The Creative Recuperation of "Blind Tom" Wiggins in Tyehimba Jess's Olio and Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank

Bibliographic Data

ID4572912
AuthorsEmily Ruth Rutter (0000-0002-5258-7021, Ball State University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume44
Issue3
Pages175-196
Publication date2019-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlz026
OpenAlexW2969750386
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited27

This essay examines Tyehimba Jess's Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Olio (2016) and Jeffery Renard Allen's acclaimed novel Song of the Shank (2014), focusing specifically on their creative recuperations of "Blind Tom," a famed pianist who remained in bondage throughout a performance career that spanned the antebellum and postbellum periods. Citing and interpolating archival documents about "Blind Tom," Olio and Song of the Shank denaturalize what Jennifer Stoever terms the "sonic color line," whereby music and other forms of aural production became inextricably bound up with racial stratification. Through contrapuntal persona poems, which may be read vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, Jess also pays tribute to Tom's musical dexterity while implying the myriad possible interpretations of the musician's life and art. Alternatively, Allen's nonlinear novel makes use of free indirect discourse, not to reimagine Tom's interiority but instead to focalize the largely undocumented interior thoughts of those who controlled Tom's life, underscoring the famed musician's lack of agency and self-determination. Not purporting to recover the "real" Tom, Allen and Jess employ distinct but decidedly self-reflexive methodologies, suggesting the ways in which historical accounts are similarly constructed to emphasize particular perspectives and silence others. As they advance counternarratives to archival accounts of "Blind Tom," Jess's Olio and Allen's Song of the Shank also elucidate cultural through-lines between the nineteenth century and our own time, especially unsettling teleological readings of the nation's steady progress toward racial equality

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Harmony (Music) · Humanities · Literature · Musical · Persona · Poetry · Silence · Sociology · History · Music History and Culture · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Race, History, and American Society

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