Description:
The Blues Muse explores how iconic blues artists--Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly--have inspired and shaped American poetry across a century of literary history. Emily Ruth Rutter examines how poets have used these musical legends as cultural touchstones, revealing the intersections of race, gender, and celebrity in poetic expression. This compelling study offers a fresh lens on the enduring influence of blues music in shaping American literary identity.
Review Quotes: "Writing from a feminist, multicultural perspective, Rutter builds on a wealth of literary studies about jazz and poetry, work by the likes of Sascha Feinstein, David Yaffe, and Emily Lordi. . . . Rutter focuses on blues masters and how they have inspired poets, starting in the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Black Arts movement into the present day. . . . Though rooted in popular culture, this treatment is complex as it considers gender, race, 'musical celebrity, ' and the aesthetics of song and poetry."
--CHOICE
--Library Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review "An impressively researched and lucidly written analysis of nearly one hundred years of American poetry inspired by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson--those 'blues muses' whose complex lives, art, personae, and historiographies have made them especially rich and persistent subjects for white and black American poets alike."
--Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and Donny Hathaway's Donny Hathaway Live