On Not Knowing by Emily Ogden

Author:Emily Ogden [Ogden, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO000000 Literary Collections / General, LCO010000 Literary Collections / Essays, BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, LCO019000 Literary Collections / Women Authors, BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices.8

Did Dearie have a brave and sexless little voice? It is essential to the promise I see in her persona that she can never be fully acquitted of the charge. It is only because her degree of distance can’t be determined, because she doesn’t permit us or herself a knowing, nimble leap away from culpability, that the extract she makes of American innocence is potent enough to be an efficacious medicine. Her first recording, with the French ensemble Les Blue Stars, might well sound helplessly, defenselessly fatuous to some ears. Like Baldwin, Dearie spent the early fifties in Paris. There, in 1954, she recorded the album Octuor with Les Blue Stars, a group she formed at the direction of Eddie Barclay, head of the Compagnie Phonographique Française. One of the songs, “Légende du Pays aux Oiseaux,” was a rearrangement, by Michel Legrand, of George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland.” The Blue Stars’ French-language version became a surprise American hit, now again under the title “Lullaby of Birdland”; the single’s success led to Dearie’s later contract with Verve Records.9 Les Blue Stars sound like a French-speaking version of the Lawrence Welk Singers. Their harmonies seethe; one can easily imagine them on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show in pastel-purple outfits all cut from the same bolt of polyester cloth, ballroom dancing with six inches of air between any two bodies. When the hit single came out, it was 1955, the year of the murder of Emmet Till and the start of the Montgomery bus boycott.10 Notes of a Native Son was published. The Americans who bought the single wanted a lullaby of Birdland. Dearie was in this number.

The difference in her solo work, which she began to record in 1956, is that the same innocence begins to sound haunting and unsupported, and the chosen songs begin to dwell on the topic of delusion. Delusion in love, yes; but still delusion. I think there is something to be said for this defenseless presentation of her innocence. It is at once sexually defiant—she claims the right to hope for pleasure as a thirty-year-old woman—and racially undefended and indefensible. There is no assurance of conversion away from whiteness. Nor is the voice shoring up its entitlement with the harmonic coordination of the Lawrence Welk Singers; it is not suggesting a closed and satisfactory world. I think—I imagine—I hope—that such an eerie portrait of the white garden finds a way not to disavow its own false innocence instantly with a knowing gesture. The bitterness and the beauty both have to be acknowledged. At the same time, it is necessary that nothing be put forward on one’s own behalf.

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