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464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
The seasonal rains causing the Mississippi River to flood its banks are part of the unalterable course of nature, but the sufferings of untold numbers of black people who lived in towns and the countryside along the river also were attributable to racism. Black people were often considered expendable, and their communities were forced to take the overflow of backwaters in order to reduce the pressure on the levees. While most white people remained safe, black people suffered the wrath of the Mississippi, nature itself having been turned into a formidable weapon of racism.
(p109)
Classic blues comprised an important elaboration of black working-class social consciousness…[it] also foreshadowed a brand of protest that refused to privilege racism over sexism, or the conventional public realm over the private as the preeminent domain of power (42).
Women’s blues cannot be understood apart from their role in the modeling of an emotional community based on the affirmation of black people's—and in particular black women's—absolute and irreducible humanity. The blues woman challenges in her own way the imposition of gender-based inferiority (36).
Blues was threatening because its spokesmen and its ritual too frequently provided the expressive communal channels of relief that had been largely the province of religion in the past (8-9).
Belitted and misconstrued by the dominant culture that has been incapable of deciphering the secrets of her art, she has been ignored and denounced in African-American middle-class circles and repudiated by the most authoritative institution in her own community, the church (124).