The year was probably 1938 and Thomas Lanier Williams would have been in his twenty-eighth year when, sitting at a typewriter, he made up two partial lists of short plays that he had written or was then writing. We need to trace these implications fully if we wish to comprehend Williams’s “use of music to establish time and place, suggest mood, forward dramatic action, define character, express theme, and achieve poetic unity” (Farfan 157). 1 What I shall hope to have proved here is simply this: in Williams’s works before Streetcar, his allusions to blues and jazz music raise provocative questions about the racialized discourse of primitivism and its relevance to a modern American identity that was largely defined by ideologies of labor, consumption, and entertainment. The third claim above is one that I shall not have the space to advance or defend here, but that I offer tendentiously, as an earnest of further exposition in a sequel to this essay. Especially in A Streetcar Named Desire and Orpheus Descending, Williams’s uses of blues and jazz tend to disrupt culturally constructed racial binaries, intimating a resistance to emergent, postwar redefinitions of whiteness. Third, some of Williams’s mature works move toward a criticism of these attitudes, provoking scrutiny of the music’s problematized association with blackness. Second, early manuscripts show that his taste for the music was formed in tension with contemporary attitudes toward its African-American cultural origins, attitudes that were primitivist and essentially racist, and that Williams to a large extent shared. First, Williams as a young writer appreciated certain values of blues, jazz, and spirituals, or at least had notions about these values, and aspired to impart something of them to his work. In the present essay I make three major claims. The scripts of Battle of Angels, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof all expressly provide for music made by African-American singers or musicians, either onstage or off. Jazz and swing music inspired both the subject and the method of one of Williams’s first free-verse experiments, the poem “Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks.” Later, he would employ “hot swing” thematically in The Glass Menagerie.
During the 1940s, Williams wrote lyrics that he called “folk-verse,” and that either included the word “Blues” in their titles, or else imitated the dialects and stanzaic forms of blues songs another of these poems paid homage to African-American spirituals. Blues music is specifically called for in the early full-length play Fugitive Kind, in the early one-act play Hello From Bertha, and later in Orpheus Descending. Williams’s writings from the 1930s contain various representations of black singers, as in the posthumously published story “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,” as well as in unpublished drafts of fiction, verse, and drama.
Whereas African-American characters rarely appear in Williams’s writings, and even more rarely participate in the main action of his plays, it is not so hard to find him alluding to music performed by African Americans, or derived from African-American traditions. Racial issues do not often arise explicitly in the Williams canon, at least by comparison with those of other major Southern writers (Bigsby 98 Adler 4 Kolin, “Race” 204).
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