SOURCE: "The Blues as Literary Theme," in The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1970, pp. 117-40.

In the following essay, Bluestein examines the use of blues and jazz as motifs in the literary works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison.

The use of folklore by American writers is a subject that has been discussed only briefly. Daniel Hoffman's Form and Fable in American Fiction (1961) is the most successful attempt to understand the impact on our early writers of themes and techniques related to folk tradition, and he has gone far toward correcting the view that folklore has counted for little in our literary developments. My concern here will be with the use of Negro folklore and folksong in more recent works which reflect both the ideological and technical implications of folklore as a basis for literary expression...