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Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature by Steven C. Tracy (review)

Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is a lengthy, encyclopedic treatment of African American vernacular aesthetic influences in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature and beyond. While purporting to limit his study of vernacular aesthetics to so-called “hot music,” which emerges “from earlier African American musical genres such as minstrelsy and ragtime” and incorporates “elements of jazz improvisation and blues inflection” (84), Steven C. Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies and blues musician, tends to color outside of the lines in his effort to recreate the dynamics of a vast musical inheritance. His study resembles the claim he makes about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Eatonville Anthology,” which he describes as a collage “much like a traditional improvisational blues lyric, which can be associational, and sometimes seemingly incoherent and non-thematic, while still forming a possible urtext for others to follow” (352). His associative style, culled from an impressive familiarity with blues music recorded before 1930 and a command of a large body of literary and aesthetic studies, leads Tracy well beyond the parameters of American literature from the 1920s. Summoning a call-and-response approach (among many other African American vernacular aesthetic tactics), Tracy acknowledges many of the critical objections to previous black vernacular readings of American literature, such as the unanswerable questions of “influence, definitions, origins, syncretism, and adaptability to Euro-American literary uses” (57). He then responds with an abundance of possibilities, just as hot music itself does. Many of the possibilities take the form of interesting authorial interjections, such as, “Some, like Furry Lewis, can peep through muddy water and spy dry land; others, when their left eye goes to jumping, don’t know which way to go” (58). Each possibility is punctuated with exhaustive references to blues music (much of which was reissued by Austrian Johnny Parth and documented in Tracy’s “Appendix 1: Discography and Videography”), giving the reader a circuitous, ever-swelling impression of the complexity of the aesthetics undertaken here while offering few definitive theoretical pegs on which critics may “hang their hats” (49). Tracy vamps until ready and then delivers his thesis: