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Relating the blues to American social and literary history and Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. With extensive reference to economic and historical facts and to the contributions of symbolic anthropology, Marxist criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction, he discusses, among others, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. In these exemplary analyses, Baker shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it. -- From publisher's description.