Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas is the third book of Maya Angelou's seven-volume autobiography series. Set between 1949 and 1955, the book spans Angelou's early twenties. In this volume, Angelou describes her struggles to support her young son, form meaningful relationships, and forge a successful career in the entertainment world. The work's 1976 publication was the first time an African-American woman had expanded her life story into a third volume. Scholar Dolly McPherson calls the book "a graphic portrait of the adult self in bloom" and critic Lyman B. Hagen calls it "a journey of discovery and rebirth".
In Singin' and Swingin, Angelou examines many of the same subjects and themes in her previous autobiographies including travel, music, race, conflict, and motherhood. Angelou depicts the conflict she felt as a single mother, despite her success as a performer as she travels Europe with the musical Porgy and Bess. Her depictions of her travels, which take up 40 percent of the book, have roots in the African-American slave narrative. Angelou uses music and musical concepts throughout Singin' and Swingin'; McPherson calls it Angelou's "praisesong" to Porgy and Bess. Angelou's stereotypes about race and race relations are challenged as she interacts more with people of different races. During the course of this narrative, she changes her name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou for professional reasons. Her young son changes his name as well, from Clyde to Guy, and their relationship is strengthened as the book ends.
Background Angelou followed her first two installations of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and Gather Together in My Name (1974), with Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, published in 1976. It marked the first time a well-known African-American woman writer had expanded her life story into a third autobiography. She also published two volumes of poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975). Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton stated, "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".
Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou, along with feminist diarirst Anaïs Nin, "pioneers of self-exposure, willing to turn a spotlight on their own sometimes questionable exploits and emotional shortcomings". Angelou, unlike African-American women autobiographers who wrote during the 19th and early 20th centuries, was able to use herself as the main character in her books. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "a work of art that eludes description", states that Angelou's work set a precedent in describing "the black experience" in African-American literature. While Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul du Feu talked her into writing about it anyway, encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and "be honest about it".
Title According to Angelou, the book's title came from the rent parties of the 1920s and 1930s, where people would pay the host an inexpensive entry fee and then eat and drink throughout the weekend. As she stated, people would "sing and swing and get merry like Christmas so one would have some fuel with which to live the rest of the week". These parties, also called "parlor socials", were attended by members of the working class who were unable to afford to go to Harlem's more expensive clubs. As critic Mary Jane Lupton stated: "The concept of the rent party helps describe Angelou's position ... She is a single mother from the South who goes to California and sings and swings for a living. She entertains others for little money as a singer, B-girl, and dancer, without getting very merry at all." Scholar Sondra O'Neale described the phrase as "a folkloric title symbolic of the author's long-deserved ascent to success and fulfillment".
Lupton writes that the title is based upon a simile, a literary technique Angelou often uses in Singin' and Swingin' and throughout her books. Lupton also considered the title "ironic"; Angelou uses positive words like singin' and swingin' that reflect several meanings related to the text. These words describe the beginnings of Angelou's career as an entertainer, but the irony in the terms also depict the conflict Angelou felt about her son. The words "gettin' merry like Christmas" are also ironic: "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas was Angelou's most unmerry autobiography." Because music is one of the book's themes, Angelou uses abbreviated verb endings in her title that reflect Black dialect and evoke the sound of a blues singer.
Plot summary Singin' and Swingin opens shortly after Angelou's previous autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. Marguerite (or Maya), a single mother with a young son, is in her early twenties, struggling to make a living. Angelou writes in this book, like her previous works, about the full range of her own experiences. As scholar Dolly McPherson states: "When one encounters Maya Angelou in her story, one encounters the humor, the pain, the exuberance, the honesty, and the determination of a human being who has experienced life fully and retained her strong sense of self." Many people around Angelou influence her growth and, as critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "propel Angelou ever forward". The book's opening chapters find Maya concerned with, as Hagen asserts, "apprehension about her son, a desire for a home, and facing racial conflicts, and seeking a career". Maya is offered a job as a salesperson in a record shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. At first she greets her white boss' offers of generosity and friendship with suspicion, but after two months of searching for evidence of racism, Maya begins to "relax and enjoy a world of music". The job allows her to move back into her mother's house and to spend more time with her son.
While working in the store, Maya meets Tosh Angelos, a Greek sailor. They fall in love, and he is especially fond of her son. Against her mother's wishes, Maya marries Tosh in 1952. At first, the marriage is satisfying, and it seems that Maya has fulfilled her dream of being a housewife, writing: "My life began to resemble a Good Housekeeping advertisement." Eventually, Maya resents Tosh's demands that she stay at home; she is also bothered by her friends' negative reaction to her interracial marriage. Maya is disturbed by Tosh's atheism and his control of her life, but does little to challenge his authority. After Tosh tells her son Clyde that there is no God, Maya rebels by secretly attending Black churches. After three years the marriage disintegrates when Tosh announces to Maya that he is "tired of being married". She goes into the hospital for an appendectomy, and after the operation, she announces her desire to return to her grandmother in Stamps, but Tosh informs her that Annie died the day of Maya's operation.
A single mother once again, Maya begins to find success as a performer. She gets a job dancing and singing at The Purple Onion, a popular nightclub in San Francisco; on the recommendation of the club's owners, she changes her name from Marguerite Johnson to the "more exotic" "Maya Angelou". She gains the attention of talent scouts, who offer her a role in Porgy and Bess; she turns down the part, however, because of her obligations to The Purple Onion. When her contract expires, Maya goes to New York City to audition for a part opposite Pearl Bailey, but she turns down the offered role to join a European tour of Porgy and Bess.
Leaving Clyde with her mother, Maya travels to 22 countries with the touring company in 1954 and 1955, expressing her impressions about her travels. She writes the following about Verona: "I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood."
Despite Maya's success with Porgy and Bess, she is racked with guilt and regret about leaving her son behind. After receiving bad news about Clyde's health, she quits the tour and returns to San Francisco. Both Clyde and Maya heal from the physical and emotional toll caused by their separation, and she promises never to leave him again. Clyde also announces that he wants to be called "Guy". As Angelou writes: "It took him only one month to train us. He became Guy and we could hardly remember ever calling him anything else."
Maya is true to her promise; she accepts a job performing in Hawaii, and Guy goes with her. At the close of the book, mother and son express pride in each other. When he praises her singing, she writes: "Although I was not a great singer I was his mother, and he was my wonderful, dependently independent son."
Style and genre According to Lupton, Angelou's choice to continue telling her life story into a third volume affects her point of view because it and her previous autobiographies, which are told in three distinct but connected segments, are linked to each other "by the changing central character and by the first-person point of view". Also according to Lupton, Angelou, in Singin' and Swingin', which does not have the same kind of uniformity that other autobiographies have, deviates from autobiographies that are more contained and tends to "begin in a moment of revelation and to end at some decisive moment in the autobiographer's life". Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development has often led reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Angelou stated in a 1989 interview that she was the only "serious" writer to choose the genre to express herself. As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou reports not one person's story, but the collective's. Lupton insists that all of Angelou's autobiographies conformed to the genre's standard structure: they were written by a single author, they were chronological, and they contained elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies. When speaking of her unique use of the genre, Angelou acknowledges that she has followed the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we. Angelou called working in this way "a responsibility", stating: "Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me."