New Paradigms in William Grant Still’s Blue Steel

This chapter examines the aesthetics underlying William Grant Still's Blue Steel and contextualizes it as a Harlem Renaissance work engaged with the African past and Still's diasporic present. Composed in 1934, Blue Steel was envisioned by Still as an African American opera—one that not only treated an African American subject, but was also rooted in African American and African diasporic culture—namely, its syncretic religion, voodoo or voudon. The chapter first takes a look at Still's first exposure to and early attempts at opera before discussing his collaborators in the creation of Blue Steel. It then provides a summary of Blue Steel's plot and characters as well as its use of African music for conceptual approaches to representing Africa and Africanness through musical signifiers. It also examines how voodoo became a means for Still to express himself as a Harlem Renaissance artist by functioning as a multifaceted signifier of African identity within the New World.