Blindness as a Rhetorical Trope in Blues Discourse

One potentially fruitful area for study in black music is the rhetorical analysis of blues discourse, which consists of the stories, descriptions, and other assorted verbiage found in scholarly articles, in reviews and liner notes, over nightclub tables and on bandstands, and in all the other places where people turn their experience of blues music into words. Like other forms of discourse, talk and writing about blues music and musicians display a characteristic set of narrative strategies and rhetorical tropes. This particular discourse has developed as a complex combination of black attitudes toward the blues and of white projections of what the music is and means, since most writing about blues has been by whites. The process is complicated further when black performers tell white fans and musicologists what they want to hear. This article is meant to suggest some of the ways literary modes of analysis can contribute to an understanding of blues discourse by considering the rhetoric of the oral autobiographies of two little-known Chicago street singers, Arvella Gray and James Brewer, with an emphasis on one rhetorical trope, that of blindness. The folk roots of blues music supply its performers with a wealth of archetypes, both in the lyrics of the songs and in the ways the singers talk about their lives and their music. In the absence of a body of documentation about even a few of the most popular and widely-recorded blues artists, many writers and commentators on the blues have shown their own penchant for mythologizing their subjects. The bluesmen and women themselves have helped to create a cluster of legends and mythical figures centered around the music and its performers. One of the most evocative of these mythical images is that of the blind blues singer. Some of the best-known country blues singers have been blind men; Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, Sleepy John Estes, Willie

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Black music · Blues · Guitar · Linguistics · Literature · Lyrics · Movement (music · Narrative · Popular music · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Trope (literature · Visual arts · History · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History

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