WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today we pledge allegiance to what Ralph Ellison called a sorrowful laughter for all, and we open with “Waitin’ for Benny” a jam session from 1941 featuring jazz and swing guitarist Charlie Christian, an artist who, like Ellison, discovered the New World of Jazz in Oklahoma City.
In Ellison’s 1958 Saturday Review essay “The Charlie Christian Story,” he writes, “The wooden tenement in which he grew up was full of poverty, crime and sickness. It was alive and exciting, and I enjoyed visiting there, for the people both lived and sang the blues.” Charlie Christian’s genius was a brief triumph that would have a deep influence on jazz greats to come.
Guest Host Jason Fickel serves as our guide today as he returns to Interchange with M. Cooper Harriss. Fickel is a guitarist and songwriter, and Harriss is an assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University. They joined us previously to discuss how the blues inflected the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston in a show punctuated by the music of Lizzie Douglas, better known as Memphis Minnie.
The occasion of the Fickel-Harris reunion is Harriss’s new book Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology published by NYU Press. Harriss finds in Ellison’s masterpiece, his only completed novel, an underlying “civil religious orientation” or as J. Kameron Carter of the Duke University Divinity School puts it, “an ‘invisible theology’ of an unseen blackness that works through and against the grain of America’s ‘original sin’: racism.”
Ellison’s “The Charlie Christian Story” opens with a revelation of America and its one original art form: “Jazz, like the country which gave it birth, is fecund in its inventiveness, swift and traumatic in its developments and terribly wasteful of its resources. It is an orgiastic art which demands great physical stamina of its practitioners, and many of its most talented creators die young.” True of Charlie Christian, dead of tuberculosis in 1942. He was 25 years old.
Ellison wrote of the blues, and perhaps his work as a novelist, that it’s “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”
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MUSIC
“Waitin’ for Benny” by the Charlie Christian Jammers
“Gone to Main Street” by Muddy Waters
“Jaybird Blues” by Peetie Wheatstraw
“John the Revelator” by Son House
“Royal Garden Blues” by the Benny Goodman Sextet (Charlie Christian)
“(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue” by Louis Armstrong
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Guest Host: Jason Fickel
Editing: Rob Schoon
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
