New English/Southern Studies Professor
Brings Blues Scholarship into the Classroom
Adam Gussow Formed a Duo with Mississippi Bluesman Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee

New York native Adam Gussow has no Southern accent, but he may know more about Mississippi than many of her sons and daughters. The new assistant professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi can also play the blues out of a harmonica.

Gussow, 44, taught American, African American, and Southern literature, as well as black music, cultural studies, and Beat poet Jack Kerouac during a stint as visiting assistant professor of English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His intense immersion into the blues tradition—whose origins are firmly planted in Mississippi—is impressive.

“The blues tradition is, needless to say, thoroughly grounded in Southern lives, Southern folkways, Southern expressive culture,” Gussow said of his principal research interest. “This is just the right place to be right now.”

For 12 years, Gussow—a longtime private blues harmonica instructor—performed with Mt. Olive native and blues musician Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee. As cofounder of the Harlem juke joint blues duo Satan & Adam, he recorded three CDs and appeared on U2’s Rattle and Hum album and concert film. The twosome also played at numerous music festivals and clubs in North America and Europe.

“For some reason, the public has this misconception that English professors are stodgy or elitist. How unfortunate!” said Joseph Urgo, chair of the University’s Department of English. “We’re thrilled to have Adam Gussow here to teach literature and topical courses based in his research on black and white cultural crossings in American literature and music. Now, in his second career, he’s assistant professor in one of the coolest departments on campus—English.”

Mississippi and blues songs are steeped in Gussow’s doctoral dissertation, “Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and Blues Texts, 1890-1996.” In his treatise, he discusses ways in which violence shapes the blues tradition. He also shows how blues texts were often cathartic responses to the eruption of spectacle lynchings in the South during the 1890s. His revised dissertation will be published by the University of Chicago Press this fall.

“Professor Gussow brings unique training and talents to the position in English and Southern Studies,” said Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “He studies African American literature and knows how central it has been to any understanding of the richness of Southern culture. As a blues performer and student of the music, he promises to augment the Center’s national lead in studying the blues.”

In addition to its Deep South locale, the Center’s innovative research activities attracted him to the University, Gussow said. Through Center efforts, the University’s J. D. Williams Library has acquired such holdings as the O’Neal Living Blues Collection and the B. B. King Record Archive. Gussow also anticipates working closely with Living Blues, the bimonthly magazine of the African American blues tradition published by the Center.

Gussow said he also hopes to promote and participate in discussions of racial healing. “I want to pick up where I left off—studying the origins of the blues and racial antagonism,” Gussow said. “I’m now interested in studying the solution rather than the problem.”

Gussow received bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton and a master’s from Columbia University. His autobiographical first book, Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir, received the 2000 Keeping the Blues Alive Award in Literature from the Blues Foundation in Memphis. He also received the 2002 Darwin T. Turner Award for the article “‘Make My Getaway’: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues,” which recently was published in the African American Review.

Gussow’s writings about Jack Kerouac, Paule Marshall, John Cheever, Alice Walker, Herman Melville and Edward Said have appeared in Georgia Review, The Literary Review, The Village Voice, and many other publications.

Deidra Jackson