that Jenkins forwards,⁴⁵ then the irony of the expression is not troublesome, but appropriate, necessary, and expected. The blues is, Richard Wright reminds us, “fantastically paradoxical.”⁴⁶ Rider's solitary position becomes an extremely personal message of one man's meaning, of his life and death, a message impossible to convey in a situational context exterior to his experience, as is the case both with the white mob that kills Rider and with the white sheriff's deputy who fails to understand Rider's individual humanity. However, for the privileged audience placed in an empathetic relationship of knowing, feeling, and understanding Rider's interior reality, the message of his private life is powerful with meaning that is both personal and communal. Rider is a blues figure extrapolated from notes and images in music; he is representative of a sustained style and genuine “type” in Faulkner's canon.

In “The Heart of the Blues,” Handy writes, “If my songs have value, it is not that of dance numbers alone. I have tried to write history, to crystallize a form for the colored workman's personal music. … I have the feeling that real blues can be written only by a Negro, who keeps his roots in the life of the race.”⁴⁷ Though he may well be right about the writing of “real blues,” he could not have imagined the impact that his own and black people's “real blues” would have on William Faulkner's syncretic form. Although Faulkner initiates two styles of black characterization in tangent and gives them parallel development throughout his fiction, he inclines toward the one with its paradigm in blues; it becomes the more prominent as he moved farther away from the cultural excitement of the “Jazz Age,” or perhaps as he grew more comfortable with his creative impulses, more confident of his own vision. Or, it may well have been the more compatible with his own felt emotional proclivities and psychological experiences, such as those projected in his early poetry. Although neither of his two styles of developing black characters obviates racially biased views in his texts, both may perhaps contribute to understanding how in an ethnocentric, culture-specific, but elastic and reversely acculturated milieu, he gave more attention to developing black characters than anyone listening to Handy's music in Gordon Hall would have imagined.

Notes

1. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1974), 1:175. Ben Wasson recalled Faulkner's excitement over the Handy Band and his insistence that Wasson listen to it (Count No 'Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983], 36-37).

2. Blotner, Faulkner, 1:174.

3. Philip K. Eberly, Music in the Air: America's Changing Tastes in Popular Music, 1920-1980 (New York: Hastings House, 1982), 4.

4. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 444-45.

5. Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 72.

6. Ibid., 38, 29-46.

7. Hildred Roach, Black American Music: Past and Present (Boston: Crescendo Publishing, 1973), 65.

8. Bill C. Malone, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1979), 4-5.

9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), 326-27.

10. Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), 16.

11. Ibid., 29.

12. Abbe Niles, “Critical Text,” in A Treasury of the Blues, ed. W. C. Handy (New York: Charles Boni, 1926), 18, 25. Reprinted as Blues: An Anthology (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1972).

13. Malone, 40; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 317.

14. Erskine Peters, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha World and Black Being (Darby, Penn.: Norwood Editions, 1983), 30.

15. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press, 1925), 31-32.

16. Carvel Collins, ed., William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches (New York: Random House, 1958), xxvi.

17. Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (1950; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1959), 140.

18. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 367-69.

19. Eberly, Music in the Air, 5.

20. Blotner, Faulkner, 1:754.

21. Ibid., 1:536, 558, 598.

22. William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, 65.

23. William Faulkner, Soldiers' Pay (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 192. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

24. Blesh and Janis, They All Played Ragtime, 141.

25. W. C. Handy, “The Heart of the Blues” (1940), in Readings in Black American Music, ed. Eileen Southern (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 203.

26. Music and lyrics in John W. Work, American Negro Songs and Spirituals: A Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular (New York: Bonanza Books, 1940), 114.

27. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 336.

28. Johnson, The Book of Negro Spirituals, 25-27.

29. Handy, “The Heart of the Blues,” 206.

30. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 170, 223.

31. Gene Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 122.

32. William Faulkner, Sartoris (1929; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1964), 36. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Leroy Ostransky, The Anatomy of Jazz (1960; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 120.

34. Bluestein, The Voice of the Folk, 122.

35. Odom and Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs, 22.

36. Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5.

37. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 86, 87.

38. Roach, Black American Music, 71.

39. James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1927).

40. Handy, A Treasury of the Blues, 75-78.

41. Ibid., 60-63.

42. Ibid.

43. William Faulkner, “Pantaloon in Black,” in Go Down, Moses (1940; New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1973), 142.

44. Lee Jenkins, Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 252.

45. Ibid., 248.

46. Richard Wright, “Foreword,” in Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues, ed. Paul Oliver (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), vii.

47. Handy, “The Heart of the Blues,” 206.