The Language of Blind Lemon Jefferson

I am an invisible man. (Ellison 1986, 17) And it's tough to see a man go to rack and almost starve and die. --Blind Lemon Jefferson (Tin Cup Blues, 1929) I can't see ya, but I can smell ya! --Blind Lemon Jefferson (quoted in James [1997, 14]) Because of his strong artistic influence and commercial impact on newborn country blues race-records field, Blind Lemon Jefferson has often been considered by music critics as an archetypal figure. If it is true that the blues are true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding--as bluesman Willie Dixon remarked (Dixon and Snowden 1989, 2)--then nobody better than Jefferson depicted African-American life in 1920s South. After working as an itinerant street musician for more than ten years, he began an extremely successful recording career, which lasted from 1926 to 1929 and resulted in a total of 110 sides (including all his alternate takes), of which seven were not issued and six are not yet available in any format. (1) His compositions reflect a strong and complex personality expressing, in an ironic, humorous, sad, yet never contradictory and self-pitying manner, his own way of understanding existence. The purpose of this study is to reassert Jefferson's relevance as an artist through an examination of his lyrics and to show that language he used is not casual, derivative, or negligible. A more-or-less cryptic message is present in each of his compositions, and such a message, in turn, represents a clear reflection of one of most extensive, heterogeneous, and at same time closely knit bodies of blues lyrics handed down to us. The tightly interconnected nature of his texts constitutes such an extremely variegated range of themes--either drawn from tradition and shaped into something new and vital or, especially in latter part of his recording career, stemming directly from his textual creative power--that it is impossible to delve thoroughly into all of them here. However, unlike previous studies of Blind Lemon Jefferson's lyrics, this study's challenge is to outline development of this bluesman's lyrical artistry and imagery by examining his poignant songs from a broader perspective. Jefferson's seemingly primitive and thoughtless approach to blues lyric composition turns out to be, in a more detailed analysis, result of a careful--albeit instinctual--choice of most suitable words to convey deepest meanings and feelings. Blindness on Blindness In past few years, researchers have focused their efforts on recovering biographical information on Jefferson. Such activity has been fundamental for preserving memory of a musician who died over seventy years ago, but it may also have contributed to Jefferson's progressively lower degree of visibility in pre-war blues panorama, from a critical point of view. Nevertheless, Jefferson's linguistic creative power has always been apparent since first insightful pieces of criticism that blues scholars produced beginning at end of 1950s. To name just most outstanding and relevant to this subject matter, there are first pioneering acknowledgments of Jefferson's stature as a man and poet (Oliver [1959] 1988, 64-70; Charters 1959, 57-72; Charters [1967] 1991, 175-189); first anthologized transcriptions of whole texts (Sackheim 1969, 72-91, 457-458), followed by a more complete serialized collection (Groom 1967-71, 1974; Groom 1970), amended--although not always enhanced--in successive stages (Taft 1983, 124-137; Macleod 1988, 65; Macleod 1992, 31-33, 379-397; Macleod 1994, 153-187); hermeneutic, as well as statistical, study on evolution of Jefferson's lyricism from a mainly traditional to a progressively more cohesive thematicism (Evans 1987, 75-81; Evans 1999, 1:607-609); and meticulous attempt at assembling pieces of Jefferson's biographical mysteries with a view to interpreting his songs (Govenar 1991; Govenar and Brakefield 1998, 61-79; Swinton 1997)

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