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COPYRIGHT 2000 Center For Black Music Research
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.
The purpose of this study is to reassert Jefferson's relevance as an artist through an examination of his lyrics and to show that the language he used is not casual, derivative, or negligible. A more-or-less cryptic message is present in each of his compositions, and such a message, in turn, represents a clear reflection of one of the most extensive, heterogeneous, and at the same time closely knit bodies of blues lyrics handed down to us. The tightly interconnected nature of his texts constitutes such an extremely variegated range of themes--either drawn from tradition and shaped into something new and vital or, especially in the latter part of his recording career, stemming directly from his textual creative power--that it is impossible to delve thoroughly into all of them here. However, unlike previous studies of Blind Lemon Jefferson's lyrics, this study's challenge is to outline the development of this bluesman's lyrical artistry and imagery by examining his poignant songs from a broader perspective. Jefferson's seemingly primitive and thoughtless approach to blues lyric composition turns out to be, in a more detailed analysis, the result of a careful--albeit instinctual--choice of the most suitable words to convey the deepest meanings and feelings.
Blindness on Blindness
In the past few years, researchers have focused their efforts on recovering biographical information on Jefferson. Such activity has been fundamental for preserving the memory of a musician who died over seventy years ago, but it may also have contributed to Jefferson's progressively lower degree of visibility in the pre-war blues panorama, from a critical point of view. Nevertheless, Jefferson's linguistic creative power has always been apparent since the first insightful pieces of criticism that blues scholars produced beginning at the end of the 1950s. To name just the most outstanding and relevant to this subject matter, there are the first pioneering acknowledgments of Jefferson's stature as a man and poet (Oliver [1959] 1988, 64-70; Charters 1959, 57-72; Charters [1967] 1991, 175-189); the first anthologized transcriptions of whole texts (Sackheim 1969, 72-91, 457-458), followed by a more complete serialized collection (Groom 1967-71, 1974; Groom 1970), amended--although not always enhanced--in successive stages (Taft 1983, 124-137; Macleod 1988, 65; Macleod 1992, 31-33, 379-397; Macleod 1994, 153-187); the hermeneutic, as well as statistical, study on the evolution of Jefferson's lyricism from a mainly traditional to a progressively more cohesive thematicism (Evans 1987, 75-81; Evans 1999, 1:607-609); and the meticulous attempt at assembling the pieces of Jefferson's biographical mysteries with a view to interpreting his songs (Govenar 1991; Govenar and Brakefield 1998, 61-79; Swinton 1997).
Yet, absent so far is a comprehensive analysis of Jefferson's lyrics and how they interact; as a consequence, detailed treatment of his personality and psychology as they relate to his lyrical output is also lacking. Such types of neglect are closely interconnected and are due in part to the conceptual error of considering each song as independent from the rest of an artist's repertoire. Such a myopic outlook narrows the critic's field of vision and creates a fuzzy and distorted picture; the result is that the artistic value of some seminal blues figures may be completely overlooked.
Although he is not the most glaring example of such neglect, Jefferson is one of the most illustrious victims of this error, which has often led to a stereotypical and sterile mythologizing. It is easy to understand why this has happened if one compares Jefferson's and other blues lyricists' compositions. For example, if one were to examine the formal similarities between Robert Johnson and Jefferson without matching the iconography emerging from their songbooks, one would find many analogies, such as their artistic creativity and influence on subsequent players, their untimely and mysterious deaths, and the scarcity of photographic evidence about them. In contrast, and notwithstanding a few evident references to superstition, Jefferson's texts have "all the characteristics of a nonmythical expression" (Monge 1985b, 43; my translation). Despite the similarities, the antimythical quality of Jefferson's lyrics--compared with the visionary features of Johnson's lyrics (LaVere 1990)--is exactly what has marked the difference between the two, thus creating the legendary aura surrounding Johnson, who nowadays personifies the blues myth, par excellence.
Just like any other single manifestation of an art form, a blues text can either be scrutinized as through a magnifying glass (see Monge 1985a; Monge n.d.) or viewed from a distance. To provide a new contribution to the understanding of the major role played by Jefferson in the development of the blues idiom, I envisage his texts not as separate subjects but as parts of a whole. Such a wider view obviously entails a change of focus on Jefferson's lyrics. The psychological portrait painted in his songs (which is not necessarily the same as his actual psychology), reconciled with known facts about his life, including the fact of his blindness, could also help build a more-convincing, better-founded, and less-contradictory profile of the man.
In order to shed light on the multifaceted metaphor of blindness in Jefferson's lyrics, one must set general standards for determining which textual statements in the blues are functionally visual. The range of such criteria should be all-inclusive; if it is limited only to explicit mentions of vision, a great number of potentially significant submerged images could be missed. Thus, I take into account not only direct descriptions of the act of seeing, viewing, and so on, but also indirect, covert, or perhaps even inadvertent implications that paint a picture or refer to some object, person, action, or event that can only be appreciated or understood fully by visualizing it. This method is applicable to any text meant as an oral or written linguistic production and is particularly valid for Jefferson, whose plain visual references represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Blindness Blues
The important role of blind performers in molding the blues language has unfortunately not been explored fully, although it has not been totally ignored. Indeed, the effort that has been made in this regard, although deficient from a quantitative viewpoint, is not altogether unsatisfactory from a qualitative viewpoint.
The first popular emergence of the image of a blind street performer of blues appears in William Christopher Handy's "Beale Street Blues," which refers to "the blind man on the corner who sings the `Beale Street Blues.'" It is interesting to note that this archetypal image dates from 1916, when the young Blind Lemon Jefferson was still far from recording but was gaining experience as an itinerant musician in Dallas and elsewhere.
Joseph Witek (1988) deals with the theme of blindness in the blues, viewing it as a rhetorical trope for "otherness." Although Witek's work focuses mainly on two post-World War II visually impaired recording artists and street performers, Jim Brewer and Arvella Gray, it is taken here as a valuable starting point. According to Witek (1988, 178), "The blindness myth comes in two main forms. The best-known image is that of the blind genius, doomed and gifted by fate to trade his eyesight in return for his artistic talent.... The other, mostly negative image is that of the suffering blues singer begging with a tin cup. This formulation casts blindness as the mark of a cruel fate which caps the singer's degradation and alienates him from his community."
After associating Brewer and Gray with their respective images, Witek makes the following argument:
If ... Blind Lemon Jefferson is "almost the archetype of all bluesmen" ..., then the fact of the singer's blindness must come close to the bone of the way American culture regards blues music. The figure of Blind Lemon Jefferson combines the two threads of the blindness image; his well-documented musical ability merits him the title of "a true naive genius of [black] American folksong", ... and we know just enough about his wandering life and obscure death to cast him as a figure of blues suffering. (192)
Finally, Witek correctly maintains a distance from the "romanticized stereotype of the blind bluesman ... begging on the corner with his tin cup," dismissing it as "an image of black powerlessness" (193), and concludes that, in both artists' categorizations (and by analogy, presumably even more so in Jefferson, who combines them in himself), "[s]ightlessness thus becomes a version of blackness" (192), and that "blindness in the blues finally works not only as a trope of musicology but as a cultural metaphor, an image of the ways human beings struggle against and overcome exclusion by turning what others regard as a handicap and a mark of otherness into a form of personal power" (193).
A sketchy reading of blindness as a social metaphor for "otherness" in rural blues communities had already been given by Ben Sidran in a more sociologically oriented study. He argues that, apart from offering an escape from unemployment, blindness can provide a type of authority:
[B]lindness is potentially an advantage when dealing in so heavily an oral/aural occupation as blues singing. Blind blues singers, from Blind Lemon Jefferson through Ray Charles, have wielded a certain amount of authority within the blues idiom. This authority comes from an obvious personal commitment to blues techniques; the vocalized tone is heightened and the intensely individualized presentation of the song is strengthened, for blindness is itself an agent of isolation. Just as important is the authority the black community grants to blind singers, as if blindness were both an exaggeration of the "black man's burden" and a physical metaphor for black life in America. Neither of these explanations adequately covers the importance of the blind blues singer as a dominant image in the psyche of the black culture because his importance is so closely involved with the concept of orality, itself so much a part of black life. (Sidran 1981, 83-84)
It is perhaps worth adding that one of the manifold effects of granting authority to blind (predominantly blues and gospel) musicians was the license that the community tacitly gave them to sing whatever they wanted (or whatever people asked them) in order to make ends meet. In practice, they were the first to be entitled to do what any other jazz interpreter, classic blues singer, bluesman or blueswoman, or black entertainer was not supposed to embark upon,
that is, to have a mixed sacred-secular repertoire or to combine spiritual and profane elements in a song or style. (2) Because of sympathy for their disability, blind virtuosos were immune to the criticism of alternating or mixing devoutness and worldliness, so they paved the way for sighted musicians (e.g., Eddie "Son" House's "Preachin' the Blues"). The final result was that they proved instrumental in bridging the sacred-secular dichotomy, perhaps not such a significant gap musically but one that had not been crossed in either direction, socially.
Blind Lemon Jefferson's Blindness Blues
In the case of Jefferson's blindness, the relatively large dossier on his affliction may at first induce us to believe that we are very lucky to have so much information, especially considering that his death took place at an early age and so long ago. In fact, the literature on Jefferson's condition consists of few original facts or useful additional data, well-known reported accounts of his "uncanny abilities," and trite or recycled material. In particular, opinions differ as to whether Jefferson was blind from birth, whether he had some residual sight, and even whether he used to be regularly or only occasionally led around by lead boys or would-be musicians. Unfortunately, independent of how old, firsthand, or fact-based these arguments may be, they have rarely been enhanced by full-length substantiated inquiries into the psychological and possibly also physical implications for his lyrical output. Although a thorough chronological examination of the comments on Jefferson's blindness could help spotlight hackneyed or faulty interpretations of his rapport with it, only the relevant facts will be covered here.
One of the earliest discussions of Jefferson's blindness is a brief statement accompanying printed versions of five of his blues in The Paramount Book of Blues ([ca. 1927], 3):
Can anyone imagine a fate more horrible than to find that one is blind? To realize that the beautiful things one hears about--one will never see? Such was the heart-rending fate of Lemon Jefferson, who was born blind and realized, as a small child, that life had withheld one glorious joy from him--sight. Then environment began to play its important part in his destiny. He could hear--and he heard the sad hearted, weary people of his homeland, Dallas--singing weird, sad melodies at their work and play, and unconsciously he began to imitate them--lamenting his fate in song. He learned to play a guitar, and for years he entertained his friends freely--moaning his weird songs as a means of forgetting his affliction. Some friends who saw great possibilities in him, suggested that he commercialize his talent--and as a result of following their advice--he is now heard exclusively on Paramount.
Despite its sentimental style, old-fashioned language, and advertising purpose, this statement should not be overlooked or ridiculed, as it has been (see, for example, Calt [1984]). It was most likely published in or not long after 1927, the latest date of any printed song in the book. Because this publication dates from Jefferson's lifetime, it is very likely based on contact, if not on an actual interview, with him; therefore, it may have some sort of authenticity and may be considered--along with Jefferson's song lyrics--the only "authorized" description of his disability.
Although one might think that the most objective background information would come from official records, the only known official source about Jefferson's blindness is the 1900 census, where he is registered as "BS," that is, "blind son" (see Roberts 1997, 5).
Downright contradictory are the memories of two of Jefferson's still-living contemporaries from his home town of Wortham, Texas. Quince Cox, age 96 when interviewed in 1999 and ten years Jefferson's junior, avers that his renowned acquaintance "wore glasses and couldn't be stone blind and do all that" (Cox 1999). Hobart Carter, age 101 when David Evans and the author spoke with him and only five years younger than Jefferson, is more skeptical about the artist's partial vision, as indicated in the following portion of the interview between Carter and Evans:
David Evans (D. E.): Do you know whether he was born blind? Hobart Carter (H. C.): He sure was, sure was. D. E.: Was he stone blind, or could he see a little bit? H. C.: I don't think so. I think he stone blind. I believe he was, I'm not for sure. He may not a' been, but I think he mostly stone blind. D. E.: People say he could get around pretty good ... H. C.: Oh, he could get around good. Walked these roads and sing at night. He bottom sing down here, and Crook's Creek sing. (3) He'd go across them bridges at night. D. E.: All by himself? H. C.: Sure would. D. E.: He didn't need anybody to lead him around? H. C.: No, not too much, 'cause he had a...
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