The Blues Muse

“Writing from a feminist, multicultural perspective, Rutter builds on a wealth of literary studies about jazz and poetry, work by the likes of Sascha Feinstein, David Yaffe, and Emily Lordi. . . . Rutter focuses on blues masters and how they have inspired poets, starting in the Harlem Renaissance and continuing through the Black Arts movement into the present day. . . . Though rooted in popular culture, this treatment is complex as it considers gender, race, ‘musical celebrity,’ and the aesthetics of song and poetry.”
—CHOICE

“The Blues Muse is an impressively informative, exceptionally detailed, scholarly study that spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history ranging from the New Negro Renaissance to the present. . . . Rutter’s expert analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.”
—Library Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review

“An impressively researched and lucidly written analysis of nearly one hundred years of American poetry inspired by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson—those ‘blues muses’ whose complex lives, art, personae, and historiographies have made them especially rich and persistent subjects for white and black American poets alike.”
—Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live

“The Blues Muse is an interesting and valuable work which will be of particular interest to those teaching American poetry with an emphasis on its connections with African American vernacular musical traditions.”
—Erich Nunn, author of Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination