SOURCE: “Faulkner in Context: Seeing ‘That Evening Sun’ Through the Blues,” in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Winter, 1996, pp. 50-58.

In the following essay, Gartner explores William Faulkner's portrait of a blues singer in “That Evening Sun Go Down” in the contexts of Handy's “St. Louis Blues.”

When Faulkner published “That Evening Sun Go Down” in the Spring 1931 American Mercury, his readers would have immediately recognized the reference to W. C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues.” When the story appeared that fall with the shorter title, “That Evening Sun,” in Faulkner's first short-story collection, readers must still have picked up the allusion, thanks to America's “blues craze” (Bakara 148). From its beginning, like Faulkner himself, they could have heard Handy and his band, or other singers or bands, playing the popular new blues. At the height of the craze, the radio and phonograph brought Bessie Smith and other blues...