Obligaciones de Hacer y No Hacer

In American culture, the road is a phenomenon of national importance, prevalent in film, television, the image, music, and public and political discourse. As I argue, the prominence of the road in our national consciousness is directly tied to our national mythology. Contrary to the cultural myths of progress, in this dissertation, I have taken up the road as an archetype, a rhetorical encounter with the other. Plainly, one of the ways this mythology is constituted and distributed culturally is through song. Recorded by folklorists John and Alan Lomax at Reed Prison Camp in Boykin, South Carolina in 1934, “Look Down That Lonesome Road,” is a vivid illustration of the thematic and mythic importance of the road in African American experience and American culture. “Look Down That Lonesome Road” is a spiritual, but more than a spiritual, it is a poetic and ritual account of African American experience, giving it a profoundly mythic

character and psychagogic rhetorical allure. In this rendition of the tune, as a harmonizing group sings, with pauses between each lyrical refrain, we hear: “Look down […] Look                                                                                                                

1 _{Alan Lomax, “America Sings the Saga of America,” in Alan Lomax: Selected} Writings 1934-1997 ed. Ronald D. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93.

down […] that long […] lonesome […] road […] where you […] and I […] must go […].”2 In “On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs,” Scarborough and Gulledge argue that, “There are certain typical Negro touches about it, for the ‘lonesome road’ is often

referred to in Negro songs, and in Negro ballads one often hangs down his head and cries, as in one of the religious songs.”3 _{Beyond the spirituals, though, this lonesome road} reaches through African American musical lore and into the blues, the substantive focus of this chapter. For instance, in Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins version, titled “Lonesome Road,” we hear a similar story: “You know I hate to go down this lonesome road. Lord, I’m going to keep on traveling until I find some place to go. Lonesome when you’re traveling down this road by yourself.”4

Put differently, through their road songs, our American progenitors have given us an important mythic heritage about the road in American life. However, there are two distinct mythologies. On the side of progress, the cultural myths of rugged individualism and socio-cultural rebellion have shaped our public imagination about the road. On the other side is the archetypal myth of the road as a rhetorical encounter with the other. These roads were not mere metaphor, they were songs written about the road while on the road. Just as America’s expeditions, explorations, and expansion have instilled the road with culturally mythic meaning and ideological purpose, so too the exploitation of African Americans along those long and lonesome roads has imbued the road with the archetype of the road as rhetorical encounter with the other.

2 _{Alan Lomax, “Look Down That Long Lonesome Road,” Deep River of Song:} South Carolina, Got the Keys to the Kingdom, recorded by Alan Lomax, CD, 2002.

3 _{Dorothy Scarborough and Ola Lee Gulledge, On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs} (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 73.

4 _{Ernie Hopkins, “Lonesome Road,” Deep Texas Blues: The Early Blues of} Lightnin’ Hopkins, directed by Ernie Hawkins (2011), DVD.

Up to this point, this dissertation has been mostly concerned with the nature of the road, with the first two chapters functioning as an apostrophe to the road in rhetorical history and American culture. In the previous chapter, I briefly outlined the importance of road songs in American folk music, which permeate all sorts of musical styles and

genres, from different regions and periods, as a bridge to this first case study. In this chapter, then, I use the blues as a representative anecdote for assessing the grand convergence of human relations. Specifically, I use Alan Lomax’s recordings and

fieldwork in the Mississippi Delta to demonstrate the psychagogic rhetorical functions of the blues. Using the language of rhetorical encounter, I show how the blues leads the soul toward along the Upward/Downward Way.

To do this, I focus on three particular collection trips in the Delta. First, I look at Lomax’s first collection trip in the summer of 1933, positioning the bluesman as

psychagogic rhetors and Lomax as audience—this is the Upward Way, revealing an

ultimate order in which the dialectical tension of self and other is transcended by the other-self. Second, transformed by his encounters with the people on the road and in the music, I consider Lomax’s encounter with Muddy Waters in the summer of 1941, situating both Waters and Lomax as psychagogic rhetors—this is the Downward Way, where Lomax broadens the mythic mode of the blues beyond the region so that others can encounter the people through their poetry. Finally, I examine Lomax’s encounter with James Carter in 1959, illustrating a paradigm example of how this mythology has influenced American culture. This case, I argue, reveals the fundamental importance of the mythology of the road, as an archetype, as psychagogic rhetoric, in American culture. Moreover, the potential of the ultimate order in the archetype that I have outlined,

enhances the persuasiveness of this music; hence, it demands our attention as a rhetorical device, “Even when we distrust its claims.”5 The objective, then, is to equip us as citizens and scholars with an ultimate vocabulary for confronting our living in relation with others.