As I’ve mentioned a few times, music is incredibly important to Ellison. He attended Tuskegee on a music scholarship, he was an obsessive collector of records, and he grew up in Oklahoma in the “swing era” amid musicians like guitarist Charlie Christian and band leader Count Basie. He was a bit old, in a sense, for the “bebop” that emerged in the 40s and rose to dominance in the 50s via players like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, but he was a cogent critic of this emergent style and its fingerprints, so to speak, are on Invisible Man in various ways. Here’s a quick tour through some helpful musical contexts for the novel:
[for those interested in a deeper dive, there’s lots of scholarship on this topic. You might start with some of the interviews with prominent scholars on this site]
Peetie Wheatstraw was a real blues musician who called himself “the devil’s son-in-law.” Peter Wheatstraw in the novel is a bit more urbane and ironic, arguably, than the Peetie of this track, but you can at least catch the flavor of the Southern “Delta blues” tradition that Ellison references via the name here:
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Charlie Christian was Ellison’s contemporary and also from Oklahoma City. He is a bridge figure between the swing era and bebop whose playing helped bring the electric guitar from its place as a “rhythm instrument,” playing chords as a harmonic foundation for the solo instruments, to a place as a solo instrument in its own right. Here’s his “Solo Flight”:
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Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie are often pointed to as Godfathers of bebop, whose velocity and melodic invention radically reshaped jazz music, especially (to quote Invisible Man) by exploring the “uncertain extremes of the scale” (259). Here both do just that, in a wild ride that shows off the sheer velocity of the music of this moment:
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