The globalization of local indexicalities through music: African‐American English and the blues

Abstract

AbstractThis article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African‐American English (AAE) features in the lyrical language use of blues artists, relying on data from different social and national backgrounds and time periods. It adopts a variationist linguistic methodological approach to examine the prevalence of five AAE forms in live‐performed blues music: /aɪ/ monophthongization, post‐consonantal word‐final /t/ deletion, post‐consonantal word‐final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in < ing > ultimas, and post‐vocalic word‐final /r/ deletion. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis applied to a corpus of 80 performances finds no statistically significant association between national/ethnic background and variant use, and indicates that blues artists, from different eras and nationalities, are highly probable to realize the AAE variant of the analyzed variables, regardless of their sociocultural background. By building on early scholarly work on language and music, existing studies considering the use of AAE by non‐members of the African‐American community, and current theorizing on authenticity, style, and indexicality, this study hence provides tentative support for the existence of a standard blues singing style, which involves performers using AAE forms as a stylistic‐linguistic strategy to index artistic authenticity.