After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

This chapter addresses Sterling A. Brown’s essays and blues-based poems, particularly those appearing in his 1932 collection Southern Road, to raise questions of commodification in the context of the technologized recording and dissemination of African American musical forms, especially the blues. The chapter claims that in Brown’s work (and that of other commentators), the folksong collector emerges as a figure antithetical to the commodification of folk forms suggested by the phonograph. Brown’s attitude toward the phonograph was ambivalent: He embraced it at times, and at others dismissed it as an emblem of commodification and cultural appropriation. The phonograph, however, emerged within a shifting set of cultural practices in which the boundaries between live performance and recorded sound, as well as bodies and recording apparatuses, became permeable and negotiable. Thus, even when Brown’s poems celebrate the blues as an uncommodified oral cultural form indissociable from its social and material milieu in the folk community, as in his iconic poem “Ma Rainey,” the phonograph becomes a kind of vanishing mediator between the poem and its vernacular sources, as Brown’s poems’ constructions of orality are underwritten by its inescapable technologized presence.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.