Author Archives: Eli Schrubbe

“Porgy and Bess” and African-American Identity

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Arguably the most famous American musical theater production of the 20th century is Porgy and Bess, “an American Folk Opera,” the peak of Gershwin’s career. There is rarely a night in the world when Porgy and Bess isn’t performed live on stage. The distinct characters of the songs have spawned hundreds of arrangements. in Maurice Peress’s book “Dvorák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots”, We are able to see the intersections between “Porgy and Bess”, Gershwin, and the African-American identity. 1

Although “Porgy and Bess” was a cultural gift, it is not exempted from some controversy. “Combining the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants, George and Ira Gershwin, with the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family, DuBose Heyward, and his wife Dorothy, an Ohio native, to depict an exclusively African-American story”(Cooper 2019)—is this an example of good melting-pot American art? Is it improper cultural appropriation? The fact that the most well-known opera depicting the African-American experience was produced by a team made up exclusively of white people is no secret to Black composers looking for acceptance. 2

In a 1936 essay for Opportunity, an Urban League journal, Hall Johnson, a black composer, arranger, and choir director whose Broadway hit musical “Run, Little Chillun!” had been successful, said Gershwin was “as free to write about Negroes in his own way as any other composer to write about anything else.” However, he noted that the finished product was “Gershwin’s idea of what a Negro opera should be, not a Negro opera by Gershwin.” Decades later, the writer James Baldwin reiterated this criticism in a review of the movie, saying that although he enjoyed “Porgy and Bess,” it was still “a white man’s vision of Negro life.”2

“Porgy and Bess” provided jobs for black singers with classical training during a time when discrimination kept them from appearing at the Met and other prestigious venues. When the initial tour of the play arrived to the segregated National Theater in Washington, DC, the black stars of the show took a stance and promised not to perform. The theater was compelled to integrate as a result, albeit only briefly. “Porgy” established the careers of other black vocalists , such as Leontyne Price, who sang the part of Bess right out of Juilliard.2

Eventually, It began featuring American culture internationally. However, this came with some problems. “Porgy and Bess”, being a Jewish composer’s work about African Americans, the work’s European premiere in Copenhagen during World War II sparked controversy because of its staging, which was seen as a direct protest against the Nazi regime. During the middle of the Cold War, in the mid-1950s, author Truman Capote wrote an entertaining portrayal of the inherent ironies of this visit of Leningrad and Moscow.2 The piece seemed to be fitting into the operatic canon, proving the pieces power.

 

1 Peress, Maurice. 2004. Dvorák to Duke Ellington : A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots. New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Accessed November 2, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
2 Cooper, Michael. “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/arts/music/porgy-bess-gershwin-metropolitan-opera.html.

Mildred Bailey and American Indian Identity

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Mildred Bailey, studio portrait, USA, 1949. (Photo by Gilles Petard/Redferns)

Concurrent Resolution No. 49 was filed by the Coeur d’Alene tribe of Idaho in the Idaho House of Representatives in March 2012 with the goal of correcting historical records and reuniting Mildred Bailey1, one of the first female vocalists in jazz history. “I think it’s not known at all. Hardly nobody knew,” says Coeur d’Alene Tribal Chairman Chief Allan. “Not only being Native, but being a woman in that era, to be so strong and keep pushing and not to give up, that would help a lot of our young tribal members who are looking for a role model,” says Chief Allan2.

For background on the Coeur d’Alene tribe, we can find a large monetary exchange between the tribe and the United States government. As a result of the constant stream of settlers into the area, the Coeur d’Alene people effectively transitioned from traditional means of nomadic survival in just fifty years after first making contact with Europeans and adopted static agriculture3. The Coeur d’Alene tribe paid the United States government half a million dollars in 1889 to give up the northern portion of their ancestral lands, as stated in the Indian Commissions Agreement. All Coeur d’Alene families received an equal share of the funds, most of which went into purchasing cutting-edge farming machinery4. Mildred Bailey, who was born in 1900 and was nurtured by her Coeur d’Alene mother and a Scotch/Irish father on a farm next to the reservation, portrayed this fast changing environment3.

For over eight decades, Bailey, a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, was mostly recognized as a “white jazz singer.” Conversations concerning the origins of jazz rarely addressed Bailey’s Indian identity; it stayed in the farmlands of Coeur d’Alene, where she learned to move, speak, and sing like a neglected crop. In a 1930s America that was still divided along racial lines, Bailey could easily be pardoned if she decided to conceal her Native American heritage, but she never made the attempt to do so3.  On the contrary, she was happy to share it with everyone around her as a source of pride. The reason Mildred Bailey was labeled as “white” was that the jazz narrative she was a part of could not accommodate Indian jazz players. The faulty label of “white jazz-singer” was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Bailey’s significant influence on the jazz and pop scenes. Bailey invented the vocal “swing” style that many singers attempted to imitate, including “Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, and Tony Bennett.” (Hamill 33) Bailey chose to attribute her voice sixty years after it was recorded for the final time, to the Indian music of her childhood rather than her contemporaries.3

 

1“Page 260 Us, Indian Census Rolls, 1885-1940.” Fold3, www.fold3.com/image/216137757. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.

2Robinson, Jessica. “Tribe Seeks to Correct Jazz History on Native Singer’s Heritage.” NPR, NPR, 15 Mar. 2012, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=148715100.

3 Berglund, Jeff, Johnson, Jan, and Lee, Kimberli, eds. Indigenous Pop : Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Accessed October 26, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

4 Dinwoodie, David. “Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane: The World of the Schitsu’Umsh (Coeur d’Alene Indians).” Montana; the Magazine of Western History 53, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 75. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/landscape-traveled-coyote-crane-world-schitsuumsh/docview/217955660/se-2.



Hawaiian Music’s Journey to Mainstream America

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Hawaii is internationally regarded as a paradise and is the perfect place for exotic getaways in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. But until 1778, it was a hierarchical, sovereign nation populated by indigenous Native Hawaiians who were self-sufficient and coexisted peacefully with their families, their islands, and their culture. Since foreigners began to settle on the Hawaiian islands, the native Hawaiian population and culture have fought to survive from their near extinction.1Specifically for this blog post, Native Hawaiian music was significantly impacted by the 19th-century immigration of Europeans and Americans. It is said that “by the late nineteenth century, Hawaiians could hear popular music from other countries in ports and cities that handled the growing trade” (Hearingtheamericas.org) after Christian hymns were introduced by missionaries.2 Hawaii’s government was taken over by US-based companies in the 1890s, and soon after that the island was annexed by the US as a colonial property. By this time, Hawaiian musicians had established a style that would have a significant impact on popular music all around the world.2 For example, the song “Aloha ‘Oe,”  is revered as a symbol of traditional Hawaiian culture. Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Islands, composed it more than a century ago. The song has both subtle and explicit themes about power hierarchies because it was written and recorded at a period of political and cultural unrest in Hawai’i. Although the song was originally written in 1878 as a mele ho’oipoipo (love song) between a man and a woman, Native Hawaiians through time adapted it socially, politically, and culturally into a song of melancholy farewell between the Queen and her country.3 Since its creation, “Aloha ‘Oe” has grown to be among the most well-known and well-known Hawaiian melodies. Following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and Hawaii’s unlawful designation as the 50th US state, demand for the song’s sheet music and performances surged significantly.3 In the figure at the top of the page, you can see one of the many adaptions of this native song. We can even see that they changed the lyrics to english.4 Hawaiian music took the music world by storm, turning their into a genre and “culture” that every American has “taken apart of”.

 

1 Osorio, Emma Kauana. 2023. “Struggle for Hawaiian Cultural Survival – Ballard Brief.” Ballard Brief, July. https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/struggle-for-hawaiian-cultural-survival.

2 “Hearing the Americas · Hawaiian Music · Hearing the Americas.” n.d. https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/hawaiian-music.

3 T. Chow, Evelyn. 2018. “The Sovereign Nation of Hawai’i: Resistance in the Legacy of ‘Aloha ‘Oe.’” SUURJ: Seattle University Undergraduate Research Journal. https://scholarworks.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=suurj#:~:text=Lili%27uokalani%20initially%20wrote%20“Aloha,Maunawili%20Ranch%20(Imada%2035).

4 Historic Sheet Music Collection, University of Oregon. “Aloha oe” Oregon Digital. Accessed 2023-10-12. https://oregondigital.org/concern/documents/00000002j

Evolution of Black Gospel Music in the 20th Century

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During a Sunday service at the National Pentecostal Church in Johannesburg, South Africa, a gospel choir leads the crowd in song. Photo by Dieter Telemans/Panos 4

“Gospel Music,” a specific genre of sacred American black music, reached its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of its musical predecessors include “white Pentecostal hymns, slave songs, spirituals, work songs, and evangelistic congregational songs from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.”  Gospel music has advanced by embracing musical ideas and “expressions from genres including the blues, jazz, rock, soul, classical, and country.” (Beatrice Irene 2014) Thomas A. Dorsey, dubbed “The Father of Gospel Music,” brought blues and jazz to black and white gospel songs, white evangelical hymns, and other genres even though he wasn’t the first to compose gospel songs.1

Gospel tunes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries started to take the place of slave songs and spirituals owing to the work of composers like Charles Tindley, Lucie Campbell, and Dr. Isaac Watts2 . They “gospelized” traditional tunes by introducing African American music style, such as flattened notes, altered rhythmic pulses, and pentatonic scales. Many of Charles Tindley’s melodies were written in pentatonic scales, and, according to gospel music specialist Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer, he left leeway “for the interpolation of flatted thirds and sevenths” (Horace Clarence) in both his melodic lines and harmonic structures. Additionally, Tindley left room in his compositions for improvised language and rhythm. Thomas Dorsey advanced this by gradually merging the performance of black holy music with blues performance elements.2 

Gospel singer and scholar, Horace C. Boyer, offered an explanation for how the sacred and secular gospels came to be recognized as separate categories.3 Black Americans who had never heard gospel music or had just chosen to disapprove of it for whatever reason began to support it, but not in churches. Black middle-class Americans suddenly found it highly fashionable to buy gospel CDs and watch gospel-music singers on television, even though going to concerts was still frowned upon2 . Furthermore, non-blacks held the opinion that because they view gospel singing as an “act,” it belongs in nightclubs where other entertainers also perform. 2 

We can see this type of secular change in a 1969 Milwaukee Newspaper 1, when ABC-TV broadcasts the special program, The Folk Gospel Music Festival, the spectacle and emotionally “charged excitement of the best in contemporary gospel music”(Milwaukee Star 1969) will be broadcast on network television. Featuring many of the top gospel artists and figures of the time, including the inspirational Clara Walker and the Gospel Redeemers, the Staple Singers, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Mahalla Jackson. As part of the Harlem Cultural Festival in New York City, “The Folk Gospel Music Festival” was recorded during an outdoor performance in front of 70,000 spectators.1

 

1 Pate, Beatrice Irene. 2014. “Southern Black Gospel Music: Qualitative Look at Quartet Sound during the Gospel ‘Boom’ Period of 1940-1960.” Order No. 1568090, Liberty University. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/southern-black-gospel-music-qualitative-look-at/docview/1609004829/se-2.

2 Boyer, Horace Clarence. “Contemporary Gospel Music.” The Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (1979): 5–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/1214427.

3  Milwaukee Star (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) VIII, no. 18, September 6, 1969: Page [1]. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12A7AE31A7B3CA6B%40EANAAA-12BE206EFAC5BEF0%402440471-12BE206F06AEFFA0%400.

4 Aeonmag. “Why Repetition Can Turn Almost Anything into Music: Aeon Essays.” Aeon, aeon.co/essays/why-repetition-can-turn-almost-anything-into-music. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023.

Marching for Social Justice

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War, political and social inequality, poverty, and other obstacles to economic and development prospects have all sparked protests calling for social justice as an alternative to the status quo.  Although social justice is frequently associated with politics, many justice movements have employed music to encourage and encourage widespread participation in their cause.1 One form of music that has been involved in many protests is the ‘marching band’. The history of marching bands may be traced to the Middle Ages, when musicians were used by feudal armies to inspire and motivate their troops. Although the bulk of countries still use marching bands in their military facilities, America has started using them in classrooms. In the majority of high schools and colleges across the country, music ensembles are now an obligatory subject. Even though marching bands were predominantly white, that did not stop people of color from making use of this brilliant genre.2 We can hear recordings of marching bands dating all the way back to 1923, as seen in the recording done by ‘Victor’ recording label and ‘Sousa’s Band’.3

In the picture above4, we can see the March 3, 1913, National American Woman Suffrage Association parade in Washington, D.C. The parade’s organizers deliberately timed the procession to take place the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, which further boosted interest in the occasion. This tactic was effective. The women marched from the U.S. Capitol toward the Treasury Building, where they were met by thousands of spectators, many of whom were in town for the inauguration.5 The all-women marching band, added to the huge spectacle of this parade, is credited in having an active role in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, signed 7 years later. Protests, like the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade, highlight the importance of music as a medium for social justice.

Although we see marching bands used as a medium for protest all the way back in the early 20th century, we can see bands making their way to protests still today. At the Honk! festival of activist street bands, which began on Thursday and ran for five days, it was difficult to determine where politics ended and the party started. Honk! Fest takes place in Somerville, Massachusetts, around the weekend of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra, whose ‘fists-up anthems’ encouraged the spontaneous dance party on Saturday, was directed by sousaphone player Matt Arnold, 39. “It’s kind of a band jamboree, something we all look forward to,” Arnold said. Eight years ago, this marching band came together to express its disapproval of the Republican National Convention in New York. Since then, it has performed at each Honk! festival, taking a break from a busy itinerary that includes picket lines, antiwar demonstrations, and, as of last year, Occupy Wall Street rallies6.

 

1 “Music and Social Justice | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” n.d. https://iep.utm.edu/music-sj/.

2 Hall, Sophia Alexandra. 2021. “How the Marching Band Became a Staple of American Music Education.” Classic FM, November. https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-education/marching-band-american-schools/.

3 “High School Cadets March.” n.d. The Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-117939/?

4 “Woman Band – Suffrage Parade.” n.d. The Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014691491/.

5 “This Day in History: The 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade.” 2016. Whitehouse.Gov. March 3, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/03/03/this-day-history-1913-womens-suffrage-parade.

6 Wikipedia contributors. 2023. “HONK!” Wikipedia, August. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HONK!

Ricky Valens and Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Many Americans tend to have a basic image of Chicanos/Latinos as a component of American culture that has just recently begun within the country because of how often immigration concerns are covered in today’s media. Chicano/Latino communities have existed in the United States for many years, notably in the southwest, despite the fact that immigrants and their children make up a sizeable portion of the present-day Latino population.However, many Americans appear to be ignorant of these historical occurrences and their impact in influencing the historical course of American society, much like the historical and musical effects of Chicano/Latino musicians.1

In Justin D. Garcia’s article “Ignored, But Not Forgotten: The Historical and Musical Influence of Chicano/Latino Rock ‘n’ Roll and Hip-Hop Pioneers“, Garcia discusses how Latinos/as influenced the creation and growth of rock and roll. Garcia takes a lot of time informing us about Latino performer Richie Valens. As shown in the image above2, Ritchie Valens was one of the most well-known Latino performers. Despite having a relatively short career, Ritchie Valens had a significant impact on rock ‘n’ roll with his 1958 hit “La Bamba,” which he adapted from a Mexican folk song by adding rock rhythms. At the request of his manager Bob Keane, who believed that Ricardo Valenzuela, his actual name, needed to ‘anglicize’ his name in order to boost “his marketability to white audiences in pre-civil rights 1950s America”, Valenzuela chose the stage name Ritchie Valens.1 His untimely passing in 1959, at age 17, left an absence in the Latinx music scene, but he also left behind a lot of inspiration for others to draw from. Journalist Ed Morales “At almost every turn in the history and development of rock and roll there has been a Latino influence. . . . Long before there was such a thing as Latin rock, there were Latino musicians in various rock groups. Many people today have only a vague idea of the Latin influence on rock.”3

We can look to “La Bamba”, in the video above, as a clear depiction of this cultural hybrid. The song is in verse-chorus format. Valens was initially reluctant to mix “La Bamba” with rock & roll because he was proud of his Mexican roots, but he soon agreed. Many musicians, like Selena, later imitated this kind of musical hybrid, or the blending of traditional Latin American music with rock, and it is still practiced today.1

1 Garcia, Justin D. “Ignored, but Not Forgotten: The Historical and Musical Influence of Chicano/Latino Rock ‘n’ Roll and Hip-Hop Pioneers.” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2023. Accessed September 28, 2023. https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1660209.

2“Ritchie Valens.” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2023. Image. Accessed September 28, 2023. https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1674854.
3 Orellana, Carlos. 2003. Morales, Ed. The Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond.(Young Adult Review). Booklist. Vol. 100. American Library Association.