"I Don't Like the Blues.": Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional Futures from the Mississippi Delta

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  • March 22, 2019
Creator
  • Foster, Bruce
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Sociology
Abstract
  • This dissertation is not about the blues—about the music’s origins in the Mississippi Delta, or its evolution from field holler and work song to Bessie Smith and B.B. King. I do not wish, here, to chronicle or update the record on black American music preferences, and I draw few references to the blues lyric tradition. Rather, this dissertation positions the blues as muse and metaphor; indeed, as an interpretive framework for understanding the racial attitudes, placemaking logics, and folk epistemologies of black southerners in the post-Civil Rights Mississippi Delta. Extending the findings of existent commentary citing the social and sociological capacities of black aesthetic cultures, I demonstrate that black Delta communities imbue the blues with social, cultural, and historical, as well as aesthetic, meaning. I find that while earlier generations embraced and embodied the blues to navigate daily life in the Plantation and Jim Crow South, black southerners today are reimagining the blues—variably as an environment of social memory, site of racial meaning and experience, and arena of regional futurism—and ultimately dispensing with it as they negotiate the emergent realities of the post-Civil Rights Mississippi Delta. I argue that such claims embody a broader way of seeing and negotiating the social world that minds the enduring importance of the past while holding to a transformative vision for the present and future. Indeed, the account offered here, logged during two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Clarksdale, Mississippi, straddles, blurs, and crosses boundaries between remembering and reckoning, vigilance and aspiration, front porches and back roads, New South and Old.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Robinson, Zandria
  • Hunter, Marcus
  • Ifatunji, Mosi
  • Tyson, Karolyn
  • Andrews, Kenneth
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2017
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file details Foster_unc_0153D_16918.pdf 2019-04-11 Public Download
file details Figure 1. Map of Mississippi, With Eleven Central Counties of the Mississippi Delta Notated 2019-04-11 Public Download
file details Figure 2. Map of Clarksdale, Mississippi, With Neighborhood Districts Notated 2019-04-11 Public Download