William Faulkner, le jazz et le blues
Quand il allait danser à Ole Miss, 1915-1918

 

Faulkner (1897-1962), élève médiocre à la high school, la quitte, en 1915 (à 18 ans), et prend un emploi de commis ou gratte-papier (assistant bookkeeper) dans une banque (qui appartenait à son grand-père). C'est à cette époque qu'il va le soir danser (avec Estelle Oldham) à Gordon Hall sur le campus de “Ole Miss” (University of Mississipi, Oxford, MS), à quoi fait allusion [Mme] Thadious Davis dans l'essai cité ci-dessous.

Thadious M. Davis, From Jazz Syncopation to Blues Elegy: Faulkner's Development of Black Characterization, dans Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Edited by), Faulkner and Race, Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1987, pp. 70 ss.

Premiers paragraphes

Listening to W. C. Handy's 1916 blues song “Ole Miss,” recorded by jazz pianist James P. Johnson in 1922, I am reminded of the way in which blues and jazz intermingled in the music of that period. Southern-born Handy, called “the father of the blues,” and Northern-born Johnson, father of the hot piano, did not single-handedly invent the music that they composed and performed; instead, for creative inspiration, each drew upon traditional black music, secular and sacred… “Ole Miss” is Handy's tribute to the University of Mississippi where, as a Memphis bandleader and cornetist, he frequently played for campus dances and balls.

One of the Oxford youngsters attending those dances was William Faulkner. In describing Faulkner's social activities during the fall of 1915, Joseph Blotner points to dances in the ballroom of Gordon Hall: “There were no tangos yet; instead there were fox trots and one-steps of the day interspersed among the jazz numbers. A year before [1914], Handy had composed a popular piece… called ‘The St. Louis Blues.’ Late in the evening he might launch into its melancholy, syncopated strains or those of another one he had called ‘The Memphis Blues.’ ” There were also dances given by Sallie Murry at The Big Place, where Chess Carothers would “pump the player piano” for the dancers on the porch, and there were other dance parties at Myrtle Ramey's house, or Estelle and Dorothy Oldham's, where Lucius Pegues's three-piece band would sometimes play. Faulker and his hometown friends were already enjoying the kind of social dancing that would become a national phenomenon a few years later when jazz rhythms would inspire the Shimmy, Charleston, and Black Bottom, all dances invented by blacks but popularized by whites such as Irene and Vernon Castle whose arranger was the black musician Fletcher Henderson.

As a budding writer in the decades during and after World War I, William Faulkner of Oxford was not isolated from the changes in popular tastes or from the spread of the “new music.” Like others of his generation, he witnessed the rapid dissemination of hit tunes that thanks to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Emile Berliner's disc records, and the radio receiver, could arrive in small Southern towns almost as quickly as they appeared in major cities. Radio and records combined with sheet music from Tin Pan Alley and small band orchestras to send popular music into every part of the country and every segment of the population.

Argument de cet essai

Thadious M. Davis' "From Jazz Syncopation to Blues Elegy: Faulkner's Development of Black Characterization" ingeniously relates Faulkner's comic black stereotypes to jazz music and his more individualized, profoundly developed black characters to blues (a category that includes religious music like that at the end of Soldiers' Pay). Davis' research is original and illuminating, especially when she discusses the vogue of black music during Faulkner's apprenticeship period. His drawings of black jazz bands, she notes, probably portrayed W. C. Handy, author of "The St. Louis Blues" (the title source of "That Evening Sun"); at Ole Miss, the young Faulkner had attended dances where Handy's band performed.