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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that the Blues is both a narrative and ecological archive, expressing African American relationships to land, labor, belief, and community. Through Blues Ecology and Narrative, it reveals how sound, environment, and memory intertwine as records of Black life and cultural survival.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how the Blues serves as both a narrative and an ecological archive, articulating African American relationships to land, labor, belief, and each other. Building on my developing frameworks of Blues Ecology and Blues Narrative, I argue that the music is more than an aesthetic form: it is a living record of environmental knowledge and social memory that encodes the natural and cultural worlds of Black life in the U.S. South.

Blues Ecology situates the music in its soundscapes and landscapes, the fields, rivers, crossroads, plantations, and porches that shape its timbre and meaning, while Blues Narrative focuses on how these elements become stories about survival, displacement, and continuity. Drawing from fieldwork, oral histories, and performance analysis, I examine how Blues texts carry traces of folk belief, spirituality, agricultural labor, and community traditions, and how these are sometimes misinterpreted or flattened in public discourse and archival framing.

Rather than treating the “natural” as merely background, this work centers the human–nonhuman entanglements that animate the Blues: wind and water, trains and highways, animals and spirits, the soil itself. I ask how these relationships are remembered, reimagined, or contested when the Blues is moved from its local landscape into national, global, or institutional narratives. By reframing the Blues as both a nature-culture narrative and a site of environmental memory, this paper argues that understanding its “naturalness” requires listening to its full ecology, labor, belief, land, and sound, on its own terms.