"What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue"

With the seminars that are currently happening in AP Lit. there seems to be one topic that has not been discussed and that has been the many songs present in the novel. Ralph Ellison is known as a man with a connection to the African American culture and jazz music is a huge part of this culture. One of the songs I noticed in the prologue, a section that will be discussed in class tomorrow, is the song “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue.” This song was originally written by Thomas Waller and was later sung by the great Louis Armstrong. The reference to the song, as aforementioned, occurs in the introduction of the novel and the narrator discusses how he wishes to feel the vibrations of the recording of “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue.” Because Ellison spent a lot of time writing the novel, I figured that the song must have some significance in the scope of the novel and was not placed accidentally. For this reason, I decided to research the song, a song I likely should have researched for my Invisible Man Research project.
“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” was originally written by Thomas “Fats” Waller for the Broadway musical called Hot Chocolates. It was one of the first musicals to be performed by only African Americans and was written to show the sadness of a dark-skinned woman who had lost her man to a lighter-skinned girl. In 1955, Louis Armstrong took the song and transformed it into a nationally recognized song representing the powerful protest against racial discrimination. The song also has a historical significance in its message against racial discrimination and expresses the futility that some African Americans felt during the time period. The impassioned performance of Armstrong came eleven months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation of schools to be unconstitutional. Before and after this controversial decision, there were a series of murders of African Americans in the Deep South in states of Mississippi and Alabama. In the same year, 1955, Rosa Parks sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat thus starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A few years later, Louis Armstrong spoke out harshly against President Eisenhower when the president was reluctant to act when African American teenagers were banned from a high school in Arkansas for no other reason than their skin color. With the start of the civil rights movement and the much political and social turmoil present at the time of the release of the song, Louis Armstrong essentially recorded an ultimate articulation of the concerns of the African American population. The song became a symbol and anthem of African American complaint against the invisibility that the speaker in the novel justifiably claims is present.