15 DOI: 10.4324/9781003081876-3 2 “I’VE GOT THE HAITIAN BLUES” Mamie Desdunes and the Gendered Inflections of the Common Wind Benjamin Barson A Note from the Author: Throughout this chapter I use the term gender to refer to both gender and sex whilst acknowledging that strictly speaking, sex is designated by biological differences, and gender is socially constructed. As this chapter also addresses prostitution, I have, following activists who work on the issue, prioritized the term “sex workers” when referring to people who sell erotic services, including sex. At this point, I want to clarify that I am an able-bodied cisgender and heterosexual male from the United States. This has allowed me to pursue my professional ambitions from a position of priv- ilege, unhindered by the structural disadvantages experienced by women, Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) individuals, or others from social or economically disadvantageous milieus. Therefore, I cannot claim to write this chapter from a position of experience. To partly alleviate this lack, I have aimed to use sources by female or non-binary authors, primarily. Introduction Mamie’s Blues … [is a] bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, a song which is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something completely beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an arche- typal form, something from before, from below. It is a piece that delivers listeners “back to a betrayed origin,” a musical ethos that demonstrates that “perhaps there have been other paths and that the only one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one” (Cortazar 1987, p. 195–198). So wrote the Argentine exile in Paris, Julio Cortázar, in his landmark work 1963 choose-your-own path novel (what he called an “Anti-Novel”) Hopscotch. Like Cortázar, I also consider “Mamie’s Blues” to be something of a “betrayed origin” in how we narrate and tell the story of jazz. This is a piece that contemporary musicologists now consider to be the first twelve-bar jazz blues (Hobson 2011), an opinion shared by Buddy Bolden’s trombonist,