"These groups [the black poor of the Mississippi Delta] learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it…Slavery, sharecropping, mechanization, and prison, wage, and migratory labor are just a few permutations possible within a plantation complex. None of these forms changes the basic features of resource monopoly and extreme ethnic and class polarization." -- Clyde Woods
I first read Professor Clyde Woods’Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (Verso) shortly after it and my book What the Music Said were published. My immediate reaction was “damn, think I need to go back to the lab.” Thirteen years later, Development Arrested remains the most sophisticated analysis of the political economy of Black music that has been published in the last generation, in part because Woods never lost sight of the fact that the very economic engines that drove the degradation and exploitation of Black workers in the Delta, inspired a resistance to those engines in the music of the region—not simply through ideological retorts, but in creating something that soothed the souls of a people well beyond weary.
Yet the brilliance of the man’s work, paled in the light of the man’s humanity; He was simply “Good People.” Professor Woods and I crossed paths finally in 2003, in a way that bespeaks his good and supportive nature; he simply showed up to a reading that my friend and journalist Esther Iverem hosted at her Washington DC home in support of my book Songs in the Key of Black Life. What I recall from that first encounter, is meeting a dude that I wished I had had the opportunity to connect with much earlier in my professional life. Still can remember talking to him about Hip-Hop’s Blues aesthetic, as he reeled off lyric after lyric from Scarface to make his point. I never heard Scarface, or Southern rap for that matter, the same after that.
Over the past few years I was fortunate enough to run into Professor Woods fairly regularly at the annual American Studies Association meeting. Last time I saw him, was at the 2009 American Studies Meeting in Washington DC; he was holding court, fittingly, with a group of students and New Orleans poet and activist Kalamu Y Salaam. Months later his edited volume In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions was published, putting a fine point on all of the scholarship that was produced in the wake of Katrina. Yet, as in all of his work, Professor Woods found that common thread to Black humanity, in what he regularly referred to as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.”
There are many scholars who make lasting impressions with their work, but comparatively few that make those same impressions as simply good people. Professor Clyde Woods was the rare person who did both. He will be missed.
