Title: The Blues in African-American Culture | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: The Blues in African-American Culture
The Blues in African-American Culture
The Blues in African-American Culture
Writing the Blues
The Black Arts Movement and After
Blues Across the Arts
Blues Legacies
Bibliography

Content: He had dared to let his blues people speak in their own vernacular voices about love, lust, loss, and violent revenge. Hughes held firm to his conviction about the artistic validity of black popular music in a manifesto entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926). " Let the blare of Negro jazz bands," he wrote, "and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand" (Hughes, 1994, p. 59). Every twenty-first century poet who strives to write a blues poem — or, for that matter, a jazz poem, or a hip-hop poem — owes a debt to Hughes for his pioneering work. Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was, in some sense, more naturally aligned with the blues than Handy or Hughes, growing up as she had in a small Florida town where "box pickers" (guitarists) of local renown frequently entertained crowds on the front porch of a local drygoods store. Yet Hurston's most important contribution to our understanding of African-American blues culture came as a result of several extended visits she made to the jooks, the backwoods blues clubs, of a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida — a subculture that no other anthropologist, black or white, had ever investigated. Her vivid descriptions of Big Sweet, Lucy, Ella Wall, and the other tough-talking, razor-wielding blueswomen helped animate both her germinal volume of black folklore, Mules and Men (1935), and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). An amateur blues singer and harmonica player in her own right, Hurston used her juke-joint experiences to create the central character of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Tea Cake, the joyous, playful, sometimes violent young Florida bluesman who helps liberate the novel's heroine, Janie Crawford Killicks Starks, by convincing her to follow him down onto the "muck" of Florida's Lake Okeechobee region where "blues are made and used right on the spot" (Hurston, 1990, p. 125). The Black Arts Movement and After
Between 1920, when Mamie Smith 's recording of "Crazy Blues" became a race-records sensation, and 1961, when Jimmy Reed 's "Baby What You Want Me to Do" was a top-ten hit in Chicago, blues music was arguably the black popular music: