Janie's Blues

Jazz music is a useful point of reference for understanding what Ralph Ellison is doing in Invisible Man. Ellison himself was an avid listener of jazz, he modeled his own urbane, debonair persona after Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians, and he described his fictional method of composition as “improvisations on a theme”—many of these improvisations being riffs on Richard Wright’s earlier composition, much as jazz artists cite, build upon, and alter earlier works in the tradition. He was inspired, as an artist, by the way jazz musicians appropriated European musical forms and instruments and made something new out of them, and he saw his own work as doing the same with white writers like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. One of the opening scenes in the novel depicts the narrator enjoying a his favorite dessert (sloe gin poured over vanilla ice cream—a merging of opposites in itself) while listening to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” fantasizing about being able to play it on five turntables simultaneously, and falling into a visionary reverie (partly inspired by the music, partly by the reefer he accidentally ingests) that initiates some of the novel’s key themes of ambivalence and identity.

If jazz is a useful point of departure for Invisible Man, then blues might be the appropriate musical analog to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie’s narrative engages a number of tropes that are familiar from blues lyrics—love and loss, marital infidelity, jealousy, violence and knife-play, gambling, drinking, desire—and the novel’s complex tone of joy and humor balanced against great tragedy and pain evokes the central aesthetic tension of the blues genre. There’s even a massive flood, which calls to mind a whole host of blues songs dealing with bursting levees and rising lakes overwhelming rural communities (see Bessie Smith’s classic “Back Water Blues” for one example). The most obvious “blues” elements in the novel are its setting (the “muck,” or the Everglades, is reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta in a lot of ways) and its language (blues is among the first forms of original folk music in American cultural history, and maybe the first extended use of dialect as the voice of poetry). Janie as narrator is positioned in a way that is similar to the classic blues dynamic: she’s just returned from a great and trying event, and she’s survived to tell the tale. She’s the quintessential “good woman feeling bad.” She tells her story with poignancy and pain, but also with resiliency and pride and humor. Life has beaten her down when we first meet her, walking back into town in her muddy overalls, but she is walking tall and proud despite her pain. Ralph Ellison describes the appeal of blues music quite evocatively, as artists “fingering the jagged edge” of the pain life has dealt them, but blues music is odd and remarkable because of its ultimately buoyant and life-affirming effects on the listener—the topics the lyrics engage are tragic, but the music works against that tragedy to transcend the pain and make something beautiful and enduring from it. Likewise, as Janie completes her tale of love and loss, her audience, Pheoby, attests to the fact that it has changed her life: “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this” (192). She is ennobled by bearing witness to Janie’s tale.

Ellison’s protagonist/narrator is in many ways a prototype of a jazz musician: an isolated genius, working hard to forge an individual voice out of the influences and social-cultural detritus of his experience. The jazz audience appreciates the spontaneous, individual expressions of creativity, just as the narrator riffs on his experience at his typewriter, transforming it into the often surreal and individuated vision we contend with in the novel.

Jazz is an urban music—its most significant innovations have taken place in nightclubs and recording studios. Blues, on the other hand, is a rural, colloquial music that only later made the migration into urban settings and popular culture. And even while jazz was in the process of “crossing over” into mainstream respectability in the 1930s and 1940s, country blues was still seen with ambivalence, as a cruder, less sophisticated folk genre. Duke Ellington would lead his big-band orchestra in a tuxedo at the Cotton Club in Harlem, while Leadbelly was recording his gritty songs in prison, accompanied only by himself on guitar. Doesn’t this same dichotomy call to mind a central distinction between Ellison and Hurston’s aesthetics? Ellison deliberately casts his novel in the “high-art” literary domain, and his settings are contemporary, modern, and urban, while Hurston leaves Harlem and goes back into the South for her subject matter, depicting an often gritty, violent community that for many evokes the past rather than the present (a past that many in the Harlem Renaissance wanted to distance themselves from).

While Ellison doesn’t directly write about any jazz musicians in his novel (except for Armstrong’s vinyl cameo), one of Hurston’s main characters, Tea Cake, is himself a blues musician (of the general type that Hurston herself helped Alan Lomax record throughout the South). One of our earliest impressions is of him sitting at the piano in Janie’s house (which, as far as we can tell, Jody had only for decoration), “playing blues and singing, and throwing grins over his shoulder” (103). After his controversial excursion with Janie’s two hundred dollars, Tea Cake heralds his return by singing outside the window. And it’s clear by the description that he’s singing the blues: “After a while there was somebody playing a guitar outside her door. . . . It sounded lovely too. But it was sad to hear it feeling blue like Janie was. Then whoever it was started to sing ‘Ring de bells of mercy. Call de sinner man home.’ Her heart all but smothered her” (120). Tea Cake’s extraordinarily smooth apology begins with a little confessional singing, to smooth the way for his charm. In his description of the wild party he threw with her money, Tea Cake explains how he came to buy the guitar: “Everybody began to holler at the music because the man couldn’t play but three pieces. So Tea Cake took the guitar and played himself. He was glad of the chance because he hadn’t had his hand on a box since he put his in the pawn shop to get some money to hire a car for Janie soon after he met her. He missed his music. He bought the guitar on the spot and paid fifteen dollars cash” (123).

When Janie and Tea Cake arrive on “the muck,” their home becomes the social center of the community, and Tea Cake’s music has a lot to do with it: “The way he would sit in the doorway and play his guitar made people stop and listen and maybe disappoint the jook for the night” (132). The “jook" is a roadside bar where blues music is performed, and where people dance and drink and fight and gamble and generally have a good time. (The term “juke box” derives from the idea that the recorded music on demand would re-create the live experience of a “juke joint” like Hurston describes.) In the context of the general critique of Hurston as perpetuating a “minstrel” dynamic in her novel (see Wright et al., as summarized in the documentary), her description of the jukes on the muck might be an instructive example to consider. At the same time that minstrel shows were experiencing their revival throughout the North and South—where white and black musicians and dancers were performing a popularized hybrid of blues music in blackface to mostly white audiences—the juke joint was a context where black musicians performed for exclusively black audiences. Bessie Smith—one of the most badass figures in American musical history, who was fiercely uncompromising when it came to the terms of her performances (she reputedly once faced down a contingent from the local Ku Klux Klan to ensure that her show would go on)—didn’t play minstrel shows; she played roadside juke joints of the sort Hurston describes so evocatively: “All night . . . the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour” (131).

The allegedly “minstrelesque” dynamics we see in Eatonville also entail black performers and black audiences,  the critique is that white readers are the real audience, and Hurston’s characters are “shucking and jiving” for them. Maybe because white readers “consume” the kind of skits she puts her characters through (Matt Bonner’s mule, Sam and Lige on nature vs. nurture, the “mock-courtship” of the pretty girl in the street), there is this inescapable “black-performing-for-white” dimension to the fiction—as Henry Louis Gates points out in the documentary on Hurston, black fiction, especially in Hurston's time, was written with an idealized white readership in mind. But since we can’t actually listen to Tea Cake’s music, we aren’t his audience in quite the same way: we observe black folk music is being performed in an “authentic” context that stands in stark contrast to the minstrel dynamic that might be troublesome elsewhere in the novel.

Love or hate Tea Cake, he’s no minstrel performer. We see his music in action, a living and breathing part of the life of the culture Hurston represents.