In a different chord: interpreting the relations among black female sexuality, agency, and the blues.

Sometimes the lyrics mock and signify even as they pretend to weep. (Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues)

Black feminism is not a monolithic enterprise. But it starts to look that way in critical treatment of the intercourse among the blues, black female sexuality, and cultural agency. Angela Davis, for example, drawing from the lyrics of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, theorizes that the blues has "helped to construct an aesthetic community" that validates "women's capacities in domains assumed to be the prerogatives of males, such as sexuality and travel" (120). Davis follows Hazel Carby's lead in identifying the late 1920s and early 1930s as especially progressive periods in the history of the blues because black women, as at no other time before, used the medium to "manipulate and control their construction as sexual objects" (333). Carby likewise reads in Ma Rainey's and Bessie Smith's performances subversions of the stereotype of black women as down-trodden and forlorn in traditional blues matrices. (1) Michelle Russell and Sandra Leib argue similarly that black female blues developed at the turn of the twentieth century as a distinguishable idiom precisely because it enabled black women to own their "past, present and future" by confiscating and reconstructing their identities (Russell 130). Like Carby and Davis, Russell and Leib portray female lyricists of the 1920s and 1930s as ideologists of the notion of black female self-determination, out of which black feminist thought emerged in the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

None of these scholars considers the possibility that musical and literary blues lyrics written by both men and women and lacking explicitly emancipatory features might nevertheless afford black women similar opportunities for self-formation and self-expression. (2) All take the same formulaic approach toward classifying "empowering" blues texts, isolating, almost exclusively, lyrics or performances in which female singers assert male prerogatives or reject and exact revenge against their oppressors as the loci of liberating and, hence, feminist moments of expression for black women. By focusing exclusively on "celebratory" black female performances, black feminist blues scholars suggest that the liberating potential of the blues is a primary function of the performer's gender identification. They forget that, while Clare Smith, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday were singing and stomping the blues in the '20s and '30s, black male writers and entertainers such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Louis Armstrong were also producing blues texts for mass consumption.

Limning Ma Rainey as both feminist foremother and prophet, Leib insists that the body of Rainey's recorded material "constitutes a message to women, explaining quite clearly how to deal with reverses in love and how to interpret other areas of life." Leib points out that, "in striking contrast to the popular concept of the blues as a music of sorrow and despair," Ma Rainey's performances reveal "women aggressively confronting or attempting to change the circumstances of their lives" (xvi). By contrast, in this essay, I work from the belief that the practice of dichotomizing black male- and female-authored blues constructions of black women and black female sexuality vitiates the life of the medium--the fluidity of the blues and its ability to circumvent diametrically opposed categorical analyses. Attending exclusively to works that paint only overtly "positive" images of black women, in other words, produces stereotypically negative interpretations of those "passive" female singers that have historically been condemned or ignored. The scholarly focus inadvertently dismisses a cross-generational body of musical and literary blues texts that, in fact, celebrate the multi-dimensionality of black women's characters. By cross-examining blues works by Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Mari Evans, and Natalie Cole, I aim to represent the blues' metasexual dimensions as well as the possibilities the blues have historically created for black American women to achieve actual and symbolic liberation within the constraints of white- and male-dominated societies.

In a tape-recorded interview from the early 1980s, Langston Hughes draws from conventional black feminist thought when he classifies the blues as thematically either masculine or feminine. "Men's blues," he asserts, "are almost always about being out of work, broke, hungry, maybe a long way from home, no ticket to get back. In other words, they're sort of economic blues. The women's blues," he conversely concludes, "are almost always about love. Very often a woman will be singing about some man who's gone off and left her before she's ready for him to go, or something like that." Hughes's ahistorical dichotomizing of the blues reveals that he could render rather myopic interpretations even of his own work. Albert Murray and Charles Keil, among other blues historians, rightly point out that the blues have never served as a conduit for gender-scripted performances and that early male and female artists often sang the same songs, appropriately changing gender references in the lyrics. "The first blues were recorded in the city (1920)," observes Kiel, "in a relatively standard form, bordering on a formula.... A series of women, starting with Mamie Smith, turned one standardized blues after another" (55). Kiel notes further that, among the many reasons male performers emerging in the late 1920s and early 1930s modeled their blues after Smith and other female pioneers, was a "desire by performers and record companies to make the blues ... more familiar and predictable to the widest possible audience" (57). (3)

Houston Baker characterizes the asexual and consubstantiating life of the blues when he analogizes the medium to a "streamlined athlete's awesomely dazzling explosions of prowess." As he explains: "The blues song erupts, creating a veritable playful festival of meaning." What we are left with, he concludes, "is not a filled subject, but an anonymous (nameless) voice. The blues singer's signatory coda is always atopic, placeless. The signature comprises a scripted authentication of 'your' feelings. Its mark is an invitation to energizing subjectivity" (5). (4) The voice of the individual blues singer transcends the speaker at once to express and represent the "experiences" of self and audience as it calls for a rearticulation and regeneration of the song. The responses always echo elements of the first singer's experiences. But as they emanate from different bodies, the songs/responses necessarily change as different voices begin to sing. Consequently, as the singer's response (to the audience) demonstrates her identification with the "group experience," it also reveals and sustains her individuality. This process diminishes the lines of distinction between women's and men's blues on issues of aestheticism, authorship, audience, and agency. It dictates the non-reductiveness of the blues--the fact that, given any relatively homogenous group of people, no single form of the medium can represent holistically the experiences of every individual; but every form of the blues has the ability to "tap into" the experiences of some people. Finally, and, perhaps, most importantly, the process frees meaning because it makes imperative the duty of the reader/listener to engage with the writer/singer in the hermeneutic process. Meaning in any given blues text is never static and in fact always represents the site of a dynamic network of evolving, multidimensional experiences and communicative acts and reactions, calls and responses. Yet even when we consider in isolation poetry by Langston Hughes in which female blues singers centrally figure, Hughes's gender-determined statements about the blues are roundly disproved.

Ironically, much of Hughes's earliest blues poetry was collected in his Selected Poems (1959) under the heading "Lament Over Love" (also the title of a poem in this section). While the prevailing concerns of the blues-singing females in this section are men and love, I would argue that these issues are also intricately linked to concern over a number of other factors that constitute black female subjectivity, including personal welfare and socio-economic status. The texts demonstrate a range of attitudes toward and responses to these issues by merging shifting images of weakness and power, despair and hope, and dependence and independence as the women describe, analyze, and/or react to their situations in song. (For the purposes of this essay, I will analyze in detail only three poems, although I maintain that the argument holds true for all the pieces contained in the "Lament Over Love" section of Selected Poems.)

"Lament Over Love" (1926) configures the blues as the battleground on which a woman's emotional and rational sentiments fight to control her actions after her partner abandons her and their child. Through paradoxically conflicting-harmonious images of the woman the text captures her ambivalence and represents her alternative states of feeling through stanzaic shifts and interlinear interjections of what we might conceive of as the calls and responses--the voices--of her heart and mind. The painful repercussions of sexual love gone awry--the heart's interests--monopolize the speaker's thoughts in stanza one, although importantly we learn in the first line of the stanza that the singer is a mother and, therefore, shares another immediate, intimate, and, perhaps, untroubled love connection: "I hope my child'll / Never love a man. / I say I hope my child'll / Never love a man. / Love can hurt you / Mo'n anything else can."

Stanza two and the first five lines of stanza four mark transitions both in voice and speaker objectives. In stanza two, the interests of the mind seem to propel her body out of conditions of physical immobility and emotional stagnation into states of actual and mental perambulation: "I'm goin down to the river / An' I ain't goin' there to swim; / Down to the river, / Ain't goin' there to swim. / My true love's left me / And I'm goin' there to think about him." Led to the river by the mind's initiatives, the speaker makes it clear to us that this is not a leisure trip. The repetition in lines two and four underscores the severity of the situation and the depth of the speaker's forlornness: She cannot simply relieve the pain that she feels through a pleasurable activity. More importantly, however, is the suggestion that, in addition to going to the river to think about her man, the speaker walks "down to the river" to engage in a sort of psychosomatic cleansing ritual, a purification of mind and body. We cannot miss the biblical allusion to the river as a source of spiritual regeneration. Indeed, the shift back to the voice of the heart in stanza three--"Love is like whiskey, / Love is like red, red wine. / Love is like whiskey, / Like sweet red wine"--marks what seems to be the beginning of a subtle though no less powerful transformation in the speaker's condition. Analogizing love to an inebriant, the heart intimates that it is beginning to recognize the alluring yet potentially dangerous effects of sexual intimacy. In the last two lines of the third stanza the mind's voice interjects a response to the heart's reflection, a response that underlines the dangers of this woman loving a man too much: "If you want to be happy / You got to love all the time." Her happiness and vitality become interminably linked to a man, both emotionally and, as the last line subtly suggests, physically.

A pivotal transition occurs when the mind again seems to take charge at the start of stanza four, mobilizing the speaker and propelling her to the top of a tower, a conventional dwelling place for distressed damsels: "I'm goin' up in a tower / Tall as a tree is tall / Up in a tower / Tall as a tree is tall." We might assume at this point that the speaker, like her fabled predecessors, is still disillusioned by her suffering. Doing so, however, ignores the telling progression of the speaker's emotional thoughts and mental condition from an incongruous to a constructive sort of heart-mind divide--an undistressed dualism that affirms through acts of expression, of singing her blues, the speaker's self-awareness and strength, notwithstanding the misery she may feel because her man has left her.

Configuring the source of her pain in the fifth line of the last stanza--"Gonna think about my man"--the speaker now has the internal propulsion needed to project pain outward: "And let my fool-self fall." She has, in other words, expelled that part of her being which she now realizes unwisely relies upon a man for its welfare. Beyond our clear understanding that the last line of the poem could not signal the speaker's desire to take her life because this mother would not abandon her child, we now recognize that she nevertheless endeavors to kill her "fool-self' in order to begin to move beyond her suffering. Here the heart speaks the final words in order to signal its claim to a brave and active initiative. No longer merely reflecting upon the situation, the heart reacts to an apparent mental calling that underscores the speaker's determination to alter her situation.

Like the speaker in "Lament Over Love," the singers in "Misery" (1926) and "Cora" (1927) arrive at understandings of the source of their pain which enable them to survive. The singer in "Misery" cries: "Play the blues for me. / Play the blues for me. / No other music / 'Ll ease my misery. / Sing a soothin' song. / Sing a soothin' song. / Cause the man I love's done / Done me wrong." Cora warbles: "I broke my heart this mornin', / Ain't got no heart no more. / Next time a man comes near me / Gonna shut an' lock my door / Cause they treats me mean-- / The ones I love. / They always treats me mean." Instantiating song as she calls for its sound, the singer in "Misery" indicates that the blues are the balm that will sooth as they transform her forlorn condition. Neither ignoring nor wishing to waste away in sorrow, Cora discovers that articulating her mental and emotional anguish actually provides room for a resilient and less despondent internal spirit to emerge, supplanting her fragile and vulnerable existence after another man has mistreated her. "Lament Over Love," "Misery," and "Cora" testify to the ability of the blues to provide self-sufficient and, arguably more importantly, self-signaled coping mechanisms for dealing with the reality of the frustration and anxieties that naturally (and inevitably) attend any sexual relationship between women and men.

In contrast, most of the remaining "Lament Over Love" poems contain lyrics dominated by a series of what we might regard as unrefined sexual interaction between men and women and physically abusive and exploitative treatment of women by men. The singer in "Midwinter Blues" (1926) informs us that "In the middle of the winter, / Snow all over the ground. / 'Twas the night befo' Christmas" that her "Good man turned her down." Similarly, Dorothy in the "Ballad of the Girl Whose Name is Mud" (1942) gets involved with a man who leaves her, presumably shortly after bedding her and taking her money. An anonymous observer of Dorothy's situation insists that, because this "no good man" to whom Dorothy "gave her all to / Dropped her with a thud," among "Decent people / Dorothy's name is mud." Dorothy does not, however, appear at all affected by her forlorn situation, for as our informant points out,

   Nobody's seen her shed a tear
   Nor seen her hang her head.
   Ain't even heard her murmur,
   Lord, I wish I was dead!
   No! The hussy's telling everybody--
   Just as though it was no sin--
   That if she had a chance
   She'd do it agin'!

"The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" (1932) narrates the story of "Madam," the omniscient village soothsayer who, according to the townsfolk, imprudently takes Dave, a shiftless, profligate rake, into her home. Dave beds, assaults, robs, and abandons Madam, leaving her to wander around, seemingly aimlessly, in search of him. The details of the text deserve liberal quoting:

   A fellow came one day.
   Madam took him in.
   She treated him like
   He was her kin.
   Gave him money to gamble.
   She gave him bread,
   And let him sleep in her
   Walnut bed.
   Friends tried to tell her
   Dave meant her no good.
   Looks like she could've knowed it
   If she only would.

   He mistreated her terrible,
   Beat her up bad.
   Then went off and left her.
   Stole all she had.
   She tried to find out
   What road he took.
   There wasn't a trace
   No way she looked.
   That woman who could foresee
   What your future meant,
   Couldn't tell, to save her,
   Where Dave went.

We should not dismiss the severity of representations of isolated acts of physical and emotional violence against women in these works. Nevertheless, we can broaden their heuristic value by highlighting their commonality with blues lyrics composed by Hughes's contemporary, Billie Holiday.

In the following excerpt from Lady Sings the Blues (1956), Holiday discusses her perception of individualism as it relates to blues singers specifically and people in general:

   I don't know of anybody who actually
   influenced my singing.... Young kids
   always ask what my style is derived
   from and how it evolved and all that.
   What can I tell them ...? Everybody's
   got to be different. You can't copy anybody
   and end up with anything. If you
   copy, it means you're working without
   any real feeling. And without feeling,
   whatever you do amounts to nothing.
   No two people on earth are alike, and
   it's got to be that way in music, or it
   isn't music. (39, 48)

This passage provides the necessary backdrop for a discussion of two seemingly paradoxical pieces written by Holiday and a correlative analysis of Holiday's songs and Hughes's poetry.

"Billie's Blues" (1936) and "Don't Explain" (1945) cast apparent doppelgangers through polarized constructions of independent and apologetic blues singers. "I love my man," asserts the diva in "Billie's Blues," "I'm a lie if I say I don't. / But I'll quit my man," she maintains, "I'm a lie if I say I won't." The affirmation serves as a prelude to the speaker's cataloguing of the domestic abuses she has suffered. "My man wouldn't give me no breakfast, / Wouldn't give me no dinner. / Squawked 'bout my supper / Then he put me outdoors. / Had the nerve to leave / A matchbox on my clothes. / I didn't have so many; / but I had a long, long ways to go." Psychologically and physically fortified by her liberation from an unhealthy situation, the speaker is undaunted by a lack of material possessions after her lover puts her out of their home and burns her clothes. As the final line intimates, the lightest load will best serve her traveling interests.

This songstress, brashly poised and self-confident, aggressive and assertive, is the foil to the seemingly fool-hearted, complaisant, and desperate singer in "Don't' Explain." Aware that her partner has had an affair when he approaches her with the truth, the songstress croons:

   Hush now, don't explain.
   You've mixed with some dame.
   Skip that lipstick,
   Don't explain.

   You know that I love you
   And what love endures.
   All my thoughts are of you,
   For I'm so completely yours.

   Cry to hear folks chatter
   And I know you cheat.
   But right and wrong don't matter
   When you're with me, sweet.

   Hush, now, don't explain.
   You're my joy and pain.
   My life's yours, Love,
   Don't explain.

In "Billie's Blues" and "Don't Explain" women sing about abusive relationships. Although the final situations in which they find themselves differ, both women act and react with distinctively calculated finesse to stabilize their lives after their "conjugal" foundations are threatened from within and without. In these singers' responses we recognize the artistic expression of Holiday's perspective on the human condition. The singer in "Billie's Blues" eventually decides to leave her man, and the singer in "Don't Explain" decides to stay with her man. But neither decision is an instinctive response to events. This crucial point of convergence provides the means to deconstruct any antithetical configurations that subordinate one character's disposition or final decision to another's without recognizing the courage and determination that both women exhibit.

When the speaker in "Billie's Blues" asserts, '"I've been your slave, baby, ever since I been your lady," she indicates that, before leaving her man, she has made a conscious effort to please him. As she outlines his abusive behavior, the singer reveals her determination to make a relationship with this man work, continuing to cook every one of his meals even as he attempts to deprive her of her own. Although we cannot know the number of times the man in "Don't Explain" cheats and the number of times the singer decides to stay with him despite his behavior, we know that the singer holds an attitude toward relationships similar to the diva's in "Billie's Blues." "You know that I love you, and what love endures" underscores her realistic vision of human relationships and, more importantly, human fallibility. The songstress does not, however, dismiss her man's behavior as immaterial and, in fact, underlines both its personal and social impact. The line "Cry to hear folks chatter" and the oxymoronic expression "You're my joy and pain" indicate that the speaker is deeply affected by her lover's actions. Nevertheless, she develops a coping mechanism that enables her to condemn his actions and preserve the relationship. Indeed, the juxtaposition and repetition of the independently connotative phrases "Hush now" and "Don't explain" intimate that the speaker intends this coda to identify her man's behavior (if not the man himself) as infantile and to warn him that empty excuses may actually drive her away.

Notwithstanding the necessary influence of ideology on individual choice, the singers in "Billie's Blues" and "Don't Explain" seem motivated by their possession of strong, relatively autonomous wills and desires. Their similar experiences shape distinct, independent individuals with personalities colored by their ability to exact satisfying and self-sustaining existences in spite of the abuse they endure. Equipped with this knowledge, we can perhaps reconstitute the temperament and behavior that Hughes's blues singers exhibit in "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" and "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" as representative of self-conscious characters who examine their options and then choose to act in ways that facilitate their interests, whether or not observers/readers/listeners believe that they (re)act appropriately.

Any acute interpretation of "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" and "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" should thus first consider the point of view through which these stories are related. Neither "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" nor "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" is narrated through the first-person perspective. Heeding, therefore, that these songs are not pure representations of Madam's and Dorothy's words, that these blues are, in fact, mixtures of lyrics filtered largely through a third-person consciousness, we can justly suspect any detail of the text advanced as "character evidence."

The singer in "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" is concerned primarily to detail the ironic naivete of a woman who could see and tell all about everyone's condition except her own. The speaker intimates that, although Madam earns very little for the services she provides, her material resources are plentiful, because she can finance Dave's fundamental needs as well as his recreation. The crucial detail that the speaker leaves out, however, is what Madam believes Dave gives to her. Indicating that Dave physically abuses Madam, robs her, leaves her, and ultimately sets her on an endless journey in pursuit of him, the narrator never directly accounts for Madam's sentiments, her reactions to these events. The speaker's reflections, therefore, are removed from Madam's attitude toward and desire for Dave. This point signifies that we, as audience, must proceed cautiously when "responding" to the analytic call of the text. In other words, we must not thoughtlessly iterate the many details that characterize Madam as naive because her silent voice opens the text to a variety of readings that may undermine the ostensible authority of the speaker. Indeed, the text lends itself to an inversion of the poem's signatory coda--"That woman who could foresee / What your future meant, / Couldn't tell, to save her, / Where Dave went"--precisely because Madam is the fortune teller. As such, Madam may still very well represent the all-knowing party and the observer may, in fact, articulate the naive perspective. One might also reasonably propose that the speaker's anxieties about Madam's behavior and Madam and Dave's relationship weakly suppress envy or even homoerotic desire. Whether male or female, the speaker could harbor intentions of supplanting Dave or Madam in the relationship. Even without such intentions, a male or female speaker might, nevertheless, feel threatened by Madam's aggressive drive. If we were to imagine that Madam's pursuit of Dave is actually the result of a determination to retain something that Dave has stolen from her, or to situate herself in a position to "even the score," to exact revenge from him, the speaker would really be expressing resentment toward Madam's audacious initiative. Whatever we speculate and however we characterize the motivating forces, we cannot deny what the speaker concedes: Madam consistently acts against the grain of conventional wisdom. "Friends tried to tell her / Dave meant her no good." Madam apparently elects to follow her own mind. So the only fair assumption that we can advance is that Madam knows what is best for Madam.

In a similar vein, we are charged by the possibility of Madam's self-determinism to conceive of Dorothy in "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" not as the anagram of her social name (a rather trite pun which the speaker undoubtedly hopes we will not miss) but as a self-confident, driven spirit who will not conform to social standards of interpersonal and interclass decorum. In contrast to "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller," we have in "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" an indirect representation of Dorothy's words which clearly express her attitude toward her situation: "If she had a chance / she'd do it agin'!" However limited its representation in "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud," Dorothy's voice signifies her possession of a joie-de-vivre that at least challenges the evaluations articulated by the anonymous voice. The familiar though no less impressive aphorism that Dorothy speaks stands in admirable contrast to the third party's blunted tone and crass locutions. Indeed, when we attend closely to the speaker's description of the events--"The guy she gave her all to / Dropped her with a thud"--and the speaker's characterization of Dorothy as a "hussy," we recognize that the speaker, not Dorothy, represents the truly "troubled" soul in this song.

However meager and condescending their acknowledgments, both "The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" and "The Ballad of the Girl Whose Name Is Mud" exhibit characters who possess distinct if unappealing individualistic spirits. Like "Don't Explain" and "Billie's Blues," these texts verify that the situations in which many women find themselves in various blues matrices are, to varying degrees, the result of their own making. Where options are neither pre-determined nor uni-dimensionally collapsed, female blues characters recognize their ability and indeed exercise their right to control their lives as well as to determine their existence in song. This theme of self-determination resonates in the lyrics of Mari Evans's "I Am a Black Woman" (1964) and Natalie Cole's "I'm Catching Hell" (1977), the veritable literary and musical anthems of the black feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Seemingly atypical of a traditional blues poem, "I Am a Black Woman" nevertheless receives the tropes and structure of the likes of Hughes's and Holiday's blues lyrics with significant variation:

   I
   am a black woman
   tall as a cypress
   strong
   beyond all definition still
   defying place
   and time
   and circumstance
   assailed
   impervious
   indestructible
   Look
   on me and be
   renewed.

In content and form, the text shapes a resilient character, intimating the emotional physical, and psychological abuse that black women have endured. At the same time, the speaker proclaims her triumph over forces that would fragment her spirit, body, and mind. The speaker articulates her experiences with a rejuvenated spirit that surfaces precisely because she wills it to. The personal commentary in the concluding lines "Look / on me and be / renewed" thus assumes rhetorical importance as other women are called upon to take the same self-determining initiative, We can read "I'm Catching Hell" as a response to this calling, as the song movingly gives voice to the blues of a woman determined to redefine the character of her relationship with her man after he leaves her. The singer chronicles events that increasingly plague and eventually destroy their connection, leaving her alone to lament his loss and to criticize as she characterizes the forces that she believes drove him away.

In significant opposition to the blues standard, the singer in "I'm Catching Hell" establishes from the outset a selective call-and-response pattern that alienates certain audience members. The singer states plainly: "Tonight I--I just want to talk to the ladies." A seemingly half-hearted aside to the men, reminding them that they are "cool," follows; but the singer's attention immediately shifts back to the women. "Girls," she tersely advises, "If you've got a good man, you'd better keep him." The singer continues by posing a series of rhetorical questions to her "isolated" audience while disclosing the details of and her attitude toward her own "situation":

   You know things that you've seen a
   thousand times
   Around the house but never paid any
   attention to?
   Like helping with the groceries, helping
   in the yard,
   Painting, repairing, and--huh!--paying
   the bills?
   But you know now, all I have is memories,
   regrets.
   I could have given our love a chance to
   grow, but no,
   I had to "Challenge it and be heard."
   Let me tell you something: That female
   liberation stuff-
   I don't know, but sometimes--
   I don't think it's worth it.
   And I'm really feeling--
   Feeling kinda bad, Y'all.

The turn from interpersonal address to personal reflection that follows marks a pivotal shift in voice that is both aesthetically powerful and politically salient. Underscoring the notion that singing the blues is both an interactive and highly personalized activity, the speaker no longer engages her audience in what we might conceive of as a mild (though no less obvious) act of pontification designed increasingly to parody the tone of a black feminist. As she advances more details that reveal the role she plays in her man's departure, we are increasingly aware that this woman, far from advocating the radical feminist position, actually seeks to relate the dangers, even the futility, of assuming this stance. Her frank assertions serve as a kind of prelude to her song, which warns feminists to heed closely and avoid misinterpreting her complaints: "I'm catching hell. / Living here alone. / I never realized, oh no, / That you mean so much to me." Ironically embracing the "hell" that the song's title reveals she is "catching," the singer accepts responsibility for her status and begs her man to return in a moving, controlled, and simple blues apostrophe: "I'm catching hell. / Living here alone. / And I want you to come back, baby, come back. / 'Cause here's where you belong (oh, yeah)."

The song's apex is a mixing and merging of broad and immediate perspectives through which the speaker humbly reminds her audience of the loneliness she feels. In a less defiant and audacious tone, she asks: "Do you hear me tonight?" She follows this question and ends the song with a series of postscripts that personalize her blues as they reveal a kind of tenet by which she hopes that women and men who identify with her will live: "It's so sad living alone / Living alone. / Hold on to your 'good things'/Hold on." "I'm Catching Hell" challenges the notion that black women--or black men, for that matter--can thrive as well living alone as with a partner. No less self-sufficient than an independent and single black woman, the singer in "I'm Catching Hell" laments her isolated condition in a voice proudly conscious of its anti-feminist articulation of the need for a man to fill the personal void.

Yet although the songstress in "I'm Catching Hell" challenges standard black feminist ideology, she actually possesses a profoundly feminist spirit, evinced through her courageous honesty and determination. She engages in the neo-feminist activity of self-reflection and self-determination that the speaker in "I Am a Black Woman" calls for.

Returning briefly to Evans's work, we notice that "I"--the speaker--in the first line of the poem stands alone, isolated from the terms of her existence. Following "I" is a series of seemingly selected/selective and self-imposed definitions. The speaker--"I'--does not remain syntactically linked to and, thus, dependent on words which define her experience even as these words shape her. The word still in the fifth line frames the preceding phrase, "beyond all definition," while extending the fluidity of the imagery depicting the black woman. The black woman remains represented, but the frame does not limit her character range. Finally, the descriptive metaphor "tall as a cypress" and the juxtaposition of potentially oxymoronic adjectives such as "assailed" and "impervious" denote the angular and asymmetrical elements of the blues as they reveal the experience, demonstrate the growth and evolution, and reinforce the resilience of the black woman. "I Am a Black Woman" acknowledges the blues diva's turmoil while subtly, though effectively, resisting conventions that would silence her.

To conclude, I must return to a point that I established earlier. Opening the epistemic framework of empowerment for black women and the blues requires critics to strike revisionary chords in conventional configurations of black female sexuality and agency in traditional blues matrices. My intention has not been to efface the history of sexual, political and socioeconomic abuses that black women have painstakingly recorded and endured. Rather my objectives flow from a desire to revitalize our assumptions about the concepts of empowerment and agency in relation to black women and the blues. I offer my analyses with the hope that the critical boundaries within which the blues, black female sexuality, and agency have been investigated can broaden, making space for readings such as mine, advanced in a different chord.

Notes

(1.) For related takes on the subversive potential of black female lyricists' performances, see Spillers; Lauret.

(2.) Addressing the myopia in other Carby criticism, as well as scholarship by Pearl Cleage, Farah Griffin makes a similar case for opening jazz compositions, specifically those of Miles Davis, to gyno-affirming readings, particularly in light of the unqualified tribute that noted contemporary female jazz lyricists such as Cassandra Wilson pay Davis in their performances. See "Ladies Sing Miles." Carby (Race Men) and Cleage both take Davis's music to task because of his notoriously misogynistic attitude toward women.

(3.) On this phenomenon, see also Murray's discussion of varying renditions of "The St. Louis Blues" by Bessie Smith in 1925, Louis Armstrong in 1933, Early Hines in the 1940s, and Velma Middleton in the 1950s (Stomping 83, 86).

(4.) Ray Pratt offers an equally cogent definition of the blues in Rhythm and Resistance (83).

Work Cited

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Carby, Hazel." 'It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues." Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. 2nd ed. Ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Du Bois. New York: Routledge, 1994. 330-41.

--. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Cleage, Pearl. Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Cole, Natalie. "I'm Catching Hell (Living Here Alone)." The Natalie Cole Collection. Hollywood: Capitol 7 466192, 1987.

Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Evans, Mad. "I Am a Black Woman." I Am a Black Woman. New York: Knopf, 1959. 11-12.

Griffin, Farah. "Ladies Sing Miles." Miles Davis and American Culture. Ed. Gerald Early. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 2001. 180-87.

Holiday, Billie. "Billie's Blues." The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert. New York: Polygram 833 767-2, 1956.

--. "Don't Explain." The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert. New York: Polygram 833 767-2, 1956.

--, with William Duffy. Lady Sings the Blues: The Searing Autobiography of an American Musical Legend. New York: Penguin, 1956.

Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1974. Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Lauret, Maria."I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues: Alice Walker's Aesthetic." Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Culture. Ed. Richard King and Helen Taylor. New York: New York UP, 1996. 31-50.

Leib, Sandra. Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981. Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Pratt, Ray. Rhythms and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Russell, Michelle. "Slave Codes and Linear Notes." But Some of Us Are Brave. Ed. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. Old Westbury: Feminist P, 1982. 129-40.

Spillers, Hortense. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words." Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. London: Pandora, 1992. 87.

Nghana tamu Lewis, Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is currently working on a book manuscript, Politics from the Pedestal: Modernity and the Mythic Consciousness in White Southem Women's Writing, 1920-1945.