In 1897, the Chicago Book and News Company published a volume of the National Home and Music Journal, a periodical that published music that was thought to embody elements of the national identity so well that they deemed it to be ‘Music for the Masses.’ From taking a look at the types of music they chose to include in these journals, we get an insider scoop into what was found to be “Americanness” in music.

The journal starts off exactly as we might expect, with The Yankee Tourist by H.S. Line and F.S Colburn. There aren’t any recordings available for this song, but one can imagine how it goes from the title. It follows a quarter note-eighth note pattern in 6/8 time, giving the piece a natural lilt.

The publisher then throws something interesting into this collection of ‘Music for the Masses’… a Beethoven piano piece. I hate to point out the obvious here, but Beethoven was not American. He was German. This inclusion shows that in 1897, a German piece of music was considered to be just as American as a piece like The Yankee Tourist.

Then, we are given a piece for mandolin and guitar—seemingly the “folk” piece of the collection. Also included are The Elk’s Two-Step, Treasure of My Heart, and Come Back to Your Mother, Madge (none of which have been recorded). Each piece selected by the editors was meant to highlight a specific aspect of “Americanness” as it stood in 1897. When I look at this collection, I see a journal that only equates the white, European-descendant’s experience with being “American.”

The question of what constitutes as “Americanness” has never gone away. The Washington Post recently published an article discussing what “real Americanness” looks like today. Their conclusion from analyzing a modern study is similar to my conclusion from analyzing a 200 year old publication:

“[‘Americanness’] is interwoven through our history and runs deep in our culture. Our hope is that these findings help us understand the particular ways these tensions are manifesting today, and thus the issues we need to confront to address our differences and remember the core values that can bind us together as Americans.”[1]

Primary Source: Colburn, Frank S, R J Hamilton, and Samuel I Osmund. National Home and Music Journal 5, no. 1, 1897. http://webfiles.wulib.wustl.edu/units/music/su pplcat/b10121535.pdf.

[1] Caleb Elfenbein, Peter Hanson. “Perspective | What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Real’ American?” The Washington Post. WP Company, January 3, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/03/what-does-it-mean-be-real-american/.

Many of us are familiar with the national anthem of the United States of America: It’s presence at countless sporting events and televised competitions offers a display of patriotism and a national musicality. Recently, the reaction to players in the NFL kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police brutality in the country has sparked conversation and controversy. But long before players took a knee during the national anthem, there were other controversies surrounding the performance practice of a song meant to unify and represent an entire nation. 

Throughout history, there have been widespread reactions in the American public backlashing against performances of the anthem deemed incorrect, inappropriate, or inconsistent with a sort of ideal performance. Recent examples include comedian Roseanne Barr’s controversial performance of the anthem at a Major League Baseball game in 1990 which drew rebuttal from the public as well as the US President at the time. More recently, American pop singer Fergie performed an allegedly jazzed-up version of the anthem, but her unique rendition drew criticism and laughter from players and fans, and went viral.

But where do these different versions of the anthem come from? Shouldn’t a national anthem be consistent, unchanging, and notated in stone? Why has our national anthem changed so much? The answer seems to be found in the earliest times of musical notation of the anthem. Drawing on sheet music found in the UCLA Sheet Music Consortium, we see a handful of different arrangements and publishers trying their hand at notating the national anthem. In scans of arrangements spanning roughly 1840-1970, there are already plenty of different notations and variations within the anthem and its arranged accompaniment.

While some arrangements are clearly named and marketed as a sort of theme and variations of the national anthem, others are simply entitled “The Star Spangled Banner” and fail to list an arranger (and sometimes a composer). Although some of the arrangements give compositional credit to Francis Scott Key, it is unclear who had written the embellishments and variations in some of these arrangements. However, what is clear from these pieces is that from very early on in the American musical life of The Star Spangled Banner, there were liberties taken with arranging and performing the piece- a rather American mindset. 

Screenshots from a government issues pamphlet with choral harmonizations to the Star Spangled Banner.

Some things have remained consistent, which should be noted. For example, many of the arrangements have marked con spirito, a rather unique and distinct marking that is found in many of the arrangements of this time period. While I could not find any sources that dove into arrangements of the anthem specific to this time period to further discuss marking such as the con spirito found in so many, I speculate that even though arrangers felt at liberty to try new things, they felt a sort of obligation to maintain specific aspects of the piece’s identity. This is also reflected in other similarities between the arrangements: most are in the same key, have the same exact notated melody, and include similar harmonization. Although The Star Spangled Banner would not officially be adopted until 1931, the artistic license to embellish, recreate, and change the piece had been established long before. Since then, American performers had the autonomy to take risks and try new ideas with our national anthem with and without public support.

Primary Sources

A Whig Of Providence. TheWhigs of Columbia shall surely prevail. Oliver Shaw, Providence, monographic, 1840. Notated Music. https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1840.371540/.

Rziha, Francis. Star Spangled Banner. W. C. Peters, Baltimore, monographic, 1850. Notated Music. https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1850.140860/.

As a class, we have encountered H. T. Burleigh many times already. As an African American composer, he adapted many pieces of Negro Spirituals into concert spirituals. Burleigh has been criticized for not presenting these songs in their original style but also praised for preserving them. In the Sheet Music Consortium, I found a H. T. Burleigh piece, “Tis me, o Lord; Standin’ in de need of Pray’r” with a preface saying, “Success in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling. The voice is not nearly so important as the spirit;”. Burleigh takes part in the spiritual belief one must have when performing these songs. There are only a few other authors throughout this semester who argue this. One could say he’s trying to keep this works genuine because he goes on to warn against performing these songs by “treat them as ‘minstrel songs’”. Yet, he still relies on a spiritual aspect of performance.

H. T. Burleigh; Arranger of “Tis me, o Lord; Standin’ in de need of pray’r”

I found this text fascinating because I immediately thought of one of our dear friends Samuel A. Floyd Jr. and the notion of “cultural memory” he constantly brings up throughout the reading. He defines it as, “Cultural memory, obviously a subjective concept, seems to be connected with cultural forms-in the present case, music, where the ‘memory’ drives the music and the music drives the memory,” (Floyd 8). Both accounts suggest the almost metaphysical aspect to performing this music. They both stress the importance of the person’s spirit becoming involved in the music.

We’ve encountered these two accounts by black men telling us how spirituals must be performed. Both musicians have studied and lived with this music for their lives. As members of the black community with a long history with this music, do we take their notions of “cultural memory” and “spiritual feeling”. On top of all this, Burleigh wrote in classical European style, so how on earth does a white person approach this work keeping all these ideas in mind?

Samuel Floyd Jr.

Bibliography:

-“Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (1937-2016).” UC Press Blog, 25 Aug. 2017, www.ucpress.edu/blog/22093/samuel-a-floyd-jr-1937-2016/.

-“H. T.  Burleigh (1866-1949).” The Library of Congress, www.loc,gov/item/ihas.200035730

-Floyd, Samuel A. “Introduction.” The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States, Oxford University Press, 1997.

-Burleigh, et al. “Tis Me, o Lord; Standin’ in De Need of Pray’r; Negro Spiritual.” Duke Digital Collections, G. Ricordi, 1 Jan.1970, library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_n)738/.

Shape-note singing has roots which may stretch as far back as 11th century Italy^[1]. Solmization has been used ever since to teach new singers to sight-read melodies, and in the distinctly American case of the Sacred Harp, written by Benjamin Franklin White, congregations have used the familiar intervals and rhythms to sing loudly and emphatically. The presence of a ubiquitous hymn book further reinforces the traditionalism of the genre, which is often praised as one which invites everyone to participate democratically, rather than creating an audience/performer dichotomy. The anthems are always in four parts, with uncomplicated rhythms and melodies to facilitate singing unrehearsed.

I include one of the hymns from the Sacred Harp below; a contemporary rendition of the tune can be found on YouTube.

A digitized copy of Windham, from the Sacred Harp, published 1844.

Perhaps in stark contrast, Lowell Mason is credited with popularizing European Classical music in the United states^[2]. Mason is known to have derided shape-note singing as being a barrier to scientific musical study; he and his brother published a book called The Sacred Harp in 1835, but this was done to supplant the shape-note tradition which existed, replacing rural American tunes with European part-writing. The authors preface the work as “the introduction of an elevated style of Sacred Music arranged on the immovable basis of science and correct taste.”^[3]

Mason later went on to write some 1600 hymns in his lifetime, some of which are incredibly popular today, such as Bethany, the tune of “Nearer My God To Thee.” I include here one of the more dramatic of his works I could find, with dotted rhythms, dynamics, and an instrumental part setting it apart from the above hymn. There is call and response among singers, and ornamented instrumental interludes. Sadly, I could find no existing rendition of this piece–it has since become a popular Lutheran hymn, with a changed musical setting.

Excerpt from Watchman, Tell Us of the Night, written 1830.

However, another piece of Mason’s, a setting of the Lord’s Prayer, has an existing rendition available here. This composition complicates the distinctness between all the examples I’ve used. The sheet music is written in a completely different style, with vocal and instrumental parts combined, but it doesn’t seem to require an instrument. The part-writing may be European, but the rhythms look more alike to “Windham” than “Watchmen.” This is not a purely performer-audience example. There are leaders, but all congregants sing. The shift toward a plainer “Watchmen” is telling–Mason may have diminished the popularity of shape-note singing, but the style his music ended up in was not as much a copy of European music as he intended.

A composition of Mason’s from 1879.

[1]  David Warren Steel. 2010. “Shape Note Singing.”  Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed https://www.britannica.com/art/shape-note-singing

[2]  “Lowell Mason.” Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

[3]  Nathan Rees. 2017. “From the Collection: An Earlier Sacred Harp.” Original Sacred Harp. Accessed https://originalsacredharp.com/2017/09/01/from-the-collection-an-earlier-sacred-harp/

Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was a Canadian-born poet, essayist, choir conductor and composer born in Drummondsville, a town founded by escaped slaves from the south of the United States. Being classically trained, he studied at both Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and Harvard University, finally getting his Master of Music from Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He was also the first African American that obtained an honorary doctorate from the Oberlin Conservatory.

His main body of work consists of “early English music, works from the Russian liturgy, Christmas carols, and arrangements of spirituals”[1], but he also wrote essays on “Negro Music”, warning about the dangers of commercializing it an consequently having it lose its meaning. Library of Congress’ biography on Dett refers to how his biographer Anne Key Simpson remarks his

“lifelong dedication to finding a musical form to bridge the gap between the music’s simple origins and its concert performance.”[2]

When listening to this performance as an example of his works I have selected his arrangement for solo voice and piano of “Follow Me”, categorized as a “Negro Spiritual” as collected by Mrs. Catherine Fields-Gay, about whom I found very little information. The piano accompainment provides a light harmonic texture in a style that in my opinion lends itself to the “Spiritual” genre. The  accompainment occationaly doubles or ecoes the rhythmic structure and/or the melody in the voice. This might be a slight nod to call-and-response. Examples of this are in meaures 16 , 20 and 24. He also also highlights the syncopation in the voice with a straight rhythm in the piano and vice versa, for instance in measures 19 and 27.

Baritone Richard Hodges performance of the piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wslTDJ-NP00

In this performance Hodges skips the appoggiatura assigned, possibly an interpretation of the portamento-like slide into the note, so often associated with the African American singing style as either transcribed by Dett or Fields-Gay. Hodge’s style of singing is essentially classical. The span between the “authentic” performance practice of spirituals and a traditional, euro-centric practice might seem too far, and Dett’s mission impossible.

Whenever an oppressive culture interprets the oppressed’s, there is always the asymmetrical power relation to consider, but what happens when an African American composer and performer respectively arranges and performs but within that “oppressive” stylistic framework? Is this reclaiming the material? Or is it as Dett wished to unify the two musical traditions in a “best of both worlds”-like scenario? Or is this just an aspect of the gentrification of the spiritual, seen throughout the 19^th century?

Primary sources

Dett, R. Nathaniel. “Follow Me” (1919). The John Church Company, Cincinati. https://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_n0687/ [Accessed October 16^th,2019]

“Richard Hodges- Follow Me by R. Nathaniel Dett”. November 18^th, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wslTDJ-NP00 [Accessed October 16^th,2019]

Secondary sources

Library of Congress. “R. Nathaniel Dett”. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038840/ [Accessed October 16^th,2019]

[1] Library of Congress

[2] Ibid

While scrolling through the Sheet Music Consortium database I started by searching by certain keywords which grew increasingly absurd, although I started with reasonable concepts I quickly found myself only looking at sheet music only written about frog romances. It seemed that if you found the right topic, there could be 50-60 pieces on something as specific as songs about owls that were symbols for men who liked to stay out late at night.

One such treasure trove is songs about mothers including amazing titles such as “That Wonderful Mother of Mine,” “Every Day is Mother’s Day to a Mother,” “Dreaming of Mother and my Sweet Home,” “Cheer up, Mother,” “There’s No One who Loves you Like Mother,” and my personal favorite, “The Little Grey Mother who Waits All Alone.” I told my own mother about what I found which garnered this guilt-inducing response.
So where do all of these songs about mothers’ come from? They are all mostly published between 1911-1920 and follow similar trends about a child leaving home to the dismay of the Long Suffering Mother. The sheer volume of such similar songs is not a coincidence, this extremely specific genre of sheet music comes from the Tin Pan Alley era of songwriting which Robert W. Randall¹ explains as  “Music publishers and composers alike operated in a world where success, measured by profit, hinged on their ability to understand through emotional cognition the yearnings of their audiences.”

The marketplace of music for these creators was not purely about creating music for an existing audience, but creating an audience out of music that they could create. Randall continues “But more than merely promoting songs, music publishers produced them on a factory scale, generating vast quantities of theme-driven songs that would enable them to both test and shape markets for tunes that would become “hits.” 

The historical era for the rise of songs about not forgetting mothers would make more sense within the context of WW1, but a fair number of these pieces were published far before any military involvement. The significance of this music appears to be more closely tied with national allegiance and loyalty, and undoubtedly a little bit of guilt.

In “Never Forget Your Dear Mother and Her Prayer”² the lyrics echo this sentiment.

“Never forget your mother tho far away you may roam, Always remember she’s praying, For you to come back home, Temptations round you will gather, Face them with courage and care, Never forget your dear mother and her prayer”

The creation of Mother’s Day in 1914³ by Woodrow Wilson is likely closely tied to this era of music, establishing a commercial holiday that has since been tied to lavish displays of wealth and public adoration. While music written specifically about missing your mom is a fun example of how Tin Pan Alley created concepts of identity based around  profits, it is crucial to examine how thin the lines are between commodity and sentiment if that line exists at all.

While the spiritual tradition has a long history in the United States, dating back undoubtedly to the first slaves taken from Africa and brought to the colonies, it can be difficult to trace a lineage of sorts.  This can be due to a number of factors, but the most prevailing is the fact that slaves were not seen as people, and thus could not have a culture worth documenting.  Thus it fell on free African-Americans to document this culture, a task that was blocked at every turn by the segregation and racism present through the 20th century.  Then take into account how many freed slaves had enough musical training to create a published representation of their music, training that was denied to them by conservatories on the basis of their race, and you can start to see the problem.

While the first published book of spirituals was “Slave Songs of the United States,” it was written by three white authors who sought to collect the music of slaves shortly after the dismantling of the institution of slavery.

This collection was published in 1867, and while interesting and insightful, is still a representation of Black music, specifically slave music, by white authors.  This brings to mind a common saying in modern choirs, especially those that are predominantly white, “we can’t sing this spiritual because we don’t know what it was like to be a slave.”  A common counterargument is that nobody knows what it was like to be a slave, since it has been so long since the institution of slavery was abolished.  With this book, however, the compilers didn’t know what it was like to be a slave, while the people they collected from TOTALLY DID.  Like they were actual slaves, who had just been set free 2 years earlier.  Does this mean that the white authors misrepresented the sentiments of their queries?  Probably if we’re being honest, but we’d have to look to the former slaves for that insight, and many of them were illiterate (both musically and linguistically) due to those same racist institutions.

Enter Fisk University, one of the first educational institutions founded by and for formerly enslaved persons.  This university was founded in 1866, shortly after emancipation, with the goal of providing the education so long denied to African Americans.  You can probably see where I’m going with this, being a musician who just brought up Fisk University, but it’s Fisk Jubilee Singers time.  The Jubilee Singers introduced the Spiritual to the world in 1871, and published this folio of sheet music in 1881 (that’s when the stamp of copyright for the library of congress is dated). 

This folio contains seven works arranged by the Jubilee Singers, all but two of whom were former slaves.  These publications, made famous by the tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, are directly responsible for the popularity of the concert spiritual.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers proved that their folk tradition made for just as high quality art music as any other, and brought the idea of Black excellence to the stage as early as 1871.  We’ve talked in class about recognizing what is representative of a style and what is an appropriation or perversion.  This publication by the Fisk Jubilee Singers is perhaps the most definitive way to see how former slaves viewed their music, and the continued performances of the group give us that direct lineage to the source that we so long for.

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) was a Czech composer who simultaneously exerted substantial influence over the development of American music. 

After extensive persuasion from the National Conservatory of Music, Dvorak travelled to the U.S. in 1892 to direct the school. The president of the conservatory, Jeanette Thurber, wanted Dvorak to found a nationalist, uniquely American style of music (which is ironic because he wasn’t American and hadn’t spent time in America prior to this visit). He remarked, “The Americans expect great things of me. I am to show them the way into the Promised Land, the realm of a new, independent art, in short a national style of music!” (1).

Dvorak turned to black spirituals and folk music as inspiration for American musical sounds:

“I am of the opinion that African American songs can provide a secure foundation for a new national school of music and I have arrived at the conviction that the young musicians here merely require prudent direction, earnest application, encouragement and the support of the public in order to co-create a new music school” (2). 

Dvorak therefore turned to black student H.T. Burleigh, requesting that he educate him regarding African-American spirituals and plantation songs (1). The New York Philharmonic premiered Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” soon after in 1893, and while Dvorak stated that he did not directly quote any Negro spirituals, he extensively studied the songs and attempted to reflect their characteristics in his work (2).

Years later in 1922, William Fisher, a former student of Dvorak’s, set to words the quintessential Largo melody from the New World Symphony’s second movement. I had actually heard the song, “Goin’ Home” (or Going Home), years ago sung by the British boy choir “Libera.” At the time, I had no knowledge of the song’s history, or of its original inspiration.

Fisher describes the song as follows:

“The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak’s own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the red-man’s bygone days, and a sense of the tragedy of the black-man as it sings in his “spirituals.” Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening theme of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words ‘Goin’ home, goin’ home’ is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a negro spiritual accords with the genesis of the symphony” (3).

Fisher’s description of the melody differs from Dvorak’s, making it difficult to discern the intention behind the work. Dvorak initially stated that the symphony was inspired by black folk music, but he never directly quoted its tunes, and rather composed the melody to be universally applicable to all Americans. However, William Fisher, whose history included arranging countless negro spirituals, printed “Goin’ Home” in stereotypically black dialect (“I’m jes’ goin’ home). While Fisher was clearly appropriating black spirituals, he wasn’t technically using a black melody. Since Dvorak did not use an original spiritual melody, he was not profiting off of black culture in the same way that Fisher was by arranging other spirituals, even though Dvorak’s intentions were nonetheless problematic.

The message and connotations of “Goin’ Home” would have been different had Dvorak pulled the Largo’s melody directly from a black folk tune. It still would have constituted appropriation, but it also would have highlighted authentic folk music from a marginalized community on an international platform. By coming up with his own melody, Dvorak was not truly authentic and American; this would have been essentially impossible given that he was not innately familiar with black folk traditions. My main argument is that neither option would have been a great choice for Dvorak and Fisher, but the fact that the New World Symphony and Goin’ Home’s melody isn’t a literal negro spiritual changes its connotations.

1. Döge, K.  (2001). Dvořák, Antonín. Grove Music Online. Retrieved 16 Oct. 2019, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000051222.
2. (2005). Dvorak and New York. Retrieved 16 Oct. 2019, from http://www.antonin-dvorak.cz/en/new-york
3. Dvorak, Anton, Fisher, William A. Goin’ home- medium voice in D flat. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1922 https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C3399955#page/6/mode/1/chapter/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C3399955 

Sheet music tells us many stories. It brings us on a musical journey, and can provide entertainment for many through the accessibility of the copies throughout the world. The shortcomings and racism of the classical music world is evident through many cultural primary sources, some of the best of them being sheet music.

“Ma little lump ob Sweetness” is an American folksong is described on the cover as “A Darkey Serenade”, using blatant racism as a way to attract more people to buy it; a selling point to appeal to the racist masses. The imagery on the cover suggests simplicity is an inherent trait of African Americans, depicting the man as playing the banjo, which has historically been stereotyped as a black folk-song instrument.

When one opens the cover, they would see the lyrics to the piece, which match the same level of racism as the cover. It reads, “Honey youse ma little lump ob sweetness, ‘deed you sets ma heart on fire” (Wilmarth). The piece is clearly being written in a dialect that African Americans spoke with, and exaggerates it in order to make fun of them and their romanticism.

The lyricist and composer of the piece, W. G. Wilmarth was also a white man, making it clear the piece is just an offensive caricature of the racist way in which Wilmarth perceived African Americans to be.

The racist imagery and lyrics in this piece of sheet music is not unique to “Ma little lump ob Sweetness”, and unfortunately many of the familiar and catchy tunes from our childhood belong to songs that are just as offensive.

Works Cited

Wilmarth, W.G. Ma Little Lump ob Sweetness. 1899. Washington, D.C. Henry White, 1899, print.

We haven’t talked about concert spirituals very much yet, but I think that they make a claim to authenticity that fits nicely into our discussions of geography and race. Similar to how the success of country music as a genre demanded ties to poor whiteness, concert spirituals maintained ties to high-society blackness. While looking through the Sheet Music Consortium, I came across 42 arrangements of the concert spiritual Deep River. The majority were credited to H.T. Burleigh who had an arrangement published during his time at G. Ricordi publishing house. The remaining versions, however, were by composers/arrangers of different races and nationalities.

This 1916 arrangement by William Arms Fisher caught my eye. Like Burleigh, Fisher worked for a prominent publishing company, and spent most of his career as its vice-president.¹ From my perspective, even though Fisher himself was white, this arrangement attaches itself to the tradition of Negro concert spirituals in two ways. First, is the inclusion of the original “American Negro melody” to which the musician(s) will refer to. Second, is the acknowledgement of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s contributions to the finished product. Not only is his name listed first on the cover (not common practice), but additionally Fisher writes on the bottom of the first page, “in making this arrangement the beautiful piano transcriptions by the late Coleridge-Taylor has been closely followed.” Would it need to be followed closely if it didn’t hold merit? I wouldn’t think so, which brings me to my next point. Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer who was inspired by the influence/culture of African-Americans like H. T. Burleigh, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. du Bois.² The only authenticity he could claim, or that others could claim for him, was his blackness.³ And he did claim it to some degree — in 1904 he published Twenty-Four Negro Melodies for piano that are still played widely to this day. But did this understanding of concert spirituals — that a tie to blackness was necessary for sales — permeate white American households?

And another question. Was there a shift in necessity for claiming black authenticity? Based on the variety of sheet music, there was, and it happened around the 1930s when the sheet music for Deep River was marketed like a popular song.

This title page looks completely different than that of versions published during the 1910s-20s. For one, the performers in the portrait must have been mainstream enough for audiences to recognize them and want to buy the music. Second, the arrangement offers versions for ukelele and guitar. Just like our favorite High School Musical hits, this transcription gives audiences the chance to bring the musical fun home! From this example, and others like it, it seems like the racialization of Deep River was less important over time. Current discussions around “who gets to perform spirituals and why” suggest that concert spirituals have been re-racialized today, but when in history did this happen?

After the American Civil War, over 25,000 new pianos a year were sold in America and by 1887, over 500,000 people were now studying piano. As a result, the demand for sheet music grew rapidly and more and more publishers began to enter the market [1]. Though it may be more pleasant to believe that these publishers printed music simply to share the beauty of music with the world, this was not usually the case. Publisher’s main purpose was to make money, and they did this by printing music that would sell. Minstrelsy was music that would sell, and a large way publishers caught the consumers eye was through cover art and using blackface to promote these minstrel tunes. 

Daniel Foster, of Duke University, believes that “because blackface relied increasingly on the publishing industry and the visual medium of sheet music, it also began to depend more on the eye, and because sheet music assumes a certain level of literacy and luxury, this reliance on the eye encouraged blackface’s growth as a middle-class phenomenon [2].” Foster believes minstrelsy was standardized and ritualized through the publishing industry. Publishing houses began making minstrelsy more accessible, and “some publishing houses even began to carry scripts that amateurs could order for putting on their own minstrel shows [2].”

A large amount of minstrel art was required to adorn these pieces of music. Below is just a sample of the large amount of blackface music I found [3][4]. The music is from multiple sources, including the Sheet Music Consortium and Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum. I also found a surprising number of this music up for auction on eBay.com. 

There are several similarities I noticed between the artwork. Most of the covers have a man on the front, either with only the face or with the man dancing in a top hat. The poses that the people are in are not flattering, and look unnatural or unpleasant (especially the ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No-Mo.’ piece). The titles use dialect, and mention stereotypical things such as “mammies,” the blues, and rag. I included “Big Chief Wally Ho Woo: he’d wiggle his way to her wigwam,” because I think it is important to note that these publishers were not only marginalizing/exoticising black people, but also Native Americans.

In my research I found it surprising that so many minstrel pieces were for sale on eBay- some songs sell for as much as $75.00. Clearly people are currently interested in buying and selling this music. Despite the changing views on racism and the fact that publishers do not print blackface anymore, consumer culture continues to live on.

Sources:

[1] Reublin, Rick. “In Search of Tin Pan Alley.” The Parlor Songs Association, May 2009.

[2] Foster, Daniel. “Sheet Music Iconography and Music in the History of Transatlantic Minstrelsy.” Duke Press, Mar. 2009.

[3] Courtesy of the Sheet Music Consortium. University of California, Los Angeles.

[4] Courtesy of the Jim Crow Museum. Ferris State University.

“Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord,

Nobody knows the trouble I see,

Nobody knows like Jesus”

Did you hear the tune in your heard as you read these lyrics? A tune that looks something like this?

This image is from the collection of songs, “Jubilee Songs and Plantation Melodies,” published in 1885 by H.B. Thearle. According to the introduction by Harry Hanaford, the songs in the collection “were not ‘composed’ after the manner or ordinary music, but came to life ready-made, seemingly during the working and singing on the plantation” and that they are “giving a truthful representation of the negro as he appeared in the days of slavery” ¹

The image above is the song “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Lord,” the first song in the “Jubilee Songs and Plantation Melodies” book. Based on the introduction, this song is meant to be regarded as a slave song, a bit of history in musical form.

Although since then, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” has been taken to Hollywood, where it has been used in movies such as The Lion King. The Hollywoodization of this song, among others, has caused the songs to lose their original motivation and meaning.

For example, in this clip from The Lion King, Zazu sits in a carcass and sings “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” as he sits in captivity. After the first two lines, Scar throws a bone at Zazu and says, “Oh do lighten up, Zazu. Sing something with a little bounce to it,” to which Zazu humorously starts singing “It’s a Small World After All.” This scene is meant to be humorous and, although it’s an interesting parallel to slavery being that Zazu is in captivity, the fact that “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” is presented as a method for humor negates this parallel.

On the flipside, other movies such as “Twelve Years a Slave” have redefined some slaves songs back to their original meaning and motivation. For example, in “Twelve Years a Slave,” the song “Roll, Jordon, Roll” is used at what appears to be a funeral. It is often seen as the scene where the main character, Plat, gives in to his situation (being kidnapped and sold into slavery) and releases of all his emotions since his kidnapping. Unlike The Lion King, this clip uses music not for a laugh from the audiences, but to help demonstrate the situational pain.

According to Henry Krehbiel in his book “Afro-American Folksongs,” he would argue that only the movies that are reclaiming slave songs and using them to demonstrate situational pain are the appropriate space to use these songs. He writes that white, Western inhabitants lack “the emotionaol elements which existed in the slave life of the plantations in the South and which invited celebration in song—grace and gay.” ²

Although we can’t put a race on Zazu as he’s a bird, we can assume that he has not experienced the same trauma that, for example, Plat has in “Twelve Years a Slave” that would give Zazu the motivation to sing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” therefore demonstrating how Hollywood has taken slave songs and shifted their motivation.

Bibliography:

1 Thearle, H.B. Jubilee Songs and Plantation Melodies. University of Tennessee, 1885.

Many people are well-aware of the classic rock one-hit wonder “Black Betty” by Ram Jam and its legacy in film, television, advertisements, and other forms of popular culture entertainment. Personally, I quite enjoy the song and I find it to have a great percussive groove and a catchy melody with some rather interesting rhythmic modulations and shifts. (Link below in case you may not be familiar with the song)

Ram Jam – Black Betty (Official Audio)

However, not many people might not be aware of its origins, especially in the context of black American music.  Ram Jam did credit the blues and folk artist Leadbelly for the origin of their cover and it was advertised as a cover, as can be seen by Richard Cromelin’s mixed review of Ram Jam’s concert at the Starwood in Los Angeles [1]:

[Here is Leadbelly’s version of Black Betty]

While Leadbelly has been typically credited as such, he cannot fully take credit for something he recorded as a folk artist, as Henry Edward Krehbiel argued that folk songs needed to be birthed originally by a group of people rather than an individual artist [2].  The source of the song is regularly contested as well as the original meaning of what a “Black Betty” could have been, whether it be an object or a person.  Some sources claim “Black Betty” could have been used as early as the beginning of the 19th century to describe a musket or a liquor bottle, and it is very plausible those could be meanings that would be applied to the Black Betty in the song.  One source I found particularly interesting was our favorite folk song collectors, John and Alan Lomax.

In their collection of songs of the Southern chain gangs, the Lomaxes documented “Black Betty” sung by “a convict on the Darrington Farm in Texas” and what they understood “Black Betty” was:

“Black Betty is not another Frankie, nor yet a two-timing woman that a man can moan his blues about.  She is the whip that was and is used in some Southern prisons… where […] whipping has been practically discontiuned…” [3]

Being that Leadbelly was also a member of Texas prison chain gangs, its very plausible that he learned the song and many others there, and there may also be a trail that could be investigated further into the musics of enslaved blacks in the US.  Therefore, this demonstrates a rather interesting transmission of music from a possible origin in slave songs to white musicians like Ram Jam.  They did manage to give credit to the artist who had a definitive recording, which I find to be at least somewhat conscious on their efforts as recording artists in the American popular music scene, but it should be worth noting the influence of black folk music that was felt as late as the 1970s and that we are likely still feeling today.

Notes

[1] Cromelin, “Ram Jam at the Starwood”

[2] Krehbiel, “Songs of the American Slaves,” 22

[3] J.A. Lomax, A. Lomax, “American Ballads & Folk Songs,” 60

Bibliography

The Puritan tradition of Sacred Harp singing has stayed in the back of my mind over the past few days. Particularly, the way it moved to Appalachia after avoiding reform in Plymouth Colony. But I wondered if any black musicians or congregations ever picked up on the shape note tradition.

After searching “Sacred Harp” in the Defender database, I was met with a 1973 advertisement for a performance produced by the Smithsonian’s Division of Performing Arts. The concert, presented in Chicago’s celebrated Auditorium Theatre, showcased folk artists from around the country including big names like Pete Seeger. Also featured on the line-up was “the Sacred Harp Singing Group”, a black shape note ensemble that called Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church its home.¹

This summer, I spent a good amount of time reading through Defender articles that recounted some aspect of Chicago musical life from 1900-1930. One of the biggest takeaways was that churches in predominantly black communities became musical epicenters for a variety of genres. It was not uncommon for touring black musicians to make their Chicago debut in a church, or for sizable black music societies to hold their weekly meetings in one. Based on the reporting of Nora Douglas Holt², Shiloh Baptist Church was one of these musical epicenters. The 1973 ad says that the tradition “thrives in the South in hundreds of churches and at informal get-togethers.”³

click the picture to hear “Recording of shape note singing convention at Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church” on loc.gov

Listen to this 1977 recording starting at about a minute in. This shape note recording has many similar elements to that of the Irish group we heard. Though, what’s especially interesting is the tone production. While the timbre is forward sounding in both, the tone in the Baptist Church recording sounds like it has been influenced by other styles. I wonder where the lineage of shape note singing fits into that of other religiously inspired music in black churches. Where were the first black shape note singers singing? And what can we learn from the history of Sacred Harp music in non-Puritan worship?

Current music platforms such as Spotify certainly have their ups and downs, but rarely enough troubling side effects for most people to be deterred from utilizing their systems. One sweet serendipity of these platforms and their algorithms are the occasional chances in which they play something new and exciting that gets the listener interested and wanting to learn more. I found myself in a similar situation. After weeks of listening to stations devoted to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Etta James, I was introduced to Hazel Scott. 

When looking for more information about Scott, I came across countless advertisements and articles detailing various endeavors she made in a storied career. It is a shame I have not heard of her until now, and I ask the question: Why isn’t Hazel Scott consistently included with the names of influential African-American jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday? How does a woman buried near Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong get a smaller narrative in a music she helped create and popularize?

The answer appears to lie in the latter parts of her career. From sources gathered, we can see that Hazel Scott was a groundbreaking and often controversial artist. 

Newspaper article describing the resistance to Scott performing at Constitution Hall in the nation’s capital. One of the many instances that contributed to resistance to Scott’s success from white audiences and public figures.

Not only did Hazel Scott push racial boundaries in a racist country (requiring many spaces to integrate their stages for her and her popularity despite historical precedence of white-only performers), but later in her career Hazel Scott was vocal against the Cold War and much of the harmful anti-Communist sentiment prevalent in the country. Scott was even called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee along with several other performers and artists who spoke out.¹

I will always remember the very first piece I heard Hazel Scott play: her Two Part Invention in A Minor. The piece begins with the opening strains of Bach’s own Invention in A Minor, but she quickly takes off into a jazzed up version which was a typical style of Hazel Scott’s. Her performance practice is often referred to as “swinging the classics”.

Take a look at the opening melodic material of Bach’s invention (just the first 20 seconds or so are important).

Now listen to what Hazel Scott has done with Bach’s melody. At about 0:56, she finishes the invention and takes off. You can hear the addition of a drum set in the background as well.

Hazel Scott took classical music that many educated audiences were familiar with and gave it an American spin. By infusing jazz, a relatively young creation of the American musical mind, Hazel Scott excited and entertained audiences in a country yearning for a unified identity in a time of unrest and worldwide war. Unfortunately, her activism and commitment to her values cost her career opportunities, and has since affected her memory and legacy in American jazz and popular culture.

Want to learn more? You can enjoy this mini-documentary about Hazel! I strongly encourage you to learn more about this performer (some tidbits: she was the first black American to host a national television show and first to get leading roles in Hollywood films). Also, you can reach out to me and I will point you in the direction of countless Youtube videos, albums, and Spotify playlists!

Primary Source

Defender, Washington Bureau. “Report Truman to Probe Ban Against Hazel Scott.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967), Oct 13, 1945. https://search.proquest.com/docview/492805155?accountid=351.

Secondary Source

Fats Domino may have invented rock and roll, but Alan Freed made it a hit. Freed, a disk jockey, worked at WAKR in Akron, Ohio, when he realized that there was a demand for rhythm and blues music (or R&B) in the area. He would make his fame by playing and marketing R&B, blues, and country music under the name of “Rock and Roll”. He became immensely popular and built a career off of promoting black rock and roll musicians, including Paul Williams, Tiny Grimes, and the Dominoes.

 “Alan Freed, sometimes called the father of Rock N’ Roll, was charged with 26 counts in two informations. He was accused of accepting $10,000 from a recording company in 1958 and with taking bribes of $20,650 from six other companies in 1958 and 1959” (Chicago Defender, 28 May 1960).

In 1959, Freed and other disk jockeys were investigated by the House Committee on Legislative Oversight for their involvement with a system called payola. Payola is, essentially, when a radio station or disk jockey takes money or other illegal bribes in exchange for playing certain music over the radio without publicly stating that it is sponsored airtime. Through various loopholes and lack of oversight, Freed and other disk jockeys made a fortune through the exploitation of black musicians. In addition to cash bribes, Freed also committed payola in the form of being listed as a co-composer of certain songs so he could receive royalties checks from them.

“Payola was how you got your records played,” stated Marshall Chess, President of Chess Records. “It was how you did business… back then it was totally open. ‘You help me, and I’ll help you,’” (Alan Freed and Payola).

It’s the same issue we’ve run across with minstrelsy. What do we make of a system that simultaneously builds careers for black musicians, and grossly exploits them? On one hand, it is far more progressive than the system of minstrelsy in the sense that it gave black musicians a career that was not so much about the color of their skin than their music, but Freed and others still left them only scraps of their surplus value. Even though record companies cannot use payola anymore, there still exist schemes that exploit musicians (pay-to-play, for example),  so we need to keep asking these questions into the present day.

Sources:

“Alan Freed and Payola” Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975. Adam Matthew Digital. 2011. Web. Accessed 10 October 2019. http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/FurtherResources/MusicScene/8FreedPayola.aspx?searchmode=true&docref=Alan%20Freed%20and%20Payola&

United Press International, “Arrest 5 Disk Jockeys Over Payola,” Chicago Defender. 28 May, 1960. Accessed through ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender. Accessed on 10 October 2019. https://search.proquest.com/hnpchicagodefender/docview/492944900/98CAE8EC624949C4PQ/2?accountid=351

I would like to take a quick step back from minstrelsy to discuss a comment I made in our last class about cultural sharing. This past Tuesday, in conversation with the idea of people of European descent making up 1/3 of those who perform Taiko in the United States, I suggested that this type of cultural sharing would not be problematic if there were not a history of colonization in this country. This is an idealized notion that I recognize to be a trying if not nearly impossible task, that is, undoing those parts of colonization which have made people unequal. The reality, however, is that colonization is far more widespread in its aftermath than I could personally be able to explain and begin to combat individually.

Take this video my father sent me called, “White people Pow-Wow song “Going To A Pow-Wow” and really focus on the way it evokes particular emotions.

https://youtu.be/h6-F2c1lvqc

It’s pretty blatantly… cringey. It also makes me laugh due to the sheer lack of knowledge of Native Americans, well, anything. 

My point is, the people in this video are not engaged in cultural sharing because they have fetishized and created their own ideal version of what Native American culture and music should be. On the contrary, I would like to still believe that cultural sharing can be possible but it is the adoption of marginalized identities by a white-majority that remains the issue. 

For example, this department had an open dialogue last year sparked by the presence of Marti 

Newland on the topic of white students singing spirituals. With her guidance, we ultimately came to the conclusion that it was okay for white people to sing spirituals and specifically in dialect however the composition of spirituals by white composers was to be abandoned. This brings up the issue of authenticity and what race of composers are allowed to compose what and profit off of a marginalized culture. Tying this back into minstrelsy, I feel the need to point out that the ambiguity in whether or not we should give attention to songs that were created for racist purposes is an act of liberal violence. There is an essay by Gareth Griffiths titled, “The Myth of Authenticity” from the collection of essays he Post-Colonial Studies Reader, I have felt helpful in the discussion of what this blog is titled. Although Griffith is not speaking to an American experience, the fetishization and mystification of marginalized groups are applicable, in part, to the discussion on marginalized identities in the United States. The claim he makes is that even though an entity may be claiming to be “even-handed” in discussing two sides of a story between an oppressed group and their oppressors, the act of giving each truth equal weight is an act of “liberal violence” [1]. This mode of thought does not give proper weight to the constant fetishization, institutional racism, or a number of other societal factors that negatively impact a marginalized group yet we give outsider voices equal weight. Take from this what you will. 

Sources Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader London : Routledge, 1995.

Since studying it in AmCon, then again in AMST 301, I have been fascinated with Jimi Hendrix’ version of the Star Spangled Banner that he performed at Woodstock in 1969. This version of the national anthem is warped and distorted, a reflection of the political climate in America at the time. Coming out of the ‘50s, Americans in the early ‘60s believed they were in somewhat of a golden age. With the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, and the struggle for Civil Rights, it became clear that the 1960s were not to be a golden age, after all. Hendrix’ version of this patriotic anthem is representative of a shifting idea of what it means to be an American and a patriot at a time in which our nation is fraught with so much disaster.

This New Yorker article claims that “Jimi Hendrix’s Rendition of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ is more relevant than ever”, by linking Hendrix’ performance to Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests. This comparison is particularly important because of the nature of the Star Spangled Banner. Kaepernick protests the anthem, not in spite of his country, but in spite of an administration that he believes threatens the country that he loves. In this article, Hendrix’s political statement is deemed a “psychedelic citizenship,” meaning that Hendrix does not reject his country by performing such a warped version of the anthem, but rather that his performance emphasizes his American identity in his call for recognition of horrendous acts by Americans and American administration. By performing the anthem in such a way, in such a public place as well, Hendrix acknowledges himself as a patriot in his own right, one that acknowledges the down-fallings of his country while still “[acknowledging] the promise and potential of the nation.” This same statement applies to Kaepernick.

Though we can retrospectively view Hendrix’ Woodstock performance as a performance of “psychedelic citizenship,” like Kaepernick, this act did not go without criticism. In this article from the Berkeley Tribe in 1969, the same year of Hendrix’ performance, the author writes of the Anti-Riot act as an attempt by the government to silence backlash against atrocities committed by the administration.

In a similar vein to Kaepernick today, artists at this time were punished for using their platforms to critique the American government. While Hendrix was calling attention to the Vietnam war, Kaepernick brings to light the issue of police violence that plagues our nation. These protests are not against America as a nation, but rather the perversion of American and human values.

If you’re interested – for my final project for AMST 301, I made a found footage music video to Hendrix’ Woodstock rendition of the national anthem (which is too big to include here but I’d be happy to send it as a google drive link).

In class discussions, the topics of advertising someone based on their race has popped up in conversations multiple times. In our context, we’ve only mentioned this in design of literal records. This article shows the same affect taking place or at least reinforcing that idea with a Teen Life magazine article written by Elvis Presley where he talks about his music. The preface to the article states, “A young lad born in Mississippi and whose singular style of singing has skyrocketed him to fame in his own words tells the simple truths about how a star is born.”

The entire article from here on, tries to defend the “original style” that Elvis has made for himself. Elvis has become controversial in the past few years for his appropriation of music by black artists such as hound dog (originally recorded by Big Mama Thorton. He states in the article, “A lot of people ask me where I got my singing style. Well, I didn’t copy my style from anybody. I got nothing in common with Johnny Ray, except we both sing-if you want to call it singing” (citation). As a modern audience, we can all agree this is not true at all.
Through a simple search on YouTube, we can confirm that Elvis took music and musical styles from black artists such as Big Mama Thorton’s original performance of the song “Hound Dog”.

Teen Life Article

I doubt Elvis read the George Pullen Jackson we had to read for class and thought “Oh! Some of African American music comes from white countries, so it’s okay that I do this”.

Johnny Ray

I can only think of two answers to Elvis’ intentions when writing these words that contradict his actions. Either, he is a big fan of the works of George Pullen Jackson and believed the work to be his or due to multiple factors in the past decades, it was completely acceptable to just take work from black artists if you needed to support yourself and your family. In the article he focuses on how his success has helped him and his poor Mississippi family. Johnny Ray, a white singer who also borrowed from a lot of black artists, is the only one Elvis acknowledges might have a similar style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

-Presley, Elvis. “Elvis Tells You His Own Story in His Own Words.” Teen Life, Apri. 1959, pp. 15-15

-Yiannis/John. “Johnnie Ray.” Johnnie Ray, 1 Jan. 1970, gaycultureland.blogspot.com/2016/10/johnnie-ray.html.

On January 28th, 1956, famous poet Langston Hughes wrote an article for the Chicago Defender titled “Concerning the Singing of Spirituals Today.” 

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was an American poet, writer, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, whose texts have been set to music in over 200 songs (1). He wrote a column every week for the Chicago Defender, a popular black newspaper, where he “chose the pen to convey the suffering and dreams of his people” (2). http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/Contents/ImageViewer.aspx?imageid=868170&searchmode=true&hit=first&pi=1&vpath=searchresults&prevPos=586091

In this article, Hughes argues that intent is imperative when singing negro spirituals, specifically for people whose ancestors were never slaves. He states:

“When the spirituals came into being one of the trials and tribulations, frustrations and bewilderments of slavery, they must have had an intense and immediate meaning for the people who made them up and who sang them out of their hearts in the dark hours of bondage…In the days when slaves had neither freedom nor doctors, song must have been a great factor in soothing the wounds of flesh and soul” (3).

Hughes believes that spirituals are integral to meaningful concerts; they have more power compared to other songs in captivating the audience and fostering a universal sense of love and healing. Even when singers do not understand the meaning behind them, spirituals still retain this inherent power.

However, as Hughes acknowledges, many listeners held issue with hearing white choirs sing spirituals. Hughes describes, “The spiritual may easily become the mark of the stereotype – the ever singing Negro” (3). Nonetheless, Hughes believes that once a song is sung, the “song is freed as it is sung..for friend or foe to enjoy impartially. Like all the common gifts of God or nature…the songs may then belong to anyone” (3). There will always be singers who demean and depreciate the music they sing, and who sing for reasons other than their personal joy, but those who invest time and effort in learning the history behind spirituals are fully capable of singing spirituals in a meaningful way.

Hughes advises singers who wish to perform spirituals to consult the works of black poets and scholars. Singers shouldn’t only learn the spirituals on their concert program; rather, they should learn many of the greatest spirituals, and choose which ones having meaning for them. White singers “may unintentionally make of their singing of these songs “stereotypes,” not by design, but simply through immaturity or lack of understanding…When they are sung purely for entertainment…then a little minor crime is committed” (3).

Question still remains nowadays as to whether all choirs should sing spirituals. The St. Olaf Choir, directed by Anton Armstrong, programs several spirituals on all of its concerts. 

Here is an example of them singing “Ride On King Jesus,” arranged by Moses Hogan, on their 2017 tour:

Here is another example of a predominantly white choir singing a spiritual, titled “Keep Your Lamps”:

Anton Armstrong instructs singers in the St. Olaf Choir to sing the words to “Ride On King Jesus” in the dialect slaves would’ve used at the time the song was written. The choir uses darkened vowels, says “da” instead of “the,” and “hinda” instead of “hinder,” to give a few examples. This choir’s performance differs from the Bishop Shanahan High School performance, who sings Keep Your Lamps at an upbeat and exciting tempo and makes no change in how they pronounce the words of the song. While I cannot give a definitive opinion as the rights white people have over singing traditionally black music, I think that being sensitive to pronunciations and the history of the songs is important.

1. Brown, R.  (2001). Hughes, (James Mercer) Langston. Grove Music Online. Retrieved 9 Oct. 2019, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000048287.
2. The Helix, Volume V , Volume 5 – Issue 9 – 12 12 1968 , 1968 – 1969 © Bowling Green State University http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/Contents/ImageViewer.aspx?imageid=868170&searchmode=true&hit=first&pi=1&vpath=searchresults&prevPos=586091
3. Hughes, L. (1956, Jan 28). Concerning the singing of spirituals today. The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967) Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/492900224?accountid=351

Article from the Chicago Defender (April 22, 1933)

When German motion picture star Dorothy Welkes arrived in the US in April 1933, she was excited to hear the sonic landscape of America. Specifically, she longed to hear “Negro spirituals sung by American Negroes.” Upon the fulfillment of this wish, she remarked that she believed spirituals “represent the real American music.”

This brief clipping from the Chicago Defender is only three paragraphs long, but there’s a fair amount to process. The fact that spirituals were gaining international acclaim is significant, particularly since the discussion about its origins (and thus by implied extension, legitimacy) was long from over. Furthermore, that a German celebrity would prioritize black music at the brink of racist totalitarianism under Hitler’s regime is significant and could be examined as an act of defiance. Even designating it as the “real” American music is amazing; while now we take it for granted that gospel and spirituals are a valuable part of the American sonic scene, defenses of African American music making as a legitimate field continued for decades after with writers such as Amiri Baraka.

The Southernaires (Ray Yeates, Lowell Peters, Jay Stone Toney, William Edmonson, and Spencer Odom)

Of course, the idea that any type of American music can be more “real” or “authentic” than another is questionable. Welkes’ insistence on hearing “Negro spirituals sung by American Negroes” belies a level of exoticism and desire to view and examine black bodies in a commercial environment. In this sense then, the performers (in this case the musical group the “Southernaires,” not to be confused with the “Jackson Southernaires”) were forced to perform blackness for a white witness.  Although no black-face was used, her desire for “authenticity” is reminiscent of the “fear of and fascination with the black male” Eric Lott outlines in regards to minstrelsy.[1]

Section of the Decca Numerical Catalog ca. 1950 from the Popular Culture in Britain and America Database

In his chapter “Community and History: The African-American Church and Sacred Quartet Singing in New York City,” Ray Allen describes how the Southernaires emerged out of the black university tradition pioneered by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The group was formed in 1929 and quickly gained acclaim for their national radio show “The Little Weather-Beaten Whitewashed Church” which featured traditional spirituals, secular southern folk songs, sermons, recitations, and guest speakers. They went on to record a number of records with label Decca, although these were never as successful as their radio show. While I faced a surprising amount of trouble in procuring information about this group, Allen asserts their importance by stating:

“The Southernaires’ smooth, barbershop harmonizing and rhythmic arrangements of spirituals undoubtedly influenced many black vocal groups of the 1930s and early 1940s, and introduced white radio audiences to the magnificent black university style of quartet singing.”[2]

The context provided by Allen raises new questions about the appropriateness of Welkes’ request. Her language certainly emphasizes their otherness in the context of her own whiteness, but their agreement to perform makes sense in the context of their commercial careers. As radio performers, they already had little control over who could listen to their music, and indeed the article shares that Welkes had already heard their broadcast. The significance thus lies in the choices made by Welkes and the author of the article when speaking about the event. The act of performance was itself not problematic, but Welkes’ word choice betrays her biases, giving us key insights into the psyche of the white observers of black sound.

[1] Eric Lott, “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture.”

[2] Ray Allen, “Community and History: The African-American Church and Sacred Quartet Singing in New York City.” Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, 26.

Works Cited

Allen, Cleveland G. “GERMAN SCREEN STAR PREFERS ‘SPIRITUALS’.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition). Chicago. 22 April 1933. https://search.proquest.com/docview/492366247?accountid=351.

Allen, Ray. “Community and History: The African-American Church and Sacred Quartet Singing in New York City.” Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4v2xwk.5.

“Decca Numerical Catalog, circa 1950.” The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. From Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975. Accessed 9 October 2019. http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/Contents/ImageViewer.aspx?imageid=1097658&searchmode=true&hit=first&pi=1&vpath=searchresults&prevPos=1011575.

Lott, Eric. “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture.”

“Southernaires ‘Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve Seen’ Decca 2859 (1939).” Published 20 November, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxhQlH4WBTY.

For this week’s blog post I have chosen a spirited article, or what I personally categorize as more of an opinion piece, from the February 19, 1966 edition of The Chicago Defender. Encyclopædia Britannica describes The Chicago Defender as “the most influential African American newspaper during the early and mid-20th century”[1]. With a national target audience, it played a vital role in the migration of African Americans from the South to the northern states.

The article is written by Baptist preacher and professor emeritus at Virginia Union University, Gordon Blaine Hancock (1884–1970)[2]. The son of two African American former slaves from South Carolina, he was an avid spokesperson for the Afro American cause the generation before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, often linking activism with education[3].

The article in question is candidly titled “Whites Constantly Steal from Negro”[4]. He begins with a call to arms of sorts:

He then goes on to describe how the religious practices of the south, what he calls the “Negro style” with “Negro Patterns”, have been adapted by white people. He continues with connecting preaching to music and music culture:

In the rest of the article he gives examples of genres and styles like tap-dancing, jazz, ragtime, and crooning. White culture popularizes the negro patterns. [They are] “Stealing our stuff!” he exclaims.  You can clearly sense Handcock’s frustration, especially when it comes to the financial gain that comes with the success of these genres, albeit a polished version to fit into white, bourgeoisie aesthetics and expectations. Despite the despair he seems to emit he ends on a somewhat positive note:

Hancock’s reaction is not completely incomparable to sentiments uttered in the ongoing debate about cultural appropriation, specifically when it comes music.

Although Hancock’s tone is very direct, in a political and academic climate such as that which Hancock had experienced up until 1966, we can understand why he resorts to a strong retaliation. Faced with inadequately researched, generalizing and populist scholarship and having to confront the likes of George Pullen Jackson, one can understand Hancock’s plea. His article expresses what I interpret as both despair and fear; The fear of losing one’s culture, one’s history, one’s music – an apprehensiveness very much shared with African Americans today, as well as other marginalized groups.

Primary Sources:

Hancock, Gordon B. “Whites Constantly Steal from Negro.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967), Feb 19, 1966. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493198185?accountid=351. [Accessed October 9^th, 2019]

Jackson, George Pullen. White and Negro Spirituals: Their life span and kinship” (1943). J. J. Augustin Publisher, New York.

Secondary Sources:

Gavins, Raymond. “Gordon Blaine Hancock (1884–1970).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 1 May. 2014. Web. 9 Oct. 2019 https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Hancock_Gordon_Blaine_1884-1970#start_entry [Accessed October 9^th, 2019

“Chicago Defender”. Encyclopædia Britannica, July 11, 2019. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chicago-Defender  [Accessed October 9^th, 2019]

[1] “Chicago Defender” 2019

[2] Gavins 2014

[3] ibid

[4] Hancock 1966

During the Civil Rights Movement, hymns were used by protestors, white and black alike, as a unifying, peaceful statement. Time and time again, protestors chose to arm themselves with hymns, which is evident in write-ups like the ones below from the Chicago Defender.

[1]

[2]

[3]

These peaceful protests appear to have been so prevalent in the mid-1960’s that they were given their own nickname— “hymn-singing meetings.” I found myself asking the question, “Why hymns?” How did a whole genre of music rise to unify the movement? Why not African American spirituals, or another genre?

An argument could be made that the protestors chose to sing hymns because of their religious significance. The Civil Rights movement, was, after all, based upon largely Biblical ideas (such as loving your neighbor as yourself, and suffering on earth for an eternal reward). The protestors could relate to Jesus who was being sung of in the hymns, such as Jesus Paid It All. He was the minority in a violent government, and He suffered and died a criminal’s death, even though He was innocent. Jesus’ life was a parallel to what many black people were experiencing in the 1960s. They were innocent people suffering and dying in criminal ways. The following excerpt comes from an account of a white man who went into prison to stand in solidarity with innocent black men who were imprisoned.

[4]

Hymns also provided a sense of hope for the protestors. Songs like Keep Your Eyes on the Prize and We Shall Overcome demonstrated that they were fighting for a cause larger than themselves, and that they can remain hopeful through the struggles of the present.

While religious motivations and hopeful outlooks played a role in hymn-singing, I don’t believe these were the only reasons hymns became the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights movement. I believe protestors chose to sing hymns because both white and black people found a home-like comfort in singing them side-by-side with fellow protestors. Both groups of people found identity within these tunes. Hymns have roots in aspects of both “white” and “black” culture. Even though these two groups brought very different experiences to the protests, both found a feeling of familiarity from singing these tunes. Amidst the tumultuous times they were living in, hymns unified the individuals’ struggle into a powerful whole.

[1] “Protest Ariz. Bias.” 1963.Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1960-1973), Jul 30, 6. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493976140?accountid=351.

[2] “N. C. Students Protest Bias on Capitol Steps.” 1960.Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960), Mar 15, 3. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493748886?accountid=351.

[3] “Arrest 52 of 400 Hymn-Singing Sit-Ins Protesting Mich. Bias.” 1963.Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1960-1973), Sep 19, 8. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493990005?accountid=351.

[4] “Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 1960-69.” Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 1960-69, n.d.

When asking American music students to name a distinctly Black style of music, most will jump onto the term “Spiritual,” or even “Negro Spiritual” if they feel the need to be more precise (as though we ever refer to sacred songs by White composers are “White Spirituals”).  This shows some kind of link between Black music that has been made popular in the Western Canon and the Christian faith.  Are all instances of Black music in the historical canon from the Spiritual tradition?  Or is that just our personal biases and preferences creeping in.

I’m sure you can tell by the way I phrased it that the answer is no, since of course not every instance of Black art music comes from a background of Spirituals.  Only a Sith would deal in such absolutes.  What may be more accurate to ask is why we have formed such a close tie between Black music and Black spirituality, and what makes that tie different.  Even Black newspapers seem to make this connection, with the Chicago Defender titling an article “Presents Black Music” (Oct 11, 1975) to describe a church’s choral program’s opening concert featuring exclusively spirituals and hymns written by Black composers.

There is no qualifier in the Article’s title, but it does go on to specify it is a concert of “Sacred Music.”  So why is it referred to as “Black music” and not “Sacred Music” or “Black Sacred Music.”  If it were a concert of only white sacred music, it would simply be called something vaguely inspiring with a Bible verse with no reference to race.

This must indicate some subconscious association with Blackness and Spirituality, perhaps best exemplified by a well-meaning, but woefully ignorant, lady in my church choir, saying, “Those Blacks sing so well because they put the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – oh I’m sorry I mean the Holy Ghost as they call it – in every note.”  It is certainly a pervasive concept in our collective consciousness that Black singers excel at being Spiritual, but our acknowledgement of the excellence of Black singers in other regards have nothing to do with their race.  When we talk about Lawrence Brownlee, his race and spirituality stay out of it until someone brings up his performance of Spirituals.

I’ll only posit one possible reason, since I am no expert on cultural consciousness and race, but I have seen quite a bit.  Spirituals and Slave Songs (which are almost always sacred in some regard) were among the first types of Black music to become truly popular.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers in particular helped with that becoming the first American ensemble to tour internationally, bringing an entirely sacred style of singing to the world.  I would argue that since then, our ability to separate Blackness from Spirituality has diminished greatly.  This may have nefarious purposes in stereotyping Black people as overly emotional or passionate, but could just be an honest inability to separate from our initial impression (this phenomenon is called Reference Dependence in Behavioral Economics, and plays a huge role in your willingness to pay certain prices for certain items).

In the following video from the Popular Culture in Britain and America database, several different scenes are depicted from the protests surrounding the Democratic Party Convention of 1968, when Hubert Humphrey beat out anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy for the presidential nomination (1). The protests and Convention took place in Chicago, and the protests were led almost exclusively by students. It’s kind of remarkable that, much like the history of minstrelsy, many of the events of these protests have vanished from the country’s collective memory. There were extreme shows of police brutality and repression of the free press, and yet like so much history that is distasteful, it is rarely taught or discussed.

Depicted left: a protester’s sign, which says,

“Get troops out of Chicago, Black America, Vietnam NOW! Stoners Against War and Fascism” (2)

While this video has very poor sound quality and jumps around a great deal, one of the things that I noticed was that it featured very little of the Black America mentioned in the sign, with the exception of the brief shot beginning at time 8:54 and ending at about 9:23. In this clip, although the audio does not line up with the video, you can hear someone drumming and leading a call and response and a group of “African American people dancing to music and chanting,” as the database description says. This is our only taste of one of the major features of the anti-war and countercultural movement of the 60s and 70s – protest music.

Watch the video here: http://http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/video/videodetails.aspx?documentId=889264

Black musicians and their music featured prominently in the anti-war movement – especially folk musicians, although there were many rock and roll musicians as well. Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, and the all-white folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary are just a few of the most famous musicians who wrote protest music during this time (3).

This struggle against widespread violence is just a continuation of the history we have been learning about in class. Like with every other genre or group of people we have discussed, music has an important role to play in both representing a movement or group to the rest of the world and in moving events forward in its own way. In protest music, this is by being a platform for viewpoints to be shared and by being a unifying force for those who hold the same (or similar) views. Protest music pushes on people’s conception of right or wrong, and thereby identity within those norms, in their society by working through stigmatized forms and symbols – in the Vietnam protests, these included connections to the Civil Rights movement and use of rock and roll and drugs (see Stoners Against War and Fascism, pictured above).

Works Cited:

1. Editors of History.com. “Protests at Democratic National Convention in Chicago.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 21 July 2010, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/protests-at-democratic-national-convention-in-chicago.
2. Huntley Film Archives. “Anti-Vietnam War Protests in Chicago during the Democrat Party Convention, August 1968.” Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975, Adam Matthew, 2011, www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/video/videodetails.aspx?documentId=889264.
3. Lindsay, James M. “The Twenty Best Vietnam Protest Songs.” Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Foreign Relations, 5 Mar. 2015, www.cfr.org/blog/twenty-best-vietnam-protest-songs.

Billy Graham was a remarkably powerful Evangelical preacher who fostered a rebirth in Christian enthusiasm post-WWII. This movement was led through effective media appearances and “crusades” in which Graham’s organization would rent out stadiums or other large spaces to host elaborate religious services for crowds in the tens-of-thousands. An important component of these services was the musical prelude to Graham’s sermon. The Chicago Defender¹ reported on a 1962 Chicago Crusade in which George Beverly Shea, the famed soloist for Graham’s services is honored as a hometown hero.

Shea and Graham

George Beverly Shea was born in Canada in 1909, and after moving to the U.S. he eventually began a career which captivated radio, TV, and festival audiences. Shea’s popstar-adjacent promotional opportunities and close personal ties with Billy Graham led to consistent performances intertwined with religious power. The Evangelical church has since been known for savvy music marketing, George Beverly Shea likely being an early example.

“As an imitation of contemporary secular music and fashion, contemporary Christian music bolstered the identity of young evangelicals who feared being alienated from their peers because of their religious faith. At the same time, however, by its incessant promotion of media consumption, the contemporary gospel industry subtly affirmed American materialism..” – William Romanowski²

In a 1970 edition of the music magazine “SuperStars” on Johnny Cash³, this image of Johnny Cash and Billy Graham is captioned “Johnny and Dr. Billy Graham discuss possibility of joint appearance in Tennessee” as the two talk closely. Cash and Graham were known to be close friends throughout their lives, and Cash performed at multiple “crusade” concerts.

Cash and Graham

Music, religion, and power have always been closely intertwined in America, but the marketing of religion alongside popular music is something relatively new. George Beverly Shea, Johnny Cash, and their relationship to Billy Graham as advocates for Christianity while still being working musicians with wide audiences adds another layer of market segmentation. While Shea was firmly a gospel performer, Cash is remembered as a country singer yet they still benefitted from the same audiences. At what point did Evangelical music blend into mainstream performance and at what point did it become hard to hear the difference?

For this week’s blog post I found an article from Rock magazine that was published in 1972. The article “Portrait of Two (Funky) Ladies”, written by Toby Goldstein, depicts the music and backgrounds of artists Sandy Denny and Merry Clayton.  The characterization of these two female artists by the male author helps to expose the one-dimensional ways in which the world viewed women in music at the time of the article’s publication.

The ways that Goldstein portrays them is very much as if he is trying to make the point that women can have personalities and depth, as if the default is to think that they do not. About Denny he continuously mentions her range, “In one hour, it is not surprising for Sandy Denny to sing ballads, a Dylan tune, some old-time rock‘n’roll, and even acapella with the band” (Goldstein). Of course the variety of the artist is of interest to potential listeners, but I feel the emphasis of his writing is on how surprising it is that she does this, not commending her musicianship and versatility. The same is done for Merry Clayton, describing her work in an admirable way, but also demeaning her in the same sentence. Goldstein states that “Merry Clayton is a woman possessed to work” (Goldstein). Although this is a compliment of sorts, a man with an identical work ethic would simply be described as “dedicated”, not “possessed”, as that word implies that there is some other force propelling her success other than her own practice and talent.

Another way in which Goldstein could’ve represented the women better was the order of the features of the artists within the article. He features Denny for about 90% of the first page, only getting to Clayton right before the page break. Although this is just a layout issue, I feel that Clayton should have been highlighted first, as her name is alphabetically before Denny’s. Mainly, I find issue with this because Clayton is a black woman, and is already facing more push-back in the music industry than Denny. This issue is more excusable, as in 1972 it was very significant to have a black woman featured in a rock magazine at all, but Goldstein could’ve helped to break down barriers more quickly had he put Clayton’s section first, in order for readers to learn about her work before they lose interest in the article, as many read magazines in a style likened to channel-surfing.

These critiques are of rather small details within the article, but the truth of the matter is that is far better that this article was written than not having it at all. From a modern standpoint, it is easy to pick out flaws in the author’s writing, but the intent and outcome of the article is still overall positive.

Works Cited

Goldstein, Toby. “Portrait of Two (Funky) Ladies”. Rock, vol. 3- issue 16, March 1972, pp. 5-6.

On April 4^th, 2011, in Madison, WI, Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke at a rally honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At 0:15 in the video below, Rev. Jackson begins singing (and encouraging others to sing) the protest song “We Shall Overcome,” a song that has now become an anthem that is frequently sung at anti-racist rallies and marches, specifically those associated with Black Lives Matter.

This isn’t the first time a movement has used “We Shall Overcome” as a protest song. In September 1963, the Chicago Daily Defender published an article titled, “’We Shall Overcome’ New Negro ‘Anthem.’”

The first sentence of the article reads:

“’We Shall Overcome,’ the theme song of American’s militant Negro, is rapidly becoming the new Negro National Anthem.” ¹.

The article continued explaining how this song had been used for decades, but was popularized in relation to race with the invention of the television and radio; after these inventions, the song was heard every time the Civil Rights Movement was on the air.

“We Shall Overcome” became such a staple for the Civil Rights movement that songbooks  were created using the title as their own. The following is an advertisement from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee magazine in 1964, based out of University of California, Berkeley, for a songbook called “We Shall Overcome,” which is full of various protest songs to encourage peaceful protest in the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

However, it didn’t start as a protest song. The piece was originally a gospel song, composed by Reverend Charles Albert Tindley in 1900.  Interestingly enough, the lyrics that are popular today (as well as in the 1960’s during the Civil Rights Movement) were written by a white musician, Pete Seeger. Seeger was not only a songwriter, but an activist, and worked to popularize “We Shall Overcome” by teaching the song at rallies and protests. It could be said that Seeger is one of the main reasons “We Shall Overcome” is such an icon for anti-racism protests across the country.

In the 21^stcentury, activists criticize “We Shall Overcome,” as it never specifies when this action will occur. A Black Lives Matter activist, Zellie Imani, attended a protest after the fatal shooting of an unarmed, 18-year-old African American boy named Michael Brown by a white police officer in 2014. He recalls Rev. Jackson, the same singer from the video I started with, tried to encourage protesters to sing “We Shall Overcome.” This time, however, he was unsuccessful.

“The song doesn’t tell us when we shall overcome. It is saying that we will overcome someday. And what we in the streets wanted, we wanted justice now,” Imani states in an article for CNN. ³

Instead of “We Shall Overcome,” people started chanting Kendrick Lamar’s “(We Gon’ Be) Alright,” reflecting a shift in the change of attitude towards the outcomes: no more is it about overcoming, but about igniting change, which this video does with it’s images of police shooting and fires, among other images.

And his concerns don’t even address the fact that we use a white musician’s words in “We Shall Overcome.” While Seeger was an activist and white ally to the Civil Rights Movement, using his words could be taking away from Rev. Tindley. In an extreme interpretation, it could even be seen as a method of taking the song and claiming as a white invention, similar to how George Pullen Jackson takes African American spirituals and folksongs in his book White and Negro Spirituals, molding the songs to attempt to persuade readers that these folksongs have white roots and are, therefore, white songs.⁴ Again, it is extreme, but why are we using a white songwriter’s lyrics for songs about promoting racial change?

As generations change, as do the wants and desires for equality. Maybe in the 1960’s, it was about overcoming, making “We Shall Overcome,” the appropriate song to sing. But maybe now, it’s about more than overcoming; maybe now, it’s about protesting inequality and promoting change. With that, maybe it’s time to change protest songs.

Bibliography

(1) Potter, Dave. “‘We Shall Overcome’ New Negro ‘Anthem’.” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1960-1973), Sep 17, 1963. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493990555?accountid=351.

Brer Rabbit with Brer Fox

Eileen Southern, a professor at Harvard University, explains that slaves in the southern United States “engaged in ‘swapping tales’, and singing songs, particularly about Brer Rabbit and his animal friends […]. The Slaves sang about the adventures of animals and about the experiences of their Biblical heroes, but not about themselves. It may well be that the simple, unvarying routines of slave-life precluded the development of a song type dependent upon the adventures of a hero or heroine [1].” Leslie Ruth argues Brer Rabbit stories, “have communicated the values and experiences of enslaved Africans and of indigenous African American culture. Brer Rabbit stories are a projection of the slave’s personal experiences, dreams and hopes, and reveal more about slave culture than… whole books on slavery by experts […]. In these stories, Brer Rabbit, an accomplished musician, songster, and dancer, successful lady’s man, skilled farmer, and shrewd strategist, engages in struggles with adversaries, such as Brer Wolf and Brer Fox, as well as conflicts with friends, such as Brer Possum and Brer Squirrel [2].” He is a symbol of how the little one can get the best of those stronger than himself. What I would like to examine is how the Brer Rabbit stories, with their ideas of protecting the small and weak against the big and powerful, relate to Fayette County’s Operation Freedom movement in the year of 1962. 

Operation Freedom was an organization who truly embodied the idea of protecting the weak against the powerful. It was an organization which provided emergency funds to “thousands of people in the south- people both black and white who [took] a stand for justice and [found] themselves faced with starvation because those in power want[ed] to drive them out. It [was] a weapon for people in the freedom struggle; it [was] a way of helping individuals who [were] under attack so they [could] continue to fight [3].”  I discovered a pamphlet for Operation Freedom in which Fannie Lou Hamer urges people to donate money for the cause. The pamphlet includes first-hand accounts of what people were going through during the tumultuous 1960s. 

The pamphlet talks about a “tent city” that has been set up in Fayette County, Tennessee. It was a place where people lived who had forcibly been cast out by their employer- landowners. The people had no land to live on, and no place to plant crops. The few African American families who owned their own farms were also unable to plant crops because they were not allowed to borrow money to buy seed, fertilizer, and other necessities while the crops were growing. Operation Freedom provided floors for the tents, replaced broken tents, and financed a well. The organization also tried to help farmers buy land and farm equipment- donating over $42,000 to 95 people in 1960. 

Despite their efforts, Operation Freedom had many obstacles against them. Many of the evictions that led to the tent cities were directed toward black people who had registered to vote. The pamphlet claims “White citizens councils and similar groups, which last year had compiled names of registered negroes and circulated them to bankers, merchants, doctors, now developed a new strategy- that of trying to reduce the Negro population. So, eviction notices are being given to Negroes who have not registered, as well as those who have [3].” In an article by the Chicago Defender [4]:

Basic needs like medical and dental care were being denied to the black community- and people were often forced to go to Memphis (a distance of 40-50 miles with no means of transportation)- even in emergency situations.

When I discover what took place in Fayette County, I was shocked and deeply saddened. It is disheartening to think just how recently this situation occurred, and it makes sense as to why the stories of Brer Rabbit are so relevant to the African American community. Leslie Ruth believes Brer Rabbit’s tricks are basically “’survival strategies’ of an enslaved people exposed to violence, injustice, and arbitrary judgment, and tricks assault Western Christian sanctioned morals in that ‘the characteristic spirit of these tales was one not of moral judgement but of vicarious triumph’ [2].” I imagine survival was constantly on the minds of the people in these tent cities.

In the Chicago Defender, there is a message of hope- it seems as though many people thought what was happening in Fayette County was wrong. The article ends by saying “a whole community is being driven to desperation, to economic ruin and the Governor of the state does nothing about it. He is either a party to the conspiracy to drive the negro voters out of Fayette county, or his political commitments have dulled his sense of responsibility. The federal government of Fayette county should declare this troubled county of Tennessee a disaster area and institute at once the measures of relief. This, at least, would show that the boycott would have no stamp of approval in Washington [4].”

At the root of Brer Rabbit and Operation Breakthrough is a message of hope, and the Chicago Defender confirms this hope. Throughout the stories of Brer Rabbit, there is a constant theme of fighting against the big and powerful. This is mirrored in what we see with Operation Breakthrough’s efforts and the Chicago Defender’s efforts to support evicted and ballot-less African Americans. All three of these writings should encourage us to stand up for the weaker man, speak out when something is not right, and support the people around us regardless of their race.  

Sources

[1] Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

[2] Leslie, A. R. (1997). Brer rabbit, a play of the human spirit: Recreating black culture through brer rabbit stories. The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 17(6), 59-83.

[3] Operation Breakthrough. “Action for Freedom,” 1962.

[4] The Boycott in Fayette County. (1960, Jul 16). The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967).

The primary source that I looked into for today was a republication of an article from the Little Rock Gazette from the year 1880. It was actually printed in the Topeka Tribune which claimed to be the sole colored publication in the state of Kansas. The title read, “A Prodigy In The Pulpit. A Boy Who Creates a Sensation by Preaching Lorenzo Dow’s Sermon” and the validity of the story told is arguable. The article itself was located on the fourth/last page of the tribune along with a number of reprinted articles from various newspapers nation-wide. Rather than search key-words such as “minstrelsy” I decided to search words associated with the topic and landed on “burnt-cork”. Oliver, the white boy the article centers around, utilizes components of black-face such as blackening his skin with burnt cork and donning a minstrel wig to swindle a black congregation out of their money. It was, in a way, refreshing to see minstrelsy contextualized by people who were living during the era. The story ends with the condemnation of Oliver who is publicly lashed once discovered to be a fraud. This particular lens of condemnation and specifically retribution I found captivating in that I had yet to hear such conversations of minstrelsy. Sentiments expressed in the article are clearly aimed at a black audience as the anger which turned to violence could have been a true story however the sensationalized air of the article warrants it to be more of a cautionary tale. My reasoning in particular as to why I believe the article to be false is that I don’t find it very likely that no one in the congregation would not be able to discern that the young preacher was in fact in blackface and wearing a wig. Second, I found the use of the word “prodigy” ironic which is what I assume the author’s intention to be. 

**I will link the article below as my computer had difficulties uploading the jpeg

https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&sort=YMD_date%3AA&fld-base-0=alltext&val-base-0=%22burnt%20cork%22&val-database-0=&fld-database-0=database&fld-nav-0=YMD_date&val-nav-0=&docref=image%2Fv2:13136344DDA00C28@EANAAA-131804FFA368D5A8@2408026-1318015A95D18A70@3-138BB10AE9049AA0&origin=image/v2%3A13136344DDA00C28%40EANAAA-131804FFA368D5A8%402408026-1318015A95D18A70%403-138BB10AE9049AA0%40A%2BProdigy%2BIn%2BThe%2BPulpit.%2BA%2BBoy%2BWho%2BCreates%2Ba%2BSensation%2Bby%2BPreaching%2BLorenzo%2BDow%2527s

Works Cited
“A Prodigy In The Pulpit. A Boy Who Creates a Sensation by Preaching Lorenzo Dow’s.” Topeka Tribune (Topeka, Kansas), November 6, 1880: 4. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:13136344DDA00C28@EANAAA-131804FFA368D5A8@2408026-1318015A95D18A70@3-138BB10AE9049AA0.

In his essay-review The day of jubilee, published February 27, 1959 in the Los Angeles Tribune , Chestyn Everett confronts issues concerning the commercialization, dilution, and decontextualization of black spirituals. Everett, who was a scholar, civil rights activist, and later, a professor at Cornell University, starts his essay with a more general condemnation of black and white artists alike for corrupting their renditions of spirituals and remaining less and less faithful to the genre and the historical background. He goes on to make generalized characters and condemning them for each way they have warped the genre.

“We must admit, however, that the average white artist approaches the Negro spiritual as if the Negro slaves who had created these songs, had studied “lieder” composition and voice at some classic conservatory in which they attended evening classes after a day’s session in the cotton fields. On the other extreme, the white popular “singers” approach the negro spiritual as if, instead of the conservatory in the cotton fields, the negro slaves had a “rock and roll” band by which they rhythmically picked cotton and did little chores around the house for the “missus”, and that the “kind ole massah” had put up a “dark town strutters bistro”– and that each night this “tired-happy, free loving, fun loving, maddening throng of dark humanity” converged upon the DTSB singing “When the saints go marchin’ in” to the insane-frentic backing of “Old Black Joe and his Cotton Picking Ramblers”

He continues with several critiques of certain black musicians. First, he critiques black musicians who “clean up the language,” that is, editing the southern slave dialect into more modern english. He argues that this is the same as saying that the slaves who created the spirituals lacked “the finer points of musical intelligence,” (Everett 9). His next critique is of incompetent black musicians who rationalize the validity of their performances by recalling that slaves would have had no formal training. “[this singer] labors under the unfortunate assumption that being a Negro establishes the assumption that he can sing Negro spirituals, and further that any vocal ability he is conspicuously lacking is inconsequential to the fact that he “feels” what he is (not) doing,” (Everett 21).

His main issue with many modern practices of spirituals is with the recontextualization of this music. Similar to what we have learned in class, the way that music, and more specifically, information, is portrayed in the present paints firmly guides how many view the past. While he characterizes and exaggerates these examples, his worry holds true.

Works Cited:
Everett, Chestyn. “The day of jubilee: an essay-review.” The Los Angeles Tribune, February 27, 1959, pp. 9, 21. African American Newspapers. Accessed on October 3, 2019. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&sort=_rank_%3AD&f=advanced&val-base-0=white&fld-base-0=ocrtext&bln-base-1=and&val-base-1=spirituals&fld-base-1=ocrtext&docref=image%2Fv2:129280BA5DFE7A33@EANAAA-12C5FE6E97CC8398@2436627-12C5FE6EC9A29168-12C5FE6FB0599BF8&firsthit=yes

While the most recent course readings and discussions have focused on the (relatively little) good and (predominantly) bad effects of minstrelsy, discussion of other black performance in the 19th century has been limited or in passing. While browsing the archives of the African American Newspapers database, I came across a name that was mentioned multiple times in a few articles about black vocal performances in the Washington D.C. area in the latter half of the 19th century. A “Mrs. Smallwood” was cited multiple times for her performances at various churches. Further digging revealed Agnes Gray Smallwood to be a vocal performer, with multiple newspaper articles hailing her as an outstanding performer.

In this newspaper review, Agnes Smallwood is hailed for her solo singing after a concert given at a local church.

This announcement was found in many papers, noting Mrs. Smallwood’s achievement, yet failed to mention specifically which church she would sing at.

Mrs. Smallwood was a part of a group of singers that formed the little-known Colored American Opera Company, America’s first opera company for black singers. The group rose out of the need to raise funds for St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington D.C., a catholic church that has long established itself as the “mother church of black Catholics”. The church established itself as a haven for free blacks in the final years of the Civil War, and has since been a spiritual and cultural refuge for blacks.

Although I could not find any video or other media related to the Colored Opera Company, take a moment to view a short video about St. Augustine Catholic Church and how the work of the opera company lives on today in this unique catholic church.

Although there were newspaper reviews praising the voices of colored singers with no conservatory preparation, any sort of monetary or moral support appears to have come from within the black community (despite evidence that white audiences attended the opera performances and enjoyed them). The opera company was formed in a short term effort to raise funds, so there appears to be no long term musical consequences from the formation of this opera company- it did not last beyond the short time the group performed to fundraise for the church. It appears Agnes Smallwood and her peers in America’s first black opera were victims of the selective history we’ve discussed in class. Despite creating opportunities for themselves as artists in a time when barriers hindered access to the art music of upper-class whites, Mrs. Smallwood and the legacy of the Colored American Opera Company have failed to get much recognition over time. They live in the dark shadow of minstrelsy, a legacy that imposes itself of the narrative of black musicians and music in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But, it is important to acknowledge their work where we can, and understand how their influence on places like St. Augustine Catholic Church live on in black music and experiences today.

Primary Sources

“That Concert.” People’s Advocate (Washington (DC), District of Columbia), March 22, 1884: 1. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:1314AA70AC23F712@EANAAA-1318B874277570C0@2409258-1317FCF1227EF690@0-138B6F284B4BF4AF@That+Concert.

“Personal.” Sentinel (Trenton, New Jersey), January 14, 1882: 2. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:12B71455EDA827F8@EANAAA-12BCB176E895E868@2408460-12BA06CF06FA58B0@1-12D625D0317DF3D0@Personal.

Secondary Sources have been hyperlinked in the prose above.

Here is a picture of William “Billy” Emerson

As talked about in class, blackface minstrelsy that originates from the United States. This form of racism borrows from the Italian theatrical form of Commedia Dell’arte as well as multiple musical practices (a form I have performed and trained in). This performance practice came to feed into a culture of racism and uphold the constructs of whiteness and blackness in the United States in ways that affect our contemporary society. It’s also important to recognize how this form became seen from an international perspective.
In an 1885 article of the Huntsville Gazette, a newspaper based in Alabama, there’s an article called “Two Noted Minstrels, Who Have Won Fortunes and What They Say About Stage Life”. The article discusses the minstrel performer “Billy” Emerson who immigrated from Scotland to pursue a life on stage. Many assume that performers were only white American men but blackface became so popular during this time that shows went on international tours.
The article says:
He visited Australia in 1874 and on his return to America joined Haverly’s minstrels in San Francisco at $500 a week and expenses. With this troupe he played before her majesty, the Queen, the Princes of Wales, and royalty generally.

In class we discussed how common minstrel shows at the White House had become but rarely are the performances for European royalty recognized. This is an example of non-Americans working in an American form or being exposed to an American form. Europeans took part in blackface Minstrelsy but my question becomes “Does this form become entirely tied to an American sense of identity such as the mime for the French or Commedia Dell’arte for Italians?” This past performance practice became capitalized on and I worry blackface minstrelsy is the only American form we are known as a country for during this century. Thinking internationally, I question how this form we made affected racial constructs in other countries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“Two Noted Minstrels, Who Have Won Fortunes and What They Say About Stage Life.” Huntsville Gazette, 6 Oct. 1885, pp. 4–4.

Yeager, Danni Bayles. “Billy Emerson.” Performing Arts Archive, www.performingartsarchive.com/Vaudeville-Acts/Vaudeville-Acts_B/Billy-Emerson/Billy-Emerson.htm.

Throughout our classes, the aspect of Blackface Minstrelsy (and other forms of racial exploitation) that seems to be of greatest concern, is the way in which white society comodifies and reduces various races and cultures into stereotypical caricatures for the purposes of white entertainment. In Love and Theft, by Eric Lott, however, he discusses that in the case of Blackface Minstrelsy, there is the simultaneous presence of racism, fear, and even “fascination.” It struck me as a very unique and unusual statement, the idea that Blackface Minstrelsy could come out of and be perceived by some as an expression of fascination and twisted admiration. That was until I read the article “Good Minstrels” from page 6 of a 1919 issue of The Broad Ax, a Chicago newspaper.

Broad_Ax_published_as_Broad_Axe___February_15_1919

This reviewer from the Chicago Tribune praises this Blackface Performance for it’s “…amazing Negro feeling for rhythm and pulse and life…” and even compares their performance to that of the Fisk cantors (the Fisk Singers being a historically well known African-american music ensemble).

Throughout the article, the reviewer expresses nothing but excitement and respect for the performance, even referencing “Negro” music in the same breath as Brahms and Dvorak. It is clear that this is Blackface Minstrelsy performance at a high caliber, and in this case, it’s not outwardly comedic or meant to be degrading. It was a performance that showcased black music as something worthy of being performed in the same venues and at the same skill level as that of western classical music. This is highly remarkable given date of this review. After reading even this one review, Lott’s claim, that there is a certain fascination and admiration for “blackness” present in white performances of Blackface Minstrelsy, doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it may first appear…

-Sources Consulted-

Broad Ax (Chicago, Illinois), February 15, 1919: 1. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:13364E8FB5DF2117@EANAAA-1336A9472B369F40@2422005-13365F056E6C2BA8@0.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 (Introduction and Chptr. 1) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxQzWOgr8AurZHRwTEcwWTczZW8/view

After last Thursday’s session, Dr. Epstein told me about an academic journal article that proved the popular Christmas carol, “Jingle Bells,” has its origins in blackface minstrelsy.  Lo and behold, I did encounter the article written by Dr. Kyna Hamill, a theater professor at Boston University, with damning evidence about a beloved Christmas song that many of us so innocently learned as young children.  She drew evidence from various songs about sleigh-riding and how many lyrics between these songs were shared between one another [1].  One similarity she found was in its original title (“One-Horse Open Sleigh”) to a lyric in the 4th verse of Stephen C. Foster’s “Brudder Gum” (see below):

[2]

While the article makes some very interesting insights as to how the song came into being and how its racial history has been lost to the passage of time, it came with its fair share of praise and unfair share of relentless criticism.  A particular example can be found in a feature on Fox News’ daytime show “Fox & Friends,” which features Dr. Carol Swain, a former political science professor from Vanderbilt, debasing Dr. Hamill’s work as a mere ploy of the “liberal agenda” to “destroy Christmas.”

Professor claims ‘Jingle Bells’ is rooted in racism

This segment was truly meant to sensationalize a very thorough examination on America’s “swept-under-the-rug” racial history of “Jingle Bells” by attaching it to the various attacks that conservatives believed they faced (e.g. War on Christmas and liberal indoctrination.)  By vaguely pulling one quote out of Dr. Hamill’s article and framing a discussion around much larger concepts in the sociopolitical sphere of American culture, Fox News wildly misrepresented Dr. Hamill’s work as a deeper examination in popular American culture and wrote it off as simply destructive.

What also peeves me about this segment is the purpose of Dr. Swain’s role on the show.  By simply having a PhD and an academic career, this gave the impression that her take as an academic gave her credibility with her remarkably vapid arguments.  Perhaps it was simply that she wanted to shill her new book, but by mocking another academic, she allowed Fox News to portray her as a maverick professor taking on the “liberal agenda.”  It may also be worth noting that by being a black woman, Fox News may be taking advantage of Dr. Swain as a token commentator on race issues, and while she is very much entitled to her opinions, Dr. Swain cannot be the overall representation of all African-Americans in regards to this issue.

It is disappointing to see how Fox News portrayed Dr. Hamill, but it is not out of character for their role as a news outlet.  The same could probably go for many of the other major news broadcasting companies in the United States and the world, but when Dr. Hamill decided to go against the grain of popular American culture and uncover one of its many black-eyes, her image took a significant beating as the scapegoat of the “liberal agenda.”

Notes

[1] Hamill, “The story I must tell,” 376

[2] Foster, “Brudder Gum”

Bibliography

Foster, Stephen. “Brudder Gum,” New York, NY: Firth and Pond, 1849.

Hamill, Kyna. “’The story I must tell’: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire,” Cambridge University Press 58, no. 3 (September 2017): 375-407, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557417000291

Pierpont, J. “The one horse open sleigh,” Boston, MA: Oliver Ditson, 1857.

I would like to begin by directing your attention to the highlighted excerpts from the following newspaper article:¹

All of the writers mentioned, Jack Haverly, Billy West, Billy Rice, Billy Emerson, and Neil Bryant, were white. Somewhat surprisingly, this article was published in Oregon’s first black newspaper, the Portland New Age, in 1902. As we can see, this article mourns the deaths of five blackface minstrelsy writers of legendary status. Let’s take a closer look at the first mentioned, Jack Haverly. In 1902, the same year of the article’s publication, Haverly published a book called Negro Minstrels: A Complete Guide to Negro Minstrelsy, Containing Recitations, Jokes, Crossfires, Conundrums, Riddles, Stump Speeches, Ragtime and Sentimental Songs, etc., Including Hints on Organizing and Successfully Presenting a Performance.² Whew! The name leaves nothing to the imagination, but in short, this book provides a template for how to create a successful minstrel show. Successful even in the minds of black audiences. So let’s take a look at what Haverly might have recommended:

As researchers who are far(ish) removed from these circumstances, it is easy to be shocked that this material was endorsed by black writers to black audiences. Or, we can understand it as “love and theft.”³

When read together, these primary sources contribute to the complex tensions that lie in Eric Lott’s understanding of minstrelsy. As baffling racist as the caricatures and narratives were, the form was so popular that African-Americans had a stake in aspects of its production. Unfortunately, this seemed to be as respectable as it got when it came to minstrelsy tropes. And black and white audiences alike got on board in the names of entertainment and artistry.

When racial ambiguity was built into the performative framework of blackface minstrelsy, what did it mean for the audience? The racial make-up of audiences is extremely difficult to track down, particularly when it comes to performances of blackface minstrelsy in the Industrial North. One way to accomplish this is to research the race of the owner of the venue but that identity could mean nothing. Another way to learn more about audience is by reading critical reviews of blackface performance, or to examine advertisements for those performances. 

One such advertisement is an 1889 flyer for “DeVere’s Negro Sketches, End Men’s Gags and Conundrums”¹ featuring an ensemble seated on stage in blackface, with white on-lookers placed above the stage in fancy clothing. This artistic framing places a white observer at the forefront of the musical space, imposing a clear hierarchy between performer and audience member.

Why does audience matter? Eric Lott writes in Love and Theft that “Regarding even the class-bound audiences of the 1840’s, there was some confusion among commentators about just who was out there in the pit and the gallery. As I will argue later, one of minstrelsy’s functions was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and finally to aid in the construction of class identities over the bodies of black people (67).”² Lott makes the important point that minstrelsy wasn’t exclusively white and black performers acting out racist and harmful stereotypes for exclusively white audiences, it was more complex than that. 

In a Chicago Weekly Review from 1911³, The Pekin Theater put on several acts, including a white ventriloquist, two “colored musical acts” and a blackface ensemble. Slyvester Russell⁴ writes in his vaudeville review “The Musical Randolphs gave an act which needs encouragement and may yet develop to become quite a feature. It will be necessary for this act to plenty of ragtime music with comedy action, but what’s the use of a blackface comedian if he doesn’t do something?” This is a black critic, writing for a black newspaper and therefore a predominantly black audience, attending a theatre which was programming lots of types of performances all within the same week. 

The audience therefore appears to be a fraught racial space, where the ambiguity and complicated racial politics being played out onstage were being echoed in the audience. In order to understand the popularity of minstrelsy, particularly as it was marketed and cultivated across geographic and cultural barriers it is crucial to consider the sheer magnitude of the audiences and to consider how it permeated and part of that research begins with combing through the legacy of performance space, not exclusively programming. 

When discussing minstrelsy in class, we continuously mentioned that minstrelsy went on much longer than most people realize or care to mention. In my research I found a theme of disturbing nostalgia surrounding the practice. One example of this nostalgia can be found in poetry.

In W.D. Nesbit’s poem published in the Chicago Tribune in 1903, “The Yesterdays of Nations”, he states, “Once the trumpet in brazen glee sang at the palace gates; Once the masters of minstrelsy babbled of loves and hates”(“The Yesterdays”). This fondness of olden days is evident through Nesbit’s language, regarding the performers of this offensive practice as “masters”, as if they are people to still be held in high esteem.

The times that Nesbit’s poem reflects so fondly upon can be seen in a second poem. This poem by James Gnocott is “Resignation.- A poem”. This poem so casually mentions minstrelsy that it truly reflects the ordinariness of minstrelsy in entertainment and life, stating “Oh! Trust in patience- hoping, trust the Lord, Although unstrung thy harp of joy may be; Yet may it give a most harmonious chord, to bless the minstrel in the minstrelsy”(“Resignation”).  The fact that this music is being described in a godly way and played by minstrel players is disturbing. The poem is meant to be agreeable in tone yet it’s encouraging God to “Bless the minstrel”. Followers of the Christian faith are meant to act like God, sending the message that the Christian faith itself condones and promotes these crude caricatures of African Americans.

The sentimental value that is placed on minstrel performances is shocking, and yet believable. I think the reason the poems are so nostalgic in tone is because they reflect a time of music and minstrel performances being one of the only times people were brought together in a light-hearted setting. People were willing to look past the innate wrongness of the way African Americans were portrayed easily because it could be written off as just a song or a joke. This mindset persists in our modern world, as jokes and racial microaggressions are brushed off in the same way. Clearly the effects of minstrelsy are even more long-lasting than we realized.

Works Cited

“Resignation.” Freedom’s Journal, 31 Aug. 1827, p. 4. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:132FB88A16969E1C@EANAAA-132FC8BB76F26BE8@2388600-132FC0E9A3F68330@3-138B6F90A11C0D66@Poetry. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019.

“The Yesterday’s of Nations.” Savannah Tribune, vol. XVIII, no. 39, 4 July 1903, p. [3]. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:11CCCBEC43F62EDE@EANAAA-11D646C6843817E8@2416300-11D646C6A24B9E08@2-11D646C7069D4878@Poetry. Accessed 3 Oct. 2019.

Program for a later performance of the same event, found at Heritage Auctions site.

The legacies of minstrelsy touch many corners of popular culture today (for examples of these legacies, scroll through other blog posts on this page), but even when it was the country’s primary means of entertainment, its reach stretched further than one would reasonably expect. The sobering reality is that it was enjoyed by members of all demographics of American culture–including African Americans.

In 1924, near the end of minstrelsy’s reign as a cultural juggernaut, The Broad Ax published an article glowing with praise for the “Amateur Minstrel Club” of Chicago. Known for its founder and editor, Julius Taylor, the paper advocated tolerance and equality and occasionally featured inflammatory language.¹ Most relevant to my argument, it was catered to black readers. The writer extended praise toward every component of a performance by the aforementioned club, from its “soul-inspiring” music to its “peppy” jokes and “real fun makers [sic].”²

Clipping from the Broad Ax, 26 April, 1924.

It is hard enough to swallow the reality of minstrelsy with regard to white audiences. That a black newspaper could describe minstrel acts as “twenty times better than . . . regular traveling old time minstrel shows,” with an audience comprising “the best class and the leading colored people residing in all parts of the city” which were led to “forget their aches, pains, troubles, sorrows and suffering in this world,” is a sobering reality. But this last quote should not be too quickly cast aside; while sorrows exist for everyone, it could easily be that the paper intended to affirm the struggles African Americans were facing to change institutions and bring about the equality Julius Taylor sought. If true, this lends the reader a glimpse into a complex reality of racial politics of the time.

Assuming African American participation in the club, it seems to me that this particular group was making a bid to control black identity through commercialization. Given the support of this paper, it is unlikely it perpetuated as many harmful stereotypes as other minstrel acts. Significantly, the benefits from the performance–some $3000 dollars, worth well over ten times that much in today’s money³–were donated to a place called the Old Folks Home. This commercial success, coupled with generosity, would neatly fit into a story which shifted societal ideas about African Americans away from poverty toward ability. Even if this was a case of ceding one’s dignity in the name of making a living, their philanthropic act, coupled with the Broad Ax’s praise of the artistic skill of the performers, does foster respect for the troupe–and African Americans by extension.

Advertisement found in a Freeman paper in June 1916.

While the popularity of blackface minstrelsy was and is a disturbing reality, African Americans have found ways to claim this popularity to succeed financially. More than that, and on a much more optimistic note, the stories constructed about minstrelsy by African Americans can re-frame otherwise disturbing performance to also include ability, rather than mere comedy.

Mardi Gras – It was a beautiful day yesterday, even though the heat was somewhat oppressive. The joyful children of the chaos celebrated Mardi-Gras with dignity. The balls/dances were not empty of beautiful or ugly masks. Some people failed to keep their masks on, while others maintained them. And so went the world, beautiful alongside ugly; light, then shadow. If there was anything that would have struck strangers who had never seen a Mardi-Gras masquerade in New Orleans, it would be the large quantity of people who had masks depicting a “negro” character. Our caucasians have the gift of imitation, to a high degree/standard, because the greater part among them imitate the “negro,” and above all the traditional “negro” which is represented to us by the Olympic Theatre minstrels, with a perfection that denotes to our cousins’ home (as belonging to our cousins, either referring back to the Theatre minstrels or to caucasians) a grand superiority. (1)

The last short segments of the article go on to describe one or two other events which occurred at the Mardi Gras parade, including a mysterious musical group. However, this is the most striking segment. Rarely, aside from a description of coming musical acts, is blackface or minstrelsy so directly addressed in the newspaper articles of this particular decade (at least of those I encountered). It’s an interesting peek into history to see celebrations such as Mardi Gras occurring during a time that we usually only study to discuss the violence that was committed.

This article is from 1869, only about 30 years after the first Mardi Gras parade was held in New Orleans in 1837 and 4 years after the end of the Civil War. The tradition was brought to the area by French colonisers when Louisiana and the surrounding area were still under French control.  It has many ties to the Brazilian celebration of Carnival (2).

The attitudes portrayed here are unclear. The New Orleans Tribune, which published this article, was an African-American publication, and yet it seems to paint quite a complimentary picture of white folks in blackface. I believe, however, that the over-the-top, complimentary wording is likely ironic – it certainly came across that way on my first reading, although it may not be as clear in my rough translation, given above. Minstrelsy was still quite in its height in the South, where it became more popular after the Civil War by leaning into the derogatory, rather than abolitionist, ties. It may very well have been unwise for a black paper to be publicly decrying minstrelsy and white participants in Mardi-Gras, hence the use of irony.

This time is also the origin of another very complicated Mardi Gras tradition. Benevolent Aid Societies came into being after the Civil War as a form of community insurance among black members of these societies – they could provide financial and other support for those who fell ill or lost family members. From these Aid Societies eventually came a group known as the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, which formed under that name in 1909 and still exists today (3).

As part of the Mardi Gras parade, this social and activist club has traditionally dressed in costumes representing Zulu warrior garb, including face painting. Now a multi-racial organisation, all members of the club, regardless of race, dress this way. However, while native Zulu face painting usually involves the bright colours seen in the costumes, the Zulu club relies on black (and some white) face paint. This has caused controversy several times in the club’s history, most notably in the 1960s, when it was condemned by several members of the Civil Rights movement as promoting negative stereotypes. Membership of the club dwindled to only about a dozen members that decade, and they switched to wearing masks instead of paint (3, 4). Since then, the Zulus’ numbers have increased again and transitioned back to face paint, causing yet another controversy in 2018. Whether they are drawing on the tradition of blackface, and whether it matters, is very much up for debate. Zulus claim that they are making no effort to conceal their race or pretend to be what they are not, that they are showing a positive portrayal, that it is a long standing tradition, and that it is not based in blackface. The last claim in particular is difficult to prove, although certainly their intention is important. The controversy in ongoing, but the overall consensus seems to be that the Black leaders of the club have the right to decide whether it is appropriate for their members to dress up the way they do. As long as they are deciding that it is, many other prominent figures have refrained from condemning the practice (4).

We must consider and decide, at least for ourselves, whether it makes a difference who is portraying a negative stereotype or drawing on a painful history, as well as their intention. Can blackface, in any form, be reclaimed?

1. “Chronique Locale.” New Orleans Tribune (New Orleans, Louisiana), February 10, 1869: 1. Readex: African American Newspapers.
2. Wikipedia contributors, “Mardi Gras,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mardi_Gras&oldid=916886656 (accessed October 3, 2019).
3. Becknell, Clarence A, et al. “History Of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club.” Zulu Social & Pleasure Club, www.kreweofzulu.com/history.
4. Krupa, Michelle. “The Black Leaders of an Iconic Mardi Gras Parade Want You to Know Their ‘Black Makeup Is NOT Blackface’.” CNN, Cable News Network, 5 Mar. 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/02/16/us/zulu-new-orleans-blackface/index.html.

While we have now become more familiar with blackface, white people are not the only ones to change the color of their skin and take on a new persona. Blackface minstrelsy might have been all the rage by gathering popularity and attention in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but behind closed doors, whiteface was growing among slaves through illegal late night cabals. Just as blackface was for white people, whiteface allows black people to assume a new identity comically, one that comes with privilege, power, and what it means to be white.

In a “Saturday Night Live” skit in 1984, Eddie Murphy becomes a “white man.”¹
The lightening of his skin, mustache, and change in hair shows the physical changes he undertook to become white. To prepare for his disguise, Murphy is shown watching TV to analyze how white men walk and act, to the audiences amusement. He practiced his “white man” voice that sounded more like a bark and authoritative. It is comedic to watch his experience of privilege, such as getting a newspaper for free from a fellow white man instead of having to pay for it. While applying for a loan at a bank with nothing to his name, he is turned down by a black man, but when the banker is replaced by a white man, stacks of money get shoved into his hands with jolly words of “pay us back-or don’t!” The skit puts a comic spin on the underlying issue of privilege and trustworthiness.

When Murphy was on the bus, as soon as the last black person got off, it became a  party with wine, cheese and jazz music complete with clapping by a white guy who had no sense of rhythm. It depicts that life as a white person is a constant party. It is comparable to the modern day slogan of “white people be like.” In social media, a platform where people try to be the best versions of themselves, girls are lightening their skin, straightening their hair, and becoming blonde; an unmistakable trait for people of European descent. It is problematic that, what some deem as the best version of themselves, is stripping their blackness. Even our Beloved Beyoncé is known to almost always have dyed blonde hair to look more European instead of embracing her natural curls. Video tutorials flood Youtube with “natural whiteface.”²

Beyoncé with straightened, then curled, blonde hair.

For as long as their has been differences in race, there has been others trying to copy and make fun of the “other”. Eddie Murphy in Saturday Night Live is a classic example of a race poking fun of the traits that come along with the other race. Fortunately for the actor, is was done in 1984, after the civil rights movement, so the fear of being criticized or physically hurt was lessened than predecessors. Still, it goes to show that just like blackface, with a little makeup, anyone can be anything.

CW: Racial slurs, suicide 

I stumbled upon this advertisement in the Afro-Americana Imprints database and immediately had about a thousand questions. Why have I never heard of this play before? What is it about? How was this show cast? What does the title even mean? Scanning the list of characters and their descriptions set off more alarm bells as characters include “Wahnotee, an Indian,” “Pete, a Slave, an Old House Servant,” a number of judges, and more slaves. Given this list and the fact that the advertisement was published during the American civil war in 1864, I was fairly certain that if I dug in deeper I would find no end to the amount of problematic material it contained. Unfortunately, I was right.

What is The Octoroon? The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault, opened in 1859 at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. The play itself was adapted from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Reid (1856). Set in Louisiana, the conflict revolves around Zoe who is the “Octoroon,” a word that was used to describe someone who was 1/8 African, 7/8 Caucasian. (Note: Although I had never heard these terms before and they are fairly outdated,”octoroon”  and “quadroon” are listed in the Racial Slur Database). 

Although technically Zoe is a free woman, she is barred from marrying her (white) lover George and is pursued by the evil M’Closky. In the British conclusion the lovers are successful, but in the American version Zoe drinks poison and dies in George’s arms to prevent portraying an interracial marriage in American theaters. The play has been credited for its sympathetic view of slaves and their humanity, but Boucicault claimed that he promoted neither a specifically abolitionist or proslavery view.[1]

Was blackface used in this production? It was never explicitly stated in anything I read, but red-face was certainly used, so it can be assumed blackface was as well.

Is Octoroon still performed? The play does appear in stageagent.com and I was able to find evidence a performance in March 2013 and a movie in 1913. However, there is little else to suggest it is regularly performed although there is substantial literature in theater magazines as it relates to the changing portrayal of race on stage. The play seems to find its most relevance in an adaptation called An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Soho Rep, 2014), a play within a play which examines the writing of the original Octoroon.

Although most people may not know the show now, this newspaper excerpt from an 1884 New York Globe publication states that The Octoroon is a “play very familiar with most theatre-goers.”[5]

Furthermore, it demonstrates in pervasiveness in American society since it was performed by amateurs as well as professional companies.

How does this finding connect with readings that we’ve done? I’m not going to lie, I got a little distracted from my original investigation into the use of blackface. There is so much to unpack in the play itself, and a lot of fascinating literature about it, particularly Diana Rebekkah Paulin’s 2012 book Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction. Paulin sets out the argument that Zoe’s body acts “as a surrogate for other characters’ desires and for the intersecting racial, gender, and (trans)national ideologies informing the play.”[2] Because she is this surrogate, she can “perform dramatic and complex significations throughout the play, disrupting racial, gender, and sexual codes that govern those around her.”[3] I saw a parallel to this in Lott’s argument that blackface is tied to an obsession with black bodies. If we assume Zoe was portrayed in blackface, or at least extend this to encompass the performance of black-ness onstage, her relationship with George demonstrates a desire to control black sexuality as well as a fear of female power and autonomy.[4] Although not classified in the genre of “minstrelsy,” The Octoroon navigates similar themes as the examples outlined in Lott’s chapter.

Now what? In the end, I (understandably) left my research with infinitely more questions than I had begun. I felt like the more scholarly articles I read the less I understood. The play itself is dense and confusing to read, packed as it is with 1860s language and politics. I wasn’t even able to begin an investigation into the portrayal of Native Americans, gender, or power, and I obviously barely even touched the surface of race. Had I known that I would be leaving with more questions than answers, I might have picked a different artifact. However, even though I strayed away from music, this play and its multitude of complexities is certainly something I am interested in researching more in the future.

[1] Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction, “Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire, ” University of Minnesota Press: 2012.

[2] Paulin, 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture,” Oxford University Press: New York. 1993.

[5] “Performance of ‘The Octoroon.’” New York Globe. New York: 28 June 1884.

Works Cited

“[Playbill. 1864-04-22].” Afro-Americana Imprints. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=D4DP55RKMTU2OTk3ODg5NC41NjczNTg6MToxMzoxOTkuOTEuMTgwLjkw&p_action=doc&p_docnum=1&p_queryname=3&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-154E9B34E025DFA8@S983-@1. 

Lott, Eric. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture.” Oxford University Press: New York. 1993.

Paulin, Diana Rebekkah. Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction, “Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire. ” University of Minnesota Press: 2012.

“Performance of ‘The Octoroon.’” New York Globe. New York: 28 June 1884. African American Newspapers. 

**Trigger Warning- the following post contains images of blackface

Last week, a video of Justin Trudeau (Canada’s prime minister) was released. In the video, the camera slowly pans downwards and we see Trudeau wearing an afro and his entire body is covered in dark paint. Several other images from separate occasions also emerged. The prime minister (who is up for re-election) confessed to a “massive blind spot” in his thinking, saying he was “deeply sorry.” When I saw this story, I honestly wasn’t that shocked. It seems as though “blackface shaming” has become the ultimate way to control powerful, important people. People are digging through their yearbooks and old photographs (physical not digital!) from years ago in order to shed light on the racist actions of people they knew back in the day. 

Photo courtesy of Afro-Americana Imprints, LCP, no. S351.

Blackface is definitely not anything new. Eric Lott explains “blackface minstrelsy was an established nineteenth-century theatrical practice, principally of the urban north, in which white men caricatured black men for profit [1].” Lott believes “the black mask offered a way to play with collective fears of a degraded and threatening-and male-Other while at the same time some symbolic control over them [1].” As we have discussed in American Music, stock characters such as Jim Crow, Zip Coon, Mammy, and Jezebel would be played by all-white male casts. African Americans in these shows were shown as barbaric, simple, passionate, hyper-sexual, and faux-suave. The cast would then come out at the end of the show as their normal white selves, dressed in elegant attire to prove they were truly “civilized white men.” As we can see in this “Eleventh St. Opera House” advertisement, minstrel shows were catered to families- they even had a discounted price for children (only 15 cents!). Names such as “The Sure Cure” and “Magic Pearl” further enticed audiences to come experience this strange “other” culture.

You may ask yourself, how does this relate to the present day? Sure, minstrel shows were incredibly racist and oppressed an entire culture of people (to put it lightly), but minstrel shows don’t happen anymore, right? However, there have been many recent cases of popular and respected figures being outed as having donned blackface besides Justin Trudeau:

While blackface is nothing new, shaming it is. The mindset on blackface and cultural appropriation has done a huge turnaround and “calling-out” culture has taken its place. In my opinion I think this is generally a really great thing. Powerful people should not be able to dehumanize others. However, I do not think people always leak blackface photos to promote the injustice of racism, but rather for their own personal or political motivations. In our current cultural climate, blackface accusations have the power to prevent reelections, cause people to be fired from their jobs, and cause public shame and humiliation. I do not think it is a coincidence that Trudeau’s blackface photos were released in the midst of his reelection campaign. 

On a positive note, there have been steps to change the legacy of minstrelsy. I came across an article written for Black News, a digital newspaper, that explains how a company called EdAnime Productions has produced an animated children’s series called Meltrek. The show follows a group of students and their teacher, and its main goals are “preserving African American history, fostering self-awareness, self-esteem and solidarity, and to project positive images of African Americans into the national consciousness [2]”. While change won’t be easy or happen quickly, it’s very positive to see that companies are moving in a more diverse direction. 

Bibliography

[1] Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Working Class. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. 1993.

[2] Lee, Dante. “Black Media Company Releases First Animated Series That Teaches Children Authentic African American History.” BlackNews.Com, 11 Jan. 2016.

While to our modern sensibilities, Blackface Minstrelsy is a abhorrent sight worthy of outcry (and rightly so, with its racist background, undertone, and purpose), however it is important to understand the reception of Blackface to understand just how ingrained it is in our society’s pop culture.  While it isn’t pretty, it is undeniably there, and what better way to see this than one of the most famous classic movies of the 20th century: Holiday Inn.

For those who haven’t seen it: go watch it then come back and keep reading, it’s an American classic that should be seen to understand the culture of America in the 1940s and 50s, plus it has some of Fred Astaire’s finest dancing in the 4th of July scene (complete with actual firecrackers he threw at his feet).

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, into the meat of why this movie is relevant in a discussion about blackface.  Spoiler alert: they use blackface in this film.

They don’t use it because it’s funny or to incite racist hatred of the only black character in the movie (named Mamie and well loved by all the characters for her stern discipline and folksy wisdom, which is a problematic stereotype present in many blackface troupes but we can talk about that later).  They use blackface as a plot device to conceal the identity of Linda Mason (played by Marjorie Reynolds) who is the leading lady to Jim Hardy (played by Bing Crosby).  It plays well in the film for one key reason: blackface was everywhere.  It isn’t suspicious that a performing group uses blackface, even though they have never used blackface until that point, because it was so pervasive in American culture that they were seen as merely experimenting with a different form of comedy and performance.  To the audience in the movie, they were essentially trying an improv show.  Maybe a little out of character for suave and smooth Bing Crosby, but not out of the realm of possibility.

This highlights the problem I’m discussing here: blackface is everywhere during this time.  Even in 1942, when blackface is past its prime of popularity, a new blockbuster movie can feature a blackface scene with confidence that it won’t be criticized until at least 1970.  In fact it wasn’t until the 1980’s that showings began to omit the blackface scene (a practice continued on AMC to the current day, so if you haven’t seen it yet you’ll have to go to Turner Classic Movies to see the unedited version).  This practice is problematic in its own way as it pretends that such actions did not exist, and were not common.  The film uses blackface in this way for a reason, and can provide important context (intentionally or unintentionally) on the pervasiveness of blackface in performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PXvqYpGCM

The writers for Saturday Night Live are not the first people to use African American English (AAE) and its mannerisms as comedic subject matter. AAE is defined by Mufwene in Encyclopædia Britannica as:

“a language variety that has also been identified at different times in dialectology and literary studies as Black English, black dialect, and Negro (nonstandard) English”[1]

He then goes on to explain that there is no clear consensus of how this language variety emerged. Some connect it to influences by African language, for instance as a descendant from 17th-century West African Pidgin English or, while others argue that it is an English dialect with its roots in colonial English or creole language.

Pullum stresses in his chapter in The Workings of Language[2], that what is known as the “African American Vernacular English” (AAVE), often used synonymous with Ebonics and AAE, is in fact not just standard English spoken inadequately, but is its own legitimate version. The starting point for his discussion he writes about the “media frenzy”[3]  that occurred in 1996 when an Oakland School Board recognised AAVE as a language in their district due to a large Afro American Population. The critics viewed AAVE as “black slang” and not appropriate in a formal setting. Pullum argues due to the use of “a different grammar, clearly and sharply distinguished from Standard English”[4], through his linguistic analysis, this argument does not hold up.

Eric Lott in his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class references the song “Jim Crow”[5]. The lyrics clearly reflecting, or at least trying to reflect, a specific way of speaking. What the text does not reflect, is the tone, body language and gestures that comes with any living language.

I am no linguist, but it seems to me that the major differences between Standard English are really in the spelling (or pronunciation) of a handful of words, for example “Ob de real ole stock”, not in the actual grammar. Having in mind that this text and Pullums analysis is separated by almost 170 years, which leaves room for considerable development of any language, I would be inclined to suggest that the lyrics are based of the idea, still present in 1996, that AAE/AAVE is just an inferior shadow of “proper” English.

Based on the sheet music presented  in How to put on a minstrel show from 1921[6], I would seem like in 100 years the language in lyrics have moved more towards Standard English. This is also present in the jokes, dialogues and monologues in the book. The author Geoffrey K. Pullum states in the beginning that his book is based of more than 30 years of experience of staging amateur minstrel shows. I will not try to pass this off as representative of the actual practice, this might just be the procedure when notating minstrel songs, leaving the interpretation to the performers. Considering this, the book is intended for amateur performers with limited experience.

Excample from How to put on a minstrel show(1921):

Saturday Night Live’s sketch reflects the portrayal of African American English previously presented in the early minstrel shows. The language and cultural non-verbal mannerisms have been made fun of, on basis of its perceived inadequacies, which in later years, have been argued are actually structural idiosyncrasies of a legitimate variety of the English language.

Primary Sources

“This is how I talk – SNL” (May 17,2015). Saturday Night Live (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PXvqYpGCM [Accessed October 2^nd, 2019]

Rossiter, Harold. How to put on a minstrel show. (1921) https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=X49Q51NGMTU3MDAyNjc0MC43NjUxMDI6MToxNDoxOTkuOTEuMTgwLjE1Mw&p_action=doc&p_queryname=4&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-154E9B0050389E50@S1879-1606D6244F711ECF@56 [Accessed October 2^nd , 2019]

Secondary sources

Pullum, Geoffrey K. “African American Vernacular is Not Standard English with Mistakes”, The Workings of Language. (1999). Westport CT: Praeger. https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf [Accessed October 2nd, 2019]

Mufwene, Salikoko Sangol. Encyclopædia Britannica. “African American English” (January 29^th 2016). https://www.britannica.com/topic/African-American-English [accessed October 1st 2019]

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. (1993). Oxford University Press, New York

[1] Mufwene 2016

[2] Pullum 1999

[3] Ibid p. 39

[4] Ibid p. 57

[5] Lott 1993:  p. 23

[6] Rossiter 1921: p. 54

Carl Cass was a professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Drama, and wrote a newspaper article titled “Racial and Conventional Types of Make-up” in 1949. 

He begins the article by dividing all races and ethnicities into the following categories: The Yellow Race, The Negro, The American Indian, The Brown Race, The Clown, and The Minstrel.

He describes the physical characteristics and facial features that he believes accompany each race, and offers instructions on how to apply makeup to most resemble this race.

Cass distinguishes between “The Negro” and “The Minstrel,” stating,”Many amateurs tend to confuse the coloring of a negro with that of a minstrel that is really a clown-caricature of a negro” (1). According to Cass, manufacturers sold shades of makeup labeled “light negro” and “mulatto,” which are much lighter in color compared to “minstrel black.”

In addition, he includes a blurb for each race describing their typical facial features. For the minstrel, Cass articulates,

“The lips tend to be thick and protruding. They may be painted as wide as desired, and, occasionally, they may be made to protrude by inserting soft rubber or chewing gum under them…Color a wide strip around the mouth for the lips with either white or very pale flesh-colored grease paint – red is a very inferior color because it lacks contrast with black” (1). 

It is interesting how blackface performers placed such an emphasis on the white strip around their lips; perhaps they wanted to ensure that the audience knew they were actually white.

As one of the article’s ‘lessons,’ Cass instructs readers to “Select from papers and magazines pictures of both men and women of all races and nationalities…Classify these pictures and study them” (1). 

The author of this article was a professor of drama at the University of Oklahoma, which indicates that minstrel shows were popular with both the general public and college students, and colleges were instructing students in the ‘art’ of minstrelsy.

1. Cass, C. B. (1949, 05). Racial and conventional types of make-up. Dramatics, 20, 6-8. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1929314848?accountid=351
2. Advertisement: BANNER PLAY BUREAU, INC. (1934, Oct 01). The High School Thespian, 6, 0-0_2. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1929344020?accountid=351
3. JOHNSON, S. (Ed.). (2012). Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. University of Massachusetts Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk2wm

Note from the author: Originally when I found this primary source, I made connections to a phenomenon I had been observing around me in the music industry—“blackfishing.” I went on to research more about what could be called modern-day blackface performing. I referenced Instagram posts and Ariana Grande’s style evolution. This research, while enlightening, drew little from what the primary source had to offer to me.

Now that the course is wrapping up, I realize that the way I approached this primary source was much how I approached this course. When we discussed difficult topics such as blackface minstrelsy, I tried to understand them based off of my own experiences. I can now see that this method is not conducive to gleaning the most knowledge. Thanks to the experiences of this course, when I now approach a new topic or a new primary source, I aspire to draw directly from what it presents to me, instead of forcing it into my perspective. Now, I allow the primary source itself to teach me about the topic.

With this growing perspective, I present renewed thoughts on this primary source…

DeVere’s Negro Sketches[1] was published in 1989 with this cover illustration demonstrating a stereotypical blackface minstrelsy scene. It shows performers with faces unnaturally darkened arranged in a semi-circle, men dressed in dapper outfits while positioning their bodies in angular stances, and of course, an all-white audience in attendance. From analyzing this illustration, we can learn more about common opinions and views of minstrel shows.

The first thing I noticed is that the audience is positioned above the performers… literally. This signaled to me a direct symbolism of the common view that black people were inferior to white people. Did white people attend minstrel shows to confirm their status as higher than black people?

The second thing that caught my attention was the illustration’s word choice when referring to the performance. It calls these performances “gags” and “conundrums.” When I think of a “gag,” I think of a silly joke that one tells knowing of its ridiculousness. A conundrum, on the other hand, has a double meaning. The first is a confusing question. The second is “a riddle, the answer to which involves a pun or play on words.”[2] Dictionary.com provides an example of a conundrum: What’s black and white and read all over? A newspaper. This gives modern observers of the illustration an idea of the type of comedy that the music from DeVere’s shows flaunted at the black experience’s expense.

Nearly 40 years later, this stereotypical humor persisted in the music performance sphere. In The Plaindealer, a columnist writes:

You know there hasn’t been a successful colored music comedy yet that didn’t have liberal sprinklings of what whites are pleased to call “typical Negro humor.”[3]

[1] De Vere, William. “De Vere’s Negro Sketches, Endmen’s Gags and Conundrums Adapted to the Use of Amateurs or Professionals.” De Vere’s Negro Sketches, Endmen’s Gags and Conundrums Adapted to the Use of Amateurs or Professionals. New York, NY: Excelsior publishing house, McKeon & Scofield, proprietors, 1889. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=I51D59AOMTU3MDAyOTU3Ny44MjU4NDA6MToxNDoxOTkuOTEuMTgwLjIyMQ&p_action=doc&p_docnum=10&p_queryname=3&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-147E02BF33448AD0@3086-@1

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/conundrum?s=t

[3] “Things Theatrical.” Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kansas) XXXIX, no. 17, April 23, 1937: PAGE [THREE]. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2:12ACD7C7734164EC@EANAAA-12CCEA0962797C38@2428647-12CCEA09794B7B00@2-12CCEA09E13A8BC8@Things+Theatrical.

Or at least that’s what Harold Rossiter encourages in his book How to Put on a Minstrel Show, published in 1921.  According to Rossiter, the objection of giving a minstrel show is that it “is the one form of entertainment of which the public never seems to tire and a show can be safely produced at least every two years and in the larger towns or cities a show every year is not too often” (¹).  After this assurance that the readers’ minstrel show will be popular simply based on the fact that the public desires such a show, Rossiter goes on to discuss how to successfully put on a minstrel show, through musical examples, joke suggestions, instructions on how to put on and take off blackface makeup, and a sample program.

Rossiter’s sample program

One chapter in his book is titled “Jokes for Minstrel Show.”  In this section, before providing some example jokes, he advices:

“Don’t let the end-men use too much negro dialect in telling their jokes. The average amateur negro dialect is almost pitiful, and they nearly always overdo it with the result that the audience fails to understand a word they say, and the joke goes flat. Have them use good, plain English” (¹).  

Good, plain English. This makes the assumption that African American individuals, whom Rossiter is encouraging his performers to stereotypically over-emulate, use a different form of the English language that is so opposing than his own that if his performers attempted to recreate it, the joke will fail.  He exoticizes the African American population, establishing them as an “other” group.

In this quote, Rossiter also mentions the “end-men.” In minstrelsy, these were the performers in blackface who were the brunt of the jokes. Rossiter gives examples of jokes between end-men named Brother Tambo and Brother Bones, and an Interlocutor who, according to Rossiter, “is not blacked up; he always performs his part white-face” (¹). Here’s an example of one of these jokes:

Example of Rossiter’s end-men jokes

Each of Rossiter’s jokes in How to Put on a Minstrel Show portrays the Interlocutor, who is white in the production, as the wise, intelligent individual always correcting and ridiculing Brother Tambo and Brother Bones, who are both in blackface.

These jokes send the overt, racist message that white individuals are, in addition to more eloquent in speech, smarter and must correct the foolish mistakes of the “black” characters.

 Just six years before Rossiter published his book, in 1915, the Chicago Weekly Review published an article that highlights the craving that audiences demonstrated for minstrel shows, emphasizing their popularity in white society in the early 1900s and exemplifying the humor white audiences found in ridiculing the blackface performers and therefore the African American race. The author, Sylvester Russell, writes that this specific minstrel show, containing blackface, was a “musical comedy” introducing “Billy King, one of the greatest and funniest blackface comedians of minstrel reputation” (²)

Chicago Weekly Review article of a minstrel show

Audiences enjoyed minstrel shows, audiences found blackface hilarious, audiences were obsessed with ridiculing the African American population.  Eric Lott writes in his introduction to Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, “Although it [minstrelsy] rose from a white obsession with black (male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruthlessly disavowed its fleshly investments through ridicule and racist lampoon” (³).

As Lott explains, as well as how these primary sources exemplify, the racists beliefs of white Americans in the early 20th century led to the popularity of the minstrel show. While minstrelsy doesn’t carry the comedic weight it once did, it is important to recognize what this history means in terms of racism in America today – how it formed, what actions led to  the current attitudes of some individuals, and how we use these horrible historical references to make changes in how race is perceived now.

Bibliography:

(1) Rossiter, Harold. How to Put on a Minstrel Show. Chicago: Max Stein Publishing House, 1921. Afro-American Imprints. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=U4EY56ALMTU3MDAzNTM1MDg1NToxOjEzOjE5OS45MS4xODAuMjE&p_action=doc&p_queryname=page7&f_qdnum=-1&f_qrnum=-1&f_qname=6&f_qnext=&f_qprev=&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-154E9B0050389E50@S1879-1606D62438F47E6D@37.

(2) “Chicago Weekly Review.” Freeman (Indianapolis, Indiana), July 31, 1915: 5. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&sort=YMD_date%3AA&page=1&f=advanced&val-base-0=minstrel%20show&fld-base-0=alltext&bln-base-1=and&val-base-1=blackface&fld-base-1=ocrtext&docref=image/v2%3A12B28495A8DAB1C8%40EANAAA-12CBF3B4D7999C58%402420710-12CBE4FDE2B80BD8%404-12DF5C8D4F757178%40Chicago%2BWeekly%2BReview&firsthit=yes.

(3) Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

What caught my eye whilst perusing the Lomax archive was this photograph:

The men depicted are both in prison uniforms, and on the back of the photograph is handwritten, “poss. Leadbelly”; Angola, Louisiana, July, 1934; “Huddie Leadbetter”.

I guess I wasn’t the first to be captured by this image because when I googled the description, the Lomax collection, of course, came up; what I didn’t expect to see was an Amazon link that resold reprints of the image. Further investigation led me to not just one, but several documentaries surrounding the culture of the Angola Prison (AKA: The Louisiana State Pen). Angola is currently the largest maximum-security prison in the United States and resides on 18,000 acres of property [1]. The land which was a plantation pre-civil war was “transformed” into a privately-owned prison by a former confederate general in the late 19th century where slave labor was replaced by inmate labor[1]. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) was in a way discovered by Alan Lomax while collecting in the south and aiding Lead Belly in recording an album, helped to secure his early release by sharing the album with Louisiana Governor O.K. Alan [2]. 

Whether or not the inmate in the photo is Heddie Ledbetter is unclear, however, the photograph provides evidence that musicking did not stop once people were convicted. 

I have a few questions in regards to the motives of the Lomaxs that include: Why did the Lomaxes decide to collect from prisons? Did it have to do with concepts of the authenticity of black music? Similarly, how did Jim Crow Era politics and criminal justice have to do with the perpetuation of black musicks? Josep Pedro’s biography on Leadbelly suggests that there was indeed a power dynamic at play. 

“Leadbelly was effectively liberated in 1934 and the popular legend – backed by both the Lomaxes and the artist himself – made the white ‘ballad hunters’ responsible for the black man’s liberation.” [4]

https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/leadbelly/cite?context=channel:march-of-time-y6

The Lomaxes created a short film surrounding the liberation of Leadbelly and his transformation into a blues star. The video feels rehearsed (Leadbelly stumbles over a line at 2:28) and is shot skillfully with the usage of continuity editing and non-diegetic noise. Lastly, the film declares the Lomax discovery of Leadbelly’s music was, “the greatest folk song find in 25 years” [3]. The physical copies of his music were then to be stored in the same archive as the original copy of the Declaration of Independence [3]. The juxtaposition of the two is certainly evoking and ethos in legitimizing Leadbelly’s music as authentically American. 

Works Cited

[1] Schrift, Melissa. “Angola Prison Art: Captivity, Creativity, and Consumerism.” The Journal of American Folklore 119, no. 473 (July 1, 2006): 257–274.

[2] “Leadbelly.” In Chambers Biographical Dictionary, by Liam Rodger, and Joan Bakewell. 9th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2011. https://ezproxy.stolaf.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/chambbd/leadbelly/0?institutionId=4959

[3] March of Time. Volume 1, Episode 2. “Leadbelly”. [New York, NY] Home Box Office, 1935. Accessed September 26, 2019. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/leadbelly.

[4] Pedro, Josep. “Leadbelly.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, 111–119. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

While perusing the “Introduction” to Neil Rosenberg’s Bluegrass: A History, I was fascinated by the importance of location in the nostalgia of bluegrass. The folk scholar notes the creation of a fictional geography in commercial bluegrass production and performance.¹ I was reminded of a similar conversation when we discussed country music- how decades of scholarship focusing on country as the music of the American South complicated and even diminished the truth in its origins. But this poses the question: If bluegrass really isn’t the music of Appalachia, where was this music being made?

“The idea of Appalachia as a cohesive unit has a large element of mythology to it”

–Bluegrass: a History, pg. 13

In searching for clues in a photography collection in the Library of Congress, I found a photograph that captured a geography that challenged the concept of bluegrass as an Appalachian genre. The picture, taken in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1937, was published in a set of photographs displaying the dwellings and lives of squatters and settlers in the area. While most photographs in the lot detail the shelters and natural surroundings of the settlers, this picture stands out.

‘Lon Allen and his son playing their fiddles to the tune of “The Arkansas Traveler.” Near Iron River, Michigan’. Taken by Russell Lee, May 1937.

Take a listen to the piece listed in the photograph description

Take a listen to an older recording here on another blog (not too different from this one!)

It should be noted that we can hear quite a bit of variation among performances and recordings of the piece. Instrumentation greatly varies between recordings, as well as ornamentations and some stylistic approaches to the core material of the music.

Upon consultation of scholarship regarding the movement of bluegrass, it is clear that Michigan and other states in the Upper Midwest created hotspots for this music as economic migrants traversed the country.² In the years during and directly following the Second World War, places like Detroit got ahold of musics like bluegrass and marketed it to a country longing for an identity that harkened back to the days of peace and the free, roaming settler. 

It is fascinating to piece together how one photograph can demonstrate an amalgamation of Southern migrant histories and Midwestern musical production. But consultation of additional sources helped contextualize this photograph in the complex geography of bluegrass that had been previously simplified by production companies intending to sell a particular image of the bluegrass musician and backstory.

Primary Source

Lee, Russell. Lon Allen and his son playing their fiddles to the tune of “The Arkansas Traveler.” Near Iron River, Michigan. May, 1937. LOT 1044, The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Secondary Sources Cited

Lomax and Amerson

In the first recordings blue grass, Erich Nunn argues the whiteness of Lomax making the informant uncomfortable in his playing. In my other blog, I discussed the tension in recordings that may have risen with Frances Densmore. In this post, this picture shows the collector and the informant, as Nunn describes. The discomfort of the performer with the collector makes me question the authenticity of the recordings. In the recording, Monologues on Accidents, the interaction between the collector and musician becomes awkward the longer they interact:

McTell: Well, that . . . all songs that have reference to our old people here . . . they hasn’t very much stuff of the people nowadays because . . .

Lomax [interrupting]: Any complaining songs, complaining about the hard times, and sometimes mistreatment of [sic] the whites. Have you got any songs that talk about that?

McTell: No, sir, I haven’t. Not at the present time because the white people’s mighty good to the Southern people, as far as I know.

Lomax: You don’t know any complaining songs at all?

McTell: Well . . .

Lomax: “Ain’t It Hard to Be a Nigger, Nigger,” do you know that one?

McTell: Well . . . that’s not in our time. And . . . now, there’s a spiritual down here called “It’s a Mean World to Live In,” but that don’t have . . . still don’t have reference to the hard times.

Lomax: It’s just because of the . . . Why is it a mean world to live in?

McTell: Well, no, it’s not altogether. It has reference to everybody. Country music and the souls of white folk 627

Lomax: It’s as . . . It’s as mean for the whites as it is for the blacks, is that it?

McTell: That’s the idea (Nunn 623)

With the racial politics of the era, it becomes reasonable to ask if any of these recordings collected are authentic. In this interaction, it seems as though Lomax is looking for a concept of black music rather than what the specific musician had to offer. Even as a respected musicologist, I question what John Lomax specifically looked for in his collection as well.
This photo includes John Lomax and musician Richard Amerson, who went on to record other folk albums later on in his career.
I continue to wrestle with the idea that record companies would advertise to different racial groups based on the race of the musicians. I wonder if this also become the case for Lomax and his collection based on the Monologues On Accident and photo. It feels as though while Lomax may be preserving a tradition through recordings, but also preserving problematic notions of race through his preconceived notions of what he wanted in his collection.

Bibliography

– Nunn, Erich. “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk.” Criticism, vol. 51, no. 4, 2010, pp. 623–649., doi:10.1353/crt.2010.0000.

– “Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Vol. 3: Rich Amerson—1/ Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, folkways.si.edu/negro-folk-music-of-alabama-vol-3-rich-amerson-1/African-american/album/Smithsonian.

– Lomax, Ruby. Richard Amerson and John A. Lomax, Sr., at the Home of Mrs. Ruby Pickens Tartt, Livingston, Alabama. 27 Oct. 1940.

For this blog assignment, I found a performance of the song, “On Emancipation Day,” from the musical In Dahomey, with music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. In Dahomey is a significant piece of art for several reasons.

First and foremost, it was the first full-length musical written by african americans, with an african american cast to appear in a major Broadway Theater. The musical was very successful; it ran for 53 performances, including two United States tours as well as a tour to the United Kingdom.

However, there is a deeper significance to this work than just pure success. It also pushed against social norms of the time period. In the chapter “Early Black Americans on Broadway,” by Monica White Ndounou from the Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, she argues that the musical contained some subversive ideas regarding black freedom of representation and production in theatre.

“The song “Broadway in the Jungle” incorporates African iconography in its vision of the Great White Way, but in a more subversive way than Williams and Walker may have been credited with in their lifetime. They speak not of bringing Dahomians to Broadway but instead building a Broadway for colored people in Dahomey. They sing: “If we went to Dahomey. Suppose the king would say, we want a Broadway built for us, we want it right away.” They call for a space in which blacks control production and performance. Stereotypical references throughout, however, detract from the revolutionary idea (for instance, using a crocodile, or a “Crock-o-Dial” on the face of the Broadway clock, getting gorillas to use as the police, and a hippopotamus for Justice of the Peace, etc). They fail to improve African representation, but succeed in the use of dialect and other devices,” (Ndounou 67-68).

Even though they challenged the status quo in this way, it fell into line with others. The play was not exempt from the influence of minstrelsy, which permeated all black theatre of the time. Ndounou also comments on this:

“In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy draws character names from minstrelsy, while combining low comedy, ethnic jokes, and references to current social and political events within its three-act structure. Whereas white comics were able to access a range of ethnic stereotypes (i.e. Irish, Hebrew, and Dutch), black performers could only play variations of the “Darky” and the Chinese. In Dahomey features these constrained representations of ethnic identity, while building on models established in previous shows,” (Ndounou 66).

To tie this back into class, even though In Dahomey followed the familiar narrative of Black Theater being a successful, though problematic form of entrepreneurship, it should also be recognized for how it pushed against the expectations of the time.

Works Cited:
Bordman, Gerald, Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 190.

Ndounou, Monica White. “Early black Americans on Broadway.” The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, edited by Harvey Young, Cambridge UP, pp. 59-70.

Spencer, Len, baritone. On Emancipation Day, by Will Marion Cook. Library of Congress: National Jukebox, 25 October, 1902.

James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Rosamond Johnson were musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and powerful figures of what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Beyond being known for writing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which has been called the black national anthem, Johnson and Johnson thrived as songwriters in New York City during the Tin Pan Alley era of popular music, in which songwriters would churn out sheet music to be sold or recorded. In James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography “Along this Way”¹ Weldon Johnson explains his process behind writing a hit song titled The Maiden With the Dreamy Eyes. 

“In those days the royalties of a writer depended largely upon the young fellow who would buy a copy of the song and take it along with him when he went to call on his girl…In writing “The Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes” we gave particular consideration to these fundamentals. It needed little analysis to see that a song written in exclusive praise of blue eyes was cut off at once from about three-fourths of the possible chances for universal success; that it could make but faint appeal to the heart or pocketbook of a young man going to call on a girl with brown eyes or black eyes or gray eyes. So we worked on the chorus of our song until, without making it a catalogue, it was inclusive enough to enable any girl who sang it or to whom it was sung to fancy herself the maiden with the dreamy eyes (160).”

James Weldon Johnson makes it perfectly clear that in writing this piece of music, the objective was to make the song appeal to as large of a group of people as possible, something that is accomplished by literally listing several eye colors in the song. A 1902 recording of the song by the Victor Recording Company, sung by a Canadian tenor named Harry Macdonough accomplishes the precise sweetness that Weldon Johnson refers to in his account. For another, more recent recording check out this version by Melinda Doolittle.

The Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes

Part of the specific success of this song was due to new customs surrounding dating at the start of the 20th century. Magazines and journals made money off of marketing to new audiences and age groups, especially to a certain subset of young people who would eventually be called teenagers, Beth Bailey² writes

“The middle-class arbiters of culture, however, aped and elaborated the society version of the call. And, as it was promulgated by magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal, with a circulation of over one million by 1900, the modified society call was the model for an increasing number of young Americans (15).”

This new middle class is also something we tend to think of as predominantly white, a market that Weldon Johnson found great success in despite being a black artist. In his autobiography, he wonders if consumers of his music are aware of his identity, writing about a letter he received as follows.

“The very serious-looking Mr. Bok read me the letter and laughed uproariously over it. I laughed too; but me laughter was tempered by the thought that there was anybody in the country, notwithstanding the locality being Georgia, who, knowing anything at all about them, did not know that Cole and Johnson Brothers were Negroes (196).”

Everything we know about the creators behind The Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes makes it a piece of black art, with words by a black poet and a musical arrangement by a black composer, but in standard examples of what “black music” is, it would be highly unlikely to ever hear this song. In my preliminary search of Alan Lomax’s photo collection tied to his work on folk music in the south in the 1930’s I found no instances of pianos, despite the fact Weldon Johnson’s music, published some 30 years prior was based around a piano.

When music is cataloged and categorized, everything that doesn’t fit into those boxes gets left to the side because it fails to serve the central narrative about what that particular music means. While The Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes is goofy and a clear grab for money, what new stories can we explore when it is as much of a piece of black music as any recording taken by Alan Lomax in the South?

Formed by Crockett Ward, the Ballard Branch Bogtrotters are, by their appearances alone, precisely the sort of people a record company of the mid 20th century would market as Bluegrass musicians. They are shown playing stringed instruments, including the emblematic banjo and fiddle, Crockett (front and center) is in a farmer’s coveralls, they are in an ensemble (including family–with Crockett’s brother, Wade, on banjo, and Fields Wade on guitar), and all are white.

Found in the Lomax Collection of the Library of Congress

The Gaelic roots which inform this group are apparent in two places. The surname of three of the members of the band, Ward, has origins in that culture (ancestry.com). Perhaps more interestingly, “bog-trotting” has distinct Irish connotations which add more detail to the study of Bluegrass. Contemporary bands have taken up the name, including the Galax Bogtrotters.

Found at the British Museum website

Last class period concluded with a short discussion of the ability to “buy into” the commercial market of country or hillbilly music. Based on Harry Jackson’s album “the Cowboy” and others like it, commercial country music claimed (and still claims) geographic authenticity even though relatively little exists. This album, produced by Smithsonian Folkways, didn’t care that Harry Jackson grew up in Chicago and later adopted the cowboy lifestyle. But his music was recorded to make money, so it’s a fair guess that only so much geographic authenticity was needed.

But what about the traditions that are recorded outside of the commercial market? I would think that geographic authenticity is important to someone like Alan Lomax. In 1961, the folk song collector was asked to speak at an ethnomusicology conference in Detroit. Over the course of two hours, Lomax and his wife Antoinette Marchand detailed their experiences as successful ethnomusicologists, and inserted field recordings and stories from their travels. Of the Georgia Sea Island Singers’ member Bessie Jones, Lomax says:

The reason that this material about Bessie’s sexual attitudes is so crucial, she is almost a pure informant from the middle of the 19th century back, as her repe[r]toire is composed of only the oldest classic songs, and all of her attitudes about singing are the nearest thing to the African pattern that we have found in America, the shape of the songs, shape of the music, how she treats all musical situations.¹

It is important to note that the Georgia Sea Island Singers were of particular interest to ethnomusicologists like Lomax. The Georgia Sea Islands held slaves and plantations during the 19th-century just like other parts of the south. Due to the relative lack of contact with outside European cultures, the dialects, songs, and other art forms originating from in the Islands are considered by historians the purest form of West African-sourced material in America. 

By 1961, Lomax had been studying the Sea Island Singers for nearly 30 years. Therefore, it was likely he knew that Jones, the most famous folk artist from the group, decided to move to the island and join the group when she was 31 years old. This begs the question, when and to what degree can we claim geographic authenticity as a marketable attribute. With regards to Bessie Jones, Lomax said:

This brings me to the real point about oral history, I think, in relationship to informants of Bessie’s level of excellence. They can give you very quickly the main emotional psychological patterns absolutely in the most complexly-stated way, and these patterns can be used for really scientific purposes, rather than sheer historical purposes, because these are the historical patterns.²

Even though Lomax’s market was much different from Jackson’s, his research (and that of other ethnomusicologists then and now) heavily relied on the authenticity of place. The degree to which audiences like us should put full faith in this authenticity is constantly in flux.

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was an American folksong scholar who dedicated his studies to searching for new folk songs to record in the rural South using an ethnographic lens. He investigated the correlation between folk song structures and melodies with folk musicians’ races, locations, and economic status. He compiled many manuscripts during his research, one of which, the “Big Ballad Book,” includes his “Appendix on Guitar and Banjo Accompaniment” [1].

He begins his appendix by describing his findings related to the differences in folk music between black and white communities. He states that white frontiersmen generally sang solo a cappella, whereas “Most Negro singing was group performed and was accompanied at least by clapping, foot-patting, and, frequently, by other instruments, played poly-rhythmically, such as the mouth-bow, the panpipe, the bones, etc.” [2], page 2.

However, according to Lomax, white folk musicians had been recently picking up influences from black musicians they met either “on the job” or “in the slums” [2], page 2. This phenomenon of stealing a culture’s music while simultaneously oppressing that culture was, and is, common among colonizers. They also encountered these ideas through the radio, recordings, and touring minstrel groups. As a result, white folk musicians began incorporating instruments into their songs. 

Lomax additionally comments on the practice of judging folk music through a Western lens. As he points out, Western European harmonic traditions were formed in urban areas, whereas folk music developed in rural parts of America. 

“Although Harmony is taught in schools as if its rules were laws of nature, classical Western European harmony is, in fact, just one more fashion …subject to change as the mood of mankind changes…to graft the ideas of this sophisticated urban music onto the sober, workaday back of folk music is an act of vanity and poor taste” [2], page 2.

As a result, composers like Beethoven and Copland who arranged folk songs for concert settings failed to capture the songs’ emotional tension and melodic simplicity; they made “no contribution to the lasting tradition of the song” [2], page 3. Lomax attributes this to the fact that these composers have not lived with the people from these folk traditions they are adapting from, and yet their arrangements caught on with the public while lacking authenticity. 

Furthermore, Lomax highlights several misconceptions surrounding folk music. He argues that many perceive folk music as based upon improvisation rather than strict structure, and consequently feel free to adapt or arrange songs as they choose.  In actuality, the minimal improvisation that can appear does so in a familiar and traditional way. He also states that while many believe that folk songs evoke individuality, a folk singer actually serves as the “mouthpiece of his culture or subculture” [2], page 5.

Finally, Lomax offers a beginner’s tutorial in how to play folk banjo and guitar, including diagrams of rhythmic strumming and picking patterns like “Carter Family’s Lick” and “Woody’s Lick.” 

The numbers above the notes indicate which strings to pluck, 6 being the lowest string. “Abs” means ‘any bass string.’ The letters below the notes indicate which fingers to use to pluck or strum the strings; “Br” means brush the strings with the first three fingers, and “T” means to use the thumb. The arrows indicate which direction to strum.

1. Lomax, Alan, and Alan Lomax. Alan Lomax Collection, Manuscripts, Big Ballad Book, -1991. to 1991, 1961. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2004004.ms190316/.
2. Porterfield, Nolan, and Darius L. Thieme. “Lomax family.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 23 Sep. 2019. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000048410

For this blog post I researched into Dolly Parton and the role she has played in shaping country music and challenged the ideas of the poor white hillbilly being the norm in this world. When one hears the word hillbilly they usually associate it with a man, which I think originates from the fact that the music industry was dominated by men at the time of country music being brought into popularity by white Southerners. So what is different about the way Parton presents herself? How does it simultaneously challenge the hillbilly stereotype and become extremely popular, leading her to become a timeless and iconic face within not just female country artists, but the entire genre?

The answer lies within her music and marketing. Dolly markets herself as the common woman, but not in the same “down on their luck” way that most people would expect country music to be presented. In her song, 9 to 5, which is also a feature film, Dolly presents us with the problems of the average person who is dealing with their dead-end job. Sure, this could be construed as someone being down on their luck, but the lyrics “They just use your mind And they never give you credit It’s enough to drive you crazy If you let it”(Parton). show this is a problem that is relatable to any listener that isn’t part of the upper 1%. The imagery of the poster shows how the working class, particularly women, are ready to take back the power from the wealthy (Gibert). This power-dynamic shift is again showing how Parton likes to fight against the typical country music narrative.

This specific line is a bit hypocritical, as country music rarely recognizes the fact that much of their origins come from African American music. Still, the spirit of the song, especially sung by a woman in 1980, is that of resistance. Is it reaching to black women and saying “I”m here! I’m your ally! We’re in this together”? Well, no. It is lacking in connecting that boldly and directly, much like most country music of that era. She presents an air of sticking to your roots but not being afraid to succeed, but isn’t showing off talented African American country and bluegrass singers alongside her.

Although she isn’t making that extra step, I feel she is still stepping out and fighting the patriarchal stereotypes of country music more than other female country singers of the era. She is known for performing alongside modern feminist folk singers, like Brandi Carlile, a known gay Grammy winner. She performed the song Just because I’m a Woman with Carlile’s band at the Newport Folk Festival in 2019 (Ballantyne). This shows that she is still pushing back against double standards that oppress women, while still staying true to the historical descriptions of bluegrass and country, as the lyrics do make it feel like a complaining song, just complaints that are more relevant and valid than some more patriarchal country songs.

Works Cited

Ballantyne, Anna, director. Dolly Parton Sings ‘Just Because I’m a Woman’ with Brandi Carlile and the Highwomen at Newport Folk. YouTube, YouTube, 28 July 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqX4SNMpfpE.

Gilbert, Bruce, producer. “9 to 5”. Poster. Twentieth Century Fox, 1980. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs. Web. 22 Sept, 2019. [http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.05922]

Parton, Dolly, director. Dolly Parton- 9 to 5 (Official Video). YouTube, YouTube, 15 Mar. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbxUSsFXYo4.

Even though my career as a washboard virtuoso was neither long nor successful, nostalgic recollections of my wild adolescence resurfaced when I found photographs of homemade instruments in The Lomax Collection. Personal experiences aside, the usage or repurposing of household items as musical instruments is an aspect of folk music, and the adjacent genres like country and bluegrass, that is worth further examination.

The Alan Lomax Collection  [1] contains documentation from ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’ field research on folk music locally in the US and internationally. The pictures chosen are from Lomax’ early American research between 1936-1950, while working for the Library of Congress. To accompany the photographs, I have chosen a recording from 1941 by performer Wayne “Gene” Dinwiddie. The recording begins with him explaining how he made a wind instrument and then he performs a song with it.

Bruno Nettl states in his article [2] on folk music in Encyclopædia Britannica that it primarily refers to the music of the majority, “particularly the lower socioeconomic classes”.  Other keywords from the article are “informal”, “social function” and “participatory” which may indicate an improvised and impromptu culture for musicmaking.  He stresses the inclusive, ‘low-bar for participation’ culture. Knowing this, we can begin to understand the need for making instruments or utilizing every-day items. The photos show a wide array different types, varying form wind instruments to strings and percussion.

One could argue that homemade instruments can provide context to the noisy and “unrefined” soundscape so often attributed to folk-related genres. The prejudices against what is identified as a “hillbilly”, “down home” genre may be enforced with the use of homemade instruments. Listening to Dinwiddie one could argue that what sounds like a lot like a modern kazoo, sounds quite tuneful. I would seem that instruments without centuries of history and development, do not get the instant status even though they apply the same basic concepts for generating sound. On the other hand, one could argue that the homemade instruments give folk music a more authentic sound, free from the restraints of western, classical dogma.

[1] Folk Musical […] 1934-1950

[2] Nettl 2019

Primary source; From the Lomax Collection:

Folk Musical Instruments Including Homemade Horns. , None. [Between 1934 and 1950] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007660366/.

Folk Musical Instruments Including Homemade Horns, Homemade Drum, and Washboard. , None. [Between 1934 and 1950] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007660362/.

Todd, Charles L, Robert Sonkin, and Wayne “Gene” Dinwiddie. There’s More Pretty Girls Than One. Arvin FSA Camp, 1941. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000266/.

Secondary sources:

The American Folklife Center.  Alan Lomax Collection https://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/alanlomaxcollection.html [Accessed September 23, 2019]

Nettl, Bruno, Encyclopædia Britannica, “ Folk music”, January 2, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/art/folk-music [accessed September 23, 2019]

I was drawn to this photo because it was one of the few in the Lomax collection that depicted black musicians performing. The photo is titled “Stavin’ Chain playing guitar and singing the ballad “Batson” accompanied by a musician on violin, Lafayette, La,” although notes later on clarify that this titled was devised by library staff. The picture is from June of 1934 and is part of the Lomax collection of photographs depicting folk musicians, a collection that focused on the southern United States and the Bahamas.

The first question I had was what the ballad “Batson” sounded like.  While I eventually found the recording, in my search I also happened to come across a particularly helpful three part series of blog posts/essays (blessays??) by Library of Congress researcher Stephen Winick. Winick’s analysis is a wonderfully detailed, albeit lengthy.

“Batson” is a ballad about a string of murders committed by Albert Edwin Batson in Lake George, Louisiana, and his subsequent trial and execution and subsequent trial. Winick examines how ambiguity in the song allows listeners to come to their own conclusions regarding Batson’s innocence. He also compares the ballad presented by Stavin’ Chain (Wilson Jones) and lesser-known versions collected by Robert Winslow Gordon, John Lomax’s Library of Congress predecessor.

Winick categorizes this ballad as an example of African American string bands, which Rhiannon Giddens notes as an influence to the development of bluegrass. This photo supports her argument that black musicians were participating in many types of music generally assumed to be “white.” The photo dates from 1934, before “bluegrass” became its own genre but after the white-washing of country music began. Although perhaps obvious, it is valuable in its depiction that black musicians were engaging in the genre of string band ballads in the 1930s which ultimately helps modern musicians rewrite the notion that these genres do not exclusively “belong” to white musicians.

At the beginning of her speech, Giddens asserts that the question should not be “How do we get diversity into bluegrass?” but rather “How do we get diversity BACK into bluegrass?” As a primary source, this photo helps document Giddens’ claim that bluegrass emerged from diverse roots rather than belonging exclusively to white Americans.

Works Cited

Caffery, Joshua C. Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings. Featuring Wilson “Stavin’ Chain” Jones, Charles Gobert, and Octave Amos. “Batson.” https://vimeo.com/145630722.

International Bluegrass Music Association. “Rhiannon Giddens – 2017 IBMA Business Conference Keynote Address.” 2017. https://vimeo.com/237464669.

Lomax, Alan. “[Stavin’ Chain playing guitar and singing the ballad ‘Batson’ accompanied by a musician on violin, Lafayette, La.]” June 1934. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007660071/.

Winick, Steven. “’I Didn’t Done the Crime’: Stavin’ Chain’s ‘Batson’ and the Batson Case.” Library of Folklife Today , July 27, 2017, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/07/i-didnt-done-the-crime-stavin-chains-batson-and-the-batson-case/.

Growing up, I had a specific image of a banjo player in my mind. I imagined a white male wearing overalls sitting on the front porch of a white house with a white picket fence surrounded by farmland.

Now, I recognize how close this picture is to an idea of the American Dream, a hope often associated with, home ownership, comfortable living, wealth, opportunity, and fame.  While the image of the “white picket fence” is more of a romanticized image often situated in Hollywood, it does represent a core tenant of the American Dream—success.

But, how come my image of a banjo growing up was so aligned with a version of the American Dream?  

            To further consider the banjo’s symbolism in the American Dream, specifically the image and idealized version of this dream, I searched simply “banjo” in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs: Lomax Collection, and eight photographs appeared from the search. Each photo contained either an individual playing the banjo, or a group of musicians, one of which is playing a banjo.

Two crucial traits were consistent throughout all the images: white and male.

            One, for example, is an image from 1937 of the Bog Trotters Band, where one of the players is on the banjo (below). They are looking at sheet music in a house with lace curtains, wearing a variety of clothing from overalls to a suit, playing instruments in good condition. While subtle, the three factors of well-taken care of instruments, nice clothing, and delicate lace curtains represent, to me, success, crucial to the American Dream. It appears as though these men are living out their American dream, using the banjo as a stepping-stone to their success [¹]. The Bog Trotters Band was such a staple of bluegrass that there is now a new band in the 21st century, the Galax Bogtrotters, who found their music so inspiring they decided to use their name.

            From this image, and what I found by searching “banjo,” it appears as though I’m not alone in categorizing the banjo with a romanticized ideal of the American Dream and with, to be frank, whiteness. Neil Rosenberg in his “Introduction” from Bluegrass: A History shares a common perception of the history of the banjo. While the following quote doesn’t address the banjo explicitly, it discusses the popular ideas of when bluegrass began, and the banjo is a crucial aspect of bluegrass.

It seems imbedded in the history of the bluegrass genre, and Rosenberg questions if bluegrass began in 1939 with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys or in 1945-48 when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were performing with Bill Monroe. All white men [²].

            However, Rhiannon Giddens in her Keynote speech at the 2017 International Bluegrass Music Association Conference would argue that bluegrass began much earlier, as she defines bluegrass as complex Creole music coming from African, European, and Native American roots. She adds that the banjo used to be a symbol of African American expression, as it started as a plantation instrument, but it has done a 180 [³]. She evaluates how the banjo and bluegrass has become known as a white art form, but it rather began with roots in slavery.

           Fast forward to the now.  There are still popular bands that feature banjo playing, such as Mumford and Sons. As you can see in the picture above, these men all still identify as white. In a way, they are continuing the same image that the Bog Trotters Band did: white men living out the American Dream of fame and success, but ignoring an entire race who contributed to the evolution of the banjo and bluegrass.

Bibliography:

[1] Bog Trotters Band members seated with instruments. 1937. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs: Lomax Collection, Washington D.C., USA.

[2] Rosenberg, Neil. Bluegrass: A History. PDF file. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxQzWOgr8AureDRQbF9UMGwyU2VCNzRXTWI4SFduMFFPMUo4/view

[3] Giddens, Rhiannon. “Rhiannon Giddens Keynote Address.” Paper presented at the IBMA Business Conference, Raleigh, NC, September 2017.

The idea that a black female pop artist is “too white” is unfortunately nothing new. In a 1988 article published in Ebony magazine (a magazine written by and for an African American audience), Lynn Norment talks to Whitney Houston. Norment claims “Black disc jockeys chided her for ‘not having a having a soul,’ and ‘being too White,’ while other critics [said] she [was] ‘too distant and impersonal [1].’” I thought Houston’s response was very interesting. Houston explains:

“‘Picture this […], you wake up everyday with a magnifying glass over you. Someone is always looking for something- somebody, somewhere is speaking your name every five seconds of the day, whether it’s positive or negative. Like my friend Michael [Jackson] says, ‘you want our blood but you don’t want our pain.’ […] Don’t say I don’t have a soul or what you consider to be ‘Blackness.’ I know what my color is. I was raised in a Black community with Black people, so that has never been a thing with me. Yet, I’ve gotten flak about being a pop success, but that doesn’t mean I’m White…pop music has never been all-White. […] My success happened so quickly that when I first came out Black people felt ‘she belongs to us,’ […] and then all of a sudden the big success came and they felt I wasn’t theirs anymore, and I wasn’t within their reach. It was felt that I was making myself more accessible to Whites, but I wasn’t.’”

Whitney Houston, 1983.

This idea of not belonging seems to be a common theme among female pop singers of color. In a recent example, pop artist Lizzo has experienced the tug-of-war between being in the black community, yet appealing to largely white audiences. She is also a classically trained flautist, who often pulls out her flute during performances (between twerking), and this further complicates people’s perceptions of what “black pop music” really is.

People from the black community are releasing tweets like the following:

Another Tweet in Response:

On the “white” end of the spectrum, “white girls” are posting pictures about attending concerts and using Lizzo’s song lyrics for captions:

There are some strong opinions present here, and these social media posts are obviously not representative of entire communities, but I think it is important to see how the general public is perceiving Lizzo as an artist. 

So what can I do as a listener and performer to break down these stereotypes? Is it okay for me as a white woman to attend concerts or to perform music by these black female artists? Professor Louis Epstein, of St. Olaf College, says that it is a “good idea for people who live “whiteness” to feel limited- but it also reinforces boundaries [2].” These boundaries can cause even more limitations. In class, we also discussed strategic essentialism (the idea that under pressure and in the context of oppression, minority groups draw together while ignoring differences to present a unified front),
as something that has positive intentions like protecting oppressed minorities and giving them political power. Strategic essentialism also has unintended consequences, such as reducing a people to homogeneity and potentially contributing to the very racialist logic they’re trying to overcome. 

Ethel Waters, another black female singer accused of sounding “too white,” was the fifth black woman in history to record a record (she also was the first black woman to have her own television show, The Ethel Waters Show. Waters performed throughout the Harlem Renaissance, but as her fame grew she performed for primarily white audiences. picture courtesy of the Library of Congress

Rhiannon Giddens, on the subject of bluegrass, says “the question is not, how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity BACK into bluegrass [3]?” This idea readily applies to pop music, and how artists are overcoming th seperations between “white pop” and “black pop.” We as audience members, listeners, and performers need to bring diversity back into pop music and make it okay to have artists included from a variety of different backgrounds. As Whitney Houston says, pop music has never been “all-White,” so the idea that we need to make subdivisions between “black pop music” and “white pop music” seems like a step in the wrong direction. Giddens explains that”we have a lot of work to do. We need to build on these moments, on these incredible opportunities [like going to a Lizzo concert] to expand understanding [3].” 

I have a hard time knowing how to handle issues like this. On the one hand, I love the music that black female pop artists are releasing (because it’s honestly so incredible), on the other, I don’t want to take their life experience and claim it as my own. I think the most important thing that listeners and performers who are not part of the African-American-women’s experience is to educate ourselves. Go out and find artists of color that may not have gotten the same publicity as their white counterparts- this is especially important in music genres that are typically considered “white” music (classical, country, pop, etc.). Another way is to keep up the conversation. Talk to peers, other musicians, and people outside of your own community. This issue isn’t going to be fixed overnight, but with conversations I believe learning and understanding will take place.

Bibliography:

[1] Norment, Lynn. “Whitney Houston Talks About the Men in Her Life- and the Rumors, Lies, and Insults that are the High Price of Fame.” Ebony (1848-1921), vol. XLVI no. 7, May 1991.

[2] Epstein, Louis. Lecture to his American Music class, September 2019.

[3] Giddens, Rhiannon. “Rhiannon Giddens Keynote Address.” Paper presented at the IBMA Business Conference, Raleigh, NC, September 2017.

Southern music is often categorized as predominantly “white,” due to the prevalence of famous white country stars and white bluegrass groups throughout history.  And while the history of Southern music, and bluegrass in particular, would be incomplete without legends such as Bill Monroe or JD Sumner, the contributions of musicians of other races and ethnicities should not and cannot be brushed over.  The art of Black String Bands goes back to the 19th century, predating the Blues, Bluegrass, and Country by several decades.  A paper by Sean K McCollough explores the background of bluegrass as it relates to race (article found here).  McCollough points out that fiddle playing in the America’s grew in the south, with many African slaves being trained to play the fiddle and accompanying dances or parties that their master’s threw.  This tradition of fiddle playing was then passed down through the generations as a new part of the distinctly African-American culture that was arising (which I differentiate from Black American culture, as not all Black Americans can trace their lineage back to Africa and the slaves taken from their).  This tradition then grew in the late 19th century to become the Black String Bands.

An early band of this style was the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, but they’re not who this blog post is about.  Instead I’ll be looking at a group that may have taken inspiration in both their name and makeup, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.  This group is much more recent, having been founded in 2005, and bases its style on the string bands of the early 20th century.  In the groups “About” page, which can be found here, they describe their founding as having been something of a happy accident.  The three founding musicians (Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemens, and Justin Robinson) would travel together to the home of fiddler Joe Thompson to hear stories and “jam,” as they put it.  Thompson himself inherited much of his fiddle technique from generations of family musicians, potentially stretching back to the slave musicians described by McCollough.  Now Thompson was passing down his skills to a new generation, and when he passed away the three students chose to form a group to honor his legacy and continue the musical tradition.  The group has since changed membership slightly, losing their fiddle player and gaining a cellist, and has gone on to win several Grammies.

Article Cited:

McCollough, Sean K. “Hear John Henry’s Hammer Ring: Moving Beyond Black and White Images of Appalachian Music.” Kaleidoscope of Cultures: A Celebration of Multicultural Research and Practice: Proceedings of the MENC/University of Tennessee National Symposium on Multicultural Music. R&L Education, 2010.

In Dan Blim’s paper, “McDowell’s Vanishing Indians,” he exposes a contrast between how post-emancipation white Americans viewed Native Americans and African Americans. He argues that the view that Native Americans were “vanishing” as part of a natural process allowed them to be parodied in their portrayals in a way that Black Americans could not, as many Americans were deeply uncomfortable with America’s slaveowning past.

The document I chose juxtaposes two hymns with each other; one from a “converted indian” and the other from “a little slave boy. The two have a stark contrast in the language they use. The “indian hymn” uses an extremely vernacular dialect of english, whereas the “slave boy’s hymn” is rather eloquent. To illustrate further, I will show the first stanza of each.

“ In de dark wood no indian nigh, den me look heaben and send up cry, upon my knees so low. Dat God on high, in shinee place see me in night wid teary face: de priest he tells me so.”

“There is a book, I’ve heard them say, which says ‘thou shalt not work or play on God Almighty’s holy day.’ On Sundays then, O let me look, in God Almighty’s holy book” (Christian Advocate).

Regardless of whether either text’s authorship is genuine as the publishers describe it (I’m not sure that it is. I couldn’t find another publication of the “slave boy’s hymn”, but the “Indian Hymn” has been included in numerous publications, including several that assert origins for the hymn, all of which conflict with each other. One such origin is even verifiably false. Friends’ Review published a version asserting that it was written down by Reverend William Apess in 1798. Rev. Apess was a renowned public speaker and activist for Native American rights in his day, not to mention that he was himself from the Pequot tribe, but he was born in 1798, so whatever plausibility the publishers of the Review sought to gain by using his name is lost when the facts are checked. While the exact history of the hymn is unknown, it is certainly sketchy.) , we can see even from their choice to include these contrasting texts that some dynamic akin to what Blim describes is at play. Even though the readers of the Advocate might not have assumed that either party would be educated, the slave boy is shown to have some eloquence, while the Indian is portrayed as a caricature that would be familiar to their audience.

The column concludes with a paragraph that echoes McDowell’s own comments on slavery. “Thank God that the old days of slavery, with all the enforced ignorance, the bitterness of bondage, and the cruel seperation of families, are gone forever, and that so much now is being done to give the freedmen both the ability and the opportunity to read in ‘God Almighty’s holy book,’” (Christian Advocate). This supports the narrative that Blim illuminates, where White Americans seek to uplift Black Americans in order to forget the horrors of slavery, but feel comfortable enough to portray the “vanishing indian” as a caricature.

Works Cited:

“Two Quaint Old Hymns.” Christian Advocate, 18 May 1893. American Periodicals, https://search.proquest.com/americanperiodicals/docview/125850496/767F6D35CC094709PQ/1?accountid=351, Accessed 19 September 2019.

When I think of country music, in my mind I can hear what sounds like to me the whiny steel guitar to accompany that accompanies it. What I did not know was the “whiny” steel guitar is not only a trademark to country music, but Hawaiian as well. The origin of the steel guitar begins in Hawaii in the early 1893.

The repertoire first performed by the steel guitar performed by the first generation of steel guitarists consisted of mele and was in the Hawaiian language. The songs often reflected the political turmoil taking place during that time in the state in the early 1900’s.¹

Joseph Kekuku is credited with inventing the steel guitar, and spent the rest of his life perfecting it. The very origin of how he invented the steel guitar is contested, but according to his great niece he developed the sound by an accident. As she recalls, Kekuku was eleven years old when he was sitting on the front steps of his house. By accident, he leaned over and his metal tooth comb fell out of his pocket and onto the strings of his guitar, making a sound he would spend his life trying to recreate and perfect.² Trademarks to the Hawaiian guitar are the ornamental sweeps such as: glissandos, dampening the strings to imitate glottal stops, sliding notes with the steel bar and many others were used to imitate ancient Hawaiian music.

Above is audio of how the steel guitar was used in Hawaiian music. While it is not performed by Kekuku, Sol Hoopii is another well known Hawaiian steel guitarist who made his living performing across the country.

The effects that the Hawaiian use of steel guitar in the music draws similar response to the “complaining songs” of country music that yearn for a better life. Bjorn Jonsen from Brooklyn wrote “I have never been to Hawaii but someday I will go. The playing makes one forgets the care’s worries of the day and makes one want to forget the humdrum existence of the city for the sandy white shores of beaches where the sun always shines.”³ Helen Ward from Ohio agrees saying “It is my favorite music. Especially when I am tired, nervous, overtaxed from worry. It is so resting, so comforting when I am all alone and blue.”⁴ No doubt, the expressiveness of the steel guitar is modeled in the listeners.

The steel guitar was brought to the United States by traveling troupes in the 1910’s. America’s reception to the steel guitar like other foreign musical cultures and instruments was exotic but not threatening. While the very start of the instrument’s implementation in country music and American culture is heavily debated, the pioneer of country music, Jimmie Rodgers is one of the first know musicians to use the instrument. The exotic sound of the guitar and the “whine” it made was a perfect backdrop for the complaining songs of country music. Below is an example of the steel guitar used in country music, in a song by Hank Williams.

In both videos the steel guitar is used as an accompaniment and “whine” and slide of the guitar is evident.

America’s reception to the foreign steel guitar was exotic like other foreign music but not dangerous. The dreaminess as told by reviews gave listeners a sense of comfort. The steel guitar unites the “whiteness” of country music and the “whine” in their music with the sounds of another culture that experiences the very same feelings linking together people of very different backgrounds and filling them with comfort and hope.

     Whilst perusing the “Hearts of Our People” exhibit this summer at the MIA, an exhibit featuring exclusively female Native American artists. What I found striking was a video from the early 1950s of a woman named Maria Tallchief who was in fact not in traditional regalia, but an elaborate ballet costume, pointe shoes, and dancing to Igor Stravinsky. I thought to myself, “Wow, a Native Ballerina? If I would have seen this video as a kid I probably never would have quit ballet.” 

     The findings of Densmore as well as of the explorer’s accounts we read in class point to a correlation between Native Americans and dance. I would find it safe to say that not all of the dances Densmore recorded, let alone what those who made first contact saw, made it to the 21st century in their original form due. The role of the U.S. government in intentionally trying to vanish Native Americans, leading to the “Vanishing Indian” sentiment which eventually evolved into what Rebekah Kowal refers to as the Termination Era (early-mid 20th century), created the environment out of which Tallchief had her start. The article that caught my eye was titled, “American as Wampum” and was published in TIME magazine in 1951 following her performance with the New York City Ballet Company in Balanchine’s adaption of Firebird [1]. The article claims she was produced by the same era that created Shirley Temple and that:

“Onstage, Maria looks as regal and exotic as a Russian princess; offstage, she is as American as wampum and apple pie.” 

Taken from TIME Magazine

The discussion of her lineage only mentions that her father was a full-blooded member of the Osage tribe [1], further exoticizing her and leaving out the fact that her mother had European heritage: Scotch, Irish, Dutch [2]. It is possible that the author of the article simply didn’t know that Tallchief was mixed-race but I find it more likely that her choice in self-identifying primarily with her Native heritage contributed to her fame and success as the first American Prima Ballerina. Her image, both literal and social, is another aspect of her life I found compelling. It was her front page of Newsweek that crowned her, “the finest American-born ballerina the twentieth century had ever produced…” [2]. The use of a literal crown in both articles, Newsweek and Time,  the image of the “Native American Princess”. This brings us back to depictions of the idealized Native woman, the peace bringer such as Pocahontas, a role model of femininity and what was called civilization, integration, or assimilation[3]. Toll argues that the trope Tallchief embodies is more complicated than simply playing the civilized Indian in that her achievement of being the first-ever American Prima Ballerina, that she was a creator of western culture rather than an “assimilated Princess” [3].

Works Cited

[1] “American as Wampum.” TIME Magazine, vol. 57, no. 9, Feb. 1951, p. 78. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tma&AN=54161559&site=ehost-live.

[2] Kowal, Rebekah J. “‘Indian Ballerinas Toe Up’: Maria Tallchief and Making Ballet ‘American’ in the Tribal Termination Era.” Dance Research Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, 2014, pp. 73–96., doi:10.1017/S0149767714000291.

Toll, Shannon. “Maria Tallchief, (Native) America’s Prima Ballerina: Autobiographies of a Postindian Princess.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 30, no. 1, 2018, pp. 50–70, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/692228.

Many people have a clear and narrow impression of Native American music, broadly amounting to a simple, percussive beat and non-syllabic unison melody atop it. As is the case for many such clear-cut descriptions, this is a gross oversimplification. Through the work of musicologists such as Frances Densmore, we can be secure in the understanding that the music of North America’s native tribes in the 20th century was far more complex than that impression, and assuming that complexity extends both forward and backward through history is natural.

Exemplifying the diversity of Native repertory is a collection of shape-note hymns called Indian Melodies, compiled by Thomas Commuck, a member of the Narrangaset tribe from the East Coast, now living in Wisconsin [1]. The Christian verses, set to choral, sometimes-chromatic textures, are a far cry from the stereotype. Yet its distance raises another concern: that of appropriation.

An example of the distinctly European harmonization of “Indian Melodies.”

While Commuck himself professes Christian sentiments–referring to himself as being enlightened “under the blessing of God” and expressing a desire to “spread the knowledge of the Redeemer”–it is informative that his work be titled as it is. The combination of traditional tunes with Protestant verse is seen by the author as an expansion of Indian repertoire in a collaborative, rather than parasitic, light. But that is still not enough to pick apart the dialogues surrounding this work. In the preface, Commuck makes his intentions with the writing clear.

“[The author] feels willing to acknowledge frankly and openly the truth, and he assures his friends and the public, that notwithstanding all other ends which may result from the publication of this work, his object is to make a little money.”

This statement opens up the possibility for concessions made in the interest of financial sustenance. Perhaps, as James Page suggests [2], Thomas Hastings’ involvement in arranging the music was forced by the publisher, thereby obscuring the intended blending of worlds with the one-sided use of the Native as a touchstone for American identity, thereby contributing to the story of the Vanishing Indian. If Commuck was desperate enough for the publishing of the book, it is at least plausible.

However, as a refutation of this line of thought, Commuck’s parting words in the preface emphasize the merely ceremonial usage of the Indian elements of the work. After stating that the tunes will use Native titles, he insists that “This has been done merely as a tribute of respect . . . also as a mark of courtesy.”

If these final words can be taken as genuine (without financial concern forcing his hand), Commuck himself may have been a participant in the era of the Vanishing Indian, at least in part. Referring to the elements of Native American culture which inform the work in such brief terms suggests their non-importance. At the same time, the most apparent part of the book remains the most potent proof of its expansion, rather than narrowing, of Indian culture–its title. Protestant hymns may also be Indian tunes after all.

References

1. Thomas Commuck, Indian Melodies, (New York, Lane & Tippett, 1845). Accessed at https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:479052/asc:479130
2. James Philip Page, “Thomas Commuck And His Indian Melodies, Wisconsin’s Shape-Note Tunebook”, (1989). Accessed at https://brothertowncitizen.com/thomas-commuck-and-his-indian-melodies-wisconsins-shape-note-tunebook/

As a part of a personal diary, William T. Parker, M.D. and Indian War Veteran of the U.S. Army, wrote of his experiences with Native American populations and peoples in New Mexico, California, Canada, and Kansas between 1867 and 1885.

The section of his journal I found most topically interesting and pertinent to our class learning is titled: “Concerning American Indian Womanhood – an Ethnological Study.” In this section, Parker discusses the role of women in music and the arts in Native American society. 

Parker places most of the importance of this section of his writing on, what he takes to be, the poor prioritizing of Native American tribes. Unlike Macdowell’s “Vanishing Indians,” Parker’s writing does not discuss attempts to appropriate and commodify Native American music and art for white consumption, but instead belittles Native American emphasis on music and art. He consistently reinforces his biased belief that American Indian populations place too much importance on art, music, and religion, and not enough on health and traditional (European) gender roles, with respect to home life. He names Native American women as the reason for the poor education of children, particularly female children, in that they are taught music and art before they are taught homemaking skills. He also blames spikes in women’s health issues on this “poor education,” saying “if hygiene and manual labor could be looked after more carefully, then might follow the cultivation of the arts.” In stating this, Parker ignores the intersection between religion, the arts/music, and health, that we know existed and still exist in Native American culture, particularly the medicinal qualities of Native American music.

Parker’s accounts and opinions of his time spent with Native American populations seems typical of someone of his background at the time of his writing. Unlike Densmore, he did not write critically about Native American lifestyle as a viable and rich culture, but instead stuck to a pre-defined, Eurocentric view of what makes for an acceptable lifestyle. 

Parker, William T. 1913. Personal experiences among our North American Indians from 1867 to 1885. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, American West, http://www.americanwest.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Graff_3197 [Accessed September 17, 2019].

Blim, Daniel. “MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, Vancouver, BC, November 2016.

Full text of “Frances Densmore and American Indian music : a memorial volume”. Accessed September 17, 2019. https://archive.org/stream/francesdensmorea00hofm/francesdensmorea00hofm_djvu.txt.

Alice Fletcher (1838-1923) was an American ethnologist who worked for the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. She extensively studied the Great Plains Indians, and was frequently able to gain their trust and immerse herself in much of their daily lives. She recorded and transcribed hundreds of songs and recorded observations of their rituals and music (using Western notation, similar to Frances Densmore). While she seemed to care about the Native Americans she interacted with, and even helped one woman get a loan to attend medical school, she also advocated for the Dawes Act, which redistributed reservation land and broke up tribes with the goal of assimilation (1).

This excerpt narrates her experience living on an Omaha reservation. She begins by asking to observe a dance, and her “Indian guide” leads her to a white tent filled with men and women sitting around a large drum (2). She states, “I was startled by a sudden mighty beating of the drum, with such deafening yells and shouts that I feared my ears would burst” (page 1); this echoes Drake’s description of Native American singing as shriek-like. As the music and dancing continues, she describes, “I felt a foreignness that grew into a sense of isolation…I was oppressed with its strangeness…It was nothing but tumult and din to me; the sharply accented drum set my heart to beating painfully and jarred my every nerve” (page 2). She doesn’t see the sounds she hears as music because it doesn’t sound like typical Western classical music, and she, along with many others, holds Native American music to a Western standard. She additionally writes, “The outstretched arms brandishing the war-clubs…called up before me every picture of savages I had ever seen,” calling the Native Americans “terrible creatures” (page 3). The use of the word “savage” relates to all of the course readings we have done so far, which contrast the white view of Native Americans as violent and savage while also nostalgic.

However, in the next paragraph she says that she later “had a laugh with her red friends” over this incident; she sees some Native Americans as savages, and others as her friends. Fletcher grew ill and Native Americans would come sing softly to her without a drum; “the last vestige of the distraction of noise and the confusion of theory was dispelled, and the sweetness, the beauty, and the meaning of these songs were revealed to me…from that time forth I ceased to trouble about scales, tones, rhythm, and melody” (4). She seems to finally realize that she shouldn’t base all musical analysis off of Western scales, and finishes her account by describing different types of songs and transcribing several.

1. DeVale, Sue Carole. “Fletcher, Alice Cunningham.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 16 Sep. 2019. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000009816.
2. Fletcher, Alice C. “INDIAN SONGS.: PERSONAL STUDIES OF INDIAN LIFE.” Century Illustrated Magazine (1881-1906), 01, 1894, 421, https://search.proquest.com/docview/125523852?accountid=351.

As an Iowan growing up in a college town, Saturday football games were unavoidable. I’m from Ames which is home to the Iowa State Cyclones, and the biggest game of the year is when we play our in-state rivals the University of Iowa Hawkeyes. This last weekend was the biggest rivalry game yet, when some 160,000 extra people came to town just to celebrate and watch football. So when I went searching for a text that stood out to me, I was stopped in my tracks by the words written for a celebratory song called “The Proud Hawkeye State” by Richard B.B. Wood. I found the lyrics as part of an 1884 reunion for “The Tri-State Old Settlers’ Association of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa”¹ to be performed after a series of speeches celebrating what it meant to be an “Old Settler,” or in this case, someone who lived in one of the states prior to 1860 or who had been there for the last 25 years. Amid the triumphant chorus these lines stand out to me

They were long and tedious hours

When we sought these western bowers

Grown with rude uncultured flowers

In that time long ago

Now this happy land is beaming

Bright as angels that are dreaming

With the harvest that is teeming

On our own Hawkeye soil

Iowa became a state in 1846, only 38 years prior to the year the convention was held. While it is unclear, the general consensus by Iowa historians is that the “Hawkeye” nickname comes from fans of “The Last of the Mohicans” an 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper set during the French and Indian War in which “According to Cooper’s story, the Delaware Indians bestowed the name of “Hawkeye” upon a white scout and trapper, who lived and hunted with them, who also braved their perils in war against the Iroquois and Hurons.”²
It seems absurd but the nickname was bestowed by white Iowan newspaper men, inspired by a story by a white writer, in which Native Americans give a white man a Native American name. In Iowa, almost all of the Indigenous population was forcibly removed by the government by 1930³, except for the Meskwaki Tribe which still exists to this day, so when this reunion was held there were likely attendees who were very familiar with this history.

The Tri-State Old Settlers’ Association of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa

In Dan Blim’s “MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians”⁴
Blim explores the concept of the “Vanishing Indian” as demonstrated in Edward MacDowell’s compositions. Blim explains that by creating art that claimed to eliminate any threat from Native Americans, Europeans could incorporate that imagined other into their cultural heritage, and that by establishing that Native American culture had “died,” it outlined white, European culture as something triumphant and unifying. 

Similarly in these lyrics, Richard B.B. Wood celebrates  “Old Settlers” as a powerful group of people who arose from some sort of tension to create a shining and glorious land on “their own Hawkeye soil.” However, while history is no doubt alluded to with racist coding like “rude uncultured flowers” these tribes are never named. The song is more about proving the excellence of the “Old Settlers” whose identity is literally grounded in economic prosperity tied to the richness of the land. 

The act of singing a song meant to celebrate an identity in opposition to something is unifying. Anyone who cheers for a certain sports team can feel a sense of camaraderie with perfect strangers if they wear the same colors as us, hate the same people as us, and sing the same song as us. In the case of “The Proud Hawkeye State,” the team is the “Old Settlers” and the opponent is effectively unworthy of a name since it was defeated. “The Proud Hawkeye State” claims that something that once was “uncultured” has now been replaced to use a farming analogy as Iowans love to-do, it was uprooted. 

When studying Frances Densmore’s notes on the music of the Pawnee people, I was impressed that many recordings were supplemented with written European musical notation such as sheet music. Phonetic pronunciation of words and sounds were provided. It’s very clear that for the time, Densmore used all the resources available to her to put together an archive of Native American tribal music.
When reading through her memoir of Frances Densmore and American Indian Music, Densmore accounts on instances where her plans of recording tribes became difficult due to lack of cooperation. In this primary source dating from 1916, she recounts her first encounter with the Ute tribe, located on their Southwest Colorado reservation, and their disinterest in making an archive and recording.
She writes:
Not all Indian tribes have the same disposition and before I went to the Utes I was warned that they were “touchy” by nature. Events proved this to be correct. From the day of my arrival the Utes did not like the idea of my work. I had a pleasant cottage for an office, far enough from neighbors so the singing could not be overheard, and on a street conveniently near the trader’s store. I set up the phonograph in the front room, secured a good interpreter and hoped for singers. Many Indians came out of curiosity, looked in the windows, sat around the room and laughed. In vain I explained through the interpreter, that I had been with many tribes who were glad to record their songs. I told of the building in Washington that would not burn down, where their voices would be preserved forever, but still they only looked at each other and laughed (Densmore 39).

The lack of desire from these tribes to work with Densmore poses a problem. Densmore is a pioneer in her attempt to preserve the believed to be disappearing traditions of Native American tribes. Through all the work we have studied as a class, I believe her intentions were to give the most accurate preservation of the music and such is shown in the visceral work she provides through writing and recordings. This primary source makes me question the authenticity of the work Densmore strived for (the musical practices and songs of Native American tribes) given that there were clearly Native people who had no interest in cooperating with Densmore. There are many factors that make me question whether Densmore achieved the goal she set out. Not only were the people clearly apprehensive but their songs had been taken out of their ceremonious context.

The musicologist may have also brought some tension to the situation. In her article of The Music of American Indians, Densmore writes, “In all his means of expression, the Indian is still a child. When he dances, he puts his feet together and moves from side to side with a motion precisely like that of a three-year-old.” When the collector and performer comes to the act of recording with such tension and veracity, how can an accurate recreation of these practices take place?

These sources open the audience up to the possibility that Densmore may have not achieved her goal. In the book, Densmore labels this section as “Incidents In The Study of Ute Music”. The format in which Densmore chooses to present the encounter becomes a question of biased as well as mention in The Music of American Indians that they are children. If the passage begins with her warning the reader of the tribe being “touchy” and continuing on to what allegedly happened, it stands to reason that other tribes may have felt uncomfortable taking part in Densmore’s work but had not spoken up.

Works Cited

-Hofmann, Charles, and Frances Densmore. Frances Densmore and American Indian Music; a Memorial Volume. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968.

-FRANCES D. “THE MUSIC OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine (1868-1935), vol. XLV, 03, 1905, pp. 230. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.stolaf.edu/docview/137407364?accountid=351.

The source that I found for this blog post is Personal Experiences Among Our North American Indians 1867 to 1885 by William Thornton Parker. Parker was an author from New Mexico who studied at both Harvard and the Institute of Technology. One particular section of his book felt very relevant to our conversations from class, and was similar to the first assigned primary source readings we had. One segment focused in on the connection between dance and music that is so essential to Native American music, but is often left out in our education about it as a recording cannot fully convey what the Native American musicking experience was like. After he had personally observed a war dance, he states that “he [the dancer] dances with the peculiar motions of the Indian, so indescribable, yet so suggestive that he is able to convey to the onlookers the passions which sway him” (Parker, 14). I think this excerpt helps to demonstrate the complicated ways that Americans have historically, and currently, interact with native culture, and especially their music. They know it is passionate and feel the meaning but at the same time they find it odd and crude; simplifying it to be insignificant rather than putting effort into understanding.

Like in MacDowell’s Indian Suite, he is taking the elements from Native American music that he perceives to demonstrate the brute force and ignorant simplicity that Native Americans were inaccurately thought to have. He does this while wrapping it in a package of typical Western orchestration that is more palatable to a white audience, allowing them to further generalize and stereotype the culture from which this music was derived. Parker views these Native Americans in such a light, shown by his journals stating “the drums are, in fact, musicians skilled in this particular are of war-dance music” (14). The use of “in fact” in such a contrary way shows that the default idea is the Native Americans could not be skilled as musicians, and it’s almost as if he is patting himself on the back for noticing that there is actual depth to a cultural practice that has been going on for hundreds of years.

Works Cited

Parker, William T. 1913. Personal experiences among our North [[American]] Indians from 1867 to 1885. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, American West, http://www.americanwest.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Graff_3197 [Accessed September 15, 2019].

Figure 1                                   Figure 2

For this blog post I will examine the book History of Oklahoma and Indian Territory and homeseekers’ guide (Fig. 1), published in 1906 and written by James L. Puckett. The book itself is based on statements given to the author by different people that were in some way affiliated with the native American tribes in the area. The specific primary source is the experiences as stated by Ora. A. Woodman (Fig. 2)[1], after his capture during an Indian raid and the subsequent adolescence as part the tribe. Puckett stated that there is little to no evidence of Woodman’s ancestry or background, other than being born somewhere in western Texas before the civil war[2]. In the section I chose from this account, Woodman explains how the Native American music might be wrongly perceived (Fig. 3)[3] and how he views it.

Figure 3

Why did Puckett include this rather nuanced encounter, stating somewhat radical opinions on Indian music, in his book? Woodman, with no recollections of his life outside the tribe and one could argue without the biases that comes with western, Eurocentric society, has an interesting platform for promoting the Native American cause. Or did Puckett simply include this story as a curiosity for the readers, a local Tarzan of sorts? Does he want to show the world the depravity attainable when one fraternizes too much with the natives? To find meaning and take pleasure in their music?

When it comes to Puckett’s personal views and credibility it is worth looking into his life story according to his own recollections, a separate chapter of the book, he began his career moving cattle in Arkansas of which he soon tired. After a failed courtship with a Cheyenne woman he went to Oklahoma where he had close friendship with a Cherokee man (Fig. 4 a and b)[4] culminating in him attending gatherings for the native tribes an interacting with them.

Figure 4 a

Figure 4 b

He ended up being married to three Cherokee women, separately, throughout his life and the book names the third one as a co-author (Fig.1). It seems to me that this is a life and the actions of a somewhat progressive thinker, through marriage and friendship he interacted a lot with native tribes and collected testimonies from them directly. in spite of this   it is important to highlight the somewhat autobiographical nature of this collection of experiences.

As far as the original or intended audience for this book Puckett writes that he believes what he calls his “memories” will be “worth something to people seeking homes in the new country”[5]. Considering this statement in light of what might be perceived as sympathetic undercurrents in the text, I would be inclined to assume that Puckett’s intentions were conscientious; That he wished that newcomers to the territory would have a better understanding of the land, its people and consequently their music.

Source:

Puckett, James L. History of Oklahoma and Indian Territory and homeseekers’ guide. Vinita, Oklahoma: Chieftain Publishing Company. 1906. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, American West, http://www.americanwest.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/Graff_3399 [Accessed September 15, 2019].

[1] Puckett 1906: p. 71

[2] Ibid p. 73

[3] Ibid p. 77

[4] Ibid p. 123-124

[5] Ibid p. 149

Henry Finck’s 1906 article “Creative Americans: Edward MacDowell, Musician and Composer” was published in Outlook, a New York-based magazine in operation from 1893-1924. The article’s opening lines casually establish Finck’s authority on MacDowell by stating that in the summer of 1895 he “spent a few days with Edward MacDowell in a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva.”[1] He further drops a subtle brag that MacDowell was “sorely tempted to ask my advice about various details, but refrained for fear of breaking into my vacation.”[2]

[3]

This is Henry Finck. In addition to having an impressive mustache, Finck was an American music critic. Although German and a Wagnerite, he distrusted Germany. His 18 publications include Wagner and his works: the story of his life, Richard Strauss: The man and his works, Songs and Song Writers, an autobiography, and books on gardening and food. Finck was a music critic at the Evening Post for 43 years and a lecturer at the National Conservatory of Music (alongside Dvorak).[4]

The purpose of Finck’s article is not consistent. The first page seem to build up to the thesis that “It is time to drop the ludicrous notion that a truly national art can be built up only on folk-songs.”[5] This theme, particularly the importance of individuality, is further developed through the third page. Finck then suddenly switches to a lengthy discussion of MacDowell’s education. Interestingly, in this section Finck uses the same revering tone that he describes MacDowell using towards his own idols (particularly Liszt and Raff), even going so far as to assert that MacDowell was “the greatest pianist this country has produced.”[6] Finally, Finck ends with a quick overview of what he considers to be MacDowell’s best pieces and mourns the “loss to American music” caused by MacDowell’s death. He never seems to return to his “thesis” that individuality is the key to building a national art. In this way the article has a unique mix of informal musicological argument and half reverent biography.

I came upon this source about MacDowell while searching for more context on Dan Blim’s essay “MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians.” I was excited to find this article because it seems to contrast some of Blim’s arguments. Blim’s essay states that:

“[A] so called “Indianist” movement had emerged, placing Native American subjects at the fore of US musical nationalism. Pisani attributes the success of this movement in large part to the participation of Edward MacDowell, the preeminent American composer of the day, who premiered his Second Suite for Orchestra with the moniker ‘Indian,’ in 1896.”[7]

While Blim only quotes Pisani on this point, he does not refute it, leading me to the conclusion that he agrees with this argument. Blim in fact seems to take the argument for granted as it is presented in the portion of the essay dedicated to context. Although it perhaps was a personal issue that I didn’t catch this distinction the first time around, my first experiences with the article led me to think that Pisani’s claim was indeed a central pillar of Blim’s own argument.

However, Finck’s article gives evidence that MacDowell specifically didn’t want to create a new American sound based on Native American music. Finck states that MacDowell:

“…never indorsed the view… that a great American Temple of Music might and will be built with Indian songs as the foundation-stones. Nor has he ever countenanced the widely prevalent opinion that negro melodies form the only other possible basis of a distinctively American school of music.”[8]

In combination with his own argument that individuality is the key to building up an American school of music, Finck’s interpretation of MacDowell’s intentions (or lack thereof) contrasts with Pisani’s claim that the “Indianist” movement was conscious and deliberate. Finck only speaks towards MacDowell’s intentions, and because actions and intentions are not the same, it is highly plausible that both Pisani and Finck are correct. I synthesize these conflicting arguments into the claim that MacDowell did not intend to participate in the ‘Indianist’ movement but was nevertheless accidentally a key player in the construction of a US musical nationalism.

This was but one interesting tidbit in a rather long article. Other intriguing morsels that I don’t have space to unpack in this blog post include:

• Your daily dose of sexism/engrained hypermasculinity (“exquisite feminine tenderness” and “sturdy, manly spirit”)
• Condescension poorly hidden by Finck’s belief in his own open-mindedness (“The aboriginal Iroquois and Iowan songs which form its main themes are in themselves by no means without charm…”)
• Was Finck in love with MacDowell? He’s really quite complimentary of his musical accomplishments, not to mention his handsomeness (“His face retains its unearthly beauty… and his eyes still have the light of genius in them.” However, Mark Grant says “Finck was an unabashed enthusiast, not a paid puffer but a booster, and he did not hesitate to write articles about his particular favorites… that bordered on press agentry.”)
• Finck has strong opinions on what a “real American,” so much so that perhaps the establishment of an American identity can be better examined in the way music is talked about rather than in the music itself

Footnotes

[1] Henry Finck, “Creative Americans: Edward MacDowell, Musician and Composer,” Outlook 84, no. 17 (1906), 1.

[2] Ibid, 1.

[3] “Henry T. Finck,” Lapham’s Quarterly, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/finck.

[4] Mark Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

[5] Ibid, 1.

[6] Ibid, 7.

[7] Dan Blim, “MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians,” Vancouver, 2016, 2.

[8] Finck, “Creative Americans,” 1.

Works Cited

Blim, Dan. “MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians.” Vancouver, 2016.

“Henry T. Finck.” Lapham’s Quarterly. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/finck.

Finck, Henry T. “Creative Americans: Edward MacDowell, Musician and Composer.” Outlook 84, no. 17(1906).

Grant, Mark. Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Robert Shelton, “Negro Songs Here and Rights Drive: Mahalia Jackson, Freedom Group at Carnegie Hall.”  New York Times (New York), June 23, 1963. Digital Public Library of America. http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/21078.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gained national attention in 1960through staging sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters, igniting a sit-in movement across the country. They continued to lead the Movement in the Freedom Rides of 1961 as well as a number of other protests, marches, and voter drives across the South. In the midst of their protesting, SNCC members sang songs that reflected their passion for the cause, lifted their spirits, and stood as a symbol of resistance against segregationists.

SNCC protestors Bernice Johnson, Ruth Harris, Cordell Hull Reagan and Charles Neblett emerged from the Albany Movement in 1962 to form the Freedom Singers. This quartet of singers, all between the ages of 19 and 21, sought to draw attention to and raise money for SNCC’s fight for racial equality through performing the songs of the Movement. ¹ The young singers captured the hearts of people across the country with their musical ability and passion for social change. Performing songs composed in jail cells, on the Freedom Rides, or in other protests,² the Freedom Singers traveled thousands of miles and shared their music and message to audiences at over 100 concerts.

This newspaper clipping from the New York Times reviews the Freedom Singers’ performance at the esteemed Carnegie Hall in New York City. The Freedom Singers collaborated with renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, but the reviewer Robert Shelton reveals, “There was perhaps even greater interest in the Freedom Singers and their songs, which echoed with the immediacy of today’s headlines, the integration battle in the South”. ³ Shelton goes on not only to praise the singers’ passion for their cause but their musical ability as well. He further commends their performance: “Even if the quartet were not dealing in matters so urgent as the topical freedom songs of the integration movement, it would be outstanding for its singing…. The Freedom Singers [are] in the top level of American folk groups” ⁴ Shelton’s review indicates that the Freedom Singers were successful in gaining the sympathies of audiences across the country through their passionate and impressive musical talent.

In many ways, the Freedom Singers resemble the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Both groups sing music intimately connected to the black culture of the past and their present. This is problematic in that they are performing for predominantly white audiences in order to raise money for their causes. Both groups experience the pressure of upholding something important at a young age: a newly founded black college and a student movement fighting for racial equality. Like the Jubilee Singers, the Freedom Singers’ commitment to their cause is admirable. They demonstrate how the power of music can bring people together in one common cause.

For my final project, I am writing a children’s book on blackface minstrelsy. To better understand what minstrel shows actually looked like, so that I can more accurately discuss them, I found a book called Minstrel Breezes by Arthur Kaser, a “collection of up-to-the-minute first-parts, sketches, skits, monologues and afterpieces.” The book was published in 1937 and was essentially a collection of scripts meant for amateur minstrels to use in their own minstrel shows. Reading through the scripts, I found that most of the humor comes from highlighting the dim-wittedness of the “black” characters, especially through pun and complicated faulty logic. For example, here is a selection from a conventional minstrel first-part, with an interlocutor and an Endman named Sideswipe:

INTERLOCUTOR: …you bragged to me the other day that you were the smartest pupil in school.

SIDESWIPE: I was de smartes’.

INTERLOCUTOR: Your sister told me this morning that you couldn’t even get out of the fourth grade.

SIDESWIPE: Dat was account of mah report card. Everything on dat report card was “A” except one.

INTERLOCUTOR: And that?

SIDESWIPE: Just one “B” on dat card, an’ dat’s what stung me.

I also found some videos on Youtube from a  1951 film, “Yes Sir, Mr. Bones,” in which popular minstrel performances are reproduced. This clip (Content Warning: Blackface) was a popular comedy routine called “28.”

The comedy routines in their contexts are quite disturbing; the blackface, the gross caricatures, the belittling of black folk all culminate into a disappointing picture. However, I raise a question: could these sort of routines be funny today if the blackface and racism was removed? Many of the jokes are puns and general silliness. Perhaps this is a controversial question, and by no means am I arguing in favor of minstrelsy, but it does make me wonder what are the limits of humor? When is a joke going too far? Is there any comedy from minstrel shows that can have any value, or do the implications mean too much? I suppose I am also thinking along the lines of the old minstrel tunes and that we know from childhood, that we know are from that tradition, but still hold onto. What do you think?