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"Blue Melody" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the September 1948 issue of Cosmopolitan. The story was inspired by the life of Bessie Smith and was originally titled "Needle on a Scratchy Phonograph Record". Cosmopolitan changed the title to "Blue Melody" without Salinger's consent, a "slick" magazine tactic that was one of the reasons the author decided, in the late forties, that "he wanted to publish only in The New Yorker."

Plot

The tragic tale of an African-American jazz singer, the story was inspired by the death of Bessie Smith, who died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in near Memphis, Tennessee. Due to segregationist prohibitions, she was denied medical treatment by physicians in a hospital reserved for white patients.

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Theme

“Blue Melody” memorializes blues singer Bessie Smith. Though denying he intended to “slam” the American Deep South, Salinger's narrator registers a “stinging” condemnation of white-supremacism in “Blue Melody” conveyed in this cynical remark alluding to the story's theme:

It’s just a little story of Mom’s apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Radio Theatre of the air—the things we fought for, in short. You can’t miss it, really.

Kenneth Slawenski draws a thematic equivalence between Salinger's “A Girl I Knew” (1948) and “Blue Melody" in their exposure of “dehumanizing values in society around him” that he believed led to the extermination of European Jews and the apartheid-like system in the United States. As such, Salinger “brought The Holocaust home.”

Footnotes

1. Wenke, 1991 p. 167: Selected Bibliography
2. Slawenski, 2010 p. 163: Title originally “Needle on a Scratchy Phonograph Record.”
3. ^ Alexander, Paul (1999). Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance. ISBN 1-58063-080-4. p. 130.
4. Slawenski, 2010 p. 165: Plot summary
5. Slawenski, 2010 p. 165; “The story is Salinger's tribute to the blues singer Bessie Smith.”
6. Slawenski, 2010 p. 165
7. Slawenski, 2010 p. 165: quoted from the text of the story, see footnote 11.
8. Slawenski, 2010 p. 176: Salinger “furious” that the name of the story had been changed by Cosmopolitan's A. E. Hotchener...”

Sources

• Slawenski, Kenneth. 2010. J. D. Salinger: A Life. Random House, New York. ISBN 978-1-4000-6951-4
• Wenke, John. 1991. J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twaynes Studies in Short Fiction, Gordon Weaver, General Editor. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-8334-2

This article about a short story (or stories) published in the 1940s is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

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• Short stories by J. D. Salinger
• 1948 short stories
• Works originally published in Cosmopolitan (magazine)
• Cultural depictions of Bessie Smith
• 1940s short story stubs