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Race/Music:

Corrine Corrina, Bo Chatmon, and the Excluded Middle

http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/music/erlmannseries/corrina.htm

Christopher A. Waterman

(University of California, Los Angeles)

To appear in Music and the Racial Imagination (In Press, University of Chicago Press)

P. Bohlman and R. Radano, editors

Please do not cite without permission of the author

© 1998 Christopher Alan Waterman



I. Introduction

The last decade has seen a critical reappraisal of the notion that certain musical genres, forms, and practitioners may reasonably be taken to summarize or encapsulate the historical experience of human ¡¥races.¡¦ This critique¡Xadvanced by scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Anthony Appiah--enjoys particular relevance in the United States, where music has long played a privileged role in the naturalization of racial categories, and where commonsense conceptualizations of musical ¡¥blackness¡¦ and ¡¥whiteness¡¦ have been employed to varying ends by racial supremacists, politicians, academics, and, most efficaciously, the entertainment industry. In music-historical discourses, the retrospective construction of well-bounded, organically unified race-traditions--musicological corollary of the infamous one-drop rule--has tended to confine the complexities and contradictions of people¡¦s lived experience (including their experience of racism) within the bounds of contemporary ideological categories. Performers, genres, texts, and practices not consonant with dominant conceptions of racial difference have as a result often been elided from academic, journalistic, and popular representations of the history of American music.

If it be granted that some forms of essentialism remain necessary resources in the struggle against racism, it is then all the more crucial that we analyze the logics of inclusion and exclusion that have informed the production of racialized music histories. One effective way to throw such ideas into critical relief is to examine music that springs from, circulates around, and seeps through the interstices between racial categories. The analysis of such forms, and of the circumstances of their production and reception, can help us to understand musicians and audiences not as instances of idealized types, but as human beings, working under particular historical conditions to produce, elaborate, and defend certain modes of social existence.

The substantive focus of my talk today is a song, the venerable Corrine Corrina. First recorded in 1928 by the Mississippi-born guitarist and singer Bo Chatmon (a.k.a. Bo Carter), Corrina is a blues, in the well-known 12-bar, AAB-texted form. It is also an ¡¥old-timey¡¦ country song, with roots in the southern ¡¥common stock¡¦ tradition (Russell 1970:28); and a pop tune, carefully crafted to appeal to a extensive and heterogeneous audience. Chatmon¡¦s recording was subsequently ¡¥covered¡¦ by musicians working in a great variety of genres and stylistic contexts, including Red Nichols, Art Tatum, Muddy Waters, Albert Ammons, Mississippi John Hurt, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Floyd Cramer, Freddy Fender, Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas Wanderers and the Tennessee Drifters, cajun music pioneer Leo Soileau, Big Joe Turner, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector, Bobby Vinton, Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and (my favorite musical trio) Steppenwolf, Lawrence Welk, and George Winston.

My lecture today intercepts the song¡¦s complex 70-year trajectory from several angles. In the first part of the talk I locate Bo Chatmon¡¦s 1928 recording of Corinne Corinna within a broader musical and social terrain, and attempt to account for the marginal status to which both the song and the musicians who performed it have been relegated in subsequent journalistic and academic writing about American music. In the second half, I present a series of analytical ¡¥snapshots¡¦ of subsequent recordings (or ¡¥cover versions¡¦) of Corrina, in an attempt to highlight the song¡¦s complex and shifting relationship to evolving discourses of racial difference, identity, and commensurability.

II. Bo Chatmon¡¦s Corrine Corrina

Early in 1929, Brunswick Records--the label of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, seeking to make inroads into the then-thriving ¡¥race¡¦ and ¡¥hillbilly¡¦ music markets--released the first recording of Corrine Corrina, performed by the singer and guitarist Armenter ¡¥Bo¡¦ Chatmon (a.k.a. Bo Carter, the name under which the record was released). Chatmon was accompanied by his older brother Lonnie Chatmon on violin, and their friend Charley McCoy on mandolin and supporting vocals. The trio, which had been recorded by Brunswick¡¦s mobile unit in New Orleans in December 1928, was a somewhat informal affair, drawn from a network of African American musicians from the hill country of central Mississippi. These musicians worked together in various configurations, playing dance music for both ¡¥white¡¦ and ¡¥colored¡¦ audiences. During the same recording sessions that produced Corrine Corrina, the Chatmons, McCoy, and the guitarist Walter Vincson also recorded several down-home blues songs and two so-called ¡¥coon songs,¡¦ Good Old Turnip Greens and The Yellow Coon Has No Race (Godrich and Dixon 1982:131,150).

The copyright for Corrine Corrina was co-registered in the names of Bo Chatmon and J. Mayo Williams. Williams, a former collegiate football star who worked during the 1920s and 30s as recording director for the race music departments of Paramount and Brunswick/Vocalion, identified and groomed recording ¡¥stars¡¦ such as Ma Rainey, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Georgia Tom. He directed dozens of important recording sessions, and oversaw the promotion of race records in African American communities (see Dixon and Godrich 1970). Williams¡¦ nickname, ¡¥Ink,¡¦ was at least in part a reference to his skill at talking musicians into signing away the rights to songs they recorded. Thomas A. Dorsey (a.k.a. Georgia Tom), a pianist and singer who was later to become a central figure in gospel music, worked for Williams in the studio. "A guy¡¦d come in with a song," Dorsey later recalled, "and he¡¦d sing it. He had nobody to arrange it or put it down on paper. So I put it down on paper and then the company could copyright it" (Barlow 1989:131). According to Samuel Charters, Mayo Williams "handled musical copyrights through a Paramount subsidiary, the Chicago Publishing Company, and made considerable money with some of the successful blues. He usually listed himself as a composer" (Charters 1975:51). By 1928 Williams had left Paramount for Brunswick, and was thus in a position to claim partial credit, and half the composer¡¦s royalties for Corrine Corrina.

Bo Chatmon¡¦s recording was advertised in Brunswick¡¦s race record catalog, among other items intended primarily for sale to African American listeners, but it also apparently sold well among southern whites, in Mississippi and farther afield. For any listener whose model of the Mississippi blues is the work of Robert Johnson (recorded some eight years later), Corrine Corrina offers an alternative view of the musical landscape.

The recording opens with Lonnie Chatmon¡¦s fiddle, playing the last four bars of the song¡¦s melody as an introduction (a arranging strategy common in pop recordings of the time). Bo Chatmon¡¦s guitar maintains a steady ¡¥boom-chick¡¦ dance rhythm throughout, while Charley McCoy¡¦s mandolin playing alternates between chords, played on the off-beats, and melodic phrases that either double the voices or fill in between vocal phrases. Lonnie¡¦s fiddle shifts from foreground to background, sometimes heterophonically ¡¥ghosting¡¦ the melody, sometimes playing descending pentatonic licks between sung phrases, and, in a few places, providing a delicate tremelo background.

The vocal melody, harmonized by Chatmon and McCoy in parallel thirds, is basically heptatonic, with occasional blue notes. The first phrase begins with a melodic sequence common in ragtime, jazz, and Hawaiian guitar recordings of the 1920s: ascending half-step movement from the 3rd to the 5th degree below the tonic, followed by a leap of a major 6th up to the 3rd degree above the tonic (C#-D-D#-E-C#2, the opening melodic gesture of Scott Joplin¡¦s rag "The Entertainer"). The ¡¥feel¡¦ of the music¡Xby which I mean its ensemble texture, timbre, and four-square rhythm--is deeply indebted to the African American string band tradition. This ensemble tradition, largely ignored in the literature on American music, had already existed for at least a century in a relationship of continual cross-pollination with English, Celtic, and German-derived fiddle traditions and popular dance music. The chord progression, melodic blue notes, AAB text, and 12-bar form of Corrine Corrina link it to the country blues tradition and the vaudevillian ¡¥classic blues,¡¦ both of which were well-known to these musicians. The careful arrangement--including its instrumental introduction and well defined melodic ¡¥hook¡¦--suggests a firm grasp of ¡¥mainstream¡¦ pop aesthetics and of the expressive possibilities of the 3-minute recording span. Chatmon and McCoy¡¦s vocal technique is relaxed and slightly nasal--a kind of cross between country ¡¥twang¡¦ and pop crooning--and the dialect employed is best characterized as generically ¡¥southern,¡¦ that is, not explicitly coded in racial terms. (His later work as a solo artist suggests that Bo was adept at linguistic code-switching.) It could, in fact, be argued that Corrine Corrina is a regional variant of a genre that DeFord Bailey, African American harmonica player on the Grand Ol¡¦ Opry, called "black hillbilly music" (Wolfe 1990:32). At the very least, a complete genealogy of this performance would have to include minstrelsy and the medicine show, Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, jazz, Delta blues, the ¡¥hillbilly blues¡¦ of Jimmie Rodgers, Hawaiian guitar bands, and a wide spectrum of country dance music.

Although the significance of music is never reducible to the social circumstances and interests of its creators, an adequate interpretation of the 1928 recording of Corrine Corrina must, I think, take into account a complex and ramifying network of social and musical relationships that transcended legal, customary and cultural boundaries between racially-defined communities in Jim Crow Mississippi. The hero of our story, Armenter ¡¥Bo¡¦ Chatmon, was born in the ¡¥hill country¡¦ of Hinds County, south-by-southeast of the Mississippi Delta, in 1893.



The Chatmon clan, an extended family almost all of whose members were competent musicians, lived on the Gaddis & McLaurin plantation, just outside of Bolton, Mississippi. The Chatmons relied upon a hybrid economic strategy, which included farming, various skilled crafts, and professional music-making. The patriarch of the family, Henderson Chatmon (1850-1934), was the matrilineal grandson of a female slave and a white planter, Sam Heron. According to Josephine Williams, one of Henderson¡¦s daughters, the old man claimed that his mother had been brought up in the master¡¦s house by Heron¡¦s wife "just like...one of her own" (Calt and Wardlow 1988:49). Although their sphere of effective action was to some degree circumscribed by race, class, and geographical location, the Chatmons¡¦ position as agrarian-proletarian-artisans of ¡¥mixed race¡¦ appears to have allowed them a degree of social latitude available to few African Americans in early 20th century rural Mississippi.

Henderson was a renowned fiddler, whose musical taste and technique appears to have been shaped by his long-standing and relatively intimate interaction with whites. He learned the core Anglo-American ¡¥barn dance¡¦ repertoire from a planter named Bob Lacy, sometime in the 1860s or 70s. According to Bo¡¦s youngest brother, Sam Chatmon, their father often played for local square dances with a white fiddler named Old Man Miller. It is clear from comments made by members of the Chatmon family that music was more than a form of entertainment or a means of expression for Henderson: it was also an alternative mode of labor. The relative prosperity and stability of the Chatmon clan was in large part based upon carefully husbanded musical skills, and a cosmopolitan, incorporative approach to music-making which allowed them to weave a set of socioeconomic relationships that crossed the color line (echoing, though not reproducing exactly, their recognized genealogical links to local white families).

Bo Chatmon started his musical career around 1900 as an accompanist, playing string bass, banjo, and guitar behind the fiddling of his father Henderson and older brother Lonnie. At this time the Chatmons repertoire focused mainly on square dance music (including songs such as Little Liza Jane and Can¡¦t Put the Saddle on the Old Grey Mare). Beginning in 1908, a gramophone purchased by a Bolton cafe owner exposed the young Chatmons to "contemporary pop material like Wild Cherry Rag, Ballin¡¦ the Jack and Chicken Reel" (Calt 1992:3). The first blues that Bo¡¦s younger brother Sam remembered learning were published songs such as St. Louis Blues, Beale Street Blues, and Sugar Blues, heard on gramophone records and at the minstrel shows that toured near Bolton. If any of the Chatmons liked a particular song, Lonnie would drive into town and buy the sheet music so that they all could learn it. (He was one of the few rural musicians in the area, of whatever color, who could read musical notation.)

From around World War One until 1928, the Chatmon family formed a septet, which played at dances in the hill country and the Delta. "We played for parties everywhere," Sam remembered. "For colored and white, too. All we wanted was the money. If we would play two hours and a half, we¡¦d get five dollars a man. When we¡¦d get through with [our] crops, late on by June or July, we¡¦d all get together and take a tour all up through Memphis, Chicago, and different places like that. We played Donna, Somebody Stole My Gal, Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. See, we was playin¡¦ jazz music" (Lomax 1993:384). The Chatmons do seem to have functioned as a jazz band while on the road, often hiring a local trumpet player, while Bo sometimes doubled on clarinet.

Clearly, the Chatmon¡¦s continual circulation--between the Hill country and the Delta, the South and the North, the country and the city, and white and colored communities and social events--enabled (in fact, required) them to develop a heterogeneous musical repertoire and a diverse set of performative tactics. They were widely regarded on both sides of the color line as the best musicians in central Mississippi. The Chatmons also made a strong impression on influential Delta bluesmen such as Charlie Patton, a musician of mixed African, European, and Amerindian descent who began his career as a guitarist with them, and later claimed to be Henderson¡¦s son. In an interview, Muddy Waters said that as a young man in the Mississippi Delta he "walked ten miles to see them play" (Calt, Kent and Stewart 1992:2).

At the time he recorded Corrine Corrina, Bo Chatmon was also working with the Mississippi Sheiks, a string band that included his brothers Lonnie and Sam, the guitarist Walter Vincson, Charley McCoy, and his brother Joe, who talent at interracial mimesis was sufficient to allow him to make several recordings under the nom de disque ¡¥The Hillbilly Plowboy¡¦ (Garon and Garon 1992:288, fn 47). The name of the band, inspired by the Tin Pan Alley tune The Sheik of Araby, was a jovial reference to a long-standing Orientalist strain in American popular culture, epitomized by the films of Rudolph Valentino. The reference to popular images of Arabs (usually played by Latin American actors) evoked an exotic, and in some ways intermediate racial category not available in the United States, where the term ¡¥mulatto¡¦ had been officially eliminated from the national census in 1920.

According to Samuel Charters (1990:136-37), some of The Mississippi Sheiks¡¦ records sold well in the rapidly expanding black communities of Chicago and other northern cities. The motivation to extend their appeal among whites--who, according to Sam Chatmon, formed the bulk of their audience in live performance situations--led the Sheiks to record songs such as "Yodelling, Fiddling Blues" (1930), an homage to ¡¥hillbilly¡¦ musician Jimmie Rodgers (Davis 1995:88). On some recordings, including their rendition of "Jail Bird Love Song" (OKeh 8834, 1930), Bo Chatmon and Walter Vinson skillfully emulated the ¡¥high lonesome¡¦ vocal style popularised by the Carter Family and the Blue Sky Boys. Although racist promotional principles prevailed for the most part--the Sheiks¡¦ records generally being restricted to the ¡¥race record¡¦ catalogues--at least one of their recordings was cross-listed in the white country music or ¡¥hillbilly¡¦ catalogue. This was a rare occurrence, and an indication of the degree to which the Sheiks, and the Chatmons, retained the ability to move back and forth between ¡¥Negro¡¦ and ¡¥white¡¦ musical domains.



Apart from Lizzie Douglas (a.k.a. Memphis Minnie), Bo Chatmon appeared on more pre-War gramophone recordings than any other Mississippi musician (Calt 1992:2). This fact makes it all the more curious that his image scarcely registers on the radar screen of American music scholarship. Completely neglected in authoritative histories of country music, Chatmon shows up only tangentially in the literature on the blues. In a recent attempt to rescue Bo Chatmon from the neglect of blues historians, John Miller argues that he was "the most sophisticated of all country bluesmen from a harmonic viewpoint" (Miller 1992:4), and that he possessed a "personal musical aesthetic unique in the country blues idiom" (1992:5). Bo--a light-skinned, somewhat finicky teetotaller who dressed in suits, owned a Model T Ford, and developed professional skills such as carpentry and gramophone repairing¡Xcertainly does not fit the stereotypical mould of the footloose, hard-drinking, (and, in the popular imagination, almost always dark-skinned) Mississippi bluesman. It seems that Chatmon¡¦s voraciously cosmopolitan sensibility--a structure of feeling not easily apprehended through dichotomous distinctions such as ¡¥black¡¦ and ¡¥white,¡¦ ¡¥urban¡¦ and ¡¥rural,¡¦ or ¡¥folk¡¦ and ¡¥popular¡¦--is in some measure responsible for the marginal position to which he has been relegated in most accounts of the history of American music.

Let me expand upon this observation, beginning with a quote from Reginald McKnight¡¦s essay "Confessions of a Wannabe Negro," published in Gerald Early¡¦s edited collection Lure and Loathing:

When whites ¡¥do blackface,¡¦ people don¡¦t so much as blink...I daresay they are looked upon by many with a kind of admiration...As for blacks who are influenced by expression that is not, as some would say ¡¥preponderantly black,¡¦ the response is rather more ambiguous. Charley Pride, for example, or Richie Havens, or Jimi Hendrix, or Tracy Chapman may be praised for their talents, their virtuosity in the ¡¥pure¡¦ sense, but I know of no one who lauds such artists for their mastery of art forms that could be referred to as decidedly ¡¥white¡¦. . .Is blackness-as-performance somehow regarded as a free-floating entity, belonging to no one in particular, while whiteness-as-performance can, and should, only belong to whites? After all, it appears to me that black-influenced whites are very often thought to be deepened and ennobled by such processes, while white-influenced blacks are regarded as weakened, diluted, less black (McKnight 1993:104).

I think it is fair to say that no genre has played a more prominent role in racial identity politics in the United States than The Blues, continually invoked as a baseline or core of black culture history. Blues music has been represented as a totem of Negro experience (Leroi Jones), a metaphor for black resistance throughout the Americas (Julio Finn), "a survival technique, aesthetic equipment for living" (Albert Murray), a "way of life" (Peter Guralnick), a noble and "essentially American" epic (Robert Palmer), an embodiment of African American theology (Jon Spencer), and a wellspring of vernacular literary theory (Houston Baker). Over the last thirty years, a powerful logic has shaped popular and scholarly discourse about the blues: the ¡¥deep¡¦ Delta blues is in and the African American string band, suspended between dominant conceptions of ¡¥whiteness-as-performance¡¦ and ¡¥blackness-as-performance,¡¦ is out; Robert Johnson is in, and the Chatmons are out; the guitar is in, and the fiddle out (which is probably why people seem so surprised to discover Louis Farrakhan¡¦s passion for the violin). I am not simply complaining here about the exclusion of a particular performer, instrument, repertoire, song, or genre from the historical record. Rather, I would argue that this empirical gap is significant because it illuminates the limits of scholars¡¦ conceptualizations of the topography of American music during a crucial period in its development.

Although Bo Chatmon¡¦s performance of Corrine Corrina bears many of the diagnostic traits typically used to identify real, authentic blues, its hybrid style and sensibility apparently places it outside of the tradition-as-such: a blues performed by rural Mississippians, but, strangely enough, not a rural Mississippi Blues. This exclusionary logic can be seen at work in the analytical equivalent of a Freudian slip, in Stephen Calt¡¦s notes for the 1978 compilation Roots of Rock, which includes the first re-issue of Chatmon¡¦s Corrine Corrina. Calt suggests that the 1928 recording "indicates a pre-blues origin by virtue of its eight bar structure, melodic structure, and conventional accenting" (Calt 1978, emphasis added). The ¡¥mixed¡¦ sensibility of the performance apparently led his ears astray, for Corrina, whatever its stylistic affinities, is in formal terms indisputably a 12-bar blues. In this instance, the discursive ¡¥necessity¡¦ of situating Corrina outside of (prior to) the blues-as-such--quintessentially defined by the Delta solo vocalist-and-guitar tradition--apparently induced a kind of anachronistic hallucination on the part of this knowledgeable scholar of the blues.

Both the Chatmons and the wider network of musicians that made up the Mississippi Sheiks are generally treated as less than wholly authentic supernumeraries of the blues tradition. Blues scholar Samuel Charters, for example, is somewhat dismissive of the central Mississippi string band style, represented by the Sheiks and Charlie McCoy¡¦s Mississippi Hot Footers:

The rhythm was a heavy 4/4, steady, even monotonous, but clearly defined so that there would be no difficulty dancing to it. At times the rhythms--especially when Bo Chatmon was the guitarist--were so dull that the bands were almost as bad as the white music that was being played in the area (1991:136).

"Almost as bad as the white music"--it is hard to imagine a more stark denial of racio-cultural bona fides. What claim is being advanced here? That the Chatmons, the McCoys, and their associates sold out, diluting ¡¥black rhythm¡¦ in order to make a profit? That they sought to ¡¥get over¡¦ by mimetically appropriating whiteness-as-performance? At the very least, Charters¡¦ comments suggest that something more than aesthetics per se is at stake in historical representations (and erasures) of the musical and social matrix within which Bo Chatmon and many other Mississippi performers operated.

In his study of mulattos in the United States, Joel Williamson (1980) documents the incorporation during the post-Reconstruction era of people of ¡¥mixed race¡¦ into an expanding ¡¥negro¡¦ identity. By 1920--when the category was officially eliminated from the United States census--most "mulattos...had," in Williamson¡¦s words, "allied themselves rather totally with the black world" (62). In Roll, Jordan, Roll Eugene Genovese concurs with this assessment, asserting that "the two-caste system in the Old South drove the mulattos into the arms of the blacks, no matter how hard some tried to build a make-believe third world for themselves" (Genovese 1976:431). I suppose it could be argued that it was a remnant of this delusional third world that nurtured and shaped Bo Chatmon¡¦s approach to music, and, therefore, his performance of Corrine Corrina. Clearly, the Chatmon clan¡¦s musical cosmopolitanism was in some degree both a product and an enactment of their interstitial, and increasingly unstable, position vis-ˆj-vis dominant conceptions of racial difference. However, I am not comfortable with interpretations that a priori assume cultures built around the fuzzy boundaries between normative racial categories to be exemplars of ¡¥false consciousness.¡¦ While mulattos in early 20th century Mississippi were the target of color prejudice in white and African American communities--their ¡¥hybridity¡¦ being conceptually associated on the one hand with excess, and on the other with infertility and dilution--musicians such as the Chatmons had succeeded for several generations in constructing a way of life--and a way of making music--around their intermediate social position between communities defined, however arbitrarily, by ¡¥color.¡¦ What is at stake here is precisely the ¡¥slippage¡¦ between the rigid codification of racist ideology in social-institutional forms and the performative representation, enactment, and negotiation of identity in music.

I do not think that Bo Chatmon¡¦s musical hybridity can be taken as an unmediated expression of a organically unified and well-bounded ¡¥mulatto culture,¡¦ for such an argument would critique the conflation of race and culture, only to reinsert it on another level. However, I would argue that detailed analysis of Chatmon¡¦s musical practice must rest on some understanding of the circulatory patterns that shaped his career and his life. From around 1930 Chatmon developed a productive niche as a studio performer, a move necessitated by the gradual loss of his eyesight and the fact that he could make more money as a solo act. He still toured occasionally with the Mississippi Sheiks, but made a lasting name for himself with dozens of ¡¥party records¡¦ featuring mildly bawdy songs such as Ramrod Daddy and Banana in Your Fruit Basket. Although precise sales figures are not available, there is evidence that these recordings were also widely popular among both blacks and whites. In 1940 he made his last recordings and settled in Memphis, Tennessee, working outside of music (as he had periodically throughout his career).

In the end, although he commanded an audience on both sides of the color line, Bo Chatmon was no more able than Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith to beat Jim Crow. He spent his declining years in poverty, blind and unable to play, living in "a shabby wooden building on [a] rutted alleyway behind Beale Street" (Charters 1990:139). Despite his ability to amalgamate aspects of European American and African American folk music styles within a pop music framework, and the steady demand for his recordings, Chatmon was never able to cash in on his proto-¡¥crossover¡¦ success. It could be argued that he was simply a quarter of a century early. Elements of African American folk and popular music, married to an insistent though flat-footed rhythm derived from Anglo-American traditions, a keen sense for the pop hook and a text delivered in a dialect that does not admit of easy racial identification--it is not too much of a stretch to hear Chuck Berry¡¦s Maybelline (based on the country tune Ida Red) or Elvis Presley¡¦s Mystery Train (a countrified version of an R&B song) as direct descendents of Corrine Corrina.

I would argue that the 1928 recording of Corrine Corrina can be read as a chronotope of Bo Chatmon¡¦s musical world, a web of relationships that traversed ¡¥white¡¦ and ¡¥colored¡¦ social spheres, the hill country and the Delta, the rural barn dance and the urban recording studio. Whatever the heuristic merits of W.E.B. DuBois¡¦ famous formulation, ¡¥double consciousness¡¦ seems altogether too shallow a metaphoric vessel to contain such experience. Bo Chatmon¡¦s Corrine Corrina is at once a harbinger of things to come (the first rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll record?), and an echo of something very much like a creole culture situated smack in the middle of early 20th century Mississippi, a structure of feeling elided by the inexorable anti-miscegenation logic of American law and custom.

III. Beneath Corrina¡¦s Covers

Within a few years of its initial appearance, several cover versions of Corrine Corrina had been released by ¡¥race¡¦ and ¡¥hillbilly¡¦ labels. In 1929 the Too Bad Boys, a Memphis-based African American duo who made only one recording, recorded Corrine Corrina Blues, basically a straight cover of Chatmon¡¦s recording, with a lugubrious Hawaiian-style slide guitar substituted for Lonnie Chatmon¡¦s fiddle.

[EXAMPLE 2]

In 1931 the ¡¥old-time¡¦ Carolina group Ashley and Abernathy recorded Corrina Corrina, adding Appalachian dialect and four-part white gospel harmony to the mix.

[EXAMPLE 3]

In addition to the virtuoso whistling display¡Xprobably inspired by records such as Gene Austin¡¦s hit recording of My Blue Heaven¡XAshley and Abernathy altered the lyric slightly, and instituted a change in the form of the song: Carter¡¦s fifth verse ("I love Corrina, tell the world I do. . .Just a little bit a¡¦ lovin¡¦, let your heart be true") is turned into a refrain, more in keeping with Tin Pan Alley song forms and the Anglo-American ballad tradition. It is worth noting that Ashley and Abernathy also chose the only verse with the word ¡¥love¡¦ in it for this purpose, perhaps an attempt to amplify the ¡¥romantic¡¦ overtones of the song for an audience accustomed to sentimental songs.

This pattern of dual proliferation into the ¡¥race¡¦ and ¡¥hillbilly¡¦ music markets continued throughout the 1930s and 40s. The song¡¦s biggest success on the country music charts came in 1940, when OKeh Records released a version of Corrine Corrina, performed by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Wills (born in 1905 in Limestone county, Texas) was the popularizer of Western Swing, a dance-hall style which melded the Anglo-American string band tradition with Tin Pan Alley songs, blues, and the swing style of Kansas City-based territory bands such as those led by Bennie Moten and Count Basie, with touches of Mexican and Cajun music. His recording of Corrina--thereafter a standard of Western swing music--indexed and reinforced the song¡¦s links to the ¡¥common practice¡¦ southern fiddle tradition.

[EXAMPLE 4]

While maintaining the basic harmonic and melodic structure of the song, Wills introduced extra beats, rather in the manner of a ¡¥crookedy¡¦ old-time fiddle tune (personal communication, Hank Bradley, 2-19-96), and created a 12-bar blues a total of 56 (rather than 48) beats in length (It¡¦s perhaps worth noting that the instrumental solos, by Leon McAuliffe and other well-known Wills¡¦ sidemen, are in the straight 12-bar format.) In addition, the tempo here is faster than in Chatmon¡¦s version, in keeping with the norms of western swing dancing, a mixture of European American figure-dancing and African American couple dances. The texture and form of Bob Wills¡¦ recording suggest that Corrine Corrina was by this time positioned within the general field of generically southern ¡¥good time¡¦ music, a nexus in a web of stylistic associations linking the blues, jazz, ¡¥old-timey¡¦ music, and popular song.

In 1956, when Joe Turner recorded a version of Corrine Corrina for Atlantic Records, the term ¡¥rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll¡¦ had recently emerged as a marketing label for rhythm & blues-inspired dance music, promoted to a predominantly white teenage audience. Big Joe had already recorded a string of R&B hits for Atlantic Records, including the song "Shake, Rattle and Roll," which reached #2 on the R&B charts in 1954. Within a few months Decca Records released a bowdlerized version of the song by Bill Haley and the Comets, a country-and-western band from Pennsylvania. Haley¡¦s version reached the Billboard Top Ten, and made him the first rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll star. Interviews with Jesse Stone, Jerry Wexler, and Ahmet Ertegun, producers at Atlantic Records, make it clear that they wanted to fight back against the ¡¥covering¡¦ of their artists¡¦ recordings by larger labels, in part by marketing African American singers such as Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, and Ruth Brown directly to a predominantly white teen audience. This recording of Corrine Corrina was part of that ¡¥crossover¡¦ strategy:

[EXAMPLE 5]

TRANSPARENCY

This arrangement of Corrina includes several important changes in structure and sensibility. Perhaps most strikingly, a 16-bar ¡¥bridge¡¦ or ¡¥refrain¡¦ was added to the song, creating a kind of compromise between the blues and typical Tin Pan Alley forms. This remodeling preserved the 12-bar blues form, while at the same time incorporating it into the verse-and-refrain, ¡¥gotta-have-a-hook¡¦ logic of corporate popular song. The rolling barrelhouse piano of Turner¡¦s earlier recordings has been replaced with an electric guitar, playing a insistent boogie-derived single-string riff. The syncopated horn parts are supplemented with subdued vocal pads, performed by Stone, Wexler, and Ertegun and the female vocal trio the Cookies (best known for their later work as the Raelettes). These formal and stylistic festures distinguish the Atlantic recording of Corrina from Turner¡¦s previous work, which was largely in a stripped-down, hard-swinging, ¡¥jump-blues¡¦ mode, and provide a clear indication of Stone, Wexler and Ertegun¡¦s desire to cross Corrina (and Big Joe) over into the predominantly white rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll market. In addition it is worth noting the insertion of a new line into the lyric--"I pray every night, she¡¦ll learn to love me, too"--definitely a move in the direction of teenage puppy love.

As it turned out, Corrine Corrina represented the last serious attempt to market the 45-year old singer as a teen idol. Atlantic released the song into the R&B market backed with the Leiber and Stoller song Lipstick, Powder and Paint, and into the pop market backed with a song called Boogie Woogie Country Girl (a ¡¥crossover¡¦ gambit if ever there was one!). This was the last of Turner¡¦s four singles to register on the pop charts (peaking at number 41 pop, number 2 R&B [Whitburn 1988:41]). "I made all those things before Haley and the others," he later reminisced, "but suddenly all the cats started jumping up, and I guess I got knocked down in the traffic." Subsequent attempts to launch Corrina into the expanding teen pop market of the late 1950s and early 1960s¡Xincluding a cover by Bill Haley, who reverted to the straight 12-bar form and added a jungle drums-cum-Gene Krupa introduction--were even less successful commercially than the Turner recording.

There is, however, one exception to that generalization. In 1961 Corrina was covered by Ray Peterson, best known for his morbid teen car-crash epic Tell Laura I Love Her. Peterson¡¦s version of Corrina Corrina reached number 9 on the Billboard charts (Whitburn 1983), and number 7 in Cashbox (Hoffman 1983), the highest position ever attained by the song. The verse-and-refrain framework of the Joe Turner/Atlantic recording was preserved in this recording, but its sensibility and aural texture had mutated almost beyond recognition:

[EXAMPLE 6]

TRANSPARENCY

Musically speaking, we have entered an alternative universe: a moderate bolero tempo, with ¡¥plinky¡¦ arpeggiated guitar chords (dripping with tremolo), angelic vocal pads, maracas and woodblock (sonic icons of Latin romance), and dramatic soli scoring for string orchestra, bathed in studio reverb. Note also that the "I pray she¡¦ll learn to love me" line, introduced on Joe Turner¡¦s 1956 recording, has now been moved front and center, in keeping with the overall romantic/masochistic ethos of the recording.

Viewed from the perspective of pop music history, this is quite an important record, as it was the first session overseen by the young producer Phil Spector. Corrina Corrina is a prototypical example of his ¡¥wall of sound¡¦ recording technique, which linked the intensity of adolescent experience to the sonic splendor of western European orchestral music ("little symphonies for the kiddies," in Spector¡¦s words). Remember also how Peterson¡¦s voice fairly quivers with sensitivity, toying with the break between chest voice and falsetto in order to evoke the passion and vulnerability of teen-age love. Recordings like this played an important role in naturalizing a particular conception of adolescence, and thus facilitated the subjective internalization of a marketing category, ¡¥the teenager.¡¦

Spector¡¦s blend of teen angst and orchestral opulence was articulated with another syncretic gambit: the melding of black and white styles within a pop music framework. Spector¡¦s recordings of ¡¥girl groups¡¦ such as the Chiffons and the Ronettes established what Romanowski and George-Warren have called a "racially unidentifiable" (1995:849) musical sensibility, connecting aspects of African American style with gendered adolescent subjectivities, the prestige of European classical music, and the professional song-craftsmanship of the Brill Building composers. In a sense, Spector¡¦s work is a direct predecessor of the Motown Sound (a debt explicitly acknowledged by Berry Gordy). There is more to be said about this recording, particularly in terms of the musical evocation of evolving images of sexuality and gender. However, for the moment I can only observe that here we have once again encountered Corrina at the crossroads of musical miscegenation and commerce, hovering over a charged (and increasingly profitable) space between evolving conceptions of ¡¥whiteness¡¦ and ¡¥blackness.¡¦

The most radical transformation of Corrina appears on Bob Dylan¡¦s 1963 album The Freewheelin¡¦ Bob Dylan, in which the Greenwich Village wunderkind deconstructs and reassembles the song in accordance with the ideological norms of the urban folk revival, and the aesthetic contours of his own emergent auteurship.

[EXAMPLE 7]

TRANSPARENCY

Corrina, Corrina, gal where you been so long?

Corrina, Corrina, gal where you been so long?

I been worr¡¦in¡¦ ¡¥bout you baby, baby please come home

I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings

I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings

But I ain¡¦ a-got Corrina, life don¡¦t mean a thing

Corrina, Corrina, gal, you¡¦re on my mind,

Corrina, Corrina, gal, you¡¦re on my mind,

I¡¦m a-thinkin¡¦ ¡¥bout you baby, I just can¡¦t keep from crying

How do you make Corrina into a real folk tune? First, deep-six the ¡¥bridge,¡¦ a privileged signifier of Tin Pan Alley professionalism and commercialism. Grab a few lines from oral tradition (learned, of course, from gramophone records) and insert them into the lyrics. Sing in a nasal voice, and play the harmonica. Yet, typical of Dylan, this is not at all a straight-ahead attempt at folkloric authentication. On this recording¡Xone of the few instances in Dylan¡¦s early work where he performs an item composed by someone else¡Xhe is accompanied by piano, two acoustic guitars, string bass, and trap set, played with brushes, creating an intimate aural atmosphere evocative of the coffeehouse, with its combination of down-home rootsiness and urban hipness.

The first line of Dylan¡¦s reconstructed lyric echoes the opening stanza of previous versions, although the mood of the B phrase changes from a complaint ("I ain¡¦t had no lovin¡¦, since you been gone") to a profession of anxiety ("I been worrying about you baby, baby please come home"), a rhetorical strategy consonant with the folk imperative of sincerity, and perhaps even echoing the lovelorn torment of Ray Peterson. Things get more interesting in the second stanza, which features a line from Robert Johnson¡¦s 1937 recording of Stones in my Passway, a deep blues classic in the urological mode. During the early 1960s the retrospective canonization of Johnson as an icon of the Delta tradition was well under way, a process initiated in 1938 when John Hammond¡Xalso Dylan¡¦s ¡¥discoverer¡¦--sought to sign Johnson up for the Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. If a folk singer wanted to signal his knowledge of and sympathy for the blues--conceived as a baseline of black authenticity--there was simply no one better to cite than Robert Johnson. This process in turn reinforced Johnson¡¦s enshrinement, and directed attention away from the heterogeneity of his repertoire, which, like those of Bo Chatmon, Charley Patton, and Muddy Waters, had included a wide range of musical material.

But Dylan¡¦s reworking of Corrina was more than the authentication of a white subject via the black other. In the liner notes for the LP, Nat Hentoff quotes Dylan: "I¡¦m not one of those guys who goes around changing songs just for the sake of changing them. But I¡¦d never heard Corrina, Corrina exactly the way it first was, so that this version is the way it came out of me." In fact, the ¡¥way it came out of him¡¦ involved a canny double movement typical of Dylan¡¦s early work, and reminiscent of the French surrealists¡¦ appropriation of ethnographic exotica (Clifford 1988): a signaling of commitment to the folkloric enterprise (as mediated through the romantic image of Woodie Guthrie), combined with a detached, ironic attitude toward the very notion of tradition. In essence, Dylan¡¦s authentication as a carrier of something akin to folk wisdom rested to a significant degree upon his ability to cite tradition from without. This triangulation of Dylan¡¦s public image--standing simultaneously inside and outside the space conventionally demarcated by the term ¡¥folk music¡¦--lies at the core of his projection of an iconoclastic modernist populist subjectivity. "All I¡¦m doing is saying what¡¦s on my mind the best way I know how. And whatever else you say about me, everything I do and sing and write comes out of me" (Dylan in Hentoff 1962). Harry Jackson¡¦s interpretation of Dylan¡¦s persona, presented in the liner notes for Freewheelin¡¦, registers here as an astute analysis of his modus operandi: "He¡¦s so goddamned real, it¡¦s unbelievable!" (Harry Jackson in Hentoff 1962).

A recent study of Dylan¡¦s recorded work explicitly identifies Corrina as "a rare Dylan cover of an old song of mixed origin" (Nogowski 1995:25; emphasis added). Once again, the song¡¦s perduring indeterminacy with regard to dominant notions of racial and musical difference appears to have had certain economic consequences. Corrina was the B side of Dylan¡¦s first 45 r.p.m. single, and thus played a role in Columbia Records¡¦ first attempt to nudge him toward commercial success in the urban folk music market. There was certainly a pecuniary method to Dylan¡¦s madness: his reworking of the song allowed him to claim composer¡¦s credits, and thereby deny royalties to Bo Chatmon and Mayo Williams. "So goddamned real, it¡¦s unbelieveable," indeed.

The next stage in the folklorization of Corrina occured in the late 1960s, when Bob Dylan¡¦s version of the song was adapted by Henry St. Claire Fredericks, also known as Taj Mahal. Mahal, whose father was a jazz arranger and pianist from the West Indies, began to play coffee houses around 1964, while a student in animal husbandry at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His eclectic style was shaped by his interest in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology, and by archival research on a variety of African American genres, including the blues, ragtime, jazz, string bands, and brass band music. Mahal recorded Corrina several times; the best-known version is a live performance at Big Sur, re-released as part of an American folksong collection produced by the Smithsonian Institution.

In Taj Mahal¡¦s performance the original song disappears completely, replaced by an improvised performance evocative of the unpolished ambiance of a field recording. Mahal accompanies his voice with finger-picking on a National steel guitar, leaving out or adding a beat here and there, stretching the form to suit his purposes, much in the manner of early rural blues musicians such as Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson. The Robert Johnson line introduced by Bob Dylan becomes a new center of gravity, around which a series of floating textual formulas are assembled.

[EXAMPLE 8]

TRANSPARENCY

Got a bird what whistle, baby got a bird, honey got a birdie would sing

Baby got a bird, honey got a birdie would sing

Without m¡¦ Corrina, sure don¡¦t mean, sure don¡¦t mean a natural thing

I learned to love you, baby ¡¥fo I call, honey ¡¥fo I call your name

Baby ¡¥fo I call, honey ¡¥fo I call your name

I wouldn¡¦ trade your love for money, honey you¡¦re my warm heart, baby you¡¦re my love light thang

Have mercy, have mercy, baby on my hard luck, honey on my hard luck soul

Baby on my hard luck, honey on my hard luck soul

I got a rainbow roun¡¦ my shoulder, look like silver, baby shine like Klondike gold

The three stanzas of Taj Mahal¡¦s Corrina text convey a sense of broad historical scope-- a famous Delta blues line (via a Jewish folk singer from Minnesota), a reference to Klondike gold (evocative of the 19th century American frontier), "a rainbow round my shoulder" (an old blues line, and the title of Howard Odum¡¦s pioneering study of African American folksongs), and the contemporary-sounding phrase ¡¥love light¡¦ (evocative of Otis Redding¡¦s soul recordings of the 1960s).

Mahal¡¦s vision of an internally diversified and historically layered African American macro-tradition, capable of incorporating and transforming diverse styles and techniques, is arguably closer than any of the other versions we have examined to the hybridizing spirit of Bo Chatmon¡¦s 1928 recording, although it represents the most radical departure from the original in melodic, harmonic, and lyrical terms. In the ¡¥live¡¦ festival recording, the domain of the rural--iconically represented in Mahal¡¦s purposefully ¡¥sloppy¡¦ and slightly ¡¥out-of-tune¡¦ guitar accompaniment, rough-grained voice, and choice of dialect--continues to function, as it did during the urban folk revival, as a imagined landscape beyond the reach of contemporary racial politics, a place where a largely white festival audience could sing, clap, and whoop along with a non-threatening version of the black authentic. It must also be noted that his re-working of Dylan¡¦s version of the song allowed Taj Mahal to claim sole composer and lyricist credits, once again channeling royalties away from Chatmon and Williams.

The link between Corrina and the bucolic--a recontextualization of the song¡¦s long-standing associations as an ¡¥old time¡¦ fiddle tune--is evident in more recent renditions of the song. In a 1991 recording on the Windham Hill label, George Winston, the New Age pianist, uses the outline of Chatmon¡¦s melody as the basis for a tone poem called "Summer." This is one of a series of pieces designed to evoke the countryside, and thus to aid the meditative exploration of one¡¦s own interior landscapes.

Finally, I want to briefly consider a more recent instance of "the Corrina complex," the 1994 film Corrina, Corrina, which stars Whoopie Goldberg as a black woman who provides inspiration for a white musician, and uses music to restore the emotional health of his child. Manny Singer is the Jewish jingle writer whose wife¡¦s funeral provides the film¡¦s opening scenario. His daughter¡¦s reaction to the death of her mother is to become mute. Enter Corrina Washington, a college-educated black woman forced by circumstance into domestic work, who captures the child¡¦s affections, teaches her to communicate by gesture, shares magical secrets, and eventually gives her back the power of speech. Corrina also introduces Molly to aspects of working-class African American life in Los Angeles--a meal with the extended family¡¦s house, visits to a jazz club, a gospel service, even a mansion where Corrina and the little girl work side by side scrubbing the floors, stopping only to float in the swimming pool together, parodying the pretensions of the mansion¡¦s owners. The initially awkward relationship between Liotta and Goldberg¡¦s characters blossoms into genuine affection, and soon runs up against the color line. Out with Corrina and his daughter at a Chinese restaurant, Manny is called a ¡¥nigger lover.¡¦ Later in the film, Manny¡¦s elderly mother takes him aside and cautions him: "A fish and a bird can fall in love, but where will they build their nest?" It turns out that a nosy neighbor has spotted Corrina giving Manny a wifely peck on the cheek after straightening his jacket for him. Although Corrina¡¦s family and friends are on the whole less judgmental about the relationship, there is pressure from that side also to recognize the real politik of race in 1950s Los Angeles. When Corrina comes home late one night after working at Manny¡¦s house, her sister warns her:

You got to stop kiddin¡¦ yourself. Now you know these white folks gonna pretend you part a their family, so they can work you all hours and not pay you for your time. Corrina, you workin¡¦ too hard to be givin¡¦ it away for free.

To which Corrina bristles, "Givin¡¦ what away for free?" Actually, her retort raises an interesting point. What is in fact most striking about the portrayal of Manny and Corrina¡¦s relationship, given the long-standing assocation of race and sexuality in American popular culture, is its platonic nature. At every step, the little girl initiates, channels, and mediates the relationship; the underlying impetus for the establishment of transracial intimacy is predominantly domestic, not erotic.

While the character of Corrina seems initially to conform to standard Hollywood conceptions of blackness--she is musical, religious, prefers spicy food, and has an uncanny ability to communicate with children and animals--she also undermines these tropes, speaking learnedly about poetic meter and the music of Erik Satie and Bill Evans. It turns out that Corrina holds a Bachelor¡¦s degree in Creative Writing, and that her dream is to write the liner notes for jazz albums ("Basically they just let us play the music, they don¡¦t let us write about it," she tells Manny). Throughout Corrina, Corrina, black music of the 1940s and 1950s--Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Big Joe Turner, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters--functions as a sonic icon of the generative power of African American tradition, and its ability to therapeutically fill the putative cultural void of white middle-class life. The film--based in part upon the experience of its writer, director, and producer, Jessie Nelson--is on the surface explicitly anti-racist: it argues that African American culture is a learned thing, that it¡¦s o.k. for little Jewish girls to sing, dance, eat, and play black, that Bill Evans was an authentic jazz musician.

It could, on the other hand, be argued that Corrina, Corrina is a not atypical Hollywood fantasy about personal relationships transcending institutionalized racism, the romantic heterosexual corollary of interracial ¡¥buddy movies¡¦ like White Men Can¡¦t Jump or Die Hard with a Vengeance. Benjamin DeMott has analyzed the links between such individuated, mass-mediated images of racial harmony and a hegemonic ideology he calls ¡¥do-nothingism,¡¦ in which "acts of private piety substitute for public policy while the possibility of political action disappears into a sentimental haze" (DeMott 1995:35). In the film Corrina, Corrina, a quintessential liberal product of the era of mature Reaganism, the utopian space beyond racial conflict is reconfigured as the bourgeois family, ideological lynchpin of what Marilyn Ivy (1993:247) has called the ¡¥privatized imaginary¡¦ of late twentieth century America. At the core of this domestic space we find the child, icon of the authentic pre-political, pre-racial (and innately musical) self (¡¥the child within,¡¦ as it were). Here we encounter young Molly in her bedroom, singing a jazz-inflected version of the transcendentalist Tin Pan Alley song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to comfort herself after learning that Corrina has had to return to ¡¥her own,¡¦ not so make-believe world.

Throughout the film, childhood is represented as the last stronghold of innocence (perhaps a contemporary analogue of the images of vanishing rural authenticity alluded to earlier), and music functions as a bridge across the gap, a yellow brick road to a magical place beyond the reach of the "agents of racial discourse" (Paul Gilroy¡¦s pithy phrase). Is this a contemporary, ghostly trace of the chronotope of the excluded middle, the vanished ¡¥make-believe third world¡¦ alluded to by Genovese in his analysis of the position of mulattos in the two-caste racial system of the Old South? Once again, I am reluctant to assume ¡¥false consciousness¡¦ on the part of cultural agents who struggle imaginatively to sustain the possibility of transcending the ¡¥one-drop¡¦ ideology of American racism. On the other hand, I think that the film Corrina, Corrina does at the very least reveal a complex articulation between music¡¦s role in problematizing dominant conceptions of racial difference, and its implication in contemporary celebrations of the triumph of individual enlightenment and ¡¥family values.¡¦

IV. Conclusion

I have asserted elsewhere the danger of imputing agency or selfhood to music, rather than the human actors who produce and experience music. Yet my own experience in attempting to trace Corrina¡¦s progress through more than half a century of American social history does suggest that it may in certain analytical contexts make sense to speak of the ¡¥identity¡¦ of a song, of something like a fluid ¡¥self¡¦ that coheres through social time and across historical space.

Certainly, the complex, multi-stranded trajectory of Corrine Corrina confounds "any simplistic (essentialist or anti-essentialist) understanding of the relationship between racial identity and non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal," to evoke Paul Gilroy once again (Gilroy 1993:99). But I would argue that Corrina¡¦s identity, while multi-dimensional and malleable, has by no means been incoherent. The song¡¦s shape-shifting manifestations as a hillbilly blues pop song, a Western Swing standard, a would-be rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll hit, a teenage torch song, a folkloricized ¡¥deep blues,¡¦ and as the theme music for a ¡¥retro¡¦ film about interracial love¡Xand literally dozens of interesting versions that I have not had time to share today¡Xsuggest a transhistorical patterning of significance constituted precisely in and through circulation.

If I am justified in postulating a kind of migratory connectedness among the various versions of Corrina, less a semiotic structure or identity position than a multiplex set of trajectories emanating from and pointing ¡¥back¡¦ (or perhaps ¡¥forward¡¦) toward an imagined vanishing point of racial bifurcation, then it seems clear that this complex gestalt can be located neither solely ¡¥inside¡¦ the song itself (an analytical move that falsely essentializes music) nor ¡¥out there in the world,¡¦ that is, in the shifting conditions of its production and reception (a mode of inquiry that risks losing music entirely by reducing it to the socio-historical grounds of its production and consumption).

Mikhail Bakhtin¡¦s concept of re-accentuation suggests one possible way of conceptualizing the relationship between a musical ¡¥text¡¦ and its evolving ¡¥context¡¦:

Every age re-accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation. Thanks to the intentional potential embedded in them, such works have proved capable of uncovering in each era and against ever new dialogizing backgrounds ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (Bakhtin 1981:421).

While Bakhtin¡¦s distinction between ¡¥classic¡¦ and non-classic works is not particularly relevant here, the notion of re-accentuation can help us to interpret the fluid coherence of Corrine Corrina as it has moved across the limits of race, class, and genre. Bo Chatmon, Lonnie Chatmon, and Charley McCoy¡¦s performance, recorded on the eve of the Great Depression, is, to use Eugene Genovese¡¦s evocative phrase, ¡¥an echo of a displaced era,¡¦ a complex web of interracial cultural traffic that supported as it threatened to undermine the paternalistic ideological system of slavery. It is also an example of the culture industry¡¦s exploration of ¡¥new¡¦ markets and of the dialectic of cosmopolitanism and authenticity, and a harbinger of the so-called ¡¥cross-over¡¦ phenomenon in popular music. It is difficult to think of a more apt example of the interpenetration of the residual, the dominant, and the emergent, Raymond Williams¡¦ three categories of cultural production in capitalist societies, than the 1928 recording of Corrina.

In the early 1930s, Chatmon¡¦s version of the song was already in wide circulation among jazz, blues, and country musicians, and had appeared in the race, hillbilly, and mainstream pop catalogues. Bob Wills¡¦ 1940 recording¡Xat once ¡¥country¡¦ and ¡¥cosmopolitan,¡¦ ¡¥old-timey¡¦ and ¡¥up-to-date¡¦--expanded upon this complex bundle of associations. Big Joe Turner¡¦s 1956 rendition of the song, retooled by Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, moved Corrina into the quality space of jump blues R&B cum-rock ¡¥n¡¦ roll, exploiting the song¡¦s racio-cultural indeterminacy, in an attempt to extend Turner¡¦s pull in the predominantly white teen music market. Four years later Phil Spector brought this commercial possibility to fruition, presenting Corrina as a lushly orchestrated 12-bar-blues-with-a-bridge tear-jerker underlain by a bolero rhythm (a signifier of the Creole, displaced ¡¥south of the border¡¦).

In the early 1960s Bob Dylan hijacked Corrina, dropping the pop bridge and injecting lines from Robert Johnson¡¦s "Stones in my Passway." Taj Mahal, apparently inspired by Dylan¡¦s version, took the song all the way back to where it had never been. Both of these folkloric appropriations of Corrine Corrina had a commercial dimension, with Dylan and Mahal each claiming composer¡¦s credits. George Winston made another kind of country music out of Corrina, providing his New Age listeners with a peaceful (and deracinated) image of bucolicity. And finally, the song appears as the title, anthem, and motivating force of a mid-1990s Hollywood film about the post-racial, pre-racial, extra-racial utopian possibilities of the bourgeois family and childhood.

Jean Baudrillard has argued that "difference is itself a utopia: the idea that...pairs of terms can be split up is a dream--and the idea of subsequently reuniting them is another" (Baudrillard 1993:128). Despite their stylistic variety and the diverse historical circumstances of their production and reception, I would argue that the versions of Corrine Corrina examined in this paper have cohered gelatinously around the ¡¥problem¡¦ of racial difference, the creative (and economic) possibilities of miscegenation (sonically figured as stylistic syncretism), and the nostalgic desire to locate ¡¥Nature¡¦--Capitalism¡¦s Other¡Xthrough a process of triangulation around mass-mediated images of negritude, the rural, and childhood. Like a tongue insistently probing the socket of a missing tooth, the song returns again and again to the gap between ¡¥whiteness¡¦ and ¡¥blackness,¡¦ the excluded middle of American conceptualizations of race, the vanished third world of mulatto identity. From the perspective of the relatively langue duree, Corrine Corrina appears less as a stable ¡¥unit of expression¡¦ than a trace element caught up in the complex vascular system of American popular culture, its ¡¥meaning¡¦ shaped by (but never simply reducible to) the practical interests of institutions and actors, ideologically-charged constructions of cultural ¡¥authenticity,¡¦ tenacious ontologies of racial difference, and the production, marketing, and consumption of utopian desire.



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End Notes

1. I would like to acknowledge the critical insights and encouragement of Joseph Vinikow, Bruce Chapman, John Gibbs, Jack Cook, Marilyn Ivy, John Pemberton, Aaron Fox, William Ferris, Charles Wolfe, Laurel Sercombe, Hank Bradley, Robert Walser, George Lipsitz, Steven Feld, Peter Nabokov, Miles White, Eileen Hayes, Stuart Goosman, and Veit Erlmann.

2. Much of this work has concerned itself with critiquing dominant representations of musical ¡¥blackness.¡¦ Paul Gilroy (1993) focuses on the transnational circulation of musical forms and styles, and the local interpretations of black music by people differently situated within the Atlantic diaspora. Ronald Radano (1995) argues that the topos of an undifferentiated black tradition is a product of language, that is, of discourses about folk authenticity that emerge in a powerful and coherent form around the middle of the 19th century. George Lipsitz¡¦s analyses of American popular music (1990, 1994) focus on the complex interpenetration of racial, class, gender, generational, and regional identities, while Charles Keil¡¦s (1994) comparison of the blues and polka music in the United States brings out previously unremarked parallels between these quintessentially ¡¥white¡¦ and ¡¥black¡¦ genres, especially in regard to the incorporation of mass-mediated stereotypes. Denis-Constant Martin (1991) and Ingrid Monson (1994) have theorized the ¡¥heterogeneity¡¦ of black musical practices, while Andrew Bartlett (1995), in a study of Cecil Taylor¡¦s music, urges us to consider the intentions of African American cultural producers before rendering judgments about their relationship to ¡¥black tradition.¡¦

Less has been written about the role of music in the construction of ¡¥whiteness.¡¦ Eric Lott¡¦s pioneering Love and Theft (1994) links the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s to the emergence of white working-class identity and a specifically American variant of bohemianism, both triangulated vis-ˆj-vis popular images of ¡¥blackness,¡¦ while Ingrid Monson (1995) has critiqued an ideological formation that she calls ¡¥white hipness.¡¦

3. V. Kofi Agawu has recently published a penetrating critique of the trope of ¡¥African rhythm¡¦ in studies of sub-Saharan African music (Agawu 1995). It should be noted in passing that published interviews with African Americans who do not identify themselves as professional musicians or academics (see, e.g., Gwaltney 1993 and Terkel 1992) often do not mention music as a criterion of racial difference. Other elements of culture--especially culinary, child-rearing, and hygienic practices--are much more frequently cited than ¡¥musicality¡¦ as diagnostic traits of an oppositional (and generally superior) cultural ¡¥blackness.¡¦ The notion that peoples of African descent are uniquely musical has not, of course, been an unalloyed blessing, given the ambivalent valorization of music-making in relation to other, more ¡¥serious¡¦ fields of human endeavor (say, science, mathematics, or literary criticism).

4. The ¡¥one-drop rule,¡¦ also known as the ¡¥one black ancestor rule,¡¦ the ¡¥traceable amount rule,¡¦ and the ¡¥hypo-descent rule,¡¦ specifies that any person who can be possessing a single ¡¥drop¡¦ of ¡¥black blood¡¦ is a black person. This bifurcating logic, peculiar to the United States (for even apartheid South Africa recognized intermediate racial categories), emerged from the South during the period after the Civil War to become the dominant mode of racial conceptualization in 20th century America (see Davis 1991).

5. The matrix number of the Brunswick/Vocalion disc is NOR-761-Br7080. The cut in anthologized on Roots of Rock (Yazoo L-1063) and Bo Carter Volume 1 (Document Records DOCD-5078).

6. By coincidence, this is also the opening contour of the core melody of early jˆ{jˆy music, which developed in the creole Afro-Christian culture of Lagos, Nigeria around 1928, the year Bo Chatmon recorded Corrine Corrina (see Waterman 1990).

7. Interestingly, the violin, derived from European prototypes but sometimes played with techniques derived from the bowed lute traditions of the west African savannah, plays only a slight role in popular and scholarly accounts of African American musical history. There is, for example, considerable evidence to suggest that the violin played a crucial role in early New Orleans jazz, a phenomenon given at most cursory attention in most authoritative accounts of the genre¡¦s development (however, see Gushee 1994). In the present context, it is interesting to note that the violin is by and large not consonant with late 20th century representations of musical ¡¥blackness.¡¦ This may in part explain the mainstream press¡¦s incredulity at discovering Louis Farrakhan¡¦s aspirations as a classical violinist.

8. Like the Chatmons, Patton claimed African, European, and Amerindian ancestry. Despite his canonization as "Father of the Delta Blues," Patton recorded ballads, vaudevillian blues songs, Tin Pan Alley hits, and (under a pseudonym) gospel sermons. The diversity of Patton¡¦s repertoire can be traced to his early experience playing with the musically omnivorous Chatmons (Calt and Wardlow 1988).

9. Yazoo Records 1063

10. A similar conflation of musical syncretism and miscegenation was an important factor in colonialist discourses about race and popular culture in Anglophone west Africa during the 1920s (Waterman 1990).

11. Paramount Pm 12861, recorded in New York City 10/23/29 (Dixon and Godrich 1982:758). Anthologized on The Voice of the Blues: Bottleneck Guitar Masterpieces, Yazoo Records L-1046.

12. Anthologized on Going Down the Valley: Vocal and Instrumental Styles in Folk Music from the South, New World Records NW 236, 1977.

13. Okeh 06530, recorded 4/15/40. Anthologized on Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys: Anthology [1935-1973], Rhino Records R2 70744, disc 1, cut 5 (1991).

14. Atlantic 1088, recorded in New York City 4/21/56. Reissued on Atlantic Rhythm & Blues, Volume 2, Atlantic 7 81392-2 (1985).

15. Dunes 2002, recorded 12/19/60.

16. Columbia 8786, released May, 1963

17. "Corinna," on Folk Song America 4: A Twentieth Century Revival, Smithsonian Collection of Recordings RD046-4 (1991). An earlier version of the song, recorded in 1968 and released on Columbia CS 9698, has been reissued on Taj¡¦s Blues, Columbia/Legacy CK 52465 (1992).

18. It is worth noting in this connection that the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," from the film The Wizard of Oz, plays a pivotal role in the young girl¡¦s internalization of black style and in her emotional recovery.

Bo Carter's version is good. I like the mood.
Thanks, Louis.