The language of Blind Lemon Jefferson: the covert theme of blindness.

I am an invisible man.

(Ellison 1986, 17)

And it's tough to see a man go to the rack and almost starve and die.

--Blind Lemon Jefferson ("Tin Cup Blues," 1929)

I can't see ya, but I can smell ya!

--Blind Lemon Jefferson (quoted in James [1997, 14])

Because of his strong artistic influence and commercial impact on the newborn country blues race-records field, Blind Lemon Jefferson has often been considered by music critics as an archetypal figure. If it is true that "the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding"--as bluesman Willie Dixon remarked (Dixon and Snowden 1989, 2)--then nobody better than Jefferson depicted African-American life in the 1920s South. After working as an itinerant street musician for more than ten years, he began an extremely successful recording career, which lasted from 1926 to 1929 and resulted in a total of 110 sides (including all his alternate takes), of which seven were not issued and six are not yet available in any format. (1) His compositions reflect a strong and complex personality expressing, in an ironic, humorous, sad, yet never contradictory and self-pitying manner, his own way of understanding existence.