Economies of Scarcity and Abundance in Contemporary Southern Blues

• In Event: Alternative Economies of Pleasure in Contemporary Southern Working-Class Cultures

Abstract

My paper examines a body of contemporary blues that is still very popular with working-class African Americans in the Deep South. This contemporary blues persists largely outside the eyes of mainstream America in economically marginalized sub-regions such as the Mississippi Delta and the Alabama Black Belt where everyday life is characterized by an economics of want for many black residents. Contemporary blues songs often document this condition of scarcity and the effects it can have on families. For example, Big Ike complains in one song that there is “too much month at the end of the money,” while Omar Cunningham laments on the struggles of dealing with bill collectors and choosing between necessities such as utilities and groceries in “Check to Check.”
I argue that these material economies are often transcoded into the economies of romantic and family relationships described in blues songs and I examine two songs that are representative of larger textual groupings. In the first part of the essay, I analyze Denise LaSalle’s “Why Am I Missing You?,” a song in which she tells us that she continues to long for her former lover, an individual who never had the emotional or financial resources to meet his own needs, let alone to provide for her. Despite this scarcity of relationship resources, she finds herself continually longing for this man she has kicked out of her house. I read this song, which describes a situation of relationship scarcity, in comparison to another song which establishes an alternative relationship economy of satiety, Ronnie Lovejoy’s “Until You Get Enough of Me.” This song imagines a contingent space of romantic fulfillment in an illicit relationship that occurs, for the most part, in a motel room. The protagonist tells his partner that, although their relationship is temporally limited and not sanctioned by the community, he will make love to her “until you get enough of me” and “until I get enough of you,” imagining a space for satisfaction and fulfillment out of and against an economy of scarcity and want. The site of this relationship, however, illustrates the difficulty of carving out a space for satisfaction within the context of an economy of desperation as well as the emotional importance of such a space to the song’s protagonists.

Author

• Nicholas Neil Gorrell, University of Mississippi (MS)