Listening to Johnson, and then to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (yes, to the instrumental blues as well as to the lyrics of blues singers), I heard a story ringing true to the one in Huckleberry Finn: a journey toward freedom against insurmountable odds undertaken for the sake of yearning for an often impossible love, with the readiness to improvise as the sole means of supporting the hope of that love. After all, Huck’s efforts to free Jim do comprise a profound expression of love—an assertion of the principle that for the American promise to be realized, everyone must learn not only to go it alone, to solo, but also to make music together with others, to swing. This, at this profoundest level, is what Huckleberry Finn learns to do. Huck knows how to solo; and like a true bluesman, he learns to swing.

How shall we define the blues as a musical form? Crystallizing in New Orleans and in other cities along the Mississippi River at just about the same time Twain’s novel was being composed, the blues typically is a first-person musical narrative or meditation on a life of trial and trouble, delivered in a comic mode. Its stark descriptions of catastrophe are leavened by the music’s design as a good-time dance music, rolling and tumbling with the sounds of flirtation and courtship, of the fine-framed “easy rider.” Even when the music seems especially made for private reflection (“I’m settin’ in the house, with everything on my mind”), its dreams of escape rarely offer mere sentimental flights but instead involve the agonies of confrontation and of real-world trips toward realms where freedom—that impossibly illusive but nonetheless inspiring dream (“how long, how long, has that evening train been gone?”)—is pursued with a full heart and a cool head. Rather than softening or turning from life’s pains, blues music probes the “jagged grain” of a troublesome existence. Typically concerned with a woman yearning for her man or a man yearning for his woman (“I’m in love with a woman but she’s not in love with me”), the blues is a music of romantic longing and, in a larger frame, of desire for connectedness and completion, for spiritual as well as physical communication and love in a world of fracture and disarray. As an improvised form, the blues admits life’s dire discouragements and limits to the point of death, but nonetheless celebrates human continuity: mankind’s good-humored resiliency and capacity, in spite of everything, to endure and even to prevail.n

In the first chapters of Huckleberry Finn, Jim sets the stage for the book’s blueness by explaining to Huck that most of the mysterious natural signs of things to come point to bad luck and trouble—that, in other words, the two of them live in a world infested with the blues. Huck complains that “it looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked him if there warn’t any good-luck signs. He says: ‘Mighty few—an’ dey ain’ no use to a body. What you want to know when good luck’s a-comin’ for? want to keep it off?’ ” (p. 44). One good luck sign, Jim’s hairy body and chest, which indicated he would be rich “bymeby,” prompt another of Jim’s bluesy reflections: “I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wurth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’ ” (p. 46). And yet of course (as Sterling Brown observed) Jim does want more: He continues on the bad-luck-haunted road toward freedom for himself and for his family.

The more I read, the more I came to feel that this book is full of the blues. Huck Finn is a lonesome, unhappy boy whose reflections on his surroundings are often sublimely sad and lonely. Before taking off on the water with Jim, Huck feels trapped in the house with his night-thoughts of loneliness and death:

Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company (p. 7).

Early one morning, before he meets up with Jim, Huck is alone on Jackson’s Island, lounging on the grass. Again the scene is rather melancholy. The sad boy is killing time. “I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them” (p. 36). That night “it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain’t no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can’t stay so, you soon get over it” (p. 38).

Only with Jim on hand as Huck’s friend and partner-in-escape does nature begin to shine.