A certain idea of the South began to form in the early years after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, emerging slowly but ineluctably as white inhabitants of the former slaveholding states created a cultural identity that signified something far more distinctive than mere geography. Even in the three-decade sectional crisis leading up to the war, as historian Charles Reagan Wilson observed, “White southerners began thinking about their society and its role not only in American life but in Western culture….”11xCharles Reagan Wilson, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 32. After the Civil War, and particularly during the Reconstruction era, whites haunted by the specter of “Africanization” feared that the African American population might gain political and cultural dominance in the South. Depicting theirs as a struggle between civilization and primitivism, the forces of Redemption, including the hooded nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, took the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops from the region as license to restore white supremacy not only through intimidation and terror but also through the systematic cancellation of the rights and protections that blacks had won after emancipation, including those stipulated by the three so-called Reconstruction amendments.
But political and legal maneuvers were not the only means by which white southerners reasserted dominion over the black population, large numbers of whom—having been cheated out of even the promised forty acres and a mule—were drawn into a system of sharecropping and debt peonage verging on forced servitude. All that was needed to complete the Redeemers’ project was to create a picture of the South in the romantic image of a genteel, gracious, and heroic past, a picture that would come to be idealized both in high culture and popular culture, from the 1930 manifesto of the Agrarian writers, I’ll Take My Stand, to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, adapted into a blockbuster film in 1939.
Promoted throughout the wider American culture, this touched-up picture of a genteel, white-dominated South relegated black southerners to passive roles in the background, their race having rendered them placeless, stateless, and all but invisible. Blacks were from the South, yet not of it. And their condition of near invisibility was increasingly mirrored in America’s emerging national culture, as the spread of Jim Crow segregation laws culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision effectively reduced blackness to a signifier of disenfranchised “Others.”
Never resigned to their marginalized status, black southerners found ways to cultivate and assert a more affirmative identity, whether through participation in institutions like the black church and mutual aid societies or through the creation of expressive forms of art, humor, and music that allowed them to translate their experience into something that challenged those representations of a passive and culturally dispossessed people. That struggle for dignity took striking form in the Deep South of my home state of Mississippi, where black residents of the Delta region led the way in creating and shaping the musical art form of the blues to resist and even find playful release from the immiserating conditions of the sharecropping life. Emerging in the first decades after the Civil War and drawing on elements of earlier African American field hollers, chants, and spirituals, it was, above all, a music of resistance, a defiant assertion of agency despite exploitation and virtual disenfranchisement.
But that was not how the blues was seen by those who first observed it and told its story to the broader world. In 1901, Harvard anthropologist Charles Peabody initially saw the music that sprang from the levees and cotton fields as representing “the primitive characteristic of patience under repetition.” Others described it as “slave music,” even though it originated a couple of decades after emancipation and would not be standardized or transcribed in sheet music until the early twentieth century. The work of another early investigator, the young Howard W. Odum, took note of the religious strains of the music in a way that tended to emphasize resignation to a hard fate rather than resistance and cheeky subversion.
Soon would come other interpreters more acutely attuned to those witty, earthy, and defiant currents of the blues, including the novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison and the critic Albert Murray. “Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits,” wrote Murray in his 1976 book Stomping the Blues, “but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.”22xAlbert Murray, Stomping the Blues (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 45. Originally published in 1976. Later in the century, in his 1998 book Development Arrested, geographer Clyde Woods formulated the idea of “blues epistemology” to explain how the music both named and critiqued the conditions of black people in the Mississippi Delta. Describing the creators of the blues as “sociologists, reporters, counsellors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summoners of life,” Woods argued that the poetry and force of the blues had the power to compel social change—which, despite the powerful persistence of the old planter culture, is exactly what it did.33xClyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York, NY: Verso, 1998), 17.
Translation is always an act of interpretation, a reconstitution of a creative act, but despite the work of the most acute translators, including those just named, black Southern culture and identity are still often popularly received and understood in ways that emphasize victimhood and backwardness, the very qualities that again and again, with the alternating progressive-regressive spasms of political change, relegate black southerners to the background of a social panorama dominated by whiteness. As a result, what is original, real, and distinctive about black Southern culture is still often distorted or dismissed as primitive. And that is true not only in the South but in the wider American culture.
A Distorted Narrative
As someone who was born in the late 1950s and grew up in the last years of Jim Crow (at least to the extent that it was formally ended by both Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964), I entered adulthood desperate to escape from the suffocating culture of the South. The flags and monuments that were part of my daily life were simply at odds with how I saw myself. If Jim Crow had been dismantled, I wondered, why were the symbols of that system, as well as those of the Old Confederacy, still so prominent in public places, including on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where I received my undergraduate education? More directly for a young man drawn to literature and ideas, I felt that an intellectual tradition tied to treatises like the Agrarians’ I’ll Take My Stand and idealizing the Southern past and its racial hierarchy was directly hostile to my very existence.
In an effort to distance myself from the South, I decided to focus my graduate studies, at the University of Michigan, on a literary tradition from the other side of the Atlantic. Studying Victorian and modern British literature exposed me to different settings, sensibilities, and ideas, but I quickly grasped that this tradition had been shaped by colonialism and empire in some of the same ways that Southern literature had been influenced by its own “peculiar institution.” Yet despite such recognitions, I remained blind to many things about my own country. Above all, I persisted in seeing the culture of the South as something quite distinct and apart from that of the rest of America—as though what happened on my native ground had no deeper connections with or influences on the evolving character of the larger national culture. Typical of this was the way I associated my favorite Mississippi writer, Richard Wright, more with the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance than with that of black South, almost willfully ignoring the fact that his body of work drew more on his upbringing in the South than on his expatriate life in New York and Paris. Although I would later acknowledge and honor that fact, the younger version of myself was inclined to take only one lesson from Wright’s example: To be a black artist or intellectual, one had to leave the South. And that is exactly what I did.
What is lost in translation can be recovered if one begins to understand the nuances and significance of what has been placed on the margins. As an adult, I came to understand that the narrative I had internalized about the culture of my birthplace was badly distorted and that I had to find a way to reclaim it, reinterpret it, and place it at the center of my life. The books and articles I went on to write about the South would deconstruct and dismantle the region’s mythologies and give voice to its socially imposed silences. In order to reclaim what I had lost or misinterpreted about my Southern heritage, I began with essential pieces of Southern culture that I had glibly dismissed or even disdained as a young person. The most significant of those was the blues, the very core of black culture in my native Mississippi. It was in the blues that I began to see what I valued most: the consistent imaginative force of resistance that allowed my forebears to survive and create personal meaning out of their experiences.
An Alternative Form of Communication
As it emerged after the overthrow of Reconstruction, when black voices were again being silenced in public and civic spheres, the blues became an alternative form of communication. As Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown reminded the noted folklorist William Ferris,
Why do you think they play the blues in Mississippi? Because of the way they used to plow the folks here, chop cotton at daylight in the morning. They would get out there and work so hard, they be even looking at the sun, saying, “Hurry, hurry, sundown. Let tomorrow shine.” They wanted the sun to go down so they could stop working, they worked so hard. They learned the blues from that.44xWilliam R. Ferris, Blues from the Delta (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1984), 41–42.
I would eventually come to see the blues as poetry born out of the struggle for survival, the songs, when taken together with their heroes, tricksters, and lovers, forming a kind of Homeric epic of suffering and resistance, of loves sought and lost, of acts of subversive cunning and triumphs of resilient humor—in sum, as a literary as well as musical form containing multiple layers of meaning. But to be fully honest, I was slow in coming to that view.
Flash back to my nineteen-year-old self and the bicentennial summer of 1976. It was in that year of patriotic celebrations that the northern Mississippi town of Houston hosted a blues concert featuring Bukka White, a native son of the area. As it happened, my family was then living there, a long way from where I grew up in the Piney Woods south of Jackson. I knew who Bukka White was, but he was not one of the acts that a 1970s rock-and-roll-loving college student wanted to see. The summer before, I had seen the Rolling Stones in Memphis, with legendary bluesman Furry Lewis opening the show, but I failed to see the strong bloodline connecting the music of the Stones with that of Lewis or, for that matter, Bukka White.
The sad truth is that I saw White less as the legend he was than as a relic of a past from which I felt disconnected and even somewhat ashamed of. I later learned that White recorded a minor hit, “Shake ’em on Down,” in Chicago in 1937, the same year he was convicted for a shooting incident and sentenced to serve in Parchman Penitentiary, where John Lomax of the Library of Congress recorded him in 1939. It was behind those walls that White also penned his famous “Parchman Farm Blues,” a song that concludes with these haunting lines suggestive of the anthem of the civil rights movement to come:
I’m down on Parchman farm
But I sho’ wanna go back home
But I hope some day
I will overcome
After his release from Parchman, in 1940, White recorded twelve of his best-known songs at a Chicago session before settling in Memphis and working at a defense plant. During those years he performed with blues legend Frank Stokes, among others, and helped his cousin B.B. King become established on the local music scene.
White was brought back into the spotlight by guitarist John Fahey and producer Eugene Denson and their influential Takoma Records label during the blues and folk revival of the early 1960s. Ed Pearl, a West Coast club owner who presented White in 1963, called the bluesman “the bearer of the torch” of Delta blues and a “very proud man whose spirit had not been broken.”55xDavid W. Johnson and Booker T. Washington White, “Fixin’ to Die Blues: The Last Months of Bukka White with an Afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy,” Southern Cultures 16, no. 3 (2010): 15–34; https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26214123.pdf. I remember him as a man in a dark suit, tie, and well-pressed white shirt, looking, to my youthful eyes, like a slightly hipper version of a Baptist preacher strutting around the pulpit on a Sunday morning.
When my mother told me we were not only going to White’s concert but also having a Southern barbecue dinner (ribs and collard greens) with him, I was less than thrilled. “The blues is the music of oppression,” I protested, echoing my friends’ take on the music that I had grown up listening to on Nashville’s WLAC during the many trips I had made across the Delta with my father. As I then understood it, the blues was music shaped by the soul-crushing Delta plantation system—and far too close to the world of Jim Crow that was part of my living memory. I took it as part of my generation’s task to put all those signs and symbols of oppression in their final resting place.
Like many other university-trained black writers, thinkers, and scholars of that time, I was deliberately trying to distance myself from an unlettered, unrefined black culture that we educated ones considered backward or even “ignorant.” Even on the level of popular culture, I belonged to a cohort raised on Memphis and Motown soul, the music of the black middle class. The blues was part of a black working-class tradition that my generation was seeking to forget or leave behind. What I failed to recognize until many years later was that the blues was essential to understanding the place I had come from.
What I wish my nineteen-year-old self had appreciated was that while the blues was the music of resistance to the indignities and exploitation of the Jim Crow era, it was about much more, including memories of a deeper, painful history and hopeful yearnings for a better present and future. The blues contained lessons of endurance that enabled not just surviving but thriving, celebrating a toughness of spirit that was anything but subservient. In an oral history recorded just a few weeks after I met him in Houston, White told the interviewer he felt that the blues he played had its origins in “slavery time,” since a few of the people who taught him music had once been enslaved.66xIbid. Had I been a bit less closed-minded, I might have learned about that connection directly from White himself, a man with a living link to Mississippi’s history of enslavement. That interview was conducted in a hospital about a month after I met him, while White was recuperating from a stroke he had suffered on a flight from Memphis to Boston. As it turned out, I had seen one of his final performances. By the winter of 1977, he was dead.
Why did it take me so long to see the radical spirit at the core of the music? When black southerners of my generation moved from blues to Black Power, we lost a piece of ourselves in translation. In an effort to embrace the shock of the new and resist the ways white supremacy continued to control our relationship with our native region, we failed to see what Albert Murray would have called the signifying power of the blues, a power derived in large part from its sheer life-affirming resilience and endurance: because, quite simply—to speak of them in plural, as both the mood and the music, and the mood transformed by music—the blues are always there. The blues are not an anesthetic intended to numb the pain of oppression. They are a force enlivening the listeners, lifting them up and driving them toward renewal.
Returning and Reconnecting
The Mississippi Delta, like the rest of the United States, developed in a way that was separate and unequal, exhibiting the same pattern of disunion that exists in every city and hamlet across this country. Today, the blues is a commodified piece of Mississippi culture, no longer on the margins as it was when I grew up in the Magnolia State, but possibly no more “correctly” appreciated by audiences drawn to its “authenticity.” When I listen to the blues now, I hear a struggle for equality echoing across time, but I fear those echoes are not what many people hear at the festivals that draw hundreds of people—most of them white—to the Delta town of Clarksdale. In Clarksdale, the blues are a source of revenue for the denizens of a region that never recovered from the collapse of the plantation system—a system that served as the incubator for an art form created to protest the inequities of that system.
The problem with translation is that in the process of making something that is alien accessible and meaningful, other interpretations—often, if not always—get layered over the narrative intent of the original. Outwardly, Mississippi’s chummy and instrumental embrace of the blues today gives the impression that white folks’ fears about the “Africanization” of Southern culture are a thing of the past. But listening to the music without hearing the echoes of its resistance reduces it to little more than a backbeat and a bassline.
When I returned to the South a quarter century ago to write about my native Mississippi, I felt that the region was no longer defined by the structures and culture that those Redeemers and their heirs fought to uphold at any cost and by any means. While reconnecting with the music, history, and culture of my homeland, I thought the widespread embrace of the foodways, music, humor, and other aspects of African American culture were clear signs of a real shift taking place, part and parcel of the rise of what was called the New South. What I failed to see amid this emergence of the New South was the persistence of a less visible but no less virulent subculture of the Old South.
Let me be clear. It’s not that I thought the past was dead or even past. It is just that I never expected to see the worst aspects of the Old South reassert themselves so powerfully. Nor did I ever expect they would spread beyond the South. But things were changing long before nationalism began to have the words “white” and “Christian” routinely attached to it. A Southern populist political style that resorts to the race card to mobilize white people’s grievances and resentments runs clearly from Georgia’s Tom Watson to South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and Alabama’s George Wallace, before being repurposed and slightly cleaned up in Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” That same style was evident during Pat Buchanan’s run for the presidency in 1992 and 1996, and, later, in the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party movement. Members of that movement claimed their objection to the Obama presidency was based in economic policy and not race. Yet the presence of racially inflammatory signs at their rallies (“A Village in Kenya is missing its idiot: Deport Obama!”) told a different story. The current of racial resentment that flowed through the Obama years was then cunningly tapped by a native New Yorker named Donald Trump, who used it even while claiming that he was not.
I first experienced the return of that chilling force in 2016, during a visiting professorship at Millsaps College, in Jackson, when I decided to attend a Trump rally shortly before the Mississippi Republican primary. The rally took place in the suburban enclave of Madison, with a parking lot filled with expensive cars and SUVs—nary a mud-spattered pickup truck to be found. A colleague and I had started walking toward the high school stadium when someone yelled at us, “Are y’all planning to vote for Trump?” I assumed the questioner, an older, well-dressed man, had assessed our casual, professorial attire—jeans, plaid button-down shirts, and worn leather loafers—and determined that we were slumming academics rather than true Trump supporters. As a native Mississippian, I heard his question, with its lightly taunting modulations, as a kind of challenge, implying that we had little or no right to be at that place at that moment. It was an old Mississippi social custom, one familiar to me from my experience in the last years of the segregated South.
Putting on a little drawl, I replied, “I’m just here to listen, since I’m not sure about voting for him.” At least the response was truthful, but I feared I had overdone the drawl. My friend, a Canadian citizen, chose to remain silent, later telling me that he felt as though he had been transported into a parallel universe. Our challenger persisted: “You need to vote for Trump, because he’s going to stop them from printing all that money up in Washington.” I looked at him and gave a polite Southern “Alright, now,” signaling my reluctance to enter into a deep discussion of economic policy. Undeterred and growing more insistent, he went on about how Trump was going to defeat ISIS and how much America needed Trump. We walked faster and finally managed to give our pursuer the slip.
That encounter and the rally itself was the first sign to me that we Americans were entering troubling territory. Or reentering it, I should say. A journalist and friend who had attended the same rally later told me that Trump’s appeal to those Mississippians, ever distrustful of federal government, was his businessman’s hands-off approach to governing. I heard something different. During more than a century of statehood, Mississippi has elected a string of strongmen to statewide office—from James K. Vardaman, who used state government to legislate “against the racial peculiarities of the Negro,” to James Eastland, a Delta plantation owner who used his power in the US Senate to keep the black residents of the Delta poor and disenfranchised. As I read the crowd and its reactions to dog-whistle phrases and assorted references to the 1950s as an era of American greatness, or the overt railing against immigrants as criminals and rapists, it was hard not to conclude these supporters were seeking to resurrect a Southern way of life that once existed, not the one that they were currently inhabiting.
In his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the historian C. Vann Woodward observed that in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, “All over the South the lights of reason and tolerance and moderation began to go out under the resistance demand for conformity.”66xC. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow: A Commemorative Edition, afterword William S. McFeely (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 165. Originally published in 1955. Across the South in the late 1950s, books were banned, news media slanted their coverage, and teachers and university professors were harassed to the point of resigning from their jobs, including the University of Mississippi historian James Silver, author of Mississippi: The Closed Society. Today, we are seeing a repeat of that pattern, only now a closed society is being constructed on the national stage.
In response, now may be the time to take what has been lost in the translations of the blues and recover its real value as instruction on how to survive, thrive, and move forward—and to do so with a certain sly humor and insouciance that subverts the schemes and dreams of those who want to bring back an imagined past that will provide even less to those whom it promises most. We of the South have been here before. The blues recognized evil in the world—often speaking of it as the devil himself—and the blues called that evil out. Writers and thinkers, artists and musicians, must do the same today. Because, like it or not, we are all now living with at least one foot in the Old South.