Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on five key blues musicians and singers - Gertrude ""Ma"" Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly - and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry.
Trade ReviewWriting from a feminist, multicultural perspective, Rutter builds on a wealth of literary studies about jazz and poetry, work by the likes of Sascha Feinstein, David Yaffe, and Emily Lordi. . . . Rutter focuses on blues masters and how they have inspired poets, starting in the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Black Arts movement into the present day. . . . Though rooted in popular culture, this treatment is complex as it considers gender, race, ‘musical celebrity,’ and the aesthetics of song and poetry."—
CHOICE“The Blues Muse is an impressively informative, exceptionally detailed, scholarly study that spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history ranging from the New Negro Renaissance to the present. . . . Rutter’s expert analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights."—
Library Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review"An impressively researched and lucidly written analysis of nearly one hundred years of American poetry inspired by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson—those ‘blues muses’ whose complex lives, art, personae, and historiographies have made them especially rich and persistent subjects for white and black American poets alike."—Emily J. Lordi, author of
Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and
Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live"
The Blues Museis an interesting and valuable work which will be of particular interest to those teaching American poetry with an emphasis on its connections with African American vernacular musical traditions."—Erich Nunn, author of
Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern ImaginationTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Blues Muse Tradition
- 1. “Don’t Like My Ocean, Don’t Fish in My Sea”: Blues Muses, Racial Uplift, and Queer Camaraderie
- 2. “Never Was a White Man Had the Blues”: Blues Icons and Black Power
- 3. “I Ain’t Gonna Marry, Ain’t Gonna Settle Down”: Blues Women and Intersectionality
- 4. “Blues Falling Down Like Hail”: Blues Men and the Second-Wave Blues Revival
- 5. “It’s Gonna Carry Me through This World”: The Post-Soul Blues Muse
- Coda. Repetition with a Difference: BeyoncÉ Knowles-Carter as Muse
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
