The Self-Fashioned American Blues Identity

In his 1945 essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues, " Ralph Ellison defines the blues as “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” “Ralph Ellison and the Blues” will examine the ways in which Ellison frames the blues as a quintessentially American form in which its makers tell individual stories that resonate for the collective, while simultaneously creating improvised, self-fashioned American identities. This chapter will consider Ellison’s engagement with the blues through his character Jim Trueblood in Invisible Man; his incisive recollections about Jimmy Rushing, and other blues people; and his own cohered identity created out of (American) cultural chaos.