In September 1929, just four weeks before William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, the singer-songwriter Charley Patton released a record with the eerily parallel title “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues.” Although working in radically different media—avant-garde Modernist fiction and popular African American folk song—Faulkner and Patton nonetheless mobilized similar imagery, language, themes, and experimental formal devices to depict their shared Mississippi world.
Tim A. Ryan, professor of English at Northern Illinois University and author of Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music, explores the provocative and illuminating relationships between The Sound and the Fury and Patton’s Mississippi Delta blues—as well as the famous white southern author’s complicated and often-conflicted lifelong engagements with Black musical traditions.
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