Reds, whites, and the blues: Blues music, white scholarship, and American cultural politics (Lawrence Gellert)

This is an interdisciplinary study of white scholarship on African American blues music. Specifically, it explores change over time in the content and character of consensus blues research and interpretation from the turn of the century through the pivotal years before and after World War II. From the early 1900s through the race record boom of the 1920s, founding authorities in the tradition of white blues historiography cast black vernacular music in terms of "Negro" pathology, blight, and victimization. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, the leftwing folksong revival engendered new perspectives and new priorities. For a time, a competitive discourse on the political meanings of African American folksong surfaced in American culture and criticism. White commentators on the political Left came to hear a note of revolution in the ballads, work songs, chain gang songs, and blues of black working people, and their documentation and writing on the subject excited considerable attention in the dominant culture.; The study revolves around the rise and fall of this competitive discourse on blues politics and protest. An evocative historical figure in these regards is one Lawrence Gellert, a largely-forgotten independent white folklorist who collected music in black communities in the South for some three decades. Gellert came to prominence in the 1930s with an extensive archive of what came to be known as "Negro Songs of Protest." He espoused the politics of the Communist Left of the time, and his documentary field recordings and transcriptions featured lyrics of explicit race and class critique. But though it was held in high regard by such authorities as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, Lawrence Gellert's work would not fare well in the shift from left to right in the United States after World War II. In the post-war, it was dismissed as a fabrication, an example of white leftwing propaganda rather than black vernacular creativity. This dissertation contextualizes these changing contours of white "discovery" and "denial" in terms of the nation's dramatic turn from a period of capitalist economic destabilization and Depression-era radicalization to a period of global economic ascendance and post-War conservatism.