AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 83
heightening interest in slave culture among white Northerners whose dominant source for
images of black musicality was the minstrel stage. And on the other hand, reviewers continually
raised suspicion about her enslaved past, even suggesting at times that she could be Jenny
Lind in blackface. This study demonstrates how mid-century reviewers constructed racial difference
through Greenfield’s musical performance.
HEARING AND SEEING THE BLUES: MUSICAL IDEOLOGIES,
NARRATIVE CONTAINMENT, AND BESSIE SMITH IN St. LoUiS BLUeS
Jessica M. Courtier
Carroll University
In 1929 Bessie Smith starred in the short sound film St. Louis Blues, performing the title
song she had recorded four years earlier with Louis Armstrong. The narrative that frames
Smith’s performance as the character “Bessie” roughly parallels the subject of the song: the
protagonist’s lover leaves her for a more fashionable woman, and she pines for him in his absence.
With Smith’s a cappella and accompanied singing supported by both on- and off-screen
contributions from J. Rosamond Johnson, members of the Fletcher Henderson band, W. C.
Handy, James P. Johnson, and the Hall Johnson choir, St. Louis Blues records a collaboration
by an extraordinary constellation of African American musical luminaries.
Scholarly discussions of the film often foreground the role Smith plays and St. Louis Blues’s
tired racial stereotypes, which were nearly ubiquitous in films of the period. Blues historian
Francis Davis (1995) and cultural critic Angela Davis (1998), for instance, read the role of a
weak “Bessie” as a personal affront to Smith, to whom they ascribe an almost archetypal power
of strong black womanhood, an assessment grounded in her fiery temperament and her songs’
subject matter. Such evaluations respond to white director Dudley Murphy’s positioning of
the blues as an utterance of personal grief in the context of humiliation and his apparent belief
that St. Louis Blues was an almost documentary representation of African American nightlife
in Harlem (Delson, 2008). These historical and contemporary perceptions of St. Louis Blues
share an interpretive prioritization of the disempowering narrative at the expense of considering
the film’s musical performances. In so doing, they read “Bessie” as if she were a portrait of
Smith, conflating role and performer. Both positions rely on the idea of Smith’s singing merely
as personal expression rather than as the deliberately shaped articulation of a professional
artist: while Murphy heard the blues as pure lament without imagining a potential range of
experiences informing musical choices, the present-day critics regard Smith as a figure of unwavering
strength and fail to listen to Smith’s voice at all.
In this paper I take these problems in reading St. Louis Blues as entry points for questions
about music and truth telling. My consideration of the collaborative musical performances
of St. Louis Blues reveals a complex of social relationships that extend beyond the parameters
of either lamentation or heroism for Smith and establish relationships between Smith and
other on-screen performers that begin to redress the degradation of “Bessie’s” abandonment.
I further assert that the musicians’ presence in the film, with its highly problematic narrative,
must be heard as reflective of the lived realities of the films’ participants as professional musicians.
Finally, I argue that St. Louis Blues and other similar short films that paired music and
narrative were a ubiquitous means of conveying ideas about race and music in popular culture,
and thus offer a corrective to traditional jazz and blues histories by serving as a reminder