Jim Crow's counterculture: The blues and African -Americans in the lower Mississippi Valley, 1890--194

The dissertation opens with a question about human oppression: How do people respond to sustained discrimination and exploitation? Here, the subject is African American southerners and their music during the age of Jim Crow (1890--1945). My main premise is that black southerners from the lower Mississippi Valley created blues music as part of their larger cultural response to white supremacy as it developed in the twentieth century. I consider the ways in which blues music was both accommodation and resistance to Jim Crow.;The bluesmen's rejection of Jim Crow took many forms as a counterculture . They avoided plantation labor and other exploitive economic relationships in the South. They emphasized the dark and mischievous aspects of Afro-American synthesized Christianity. They openly used and abused a variety of narcotics, most often alcohol, and celebrated sexuality and sexual pleasure. In living this "blues life," black musicians served as negative examples of proper conduct in the eyes of both white southerners and African Americans that preferred a more assimilationist approach to overcoming Jim Crow.;However, all black Americans did not remain bound to sharecropping in the plantation South. The Great Migration, two World Wars, the Great Depression and the New Deal all wrought major changes that reshaped the face of African-Americana. In the social crucible of the New Deal and World War II, African Americans began to express---through their music---that remaining countercultural to Jim Crow now included social assimilation into mainstream America. Blues artists during FDR's time carried out a far different rejection of Jim Crow than they had two decades before. Instead of reinforcing the exclusionary practices of segregation, black southerners began to include themselves in the collective American identity. By taking part in the war effort and experiencing patriotism on both the individual and collective level, African Americans claimed for themselves that which Jim Crow society so effectively had denied them: citizenship.