These should accompany any
reading of this poem. It will greatly enhance the experience:
and
Bessie Smith’s fame grew across
the South in the 1920s, when it was shown that black blues singers’ records
would sell, in spite of doubts from record companies. The old recordings from 1929
and 1928 carried her voice forward, and B. was listening to them the day after
Christmas, 1962, while visiting his mother, which is when DS 68 was written. I
don’t have much patience with the gratuitous appropriation of black American culture,
and all the racist minstrel stuff, but the blues figure too in The Dream Songs, in a different way.
Black music—blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and more—has been so defining of
American identity in the 20th century that the music transcends racial
matters and all Americans have a stake in it. Nothing I can see in this poem
stretches my sense of correctness past the snapping point like B. has managed
before. The last stanza references Bessie Smith’s death, and with some
bitterness. She had a bad car accident in 1937. The ambulance—as would have
been standard procedure—refused to take her to the whites-only hospital (the “sick-house”
with its white birds). Once she made it to the Negro hospital, the thought was
that it was then too late, which was why she died. Likely it wouldn’t have made
a difference because she was too badly injured, but the fact remains that the
best-equipped and nearest hospital was never an option for a black woman in the
South, even if it meant she would die as a result of being refused. So it goes.
“they all come hangin Christmas on some tree / after trees thrown out”—now that
she’s gone, it’s permissible to celebrate her, since her art in its recorded
retrospect is safe and meaningful, but her actual life as an African American
woman, which her art sprang from, meant nothing. Again, so it goes. This will
matter to somebody who poses, or at least envisions himself, in sympathy with
the outsider, repressed image of the black artist in American society. More
broadly, clearly something like this is going to matter to a poet who mines his
life and psyche for inspiration.
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