史蒂文•特雷西 | 我是怎样发表《兰斯顿•休斯与布鲁斯》的？（英文）

作者简介

史蒂文 • 特雷西（Steven C. Tracy），美国马萨诸塞大学杰出教授、华中师范大学海外名师，主要研究美国非裔文学和文化，出版由其独著、编著、作序的著作 30 余种，发表有关美国非裔文学和文化的书章、百科词条等百余篇。特雷西教授也是歌唱家和口琴演奏家，曾推出多部音乐作品。

内容摘要：本文讨论了《兰斯顿 • 休斯与布鲁斯》一书付梓的情形。作为首部专题研究休斯作品的专著，该书在资料相对稀缺的情况下得以成形，引发了学界对休斯基于热情拥抱并大胆运用民间题材和大众题材进行文学创作开展深入研究的兴趣。事实上，当时将休斯作为博士论文研究选题面临诸多问题，不被接受，但最终这项研究得以被接受，并被认为是美国非裔音乐以及美国文学的早期重要研究之一。

关键词：兰斯顿 • 休斯；布鲁斯；美国非裔文学；美国非裔音乐

How I Published Langston Hughes and the Blues

It is a little over the 30-year anniversary of when I began my doctoral dissertation on Langston Hughes. I can recall after I completed my doctoral exams walking across the campus of the University of Cincinnati with my doctoral adviser Wayne C. Miller on a warm Spring day when he posed the question to me just outside of the University music library: “What do you plan to write about for your dissertation.” I had come to the University of Cincinnati, a college freshman with grades that were not so good and not much of an idea what I wanted to major in—except I knew it wasn’t music! My music had been something personal to me for a long time, and something that I didn’t want to “mess up” through formal study. Blues and jazz and bluegrass and country, after all, were to me not technical, but emotional, passionate, and though I could read music—indeed I had been on local and national television and radio shows, and even played and recorded with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra—my proudest moments were playing the blues with famous blues stars T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and others. Eventually through an interest in folklore I fell into the English department and became an Americanist with a side order of 16th century British non-dramatic literature, with my music hooking me up with Afro-American literature as well. And now I wanted to write something related to as much of that as possible, and something that hadn’t been done. I spun out the rather pompous title in an instant: “The Influence of the Blues Tradition on Langston Hughes’s Blues Poems.”

My adviser stopped and looked at me quizzically and hesitantly, and half whispered in a halting voice, “You know, they might not think that Langston Hughes is an important enough writer to focus on in a doctoral dissertation.” The state of American literary studies in the early 1980s. “And then,” he added, “there is the matter of the blues.” The blues had always been considered lower class and “dirty,” and though it was now becoming more popular in white cultural circulars, “popular” music was not exactly what the academy had in mind for doctoral dissertations, either. The defiant, marginalized outsider in me shot back quickly, “Can they be convinced?” My adviser chuckled and shook his head at the brashness of youth, and set about with the wisdom of the elder to create a space for one of the first critical books devoted to Langston Hughes, and the first to focus on a single thematic subject matter in his work, what would be later published, pared down from its dissertation title, as Langston Hughes and the Blues.

Here I should pause to say that I had never studied Hughes in graduate school, and had had about a week on him as an undergraduate. I had also never studied the blues at any school or university either. A survey undergraduate course, an undergrad course on the black novel, and a graduate course on African and African American Drama were the only courses I had taken in school. So everything I knew about the two, and would come to know, was based almost 100% wholly on my own research and listening and performance.

Previous to my study, there had been a half dozen or so dissertations on Hughes, in addition to biographies, primarily for children (including one by Alice Walker in 1974) and Donald C. Dickinson’s A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967 (1972); James Emanuel’s general assessment Langston Hughes (1967), Onwuchekwa Jemie’s Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry (1976), Richard Barksdale’s overview Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics (1977); and two volumes of critical essays, one edited by Therman B. O’Daniel entitled Langston Hughes: Black Genius (1971) and the other by Edward Mullen entitled Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (1986). Peter Mandelik and Stanley Schatt also compiled A Concordance to the Poetry of Langston Hughes (1975). As Craig Werner noted about my book in Choice, “This useful study initiates a new phase of scholarship on Langston Hughes…the first book-length study of a single aspect of Langston Hughes’s achievement…Tracy’s study establishes a high standard for future scholars of a major American writer” (180).

Additionally, there were no books of criticism devoted to the relationship between literature and the blues. There had been articles and brief sections of books—Jean Wagner’s Black Poets of the United States (1963; 1973 translation), Gene Bluestein’s “The Blues as Literary Theme” (1963), Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973), Jemie’s Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry (1976), Houston Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), and Joanne Gabbin’s Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985); brief commentary by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling A. Brown, and articles by Charles Johnson (“Jazz Poetry and Blues” 1928), Nat Hentoff, Dellita Martin and Edward Waldron, in addition to several pieces I had written. In the cases of Hughes as a subject and blues and literature as a subject, it was practically virgin territory, which can be a danger, a blessing, or both.

My own feeling at that time was that these mostly shorter pieces did not take enough time to convey a comprehensive and specific picture of the possibilities of the blues. This was a problem because many people knew little about the blues, and so there was frequently not enough context for people to make and explain their points about the relationship between the blues and literature. Blues was simply too complicated, too nuanced, and too vast, to boil down to a couple of paragraphs in an essay or chapter. Gabbin’s book on Brown was stronger on the literature that the blues, misidentifying Brown as a creator of things that were already in the blues tradition and misspelling the names of a number of blues singers. Baker’s book was longer, but his over-reliance on critical theory and its choked thicket of multi- syllabic verbiage seemed just to stray too far from the directness, frankness, and earthiness of the blues. What I was aiming for was to provide a social, historical, political, and aesthetic understanding of the blues leading up to an application of those ideas to Langston Hughes’s particular understanding of the blues, as well as his employment of that understanding in his literary works. This involved a discussion of chronological, regional, popular, and hybrid manifestations of the blues about which readers should know in order to understand from which parts of the blues tradition Hughes was drawing in his work. It would be self-contained, a survey of the sometimes-conflicting attitudes of critics toward the blues, starting with a contextualization of the New Negro Renaissance in terms of attitudes toward folklore, segue- ing into various definitions of the blues, and, having plowed the foreground, sowing the seeds of Hughes’s understanding of the blues and identifying the rewards he reaped in his work.

And, of course, all of this had to be substantiated by particular references to a variety of elements of the blues current at the time Hughes was composing his own blues poems, so that it was clearly possible for Hughes to have heard and used these elements drawing upon the tradition rather than creating them himself. References to “jelly roll” appeared in folk blues and popular blues before they appeared in Hughes’s poetry. Hughes use of hard luck and bad luck was clearly preceded by the ubiquitous use of these terms in blues from the nineteen teens and twenties. There were recordings of songs entitled “The Weary Blues” before Hughes’s poem of the same name. Different West African related elements such as call and response, polyrhythms, percussiveness, and so on had to be verified, and the variety of musical and lyric stanzaic patterns had to be surveyed, recognized, and described, and African American musical precursors to the blues had to be examined for similarities and differences. All of this had to be meticulously checked and supported. But I also had to walk a precarious line, acknowledging that, unless there was particular evidence from Hughes to the contrary, I could not definitely say exactly where Hughes heard these things. That is the danger of using the term “influence,” which is often very tricky to prove. Still, proving that words and terms and images and symbols that occurred in Hughes’s work were common in the blues tradition helped establish that the environments in which Hughes moved—in Lawrence, Harlem, Chicago, Paris, and elsewhere—likely provided Hughes with knowledge of the elements of the blues that turn up in his work. There were a variety of writings by Hughes, including essays about the blues, that helped make this just a bit easier.

And there was the need to bring my performance knowledge to bear, but try to find a way to make technical elements understandable to a non-music reading audience. When I read Hughes’s blues poetry, I could feel the performative elements at play in the lines. What I had to figure out was how to describe how Hughes communicated performance in his work— and this in the days before “performance studies” became an official field of focus in literary studies, even though poems have been performed for thousands of years, and literary blues poems themselves from the 1920s on. I say literary blues poems because, of course, there are lyrics to many blues songs and, of course, many people consider them to be great poetry in their own right. When Carl Sandburg performed his folk pieces in the 1920s, they were frequently folk songs from the tradition. Vachel Lindsay’s work came from his own pen. And Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth made use of jazz performance in their work as well. Later Richard Wright would write a blues recorded by Count Basie and Paul Robeson; Josh White would record blues co-composed by poet Waring Cuney; and many Beat writers and budding black nationalists such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Leroi Jones would perform their blues works as well—including Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus and Sam “the Man” Taylor. However, I also wrestled with the issue of using musical transcriptions in my musical examples. Knowing that I would be writing for a primary audience that did not likely read music, I searched for a way to communicate the relationship between music and lyrics without using the staff and musical notes. While I encountered some resistance on this from my committee, my own sense of being a kind of go-between for the music and literature camps led me to remain committed to this point. What clinched my ability to stick to this was my argument that I was providing an extensive discography of recorded works to which the reader could listen. This function led me to list the original recording dates—usually in the 1920s— but provide discographical material from current LP and CD reissues in order to make the original recordings more available to readers.

Early reviews were quite positive. In American Literature, John McCluskey, Jr. wrote:

Tracy moves beyond any facile attempt to demonstrate influence here. He grounds his examination in the poetics of form, its stanzaic structures, rhythms, and musical techniques. He does this with energy and lucidity, keeping the text accessible to generalist and specialist alike… His study inspires a close and unsentimental look at this rich and enduring form and a deep and continuing questioning of its possibilities for more formal expression. (488)

Ruth Banes wrote in the Canadian Review of American Studies that the book “offers the best and most comprehensive view of blues research available.” Craig Werner wrote in Choice that “Tracy’s study establishes a high standard for future scholars of a major American writer.” (180).

A sample of other reviews, beginning with one from a giant of Afro-American studies:

Steven Tracy knows very well both the blues and Langston Hughes’s poetry. His study leaves us with a far better understanding of the role of black music, and the blues in particular, as the central influence on the most original of black American poets.

—Arnold Rampersad, author of The Life of Langston Hughes

Nowhere else has anyone revealed such a comprehensive knowledge of blues forms, lyrics, and performers when discussing Hughes's works… This is an essential book for all libraries and for all readers interested in the blues and/or Langston Hughes.

—Richard N. Albert, Small Press.

The release of the book in paperback in 2001 with a new introduction prompted the following reviews:

Thought-provoking… Explores the relationship between the famous African American poet's writings and the lyrics and rhythms of early blues. The book also provides a wealth of information on pre-war blues.

—Kevin Toelle, Illinois Entertainer

Tracy’s book is an important read for folklorists and literary scholars interested in the blues, Hughes, and folklore and literature.

—Kevin Eyster, Journal of American Folklore

Tracy’s book has been a basic and important source for my study and teaching of Hughes’s work since it first appeared in hardcover in 1988… The good news… is that this edition has an excellent ‘Introduction to the Paperback Edition’ of approximately eight pages that informs us of newer sources. It is—as is the whole book—an entertaining read.

—Steve West, Arkansas Review

I always appreciated the references to the book being an entertaining read, and accessible to many audiences, for a number of reasons. Primary among them were that the advance of critical theory was making critical works increasingly impenetrable not only to other critics but the general public as well, which I thought was a negative development in our profession. Additionally, I had always been taught that writing was meant to communicate, not obfuscate, so I always aimed for clarity and interest. Most importantly, I wrote in the spirit of Langston Hughes, who himself sought in his poetry and prose to make a wide embrace with his language to reach as many people as possible. His language practice was not exclusionary, and neither would mine be. I suspect that one critic who suggested that my book was good for “beginners” in blues and undergraduate and graduate students meant that as a criticism, though I took it as a compliment. Some people were writing about the subject without going back to the beginning, and thus missing a whole lot of foreground.

Negative criticisms of the book focused on the tendency to concentrate on structural patterns and forms more than on themes, which is perhaps true, though naturally it takes more time to explain the variety of technical patterns and forms than to discuss themes, since most people would be likely less familiar with them. Some critics felt I was too much a blues “purist,” meaning, I guess, that I retained a sharp focus on the blues—which is exactly what I wished to do. Since the blues was a hybrid form, and since many so-called blues singers sang a variety of types of songs, and were more correctly labelled songsters, the term purist and purity, so appropriately derided by Ellison in Invisible Man, seems rather misapplied. In fact, my frequent use of

1)the commercially-recorded blues of the 1920s (rather than exclusively the blues collected in the field by folklorists) and

2)the blues of the female vaudeville pop-blues singers with whom Hughes was familiar, and who sometimes sang a hybrid form derided by Sterling A. Brown,

put me a couple of steps away from the “true” purist. I was, thus, a little bemused by the characterization. There was even one criticism that I used too many footnotes—for which I will never apologize, since the footnotes were packed with information about where to locate blues recordings relevant to Hughes’s poetry. I should have had MORE ! To be fair, I was also specifically praised by one critic for the wealth of sources as well.

One interesting review provides a commentary on the times and my marginalized position in the academy at the time. A critic who shall be nameless commented rather superciliously that “Steven Tracy has written the book that any one of us could have written years ago.” Immediately upon reading the sentence, I had asked myself who he meant by “us”? Who was this mysterious group of which I was so clearly not a part? And why wasn’t I a part of it? Furthermore, why had he felt it necessary to say that someone else could have written it? And if they could have, why hadn’t they? I recalled that about ten years earlier, when I declared as an undergraduate major in Afro-American Studies, I was called in by the department head. He sat me down, and said to me,

I don’t know you. I have never had you in a class. I have never read anything you have written. I have never had a conversation with you. And I don’t know anybody who has had you in a class, or read anything you have written, or carried on a conversation with you. But I have to tell you, I would never hire you to work in my Afro-American Studies department, and I advise you to get out of the field.

I was one stunned twenty-year-old, I can tell you. Around that time, my folklore teacher told me he could get me around $2000 per quarter if I were to join the English department and, reasoning that I would continue my studies in Afro-American literature and music on my own, and that I loved British and American literature and would benefit from studies in those fields, I switched my major. Oh, yes, the money, too!

So what have we learned about the subjects in the past 30 years? Yes, Hughes is important enough. Yes, so is the oral tradition as important as the written. Yes, the blues is a very significant genre. Yes, now that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize, people can take these things more seriously. And yes, someone can spend 30 years working on the subject and still not cover it all. All of which has prompted a trilogy of books dealing with the “bluing” of American literature, which, if I live long enough, I will complete—and which will themselves certainly not cover the subject adequately.

END

史蒂文 • 特雷西，我是怎样发表《兰斯顿 • 休斯与布鲁斯》的？，《外国语文研究》2021年第1期。为适应微信风格，删除了注释。

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