University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Spring 2012
Crossover narratives: intersections of race, genre
and authenticity in unpopular popular music
Eric David Johnson
University of Iowa
Copyright 2012 Eric D. Johnson
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2904
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Eric David. "Crossover narratives: intersections of race, genre and authenticity in unpopular popular music." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2012.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2904.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the American Studies Commons
CROSSOVER NARRATIVES:INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, GENRE, AND
AUTHENTICITY IN UNPOPULAR POPULAR MUSIC
by
Eric David Johnson
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in American Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Iowa
May 2012
Thesis Supervisor:$VVRFLDWH Professor Harilaos Stecopoulos
1
ABSTRACT
This thesis analyzes the construction of racialized notions of authenticity within
American popular musical genres across the span of the 20th Century, but especially from
a crucial period between the years 1938 and 1965. In these pages I argue that the
discursive construction of genres is a narrative act, one intended to provide symbolic
resolution to real and felt dilemmas in people’s lives. My first chapter focuses on the
singer, Nat “King” Cole, arguing that the retrospective construction of the rock and roll
genre as an example of a hybrid or crossover musical from by critics in the late 1960s and
early 1970s helped fix in the popular imagination a notion of “authentic black music”
which effectively marginalized Cole, an important African American musician whose
musical style was at odds with this critical construction of racial style. My second chapter
argues that jazz trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie’s efforts to combine African
American and Afro-Caribbean musical forms included a strategic discursive crafting of a
narrative of origins which placed jazz as an expression of musical Afro-internationalism.
My third chapter argues that critics and audience involved in the blues revival of the early
1960s reconstructed what had been a female-dominated African American popular form
as a kind of unpopular popular music: music distinguished in the marketplace by its
supposed transcendence of the marketplace via its vernacular roots, and as a musical form
dominated by the male figure of the rural bluesman. In conclusion I argue that these
efforts to narrate authentic and anti-capitalistic origin for and expressions of popular,
commercial forms reveal, within the American public imagination, deep-seated anxieties
about the gulf between the cultural influence of African American music and the social
and political situation of African American citizens, and, on another level, anxieties about
2
the contradictions inherent in the experience of transcendent pleasure through
commercial musical forms.
Abstract Approved:
_____________________________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
______________________________________________________
Title and Department
______________________________________________________
Date
CROSSOVER NARRATIVES: INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, GENRE, AND
AUTHENTICITY IN UNPOPULAR POPULAR MUSIC
by
Eric David Johnson
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in American Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Iowa
May 2012
Thesis Supervisor: $VVRFLDWHProfessor Harilaos Stecopoulos
Copyright by
ERIC DAVID JOHNSON
2012
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________________________
PH.D. THESIS
______________________________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. Whesis of
Eric David Johnson
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in American Studies at the May 2012 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
________________________________________________
Harilaos Stecopoulos, Thesis Supervisor
_________________________________________________
Kevin Mumford
_________________________________________________
T. M. Scruggs
_________________________________________________
Laura Rigal
__________________________________________________
Deborah Whaley
To Lisa, who has made all of this possible, and to Rachel. With all of my love to you both.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………........iv
INTRODUCTION: GENRE, MEMORY, AUTHENTICITY ...........................................1
CHAPTER
1. KING COLE, CROSSOVER AND CONTAINMENT .............................................37
King Cole………………………………………………………………………...37
“Could if I Wanted To Though!” September 2, 1959, Las Vegas, Nevada……..47
Mobility and Containment……………………………………………………….57
Generic Containment and Crossover Narrative.…………………………………67
Birmingham, Alabama, April 14, 1956………………………………………….86
Coda: Rearticulating Nat Cole…………………………………………………..94
2. MANTECA: NARRATING MUSICAL AFRO-INTERNATIONALISM ............121
Containment, Mobility, and Diaspora…………………………………………..121
I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia………………………………………………….128
“Gimme Some Skin!”……..……………………………………………………146
Performing Diaspora: Inventing Black Music………………………………….154
Coda: Newport and New York City……………………………………………173
3. THE BLUES IN A STATE OF NATURE: ORIGINS, REVIVIALS,
AND REVISIONS ......................................................................................................191
Festivals, Revivals, and Revisions: Newport, Rhode Island, 1959…………….191
“The Weirdest Music That I Have Ever Heard”………………………………..203
The Authentic Music of the American Negro: Carnegie Hall, 1938…………...218
Vernacular Transformations/Transforming the Vernacular…………………….234
Coda: Really the Blues!.......................................................................................258
CONCLUSION: ACROSS THE GREAT DIIVIDE ......................................................278
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................295
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.
The front cover of Re:Generations……………………………………100
Figure 2.
The inside cover of Re:Generations…………………………………..101
Figure 3.
The 1948 LP Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra in Concert………….164
Figure 4.
The 1956 LP Afro……………………………………………………..166
iv
1
INTRODUCTION: GENRE, MEMORY, AUTHENTICITY
The racial questions of rock’n’roll—How much of a white component
(country, rockabilly) was truly present in “white” R&R’s version of
“black” R&B? Did Elvis imitate or did he sing “black” music?—were
only the latest chapter of a history in which hybrid cultural forms have
themselves begged the question of imitation to the point of absurdity.
Andrew Ross1
In examining how the elements of popular music work (the sound, the
lyric, the voice, the beat) we always have to take account of their genre
coding—popular musical pleasures can only be understood as genre
pleasures; and genre pleasures can only be understood as socially
structured.
Simon Frith2
We can study the negotiation of authenticity once we have ceased to be a
negotiating party, or once we admit to our participation in the negotiating
process.
Regina Bendix3
This dissertation began by accident: an accident of reading. In 2004, as a new
graduate student at the University of Iowa, I was searching for something to write a paper
about for two different graduate classes: a seminar on performance studies led by Jane
Desmond, and an ethnomusicology seminar entitled Music and the Politics of Culture
that was taught by T. M. Scruggs. I knew that I wanted to write something about rock
and roll music. I had begun, in my last undergraduate semester at the University of
Alabama, to investigate the kinds of ideological apparatus that were used to define rock
and roll, to narrate its history and explain its performative aesthetics. I began the
research for these papers thinking about violence, and specifically about the role that race
(and as I would later understand more fully, gender) played as hidden partners to fears
about teenage delinquency and violence in the moral panic that accompanied the
emergence of rock and roll in the mid-1950s and which was proudly incorporated into
2
accounts of the music’s later history by many of its most ardent fans as proof of its
fundamentally rebellious essence. I theorized that initial associations between rock and
roll and violence were covert articulations of racial anxiety, which later critics, mostly
white writers associated with what had come to be understood as “rock criticism,” had
decoded and taken as affirmations of the music’s racial authenticity. I went looking for
evidence to support this. I found something different.
Searching through Charlie Gillette’s The Sound of the City, one of the first, wellresearched, oft-cited histories of rhythm and blues and early rock and roll, I noted, in
1956: a riot at a dance in New Jersey; an attack on Chuck Berry after a show in Little
Rock, Arkansas; and…an attempted assault on Nat “King” Cole onstage in Birmingham,
Alabama. I found the inclusion of the latter incident puzzling. On what planet had Nat
“King” Cole ever been part of the history of rock and roll? Intrigued, I looked more
closely. Surveying nationally distributed African American newspapers like the Chicago
Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American, I found accounts of the attack on Cole at a
segregated concert by Klansmen who did indeed identify Cole as a rock and roll
performer on the basis of race. I also found much criticism, from journalists, public
figures, and letter writers, of Cole’s controversial decision to continue his tour, including
shows in several other segregated southern venues. And, I found out that Asa “Ace”
Carter, the demagogue who inspired and likely planned the attack, had reinvented himself
in the 1970s as “Forrest Carter,” and had written bestselling historical novels, including
one hailed as a multicultural children’s classic, The Education of Little Tree. All of this
was helpful in building two slightly different papers in which I, somewhat clumsily, tried
3
to tease out the cultural politics of racial performance during the era of southern
resistance to federally mandated desegregation.
At the same time, I found something else that I didn’t quite know what to do with:
a lively debate, especially in the pages of The Chicago Defender between 1954 and 1957,
about whether rock and roll was indeed “Negro music,” as Carter and others had
maintained.4 In the rock criticism and musical biographies and histories which I had
been immersed in for much of my teenage and adult life, the intimate connection between
rock and roll and “black music” was an article of faith, although the nature of that
connection—whether it should be characterized as ruthless exploitation or syncretistic
borrowing—was up for debate. This was, I believe, where I first consciously
encountered the limitations of genre terminology and the effect of those limitations on
popular memory, and as I would later see, on the academic and popular written histories
of popular music and popular culture. My received notion that rock and roll had emerged
from African American musical forms was also tied up with another explanatory conceit:
that rock and roll’s origins could be explained as a fusion of genres, notably (“white”)
country music and (“black”) blues or rhythm and blues, an admixture exemplified by the
“crossover” success of early rock and roll singers like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins,
whose hits reached the upper levels of multiple charts (“Rhythm and Blues,” “Country,”
“Pop”) that tracked sales according to strict racially defined genres. I understood that
such a formulation simplified actual, practical historical events, but I had taken for
granted the legitimacy of the manner in which genres like “country,” “blues,” and “rock
and roll,” which were related to but not entirely defined by those sales charts, were
treated as stable and self-evident articulations of musical development and relation. I
4
also realized that the relation between those genres and the ethnic identities they were
taken to represent could not be as stable as they were assumed to be in daily usage.
The questions that this raised rattled around in my head as I continued my
graduate studies. They mixed and connected with other ideas that I encountered: T.M.
Scruggs advised that I should think more about the idea of “crossover” and its
implications for the barriers whose breach it described; in an introductory American
Studies Theory and Methods seminar I found Mary Louise Pratt’s argument that the
Linnaean system of classification articulated a “planetary consciousness,” mapping
reality within the discrete, discoverable hierarchies of Eurocentric rationalism; Deborah
Whaley urged me to think more carefully about gender, race, and identity, and directed
me to Stuart Hall’s formulation of identity as identification, a change which crucially
emphasizes process over essence. Hall’s work reminded me of my undergraduate
Comparative Literature teacher John Locke’s advice to turn nouns like “identity” into
verbs like “identify” in order to facilitate critical thinking.5
Of all of these scholarly encounters, the one that perhaps the most influenced the
shape of this dissertation and the notion of “genre narratives” around which it is
organized, was a graduate seminar taught by Rick Altman, whose work on the discursive
nature of film genre spoke to my own social experience of musical genres as sites of
rhetorical contestation among listeners and players, audience members, musicians, and
other musically interested parties.6 It struck me that musical genre functioned in a similar
fashion, and that what Altman was describing was the way that parties who were
engaged, at any level, in the commercial dissemination and consumption of aesthetic
artifacts and performances negotiated and contested not only the meaning and relation of
5
artifacts and performances, but also what it meant that those artifacts and performances
were embedded in commercial structures. I had been looking for the grounds for relating
generic categories to acts of ethnic identification, and it seemed to me that it must be
somewhere in the discursive, if the discursive could be taken broadly to include the wide
variety of socially situated communicative acts that, to my observation, people used to
define themselves and each other in relation to the meanings found in aesthetic
expressions, such as film, music, and literature.
In the summer of 2010, after abandoning an earlier dissertation topic, I returned to
a collection of papers I had written about popular music, including the essays about
Cole’s performance in Birmingham, and began to search for unifying themes that
reflected the way that my concerns had evolved. I knew that I wanted to try to apply
what I had learned about genre theory in film to musical genre, and to try to reconcile my
lived experience with musical genre, and my developing thoughts on how to theoretically
apply that experience, with the way that I had seen genre mobilized in musical-historical
narratives. As a record collector, I had spent many nights with fellow enthusiasts arguing
over canons, borders, and archives that defined specific genres. As a sound system
operator, genre had helped me understand how musicians wanted their audience to hear
them and had thus guided a number of technical decisions, some made before I even
heard a note. Now, I had begun to see—or hear—genre in general and in popular music
specifically as the unstable accretion of ongoing social-rhetorical practice, its seemingly
fixed categorical classifications better understood as arguments rather than conclusions. I
had come to believe that, like music itself, which I argue requires the imposition of
learned, culturally specific narrative logic in order to retrospectively make meaning out
6
of what is experienced as an ongoing series of discrete sounds, genre functions
mnemonically. This concurs with Simon Frith’s observation that “Musical
evaluation…seems inevitably to mean thinking backwards: first the experience, the
music; then the judgment, the account of the music. Even everyday criticism frames the
music discursively after the event, as it were.”7 Frith’s comment suggests that music can
be understood partially as the production of performed or recorded memorable moments.
In this process of production, genres work as intermediary discursive formations,
providing (or imposing) a dominant (but not totalizing) cultural logic which listeners can,
with varying degrees of competency, bring to bear in the process of opening up the
communicative potential of those memorable moments and making them intelligible,
both in the present moment and to history.
One way to think about the manner in which genres function in individual and
social memory, is to refer to Diana Taylor’s conceptualization of “archives” and
“repertoire” as mnemonic repositories and “systems of transmission.”8 Taylor crafted
these terms in order to come to grips with “the repression of indigenous embodied
practice as a form of knowing as well as a system for storing and transmitting
knowledge” during the European conquest of the Americas, after which “nonverbal
practices—such as dance, ritual, and cooking, to name a few—that long served to
preserve a sense of communal identity and memory, were not considered valid forms of
knowledge.”9 In the process of doing so, Taylor reorganized the commonly observed
dichotomy of the written and spoken word as a “rift…between the archive of supposedly
enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral
repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge) i.e., spoken language, dance, sports,
7
ritual).”10 If, in the world of popular music, recorded texts (ranging historically from
sheet music to digital files) constitute archival memory, and stage performance represent
embodied repertoire, then genre mediates both, as well as the transmission between the
two. Genres guide industry agents—sometimes known in terms that recall Taylor’s
theoretical ones as Artists and Repertoire (A&R) people—in deciding which performers
are recorded and how their recordings are organized in the marketplace. Genres structure
pedagogy and performance, facilitating communication between musicians who do and
don’t read written music, and organizing music fans and critics into communities who
work to remember and extend particular repertoires.
In doing so, genres work against the “so-called ephemeral” nature of performance
itself, but they do so at a price: as Chris Atton observes, “The retrospective codification
of genre enables more or less contained studies to be made of what contemporary
listeners may have heard quite differently.”11 Thus, ongoing acts of genrification should
be understood in the same terms that W. Fitzhugh Brundage uses to describe “collective
or historical memory,” as “not simply the articulation of some shared subconscious, but
rather the product of intentional creation.”12 And, as Brundage notes, “Collective
remembering forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms. For
individuals and groups alike, memory provides a genealogy of social identity.”13
Because genres function as sites for “collective remembering,” they unite users in what
Altman calls “generic communities,” which he explains are actually “constellated
communities, for like a group of stars their members cohere only through repeated acts of
imagination.”14 Continuing with this metaphor, he illustrates the discursive or perhaps
8
rhetorical nature of the communities he envisions constituting and being constituted by
the practice of genrification:
In the sky, constellations don’t always have the same appearance; nor do
they appear the same way to all viewers. One viewer’s Big Dipper is
another’s Big Bear. Some of the stars that I think of as constituting a
single constellation may be split by another star gazer into two or more
separate constellations. Even though generic communities clearly enjoy a
physical as well as an imagined existence, they are for the most part
nowhere near as identifiable as the members of an organized church. Nor
are participants limited to a single generic community. The same
individual may, at different times, be part of a screwball comedy
community, a musical community, an exploitation community and a gay
porn community.15
Obviously, Altman’s model is built around film viewing, and in its specific details there
are places where the analogy to popular music genres fails to transfer. But his broad
framework is compelling, and I am specifically interested in much of what is displayed
here: the notion that genres are not static; that they and the communities that cohere
around them are constituted via acts of imagination and imaginative discourse; and, that
they serve a broadly social function. In these areas they correspond with other relevant
constructions in film, television, musical, and literary genre, including work by Aviva
Freedman and Peter Medway, Fabian Holt, and Steve Neale, and with broader
approaches to genre as a theoretical construct, including scholarship by Roland Barthes,
Bernadette Casey, Carolyn Miller.16
While the notion of generic communities described here is particularly
appropriate for the model of musical genre I wish to propose, I would add two distinct
qualifiers. One is that I would argue that musical genre communities, where genre
fandom is displayed in dress, dance styles, slang, manners, and mores, are more
aggressively social than film communities; a difference which I believe speaks to the
9
embodied nature of musical performance, including the performance of musical
audiences. The other is that we should note the role of power, whether it’s the
commercial power exerted by record companies, the institutional and textual power
exercised by folklore scholars and critics, or the persuasive power of influential
tastemakers, in fixing and modifying generic meaning. We should equate “community”
with “communicative” here, rather than with “communitarian,” although I would argue
that the acts of communicative imagination that constellate these communities sometimes
bespeak a kind of communitarian recognition of shared notions of what constitutes
authentic experience.
The social, mnemonic, and identificatory nature of musical genres ties them, like
any classificatory system, to notions of authenticity, purity, and transgression, because
such a nature necessarily contemplates the delineations between the authentic and
inauthentic, or the exemplary and the iconoclastic members of a given category. As
Jacques Derrida notes, “ as soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as
soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And, when a limit is established,
norms and interdictions are not far behind.”17 I believe that it is through the mobilization
of authenticity and typicality that those norms and interdictions are felt in the practical
world. It is true, as Jane Feuer notes, that “a genre is ultimately an abstract conception,
not something that exists empirically in the world,” but genres are spoken of as if they
exist “in the world,” and through that speaking and writing signal attempts to describe,
contain, and resolve real situations.18 Meaning that, like many other “abstract concepts,”
including rhetorically related spatial and civic denotations such as region, nation, and
diaspora, genre operates in the world in a more concrete fashion than Feuer’s statement
10
suggests.19
Returning to Nat Cole in Birmingham in 1956, I was struck by the apparent
contradiction between his stature as perhaps the dominant male vocalist in the musical
marketplace at the time, and his absence from the historical narratives most commonly
mustered to explain the development of popular music during the 1950s, most of which
involved the emergence of rock and roll. This absence was all the more striking because
those narratives, which almost exclusively featured male performers, centered around
what I came to identify as the crossover narrative: the story of young “white” listeners
discovering and consuming “black music” via musicians or disc jockeys (usually but not
always white themselves) who acted as racial agent provocateurs, prefiguring in the arena
of popular music, the political dismantling of the system of Jim Crow segregation
accomplished by the civil rights movement in the 1960s.20
This is, as I will argue in the coming pages, an enduring story in the American
popular understanding and interpretation of mid-20th century U.S. cultural history. It
can, I also argue, be approached as Kenneth Burke suggested we can approach literary
narratives: as a kind of extended parable.21 In its nuanced and detailed versions,
articulated by scholars like Michael Bertrand, it can usefully elucidate the connections
between popular culture and political change.22 On the other hand, in its most popular
retellings, such as in the 2009 Broadway hit Memphis: The Musical, the crossover
narrative collapses all too easily into a kind of self-congratulatory mythology that
provides white baby boomers with a comfortingly depoliticized vision of their history,
one which equates listening to Elvis Presley or buying Chuck Berry records with
supporting civil rights, and which elides black musicians like Cole who crossed racial
11
barriers in the music business while playing music that has been deemed, within the
strictures of the crossover narrative, “white” or inauthentic.23
The problematic notion of authenticity is imbricated deeply within the sociotextual ecosphere of popular music, tying together everyday experience, popular criticism
and scholarly study. Perhaps the most detailed examination of its construction and
relevance in modern popular music is Barker and Taylor’s Faking It: the Quest For
Authenticity in Popular Music24. Observing that “When we listen to popular music, some
songs strike us as “real” and others as “fake,” the authors argue that
…especially in the past fifty years, the quest for authenticity, for the
“real,” has become a dominant factor in musical taste. Whether it be the
folklorist’s search for forgotten bluesmen, the rock critic’s elevation of
raw power over sophistication, or the importance of bullet wounds to the
careers of hip-hop artists, the aesthetic of the “authentic musical
experience,” with its rejection of music that is labeled contrived,
pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in
forming musical tastes and canons, with wide-ranging consequences.25
While Faking It addresses the role of perceived notions of authenticity as they operate in
multiple popular musical genres, it is worth noting that two of the three offered here as
examples (blues, hip-hop) are closely identified with and largely defined as African
American musical traditions, and that the third, “rock,” is connected to those traditions by
virtue of a popular narrative of origins. Given the long history of and extensive literature
on the use of race as an authenticating agent in American popular culture, this is hardly
surprising. As Robin Kelley notes, “Terms like 'folk,' 'authentic' and 'traditional' are
socially constructed categories that have something to do with the reproduction of race,
class, and gender hierarchies and the policing of the boundaries of modernism."26
Similarly, the association between race, authenticity, and primitivism that Barker and
Taylor identify as the opposition between “raw power” and “sophistication” informs the
12
story that rock critics tell about the constitution of rock music, a story that, as my first
chapter argues, elides significant figures like Nat Cole, who challenge retroactively
constructed generic borders.
Perhaps the most paradoxical part of this story, given the immense popularity of
music described and understood, bought and sold as “rock” over the last several decades,
is the constitution of rock as (per Barker and Taylor) “authentic musical experience” via
its opposition to “contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial” music. Musical
historian David Sanjeck notes that this constitutive distinction is ideological, observing
that “one of the central issues to rock ideology is authenticity: the degree to which a
musician is able to articulate the thoughts and desires of an audience and not pander to
the ‘mainstream’ by diluting their sound or their message.”27 Thus, what Sanjeck and
others (notably Simon Frith and Andrew Ross) call “rock ideology” mediates between the
consumer’s position in a commercial process and the experiential state brought on by the
immersion in the music and the identification with musicians and other listeners that is
part of that experience.28 Kembrew Mcleod historicizes the textual (re)production of this
ideological narrative of rock authenticity by observing that “the late 1960s and early
1970s was marked by the emergence of “a specific ideology of rock criticism, one that—
to summarize and simplify, valorizes serious, masculine, 'authentic' rock and dismisses
trivial, feminine, 'prefabricated' pop music.”29 As I argue in the third chapter of this
dissertation, the gendered nature of this construction is prefigured in early 1960s
revivalist depictions of the idealized figure of the rural “bluesman” whose presence in the
narrative of rock’s origins serves as both an authenticating ancestor and a repository of
masculinist anxiety.
13
The critical construction of jazz is marked by a similarly gendered rhetorical
opposition between the conflicting demands of an authentically expressive, highly
masculine improvisational aesthetic, and a feminized, seductive, and safe commerciality;
between male instrumentalists and female singers. First expressed in the 1920s as a
division between “hot” jazz, authenticated like the blues by its relation to African
American vernacular sounds, and the “sweet” jazz that dominated popular taste, this
division reasserted itself in the 1930s and 1940s as a long-running argument between
“moldy figs” and “progressives” who pitted vernacular roots against virtuosic selfexpression in championing competing notions of what made non-commercial jazz
authentic. While the entire history of this debate is addressed elsewhere, particularly in
Paul Lopes’s The Rise of a Jazz Art World, and is outside the scope of this dissertation,
my second chapter details the musical and rhetorical attempts by John Birks “Dizzy”
Gillespie to build a narrative, through public statements, performances, articles, and
entrepreneurship, which seamlessly united jazz’s roots in the music of the African
diaspora with progressivist notions of high-art authenticity, while at the same time
maintaining a meaningful presence in a black public sphere where dance music remained
the most meaningful social currency.30
Gillespie’s project, which involved such unlikely collaborators as the Cuban
Conguero Luciano “Chano” Pozo, the literature professor-cum-jazz critic Marshall
Stearns, and the U.S. State Department, can be seen in part as an effort to reconcile two
conflicting notions regarding the constitution of the authentic. One, which permeates
high art, is based on the singular and unique existence of an original, the presence of
which is, according to Walter Benjamin “the prerequisite to the concept of
14
authenticity.”31 In fact, Benjamin’s description of the “aura” of the original in terms of
“its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,
[which has] determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its
existence,” qualities necessarily lacking in any reproduction, tracks closely with the
aesthetic that valorizes jazz as uniquely expressing a musician’s attempts to grapple with
the improvisatory moment.32 At the same time, Gillespie’s embrace and articulation of
Jazz’s African, Afro-Cuban, and African American vernacular origins aligned his project
with narratives that defined authenticity along shared, communally-based principles
which suggested that rather than being unique, locatable and unduplicable, the authentic
could be the product of unlocatable origins and endlessly duplicated. As Karl Hagstrom
Miller observes, these “purist visions of American folk culture developed at the same
time that Jim Crow segregation put its stranglehold on southern states. Their histories
were deeply intertwined.”33 Gillespie’s appropriation and re-deployment of such
narratives represents, I argue, a kind of strategic re-articulation of essentialist notions of
folk culture.
My third chapter, “The Blues in a State of Nature: Origins, Revivals, and
Revisions,” differs from the first two in a number of ways. While the first two, “King
Cole, Crossover, and Containment” and “Manteca: Narrating Musical AfroInternationalism” focus biographically, on Nat “King” Cole and John Birks “Dizzy”
Gillespie respectively, the third chapter intentionally lacks such a central figure. In the
first chapter, Cole helps me illustrate the way that genre distorts and disfigures popular
memory, and how the notion of crossover from one genre to another can retrospectively
imbue a performer with authenticity or rob them of the same quality. In the second
15
chapter, I offer Gillespie as an example of a performer actively attempting to manage the
narratives that define, in critical and commercial terms, the genre in which he performs:
an effort in which the crossover style of Afro-Cuban jazz takes center stage. My third
chapter lacks a biographical focus, not only because it seems desirable to disrupt the
construction of such heroic subjects, but also because I want to emphasize the way that
critical constructions of generic authenticity have displaced the female performers who
pioneered the form in the commercial marketplace, and, as the blues crossed over to a
new, mostly young and white audience in the early 1960s, replaced them with the figure
of the rural male bluesman. In accordance with this aim, the chapter substitutes
“performances” by critical narrators—W. C. Handy, John Hammond, Alan Lomax,
James Luther Dickinson, and Hazel Carby—for performances by musicians, except for
the technologically mediated performances of Robert Johnson and Big Maybelle, the
former via a phonograph record played from the stage at Carnegie Hall, and the latter on
film at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival.
The paradoxical role that such mediation—accomplished through text, oral
testimony, and an evolving series of recording technologies—plays in our understanding
of the blues, a musical form rhetorically defined by its performative immediacy and
purported authenticity, is part of what I hope to illuminate in this third chapter. The
history of blues music is animated by a pattern of periodic revivals, so much so that it
often seems that the music is in a perpetual state of revival, its current practitioners and
aficionados always harkening back to some timeless and lost golden age of careless and
unalienated musical production. Whether it is W. C. Handy describing his encounter
with an anonymous slide guitarist in a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1902, or
16
John Hammond playing Robert Johnson’s records from the stage of Carnegie Hall in
1938, the genre is defined by always-offstage performances which signify authenticity in
a way that material bodies making music in the world never can. In these narratives, the
absences and imperfections of text and recording always point provocatively toward what
the audiences might have seen and heard if they had only encountered these musicians
live.
This construction of the authentic, whether in the always-absent vernacular
formulation or the uniquely present high art context, can be seen as part of a series of
ongoing and complicated responses to modernity. As Regina Bendix argues:
The quest for authenticity is a peculiar longing, at once modern and
antimodern. It is oriented toward the recovery of an essence whose loss
has been realized only through modernity and whose recovery is feasible
only though methods and sentiments created in modernity. [...] The
continued craving for experiences of unmediated genuineness seeks to cut
through what Rousseau has called ‘the wound of reflection,’ a reaction to
modernization's demythologization, detraditionalization, and
disenchantment.34
In the period that I concentrate on the most in the following chapters, between roughly
1947 and 1965, the increasingly audible concern with authenticity as a generic quality
reflects and refracts, I argue, the preamble to and onset of postmodernity or late
capitalism.35 As the traffic in authentic representations and representations of the
authentic gathered speed and volume, groups and individuals mustered textual and
musical resources, and crafted narratives that attested broadly to the meaningful origins
of and connections between identificatory expressions. There was a be-bop revolution, a
rock and roll explosion, a folk revival, and a blues revival, each of which presented, via a
new paradigm or nostalgic framework, a standard for naming and understanding a shared
experience of the musical authentic. In elucidating the ongoing construction of the
17
authentic through these discursive processes, my intention is not to dispense with or
invalidate the notion of authentic experience, but instead to come to grips with how what
is experienced as authenticity functions in the social world of popular music.
The quest for—or construction of—authenticity in the face of modernity that
Bendix describes above, through the construction and use of generic categories by
members of generic communities, can be understood effectively as a kind of social
narrative work. As Frith explains:
…it is through its generic organization that music offers people, even socalled passive at-home listeners, access to a social world, a part in some
sort of social narrative, offers them what Finnegan calls “social
pathways.” In aesthetic terms, musical sounds, ideologies, and activities,
musical texts and their implied contexts, cannot be separated. The
pleasures popular music offers us, the values it carries (and I include
classical music as popular here), have to be related to the stories it tells us
about us in our genre identities. Or, to put this the other way around,
genre analysis must be, by aesthetic necessity, narrative analysis. It must
refer to an implied community, to an implied romance, to an implied plot.
In examining how the elements of popular music work (the sound, the
lyric, the voice, the beat) we always have to take account of their genre
coding—popular musical pleasures can only be understood as genre
pleasures; and genre pleasures can only be understood as socially
structured.36
Frith follows this with an extended syntactic analysis of those elements via a
systemization developed by Franco Fabbri.37 What I want to do instead is to offer the
“genre narrative” as a theoretical framework for understanding how musical meaning is
socially constructed, maintained, transformed and reproduced in the course of musical
and textual acts.
My hope in deploying this construction is to avoid describing musical genres
according to their characteristics because those characteristics are not, I argue,
characteristics in the sense of being fixed or innate musical qualities which we can use to
18
conveniently slot songs or musicians into discrete categories. Rather, those
“characteristics” are actually the accretions of discursive (and social and economic, and
political) process used to explain or describe or assign meaning to musical practice. What
we understand to be genre characteristics are actually a set of arguments about what a
genre’s characteristics are, their relative importance in defining generic authenticity, their
relation to each other, their processes of physical and cognitive transmission, their
relative mutability and their extra-musical significance. I call these arguments narratives
because that is so often their form: narratives or origin, narratives of belonging and
exclusion, narratives of canonization and aesthetic possibility, and so on.
Of course, genre narratives are not narratives in the strictly literary sense, as they
lack singular narrators. But they are discursive formations, rhetorical in purpose and
taking narrative form, dependent on sequential logic to communicate their stories of
origin and relation. As such, I argue, they should be understood as what Frederic
Jameson, elaborating on the work of Kenneth Burke and Claude Levi-Strauss, called
“socially symbolic narratives.”38 As such, I argue, the social construction of genre can be
understood by recourse to what Jameson describes as “a basic analytical or interpretive
principle: the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as
the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”39
It may seem odd to speak of socially constructed relations between musical texts
and performers, archives and embodiments of repertoire, as socially symbolic acts. But,
having established the narrative or rhetorical nature of genrification, I believe that this
passage by Jameson further clarifies why it is that relations based upon notions of form—
which I argue can here be understood broadly as the same characteristics of style that
19
genrification presents as a rationale for categorization—provide a persuasive model for
interpreting these narrative acts as socially symbolic. As Jameson argues,
the starting point will be an immanent description of the formal and
structural peculiarities…yet it must be a description already pre-prepared
and oriented toward transcending the purely formalistic, a movement
which is achieved not by abandoning the formal level for something
extrinsic to it—such as some inertly social “content”—but rather
immanently, by constructing purely formal patterns as a symbolic
enactment of the social within the formal and aesthetic.40
If we explore Jameson’s model further, we can see another rationale for looking for
socially symbolic meaning less within individual texts and more in the narrative
construction of generic relations between texts, as Jameson argues that “the social
contradiction addressed and ‘resolved’ by the formal prestidigitation of narrative must,
however reconstructed, remain an absent cause, which cannot be directly or immediately
conceptualized by the text.”41 Thus, while Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right, Mama” or
Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad’s Blues” may portray a symbolic resolution, that is less my
concern overall than this: that the narrative of belonging that is built up around their
emplacement in genres which are themselves built around historically specific and
contingent constructions of authenticity enacts a symbolic or aesthetic resolution of a
crisis or contradiction that remains off-stage in both the individual work and the details of
the narrative of relation that defines the genre in critical and popular discourse. It is
arguable, however, that these songs with their attached generic meanings, do embody for
performers and listeners, such a resolution, and that this, to some degree, speaks to
without entirely accounting for their experiential pleasures.
I should make it clear that I am not in this dissertation adopting wholesale the
structure that Jameson outlines for the interpretation of form. But I am arguing that the
20
quotidian habit and textual reflex of classifying and categorizing musical acts—of
elaborating on their relation to each other and to the circumstances of their time—is
vulnerable to being interpreted as a narrative construction and can be read as a symbolic
resolution of a real or felt contradiction. The relations between our explanations of the
authenticated histories of rock and roll (or jazz, or blues, or country music, or disco, etc.);
the narratives of ethnic, gendered, and regional difference that those histories relate; and
our feeling for the music in the present is an ideological relation that seeks to affirm our
momentary transcendence by articulating it to an understood-as-stable and coherent
history, a “usable past.”42 To borrow from the explanatory structures developed by
American Studies scholars during the mid-Twentieth Century, we could refer to these
narratives as the creative ground for myths and symbols, but, following later
developments in American cultural studies and critical cultural studies, I argue that they
are myths and symbols which reflexively express and register historically contingent
circumstances and political and economic realities.43
The communicative principles that I see genre narratives taking place under are
well described in Stuart Hall’s 1973 essay “Encoding/Decoding.”44 Rather than a linear
and continuous sender/message/receiver chain, Hall envisioned “a structure produced and
sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments—production,
circulation, distribution, consumption, reproduction.” Hall argued that “while each of
these moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can
guarantee the next,” meaning that each of these “determinate moments” where
“apparatuses, relations and practices” are encoded or decoded into discourse presents a
21
moment where meaning may be modified.45 Referring to the specific articulation of this
process in television, Hall explains that
A ‘raw’ historical event cannot in that form, be transmitted by, say, a
television newscast. Events can only be signified within the aural-visual
forms of the televised discourse. In the moment when a historical event
passed under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal
‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event
must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event.46
Hall is using the term “story” specifically to indicate the way that an actual historical
event is encoded as a “news story” in order to function as a communicative event,
gathering specific meanings and discarding others in the process. But I want to access
here the broader idea that process of placing musical events and performative practices
within the discursive web of meaning that constitutes a genre requires that those events
and practices be similarly encoded as “stories” or narratives in order for their implied
relations to be translated into social practice. The practice of “free improvisation”—the
departure from normative harmonic and rhythmic expectations during an act of
spontaneous musical composition within a performance—becomes intelligible via
reference to a “genre narrative” which positions such actions within the history of jazz
and makes specific meanings available for decoding by listeners (including other
musicians) depending on their own familiarity with and understanding of the “narrative”
which functions, to return to Hall’s terms, as a kind of decoding (and encoding) resource.
This is not to say that, for instance, a recording like Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures is
necessarily displeasing or unintelligible to a listener unfamiliar with the narrative that
explains free jazz as a radical break from be-bop in the late 1950s and early 1960s.47
Such a listener might hear that music as energetic, or discordant, or surprising, or
humorous, or any number of different ways. But they wouldn’t hear it as “free jazz” the
22
way a member of the constellated community where the narrative that defines and
decodes the music in genre terms circulates.
Altman’s notion of genre communities as constellated communities depends on
what he describes as “lateral communication” between receivers, as opposed to “frontal
communication” between senders and receivers. These acts of lateral communication are,
he argues, not only an important part of the constitution of genre communities, they are
also essential to the constitution of genres:
Genres are commonly taken to come into being when a body of texts
shares a sufficient number of semantic and syntactic elements. This
production-driven definition needs to be matched by a reception-driven
definition that recognizes that genres do not exist until they become
necessary to a lateral communication process, that is, until they serve a
constellated community.48
While there is an air of circularity here, I find it convincing and appropriate for the
discursive, socially symbolic understanding of genre that I have outlined so far. Genres
come into being as they become necessary or at least useful, and circulate according to
their effectiveness among and in the self-definition of genre communities, and according
to the cultural capital of their users. Moreover, while Altman argues that his “receptiondriven” formulation requires an entirely different communications model, one that he
does not entirely specify, I find that in my reading, it harmonizes quite well with Hall’s
model, particularly when transposed to the area of popular music.
Because music making can differ greatly from film (in Altman’s model) or
Television (in Hall’s) in terms of the scale and capital required for production, members
of the audience who “consume” and “reproduce” the message may well be involved in
the “production” and “distribution” of messages of their own. Throughout its history the
U.S. Popular music industry has gone through several stages of relative centralization and
23
decentralization, but music making as an overall activity, even music making for the
express purpose of commercial gain, has always been more decentralized than television
or film production. In the course of this dissertation I have found myself repeatedly
referring to “musicians, audiences, critics, and industry actors,” and repeatedly reminding
myself and the reader that these are more coterminous roles than discrete identifications.
Audiences are full of musicians and critics; the A&R representative may be a musician,
and you had better hope that the record producer is; the woman behind the soundboard
might be working on a dissertation on popular music, and so on. Christopher Small’s
invaluable term, “musicking,” more than any other, captures this state of affairs, and
reminds us of the broadly social nature of any musical enterprise by refusing to reduce
the practice of playing to the reified abstraction of music. As Small points out, “music
can articulate many kinds of relationships at once” whereas “words…can deal with things
only one at a time, and there is no way they can be made to bear the cargo of multiple
simultaneous meanings that the gestures of musicking can do.”49
My intention in writing this dissertation has been to offer three distinct but
interlocking accounts of the way that pop music genre narratives have been mobilized in
the production and reproduction of problematic notions of race and authenticity in
popular memory during a crucial transitional period in U.S. cultural history. That period
dates approximately from 1938 to 1965, although, as with any historical schema, there
are always events leading the reader forwards and backwards, and credible arguments for
expanding or contracting a given range. My choice of this range, dating approximately
from John Hammond’s first From Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938,
to Bob Dylan’s electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, reflects a
24
period of intense renegotiation of musical boundaries and meaning in regards to race,
class, and gender. Besides this broad periodicization, there is a kind of high-water mark
of intense redefinition of boundaries and meanings in the mid-to-late 1950s, not
coincidentally concurrent with the emergence of the public protest phase of the southern
civil rights movement. In each account, I have tried to illustrate the way that various
individuals and institutions have, in the narrative citation and transgression of generic
boundaries described by the term “crossover,” shaped normative notions of social
belonging through the construction and reproduction of racialized and gendered notions
of authentic musical experience. As with any subject this rich, there is always more to
say, but I feel that the chapters here do at least begin to sound out a new way to hear
these issues.
While my original conception of this dissertation was as a popular music studies
project within the broad interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies, there are several
components which bring it into the purview of African American Studies and African
American history. These include my biographical treatments of Cole and Gillespie in
these first two chapters, my analysis of Gillespie’s diasporic narrative, and my discussion
of Leroi Jones’s politicization of the notion of “black music” in the third chapter, as well
as the project’s overarching concern with the changing meanings of racial difference and
racial identification during a crucial period in the middle of the 20th century. As a
scholar of European American descent and identification, I tread carefully here,
remembering Nell Irvin Painter’s observation that “for too long we have normalized
whiteness, as though to be white were to be natural, and only those people not counted as
white had racial identities.”50 While the contestation and re-negotiation of black-
25
identified generic musical practice holds center stage here, I have tried to heed Painter’s
suggestion by pointing out that, until that crucial mid-century crossover moment, popular
music was assumed, with the same naturalness that Painter notes above, to be white, an
assumption born of its privilege to remain unmarked by genre at all. In fact, because the
history of musical genre in American popular music, and the history of racial
categorization in American popular music both lead back to Race Records—what Miller
calls “the music industry’s first experiment with market segmentation” in the early
1920s—it is possible to argue that “black music,” which is the most influential sociomusical formation in 20th century American popular music, is constituted via genre.
What this dissertation does not do is too long to list entirely here, but for the sake
of clarity, I do want to specify some limitations. This is not intended to be a complete
investigation of the idea of crossover in popular music, or a complete accounting for the
broad and lively history of racial hybridity in American popular musical genres. Nor is it
even a thorough exploration of genre hybridity during the given period. There are several
important genres—namely western swing and country music—which are entirely absent.
Although the emergence of rock and roll and its rise to a near hegemonic status within the
U.S. music industry is a major theme in these chapters, I do not claim to give anything
like a complete account of that music. In fact, rock and roll, and its transition to “rock”
appears mainly offstage here, its popular gravity acting as a contentious force for
musicians, critics, and audiences involved with jazz, blues, and pop music.
I think that the easiest way to clarify what I am and am not doing in this
dissertation is to look at another text which covers (roughly) the time period and many of
the same themes and subjects as mine, and draw a contrast. Richard J. Ripani’s The New
26
Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm and Blues, 1950-1999 is a good and useful book.51 It’s
well researched and thoughtful, and particularly inspiring in the wealth of technical
musical detail which is, nonetheless, rendered clear to readers who do not speak that
particular language fluently. Ripani’s text performs a number of feats that this
dissertation does not attempt, including mounting a convincing argument about how the
manner of music making that was called “Rhythm and Blues” changed, and how it
changed popular music in an extended version of what I have periodicized as the
“crossover era.” But, in doing so, Ripani’s text implicitly and explicitly argues for a
degree of stability and coherence in the formulation of rhythm and blues as a genre that
this dissertation resists.
I should be clear that this is not intended as a criticism of Ripani’s work, but is
instead intended to point out that even a book which argues persuasively for a new
system for understanding musical and commercial developments in American popular
music depends on the author and reader sharing and confirming, rather than questioning
and deconstructing, notions of generic belonging and bordering. This is not to say that
Ripani’s approach is uncritical. He recognizes the chimerical nature of generic discourse.
He accounts for the history of “Rhythm and Blues” as a “trade category,” distinguishing
between commerce and musical style while recognizing their interdependent nature.52 In
asserting “the new blue music” as a system that connects and encompasses such periods
as “The Soul Era,” and the “Funk and Disco Reign,” Ripani performs a narrative act, an
act of genrification, which depends on genres for its base materials. My work here is to
shed some light on the nature of those base materials, their creation and constitution, and
27
how they interact and combine with each other under the discursive pressure exerted by
users like Ripani.
Michael Foucault argued that “we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions,
each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity.”53 I don’t claim to
have performed such a feat here, but I have attempted to show both the construction of
genre based continuities and the elisions that such continuities accomplish. Doing so,
while relating a historically placed narrative, is something like the textual equivalent of
trying to keep all the lights on while rewiring a house. Despite their inexact and
sometimes even misleading nature, the ubiquity of genre terms in musical histories is
based on their overall utility in conveying sometimes complex contextual and historical
information—what Foucault calls “continuity” above—in a compact manner. Eschewing
genre as a device and attending to its construction, while at the same time placing a
historical narrative in relation to a popular memory shaped by genre effects, has here
generated three very long chapters.
In these chapters generic and subgeneric terms like “jazz,” “swing,” “rock and
roll,” “rock,” and “rhythm and blues” are presented as if preceded by the phrase “what is
or was broadly thought and spoken of as ….” Actually adding such a phrase would be
unreasonably awkward, but I do try to keep the contingent nature of genre terms and their
inter-relation with the stylistic continuities they claim to describe obvious within the text.
The incredibly broad range of users and wildly uneven application of terms like this also
means that their punctuation varies greatly. This calls for some clarification of my own
usage. In this text, I do not capitalize genre terms unless I am quoting someone who
does, or unless the term is being used to refer specifically to the title of a chart from a
28
trade magazine or other source. “Rhythm and Blues” (or “Rhythm & Blues,” or “R&B”
is the name, starting in June, 1949, of what had been the “Race Music” chart in Billboard
Magazine, while “rhythm and blues” is the broader discursive rendering of the secular,
commercial music by African American musicians which the chart tracked the sales of.
In my own usage I use “rock and roll” rather than “rock & roll,” and make an argument
for the contingent genrification of the related term “rock” in the conclusion of this
dissertation. The term “Delta blues” is used with “Delta” capitalized because it refers to
a specific geographic area.
There are categorical terms that are, to my mind, wider than genres and which
also need to be understood here not as instrumental uses but instead as references to
instrumental usage. The terms “black music” and “white music” appear in quotation
marks in order to ward off essentialist notions which would like specific musical
impulses to specifically racialized bodies. Doing so is necessary, I feel, in order to make
it clear that I understand and attend to the social construction of racial categories, which
is one of the guiding principles of this dissertation. In doing so, I have to also
acknowledge that there are distinct continuities of embodied and archival musical
knowledge and practice that have been and are transmitted within racially bound groups.
“Black music” is not the same thing as “music created, practiced and maintained by
African Americans (or any descendents of the African Diaspora)” even though the former
is and has been commonly used to refer to and construct the latter in a particular light.
This is an important enough distinction, especially given the explicitly political
mobilization of the term “black music” in the early 1960s, that it is rehearsed more than
once in the following chapters. This is also a tricky distinction because part of the
29
cultural effect of “black music” is a result of its being understood, by musicians and
audiences of varied racial identification, as “black.” Attending to the reproduction of that
effect should not be taken as an endorsement of the notion that this effect is all there is.
There are two terms that I do use instrumentally, although not naively. I use the term
“vernacular music” rather than “folk music” to indicate, largely or significantly nonprofessionalized music making activity, because “folk” has been mustered into service as
a genre term, and because the definition of specific, historically determined meanings for
particular kinds of musical activities as “folk” is one of the investigative nodes of this
dissertation. As a genre, “folk music” presents a fascinating set of contradictions. I can
go into a record store, or go to an online digital music service, and purchase what’s
categorized as “folk” music, made by professional “folk” musicians, even though the
term itself originally referred to music made explicitly outside of and even in opposition
to commercial channels. The emergence of “folk” as a genre and as the primary
originating expression of what I call “unpopular popular music”—music that is
distinguished in the popular marketplace by its opposition to or transcendence of the
marketplace—is an important and paradoxical part of the interaction between popular
music and popular memory in the 20th century United States. While this dissertation does
not fully account for that emergence, I do think it usefully illuminates its effects.
Part of my use of “vernacular” rather than “folk” is to avoid the bright line between
“folk” and commercial or popular music that is contemplated by the guiding ideology of
what William G. Roy calls the “folk project.”54 While I do use the term “popular music”
to refer to specifically professionalized musical styles, songs, recordings, and artifacts
and practices of all kinds, I understand that whatever circulates commercially also
30
circulates and habituates in the everyday vernacular practices and relations of musicians
and audiences, and that its meaning coheres and transforms through its travels along these
conjoined circuits.
The history that I have attempted to illuminate here is conceived as taking place
along a broad continuum, between the alienating, commodifying relations of an
industrialized musical apparatus and the untotalized, playful, and potentially resistant
relations of groups and individuals who attempt to negotiate that apparatus on a daily
basis. Despite the difficulty and inherent awkwardness that comes with writing such a
history, I think it’s a worthwhile and helpful endeavor because it helps us understand the
constitution of popular memory within popular culture and vice versa, and because, as
Stuart Hall so cogently and succinctly argues:
Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a
culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in
that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where
hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where
socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply
‘expressed.’ But it is one of the places where socialism might be
constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters.55
Genre is one of the places where we can most clearly see the social nature of music,
because genre accrues from out attempts to communicate the experience of music, and
specifically the experience of music as meaningfully authentic, in all of that term’s
myriad and contradictory meanings. But, genre is also part of the marketplace, and one
of the places where the work of recasting our social relations as commercial transactions
is most energetically pursued. This, the mass production of authentic musical experience,
is perhaps the final contradiction that any musical genre narrative seeks to resolve.
31
Notes
1
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge,
1989. p.67-68.
2
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1996. p. 91.
3
Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity the Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. p. 23.
4
See for example “Harlem Disc Jockey Says Rock ’n Roll Not ‘Sepian’.” The Chicago
Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., April 14, 1956. Or Freed, Alan.
“Just Where Did Rock ‘n’ Roll Get Its Start Is Question.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition)
(1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., July 23, 1956.
5
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Taylor &
Francis U.S., 2008. p. 15-36
6
Altman, Rick. Film/genre. London: BFI Pub., 1999. Pages. 166-178 are especially
applicable to the notion of “genre communities.”
7
Frith, Performing Rites p. 99.
8
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. p. 21
9
Ibid. p. 18
10
Ibid. p. 19
11
Atton, Chris. “Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the ‘Democratic
Conversation’.” Popular Music and Society 33, no. 4 (2010): 517–531. p. 522
12
Brundage, W. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and southern Identity.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. p. 4
13
Ibid.
14
Altman, Rick. Film/genre. London: BFI, 1999. p. 161.
15
Ibid.
16
See for example, Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Macmillan, 1983. Barthes,
Roland, Honoré de Balzac, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. S/Z. New York: Hill
32
and Wang, 1974. Casey, Bernadette. Television Studies: The Key Concepts. Taylor &
Francis, 2008. Cohen, Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17, no. 2
(1986): 203–218. Coppola, Nancy, and Bill Karis. Technical Communication,
Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions.
Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Pub., 2000. Derrida, Jacques, and Avital Ronell. “The Law of
Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–81. Duff, David. Modern Genre Theory.
Harlow England; New York: Longman, 2000. Feuer, Jane. “Genre Study and
Television.” In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Contemporary Television
Criticism, edited by Allen, Robert C., 138–159. London: Routledge, 1992. Freedman,
Aviva, and Peter Medway. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, 1995. Miller,
Carolyn R. “Environmental Impact Statements and Rhetorical Genres: an Application of
Rhetorical Theory to Technical Communication”. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1986.
———. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984): 151–67.
Neale, Stephen. Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute,
2002. Daniel Chandler provides a very good theoretical overview and review of relevant
work in the field, although musical genre is notably missing from his survey, as is
Altman’s work in film genre. See Chandler, Daniel. “Introduction to Genre Theory.” An
Introduction to Genre Theory, n.d.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html. Accessed 3/06/2012. A
bibliography of critical work in musical genre and of pop music studies which attend to
genre formation should include:: Atton, Chris. “Fan Discourse and the Construction of
Noise Music as a Genre.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 3 (September 1,
2011): 324–342. ———. “Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the
‘Democratic Conversation’.” Popular Music and Society 33, no. 4 (2010): 517–531. —
——. “Writing About Listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism.” Popular
Music 28, no. 01 (2009): 53–67. Borthwick, Stuart, and Ron Moy. Popular Music
Genres: an Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bourguignon, Erika. “Relativism
and Ambivalence in the Work of M. J. Herskovits.” Ethos 28, no. 1 (2000): 103–114.
Fast, Susan. “Genre, Subjectivity and Back-up Singing in Rock Music.” The Ashgate
Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009): 171–188. Frith, Simon. Performing
Rites: on the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1996. ———. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’roll. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009.
———. “Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the Blues Tradition.” Past &
Present, no. 169 (November 1, 2000): 132–160. ———. “The Blues, The Folk, and
African American History.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11, no. 1
(2001): 17–35. Hesmondhalgh, David. “Audiences and Everyday Aesthetics.” European
Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (November 1, 2007): 507–507–527.
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Keith Negus. Popular Music Studies. London; New York:
Arnold; Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press, 2002.
Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Mazullo,
Mark. “Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train as Rock ‘n’ Roll History.” The
Musical Quarterly. 81, no. 2 (1997): 145. Middleton, Richard. Voicing the Popular: on
the Subjects of Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. Miller, Karl Hagstrom.
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Duke
33
University Press, 2010. O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine
Griffin. Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Rothenbuhler, E. W. “For-the-record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a
Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music -Cambridge- 26, no. 1 (2007): 65–82.
Sanneh, Kelefa. “The Rap Against Rockism.” The New York Times, October 31, 2004,
sec. Arts / Music. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/31sann.html. Titon,
Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In
Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Rosenberg, Neil V.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music
Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. London; New York: Arnold; Co-published in the
U.S.A. by Oxford University Press,, 2000. ———. “Policing Bohemia, Pinning up
Grunge: The Music Press and Generic Change in British Pop and Rock.” Popular Music
12, no. 03 (1993): 289–300. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the
Invention of the Blues. 1st ed. New York: Amistad, 2004. ———. How the Beatles
Destroyed Rock “n” Roll: an Alternative History of American Popular Music. Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
17
Derrida, Jacques, and Avital Ronell. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1
(1980): 55–81.
18
Feuer, Jane (1992): “Genre Study and Television”. In Robert C Allen (Ed.): Channels
of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. London: Routledge,
138-59. p. 144.
19
The relation between genre and region is an area that, I believe, is still rich for
exploration, in that both are contested and contestable discursive formations which appeal
to notions of objective truth while being in practice subjective and fluxy, and in that
geographic regions often serve as a de facto basis for generic and subgeneric division, as
in, for example, “southern literature” or “Western swing.” For an excellent overview of
the history of diaspora in the Africanist context, which I believe clarifies its relation to
these other concepts of rhetorical binding and linking. See Edwards, Brent. The Practice
of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text,
no. 66 (2001): 45. For an analysis of the formation of nations which similarly speaks to
these concerns, see Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.
20
The problem with such a narrative is that, while it is not entirely false, it is not entirely
true either. Moreover, it ignores and elides important nuances of historical action and
minimizes racism in the past, making it harder to perceive in the present. Pete Daniel’s
book Failed Revolutions: The South in the 1950s makes the disconnection (and some
connections) between musical and social or political integrations more clear.
34
21
See “Literature as Equipment for Living” in Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of
Literary Form; Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1967. p. 293-304.
22
Bertrand, Michael T. Race, Rock, and Elvis. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
23
Roy, Don. Memphis: The Original Broadway Production. Shout Factory!, 2011. For an
analysis of this production and its relation to the retroactive narration of rock and roll
genre history, see chapter one of this dissertation.
24
Barker, Hugh, with Lynval Taylor. Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular
Music. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
25
Ibid. p. ix.
26
Kelley, Robin D. G. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’.” The American Historical
Review 97, no. 5 (December 1, 1992): 1400–1408.
27
Sanjek, David. “Pleasure and Principles: Issues of Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock
‘n’ Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4, no. 2 (March 1, 1992): 12–21.
28
Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’roll. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981. p. 165. Ross, No Respect. p. 72.
29
Mcleod argues that rock critics function as Gramscian “organic intellectuals,” which is
true, in that these critics do help establish commonsense understandings of rock’s
ideological formations. While not disputing this construction, I prefer to think of them as
narrators, in keeping with the discursive conceit that I use to describe logocentric
meaning making, whether it is textual, oral, aural or performative, and to avoid
naturalizing the semantic equivalence that could too easily be drawn between “organic”
intellectuals and “authentic” genre communities. Such a slide threatens to obscure rock
criticism’s professional and ideological roots in jazz criticism. See Mcleod, Kembrew
30
Lopes, Paul Douglas. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
31
Benjamin, Walter. “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968. p. 220.
32
Ibid.
33
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age
of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010. p. 227
34
Bendix, The Quest for Authenticity. p. 8
35
35
Following Jameson, I prefer to figure expressions of postmodernism within a frame of
extended but transformative continuity rather than absolute rupture. See Jameson,
Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991.
36
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
37
Fabbri, Franco. “What Kind of Music?” Popular Music: a Year Book 2 (1982): 131–
143.
38
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Psychology Press, 2002. p. 65-67, 174-176.
39
Ibid. p. 62.
40
Ibid. p. 63.
41
Ibid p. 220.
42
For more on the mobilization of a “usable past,” within a narrative act, see Zamora,
Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: the Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the
Americas. Cambridge; New York, NY, U.S.A: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
43
For a recent texts that historicize and critique work done under the sign of American
Studies, including its relation to critical cultural studies, see Johns Hopkins University.
Press., and American Studies Association. Encyclopedia of American Studies. [Baltimore,
Md.]: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a
Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.Maddox, Lucy.
Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999. Oppermann, Matthias. “American Studies in Dialogue: Radical
Reconstructions Between Curriculum and Cultural Critique”. Campus, 2010. For an
older but still important history of American Studies (inter) disciplinary development see
Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: a Strategy for Grounded Inquiry.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1980. ———. “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American
Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31,
no. 3 (1979): 293–337. ———. “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture
Studies.” Prospects 4 (1979): 517–547.
44
Stuart Hall. “Encoding/Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon
During, 507–517. London: Routledge, 1999. For recent reconsiderations of this model,
see Pillai, Poonam. “Rereading Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model.”
Communication Theory 2, no. 3 (August 1, 1992): 221–233.
36
Wren-Lewis, Justin. “The Encoding / Decoding Model: Criticisms and Redevelopments
for Research on Decoding.” Media, Culture & Society 5, no. 2 (April 1, 1983): 179 –197.
45
Ibid
46
Ibid p. 508
Taylor, Cecil. Unit Structures. [New York, N.Y.]; Los Angeles, Calif.: Blue Note
Records; Manufactured by United Artists Music and Records Group, 1970.
47
48
Altman, Film/Genre, 162.
49
Small, Christopher. Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1998. p. 8 ff.
50
Painter, Nell Irvin. southern History Across the Color Line. Gender & American
Culture. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. p. 3.
51
Ripani, Richard J. The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm and Blues, 1950-1999.
Jackson, Miss.; Northam: University Press of Mississippi; Roundhouse [distributor],
2006.
52
Ibid. p. 6.
53
Foucault, Michel. Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2010. p. 23
54
Roy, William G. Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in
the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. The term “folk project” is
used throughout.
55
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” edited by Samuel, Raphael.
London: Routledge, 1981. p.453.
37
&+$37(51. KING COLE, CROSSOVER, AND CONTAINMENT In music-historic discourses, the retrospective construction of wellbounded, organically unified race traditions–musicological corollary to the
infamous one-drop rule–has tended to confine people’s lived experience
(including the experience of racism) within the bounds of contemporary
ideological categories. Performers, genres, texts, and practices not
consonant with dominant conceptions of racial differences have as a result
often been elided from academic, journalistic, and popular representations
of the history of American music.
Christopher Waterman1
The everyday, plagiaristic commerce between white and black musics—
between, strictly speaking, the European diatonic scale and the African
American non-diatonic harmonies—has been generic and not exceptional.
But it is important to remember that this overexchanged and overbartered
record of miscegenerated cultural production everywhere bespeaks a racist
history of exploitation exclusively weighted to dominant white interests.
Given such a history, it is no wonder that terms like “imitation” are often
read directly as “theft” and “appropriation,” and that white definitions of
“authenticity” are mismatched with black essentialisms like “roots” and
“soul.”
Andrew Ross2
King Cole
For a singer who died in 1965, Nat “King” Cole was remarkably busy in the
spring of 2009, releasing a digital EP and a full length CD of new recordings, including
collaborations with his daughter Natalie Cole, Will. I. Am of the Black-eyed Peas, The
Roots, Cee-Lo Green, and Barack Obama. The records in question are the full-length
album Nat King Cole Re:Generations and the three-song digital EP Voices of Change,
Then and Now.3 The songs on Re:Generations feature eclectic contemporary remixes of
both well known and obscure Nat Cole recordings, while Voices of Change offers two
songs in the ballad style more commonly associated with the famous African American
38
crooner and a previously unreleased up-tempo march called “We Are Americans, Too.”
That song is unusual for its overt political comment, a rarity in Cole’s oeuvre. Two of
the songs on Voices of Change include introductory excerpts from Barack Obama’s
inaugural speech. Both of the records were released in February, timed to coordinate
with Black History Month and the historic inauguration of America’s first African
American president. That same month in 2009 Natalie Cole received the Best Traditional
Pop Vocal Grammy award for her album Still Unforgettable which, like her 1991 album
of standards, Unforgettable, includes a “duet” created in the recording studio by mixing
her new vocal and the master tapes of her father’s performances.4
In a video produced to help promote Re:Generations, Capitol Records executive
Rick Camino states “I thought that [the record] was a genius approach to…trying to
really reintroduce a legacy.”5 Certainly, the posthumous marketing of performers is
nothing new in the music business, and Camino’s statement could come from any record
company functionary touting the repackaging of pop star no longer among the living. In
fact, in a business which historically, as cultural critic Ta Nehisi Coates recently
observed, “has shunned nothing save red ink,” the commercial reanimation of performers
capable of moving units—particularly those unlike Cole who lack estates to send
royalties to—is far from noteworthy.6 But the case of Nat Cole is something different.
Cole’s performative arc—from virtuoso pianist to popular ballad singer to (literally)
disembodied voice—and his generic arc—from jazz to pop—and his historically
significant breach of racial barriers in the commercial music market, all make it an
attractive proposition to take Camino’s statement more or less at face value and ask why
39
Cole’s legacy might not be self-evident to even informed and engaged musical
consumers.
In fact, I argue that the discursive imprint of Nat Cole’s presence, persona, and
performances reveals how genre—and specifically the racially framed notions of generic
authenticity associated with the critical histories of jazz, rhythm and blues, and early rock
and roll—shapes and disciplines the history of American popular music, and through that
history, American popular memory. Because histories of popular music are most often
written around retrospectively constructed generic ideals, there are significant elisions in
those histories, which this chapter and this dissertation intend to address. As Elijah Wald
notes in the introduction to a similarly revisionist account:
One thing I concluded very early on in this exploration was that the words
“jazz” and “rock” were getting in the way. Both genres have inspired such
devotion and spawned such vast critical and historical literatures that it is
difficult to put them in perspective. In the creation of their canons, certain
artists and styles have been examined in exhaustive detail while others
have been ignored, often with little regard for which were more popular or
more respected in their time. I understand the value of those canons—like
all canons, they define and aesthetic and are both useful and
illuminating—but because they account for such an immense proportion
of the writing on American popular music, it has become hard to see
beyond, around, under, and through them and to make sense of the broader
picture into which they fit.7
This is not to say that my purpose and Wald’s are exactly the same. Wald’s book How
The Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music
is, as it claims, an attempt to craft a comprehensive re-narration of American popular
music centered around what was actually, at the time, constituted as popular between the
1920s and 1960s. My concern, more theoretical and critical, is with the processes by
which generic authenticity is constituted in popular and critical discourse. But I share
with Wald and other revisionist scholars of American popular music a commitment to
40
recovering historical subjectivities and revealing the workings of power in popular
memory. As an American Studies acolyte, I am particularly concerned with how power
and powerlessness are reflected in the crucial areas of race, class, and gender.
The term “legacy” may be suspect in the mouths of record executives promoting
work that they have a stake in, even by historically important musicians, but it is
applicable here. Nat “King” Cole appeared in more than 20 films between 1945 and
1965 and was the first African American performer with his own weekly television
variety show. He regularly placed songs in the Billboard top ten from 1943 to 1964, sold
millions of records worldwide, and his 150 charting singles remains a record for a Capitol
Records artist.8 Jazz critic Gene Lees asserts that, in 1949 and 1950, Cole was “the most
popular and powerful male singer in the U.S., probably in the world.”9 As noted earlier,
Cole’s recordings regularly violated the racially segregated sales charts of his era,
appearing often on “white” Popular and “black” Rhythm and Blues charts and even
occasionally on the Country and Western charts.10 He pioneered what has become an
iconic jazz instrumental group format—the piano, bass, and guitar trio—and has been
publicly cited as an influence by a dizzying range of artists, including Ray Charles, Willie
Dixon, Percy Mayfield, and Chuck Berry. And Nat Cole reached wider and deeper into
the mass white audience defined as the mainstream of the U.S. music industry than any
African American singer ever had before, a feat which may have a seemingly
counterintuitive relation to his current place in the written and remembered history of
Post-World-WarTwo American popular music.
This is not to claim that Cole is forgotten or unknown. He has an eclectic
constituency, one which includes (some) jazz critics, professional musicians like those
41
who participated in the Re:Generations project, and thousands of devoted fans. Some of
these fans are old enough to remember him as a contemporary recording artist, while
others may have discovered him through their parents’ record collections, or through
Natalie Cole’s first posthumous duet in the late 1990s, or through his appearance on
movie soundtracks like 2009’s Watchmen, or even through the ubiquitous holiday
presence of his recording of “The Christmas Song,” which was, in 1948, Cole’s first
million-selling song. One of the ways to see a representation of that fandom is by
searching on the video sharing and distribution site Youtube.com for “Nat King Cole.”
The search returns almost 25,000 videos uploaded over the last decade.11 These videos
vary in content: some consist of old performance films or clips from TV shows; others
are homemade collages or songs set to still photos. The most intriguing and, I think,
revealing, are videos of records being played on jukeboxes or turntables. Videos like this
turn up for a host of songs released as early as the 1920s and as late as the 1970s, but,
from my observation, seem to most often accompany songs released between 1940 and
the mid 1960s. These videos range from still shots of spinning black vinyl discs, or
dimly glowing Wurlitzers in neon lit rooms, to elaborate films which document the act of
playing and listening to the recording in loving detail. In one of the latter examples, the
camera pans lovingly over and around an HMV102 phonograph player as the machine
plays a 78 RPM recording of the King Cole Trio performing “Sweet Lorraine.”12 We see
the thick black shellac disc with the blue Capitol Records label spinning under a needle
attached to a large, circular cartridge at the end of an improbably thick and smooth silver
tone arm. The camera moves across the record and tilts upwards to show the HMV logo,
a dog sitting by the horn of a gramophone player, accompanied by the words “His
42
Master’s Voice” on the inside of the cover. The sound we hear comes out of the HMV’s
internal, acoustic horn, into a microphone on the camera and, when we watch it, out of
whatever speakers are attached to the computer we are sitting at. Although this one has
no information except what is in the title, videos like this often feature extensive captions
that identify the manufacturer, model, and year number of the playback equipment,
details intended to authenticate the experience depicted in a way that the sound alone
cannot.
The overall effect is an offer to forget that what you are watching is the result of
one piece (or more) of recording technology being pointed at another, that the sound you
are hearing is only reaching your ears through your computer speakers, that the video
itself is an endlessly duplicable recording of a unique event which consists entirely of the
“performance” of an endlessly duplicable recording. As a text, this video presents a
fascinating complication for some of the concepts presented by Walter Benjamin in “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” If we take the “original” here to
be the initial performance by the King Cole Trio, and understand “tradition” to indicate
the face-to-face communication of musical performance, then, following Benjamin’s
analysis, the recording on the disc “detaches the reproduced object [and here I would
tentatively substitute “performance,” while noting that it is not an unproblematic
substitution from the domain of tradition [and]…substitutes a plurality of copies for a
unique existence.”13 However, If we consider the true subject of the video to be the
performance of the HMV102 in playing the record we are still substituting “a plurality of
copies for a unique existence,” but I think it is arguable that we are no longer so clearly
detached from tradition, given the proliferation of videos like this on Youtube, each of
43
which presents a documentary-style recording of a “face-to-face” encounter between a
listener and an elaborate and obsolete piece of machinery. Each of these instances
involves, to some degree, an encounter that is still repeatable, as iterations of
performative tradition or ritual are, as well as the duplicable representation that the video
recording of that moment clearly is. If it is true, as Benjamin argued, that “mechanical
reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” then
these videos suggest, to me, attempts to return the sound-objects created by electromechanical recording and reproduction to tradition; to enter into (felt-as) authentic
ritualistic relationships with them and with the duplicable technology that reproduces
them.14 As such, we might see them as attempts to re-territorialize the relationship
between listener and listened-to forged during what Toynbee calls “the documentary
period” of recording aesthetics, between 1890 and the early 1960s, a period marked by
“the pursuit of sonic fidelity, the obsessive search for the wholeness of a performance
nonetheless constituted in lack. 15
Like the 78 RPM shellac recording of “Sweet Lorraine” in the example above,
Nat Cole’s presence in the present is often as a signifier of the past, a complicated and
perceivable non-presence. Youtube’s comments section allows viewers to rate comments
by other viewers, and the highest rated comments on Cole’s videos are overwhelmingly
nostalgic, praising the videos and their accompanying songs for their evocation of
wonderful memories, or by positive comparison with “what passes for music today.” For
example, the top-rated comment for a live version of “When I Fall in Love” complains
“What happened to music? This is the best kind of music. Nowadays, it’s all sex,
money, and violence. Back then, music was so perfect.”16 While many of Cole’s albums
44
are still in (or back in) print, the bulk of his circulating catalog is made up of
compilations whose fastidiously old fashioned covers almost always depict a smiling
black man dressed in a tuxedo or a sweater and whose contents often repackage Cole’s
most familiar material in search of buyers motivated more by nostalgia than either
novelty or coherence. The ghostliness of his presence is perhaps starkest on the
posthumous duets with his daughter Natalie on the songs “Unforgettable” and “Walkin’
My Baby Back Home,” recordings whose existence depends on the ability of recording
equipment to manipulate time and space and whose appeal is, to some degree, predicated
on Nat Cole’s absence from the field of living performers and presence as an aural
signifier of the past.17 As such, these songs can almost be thought of as tripartite
collaborations between a living singer, the commercial and technological apparatus of the
music industry itself, and the memories of various members of the audience. Memory is
always a factor in our efforts to make musical sense out of perceived sound, as I argue in
the introduction to this dissertation, it is one of the places where genre intersects musical
meaning making. In these songs, and in similar posthumous duets recorded by Hank
Williams Jr. with the master tapes of his father’s recordings, memory functions as a
primary guide to musical pleasure.18 Even listeners unfamiliar with the works of Hank
Williams Sr. or Nat Cole are given extensive guidance on how to “remember” them in the
graphics, videos, press releases, and other publicity materials that accompany the release
of these songs.19
In one sense it is not so unusual that a popular performer would, after the passage
of time, become the provenance of specialists and sentimentalists. Popular music
marketing often depends on an exaggerated currency or an exaggerated obsolescence as a
45
means of fostering identification and fantasy between music and audiences. In his
narrative placement as a signifier of the past, Cole is not unlike Frank Sinatra or Bing
Crosby. But this process of popular memorization and memorialization is not transparent
or to be taken for granted, and investigating how and why such a popular performer is (or
is not) remembered can help us understand the nexus of commerce, desire and aesthetics
that controls the dynamic tension between popular memory and popular art. Moreover,
given the arc of his career, the range of performers he influenced, the depth of his talent,
and the eclectic nature of his achievements, Nat Cole plays a surprisingly minor role in
the popular and critical narratives crafted to explain the development of popular music in
the post-war era, particularly in narratives devoted to African American music, where one
might expect to find him.
The following list is intended to be representational, rather than comprehensive,
but I think it communicates a sense of the critical lacuna that Cole inhabits. Despite his
pioneering achievements, you will find nothing about Cole in such iconic texts as Amiri
Baraka’s Blue’s People (1962) or his later volume, Black Music (1965).20 Nat Cole is a
near footnote in Eileen Southern’s encyclopedic and thorough The Music of Black
Americans (1974). A search through Portia Maultsby and Mellonee V. Burnim’s very
thorough and informative African American Music: An Introduction (2006) turns up not
one mention of Nat Cole. Cole does appear briefly in Mark Anthony Neal’s engaging
and theoretically provocative What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black
Public Culture (1999) as a “sepia Sinatra,” a somewhat ironic title since it was Cole who,
in 1953, introduced a down-on-his luck Sinatra to the young arranger Nelson Riddle, with
46
whom Sinatra went on to make a series of important, thematically unified records which
returned him to the public eye and expanded the parameters of mature pop music.21
Neal’s discussion of “sepia Sinatras” cites Nelson George, who used the same
designation for Cole in his popular revisionist history The Death of Rhythm and Blues.22
George, in turn, cites Albert Shaw, whose 1971 Honkers and Shouter: the Golden Years
of Rhythm and Blues is still considered a definitive factual (if not theoretical or
historiographic) account of rhythm and blues as a genre.23 Still, Cole and other “sepia
Sinatras” like Charles Brown and Pvt. Cecil Gant are mentioned only briefly, as Shaw
considers their style of African American ballad singing to fall on the edges of the
rhythm and blues genre whose history he narrates.24 Unsurprisingly, Cole rarely appears
in histories of rock and roll, except as an embodiment of the old-fashioned pop style that
rock and roll is so often positioned against. Much more surprisingly, despite his
instrumental improvisational prowess, the high profile of the trio in jazz circles in the
1940s, and the influence of his trio on other jazz trios, Cole rarely appears in histories of
jazz and does not even rate a mention in Ken Burns’s ten hour documentary Jazz, a film
with ambitious designs on the shape of popular memory25. As George Lipsitz rightly
notes, Jazz is “not just a film about history, [it is a] production [that] makes history by
condensing the complex and conflicted history of jazz music into an allegory of national
identity.”26 Nat Cole is also nowhere to be found in the volume in which this observation
appears, Lipsitz’s ambitious and provocative 2007 volume Footsteps in the Dark: the
Hidden Histories of Popular Music, perhaps because he is in some sense, hiding in plain
sight.
47
“Could If I Wanted To Though!” September 2nd, 1959: Las Vegas, Nevada
Nat “King” Cole sounds like he’s having a ball onstage. It’s almost 5:00 AM, and
getting near the end of a very long night: a recording session in front of a live audience at
the Sands Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.27 Winding up the song “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock
and Roll,” he exclaims “Hey, I got carried away over there” before tearing, with obvious
relish, into the song’s closing refrain “I’ve got news for you, Nathaniel must refuse
you…Mr. Cole…won’t rock and roll!”28 Over the closing crescendo of the large band
behind him, he stretches the middle vowels of the words “Cole” and “Roll” with
exuberant precision, extending “Cole” approximately twice as long and “roll” four times
as long as in previous choruses. Then he adds slyly “could if wanted to though!” as the
horns, piano, bass and drums behind him raise the volume one last time and then take
one…two…three…and…four…resoundingly emphasized steps down the scale to close
the song with a dramatic but tightly controlled crash on the final chord.
On paper, “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock and Roll” is a trifle, a wry novelty song version
of the kind of complaint voiced by many older pop and jazz performers following the
emergence of rock and roll as a commercial force in the late 1950s. In performance,
released for the first time in 2000 as an added track on a remastered version of the 1960
album Nat King Cole at the Sands, it’s something different. The band, including
longtime Cole accompanists John Collins on guitar and Lee Young on drums, gleefully
presents a mini-medley of Nat’s iconic ballads—songs like “Mona Lisa,” Nature Boy”
and “Too Young”—arranged as rock and roll numbers with over-dramatic stops and
corny references to Elvis, hepcats, and hot rod kings. The musicians play with precision
and flair, and sound as if they might be having fun playing rock and roll at the same time
48
they are making fun of how rock and roll is played. It is, I would argue, similar to the
dynamic that animates Chuck Berry’s song “Maybelline,” which began life in the black
clubs of East St. Louis as a parody of the country song “Ida Red.”29 Both songs are
performance pieces that draw upon and exploit generic expectation and disidentification.
Cole’s audience would be unlikely to sit still for an entire evening of rock and roll, just as
Berry’s would likely reject a whole night’s performance by an “authentic” country band.
But the camp performance of a single song makes the pleasures of the generic other
briefly available while at the same time keeping a conscious and overt sense of
identification with that other firmly at bay. There is an element of overt ridicule, but the
pleasures of the performance are multifaceted and do not turn entirely on that element.
Berry’s performance works in part by exploiting the similarities between country music
and rhythm and blues, as well as the tension that accompanies the differing racial
identification of the two genres; Cole’s performance demonstrates that, though he is not a
rock and roll singer, he could perhaps, as he claims, be one if he wanted to.
Rarely identified as a rock and roll singer except once by a group of white
supremacists that attacked him onstage in Alabama—an incident we will examine in
detail later in this chapter—Cole tears into the song, bringing convincing energy and faux
drama to both the hopped up versions of his ballads and intervening dramatic soliloquies
like this:
When a guy has got an eye for some tomata
He would never dare to call her lady fair.
If he doesn’t call his girl an alligator
He’s the lowest form of human, he’s a square.
When Tin Pan Alley serenades a beauty,
Do they sing of Rose Marie or Sweet Lorraine?30
No, they dedicate a song to Tutti Frutti
Who’s as tender as a dame…from Mickey Spillane
49
In these lyrics, particularly in the identification of rock and roll as a product of Tin Pan
Alley in the verse above, and in subsequent lines like “one-two-three-o’clock, four
o’clock rock/you gotta play rock or else go in hock,” we can hear voiced a commonsense
understanding among showbiz professionals at the time: that rock and roll was a passing
fad, a shoddy commercial boondoggle, and, like any other popular musical style, a set of
practicable, performable musical conventions not tied to or expressive of any particular
fixed social or musical identity. Rock and roll was, in other words, not any more
authentic or expressive of its audience’s deeper feelings or existential state than any other
musical form, and likely much less so than serious jazz or the mature pop of a singer like
Cole or Sinatra. It was a view held by many musicians, industry figures, and cultural
critics at the time, and one that has an odd mirror in the boos and shouts of leftist and leftleaning folk purists who, a few years later in 1965 would reject Bob Dylan’s turn from
“authentic” folk-style performance to electrified rock music based on a similar
understanding of rock and roll as a commercial product, and not a particularly well-made
one at that.31
Recovering this historical subjectivity requires us to put aside much of the
received wisdom that defines both the early history of rock and roll and the place of its
“descendent” genre, rock, in American popular culture and criticism.32 Particularly, we
need to peel back the notion of the genre’s exceptional authenticity, a narrative posture
that has been defined in some quarters as “rockism,” and which can be traced to the
writings of some members of a critical infrastructure which emerged around analysis of
the work of musicians like Dylan in the late 1960s, achieved cultural prominence in the
early to mid-1970s, and has since become institutionalized.33 While the full breadth of
50
what is constituted as “rock criticism” is too varied to fairly typify here, there is a broad
consensus to be found in the work of male writers like Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Lester
Bangs, and Jon Laundau who have, as part of the historiographic representation of rock
music, narrated the rise to prominence of 1950s rock and roll as an outsider’s triumph, a
bold capture of hostile mainstream territory by denizens of the Rhythm & Blues and
Country & Western charts. Writing first in local presses and alternative free weeklies,
later in magazines like Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Creem, and eventually in mass
market monographs, these influential critics and others like them constructed a kind of
rock ideal or ideology whose genealogical narrative pitted an authentic generational
expression rooted in rural white southern and urban black American musical styles
against a stultifying and prosthetic commercial culture tied to no particular place except
the marketplace.
Mark Mazullo, in an analysis of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of
Rock’n’Roll, an anthology of the magazine’s rock criticism issued in 1974, points to a
series of illustrations that broadly identify the claims made by this history:
At the very front of the book one found three illustrations whose
placement preceded the introduction by the editor, Jim Miller, and which
were doubtless intended to encapsulate the key features of the musical
style. In the first, the little-known 1950s rocker Ersel Hickey represented
the quintessential image of stylized, white, working class rock’n’roll—the
electric guitar, the cuffed pants, the turned-up collar, and the duck-tailed
hair. The second, a two-page spread depicting an energetic crowd of
teenage girls held back by a middle-aged police force, reminded the
viewer that rock’n’roll was and always has been a phenomenon both
charged with sexuality and at odds with authority. The third, a studio
portrait of the Five Satins, who became famous with the 1956 hit “In the
Still of the Night,” highlighted the importance of the musical traditions of
black America within rock’n’roll’s history. […] This was a tale that
evoked the participatory society that rock’n’roll was believed to have
created through rebellion, style, sexuality, and inclusivity of race, class,
and gender.34
51
It is worth noting that even in the sympathetic portrait presented by the editors of The
Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock’n’Roll, we can see that the “participatory
society” envisioned in the rock’n’roll narrative proscribes particular limits on its
supposed “inclusivity.” Women are presented as audience members only. Black
musicians are ancestors rather than present contributors. The narrative is dependent on
these figures as the bearers of sexual energy and racial authenticity [which is itself, to
some degree, codified sexual energy] but they are not identified as exercising significant
creative agency. These criticisms are far from unique to me, and it is important to note
that even charter members of the mostly-male rock critical establishment like long-time
Village Voice contributor Robert Christgau have leveled incisive critiques of the
workings of race and gender and class in rock’s social relations and its textual apparatus,
and that academic criticism of rock and roll historiography has further examined these
issues in recent years.35 Still, the narrative construction of rock’s authenticity, and
especially for our purposes here, the roots of that imputation of authenticity in its
historiographically constructed relation to “the musical traditions of black America,”
remains influential and persistent. Writing in 1968, Ellen Willis, one of the only female
members of this critical community, offers a mock-confessional account that underscores
exactly how the projection of racialized notions of authenticity has shaped the history that
emerges from this narrative:
If we who grew up with rock and have always loved it feel smug these
days, the smugness is tainted—at least for some of us. We all knew Elvis
was great…but who among us has soul so pure that he [sic] never liked
Pat Boone? My own taste was not only less discriminating than it could
have been, but often discriminating in the wrong way. I tended, for
instance, to prefer the tamer white versions of rhythm and blues records to
52
the black originals. Partly this was because the imitators were pushed on
the radio, but partly it was because Georgia Gibb sounded better to me
than LaVern Baker; I was one of the white teen-aged reasons the music
was being watered down.36
One place where we can see the persistence of this narrative, in explicitly
narrative form, is the musical revue Memphis: The Musical, which premiered on
Broadway in 2009, was an immediate hit, and went on to win Tony and Golden Icon
awards for Best Musical in 2010. It has since toured the U.S. and a filmed version of the
Broadway production has been released on DVD. The production, written, by David
Bryan and Joe DiPietro, tells the story of Huey Calhoun, a young white disc jockey,
whose enthusiasm for rock and roll—identified in the play as categorically African
American music—and whose romance with a black woman, Felicia Delray, engender
stubborn resistance from, and ultimately triumph over, racist authorities. The story itself
is an elaborate mishmash of clichés that ultimately present the consumption of “black
music” by white listeners as a radically libratory act: rock and roll loving teenagers
triumph over segregated radio and television formats; white racists are converted to
integrationist understanding by the singing of a black church choir; and perhaps most
improbably given the actual history of rock and roll and the critical construction of its
history, a young black woman becomes a rock and roll star. Like the casting of a white
disc jockey who plays the records of black musicians (rather than a white singer of black
songs) in the protagonist’s role, Felicia’s rise to stardom in Memphis: The Musical seems
to be a progressive revision of the standard rock and roll mythology. Both of these
choices seem to indicate a sincere desire to credit African American musicians with a
formative role in what has become a hegemonically “white” form. At the same time,
however, the mechanics of the storyline suggest that what is transformative in terms of
53
social relations here is the desire of white audiences for black performance, a
construction which echoes Eric Lott’s observation regarding minstrel performance that
“The blackface performer is in effect a perfect metaphor for one culture’s ventriloquial
self-expression through the art forms of someone else’s.”37 And this, in the end is no
transformation of social relations at all.
It’s not so much that this narrative of rock and roll’s musical origins—which I
would argue could be characterized as both “cross-cultural transaction and “ventriloquial
self-expression”—is factually incorrect, although it is distinctly simplified. Instead, I
argue, the elisions and misdirection of this account are more distortions of emphasis and
process. As such, they contribute considerably to the racial mystification of popular
memory, especially in two related areas. The first is the notion that the blending of
racialized styles like country and rhythm and blues in early rock and roll is exceptional,
when, as Andrew Ross points out, “The everyday, plagiaristic, commerce between white
and black musics—between, strictly speaking, the European diatonic scale and the
African American non-diatonic harmonies—has been generic and not exceptional.”
There has been commerce across the musical color line in popular music since there was
something called popular music, and to claim exceptional status for early rock and roll
ignores not only the achievements of figures like Nat Cole, but also stylistic
confabulations like western swing which predated it and contributed to its repertoire. The
other important consideration is the claim, depicted in Memphis: The Musical by the
ongoing resistance to Felicia and Huey’s music despite its popularity with teenagers, that
rock and roll’s connection to African American music marks it as somehow transcendent
of or opposed to commercial or “mainstream” pop music. To claim such a bright line of
54
demarcation is, I argue, to misunderstand the actual history of a popular music industry
which has long been defined by African American musical traditions even as it unfairly
exploited African American musicians. As Ralph Ellison argued in response to Amiri
Baraka’s similarly constructed opposition between a “white” musical mainstream and an
alienated “black” musical other, “Negro musicians have never, as a group, felt alienated
from any music sounded within their hearing, and it is my theory that it would be
impossible to pinpoint a time when they were not shaping what Jones calls the
mainstream of American music. Indeed, what group of musicians has made more of the
sound of the American experience?”38
In fact, if disruption of the music industry’s segregated marketing is the measure,
the release of Nat Cole’s string-laden 1948 version of “The Christmas Song” is arguably
a more revolutionary and exceptional event than more commonly observed crossover
watersheds like Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right, Mama” or any of Louis Jordan’s hits
from the late 1940s and early 1950s. This may seem like an unlikely claim: On the night
that he received a test pressing for “That’s All Right, Mama,” Memphis disc jockey
Dewey Phillips (the vastly more complicated real-life model for Huey Calhoun) famously
asked a young Elvis Presley where he went to high school in order to slyly communicate
to his listeners that Presley was white.39 Louis Jordan was an African American
bandleader who, like Nat Cole, regularly placed songs on both “black” and “white” charts
in the 1940s. Unlike Cole, however, Jordan’s hits were in a style, known as “jump
blues,” which presaged rhythm and blues. Moreover, critics have argued that songs like
“Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” were decoded differently by African American
audiences, particularly recent urban immigrants who recognized the play of authority and
55
resistance in the song’s comic rural imagery.40 “The Christmas Song” is, on the other
hand, a sentimental holiday song whose lyrics are devoid of sexual provocation. Even
taking into account the strictures that an African American ballad singer had to work
under in the act of courting a mass audience in 1949, it hardly seems like a transgressive
piece of music. But “The Christmas Song” sold more than one million copies within a
month of its release, and reached number one on the Billboard Top 100 chart, the first
record by an African American artist to do either one of these things. Moreover, I believe
that Cole’s measured and intimate vocal, laid carefully over its orchestral
accompaniment, contravened prevailing notions of the performative strategies available
to African American singers. Before this, and the hits “Nature Boy” and “Mona Lisa”
which followed within the year, African American singers, and especially male African
American singers, had depended largely on trickster appropriations of the remnants of
minstrel fantasy, reaching white audiences and black audiences through cartoonish
delineations of exaggerated blackness that masked complex code-switching maneuvers.
Cole, who blues critic Francis Davis says “embodied masculine smooth” and who jazz
critic Gene Lees calls “the first black romantic idol,” turned that minstrel logic on its
head, appropriating the privilege of racial ambiguity which had previously been accorded
only to white singers.
Heard in the context of his commercial achievements and the precise musicality
that characterized both his virtuoso piano playing and his confident and controlled vocals,
Nat Cole’s closing interjection of “could if I wanted to, though!” at the end of “Mr. Cole
Won’t Rock and Roll” in Las Vegas in 1959 is more than the offhand riposte of a
musician whose audience is smaller and less hip than it used to be. It’s an ambitious
56
performative claim from a performer who had already in his career disrupted one of the
founding assumptions of the popular music industry. And the song itself can be heard as a
complicated racial shell game, wherein a black performer, famous for working in “white”
styles, represents performatively and signifies skeptically upon the performance of
“black” styles by white musicians. As such, it supports this chapter’s claim that the work
of Nat Cole, found in recordings, performances, and critical and historical accounts,
reveals fissures and tensions between notions of the authentic and the popular in
contemporary popular memory. And those fissures and tensions, or elisions and
conflicts, are shaped by the essentializing logic that haunts popular music making and its
attendant identifications and activities. This logic, fundamental to the marketing of
popular music throughout its history in the U.S. insistently ties specific sounds and styles
to specific, racially identified bodies. Despite widespread repudiation of essentialist
discourses within academic and even some popular critical discourse, the terms
stubbornly persist, and their persistence continues to trouble the language that we use to
talk about popular music. There are a number of reasons for this. The notion of a
racialized body of music with discrete borders has been mobilized for economic and
political reasons, both progressive and repressive. Moreover, such notions reflect and
embody political reality and social practice. An intellectual commitment to refuse to
engage and substantiate essentializing language will not, by fiat, make the sociohistorical existence of something called “black music” vanish. But it does impel us to
clarify the relation—and the distance—between “black music” and black musicians and
audiences. This is a complex undertaking, one that will not be accomplished in this
chapter alone, but which informs my entire dissertation.
57
Music making is, of course, articulated to bodies whose motion produces music.
And some of the ways that musical practice moves forward in time do correspond to the
social and political divisions that that identify those bodies as supposedly belonging to
separate “races” and placing them in racially separated spaces. Because we live in a
society that has historically divided people by race and continues to do so, there are
musical traditions that adhere to racialized groups. But those traditions are predicated on
practice and the structures which communicate practice, not on essence. We must be
wary that the descriptive language that we use to describe the creation and maintenance
of those traditions should become conscriptive language, language which urges us to
listen with our eyes rather than our ears. I assume that musical practice moves back and
forth uneasily and unevenly across these racial lines, in contingent relation to how those
lines are drawn in specific places and times, and that this movement is a persistently antiessentialist and fundamentally good. At the same time, I assume the fundamental human
importance of musical traditions cultivated, innovated, practiced, and maintained by
people inside those lines as a way of surviving and prospering under racial regimes, and
try to account for the generative role of those racial regimes in that music as well.
Mobility and Containment
Music may be born of bodies in motion, but it inhabits the spaces between bodies.
Discussions of music making often acknowledge this, but not always as critically as they
should. It is not unusual for writing about music—in either popular or academic
quarters—to use space as way of encoding and conflating performative style and identity.
Consider, for instance, this brief and dramatic description of rock and roll’s emergence
onto the popular scene, written in 1969 by Greil Marcus, then a graduate student in
58
sociology and now one of the few music critics able to work concurrently in popular and
academic circles.41
It was the old Hit Parade show, with Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins, and
the others. They really knew how to enunciate–otherwise we might have
missed the tag line of the Naughty Lady of Shady Lane. This was slick
music, perfectly suited, words and all, to serve as background sounds for
cocktail lounges and piano bars. Pop music, performed live, was an
atmosphere for small talk. Remember “mood music”?
And then Chuck Berry was on stage, with his flashing electric
guitar.42
I want to focus here on the sound that Marcus ascribes to the space of the “cocktail
lounge” or “piano bar,” and the way that space is sonically racialized as “white” not only
by the contrast between Snooky Lanson or Dorothy Collins and Chuck Berry, but also by
the enunciation through which Marcus identifies their performances, in contrast with his
later observation that rock and roll singing seemed “unintelligible” at first because “white
kids weren’t used to hearing the voices of black people, and white parents weren’t
interested in trying.”43 We should note that the image of rock and roll disrupting a staid
and placid entertainment environment is likely an accurate reflection of Marcus’s
experience, and more broadly, that of many in his generational cohort, as is the notion of
rock and roll’s mysterious and captivating “unintelligibility,” which speaks to the
paradox I alluded to earlier regarding rock and roll’s dual authentication as an expression
of its audience’s true feelings and as something issued from African American culture.44
More concretely and less impressionistically, Marcus’s account does point usefully to the
way that sound, however racialized, penetrates and confounds segregated space.
But like the assumption that the denizens of these imaginary “cocktails lounges or
piano bars” must be white, the division between “black” “unintelligible” rock and roll,
and the “mood music” made by performers who “really knew how to enunciate,” is
59
revealing of what is elided in the generic construction of rock and roll. Doubtless,
Marcus and other “white kids” his age likely did hear early rock and roll’s
unintelligibility as part of what coded it as “black music,” but at the same time, they more
than likely decoded the music of some African American singers as “white music.” As
more than one observer has noted, Nat Cole’s singing was marked by the same clear and
precise enunciation that Marcus dismisses, and it had been at least since he started
performing in front of a trio in nightclubs (or if you wish, “cocktail lounges and piano
bars”) in Los Angeles in the late very 1930s and early 1940s.45 The instrumentation of
The King Cole Trio (piano, bass, and guitar) and Cole’s performative style, including his
preference for ballads and the way he sung those ballads, were shaped by that
environment. Both the instrumentation and the approach bespeak the realities of an
environmental soundscape in which music and conversation blend. Where Marcus
dismisses the musical component of such a soundscape because of its supposed lack of
transcendentally evocative power, I would argue instead that its power comes directly
from an intimate imbrication with the social, and that even outside of that environment, in
recorded form, it is capable of performatively summoning that space where contact and
communication are possible.
These “cocktail lounges and piano bars” were important sites of labor for African
American musicians and, as such, were hardly signifiers of inauthenticity to those
musicians and their audiences.46 Nat Cole was, of course, hardly the only African
American performer to inhabit such spaces, though he was among the most important.
Francis Davis, a music writer whose History of the Blues is perceptively written enough
to include a chapter entitled “The Blues as Such/No Such Thing as The Blues” offers us a
60
view of what’s elided in Marcus’s narrative by placing Marcus’s imagined and
metaphorical nightclub in a real place and time and in front of a real audience:
In Percy Mayfield, Charles Brown, and Ivory Joe Hunter, Los Angeles
also had its share of poets, crooners and dreamers, most of them pianists
as well as singers, and all of them influenced to some degree by Nat
“King” Cole—not a bluesman by any stretch of the imagination, but a
performer who epitomized masculine smooth and whose ascendancy from
jazz to pop was seen by blacks as an advance for the entire race. In the
lingo of the day, Nat was “clean”: this was a large part of his appeal to
men and women who dirtied their hands on jobs all day, and to the
performers who serenaded them in squalid dives at night, both groups
lulled by wartime and postwar prosperity into thinking that it wouldn’t
always be so.47
Davis usefully reminds us of Cole’s African American audience, an audience which
named him “The King” long before Elvis, and which featured him on countless blackoriented newspaper and magazine covers between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, and
which tends to be forgotten in accounts of the huge following Cole garnered among white
fans. For this audience and, I would argue, not just this audience, the music made by
singers like Nat Cole articulated transcendence in ways both more subtle and more
material than the change in musical consciousness which Marcus and other critics in his
boomer cohort tend to ascribe to rock and roll. Davis’s brief snapshot of post-World-War
Two Los Angles also usefully reminds us that music takes place in specific locales and
specific times, and that its performative dynamics are shaped by musicians and audiences
mutual experience of those places.
While I will attend to those specific dynamics that he and others identify in Cole’s
performative approach, and how they might work differently in places very different
from wartime Los Angeles, I want to now pull back and consider terms which, I argue,
will help us to place Cole’s performative strategies in a larger chronological and cultural
61
context. While the analysis and events that follow will be informed by the period when
Nat Cole played clubs in Los Angles, the major focus of my attention will be the period
following 1949, when Cole, a critically heralded and award-winning piano virtuoso,
almost entirely abandoned the instrument in live performance and ascended to popular
stardom as a singer of lushly orchestrated ballads.
Cole undertook this performative transition during the heyday of what Alan Nadal
calls “containment culture.” According to Nadal,
Although technically referring to U.S. foreign policy from 1948 until at
least the mid-1960s, it also describes American life in numerous venues
and under sundry rubrics during that period: to the extent that corporate
production and biological reproduction, military deployment and industrial
technology, televised hearings and filmed teleplays, the cult of domesticity
and the fetishizing of domestic security, the arms race and atoms for
peace all contributed to the containment of communism, the disparate acts
performed in the name of these practices joined the legible agenda of
American history as aspects of containment culture.48
While Nadal makes a convincing case for the efficacy of using containment as a narrative
metaphor, and finds evidence of this discursive frame in period narratives as disparate as
J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Walt Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp, I
would argue that containment insufficiently communicates the decade’s imperatives and
anxieties. We can understand this era better if we look at the notion of containment
culture alongside the related notions of mobility and crossover.
Mobility is not an unusual frame for understanding post-World-War Two
America, and particularly the decade of the 1950s. There are myriad reasons why this is
so, from the establishment of the interstate highway association, to the “upward mobility”
of economic prosperity, to the beginnings of the southern civil rights movement in the
contestation over mobility in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It is a theme that can be
62
used to connect expressions as diverse as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Chuck Berry’s
celebrations of automobility in songs like “You Can’t Catch Me,” and the cultural ritual
of the American family vacation.49 W. T. Lhamon Jr., who calls Chuck Berry’s narrator
“Mobileman,” finds a collision between contradictory notions of mobility (“deliberation”
and “speed”) at the heart of the connection between modern and post-modern America in
the book Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in 1950s America, which is
perhaps the most complex and far-reaching exploration of the metaphor.50
Certainly, mobility can be used to describe the events that shaped Nat Cole’s life.
Cole was born in Montgomery Alabama, in 1919.51 Soon after, his family moved to
Chicago, where he was raised, and in 1936, he left Chicago as the pianist for Eubie
Blake’s African American musical revue Shuffle Along, which took him to Los Angeles,
where he stayed after the show closed.52 Cole’s path broadly conforms to and outlines
movements made by millions of other black Americans in what is called the great
migration. While the northern path of this mass movement of individuals and families is
well known, the westward leg of this journey, the road “from Chicago to L.A.” to quote
the Bobby Troupe song “Route 66” which Cole had a major hit with in 1946, is important
too. Beginning in the early 1940s, millions of black (and white) Americans moved west,
seeking wartime defense and shipping jobs. This had a tremendous and perhaps underobserved geo-musical effect. Willie R. Collins points out that “some of the most
significant recordings in the history of rhythm and blues were made in California
between 1942 and 1972.”53 Barney Hoskyns asserts that “there is a case for arguing that
L.A. can boast a more important R&B heritage than almost any other American city”
63
despite the fact that “it has […] been difficult for rock historians to conceive of L.A. as a
black environment.”54
Cole’s socio-economic mobility can also be narrated in spatial terms, his path
from Alabama to Chicago to Los Angeles being typical in geography and strikingly
atypical in scale. In 1949, he and his wife Maria, a native of the Roxbury neighborhood
in Boston whose family included pioneering African American educator Charlotte
Hawkins Gilman, bought a house in Los Angles’ ritzy Hancock Park subdivision. During
the purchase they kept their identity secret in order to circumvent the local homeowner’s
association’s restrictive covenant, which forbade membership to Jews and African
Americans. While the Coles endured anonymous threats and racist yard signs, and had a
window shot out with a BB gun, the opposition they faced was less violent and certainly
less effective than the kind of terrorism that poor and middle class African Americans
faced elsewhere when they attempted similar breaches of segregated space. Cole’s witty
response to his neighbors’ explanation that it was nothing personal and that they simply
“did not want to see undesirables moving in” underscores the ease with which he had
settled into the class position that he occupied. “Neither do I, and if I see anybody
undesirable coming in here, I’ll be the first to complain.”55
Restrictive covenants, zoning laws, redlining—all components of the northern,
privatized mirror of the Jim Crow laws that racially restricted public space in the South—
define one of the ways that we can see containment operating in the post-World War Two
era, just as surely as we see mobility in the previous examples. The direct origin of the
term’s association with the times is in American foreign policy circles, where it was used
to describe a coordinated set of proposed responses to Soviet expansionism.56 Like
64
mobility, containment can also be used to sum up historiographic characterizations of the
era which focus on the ease and relative affluence of the expanding American middle
class, many of whom occupied less well-to-do versions of Hancock Park, with similar
restrictive covenants. Also, like mobility, containment is a theme that we can find in
popular expressions of contemporaneous hopes and fears, including books like The
Organization Man, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and The Lonely Crowd, which
voiced popular anxiety that the 1950s public and private cultures associated with and
formed by such mobility was conformist and stifling.57
While this initial sketch of mobility and containment as cultural strategies seems
to point towards a binary correlation between black mobility and white containment, a
binary that I think popular memory and historiography supports, I want to avoid such
easy associations, especially as they might re-inscribe the primitivist opposition between
“refined” white music and “natural” black music which, I argue, Nat Cole’s cultural
production annihilates. Certainly there is little more mobile and fluid in a racially
hierarchical society than white privilege, and greater freedom of movement—both
geographic and socio-economic—was certainly one of those privileges racially conferred.
Moreover, while containment can be used to describe segregation, it also describes
strategies necessary to survive under segregation. To hear this, we might listen for the
echoes of Paul Dunbar’s 1896 poem “The Mask,” which begins like this
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.58
65
In the song “The Great Pretender,” which, recorded by The Platters, reached the top of
the Billboard Magazine Popular and Rhythm and Blues Charts in 1955:
Oh yes, I'm the great pretender
Pretending I'm doing well
My need is such
I pretend too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell.59
Just two years earlier, Nat Cole had recorded a song with a similar theme. “Pretend,”
which reached number three on Billboard’s Best Sellers chart.60 In Cole’s song,
however, the figurative mask is hardly a burden at all. In fact, in this song, the mask
offers, rather than containment, a kind of limitless mobility. As Cole sings in the first
verse:
Pretend you're happy when you're blue
It isn't very hard to do
And you'll find happiness without an end
Whenever you pretend.
The song continues, extolling the virtues of pretense in such a straightforward manner
that seems remarkable to our contemporary ears, if only because we live in an era where
popular music is dominated by claims to authenticity. In contrast to “The Great
Pretender,” which is certainly one of the ancestors of this discursive tradition, there is no
hint in the lyrics that the act of pretending has caused the narrator even the slightest
discomfort. Similarly, Cole’s vocal is wistful and nostalgic, and delivered almost entirely
without pathos. In fact, given that the very first line urges the listener to “pretend you’re
happy when you’re blue,” it is the lack of drama that is remarkable. One way to hear this
is that the song’s narrator is enacting, rather than describing, the mask or racialized
repression. Such a reading makes the invitation in the last verse all the more striking:
66
And if you sing this melody
You'll be pretending just like me
The world is mine; it can be yours, my friend
So, why don't you pretend?
Who can we imagine this as being addressed to, if we hear the song as I have suggested
above? There is no clear answer to such a speculative line of inquiry, but it does raise
interesting possibilities regarding the cultural politics of such an innocuous-seeming
song. Is it a performative paean to the politics of respectability, addressed to Cole’s
African American audience? Or perhaps we could hear it as a subtle appeal to the
fantasies of his white listeners, asking them to project themselves into the world they
imagine he inhabits? Or, following James Baldwin’s observation that “As long as you
think you’re ‘white,’ I’m going to be forced to think I’m ‘black,’” does the song suggest
we can pretend away the containment of race, if only for the length of a pop song?61
Of course, none of these readings is supported by a strict and literal attention to
the song’s text, which, like “The Great Pretender,” concerns itself with heartbreak and
lost love, subjects for which, during the mid-1950s, and perhaps always, a certain amount
of pretense and duplicity would be necessary tools for a singer or group looking to cross
over from one side of the racially defined market categories of the music business to the
other. As Lhamon, writing specifically about “The Great Pretender” says, “These
crossover songs nearly always leapt across smilingly, enacting the I’m-whatever-youneed tomfoolery.”62 While the very notion of “crossover” seems to contravene the whole
idea of generic and (therefore racial) authenticity in its obvious quest to consolidate
diverse audiences into a single consolidated consumer bloc, the truth is that it is a much
more complex and paradoxical idea as it has been applied in popular musical discourse.
Crossover is, I believe, more than just a market term, just as the stories that define and
67
account for musical genres are more than historiographic lists. As I intend to
demonstrate, these genealogical accounts narrate acts of identification by musicians,
audiences, critics, and other parties implicated by profession of pleasure or both. In the
process, they territorialize social space and define points of identification and desire,
transgression belonging, and exclusion. Within such a symbolic regime, the act of
crossing over from one domain to another may have a variety of meanings and
consequences.
Generic Containment and Crossover Narratives
Crossover in American popular music always articulates, more or less explicitly,
to race, an articulation that is sometimes explicit but whose full dimensions are often
hidden, naturalized by the tendencies of genre criticism to present its implicit arguments
as conclusions. The borders crossed are always racialized to some extent by the history
of racialized marketing and the racial regimes imposed upon the social and professional
lives of musicians and listeners, and this makes issues of authenticity and its construction
unavoidable. In popular musical discourse, crossing over may be constructed as the
transcendence or disruption of staid and obsolete categories thus revealed as unable to
contain a particularly vital text or artist. Or it might signal a transition from a pure or
authentic practice to a hybridized and more easily commodified style. Often, both ideas
are operative at once, giving the listener/reader the choice of positioning themselves as
purists, populists, or somewhere in between.
Paradoxically, whether seen as transcendence or betrayal, crossover depends upon
and gathers discursive force from the reification and substantiation of those same barriers
whose breach it so loudly announces. Without containment, crossover is meaningless.
68
And while the term is usually mobilized as an imputation of uncommonness, crossover
marketing strategies, ranging from early rock and roll to “country crossover” to jazz
fusion to rap-rock have dominated the commercial history of post-World War Two
popular music. This is similar to the case of the film industry, where Rick Altman notes
that “though critics have consistently claimed that generic templates undergird
Hollywood’s profit-assuring, assembly-line production practices, careful inspection
suggests that Hollywood prefers romantic genre-mixing to the classical idea of genre
purity.”63 The act of crossing over the boundaries between musical genres, however,
carries different consequences, depending on where a performer starts and where they
end up. And as we shall see later in this chapter, sometimes the consequences for
crossing over, for exerting mobility in the face of attempts at containment, are more
physical and literal than they are discursive and mnemonic.
Nat Cole operated in a strictly segregated music market, a market whose racial
boundaries he repeatedly transgressed and modified by virtue of his appeal to multiple
audiences. In order to properly attend to the conditions of that market, even briefly, I
should clarify my use of the terms “style,” and “genre,” and the specific meanings that I
wish for them to communicate. Both terms are used, broadly, to divide and associate
musical practices and performers from each other, but they are inconsistently employed
both within and across disciplinary boundaries within the academy and even more so by
the popular critics whose work circulates more broadly among music-interested publics.64
Proceeding with a firmer definition is necessary because the discussion at hand is
concerned as much with how music making is written and thought about as it is with
music making itself. Moreover, I hope that the specific definitions that I wish to put forth
69
will be useful in illuminating concerns that have been obscured and elided in popular
music discourse.
My use of the terms “style” and “genre” indicates a mutually nested or recursive
relationship wherein “style” refers most directly to the playing of music, including the
techniques used to produce certain associated sounds and the sounds themselves, and
“genre” refers to the more broadly discursive associations and categorizations that come
into play through the ongoing practice of those styles. How one plucks a string, sets the
controls on an amplifier, or even holds a microphone, is a matter of style. Genre refers to
or identifies the area in the record store where the recorded results of these performative
choices are likely to be filed, the trade magazines or websites where they will be
reviewed, the critical historiography that comes into play in that review, and the grounds
for arguments between fans regarding the “real” identity of the performer or recording.
While “style” tracks more closely to the physical and cognitive practice of music,
and will be used here to describe musical choices, genre is also integral to musical
practice. Genres, which may associate different, related styles, are often integral to the
ways in which musicians (who are also members of audiences) communicate with each
other and transmit information about stylistic practices, particularly in the realms of
popular and folk music where it is more common for players to not read written notation.
Of the two, genre is more firmly embedded in the world of commercial music making. As
Simon Frith points out
Genre distinctions are central to how record company A&R departments
work. The first thing asked about any demo tape or potential signing is
what sort of music is it, and the importance of this question is that it
integrates an inquiry about the music (what does it sound like) with an
inquiry about the market (who will buy it). The underlying record
70
company problem, in other words, how to turn music into a commodity, is
solved in generic terms.65
I would argue, however, that the question of how to turn music into a commodity is not
just a problem for record companies, and that assuming so overlooks the stated interests
of many musicians and substitutes instead a critical desire to extract music making from
capitalist regimes. We can recognize the pursuit of such a desire to be one of the highest
callings of popular music criticism, but we should also note its divergence from the
viewpoints of practicing musicians. We should also note that such a pursuit often
contemplates a discrete separation between capitalist processes and the music that they
act upon, one that fails to recognize their mutually constitutive relationship. As Frith
argues elsewhere regarding the contradictory nature of what he calls “rock culture,” “rock
fans and rock performers alike want their music to be powerful, to work as music and
commodity.”66 I would argue that this is true not just of rock fans and performers but of
popular musical performers and audiences in general, and that this is a relationship
accomplished on many levels, including the linguistic.
Despite the practical need to differentiate style and genre, and the usefulness of
both terms in communicating about the activity that Christopher Small calls “musicking,”
both are part of the process of reification that generates the abstraction that we invest
with “thingness” and call music. The transformation of “musicking” to “music” is
essential to the commodification of musical practice, but it involves the workings of all of
the parties involved in music making under capitalism, not just explicitly commercial
entities.67 Such a transformation also generates notions of fixed and discrete identities for
these participants in that process, such as “musicians” and “audiences” and “critics” and
“industry actors.” I retain these terms for communicative convenience, but Small’s
71
intervention helps us see that that any given audience may include any number of
musicians, critics, or industry actors; and that even musicians in the act of playing could
be thought of as an especially engaged “audience” for the music being played,
particularly in the case of improvised jazz where musicians react to each other’s more or
less spontaneous musical choices in the act of creating an ongoing in-the-moment
composition.68
In many ways, my use of “style” and “genre” attaches to different components of
Leonard Meyer’s definition of musical style as “a replication of human patterning,
whether in human behavior or in the artifacts produced by human behavior, that results
from a series of choices made within some set of constraints.”69 My use of “style” is
similar to the notion of “human patterning” in Meyer’s formulation, while the
“constraints” which he identifies track more closely to what I identify as “genre.” This
has the advantage of preserving the idea of individual performance style, which is just as
much a linguistic commonplace as is the understanding that no single work can constitute
a genre, and opening up theoretical formulations developed in literary and film genre and
adapting them to analyze popular music. Specifically, I draw upon Rick Altman’s work
in film genre, which describes genres as discursive formations which identify areas of
consent and contestation among interested parties, rather than categories flowing
inexorably from essential characteristics of their included artifacts. Altman’s useful term
“genrification” is particularly helpful in understanding the ways in which those involved
in musicking, taking the roles of musicians, audiences, promoters, critics, and industry
actors actively reshape musical genres.
72
Thus, in my opening example of the song “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock And Roll,” the
verses from Cole’s ballad hits are played in rock and roll style, indicating specific choices
on the part of the musicians regarding volume, timbre, tempo, tone, and harmonic
complexity. In order to produce a rock and roll style, they combine (generally) a loud
and undifferentiated volume, a rough timbre or texture in their instrumental voicing, a
generally fast tempo, and simple and straightforward harmonic accompaniment. In doing
so, they don’t, however, produce something likely to be genrified as authentic “rock and
roll,” in part because of the lyric’s obvious intent to satirize rock and roll, but also
because of Cole’s previous identification with the same pop genre that rock critics have
done so much to define rock and roll in opposition to.
This division between “style” and “genre” which attaches the latter more firmly
to the marketplace and the former more firmly to the music, with the understanding that
both processes are thoroughly social and mutually imbricated, is inexact, but I believe
that it provides a coherence that is lost if we assume that the two terms are identical or if
we assume that genres are the discrete, orderly, and objective catalogs of style that they
are often presented as being. So we can understand that “boogie woogie” style piano, a
playing practice marked by (among other characteristics) a strong, constant, and
repetitive bass line played by the left hand, can be heard in both the country and blues
genres because critics, industry agents, and fans have broadly identified songs containing
those characteristics and performers practicing those styles as being part of those genres.
For many reasons, including its shared nature, boogie woogie piano is not, for country, as
definitive a generic marker as, for instance, the presence of a pedal steel guitar might be,
but it can form part of the basis by which a listener identifies a particular song or
73
performance as belonging to the country genre. And that act of identification is, in turn,
related to broader acts of imagination and self-interpellation whereby listeners place
themselves and each other within communities and landscapes both figurative and literal
based on affinities and divisions which are narrated in the ongoing process of
genrification.
This imaginative narration of place and self through the efforts to make sense out
of the unevenly shared experience of popular music, a form which occurs at the
intersection of aesthetics and commerce, sociability and capitalism, can be understood as,
following Jameson’s reconfiguration of Kenneth Burke’s analysis of literary narrative, a
“socially symbolic act,” one that provides an aesthetic resolution to lived contradictions70
For Burke, this was part of an argument that all literary narratives could function as
“equipment for living,” in the way that its commonly understood that parables do,
drawing their power from their ability to map an imagined response to the world that is,
as Jameson says “on the one hand affirmed as a genuine act, albeit on the symbolic level,
while on the other it is registered as an act which is ‘merely’ symbolic, its resolutions
imaginary ones that leave the real untouched.”71 In musical discourses, these imaginative
narrations of generic meaning sometimes almost literally take the form of parables, as in
the title to the Muddy Waters and Brownie McGhee song “The Blues Had A Baby And
They Called It Rock and Roll,” or in the stage patter that Arkansas-born Ronnie Hawkins
has used to introduce his 1958 hit “Ruby Baby” for the last four decades: “This is the one
that took us from the stills in the hills and put us on the pills!”72 Each of these “parables”
encapsulates an implied generic historiography, an appeal to “remember” that history in a
specific way, and a map for constituting a specific set of musical meanings. Waters and
74
McGhee position themselves as still-vital ancestors, whose folkloric authenticity informs
rock and roll which, in turn, lends them popular currency. Hawkins reminds his audience
of his rural “otherness,” his fleeting, decades-old national popularity, and then offers a
framework in which these things can be understood as signifiers of transgression rather
than nostalgia. Both seek on one level to explain to their audience just what they (and the
audience) are doing there, in that moment. Beyond this, both speak to our attempts to
wring what we identify as an authentic experience from the products and practices of
commercial music making.
My argument here is that the configuration of canons and genealogies, the
ordering and disputation of influence and effect, the rupture and maintenance of tradition
that we see in the narration and re-narration of genre amounts to a symbolic act, one
whose purpose it to address both the text or process at hand, and what Jameson terms the
“absent cause” that is present in the world as that world is constituted in the symbolic act
of ordering.73 But the world presents itself differently in different expressive forms.
Unlike film and literature, although like certain kinds of texts, music can be and is
produced and reproduced easily on a quotidian, vernacular level. As Lawrence
Grossberg observes, “Music’s sensuous materiality transforms passive reception into
active production. Music surrounds and invades the body of its listeners incorporating
them into its spaces and making them part of the musical event itself.”74 This is not to
dispute Raymond Williams’s observation that “literature is quite obviously, in the general
sense, a social activity, and value does seem to lie in the writer’s access to certain kinds
of energy which…lie in the whole complex of a writer’s relations with reality”.75 But I
believe that music is often more immediately and inescapably social than almost any
75
other expressive form. People, professional or amateur, play music for each other at
parties; films and literary texts have little or no such parallel practice. Many, if not most,
music critics play at least a little, and while some literary critics act also as writers of
literature and poets, few film critics are themselves filmmakers. These divisions are
inexact and inconsistent, and any conclusions I would draw from them are largely
speculative, but, because the experience of music, live or recorded, is often a social
occasion, the genre narratives that arise from that experience may be more socially
volatile in their formation and transmission and may more directly indicate the
contradictions resolved or elided through those imaginative acts.
Like the notion of crossover itself, the contradictions addressed in crossover
narratives in American popular music almost always articulate to race. As previously
noted, rock and roll’s founding narrative places a premium on the way that singers like
Elvis Presley and singer-instrumentalists like Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry found
commercial success by combining elements of “white” country and “black” blues or
rhythm and blues. Much of the power in Greil Marcus’s earlier cited vision of Chuck
Berry’s “flashing guitar” disrupting the sleepy nightclub lies in the assumption that
Berry’s appearance provides a moment of racialized recognition between Berry, a black
rock and roller, and the white audience, and that this recognition (literally, re-cognition)
amounts to a reorganization of boundaries that had heretofore been firmly placed.
Marcus does not precisely identify the moment he imagines, but Chuck Berry’s first full
length LP, After School Special, was released in 1956.76 The same year, a young singer
from Memphis, Elvis Presley, who had cited Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Dean Martin
as his favorite singers, placed the song “Don’t Be Cruel” on three different charts used by
76
Billboard magazine to track commercial record sales: the popular (or pop) charts, the
Hillbilly chart, which tracked records marketed to rural white consumers, and the Rhythm
and Blues chart, which recorded sales marketed to African American consumers.77
Marcus’s vision of this crossover moment as a schism, a hard break from past
practices, is common among rock critics and music historians, and reflects both the
public outcry that arose around the music’s sudden popularity in the mid-1950s and the
aesthetic qualities that set it apart from the pop music of the day, including faster tempos,
simpler harmonic structures, an aggressive and exaggerated performative style, and often,
the rural backgrounds of its practitioners. I argue, however, that the emergence of rock
and roll is better understood as another step in the process of generic containment, a
continuation of ongoing attempts by musicians, consumers, and industry actors to
account for and profit from the play of musical styles across racial boundaries. In order to
see what is at stake in this crossover narrative, and what kind of work the putative
transgression of these boundaries actually does, we need to understand a little about the
history of the broad racial divisions in the musical marketplace that those sales charts
represented.
Musicologist and historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s book Segregating Sound:
Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow attends to the ways which, in the
1920s, record companies began to record and release records classed as “race” and “oldtime” music, each sold in catalogues separated both from each other and from the
companies’ other offerings. These catalogues enacted broad divisions along lines of class,
race, and region, and, according to Miller, represented “a new way of organizing
American popular music and, by extension, the American public. […] Separate
77
catalogues suggested a correspondence between consumer identity and musical taste, one
that was both holistic and exclusive.” As Miller perceptively notes, “the race and oldtime categories…resided at the edge of the difference between what black and white
southerners loved and what predominantly northern [and overwhelmingly white]
corporate record men imagined they did.”78
Here we can see one of the clearest illustrations of the way that genre, embodied
in the record company catalogs, and style, as practiced by southern musicians, interact.
But where we might habitually think of genres being composed of and therefore
determined by stylistic relationship, here we see the opposite: genre, in this case,
determines what embodied stylistic practices enter into the recorded archive. As Miller
and other scholars have noted, the “race” and “old time” categories were imposed upon
the repertoire of stylistic practices that Waterman describes as “southern string band”
music.79 While Miller’s work perhaps overemphasizes the unity of what he calls—
without defining in a complex way—“southern music” previous to the introduction of the
“race” and “old time” catalogs, it is clear that the institution of these categories
reorganized cognitive and playing practice in regards to music and race, and offered
many musicians economic reward for presenting their work in accordance with the
borders those catalogs delineated. Talent scouts who scoured rural areas for performers
made choices not only of who to record, but of which songs these performers, who often
lived near each other and shared material drawn from both vernacular and commercial
sources, could record, according to their racial identification.80 Miller’s work traces the
way that these categories, which shared a language of isolation and authenticity with the
growing field of folklore studies, “profoundly shaped Americans understandings of the
78
nation’s vernacular music” even though they “corresponded to the musical lives of no
particular set of artists or audiences.”81
The evolution of these separate catalogs into genres—distinct categories which
attempted to encapsulate and in the process profoundly shaped musical practice—is too
extensive a subject to entirely rehearse here. But it is worth noting that it is a history that
has been hard for scholars to gather because the genres themselves tend to direct the flow
of historical inquiry. Miller presents what I find to be the clearest picture of musicians
and audiences in the early 20th century managing the attempts to manage their
experiences of playing and listening to music. In the process, he identifies two
performative paradigms through which notions of raced musicality were negotiated: the
minstrel, which emphasized the felt-as authentic performance of racially rooted music,
and the folkloric, which emphasized performance as the authentic embodiment of racially
defined musical culture. Here he summarizes both and describes the transition from one
to another in both the marketplace and the national consciousness:
The shift from minstrelsy to folklore marked the culmination of two long
processes I have traced throughout this book: the growing association
between racial music and racial bodies, and the distinction between mass
produced music and southern culture. For all its similarities with
minstrelsy, folkloric authenticity alone promoted these two ideas. The
connection between racial bodies and racial music was long in coming.
The tenacious minstrel conceit that black music could come from white
singers underwent a series of attacks. African American performers such
as Bob Cole asserted that black people made the most genuine minstrels.
White singers such as Vernon Dalhert insisted that blackface dialect could
be considered a marker of [southern] white identity. Race records artists
showed up white delineators on phonograph records. The disabling blow
came from folklore, which rooted traditional music in racial cultures and
often explicitly in racial bodies. Folklorists, black and white, vigorously
debated the value and meaning of black music, but on this they largely
agreed: African American music was performed by black people.82
79
The persistence of this circular paradigm in the post-World-War Two music industry, and
the way in which musicians understood it to be both a constraint upon and somewhat
independent of musical style, is well illustrated by these remarks made by singer and
guitarist B. B. King in an interview from 1978:
I remember that Dinah Washington was considered R&B or ‘race’ but
Dinah sang anything that anybody else sang. She just sang it her own
way. She was doing all of the popular tunes of the late forties and early
fifties. […] I remember Dinah covering “Three Coins in a Fountain.”
Mercury Records was using her to sell records to black record buyers. But
when she did these pop tunes in her way, they were classed as rhythm and
blues.”83
In the same interview, King discusses a debate by some of his contemporaneous critics
regarding whether his music should be considered “rhythm and blues” or “blues,” a
distinction which he dismisses by arguing that “it was all rhythm and blues, it was blues
and it had rhythm.”84 Musicians like King negotiated these categories as a matter of
economic survival, and we should not be surprised at the sophisticated understanding of
the interplay between critical discourse, industry conventions and musical practice that
his remarks display. In the commercial and musical reality that musicians like B. B.
King, Dinah Washington and Nat “King” Cole encountered, race functioned as a kind of
meta-genre, asserting the folkloric paradigm even as specific musical genres—jazz,
blues, and rhythm and blues—were asserted according to stylistic affinities within the
“race” category, a categorical division that long outlived the use of the term “race music”
in formal industry practice.
As Miller’s research suggests, this kind of broad, racially framed metacategorization instantiated an obvious color line, drawn right through what Waterman
calls “the excluded middle” ground of stylistic practices shared by black and white
80
performers.85 At the same time it marked, on a national level, a much more subtle border,
one which conflated race and class in order to make one kind of “white music” visible
while eliding the privileged whiteness of the mainstream. Country, marketed first as
“Old Time” music and then as “Hillbilly” was indeed “white” music, but it was the music
of the white, rural working class, a people who had long been denigrated as “white trash”
and had even been described in terms that mimicked racial division, including their
phenotypic characterization as “sallow.”86 Like “black music,” this music was also
commercialized in folkloric terms, suggesting that the racial binary at the heart the genre
narratives that reflexively shape our understanding not only of rock and roll, but of
American popular music in general is not between “black” blues, jazz, and rhythm and
blues, and “white” country or folk, but between those recordings that issued from
Americans marked specifically by race, class, and region, and the larger unmarked
category of known simply as popular music or “pop.
Understanding this division helps us understand why the “white music” that Elvis
Presley, a country boy from Memphis, crosses over from, is different from the “white
music” that Nat Cole crosses over to. It also helps us understand how and why their acts
of crossing over are narrated so differently. Turning again to Greil Marcus, but this time
to his more mature work—the acclaimed 1975 essay “Presliad”—we can see this
illustrated87 Here, Marcus first borrows W. J. Cash’s term “hillbilly hedonism” in order
to define rock and roll as “a violent outburst of emotion” that could “make life not only
tolerable but infinitely sweet”.88 Then, searching for something to define the emergence
of rock and roll against, Marcus finds what many actual hillbilly hedonists were listening
to wanting:
81
In the fifties we can hardly find that moment [described by Cash] in white
music, before Elvis. Hank Williams was not all there was to fifties
country, but his style was so pervasive, so effective, carrying so much
weight, that it closed off the possibilities of breaking loose just as the new
black music helped open them up.89
In this formulation, Elvis is a kind of carrier of “the new black music.” It’s far from
uncommon for Presley to be presented this way in retrospect, and it is mostly consistent
with how was understood at the moment of his emergence, although not entirely: we
should remember that, backed by Bill Black on bass and Scotty Moore on guitar, he was
first marketed as a country act and that his first major live appearance was at the Grand
Ole Opry in Nashville in 1954. On the other hand, three years later, after it was firmly
understood in the public mind that what Elvis Presley played was called rock and roll (or
rock & roll, or rock’n’roll), Presley went to great pains to point out that whatever it was,
it “used to be called rhythm and blues.”
The crossover narrative of rock and roll’s early origins adheres perfectly to
Presley’s first nickname, “The Hillbilly Cat,” a name which combines both the regional
and racial signifiers that define his performative identity: “Hillbilly” for his white skin
and rural birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi, and “Cat” for his uninhibited stage and
singing style, and his wardrobe which came straight from Memphis’ Beale Street, known
since the late 1800s as “the main street of black America.”90 This narrative in particular
emphasizes, as Marcus does above, the role of “the new black music” in the creation of
“possibilities of breaking loose.” In doing so, it puts special weight on the perceived
distance between country (or hillbilly) and rhythm and blues (a regional variation of
which was known as “cat music.”) I want to try to complicate this in three ways. One is
to ask just who is and is not being offered “possibilities of breaking loose” in this story.
82
Certainly it isn’t the women who are being held back by police in the illustration cited
earlier from the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. It might be the actual
women who attended Presley’s shows and whose abandon and enthusiasm contributed so
much energy to this mythology, but we know, historically, that rock and roll only offered
these women limited possibilities for breaking loose. Second, along the same lines, we
should, without doubting Marcus’s sincerity, ask whether this should be read the way that
Ralph Ellison read Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro,” as “more of that
same old primitivism crap in a new package.”91 In asking this, though, we should also
note that, for Presley (who here stands in for a host of lesser white, southern, rock and
rollers) primitivism—signified by both the hillbilly and the cat—tracks to both sides of a
fused identity. And that fused identity speaks to the third complication I want to offer:
where the crossover narrative emphasizes the distance between the two racialized genres
at the heart of early rock and roll, I want to emphasize their closeness, which included a
shared set of musical devices and a shared working-class identification among their
audiences. Viewed in this light, we can see Presley as the carrier not of “the new black
music” but of a single repertoire heard in different registers and viewed through different
lenses. Arguably, the perception of essential differences, even opposition, between these
two genres speaks to the differences, broadly speaking in the experience of the rural
landscape by black and white Americans throughout the first half of the 20th century.
For white southern migrants, “country” was usually constructed as the sound of a faraway
and fondly remembered home; for African American migrants like the family of
Nathaniel Coles, freshly landed in Chicago from Alabama, “country” was an accent that
they had to lose. This is not to say that white migrants did not face pressure to change
83
their speech patterns, but that pressure was more likely to come from external rather than
in-group forces, a difference reflected in the musical discourse that circulated in northern
and western outposts of the white South like, respectively, Detroit, Michigan, and
Bakersfield, California.
Nat “King” Cole’s career actually includes two distinct crossover moments. The
first more closely resembles Presley’s initial achievement, although it came more than a
decade earlier: in 1943, the song “Straighten Up and Fly Right” by the King Cole Trio
reached number nine on the popular chart, number one on the “Harlem Hit Parade”
(formerly the race chart) and spent six weeks as one of the top 20 most played Hillbilly
Jukebox selections. The second, and the one more important to my argument here,
probably begins with the release of the aforementioned “The Christmas Song” in 1948.
Cole had, at that point, already replaced the founding guitarist and bassist in the trio, and
over the next decade his recordings more often featured his smooth vocals in front of a
lush orchestra than any other accompaniment. On tour, he was billed as “Nat King Cole
and the Trio” and he and the trio were always supported by strings. This made touring
expensive, but his success made it more economically feasible for him to carry a larger
band on the road than almost any performer working at the time.
For both Elvis Presley and Nat Cole, performers who seem to mirror each other in
interesting ways (including the fact that both were colloquially known as “The King” in
the popular press at different times), massive popular success has been narrated as artistic
decline. There are important and revealing differences, though. While Presley’s success
has often been presented as an abandonment of his most engaging and authentic music,
his production of pop music, as opposed to rock and roll, has never been presented as an
84
act of “crossing over,” and his decline into massive success has rarely been presented in
explicitly racial terms. This is not the case for Nat Cole. In his book Unsung Heroes of
Rock and Roll, Nick Tosches summarizes the common critical evaluation of the arc of
Nat Cole’s career in typically (for Tosches) hyperbolic fashion:
In the 1940s there were two black singers who crossed over from the race
charts (as Billboard called its bluegum charts until 1949, when the phrase
rhythm and blues was adopted) to the pop charts. Nat King Cole, the more
successful of the two singers, [the other was Louis Jordan] was eventually
swallowed by the tamer, white music. One of the most inventive West
coast R&B singers of the early forties, by the year of his death, 1965, Cole
had been reduced to singing “the Ballad of Cat Ballou” with Stubby
Kaye.92
The blunt language here amplifies undercurrents present in critical pronouncements
delivered during Cole’s heyday, such as Downbeat magazine’s 1956 backhanded praise
of Cole as “the popular singer who used to play a hot piano,”93 and in retrospective
characterizations like that of rhythm and blues historian Charlie Gillette who, in 1970
maintained that “the fact that Cole was a Negro was irrelevant to his style.”94 Gillette’s
comment implies that, unlike Cole, the R&B musicians covered in his iconic monograph
The Sound of The City practiced a style that was relevant to their racial identification, and
Downbeat’s readers would surely recognize “hot” as denoting authentic, African
American jazz performance, a term mobilized as an appositive to “sweet” or commercial
jazz performance that was historically more successful with white audiences.95 The
message of all of these pronouncements was that Cole had become too “white” to be
authentic, a message which underlies a paradoxical truth about crossover in general: that
it reifies and reinforces the barriers whose breach it so loudly announces.
Cole’s exclusion from these genres and from the histories that they narrate can be
understood as a consequence of the collision of minstrel and folkloric paradigms, and of
85
the assertion of the folkloric paradigm as a definitive constituent of previously unmarked
mainstream popular music. Presley is, in retrospectives like Marcus’s “Presliad,”
folklorically valorized for bringing “authentic” black music to a mass white audience,
and for allowing a cadre of boomer rock critics to remake the history of popular music in
the image of their own mysterious and unintelligible other. What is lost in that
transformation is a record of the way in which Nat Cole turned minstrelsy on its head by
delineating whiteness as a set of mobile, practicable, performative characteristics, much
as minstrelsy had claimed for blackness for a century or more prior.
Understanding Cole’s performance this way, we can better hear the possibilities
that he represented for his audiences—black and white. And we can perhaps better
understand why, in 1956, well after being, in Tosches’ estimation, “swallowed by the
tamer, whiter music,” Nat Cole was attacked onstage in Birmingham, Alabama by
members of the North Alabama White Citizens Council who had, for a month or two
prior, made great noise in the press about the coming onslaught of “communistic rock
and roll.” As ridiculous as those claims might sound today, they need to be understood in
terms of both the fluxy and as-yet not fully genrified racial nature of rock and roll, and
the racially tinged moral panic which connected the music with juvenile delinquency in
the national press.96
Local press coverage in Birmingham carefully noted that Cole did not, in fact,
play rock and roll. But Asa Carter, leader of the North Alabama White Citizens Council
(hereafter NAWCC) and of a local Klan chapter, responded by arguing that it was only “a
short step…from the sly, night club technique vulgarity of Cole to the openly animalistic
obscenity of the horde of negro rock and rollers”97 Although it remains unproven, the
86
attack on Cole was likely orchestrated by Carter, who went on to write speeches—
including the one bearing the famed declaration “Segregation today, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever!”—for George Wallace, before moving to Texas,
changing his name to Forrest Carter, and reemerging as a popular novelist and author of
the multicultural children’s book The Education of Little Tree.98
The incident in Birmingham is well known, despite or more likely because of its
anomalous content. It is often the only mention of Cole in genre histories devoted to
rhythm and blues or rock and roll.99 Generally the story is narrated as a paradoxical
account of mistaken genre identity and/or an example of southern white hysteria
following the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board in 1954. Still, it is in incident
worth examining more closely as it moves the discussion of crossover narratives from
metaphorical to real spaces, and illustrates graphically what is at stake in Cole’s reversal
of minstrelsy’s performative conventions.
Birmingham, Alabama, April 14th, 1956
Although the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had not yet named Birmingham
“the most segregated city in America,” as he would in 1963, the conditions that will
suggest the name are in full effect in April of 1956. The city was founded after the Civil
War, and had been envisioned from the start as a specifically southern industrial center.
As such, a raced and classed regime intended to maintain and contain a permanent
underclass of black workers had long been considered a necessity by the city’s elites, and
Jim Crow had developed there as a kind of unified system, involving the cooperation of
public and private entities on a level greater than perhaps anywhere else in the South.
This unified system was expressed in the nation’s longest surviving racial zoning
87
ordinance, which shaped the growth and development of the city’s neighborhoods from
1926 until long after it was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 1953; in
the policies of industrial giants like Tennessee Coal and Iron, whose company towns kept
black workers in horrifyingly substandard housing; and in the actions of local union
leaders who actively pressured companies not to promote black workers. While black
residents had seen some economic gains due to increased employment during World War
Two and the years immediately following, their attempts to cross even the more informal
boundaries that separated black and white residences were met with dynamite and terror,
earning the city the nickname “Bombingham.”100
Within the segregated metropolis, a place where, according to Robin Kelley,
“signs of post-industrial decline began to appear as early as the 1950s,” the Municipal
Auditorium, where Nat Cole performed, occupied what was quite literally contested
terrain. Since renamed Boutwell Auditorium, the building has been called, by historian
Glenn Eskew, “The most important building in the history of the South in the 20th
century” and the place that “saw more key events determining the South’s relationship to
the country at large in the previous century than any other structure in the United
States.”101 Those events had included the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, in
1936, where Eleanor Roosevelt dragged her chair to the middle of the room in defiance of
Bull Connor’s attempts to segregate the proceedings, and the convention popularly
known as the “Dixiecrat Revolt” in 1948, where the members of the States Rights
Democratic Party had nominated senator Strom Thurmond for President. And while the
events of April 14, 1956 might not have helped to “determine the South’s relationship to
the country at large,” they at least indicated that relationship’s still-contested nature.
88
No recording of this event exists, and there are few photos or eyewitness
accounts, but we can, speculatively, attempt to recuperate the performance. Onstage in
the Municipal Auditorium, Nat Cole is dressed in a simple, elegant black tuxedo and
bowtie. The suit is handmade, tailored for his tall frame, and formal, but understated and
as unostentatious as such a suit can be. His skin is an exceptionally dark shade of brown
and perhaps seems darker than it might normally appear, illuminated in a spotlight and
contrasted against a sea of approximately 3,000 much paler faces in the seats in front of
him, and against a thick white stage curtain behind him. The curtain, which runs down
the middle of the stage for tonight’s performance, separates the singer from the Ted
Heath Orchestra, “Britain’s Premiere Big Band Swing Outfit” according to the
advertisements for this package tour, which also features Cole’s fellow Capitol Records
recording artists June Christy and The Four Freshmen.102 The tour, which started a
month before, has taken the musicians, their road managers, assistants, and a small
production crew across five southern states: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky
and Georgia. In many of the venues on this tour the audiences are segregated, with
African American attendees relegated either to a balcony or seats in the back, or, as here,
only allowed entry into a second, separate show. Birmingham, however, where even the
stage is segregated by the curtain between the “black” singer and the “white”
instrumentalists, is a special case.103
Standing at center stage, Cole opens the show with “Autumn Leaves,” a song
which, for the past month, could be heard behind the opening title sequence of a film by
the same name, in theatres in many cities across the country, including Birmingham.
Even in this most segregated of American cities, Cole’s voice had established a presence
89
where his physical body could not. Many scholars have noted the role of radio stations,
some black owned but many simply programming “black music” in contravening the
borders of both de jure and de facto segregation in the 1950s.104 Nat Cole’s voice,
however, unmarked by the vernacular styles of speech or singing associated with rhythm
and blues, penetrated bastions of segregation closed to even the most charismatic rhythm
and blues singer. In the auditorium, there is a short flourish from the orchestra, and over
a mournful minor chord Cole breathes lyrics adapted by Johnny Mercer from a French
poem:
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands I used to hold.105
Cole’s mouth is open and his lips are somewhere between one and three inches from a
large silver microphone, close enough that his softly sung and precisely controlled
phrases are amplified throughout the room, but far enough away to avoid the overemphasis on bass frequencies that occurs when the vibrations from the singer’s mouth
overwhelm the tiny, electrified paper cone inside the microphone’s capsule. Cole
maintains this distance perfectly, and the ability to do so is a vital part of his art. He sings
softly, but rhythmically, each note issuing from his mouth occupying a discrete space in
time and sitting precisely at the center of the intended pitch. More than one critic has
found a relation between this deep rhythmic assurance and the fact that Cole first
achieved fame as a virtuoso pianist. As former Downbeat editor Gene Lees notes, “a
piano, even at it’s most legato is a percussion instrument, and my sense of Cole’s singing,
even at his most legato, is of isolated, crystal tones, linked only by the aural imagination
of the listener and not breathed slurs by the performer.”106
90
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
The imagination of the audience is, of course, integral to any musical
performance. Music depends on the listener’s ability to string discrete sonic events
composed of vibrating air into a kind of narrative, and to understand that narrative
immediately and remember it later as emotional affect. Here, those vibrations in the air
leave Cole’s mouth and impress upon the microphone’s diaphragm, causing the paper
cone to move minutely and quickly backwards and forwards. Those movements are
translated by a magnetic field into currents of electricity which move though cords and
cables to a large, vacuum-tube powered mixing board in the back of the auditorium.
From there, the signals move to amplifiers, weak by today’s standards, but strong enough
to boost and push these alternating currents down speaker wires and into boxes
containing speakers. Inside the speakers, much like a larger, mirror-image of the
microphone on stage, magnets translate the electrical current into movements, causing a
paper cone to vibrate sympathetically back and forth in space.
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands I used to hold.
The sound of Nat Cole’s voice, captured just inches from his lips, fills the
auditorium. And the single emotional effect most often descriptively associated with that
voice is intimacy. According to jazz critic Henry Pleasants, “at his best and most
characteristic, Nat Cole was not so much a singer as a whisperer, or, as one might put it, a
confider.”107 Similarly, the drummer Earl Palmer noted that Cole “had a beautiful voice,
91
always masculine, but tender and warm. His portrayal of a song had such understanding;
it was like he wrote everything he sang.”108 In her biography, published in 1996, Cole’s
daughter Natalie helps to identify the technique in terms of the effect that it caused: “You
felt an intimacy in the way he sang a word, in his phrasing, or in the way he put a
sentence together. Using the pauses is very effective—it’s more conversational. It’s
called “caressing.” […] You felt that he was singing to only one person—you—and not
to a roomful of people.”
Certainly, to the members of the North Alabama Citizens Council sitting in the
audience, the notion of Nat Cole caressing their ears and those of the people around them,
particularly the women around them must have been too much to bear. During the third
song, an ancient and trite Tin Pan Alley tune called “Little Girl” there is a commotion out
in the dark, beyond the footlights. Six men who, it was later found, believed there might
be more than a hundred others in the crowd with them, are moving down the aisles
toward the stage. A policemen stationed by the orchestra pit intercepts one of them, and
they trade blows. Lees once claimed that “Nat Cole never shouts, not in his singing and
not in his life.” But Cole probably shouts now, as he is tackled by Willis R. Vinson and
knocked backwards, breaking his piano bench and sending the microphone crashing to
the stage with a dull thud that was likely powerful enough to blow out several of the
hall’s speakers. Vinson has hold of Cole’s leg, and is trying to drag him off stage when
the police reach the stage in force. As the curtain closes, drummer Lee Young yells to
the Heath Orchestra, “Play something, anything, the national anthem” and the Heath
Band, confused, responds by launching loudly into “God Save The Queen,” which the
92
audience likely heard as “America the Beautiful since they share the same melody, as the
curtain closes.109
The events at the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium have been investigated to
some depth by scholars, and while the idea that Nat Cole, who did not sing rock and roll,
was attacked onstage for was attached onstage for being a rock and roll singer, offers the
reader a certain hook, it fails to satisfactorily explain the attack. Brian Ward, who offers
probably the most comprehensive account, points out that Asa Carter’s newspaper, The
Southerner, had in the months prior published several pictures of Cole with white
Hollywood actresses, reprinted from trade papers like Variety.110 These pictures, of
course, spoke directly to the white southern sexual anxieties that demagogues like Carter
traded on and likely had as much or more to do with drumming up enthusiasm for the
attack as Carter’s denouncements of rock and roll. Ward suggests that Carter’s efforts to
demonize rock and roll made the music in general a kind of ancillary target of massive
resistance, but it is far from clear how broadly this is true. Pete Daniel, for example,
notes the presence of teenagers wearing the standard rock and roll male youth uniform of
black leather jackets, white T-shirts and jeans, and duck-tail hair among crowds
protesting the admission of African American students to Little Rock’s Central High in
1957.111
Ward’s narrative in Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black
Consciousness and Race Relations contextualizes the incident between the twin poles of
massive resistance to Brown v. Board and increasingly visible and audible blackness in
American popular culture. Gary Sprayberry, in a short article, delves deeper into the
motivation of the attackers themselves, noting that the North Alabama White Citizens
93
Council was separated from the other Alabama Councils not only by Carter’s violent and
anti-Semitic rhetoric, but also by class division. Across the South, the Citizens Councils
that sprang up in opposition to Brown v. Board were generally middle class operations
whose members distanced themselves, at least publicly, from the excesses of Klan
violence. The attack on Cole, which Sprayberry argues was an attempt by Carter to
establish a kind of brand for himself within the local white supremacy movement,
departed from those strategies with disastrous results. While 12,000 people had attended
a rally put on in Montgomery by the Association of Alabama Citizen’s Councils a few
months earlier, a similar rally following the attack on Cole drew less than 100 people.
Building upon Ward and Sprayberry’s observations, I would emphasize the
performative dimensions of the incident, on both sides of the stage. As Sprayberry
observes, “For the audience, who sat in stunned silence throughout the ordeal, the whole
affair seemed like an absurd comedy, purposely staged and chaotically performed by
Cole and the Birmingham police.” While I do not wish in any way to minimize the
physical danger that the attack posed to Cole, I think that Sprayberry correctly attends to
the absurdist elements of what is clearly a performance of class resentment, a spasm born
out of the divide characterized historically in Alabama as the struggle between “the
bourbon and the redneck.”112 As such, it represents the desperation of men whose only
real social privilege is racial, and who see that privilege slipping away. To men in this
position, lacking the economic power to assert any advantage not based purely on race,
Cole’s performative assumption of the characteristics of whiteness, and of a
commensurate class status, might have seemed authentic enough to put their own in
doubt. Thus, it is perhaps more true than not that it was the fact that Nat Cole was not a
94
rock and roll singer that made him a target in the Municipal Auditorium in 1956. This in
turn suggests a fascinating reversal of Greil Marcus image of Chuck Berry and his
“flashing guitar” disrupting the sleepy cocktail lounge, as here, it was “mood music,” and
particularly the high economic status and widespread appeal that Cole had consolidated
through the performance of such music that engendered, however innocently, disruption
and violence.
Coda: Rearticulating Nat Cole
Perhaps the most recent re-narration of the attack in Birmingham can be found in
the press release put out by Capital Records and King Cole Enterprises LLC to
accompany Voices of Change: Then and Now, a three song “digital EP” available for
download on popular music shopping sites like iTunes and Amazon.com.113 This
document describes that night in Birmingham in heroic terms intended to align Cole with
popular memories of the southern civil rights movement:
“We Are Americans Too,” recorded by Cole in May, 1956, one month
after he was assaulted onstage in Birmingham, Alabama by three white
supremacists, is a call for recognition, mutual respect and human kindness.
On Voices Of Change, Then & Now, an excerpt from President Obama’s
momentous Inaugural Address introduces the song.
The label declined to release “We Are Americans Too,” a striking
departure from Cole’s well-loved ballads, when it was recorded. That
same year, Cole became the first African American host of a national
television program (NBC’s “The Nat King Cole Show”). With quiet
resolve and sheer perseverance throughout his life, Cole broke through
and broke down numerous color barriers in his determination to further
civil rights for all marginalized Americans.114
This is not, to say the least, the reaction at the time from the black public sphere at large
and especially from those involved in the campaign for civil rights. Far from applauding
his “quiet resolve and sheer perseverance,” the national black press and many prominent
95
African Americans denounced Cole’s declaration that he “was not mad at the people of
Alabama,” and that he would continue to play in the South, even at segregated venues
because “they have a lot of Negroes there.”115 Playing on of the title of his hit song “Too
Young,” The Baltimore African American published a cartoon with the headline “Not
Too Young” to Know Better.”116 The Chicago Defender opined that “The King was dead
wrong anyhow for going into Birmingham under an arrangement whereby he played first
to a white audience and then a Negro audience. […] If he couldn’t have played to a group
of American Citizens on an integrated basis, he just should have stayed out of
Birmingham.”117 Lead NAACP lawyer and future Supreme court Justice Thurgood
Marshall was reported to have said that “All Cole needs to complete his Uncle Tom role
is a banjo.”118
Cole held his ground in interviews, but eventually responded to the furor in the
press with an open letter explaining that he had purchased a lifetime membership in the
NAACP and that, in case there was any confusion, he fully supported the organization’s
goals.119 “We Are Americans Too,” which was written by Eubie Blake and Andy Razoff
in 1940 as part of a campaign to integrate the armed forces, was recorded in Chicago on
May 17, a month or so after the attack. The music, performed by the Brian J. Farnon
Orchestra, is an uptempo march. It is, or is supposed to be, stirring, and it is clearly a
response the attack. It swings less than almost anything in the entire Cole catalog, and
Capitol’s decision not to release it may have had as much to do with it sounding oldfashioned to contemporary ears in 1956 as it did with any potentially controversial
content. The lyrics present a demand for civil rights by articulating those rights to
normative notions of nationalism and capitalist production.
96
By the part that we’ve played and the record we’ve made,
We are Americans too.
By the pick and the plow and the sweat of our brow
We are Americans too
Somewhere out there in the parade
Loudly, proudly and undismayed
We’ll be singing this song many millions strong
We are Americans, loyal Americans
We are Americans too
Such articulations represent a long-lived strategy in racial struggles in the U.S. and one
that was far easier for Capitol Records to market in conjunction with the Obama
inauguration than Cole’s actual response to the civil rights movement that he encountered
or that movement’s complicated tensions regarding the twin structures of capitalism and
nationalism. Cole did “show quiet resolve and sheer determination throughout his life”
and he did “break down numerous barriers.” But while he was, by all accounts, a gentle,
thoughtful, caring man, he did not, at least in public, betray a “determination to further
civil rights for all marginalized Americans.”
Putting aside, momentarily, the work that his music did in the public sphere, Cole
did very directly confront and surmount a few racial barriers. He did, as previously
noted, integrate Hancock Park in Los Angeles, and he and his manager Carlos Gastel
were instrumental in relaxing color barriers that kept black musicians from the restaurants
and casinos of the hotels in Las Vegas where they played. Cole also sued hotels in New
York and Philadelphia for denying him lodging, winning money and apologies from the
owners in both cases. Throughout his career, Cole also played benefits for, and privately
donated money to, the NAACP, and was an early financial supporter of the Montgomery
bus boycott. But he also placed severe limitations on what he would and would not do
publicly for African American civil rights. As support grew in the late 1950s and early
97
1960s among black entertainers for a public boycott of segregated venues, he refused,
with uncharacteristic anger, stating in 1962 that it was an “idiotic idea” that “negro
entertainers should lead the way” in protesting segregation, and arguing that Dick
Gregory and Al Hibbler “needed the publicity” and calling Harry Belafonte “a
professional integrationist.”120 It is hard, perhaps impossible, to say whether his stance
was motivated more by political calculus or personal reserve. But there are consistent
threads that run through the areas where he did and did not step forward to advocate
against racism, and those threads coalesce around the careful public containment of his
private self, the individualistic nature of his aesthetic and commercial ambitions, and the
desire to protect the privileged class position he had achieved.
The elision of this full context from the press materials accompanying Voices of
Change: Then and Now is an attempt to build a simplified, effective, and immediately
recognizable connection between Cole’s music and the popular memory of the civil rights
movement, while eliding the complicated cultural politics of black liberation. It is an
appealing connection, one often made retrospectively between the vital black popular
music of the post-World War Two era and the civil rights struggle that emerged fully and
inescapably into American public life in those years, but in the end it does a disservice
both to both the music and the movements by ironing out what are, in the end, instructive
complexities. Arnold Shaw, whose 1971 book Honkers and Shouters remains an
authoritative musical history of the rhythm and blues era, argues that this music was “an
expression of people enjoying a new sense of freedom, hemmed in though that freedom
was by ghettos” and that “R&B discs helped blacks establish a new identity—the kind
that led a little old black lady to refuse to yield her seat to a white on an Alabama bus.”121
98
But putting aside the osmotic strategy of deducing influence according to proximity in a
sentence, Shaw’s rhetoric fails to acknowledge a key point. Although Rosa Parks might
have been “a little old black lady,” she was also the Secretary of the Montgomery
NAACP, and her act of protest—both spontaneous in the moment and the result of
months of discussion and planning in chapter meetings—is not diminished by the
knowledge that she fully intended to participate in some kind of action intended to help
her and her community secure their full rights as citizens. On a larger level, both the
struggle and rhythm and blues were in the air, but they were connected to each other only
through complex articulations which Shaw barely hints at.122
The conflation of musical expression and political activism in Shaw’s formulation
above, exemplifying what Brian Ward calls “the tendency to exaggerate the extent of
personal involvement in or tangible support for, organized black protest by the heroes and
heroines of soul,” may tell us something about why Nat Cole is so often excluded from
histories and reference volumes dealing with African American music. As Guthrie
Ramsey Jr. notes, “black music research…has been slow to shed its modern-day genesis
in the politics of the 1960s black power movement.”123 While there are myriad and
compelling reasons that support the maintenance of such a posture, it makes it lacunae
like the one that envelops Nat Cole all the more likely. Cole is an uneasy fit for
scholarship so forged, due not only to the self-interested moderation of his political
stance, but also because his musical output strayed so far from the set of musical styles
that Guthrie calls “the blues modality” and which this scholarly tradition has defined as
central to “black music.”124
99
Without taking the claims made on their behalf by Capitol Records executives too
seriously, we can hear and see the two most recent releases credited to Nat King Cole as
attempts to rearticulate his musical memory to narratives that describe African American
cultural production as both a historic national resource and a vital part of the
contemporary commercial landscape. While Voices of Change: Then and Now presents a
more familiar iteration of Nat Cole, Re:Generations purposefully announces itself as a
departure from received notions of the singer as a nostalgic figure. In fact, one effect of
listening to this record is to imagine that, denied an authentic perch in the pantheon of
rock and roll and soul heroes, Nat Cole had instead been recuperated by hip-hop, the
genre which, in many ways, superseded both as the critical and commercial center of the
popular music industry, and which, like those two genres, is recognized in part by an
elaborate tension between authenticity and commerciality, managing to be understood as
both the authentic voice of its audience and, especially in terms of technical production,
the dominant stylistic influence in the modern musical industrial complex.
Despite a career which saw more than 60 recordings in various formats released
while he was alive, and perhaps three times that number in posthumous collections, the
collage on the cover of Nat King Cole Re:Generations presents Cole differently than the
covers of any of those records. Familiarly enough, Cole is wearing a well-cut, smoothly
tailored, double-breasted suit and tie. But the photograph has been digitally manipulated
and Cole and his suit are bathed, silhouette-like, in bright orange light, fading to dark red
around the edges, and suspended against a glittering, colorful starscape. Perhaps even
more unusually, Cole, whose torso fills the space along the right axis of the CD cover,
legs disappearing into the star-field, has his head back and the singer who Gene Lees said
100
“never shouts, not in his art, not in his life” has his mouth wide open suggesting a fullthroated and climactic sonic release.
Figure 1: The front cover of Re:Generations
101
The inside cover even more starkly illustrates the tension between well known
critical and historical accounts of Nat Cole and the Nat Cole (re)presented here. The
cover folds out into three panels, and across them is another painting, duplicating a
graffiti mural prepared especially for this project by the artist Man One and constructed
in the parking lot of the iconic Capitol Records tower in Los Angeles, a building
nicknamed “the house that Nat built” because of the countless hit records the singer
recorded for the label.125
Figure 2: The Inside Cover of Re:Generations
Here, the focus is on a multicolored profile shot of the singer, which occupies
most of the leftmost panel. Drawn in thick, stark lines, he is wearing a smart suit again,
and a hat as well. His face is multi-hued, with swaths of green, blue, red, orange, and
yellow laid across the angles of his recognizable profile. Erupting from Cole’s wide-open
mouth and extending across the other two panels is a dark cone which, in the rightmost
panel opens up into a star-field much like the one on the front cover. A giant ringed
planet, all red, orange, and purple floats in the middle of that starfield. The words “Nat,”
102
“King” and “Cole” are spread across the three panels in the three-dimensional font
commonly associated with tagging, an essential practice in graffiti art, and the middle
panel also includes the record’s title, in blue letters outlined in white, duplicating another
tagging style. The background is a muted gold color, and bright yellow and dark ochre
lines radiate out explosively from the face of the singer who Lees called, “a confider,
almost a whisperer.”126
The aural qualities depicted in these images are familiar tropes in the visual
presentation of modern popular music. Cole’s wide-open mouth in both images, the thick
lines that radiate out from the side of the painted profile, and the ever-widening black
cone that fills all three panels on the inside cover, all conflate vocal power, (racial)
essence, and, when combined with the extraterrestrial imagery in both pieces,
transcendent experience. But the singer ostensibly at the center of this recording
achieved transcendent effect more often with precision than with power.
In many ways, Cole’s ambitious materialism–he once said that he didn’t make
records for jazz critics because they didn’t pay for them–fits better into hip-hop’s bluntly
commercial ethos than it did within soul’s imagined communitarian polity.127 And while
the stable currency of hip-hop has long been the discursive and performative construction
of authentic blackness, its authenticity has always been located as much in situational
narratives, specifically the narratives of the post-industrial city, rather than in essential
constructions.128 Like Cole’s, the base performative paradigm of hip-hop is closer to
what Miller terms minstrel, rather than folkloric, meaning that it places a higher value on
performance than on essence in the figuration of identity. The ubiquitous performative
imperative to “keep it real” reminds us that authentic identity, in hip-hop discourse, is
103
realized through ongoing performative practice, and is not to be taken for granted. At
the same time, hip-hop also recuperates and sometimes literally reanimates through
sampling the kinds of oral and aural traditions historically maintained in African
American musical communities that the folkloric paradigm attempts to describe.
What Cole brings to this are the possibilities held in his virtuoso reversal of
minstrel delineations: the idea that authentic African American performance could
include the virtuoso performance of musical whiteness as legitimately as they do musical
blackness. Hip-hop production depends on the precise arrangement and re-arrangement
of samples, discrete pieces of music—some recorded for the occasion, others found—into
complex sonic structures. Like the notes issuing from Nat Cole’s mouth, each is
contained, placed precisely in time, and connected together by the imagination of the
listener. Historically, hip-hop producers have drawn not only from African American
musical traditions, but from all genres, intending to capture listeners in a web of memory
and association, one that draws upon the mnemonic power of the kinds of genre
narratives that I have described here as an affective resource.
Voices of Change and Re:Generations present contradictory articulations of the
blackness and Americaness of Nat Cole’s music. Neither one, I believe, makes
thoroughly coherent sense of the singer or his songs. Re:Generations does suggest that it
is possible for Cole and his music to be recuperated by ongoing African American
popular musical traditions, although perhaps only selectively. It is in many ways
appropriate to Cole and his art, which we can understand both as an ambitious
performance demonstrating mastery over race itself, and as a stoic accommodation of
racialized realities, that even on these new records he remains something of a cipher. His
104
characteristic performances, especially from the later orchestral period, are such perfectly
crafted expressions of musical intention that in the end they offer us little to understand
beyond what he intends the performance to sound like. For audience members like
myself, raised on the folkloric paradigms of post-rock and roll popular music, this may
feel false or inauthentic; we are taught to respond to performances that claim to be
organic expressions rather than performances at all. Singers like Janis Joplin, Otis
Redding, or Johnny Ray, who offered dramatic and emotive performances, are often
spoken of as losing themselves in, or giving themselves over to, the song. Such a
description taken literally seems entirely more appropriate for a singer like Nat Cole who,
despite all of this technological and commercial recontextualization, remains lost in the
music he made.
105
Notes
1
Waterman, Christopher. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina’, and the
Excluded Middle.” In Radano, Ronald Michael, and Philip Vilas Bohlman. Music and
the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. p. 168.
2
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge,
1989. p. 68
3
Cole, Nat King, Natalie Cole, and Bebel Gilberto, et.al.. Re:Generations. [Europe];
[France]: Capitol records; [distrib. EMI music France], 2009. Cole, Nat King. Voices Of
Change, Then And Now. Capitol, 2009.
4
Cole, Natalie, and Nat King Cole. Still Unforgettable. [S.l.]; Burbank, CA: DMI
Records/Atco; Manufactured & marketed by Rhino, 2008.
Cole, Natalie. Unforgettable. Beverly Hills, CA: Elektra, 1991.
5
Nat King Cole Re:Generations Album Sizzle Reel, 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVJ7F5Cr6I&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Accessed 2/12/2012.
6
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Thoughts on the Rihanna-Chris Brown Collaboration.” The
Atlantic, February 22, 2012.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/thoughts-on-the-RihannaChris-brown-collaboration/253466/.
7
Wald, Elijah. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock “n” Roll: an Alternative History of
American Popular Music. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 4.
8
“Nat King Cole Album & Song Chart History | Billboard.com”, n.d.
http://www.billboard.com/artist/nat-king-cole/chart-history/51164#/artist/nat-kingcole/chart-history/51164. For an exhaustive statistical account of Cole’s recordings, see
Teubig, Klaus. Straighten up and Fly Right: a Chronology and Discography of Nat
“King” Cole. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. See also for general
biographical information: Cole, Maria, and Louie Robinson. Nat King Cole; an Intimate
Biography,. New York: W. Morrow, 1971. Epstein, Daniel. Nat King Cole. New York:
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999. Gourse, Leslie. Unforgettable: the Life and Mystique of
Nat King Cole. 1st Ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Haskins, James, and
Kathleen Benson. Nat King Cole. New York: Stein and Day, 1984. Of these four
biographies, Epstein’s is probably the most thoroughly researched and objective,
although Gourse provides the best-written account of Cole’s career available.
9
Lees, Gene. You Can’t Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001. p. 232.
106
10
It should be noted that it is hard to make the overall point about Cole’s appearances on
multiple, racially coded charts in a way that is both precise and efficient because, while
the larger regional and racial categories have remained more or less constant, the actual
names of the Billboard sales charts that track to these coded divisions have changed
several times over the years. Broadly, there has almost always been a set of “Popular”
charts that are, by unspoken agreement, assumed to represent mostly white consumers but
which are discursively unmarked; a set of “black” charts which have variously been
named the “Race” chart, “The Harlem Hit Parade” and “Rhythm and Blues,” among
other names, and which is now known as “Urban”; and the “Country” or “Country and
Western” charts which began as the “Old Time” charts and were also known as the
Hillbilly charts. There are also, within these divisions, numerous charts tracking singles,
albums, radio play, and for a time, jukebox distribution. As yet, a comprehensive history
of the changes in the names of these charts and what those changes say about popular
understanding of popular music has not been written, although the charts themselves are
oft-cited as indicators of sales and popular taste. What can be said and verified is that
Nat Cole, throughout his career, regularly appeared on charts that were coded as “white”
and which tracked sales to consumers assumed to be at least primarily white, as well as
charts that were much more clearly coded as “black” and intended to track sales to
specifically black consumers, and that he also occasionally even placed songs at a
significant level on charts intended to track sales to rural, white, consumers.
11
This is the approximate number of returns for a search on youtube.com for the term
“Nat King Cole” as performed 2/26/11. See “‘Nat King Cole’ - YouTube”, n.d.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Nat+King+Cole%22&oq=%22Nat+
King+Cole%22&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=41921l45152l0l46650l15l15l
0l0l0l0l241l2228l0.12.3l15l0.
12
HMV102,Sweet Lorraine, The King Cole Trio, 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRPs3gp55Zo&feature=youtube_gdata_player. The
HMV-102 was advertised as “The World’s Finest Portable and was manufactured from
1931 to 1960, long after most mechanical Victrola players ceased to be made. For more,
see “1931 HMV 102 - The World’s Finest Portable”, n.d.
http://myvintagetv.com/updatepages1/changer%20videos/Best%20Portables/HMV102.ht
m.
13
Walter, Benjamin. Illuminations. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968. p. 220
14
Ibid.
15
Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. London;
New York: Arnold; Co-published in the U.S.A. by Oxford University Press, 2000.p. 72.
Toynbee’s remarks here are from a discussion comparing the “fast-tracking” of
technology presenting the audience with multiple viewpoints within the spatial field in
film to the much slower and more conservative development of similar methods of
presentation in sound recording, which he argues has much to do with the guiding
107
influence of the discourse of fidelity on commercial and technological development in the
field. In the course of this discussion, Toynbee draws upon Laing, Dave. “A Voice
Without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890s.” Popular Music 10, no.
1 (1991): 1–9, and Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr.
Funkenstein. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. For a theoretically sophisticated
discussion of the role of this discourse of fidelity in the production of the subject in
popular music, see Middleton, Richard. Voicing the Popular: on the Subjects of Popular
Music. New York: Routledge, 2006.
16
Nat King Cole - When I Fall In Love - Live, 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h649I7ETaHI&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
17
Cole, Natalie, and Nat King Cole. Still Unforgettable.; Burbank, CA: DMI
Records/Atco; Manufactured & marketed by Rhino, 2008. Cole, Natalie. Unforgettable.
Beverly Hills, CA: Elektra, 1991.
18
Williams, Hank. Greatest Hits III. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Bros., 1989. See also
Williams, Hank. The Bocephus Box the Hank Williams Jr. Collection, 1979-1992.
Nashville, TN: Curb/Capricorn, 1992.
19
Both Cole and Williams released videos which used footage of their fathers’
performances to further the illusion of a duet performance. Natalie Cole has also
incorporated films of her father’s performances into her live shows at times, having these
films edited and projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage so that she can
execute a carefully choreographed performance of the two of them seemingly singing
together. See Cole, Natalie. Unforgettable, with Love: Natalie Cole., 1992. See also,
Williams, Hank, and Hank Williams Sr. In the Hank Williams Tradition. West Long
Branch, NJ: White Star, 2000.
20
Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: W. Morrow, 1967. And, ———. Blues
People: Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow, 1963.
21
Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. For an account of Cole’s introduction of Riddle to
Sinatra, and his role in getting Sinatra signed to Capitol, the label which issued Sinatra’s
iconic mid-1950s “comeback” albums, see Epstein, Daniel Mark. Nat King Cole.
Boston; Northeastern UP, 1999. p. 240-241.
22
23
George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: the Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New
York: Macmillan, 1978.
108
24
For a thoughtful discussion of “sepia Sinatras” including a useful stylistic genealogy,
see Salem, James M. The Late, Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R & B to Rock
“n” Roll. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
25
There have been a number of pointed critiques of Burns’ film, especially regarding
particular omissions and emphasis. See, Nicholson, Stuart. “Evansing the Score: The
Politics of Exclusion in Ken Burns’ Jazz” Jazz Times. April, 2001. Available on the
web at: http://jazztimes.com/articles/20327-evansing-the-score-the-politics-of-exclusionin-ken-burns-jazz. Accessed 2/12/2012. Lees has been highly critical specifically of the
omission of Cole, both in You Can’t Steal a Gift (p. 252) and in an interview where he
states “I loathed and detested the Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary because there was no
mention about Nat Cole. There is not much of Earl Hines either. Essentially, all of
modern jazz piano comes out of Hines to Cole to all the people who came out Cole, such
as Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver, Bill Evans, and so many others. This is one of the
major streams in jazz history, is that flow of Hines to Cole, and it was not mentioned
once in that atrocity of a program Burns put together. It was a total distortion of jazz
history.” See “Jazz/Jerry Jazz Musician/Jazz Critic Gene Lees Interview.” Available at
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/linernotes/gene_lees.html. Accessed 2/14/2012.
26
Lipsitz, George. Footsteps in the Dark: the Hidden Histories of Popular Music.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p. 81.
27
Cole, Nat King. Nat King Cole at the Sands. Los Angeles, Calif.: Capitol Jazz, 2002.
The liner notes state that the songs were recorded between 2:30 and 5:30 AM for a
privately invited audience, making it a “live” recording produced in a carefully controlled
environment.
28
Lyric transcription by the author.
29
Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry: the Autobiography. New York: Harmony Books, 1987.
McKaie, Andy. Chuck Berry. Universal City, Calif.: Chess, 1988.
30
“Rose Marie” and “Sweet Lorraine” are both titles to songs written for Broadway
productions in the 1920s and 1930s which became jazz standards. “Sweet Lorraine” is
particularly associated with Cole, being the first record he released after signing to
Capital Records in 1943. Cole performed and recorded the song many times throughout
his career.
31
For a treatment of Dylan’s performance at Newport in 1965 that specifically addresses
these issues, see the conclusion of this dissertation. This performance by Dylan is one of
the most frequently discussed single events in rock and popular music criticism. See, for
example, Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York:
Public Affairs, 2006. Memoirs and biographies by participants include but are not
limited to: guitarist Mike Bloomfield (Bloomfield, Michael, with Jan Mark Wolkin and
Bill Keenom. Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues. San Francisco: Miller
109
Freeman Books, 2000.); organizer and board member Alan Lomax (Szwed, John F. Alan
Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.); and
organizer and musician Pete Seeger (Wilkinson, Alec. The Protest Singer: an Intimate
Portrait of Pete Seeger. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.) For an excellent
documentary treatment that includes Dylan’s performances from the Newport Folk
Festivals from 1963-1965, see Lerner, Murray, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Johnny Cash.
The Other Side of the Mirror. [Europe]: Sony BMG music entertainment [éd., distrib.],
2009. For an academic treatment of Dylan’s performance, see Filene, Benjamin.
Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000.
32
For a fuller discussion of the relation between “rock and roll” and “rock,” see the
conclusion of this dissertation.
33
For a brief but authoritative treatment of the development of this “rock ideology,” see
Mcleod, Kembrew. “A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America.” Popular Music 20,
no. 01 (2001): 47–60. See also Sanjek, David. “Pleasure and Principles: Issues of
Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4, no. 2
(March 1, 1992): 12–2. For the “rockism” and a proposed antithesis in “poptimism” see
Rosen, Jody. “The Perils of Poptimism.” Slate, May 9, 2006.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2006/05/the_perils_of_poptimism.html.
Sanneh, Kelefa. “The Rap Against Rockism.” The New York Times, October 31, 2004,
sec. Arts / Music. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/31sann.html.
34
Mazullo, Mark. “Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train as Rock ‘n’ Roll
History.” The Musical Quarterly. 81, no. 2 (1997): 145. p.149.
35
Christgau, who wrote capsule reviews for the Village Voice from 1967 to 2011 and
continues to write in the same format for various publications, is both the most incisive
and the most trenchant of the first generation of rock critics. His attention to race,
gender, and class is acute and present on such a weekly basis that it seems unfair to the
whole to cite particular examples, although I will as illustration. For a clear-eyed and
compact view of the role that race plays in rock and roll, see Christgau, Robert. “The
Race Factor.” Robertchristgau.com, n.d. http://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/racesea.php. His attention to gender in pop music can be seen in this text, short enough to
reproduce entirely in a footnote: The rhetoric of the antisubject now preoccupies the
largely male aesthetes' wing of what I insist on calling pop—shadowy DJs and
pseudonymous collectives mixmastering aural wallpaper from digital sound
manipulators. But in 1996 more than ever, it was women engaged by the human struggle
of subject construction who came up with striking and durable music, usually in formally
received guises: unexpected 37-year-old singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, or such punks
manqué as Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna, Fluffy's Amanda Rootes, and Sleater-Kinney's
Corin Tucker. And to remind us that the worthiest social tendency exacts its social cost,
we also got the awestruck self-regard of unexpected 22-year-old singer-songwriter Jewel
110
and the kitchen-sink ska manqué of No Doubt's Gwen Stefani. Christgau, Robert.
“Women’s Work”, n.d.http://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/96-af.php.
36
Willis, Ellen. “Records, Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, 6 April 1968 148. Also quoted in
Wald, Elijah. How The Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: An Alternative History to
Popular Music. p. 4. Wald argues that it is no coincidence that this “confessional” is
written by the only well-known female critic of the first generation of widely published
rock writers.
37
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.p. 92.
38
Ellison, Ralph, and Robert G O’Meally. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz
Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2001. p. 129.
39
Dewey Phillips was an important figure in the development and dissemination of early
rock and roll. There are numerous sources for details concerning his epic night of
playing Elvis Presley’s first single, his on-air interview with Presley, and his subsequent
relationship with the singer, see “Tell ‘Em Phillips Sentcha” in Gordon, Robert. It Came
from Memphis. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. See also “Situation Report: Elvis in
Memphis in 1967” in Booth, Stanley. Rythm Oil: a Journey Through the Music of the
American South. 1st American Ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. And, see also
Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Paw Prints, 2008.
40
George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. p.
19. George’s discussion of Jordan is also quoted by Neal in Neal, Mark Anthony. What
the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge,
1999. p. 28.
41
Greil Marcus began publishing rock criticism in the late 1960s. The publication of
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music in 1975 introduced him to a
wide popular and critical audience, especially in comparison with other rock critics.
Since then he has published a more than a dozen books, mostly focusing on music but
with forays into literature and politics as well. Marcus has collaborated with credentialed
academics on two occasions, co-editing a literary anthology with Warner Sollors and a
volume of historical musical essays with Sean Wilentz. (Marcus, Greil, and Werner
Sollors. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2009. Wilentz, Sean, and Greil Marcus. The Rose & the Briar:
Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.)
Marcus holds an undergraduate degree in American Studies form the University of
California at Berkeley, and has completed some graduate work in political science there.
He has taught graduate courses at the University of California at Berkeley and at the New
School in New York City. His work is highly intertextual and generally concerned with
thematic unities in American cultural life and cultural expressions and his methods and
focus make it possible to consider him one of the last surviving Americanists of the myth
111
and symbol school, although he rarely formally draws upon or cites scholarly work in his
criticism. For a critical analysis of Mystery Train that includes some biographical
treatment of Marcus as a critic, and an exchange between Marcus and the author of that
analysis, see Marcus, Greil. “Comment on Mark Mazullo, ‘The Man Whom the World
Sold’.” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (December 21, 2000): 750–753. Mazullo, Mark.
“Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train as Rock ‘n’ Roll History.” The Musical
Quarterly. 81, no. 2 (1997): 145. ———. “Institutions, Technology, and Economics Response to Greil Marcus.” The Musical Quarterly. 84, no. 4 (2000): 754. ———.
“Response to Greil Marcus.” The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (December 1, 2000): 754–
755.
42
Marcus, Greil. “Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp De-Bomp De-Bomp?” in Greil
Marcus, Ed. Rock and Roll Will Stand. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. p.9.
43
Ibid- p. 11.
44
Marcus was born June 19th, 1945, placing him in the first wave of baby boomers.
45
Gene Lees, who is an absolute defender of Cole on every front except for his taste in
songs, asserts that Cole’s precise enunciation came from his family background. You
Can’t Steal A Gift, p. 207. Whatever influence his family had on him, the precision in his
vocal delivery is certainly also related to the wider audience he sought for his recordings.
46
See Andrew Ross for a discussion of the differential between the understandings of
black musicians and those of white fans of black musicians regarding commercial
musical work in non-concert settings in the decades leading up to the 1960s. Ross,
Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. p.
72-79.
47
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995. p. 163.
48
Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the
Atomic Age. New Americanists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. p. 4
49
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Berry, Chuck. After School
Session. [S.l.]; Santa Monica, CA: Chess; Geffen Records: Distributed by Universal
Music & Video Distribution, 2004.
50
Lhamon, W. Deliberate Speed: the Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
51
There has been some disagreement about Cole’s actual birthdate, as he recorded
different dates on his marriage licenses and Selective Service documents. Epstein
accounts for the disparities and convincingly places Cole’s birth date at March 17, 1919.
See Epstein, Daniel. Nat King Cole. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999. p. 14.
112
52
Ibid. p. 59-61.
53
Collins, Willie R. “California Rhythm and Blues Recordings, 1942-1972: A Diversity
of Styles.” In DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell, and Eddie S Meadows. California Soul Music
of African Americans in the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
54
Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of
Los Angeles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. p. 21.
55
Epstein, Nat King Cole. p. 181.
56
The U.S. Cold War strategy of containment of the Soviet Union and of communism in
general can be traced back to the period immediately following World War Two. The
origins of the policy are usually held to be a telegram written in 1947 by George F.
Keenan, known as the “long Telegram.” Keenan followed up on this analysis with an
article published anonymously in the magazine Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of
Soviet Conduct.” The term “containment” was coined in this article and later uses in this
context stem from it. See Kennan, George Frost. American Diplomacy. Penguin Group
USA, 1985. Kennan, Georges F. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs 65 (1987): 852–868.
57
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd; a Study of the Changing American Character,.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The
Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in
the Grey Flannel Suit. London: Cassell, 1956.
58
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1980.p. 71.
59
Whitburn, Joel (2004). Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles: 1942-2004. Record Research. p.
463.
60
Whitburn, Joel (1973). Top Pop Records 1940-1955. Record Research. p. 210.
61
The quote is from an interview with Baldwin in Thorsen, Karen, Douglas K Dempsey,
Susan Lacy, Albert Maysles, William Miles, California Newsreel (Firm), Maysles Films.,
and N.Y.) WNET (Television station: New York. James Baldwin the Price of the Ticket.
San Francisco, Calif.: California Newsreel [distributor], 1989. Also quoted in Radano,
Ronald Michael. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003. p. 4.
62
Lhamon, W. Deliberate Speed: the Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. p. 4.
113
63
Altman, Film/Genre,129.
64
My thinking regarding these two terms and their relationship in musical discourse is
influenced by an article by Allan F. Moore. See Moore, Allan F. “Categorical
Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre.” Music & Letters 82, no. 3 (2001):
432–442.
65
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1996. p.76.
66
Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’roll. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981. p. 91.
67
As Small argues, regarding the wonderfully useful term “musicking,” “Music is not a
thing at all, but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing ‘music’ is but a
figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at
all closely. This habit of thinking in abstractions, of taking from an action what appears
to be its essence and of giving that essence a name is probably as old as language itself; it
is useful in the conceptualizing of our world but it has its dangers. It is very easy to come
to think of the abstraction as more real than the reality it represents, to think, for example,
of those abstractions which we call love, hate, good, and evil as having an existence apart
from the acts of loving, hating, or performing good and evil deeds and even to think of
them as being in some way more real than the acts themselves, a kind of universal or
ideal lying behind and suffusing the actions. This is the trap of reification, and it has
been a besetting fault of Western thinking ever since Plato, who was one of its earliest
perpetrators.” (p.2) One of the useful effects of moving from the abstraction of “music”
to the concrete notion of “musicking” is it usefully reorients our view of who is involved
in the activity of musicking. If musical meaning inheres in musical actions instead of
musical objects, then obviously it is more than simply musicians who constitute musical
meaning, but an entire range of persons whose labor makes the musical act possible and
meaningful. See Small, Christopher. Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and
Listening. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998.
68
Ibid.
69
Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music:Theory, History and Ideology. Philadelphia,
1989. p. 3. Meyer is also quoted and discussed in Moore, Allan F. “Categorical
Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre.” Music & Letters 82, no. 3 (2001):
432–442. p. 438.
70
The quotation is from Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act. Psychology Press, 2002. p. 98. An earlier version of this
formulation by Jameson appeared in Jameson, Fredric R. “The Symbolic Inference; Or,
Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 3 (April 1, 1978): 507–
523. This article prompted an exchange between the two critics, mostly regarding
114
conflicting definitions of what constituted “ideology” and the efficacy of Jameson’s
interpretive method of “rewriting” texts. See Burke, Kenneth. “Methodological
Repression And/or Strategies of Containment.” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (December 1,
1978): 401–416. And also see Jameson, Fredric R. “Ideology and Symbolic Action.”
Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (December 1, 1978): 417–422.
71
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form; Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.
72
“The Blues Had a Baby and They Called It Rock and Roll” was written by Waters and
McGhee sometime in the early 1970s. It first appeared on Waters’s 1977 “comeback”
album, Hard Again, produced by blues-rock guitarist Johnny Winter. Around the same
time, Winter produced an album of songs for Mcghee that also featured the song, but the
album went unissued until 1989 when it was released as Blues Is Truth. McGhee,
Brownie. Blues Is Truth. Concord, CA: Blues Alliance, 1996.
Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, James Cotton, Pinetop Perkins, Bob Margolin, Charles
Calmese, and Willie Smith. Hard Again. New York, NY: Blue Sky, 1987. Hawkins is
quoted by his former drummer, Levon Helm in Hoskyns, Barney. Across the Great
Divide: The Band and America. Hal Leonard Corporation, 2006. p. 29.
73
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Psychology Press, 2002. p. 101.
74
“Rock and Roll, Pleasure and Power” in Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of
Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. p.77.
75
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. Columbia University Press,
1958. p. 77.
76
Berry, Chuck. After School Session. [S.l.]; Santa Monica, CA: Chess; Geffen Records:
Distributed by Universal Music & Video Distribution, 2004.
77
While the Popular charts recorded overall popularity nationwide, both of the “other”
charts corresponded to spatial divisions. Records listed in Hillbilly (soon to be “Country”
catalogs were mostly sold in the South, West, and Midwest, while Rhythm and Blues
records were generally only available at stores in black neighborhoods in the North and
the South.
78
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age
of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010. p. 189.
79
See Waterman, Christopher. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina’, and the
Excluded Middle.” Music and the Racial Imagination (2000).
115
80
This practice was widespread and is much discussed in recent revisionist historical
work on early blues performers. For thorough treatments, see Barker, Hugh. Faking It:
the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. 1st Ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the
Blues. Basic Books, 2009. ———. “Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the Blues
Tradition.” Past & Present, no. 169 (November 1, 2000): 132–160. Wald, Elijah.
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York:
Amistad, 2004.
81
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age
of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010. p. 194 .
82
Ibid 243.
83
Quoted in Brackett, David. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 59-61. The same interview appears in
Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: the Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York:
Macmillan, 1978. p. 220-225.
84
Ibid.
85
Waterman, Christopher. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina’, and the
Excluded Middle.” In Radano, Ronald Michael, and Philip Vilas Bohlman. Music and
the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
86
Hubbs, Jolene, and Stanford University. English Dept. “Revolting Whiteness: Race,
Class, and the American Grotesque” 2009.
87
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock “n” Roll Music. 1st Ed. New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1975.
88
Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1941.
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock “n” Roll Music. 1st Ed. New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1975. p. 121.
89
90
Marcus, Mystery Train. p. 132.
Lee, George W. Beale Street, Where the Blues Began. College Park, Md.: McGrath
Pub. Co., 1969. (Originally published 1934). Lee is quoted in Salem, James M. The Late,
Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R & B to Rock “n” Roll’. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999.
116
91
Ellison, Ralph, and Robert G O’Meally. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz
Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2001. p. 250.
92
Tosches, Nick. Unsung Heroes of Rock’n’Roll. New York: Charles Scribner and
Sons, 1984, 33. The other singer Tosches refers to here is Louis Jordan.
93
Downbeat March 21, 1956. p. 14 .
94
Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. Da Capo Press,
1996. Originally published 1970. p. 143.
95
For an extended analysis of the engagements between jazz musicians, audiences, and
critics, including the rhetoric of “sweet” vs. “hot,” see Lopes, Paul Douglas. The Rise of
a Jazz Art World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
96
For more on the “moral panic” associated with rock and roll, see Bertrand, Michael T.
Race, Rock, and Elvis. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
97
Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and
Race Relations. Taylor & Francis, 1998. p. 100. Note 30.
98
The transformation of Asa Carter to Forrest Carter is a fascinating tale. Carter’s
charade was first uncovered in 1976 when his book Gone to Texas was made into a
movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. (Carter, Forrest. Gone to Texas. New York: Delacorte
Press, 1975. Eastwood, Clint, Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon,
Philip Kaufman, Sonia Chernus, Forrest Carter, and Malpaso (Company). The Outlaw
Josey Wales. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999.) But the allegations remained
unproven until a professor of history at Emory University, Dan T. Carter (no relation)
uncovered and published documentary evidence of Carter's change of identity. Besides
Ward, cited above, see also: Carter, Forrest. The Education of Little Tree. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Lee, Felicia R. “Best Seller Is a Fake, Professor
Asserts.” The New York Times, October 4, 1991, sec. U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/04/us/best-seller-is-a-fake-professor-asserts.html.
McGurl, Mark. “Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the
Counterculture.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2005): 243–267. “The
Education of Little Fraud”,n.d.http://www.salon.com/2001/12/20/carter_6/. n.d. “The
Transformation of a Klansman - New York Times”,
n.d.http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/04/opinion/the-transformation-of-a-klansman.html.
99
Ward (Just My Soul Responding) and Gillette (The Sound of the City) are prime
examples of this.
100
Connerly provides an excellent overview of the melding of city planning and Jim
Crow segregation in Birmingham, including much detail on the racial zoning ordinance.
Wilson adds a theoretically sophisticated reading of Birmingham’s legal and physical
117
landscape, including treatment of the civil rights history of the city, while Eskew
provides the most comprehensive treatment of the city’s civil rights history. See
Connerly, Charles E. “The Most Segregated City in America”: City Planning and Civil
Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: the Local and National Movements in the Civil
Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Wilson, Bobby M. Race and Place in Birmingham: the Civil Rights and Neighborhood
Movements. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
101
Eskew, Glenn T. “Don’t Tear Down Boutwell Auditorium–It’s an Important Part of
Birmingham History.” The Birmingham News, Monday, January 14, 2008.
102
Downbeat March 20th, 1956.
103
The separation here included Chicago born, Italian descended percussionist Jack “Mr.
Bongo” Costanzo, a regular member of Cole’s backing band, whose Latino appearance
often allowed him to eat and stay with African American musicians while traveling in the
South. See Epstein, Nat King Cole. p. 250-254.
104
For more on black radio and segregation, see George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm &
Blues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Note that Ward complicates George’s
celebratory treatment of black radio by pointing out that many “black” radio stations
were actually white owned. See Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and
Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Taylor & Francis, 1998.
105
“Autumn Leaves” was first a lyric poem, written by Jacques Prevert and then adapted
to song by Prevert and Joseph Kosma as ”Feuilles Mortes” (The Dead Leaves). Mercer
wrote the English lyric. For more see Furia, Philip, and Michael L. Lasser. America’s
Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. CRC
Press, 2006. And, Suddarth, Roscoe Seldon, and University of Maryland, College Park.
Music. French Stewardship of Jazz: The Case of France Musique and France Culture.
ProQuest, 2008.
106
Lees. You Can’t Steal A Gift. p. 219.
107
Ibid p. 242.
108
Scherman, Tony. Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1999. p.
206.
109
“6 Arrested For Attack On Nat Cole.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960).
Chicago, Ill., April 12, 1956. “A Lesson For Nat Cole.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition)
(1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 12, 1956. Alabama Anti-Saloon League. “The Alabama
Citizen.” The Alabama Citizen. Birmingham, Ala., 1906. Calvin, Delores. “Maybe There
118
Is Another Side To Cole’s Silence.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960).
Chicago, Ill., April 19, 1956. “Cole Cites Race Haters In Attack.” Daily Defender (Daily
Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 12, 1956. Cole, Maria, and Louie Robinson.
Nat King Cole; an Intimate Biography,. New York: W. Morrow, 1971. Cole, Natalie.
Unforgettable, with Love: Natalie Cole., 1992. “Cole’s Sluggers ‘Didn’t Mean To’.”
Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 17, 1956.Connerly,
Charles E. “The Most Segregated City in America”: City Planning and Civil Rights in
Birmingham, 1920-1980. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions: the South in the 1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press for Smithsonian National Museum of American History Washington
D.C., 2000. Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: the Local and National Movements in
the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Gourse,
Leslie. Unforgettable: the Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole. 1st Ed. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991. “Harlem disc jockey Says Rock ’n Roll Not ‘Sepian’.” The
Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., April 14, 1956.
Haskins, James. Nat King Cole. New York: Stein and Day, 1984. “Irked By Stand
Harlem Taverns Ban Cole Discs.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago,
Ill., April 17, 1956. Johnson, Ziggy. “Hurt! And Plenty, Is Nat Cole’s Reaction.” The
Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., May 12, 1956.
King Cole Trio., and Nat Cole. Nat King Cole. Hollywood, Calif.:: Capitol,, 1992.
Lees, Gene. You Can’t Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001. “Our Opinions: The King Messes Up.” The Chicago Defender
(National Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., April 21, 1956. Sprayberry, Gary S. Town
Among the Trees: Paternalism, Class, and Civil Rights in Aniston, Alabama, 1872 to
Present”, 2003. Sprayberry, Gary S. “Interrupted Melody: The Attack on Nat ‘King’
Cole.” Alabama Heritage, no. 71 (Winter 2004): 16–24. “Not Too Young to Know
Better.” The Baltimore Afro-American. April 17th, 1956. Tosches, Nick. Unsung Heroes
of Rock “n” Roll. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1984. Werner, Craig Hansen. A
Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2006. Wilson, Bobby M. Race and Place in Birmingham: the Civil
Rights and Neighborhood Movements. Lanham, Md.: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers,
2000.
110
Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding, p. 99.
111
Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions: the South in the 1950s. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press for Smithsonian National Museum of American History,
Washington, D.C., 2000. p. 269-270.
112
Sprayberry, Gary S. “‘Town Among the Trees’: Paternalism, Class, and Civil Rights
in Aniston, Alabama, 1872 to Present”, 2003.Sprayberry, Gary S. “Interrupted Melody:
The Attack on Nat ‘King’ Cole.” Alabama Heritage, no. 71 (Winter 2004): 16–24.
113
The term “EP” like the term “LP” is an adaptation of music industry terminology from
one delivery medium to another. “LP,” meaning “Long Play” originally referred to full-
119
length vinyl record albums, usually 12” across and played on a turntable at 33&1/3 RPM
(rotations per minute) and containing around 22-25 minutes of music per side. “EP,”
meaning “extended play” originally referred to shorter releases, containing 3–5 songs or
up to 12 minutes of music, on 7” or 12” discs, usually but not always played at 45 RPM.
Since records were replaced first by CDs and then by digital files as the dominant
musical delivery method for U.S. consumers the term “LP” has come to mean
specifically a vinyl release, whereas “EP” is used to denote a shorter-than-average release
regardless of physical format.
114
“Capitol/EMI Releases Nat King Cole ’Voices Of Change, Then & - Bloomberg”,
n.d. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGXXHYRAcyUM.
Accessed 2/26/2012.
115
“Cole Cites Race Haters In Attack.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960).
Chicago, Ill., April 12, 1956.
116
“Not Too Young to Know Better.” The Baltimore Afro-American. April 17th, 1956.
117
“Our Opinions: The King Messes Up.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition)
(1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., April 21, 1956.
118
Ibid. Also quoted in Lees. You Can’t Steal A Gift. p. 211.
119
“‘King’ Cole Takes Out $500 Life Membership In NAACP.” Daily Defender (Daily
Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 24, 1956.
120
Guralnick, Peter. Dream Boogie: the Triumph of Sam Cooke. New York: Little,
Brown, 2005. p. 490.
121
Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: the Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New
York: Macmillan, 1978. p. xvi.
122
For a thorough and sophisticated exploration of those articulations, see “Legislating
Freedom, Commodifying Struggle: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Struggle for
Musical Hegemony” in Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music
and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.
123
Ramsey, Guthrie. Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-bop to Hip-hop. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. p. 19.
124
Burnim, Mellonee V, and Portia K Maultsby. African American Music: an
Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.
125
Cogan, Jim, and William Clark. Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording
Studios. Chronicle Books, 2003. p. 26.
120
126
127
128
Lees. You Can’t Steal A Gift. p. 219.
. Epstein. Nat King Cole. p. 184.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
121
&+$37(52. MANTECA: NARRATING MUSICAL AFRO-INTERNATIONALISM
When I heard the Charlie Johnson Orchestra, when I heard the Fletcher
Henderson Orchestra, I said, oh, this is me! This is what I am looking for!
Mario Bauza1
When I played Berlin, a lot of them Russian Cats jumped the iron fence to
hear Satchmo, which goes to prove that music is stronger than nations.
Louis Armstrong2
Containment, Mobility, and Diaspora
While Nat Cole practiced what I have metaphorically termed “containment,”
using a precisely controlled performative style both on and offstage to encompass whiteidentified pop music styles within an African American performance tradition, Dizzy
Gillespie literally participated in the U.S. government’s identically named foreign
policy.3 He did so, arguably, on his own terms: using the cultural and economic capital
that came from participating in the State Department’s Jazz Ambassadors program to
fund and tour a 22-piece band while arguing publicly for the significance of jazz as a high
art music from a prominent perch on an international stage. Moreover, even as he
formally represented the United States abroad, Gillespie consistently voiced an explicitly
Afro-centric narrative of jazz music’s construction from cultural survivals of the
international slave trade. This narrative, which anticipates contemporary academic
concepts of transnational emplacement and belonging, including Paul Gilroy’s “Black
Atlantic” and the new southern studies’ notion of a “global South,” emanated not only
from Gillespie’s public and published statements and from the lectures presented on the
tour by noted jazz scholar Marshall Stearns but also from the Afro-Cuban jazz
compositions which formed a significant part of the State Department band’s repertoire.4
Because this narrative—which foregrounds the brutal dispersion of enslaved Africans in
122
the Western Hemisphere—presented an indictment of Western colonialism, the
performances by the “State Department band” demand to be heard as strategic and
sometimes contentious collaborations serving multiple and often contradictory agendas.
On April 15t, 1956, the same day that Cole flew home to Chicago from
Tuscaloosa, following the onstage attack in the Birmingham Civic Auditorium, Gillespie,
already on tour with impresario Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, flew to Greece
to meet the big band which he had recruited for the tour. The band, fresh from rehearsals
in New York with 22-year-old musical director and arranger Quincy Jones, included a
number of notable players, including saxophonist and composer Bennie Golson and
trombonist/arranger Melba Liston, who contributed songs and arrangements,
respectively, to the band’s repertoire. Liston, whose presence as a female instrumentalist
in the male dominated world of jazz was unusual enough in the U.S., was the focal point
of some controversy during the Middle Easter Tour, as was Jewish trombonist Rod
Leavitt, who was almost denied an exit visa as the tour left Turkey. After a nearly-two
month excursion that included stops in Iran, India, and Greece, the Gillespie big band
returned to the U.S. at the end of May, before leaving in August for a tour of South
America. On both tours, Gillespie insisted on seeking out and playing with local
musicians, and, in defiance of State Department protocols, distributing free tickets to
poor fans that crowded their hotel lobbies in order to make sure that the band’s audiences
were not limited to the local elites that the State Department was attempting to court.5
And while Gillespie, who refused to attend his official briefing because, “we’ve had three
hundred years of briefings,” remained largely circumspect in his public statements about
123
U.S. race relations, he was not asked to participate in the jazz ambassadors program again
for 14 years.6
While the Jazz ambassadors program continued for many years, and still exists
today in slightly altered form, these initial tours by the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band were
enmeshed in a contextual matrix which included not only the Cold War and the U.S. civil
rights movement, but also the worldwide anti-colonial movements that Penny Von
Eschen identifies as a “global rebellion against white supremacy.”7 As such, they have
received some scholarly attention, most notably from Von Eschen in her history of the
U.S. State Department’s Jazz Ambassador’s program Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz
Ambassadors Play the Cold War.8 While Von Eschen more than ably captures the
complex cultural and political dynamics that arose from having an integrated, AfricanAmerican-led band serve as international representatives of a still-segregated nation,
Gillespie’s two tours as jazz ambassador occupy only a small portion of the text, and
even there, more attention is paid to the contradictions of Cold War public diplomacy
than to what Gillespie’s music itself might signify in these interlocking contexts. And
while the importance of Gillespie’s music, including his and Chano Pozo’s blending of
Afro-Cuban and African American musical forms in the middle of the 20th century is
certainly recognized in both popular and academic criticism, most treatments of what is
termed “Afro-Cuban Jazz” are subsumed within studies of jazz or salsa as generic forms
with discrete histories and narratives of stylistic and social development. Despite their
deep involvement with the mainstreams of popular musical taste, these genres are rarely
treated as part of the larger field of popular music. This critical and disciplinary
codification tends to obscure the ways in which, in 1956, the place of jazz in the
124
hierarchies of American culture was in transition, and “salsa” was still known as “Latin
music.” As I have argued, generic terms like these are spaces of intense contestation
through which the relations between musicians and audiences are negotiated at any given
time and place, negotiations which determine, among other things, the avenues and
consequences of: pleasure, profit, socio-political positioning, and professionalization. As
jazz moved uneasily and unevenly from being understood as a middle-to-lowbrow,
market-supported commercial practice to an institutionally supported highbrow art with
extensive vernacular roots, musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo and critics
like Marshall Stearns intervened in these negotiations.
My intention in this chapter is to illuminate some of the aesthetic, political, and
social possibilities articulated during and immediately after the State Department tour in
1956, by a specific intervention: the Afro-Cuban Jazz project which, in 1947, Gillespie
undertook with Cuban percussionist Luciano Pozo y Gonzalez, known widely as “Chano
Pozo.” Although Pozo—who, according to Sublette, “created the role of the conga
soloist in the modern [jazz] band”—died only a year later, his brief partnership with
Gillespie brought the blending of Cuban son and African American jazz styles already
underway among expatriate Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians in New York to the
forefront of jazz modernism.9 From 1947, until his death in 1993, Dizzy returned to this
territory both stylistically and rhetorically. As the hyphenation suggests, “Afro-Cuban
Jazz” is a blending of genres, a crossover style which invokes a narrative of fusion, or
cross-cultural borrowing. But Gillespie’s narrative, voiced consistently throughout his
career and summed up in the 1979 autobiographical compilation To Be Or Not…To Bop
argues that “the main source of our music is Africa…The music of the Western
125
Hemisphere is primarily of African origin,” and places Afro-Cuban music closer to that
source because of its greater retention of broadly “African” rhythmic elements.10 For
him, and for other musicians, Afro-Cuban jazz was imagined as both a way forward and a
return to origins. Following the theoretical framework that I have proposed for such
genre narratives, I argue that Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban jazz project—and specifically the
song “Manteca,” which represents it here—should be understood not only as a musical
practice but also as a strategy for reconciling the increasingly contradictory imperatives
thath defined jazz as a component of the popular marketplace, as a highbrow art form,
and as a musical style built on vernacular origins. Undertaking this strategy at this point
in time required Gillespie and his collaborators to appropriate and repurpose essentialist
racial discourses, fuse disparate stylistic practices, and negotiate—without entirely
resolving—the competing claims of American exceptionalism and anti-colonial Afrointernationalism.
While the narrative foregrounding of the African origins of jazz hardly seems
revolutionary now, it was, at midcentury, an affront to serious critical voices who argued
that the only authentic fount of jazz was New Orleans, and rejected both modernist
harmonic development and narratives which placed American jazz as simply a single
voice in a diasporic polyphony. Gillespie’s narrative of origins here aligns him with, and
draws upon the work of, pioneering Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, whose 1942
book The Myth of the Negro Past argued against the notion that slavery had obliterated
black culture and black history (with said obliteration being the titular “myth”).
Herskovits’ study introduced still-useful explanatory terms for describing cultural
change, such as “syncretism” and “cultural retention,” and its roots in the radical cultural
126
relativism of his teacher Franz Boas provided a rhetorical basis for valorizing a view of
black culture which transcended national origins and borders.11 Some version of this
worldview seems to have shaped Gillespie’s thought since at least the mid-1940s and
perhaps earlier, and its influence on his politics and social and musical practice makes his
role in a U.S. State Department cultural exchange program that was predicated on
American exceptionalism all the more remarkable. This is especially true when we
consider that these convictions were embodied in musical performances and even
verbalized in the chant of “I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia” which, during these tours,
introduced what was often the band’s closing number: the Afro-Cuban jazz song
“Manteca.”
“Manteca,” was written by Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and Walter “Gil” Fuller, and
recorded in 1947 by Gillespie’s first be-bop big band. It was Gillespie’s first
collaboration with Pozo and is considered one of the foundational texts in the synthesis of
Afro-Cuban music and modern jazz, or be-bop that developed out of the circuitry that,
beginning in the early 20th century, connected Harlem to Havana. As we will see and
hear, there are qualities specific to the song’s titular meaning, composition, and
performance which make it an excellent vehicle for portraying the historical and
transnational reach of what drummer Max Roach called “this maze that black folks have
to do.”12 By following versions of “Manteca” recorded between 1947 and 1961, I will
illustrate the ways in which the song, and the stylistic complex it is part of, articulates—
in the expressive sense—an afrocentric and diasporic aesthetic with a distinct political
posture, while also articulating—in the sense of joining together—the seemingly
contradictory constructions of jazz as both a high art and lively part of the popular music
127
marketplace, and as a uniquely “American” music rooted in African, African American,
and Afro-Caribbean experiences.13 Although this chapter focuses on the “crossover”
genre known as Afro-Cuban Jazz, or “Cubop,” and investigates the rhetorical strategies
which place that genre within attempts to narrate an originating mythos for the larger
genre of jazz itself, the mechanics of mobility and containment play out differently here.
Where Nat Cole’s ascent to the heights of pop stardom, and his liminal place in popular
memory, reveals the unspoken racialization of pop music’s generic institutions, this
chapter will detail attempts by artists, fans, critics, and even governments to manage
transformations in the institutional status of racialized genres.
“Manteca” retained a place in Gillespie’s recording and performing repertoire
from the late 1940s to his final performing years in the early 1990s, although not a
consistent place since it was most often arranged for a large band.14 Unlike most of his
modernist contemporaries, Gillespie had a real affection for the big band format, and
intended his large bands to be populist vehicles, combining be-bop’s complex harmonic
experiments with rhythms that at least in theory could keep dancers on the dance floor.
Gillespie used “Manteca” as part of a strategic commercial attempt to combine both
popular and high art aesthetics, and to assert the blackness of what was called “Latin
music” in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He also, from the mid-1950s on, used the song
to argue for social and aesthetic importance of this international black-Latin music and to
place its diasporic origins within a narrative that predicted a black internationalist
triumph over segregation in the southern United States and perhaps over white supremacy
worldwide.
128
I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia
I think Birks was so happy to be once again standing in front of a helluva
good band that he just started with the Chant (“I’ll never go back to
Georgia”) on the vamp and the band fell in. That incident tells more about
the nature of jazz than anything I can think of. A burst of energy, joy and
truth.
Phil Woods15
Gillespie is an intelligent comedian, cultivated, with novelty acts, and his
musical material is interesting. A tour is therefore recommended for him.
U.S. State Department Musical Advisory Panel16
Although versions of “Manteca” vary greatly, depending on which of Gillespie’s
ensembles are playing it, and—because jazz is an improvisational enterprise—even
versions by the same band differ, there are three basic components: two different verse
sections based on harmonically and melodically simple, rhythmically complicated riffpatterns, and a more harmonically complex bridge where rhythm is deemphasized in
favor of a distinctive and memorable melody, played by Gillespie’s trumpet. Versions
played by Gillespie’s big bands in the late 1940s often featured an extended conga solo
by Chano Pozo.17 This solo space was open-ended, allowing Pozo time to dance and to
engage his fellow musicians and the audience in improvised call-and-response chants.
These chants were drawn from rituals practiced by members of the Abakuá, to which
Pozo belonged, a secret society originally formed to resist slavery in Cuba.18 Pozo’s
ritual-themed performance tended to occur after the bridge was played the first time, and
live versions that include this section tend to be almost double the original studio
recording’s 3:06 length. The State Department band, formed after Pozo’s death, did not
include a conguero, and replaced this solo with what Bennie Golson called “the con-stantinople, Istan-bul section,” a mostly percussive breakdown highlighted by a simple but
129
exotic-sounding melody which, as diagrammed in the phrase that its name is borrowed
from, follows the clave rhythm characteristic of Afro-Cuban music.19 In the recording of
the State Department band playing “Manteca” in Brazil, you can hear the audience break
into laughter during this section, apparently provoked by Gillespie’s theatrical clowning
onstage.20
We will return to this band’s arrangement of the song in some detail later in this
chapter, after examining the composition of the song and its earlier recorded iterations.
Here, however, I want to stop and think about what it meant, in 1956, for this band to
close performative presentations of the history and possibilities of modern jazz, with the
declaration “I’ll never go back to Georgia,” especially when those performances took
place in Tehran, Ankara, Caracas, and Rio De Janeiro, and were sponsored by the U.S.
State Department. What does “Georgia” mean in this formulation, particularly in South
America, a “South” geographically below but historically interconnected with the U.S.
South where the state government of Georgia had, as a symbol of its efforts to maintain a
segregated public school system, adopted a State flag which conspicuously featured the
stars and bars of the battle flag of the Confederate States of America? And which “I” is
speaking, or more properly, which identification of the speaker should we imagine is
making the claim? Is it the professional musician on lavishly-provided tour? Is it the
African American man who, even as a celebrity, is a second-class citizen in fully half of
his homeland? Is it the official U.S. State Department representative? To hear the
answers, we need to listen more closely to the disparate and sometimes dissonant voices
speaking through the band’s performance and through the performance of the tour itself.
130
The 1956 State Department Jazz Ambassadors tours are probably best understood
as collaborations by a number of actors, each with common and contradictory interests,
and widely varying agendas. Within the U.S. government alone the tours represented
initiatives of John Foster Dulles’s State Department, the Federal Advisory Commission
on the Arts within the Department of Health Education and Welfare, and the United
States Information Agency, a propaganda shop set up as an independent agency in the
Executive branch in 1953, which incorporated the internationally broadcast Voice of
America radio programs as well as operating libraries and cultural exchange programs.
The execution and form of these cultural diplomacy initiatives was shaped by a number
of individuals, including: Senator Frank Thompson (D-NJ) and Representative Jacob
Javits (R-NY), both of whom were interested in using Cold War policies to channel
federal funds into support for the arts; and David Sarnoff, President of the Radio
Corporation of America (RCA) and a close advisor to Eisenhower who advocated a
comprehensive program of “psychological peacefare” in fighting communism.21 While
these agencies and individuals were responsible for creating a robust cultural diplomacy
program, funded first by the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs, and
later by the International Cultural Exchange and Trade Fair Participation Act of 1956, the
use of jazz as a representative vehicle for American culture abroad, and the choice of
Dizzy Gillespie as the United States’s first official representative of jazz seems to have
been the work of Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-NY). Powell, a Harlem
native who eventually served 11 consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives,
told the New York Times in November of 1955 that the State Department had agreed “that
131
it would go along with his proposal to send fewer ballets and symphonies abroad and put
more emphasis on what he called real Americana.”22
Powell is, in many ways, the fulcrum of the process which moves jazz into the
realm of cultural diplomacy, in that he represents a crucial place where the separate
currents of international and domestic politics, jazz, and civil rights meet. The son of the
powerful minister of New York’s largest black church, a position that he inherited,
Powell rose to power as a civil rights advocate in the 1930s and 1940s, leading marches,
protests, and boycotts largely centered around employment and other economic issues in
Harlem. He was a colorful and outspoken public figure who styled himself (and titled
one of the chapters of his autobiography) “The first bad nigger in congress,” and who
spent considerable time antagonizing segregationist Representatives of his own party, by
sitting next to them in chambers, addressing them by their first names, and urging them to
“keep the faith, baby.”23 Powell’s presence at the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference
of mostly nonaligned and newly independent states in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955
caused Eisenhower’s State Department some consternation. When he returned, Powell
pressed the administration publicly on issues relating to colonialism and the emergent
“third world,” but he also ended up supporting Eisenhower for reelection in 1956 because
the Democrats selected Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama as Adlai Stevenson’s running
mate. Powell was also a well-known presence in New York City’s jazz clubs and, at the
time that he secured Gillespie’s appointment as the first jazz ambassador, was married to
jazz pianist and singer Hazel Scott.
Another voice in this collaboration, and one who advocated for Gillespie’s
selection, belonged to Marshall Stearns, a professor of medieval literature and jazz critic
132
who served on the State Department’s music selection committee. In 1953 Stearns
founded the first academic program devoted to jazz, the Institute for Jazz Studies, which
was first located in his apartment, then at Hunter College, where he taught, and finally
moved to Rutgers in 1966. He helped organize and wrote the program notes for the first
Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, and in 1956, the year he was chosen to accompany
Gillespie’s band as “combined artistic advisor, bandboy, and lecturer on jazz,” he
published The Story of Jazz, which presented a linear narrative of the music’s stylistic
development from Dixieland to be-bop, including a lengthy pre-history that traced a
musical path from Western Africa to the Caribbean and South America to New Orleans.24
Although Stearns believed that “jazz was born and grew up only in the United States and
nowhere else,” his book’s detailed and concrete observation of musical and
choreographic correspondences throughout the African diaspora provided fundamental
support for transnational notions of musical development.25 Also, unlike some jazz
critics who saw be-bop’s innovations as unforgivable transgressions of good taste and
generic boundaries, Stearns argued that “bop was a sudden eruption within jazz—a fast
but logical complication of melody, harmony, and rhythm.”26 Both of these critical
positions were sympathetic to Gillespie’s music, and the same alignment with modernism
which had made Gillespie and other be-bop players heretics to some jazz purists, made
them attractive to the State Department selection committee who “promoted American
modernism as an effective counter to Soviet promotion of folk art and classical ballet.”27
If Gillespie’s autobiography is accurate, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. invited
Gillespie to a press conference announcing the first tour, and Gillespie’s role in it,
without telling him what the invitation concerned. If so, this may have been intended to
133
keep either Gillespie or anyone else involved in the selection process from derailing the
appointment. Depending on which set of interests one represents, the choice of Gillespie
as the initial ambassador was either inspired or outrageous, a choice fraught with
immense gain and the possibility of total disaster. Gillespie was an exemplary jazz
modernist, one of the architects of the be-bop revolution of the 1940s, and a canny selfpromoter. Unlike many of his contemporary innovators, like Charlie Parker who he
called “the other half of my heartbeat,” however, Gillespie eschewed hard drugs and
cultivated an informal and often humorous public persona. Gillespie’s onstage antics,
iconic visual style (beret, zoot suit, goatee and horn-rimmed glasses), and his public
embrace of the popular term “be-bop” concealed both the studiousness that undergirded
his virtuosity and the fiery race-consciousness which marked his worldview. According
to his autobiography, Gillespie told his draft board
Well, look, at this time, in this stage in my life here in the United States
whose foot has been in my ass? The white man’s foot has been in my ass
hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole! Now you’re speaking of the
enemy. You’re telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can
never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there
with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I’m likable to
create a case of ‘mistaken identity,’ of who I might shoot.”28
The contentious relation between racial and U.S. national identity in this likely
hyperbolic declaration echoes what Robin Kelly argues are underappreciated articulations
of black resistance to hegemonic notions of patriotism during World War Two. In his
essay “The Riddle of the Zoot” Kelley quotes an anonymous Harlem zoot suiter
interviewed by Kenneth Clarke, who, speaking to the audience he imagined Clarke’s
survey reaching, stated “By [the] time you read this I will be fighting for Uncle Sam, the
bitches, and I do not like it worth a dam[sic]. I’m not a spy or a saboteur, but I don’t like
134
goin’ over there fightin’ for the white man.”29 Even Nat Cole—who responded to an
onstage attack from segregationists by recording a song (“We Are Americans Too”)
which equated African American civil rights with patriotic wartime participation—had
his first hit with “Gone With The Draft,” a song that celebrated the enhanced romantic
prospects of a “skinny” protagonists in a landscape where more able-bodied and
attractive men had gone to “face the cannonballs.”30 Even as he prepared to represent the
United States on the first tour of nonaligned nations in the Middle East, Gillespie still
seems to have felt that this conflict was inherent in his new role. When asked to return
home early from a Jazz At the Philharmonic tour of Europe to attend an official state
Department briefing in the spring of 1956, he famously told his wife Lorraine “Brief?
I’ve got three hundred years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us and I’m not
gonna make any excuses. If they ask me any questions I’m gonna answer them as
honestly as I can.”31
As Von Eschen notes, the Jazz Ambassador tours were predicated on a series of
deep-set contradictions that involved not only international and U.S. domestic politics,
but also the role of internationally shared ethnically identified expressive practices like
jazz in a post-colonial world. Regarding the maze that Gillespie, and others following
him, would have to negotiate, she writes:
In the high-profile tours by Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke
Ellington, and many others, U.S. officials pursued a self-conscious
campaign against worldwide criticism of U. S. racism, striving to build
cordial relations with new African and Asian states. The glaring
contradiction in this strategy was that the U. S. promoted black artists as
goodwill ambassadors—symbols of the triumph of American
democracy—when America was still a Jim Crow Nation. Indeed, the
primary contradiction of promoting African American artists as symbols
of a racial equality yet to be achieved would fundamentally shape the
135
organization and ideologies of the tours as well as the ways in which the
tours were contested by artists. And that U. S. Officials would
simultaneously insist on the universal, race-transcending qualities of jazz
while depending on the blackness of the musicians to legitimize America’s
global agendas was an abiding paradox of the tour.32
In evaluating the tours and the meanings communicated by their constituent
performances, it is necessary to give these contradictions the weight that they deserve.
The aim of the tours was ultimately to limit the influence of the Soviet Union in
nonaligned nations, furthering the official U.S. foreign policy of containment. In order to
do so, the U.S. presented an image and an implicit narrative of African American cultural
and social mobility while authorities in southern states, with as yet very little
discouragement from Eisenhower’s federal government, marshaled both official power
and unofficial terror in the service of retaining severe limits on cultural, social, political,
and physical mobility by black Americans. Despite Gillespie’s vow that “if they ask me
any questions, I’m gonna answer them as honestly as I can,” it’s hard to see the overt
narrative provided by the fact of the tour itself offering, to those who might be asking the
question most critically, any honest comment regarding the relation between blackness
and citizenship in the United States.
Given the possibility, even probability of co-optation built into the tour, it’s worth
investigating Gillespie’s motivations for accepting the post and the ways that, during the
tour, he and the musicians that he gathered, a hand-picked band of professionals,
negotiated their role. Certainly the State Department represents a dominant voice in this
collaboration, but I would argue that Gillespie and the band contested the State
Department’s role in managing both the day-to-day mechanics and the overall message of
the tour, and in the crucial arena of onstage performance, used their platform to present a
136
counternarrative which undercut the overt transcript of American capitalist triumphalism
that the tour intended to present. This counternarrative was one which the band’s global
audiences were prepared to find within the performances themselves, despite the State
Department’s sponsorship. As Paul Austerlitz notes,
The diffusion of jazz gained impetus from the growing influence of the
United States that followed the two world wars, and the music both
followed and promoted U. S. hegemony around the world. At the same
time, issuing from African American culture rather than the dominant
Euro-American culture, jazz was often seen as a counterforce to U.S.
hegemony.”33
This counternarrative did not entirely contradict the official presentation: despite the
tensions between race and nation which the emergent civil rights and anti-colonial
movements brought to the fore, Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and the other musicians
considered the containment of Soviet influence to be an admirable goal. Moreover,
participation in the tour allowed them to advance other agendas, personal and
professional, which they saw as complementary to the values that the tour presented
publicly, if not to the domestic and geopolitical realities which guided the overall
exercise of cultural diplomacy.
The chance to put together and tour a top-notch 22-piece modern jazz orchestra in
an era where big bands had grown increasingly unprofitable was certainly a
consideration, both in terms of economics and aesthetics, in Gillespie’s acceptance of the
State Department post. The tours were arranged and booked by private companies, but
the band’s basic fees were guaranteed by the State Department regardless of who showed
up.34 Such guarantees were rare in the jazz world, especially for the entirety of a tour,
and especially for such a large band. It is perhaps ironic that the official promotion of
137
aesthetic capitalism would be almost entirely underwritten by the government, but even
given the worldwide popularity of jazz, such subsidization was essential in order to
guarantee the success of the tour.
For Gillespie, a big band represented an extended harmonic and rhythmic canvas
for Be-bop’s formal experimentation, and a format with the potential to appeal to dancers
increasingly lured away form jazz by the rise of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. This
dual purpose helps to explain the centrality of Afro-Cuban jazz compositions like
“Manteca,” “Tin Tin Deo,” and “A Night In Tunisia” to the State Department band’s
repertoire as well as its overall mission. These songs exploited the harmonic possibilities
available to such a large group of voices, while maintaining a powerful rhythmic appeal
linked to the massive worldwide popularity of “Latin music,” much of which was Cuban
in origins and influence.35 At the same time, Afro-Cuban jazz asserted, sometimes
explicitly and sometimes implicitly, that this was “black” music, and, narrated a deep
vernacular origin for the entire genre of jazz. This narrative, connecting Jazz’s African
origins to its modernist experiments, carried the promise of cultural and racial (and
thereby political) recognition important to Gillespie and others invested in jazz at this
time. Even some of the music’s champions had historically made much of its supposed
origins in New Orleans brothels and association with organized crime in speakeasies and
gambling houses, an image that was as appalling to some as it was romantic to others.36
The narrative of an Afro-Caribbean and African prehistory offered a chance to displace
these potentially lurid associations. Modern jazz’s association with drug use was
similarly both decried and romanticized on similarly coded racial terms, affecting the
relations between the Gillespie band and their official handlers. Quincy Jones recalls the
138
“arrogant and condescending” bureaucrat, who came to the band’s New York rehearsals
and, in a “flat, patronizing voice” declared “I have nothing to tell you except that when
you’re abroad, you’re representing our country. So please indulge in your various
idiosyncrasies discreetly.”37
Gillespie understood that increased recognition of jazz as a legitimate form could
protect it from demeaning attitudes by all manner of gatekeepers, and help free it from
the demands of a marketplace increasingly dominated by rhythm and blues and rock and
roll. The rhetorical appeals to an African past for jazz, and a progressive and
experimental modernist present and future that he and others made during the mid-1950s
should be seen as part of an effort to gain access to the kind of cultural capital afforded to
vernacular and fine art music. Like the booming acoustic, string-based folk music with
which it shared vernacular origins, they wanted jazz to be distinguished in the popular
market by being severable from that market; like classical music with which it shared a
commitment to instrumental virtuosity, they wanted jazz to be recognized as worthy of
public and private institutional support. In a telegram sent to Eisenhower as the tour drew
to a close, Gillespie frames the music in language drawn from the lexicon of what Paul
Lopes calls “A Jazz Art World,” calling jazz “American folk music that communicates
with all peoples regardless of language or social barriers” and urging the President to
“continue exploiting this valuable form of expression of which we are so proud.”38
Being proud of this form and its communicative possibilities played a part in the
musicians participation in the program, but their expressions of that pride, and
exploration of those possibilities sometimes brought them into conflict with their official
handlers, even as it also confirmed American rhetoric regarding independence and
139
individuality. In many ways, these conflicts arose from the idealism with which the
musicians approached their role as cultural diplomats. As Monson observes:
Jazz, in their view, offered an alternative, more democratic vision of
American society, and the musicians enjoyed enacting a sense of solidarity
and diasporic interconnection with people outside of the European orbit.
They did not view their participation in the program as an aspect of
Western cultural imperialism but as an alternative to it.39
This alternative vision asserted itself in the day-to-day mechanics of the tour and the
performances, as all of the musicians, but especially Gillespie acting as leader, sought to
dismantle social barriers that separated them from other musicians and from their
audiences. As all accounts of the tours suggest, Gillespie jousted with State Department
officials and promoters, insisting in Ankara, Turkey, that a group of young “ragamuffins”
that had gathered outside the gates of the band’s outdoor concert be let in for free, a
demand that he repeated at other concerts, including one in Sao Paulo, Brazil, insisting
that I came her to play for all the people.”40 Gillespie also sought out local musicians to
play with, inviting, for example, a flute-playing snake charmer into his hotel in
Bangladesh, and jamming with a tango orchestra in Buenos Aires.41 Buenos Aires was
also the only place where, despite the imprimatur of the U.S. State Department, the
integrated band ran afoul of local permutations of the color line. Ironically enough, it
was the Savoy Buenos Aires, a hotel owned by Americans, which refused entrance to the
band’s black members.42
but if the band’s vision of democracy challenged that of the American
government, it also challenged what passed for egalitarianism in jazz. While both Von
Eschen and Carlotta have noted that the diverse band which Gillespie assembled was, in
its basic constitution good propaganda, there’s no reason to think that this accounts
140
entirely for his selection of band members. In fact, the group that he put together
challenged boundaries within the jazz world as well as American social life, particularly
in his selection of trombonist and arranger Melba Liston, who had been a member of
Gillespie’s first big band in 1948–49. Expecting that her presence might meet some
resistance from musicians used to jazz bands being all-male enclaves, Gillespie asked
Liston to write up and bring a few arrangements with her.
According to Liston, after playing her arrangement of “Stella by Starlight” the
men who had asked each other why Gillespie “had to send all the way to California for a
bitch trombone player” changed their tune: “after that it was ‘mama’ this and ‘mama’
that, it wasn’t ‘bitch’ no more.”43 Of course trading “bitch” for “mama” suggests more of
a modification of gender-based stereotypes than a full-fledged embrace of personhood.
But the entire episode suggests that Gillespie, given the freedom to recruit players that he
wanted, sought to create a band which, musically and socially, symbolized his
interpretation of the values the band was going to be asked to portray. As Liston’s
overall account suggests, the band developed a deep camaraderie, one encouraged by the
diversity of their membership and their experiences together. Explaining a confrontation
with security at the Atlanta airport on a U.S. tour that followed the State Department
tours, Liston remarked “You know, little black and white shit was going on at the time.
That’s the band we went on the State Department tour with, and we went down South.
That was a mixed band. We had Jew, we had whitey, we had brothers and sisters. He
[Gillespie] had taken us down there and we were quite bold.”44
This boldness is informed, in Liston’s account above and in the accounts by
Gillespie and by others, by an almost vanguardist sense of the band’s overall mission and
141
its place in the events of its time. As Gillespie recalls in his autobiography, the notion that
the band accurately represented, if not the current shape of American democracy, at least
the current of progress that seemed to be working its way through American life, became
part of how they narrated their participation in the tour:
People asked us a lot of questions about racism in the United States. But
they could see it wasn’t as intense because we had white boys and I was
the leader of the band. That was strange to them because they’d heard
about blacks being lynched and burned, and here I come with half whites
and blacks and a girl playing in the band. And everybody seemed to be
getting along fine. So I didn’t try to hide anything, I said “yeah, there it is.
We have our problems but we’re still working on it. I’m the leader of this
band, and those white guys are working for me. That’s a helluva thing. A
hundred years ago, our ancestors were slaves, and today we’re still
scuffling with this problem, but I’m sure its gonna be straightened out
some day. I probably won’t see it, completely, the eradication of racial
prejudice in the United States, but it will be eliminated.45
Certainly it suited the State Department as a whole, if not all of its employees who came
into contact with the band, to send abroad a racially and sexually diverse group and have
it enthusiastically perform a very public role as aesthetically modern innovators,
displaying little patience for divisions based on class or station, but doing so with good
humor and style. Nonetheless, it also suited the band’s purposes and agendas as social
beings, citizens, and musicians. Paradoxically, the cultural politics of modernism, which
made Gillespie’s music attractive to Stearns and other members of the Music Advisory
Panel, also brought the conflict between racial and national identification to inherent in
their position to the fore. As Monson explains,
The civil rights movement drew upon the universalizing legacy of
modernity to advance its cause. Civil rights attorneys emphasized the
modern principles of political democracy, equality before the law, and
individual freedom to highlight the gap between the rhetoric of equality
and the actual denial of citizenship rights to African Americans. Similarly,
be-bop musicians drew upon broadly accepted ideas about the modern
142
artist and universal musical standards to argue for the inclusion of African
American musicians in the top ranks of modern music. Simply embracing
aesthetic modernism, in this sense, was viewed as being of political
consequence.46
The key phrase here might be “was viewed as being of political consequence.” It is far
too easy, in writing the history of socially conscious music and musicians during socially
turbulent times, to overstate the connections between rhetoric, identity, and activism.
Moreover, the dynamic interaction between anti-communism abroad and civil rights at
home—with official action in the latter stemming from a pragmatic desire to advance the
former—has become, in the work of Von Eschen, Mary Dudziak and others, an accepted
part of the periodic account of the cold War. What I wish to emphasize here is that the
Gillespie band’s narrative of themselves as musicians, and their narrative of the meanings
of the genre of music they made intersects the crossover ground not only between Cold
War internationalism and the domestic civil rights movement, but also between those two
poles and diasporic anti-colonial interests and sentiments.
I have spoken previously of “crossover narratives” as discursive formations
intended to authenticate individual performers whose career or body of work is held to
defy genre boundaries. I have argued that, more often than not, it is more accurate to say
that these performers are at the center of efforts by critics, audiences, industry actors, and
other musicians to manage genres for their own benefit, and that the genre boundaries
supposedly crossed are in fact reified. What Gillespie and the band present, and I would
argue enlist Stearns in, is a different kind of “crossover narrative,” one which defines jazz
as a musical hybrid, demanding, as Gillespie notes in an interview recorded on the tour,
“access to the full range of European harmonic development, and also the full range of
143
African rhythmic development.”47 And as the continental geographies Gillespie cites
imply, it is a narrative rooted in the history of colonialism and the global slave trade, a
history that is, in many of the locations the band visits, increasingly subject to revolution,
revision and critique. The act of “crossing over” activated in this narrative is the crossing
and re-crossing of the Black Atlantic, the necessary condition for the establishment of
“black music” as, in Paul Gilroy’s term, “a counterculture of modernity.”48
Ingrid Monson, whose account of Gillespie’s State Department Tour attends to
musical details thoroughly, describes the band’s performative depiction of this history:
With Quincy Jones in charge of preparatory rehearsals, a program was
developed that presented a concise musical history of jazz. Quincy Jones,
Melba Liston and Ernie Wilkins were responsible for the arranging and
contributed original charts as well, including Liston’s “Annie’s Dance”
(based on a theme by Greig) and “My Reverie” and Quincy Jones’s “Q’s
Tune.” The first half of the concert began with Dizzy Gillespie on bongo
drums and Charlie Persip on drum set demonstrating African rhythms.
Herb Lance followed, singing several spirituals such as “sometimes I feel
Like a Motherless Child” and “Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho.” These
were followed by an old-time blues and a small group playing “when the
Saints Go Marching In” in New Orleans style. Dizzy and the full band
continued with a series of arrangements illustrating the development of the
big band and summarizing jazz trumpet styles. Among the compositions
they played were Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” Benny Goodman’s
“King Porter Stomp (arr. Fletcher Henderson), Jimmie Lunceford’s “For
Dancer’s Only,” Roy Eldridge’s “Rockin’ chair,” and Count Basie’s “One
O’clock Jump,” which were scored from the original recordings. To
illustrate how be-bop musicians wrote new compositions over the chord
changes of existing standards, Gillespie simultaneously played “Groovin’
High” and “whispering.”49
Monson notes that the second half of the concert featured “more contemporary
arrangements” including trombonist Melba Liston’s arrangement of “Stella By Starlight”
some Be-bop tunes arranged for a small group, modern arrangements of pop tunes
featuring vocalists Herb Lance and Dottie Saulter, both replaced by Austin Cromer on the
144
South American tour, and the Afro-Cuban pieces “A Night in Tunisia” and “Manteca,”
placed prominently in the middle and end of the set.50
There is a lot in this set that is worth taking note of in terms of our concerns here.
First and most obviously, the progressive narrative which begins by foregrounding the
music’s African origins, and then moving as John Hammond’s Carnegie Hall “black
music” showcases from 1938 and 1939 were called, “from spirituals to swing,” and then
placing the development of harmonic substitution at the dividing line between swing and
modern jazz, the latter being defined in the second set by the application of these
harmonic compositional techniques to standards and popular songs in the context of large
and small group improvisation. A significant sub-theme of this narrative is the
innovation and nurturance of the music by African Americans, and the cultural politics of
the color line, illustrated by the presence of a Benny Goodman hit arranged by Fletcher
Henderson. Even more subtly, but perhaps most significantly for my argument here, the
program also narrates the musical history of slavery and colonialism in the new world
and the United States, as the African rhythms performed by Gillespie and Persip at the
beginning are silenced abruptly in the transition to spirituals, born out of the syncretic
collision of Africans with Protestantism and the banning of drums in the U.S. South.
The rhythmic pulse then begins to reassert itself, simply and directly at first in the blues
and Dixieland pieces. These simple rhythms become propulsive and commanding in the
swing tunes, a feeling that is maintained and then expanded upon and transformed in the
second half. There, the precise rhythms of swing, at once cooperative, organic, and
somehow also mechanical and bureaucratic, are surrounded by the highly individual and
dialogic accents that characterize drumming in small group be-bop. This is then followed
145
by “A Night in Tunisia” and “Manteca,” which signal the dramatic reemergence of
African rhythms via diasporic circuits connecting, as we shall see Harlem and Havana
and presumably every stop on the Jazz Ambassadors’ tour. Even the note that the
arrangements of the swing tunes were learned from LP records is instructive, as it points
to the role of technology and commerce in the dissemination of this musical
counterculture across geographies defined by multiple color lines.
The version of “Manteca” performed by the State Department Band in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, on August 24, 1956 opens with Dizzy announcing, over a wildly
enthusiastic crowd, “and now…Manteca!” He stretches out the middle syllable
[“maantaaaaaaaayyyyy-ca!”] and follows the end of the word with a short, almost
grunted four-note vocalization in guttural unison on top of Nelson Boyd’s bass, which
has begun delineating the repetitive and memorable ostinato pattern that underpins one of
the song’s three main sections. Elsewhere in “Manteca” this simple pattern’s repetition
will cycle hypnotically below and through the complex harmonies implied by the horns
and piano, creating an insistent and propulsive pulse. Here in the introduction, though,
Charlie Persip punctuates the space between the end of one cycle and the beginning of
the next with a succinct and dramatic flourish played on his bass drum and floor tom.
And as the bass ostinato begins its second repetition, the voices come in, first the band
without Gillespie, and then Gillespie, audibly closer to the microphone, joining in, to
chant along with each iteration of the bass line: “I’ll never go back to Georgia!” The
chant, which does not appear on any of the publicly released versions of the song
recorded before this tour, is sung three times total, with Persip’s drums supplying
exclamation points in between. After the third chant, the drums roll the band into the first
146
section, with Persip’s accents on the upper toms implying the conga drums that appear on
earlier versions of the song. The saxophones, trombones, and trumpets begin the simple,
interlocking riffs that define this section, and Gillespie’s trumpet enters with a
commanding flurry of upper register notes, announcing the song’s primary theme.
All of this takes place in less than a minute. The key to this gesture, though, and
to the way in which the crossover genre of Afro-Cuban jazz registers not only the deep
history of diasporic dispersal, but the more recent history of 20th century diasporic
dialogue between Harlem and Havana, is that the phrase doesn’t end with “Georgia.” It
ends with that final beat. In the State Department band, that beat is articulated by a quick
flam on Charli Persip’s toms. In the original recording, it’s the sound of skin on skin.
“Gimme Some Skin!”
Afro-Cuban music is based on the clave, the two little wooden sticks,
that’s called the clave [holds fingers up about 4” apart to demonstrate
length] And they have a specific beat [also called the clave], like [sings]
ping-ping-ping; ping-ping. Ping-ping-ping; ping-ping. I was very much
inspired by the music of Cuba. But there weren’t any of those African
rhythms around in jazz. So, [in the] organization of my first big band, I
immediately contacted [Cuban saxophonist] Mario Bauza to see if he
could get me a drummer, and he introduced me to Chano Pozo. And from
that moment on, it was…chicken butts!
John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie51
…the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation. It
is not possible to take up the question of “diaspora” without taking
account of the fact that the great majority of peoples of African descent do
not speak or write in English.
Brent Hayes Edwards52
The very first sound that you hear on the 1947 studio recording of “Manteca” is
the sound of Chano Pozo’s hand striking his conga drum. This is perfectly appropriate,
because, although the word “Manteca” can mean “fat” or “lard,” (and is often translated
147
as such in critical exegesis), Pozo, who originated the compositional process and named
the song, intended it to be understood to mean “skin.” As Gillespie explains it:
“Chano Pozo came to me when he was with the band and said “I got an
idea for a tune.” “Manteca” means skin or grease in Spanish, and
everybody then was saying “Gimme some skin.” That [the title of the
song] was his idea of saying, “Gimme some skin.” In Spanish, skin is
grease, lard, butter, whatever, so “Manteca” is something greasy, that’s
where the title came from. That was pretty slick. He couldn’t even speak
English and wrote a tune with a title that had connotations in English.53
And those “connotations” are indeed fascinating. By reincorporating Pozo's
original intentions, the title and the song itself open up to reveal layers of meaning. One
of those layers is the recognition of the "skin" that covers both the bodies of the
musicians and the heads of the conga drums that drummers like Pozo played, drums that
were outlawed in Cuba (because of their connection to the Santeria religion) until the mid
1930s but which, by the late 1940s, had begun to assume their worldwide place as a
musical and visual signifier of Afro-Cuban or (as it was commonly genrified in the U.S.)
"Latin" music. Even more so when covering bone than drum, of course, skin served as
the overriding consequent signifier of color lines which, although drawn differently in
different locales, provided a common ground of experience which could be
acknowledged and recognized in such a greeting. Skin is also however what marks the
limits of physical intimacy, meaning that it signals a demarcation between body and
world beyond which commonality is speculative and discursive, a limit acknowledged,
and perhaps challenged by a simultaneous sensation felt between hands or ears, such as
the greeting exchanged on the streets of Harlem, or an improvised conga solo in a jazz
performance.
148
Hearing “Manteca” as a meditation on “skin” engages Ajay Heble’s application
of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition” to jazz performance. Taylor contends that
“my own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.”54 While
writing about jazz has often construed improvisation as simple self expression, Heble
contends that “improvisation’s link with processes of identity formation and struggles
with self-definition has less to do with a creative actualization of the self as a stable
origin of meaning than it does with unsettling the very logic of identity. If anything,
improvisation [in a group setting] teaches us…that identity is a dialogic construction.”55
This may, at first flush, seem like a simple and self-evident point, but it has important
corrective implications for the construction of jazz as a genre in public discourse,
especially during this era. For instance, a Newsweek reporter’s assertion that jazz
musicians made excellent ambassadors because of the music’s “simple emotional impact”
depends not only on eliding the discipline involved in the craft of this complex music, but
also the conversational nature of its performance.56
We can think of “Manteca” as a performative acknowledgment between AfroCuban and African American people, cultural formations, and geographies, an
understanding supported by the song’s structure which places discrete Afro-Cuban and
African American sections next to each other within a common framework. That
structure, in turn, reflects the song’s compositional process and the contributions of its
two main composers:
When he came [to me with the song “Manteca”] he had already figured
out the what the bass was gonna do, how it was gonna start off, how the
saxophones were gonna come in afterwards. He had that riff, he had the
riffs of the trombones; he had the riffs of the trumpets. But Chano wasn’t
too hip about American music. If I’d let it go like that, it would’ve been
149
strictly Afro-Cuban, all the way. I wrote the bridge. I said, “now wait a
minute. Hold it, hold it. After that part, we need a bridge.” I was sitting
down at the piano writing the bridge, and I thought I was going to write an
eight bar bridge. But after eight bars, I hadn’t resolved back to B-flat, so I
had to keep going and ended up writing a sixteen-bar bridge. That’s how
it happened. Anytime you hear something that Chano and I wrote, that we
were collaborators on, I didn’t just gorilla myself in it, I contributed.57
Gillespie’s remarks here illustrate the role of improvisation as it occurs in the act of
songwriting: how his part of the composition “happened” in dialogic response to the
musical context created by Pozo’s riffs. These remarks also betray, if not exactly
defensiveness, at least a distinct sensitivity to the imbalance in power inherent in his
collaboration with Pozo, an imbalance marked in the difference between Pozo’s
contribution, composed and communicated orally, and Gillespie’s contribution, which not
only includes his piano-composed bridge, but also the textual codification of the entire
work as a song. A further layer of codification was added by Walter “Gil” Fuller, who
wrote the orchestral arrangements for the Gillespie big band, and who complained about
having to translate Pozo’s spoken "Pee-do-do! Pee-do-de! Peedo de."
Despite Gillespie’s recognition and refusal of the role of imperialist appropriator
of colonial inventions, such questions are inevitable, and often arise in consideration of
Gillespie’s famous description, repeated in several interviews and in his autobiography,
of how he communicated. According to Gillespie, when Pozo was asked this question
once, he answered “Deehee no peek pani, me no pek Angli, bo peek African,” meaning
of course “Dizzy doesn’t speak Spanish, I don’t speak English, but we both speak
African.” As Jairo Moreno suggests in an article analyzing the relationships between
Gillespie, Pozo, and the Afro-Cuban bandleader Mario Bauza, who introduced them,
there is something disconcerting in Gillespie’s act of “ventriloquism.” Certainly,
150
Gillespie is rendering Pozo’s voice in a pidgin version of what post-colonial theorists
would identify as a master language. Significantly, however, Gillespie is attempting to
illustrate a kind of communication that escapes the net of those master languages,
particularly the net of textual literacy where their effects are the most pernicious and
limiting. He’s describing an oral and vernacular practice: the language of rhythmic
gesture and patterning that he and Pozo use to thread the barriers that differing colonial
histories placed between them.
That Gillespie uses a caricatured version of accented English to describe this act
of communication does open up a space for critiquing his relationship to Pozo, but while
that critique makes the hierarchical divisions that exist between Gillespie and Pozo
(employer and employee, native born and immigrant, striver and scuffler) usefully
visible, it fails to account for the totality of their relationship. In his autobiography,
Gillespie makes an effort to dispel any notion that he or Pozo understood the idea of
“speaking African” literally, and argues that he understands what is, historically at stake
in the act of their communication:
He [Chano Pozo] meant something [when he described them both as
“speaking African”] which began during slavery times. In the United
States they wouldn’t let us use our primary means of expression, which
was the drum, because we could talk with the drum, and they figured you
could foment revolution with the drums. So what the hell are they gonna
let you talk for?58
While the exact history of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas is far more complex
than Gillespie’s brief description, his claims are broadly accurate. Marshall Stearns
offers a similar rationale for distinguishing and disentangling Afro-Caribbean and
African American musics in The Story of Jazz, published the same year that he
151
accompanied the Gillespie band on its State Department Tour. My concern here is not as
much the exact factuality of this claim as its importance in the genrification of jazz as an
international music rooted in the dispersal of Africans via the European slave trade.
Gillespie’s specific claim here is important in its emphasis on the revolutionary potential
of the act of communication across barriers, an act evoked by “Manteca’s” fusion of
diasporic styles.
Just as Moreno’s article errs, I believe, in too broadly analogizing the relationship
between Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo as the relationship between the United States
and Cuba, he also, I argue, draws too easy a contrast between New York in the 1930s and
1940s and "cosmopolitan Havana," where other sources report that memories of a brutal
massacre in 1912 still discouraged black participation in public life and where political
affiliations based on race were banned.22 While the color line was drawn differently in
these two cities, it was drawn more harshly in Havana than Moreno suggests. Ned
Sublette recognizes a stronger and more consistent sense of national identification among
Cubans of African descent than among Americans of African descent, but he also argues
that African Americans, longer emancipated and just slightly less brutally repressed, had
built stronger musical commercial and social associations than Afro-Cubans had, and that
this was a large part of the magnetic draw that New York exerted.23 In fact, Chano Pozo,
a successful songwriter in Cuba, had immigrated to the United States because he was
tired of shining shoes in a city where he was barred from performing his own
compositions publicly with the bands who recorded them. Similarly, Richard Gott
reports an ongoing history of race-based abuses, including deportations, violence, and the
aforementioned ban on anything associated with Santeria, by both the Machado
152
government of the 1920s and the revolutionary government of 1933, which first brought
Fulgencio Batista into the circles of power.59
Harlem, in New York City, and Havana, Cuba, represent particularly vital nodes
in the “cross-border, transnational zone” that Frank Andre Guridy refers to as “the U.S.Caribbean World,” a region which “first emerged out of the trade networks of the
Eighteenth Century and came to full fruition after the war of 1898.”60 This
“supranational configuration stretched from the eastern seaboard of the United States,
southward along the Atlantic coast to the islands of the Caribbean basin, the shores of the
Gulf of Mexico, the nations of Central America, and even the northern reaches of South
America.”61 While the growth of transnational scholarship in such fields as American
Studies, African American Studies, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Post-colonial
studies, Cultural Studies, and the New southern Studies has produced much rewarding
work in this area, Guriday’s detailed, interdisciplinary attempt to “historicize the
formation of Afro-diasporic subjects out of these cross-national interactions that
frequently transcended cultural and linguistic differences,” is particularly fulsome.62 Paul
Austerlitz provides, however, a more specifically musical account of the ways in which
the interactions of these “afro-diasporic subjects” produced, in New York City, what we
might think of as, before the emergence of salsa as a genre, the characteristic sound of
this “transnational zone.”63 Here, Austerlitz quotes Mario Bauza, who immigrated to the
United States in 1929, and who, while playing in Cab Calloway’s orchestra, tutored his
roommate, a young trumpeter from Cheraw, South Carolina named John Birks “Dizzy”
Gillespie, in Cuban musical practice. Here, Austerlitz quotes Bauza’s description of the
dialogic encounter in which, he claims, this new identificatory sound was born:
153
[speaking to drummer cozy Powell] “Cozy, if I hum it to you some kind
of rhythm, do you think you can do it?” He said “well, I’ll try it.” So I
hummed something and I said “no, no, not like that, like “[hums a phrase].
So I said, let me get hold of Dizzy. So I said “Dizzy, put a mute in the
trumpet. He’s going to play some rhythm in there, and I want you to play
something jazz in there on the top.” So he start the phrase and I say “no,
no, stop, stop. Cuban music, the metric of the Cuban music is clave…so
put the phrasing from upbeat to downbeat.” So Dizzy start playing on top
of the rhythm. I said this is it already. I know what to do know. All I got
to do is take the tune and dress it, voice wide like a jazz band, with the
same harmony, the same voicing and instruments. That’s how the AfroCuban jazz was born.64
As Austerlitz notes, “Bauza’s idea was not merely to superimpose jazz solos over Cuban
rhythms. Instead he wanted the jazz elements to be rhythmically consonant with the deep
structures of Cuban music: they should emphasize beats 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4, and
they should refer to the clave rhythm.”65
Gillespie and Bauza both left Calloway’s band in 1937. Gillespie went on to
pursue the virtuosic harmonic, rhythmic and melodic experiments that, in the early 1940s
in after-hours jams with musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny
Clarke in a club called Minton’s in New York City, became known as be-bop, or modern
jazz. Bauza, for his part, went on to found Machito and his Afro-Cubans, not only the
first band to blend African American jazz, including modern innovations, with AfroCuban music, but perhaps the longest-lived of such ensembles. Bauza, his sister
Graciela, and her husband the charismatic vocalist frank “Machito” Grillo formed the
band in 1940, and they performed and recorded until the mid-1970s. While there were
many popular “Latin” bands in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Xavier
Cugat’s orchestra, Bauza, Graciela, and Machito’s ensemble was different in its
commitment to playing Afro-Cuban music, to presenting that music and themselves as
154
being specifically Afro-identified, and to employing African American jazz musicians in
key roles. Bauza explains the logic behind this last practice thus:
On account they was American they knew they got to learn how to get
adjusted with us…A Spanish guy would have said ‘no, because I played
with Coén, I played with Nero Morales, I played with Cugat.’ We don’t
want that. We want a guy who would pay attention to what we
want…There was a lot of musicians who could read, but…we were
looking for people, for flexible people, that we could mold the way we
want…they don’t supposed to be the best musicians. The most flexible
was the one we was looking for.”66
Bauza’s emphasis on flexibility and its importance to expression should remind us that,
as Stuart Hall points out, articulation means “both joining up (as in the limbs of the body
or an anatomical structure) and giving expression to.”67 And lest we see this recombinant
musical expression as confirming any kind of essential unity, that, as Brent Hayes
Edwards observes, “Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because
finally, in the body it is only difference—the separation between bones or members—that
allows movement.”68
Performing Diaspora: Inventing Black Music
People talk about music. "Music is ethnic," they say. Music in and of itself
is not ethnic. Notes are merely servants. They only do what we tell them to
do. If we know how to write something that's ethnic, then it becomes
ethnic. Music in and of itself is not ethnic. Notes are only tonal
documentations of pitch, that's all. But what we do with them, now, that's
something else.
Bennie Golson69
The idea of one Africa to unite the thought and ideas of all native peoples
of the dark continent belongs to the 20th Century and stems naturally from
the West Indies and the United States.
W.E.B. DuBois.70
Every rhythm comes from Africa, and all blacks come from there,
regardless.
Dizzy Gillespie71
155
Chano Pozo was only a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s band for a little over a year.
He participated in two recording sessions, both in December of 1947, appearing on a total
of six songs. He made his public debut and was prominently featured at a concert at
Carnegie Hall on Monday, September 29, 1947, a noteworthy show which also featured
Ella Fitzgerald and reunited Gillespie with his old partner and fellow be-bop architect,
Charlie Parker. Critic Michael Levin, writing in Downbeat, noted that “the crowd
unquestionably liked the “Cubana Bop” number with its added bongo and conga drum
soloist the best, illustrating a point the Beat [meaning Downbeat] has often made: that
there is much jazz can learn from South American and Afro-Cuban rhythm styles.”72
Pozo accompanied the Gillespie big band on a wildly successful tour of Europe. In
England, the British Musician’s Union temporarily waived rules forbidding bands from
overseas in order to accommodate the Gillespie Orchestra. In Stockholm, Sweden, where
a foreign correspondent from the New York Times noted that “America’s latest jazz
phenomenon–be-bop music–has taken this jazz music hotbed by storm,” the band set a
new attendance record for the Vinterpalaset, drawing over 26, 000 fans over three
nights.73 In Paris, audience members were astounded when the musicians, having lost
their written music, played their complex arrangements from memory, a gentle reminder
of the oral, aural and textual interweave which marks this music.74
Immediately after returning from Europe—and despite concerns about travelling
and lodging in the South and about having to play segregated venues—Gillespie and the
band embarked on a southern tour. Gillespie felt that “to attract a mass audience to bebop, we had to first establish a feeling for the music among the large black population of
156
the South by touring the southern states.”75 Unfortunately, as Dizzy recalls, southern
black audiences failed to connect with the band’s music. “They couldn’t dance to the
music they said. But I could dance to it. I could dance my ass off to it. My music is
always danceable. But the unreconstructed blues lovers down south who couldn’t hear
nothing else but the blues didn’t think so. They wouldn’t even listen to us.”76 While
southern audiences may not have responded to the Gillespie band as he envisioned they
might, it is still worth emphasizing that Jazz, including modern jazz, music which we
take for granted as belonging in the concert hall, was firmly ensconced at that time in the
popular realm. Earl Palmer, a jazz drummer from New Orleans who, as a session
musician, played on all of Little Richard’s groundbreaking rock and roll hits, remembers
the black southern response to modern jazz differently, arguing “the hell Be-bop [sic]
wasn’t a mass movement!”77 Palmer may be exaggerating to some degree, but his own
performative history—from working in African American minstrel shows as a child, to
playing drums in jazz bands, to defining the basic rhythmic beat of rock and roll, to
working as a highly paid and sought after session player—suggests that genre histories
which hew closely to narratives defined by stylistic authenticity often tell us little about
the experiential lives of musicians and audiences. While U.S. audiences remained cooler
than European audiences to the band’s mix of swing and Afro-Cuban rhythms and
complex harmonies, they did play for packed houses in the Northeast and on the West
coast, and Gillespie continued to emphasize dancing as an integral part of the
communication between jazz musicians and those they performed for. When Charlie
Parker publicly criticized Gillespie for “diluting his music,” Gillespie replied that “Bop is
a part of jazz…and jazz is music to dance to.”78
157
In the fall of 1948, after a performance in North Carolina, Chano Pozo’s congas
were stolen. Lacking a suitable replacement, and hardly fond of traveling in the U.S.
South, Pozo left the tour and returned to New York. On Thursday, December 2, the same
night that the Gillespie band played a one-nighter in Jackson, Mississippi, Pozo was shot
dead in a bar in Harlem by a small-time marijuana dealer named Eusabio Munoz, seconds
after dropping coins in the bar’s jukebox and selecting “Manteca.” Pozo had always been
something of a rough character. According to Austerlitz, Mario Bauza recalled that when
Chano arrived in the U.S. while travelling with a dance troupe he was “characteristically
dapper, dressed in white, but was unable to dance because he was recovering from
gunshot wounds.” By most accounts, the fatal shooting took place because Pozo,
unhappy with the mota that Munoz, nicknamed “El Cabito” had sold him, had humiliated
the dealer, slapping him around and retrieving the cost of the marijuana from El Cabito’s
wallet.79
Despite his brief tenure in the band, Chano Pozo was, and still is, a remarkably
influential figure. Sublette considers him to have “created the role of the conga soloist in
the modern band, somewhat the way Coleman Hawkins created the solo tenor sax,” and,
as Austerlitz explains, Pozo also altered the role of the conga drummer in Cuban bands as
well:
As noted, the conga drum had been used only in carnival music and the
rumba until the early 1940s, when it was incorporated in dance bands as
result of the influence of Arsenio Rodriguez. Pozo was innovative in
bringing the conga to the fore as a solo instrument in the concert setting,
and his short career thus had a lasting and vital influence: featuring conga
drums in jazz, rock, and funk bands eventually became standard practice, a
mainstay of North American music.80
158
It is worth pausing for a moment and considering what those solo performances were
like, how audiences reacted to them, and how they helped turn Chano Pozo, briefly, into
something of a crossover star. Newspaper and trade magazine accounts from the time
refer to the ritualistic and exotic nature of these performances. There was, in fact, an
element of practical ritual to them quite separate from any considerations of
showmanship, as the heads on Chano’s handmade conga drums had to be heated and
stretched and tightened to the proper tension and pitch for each performance. Chano did
this with oil lamps, and did so onstage after stripping to the waist, leading to breathless
descriptions of the “ritualistic and downright primitive” nature of his performances81
Besides playing congas and bongos during his solo, he danced, as he had all of his
professional life, and engaged in call and response chants with other band members,
especially Gillespie, who learned the chants well enough to convincingly replicate them
with some surprised Cuban musicians in a performance in Havana almost 40 years later.82
Some of this performance was “ritualistic” in a sacramental sense, as Pozo was
adapting words, dance steps, and rhythmic patterns not only from his Abakuá training,
but from other aspects of Cuban folklore. However, while focusing on the origins of
these parts of his repertoire helps us to understand the interplay between folkloristic and
commercial economies that Pozo exploited in his career, it can also lead us astray
because of the imprimatur of authenticity which so often comes with such an attention to
exoticized origins leads us away form their immediate performative context. We should
remember that Pozo, with the help of Gillespie and the arrangers that Gillespie worked
with, primarily Gil Fuller and George Russell, crafted these performances as
performances. Reading their legitimacy through the lens of their origins distracts us from
159
the role they played as jazz performances and from Pozo’s recognition and conscious
manipulation of his role as the exotic other.
Here, George Russell recounts how Chano’s showcase was introduced into the
Gillespie big band’s show, and the reaction that it brought about from some audience
members.
So we premiered “Cubana Be-Cubana Bop” at Carnegie Hall and people
were really surprised and impressed. After Carnegie Hall we had Boston
Symphony Hall, and I went with the band. Going up on the bus, Chano, in
the back, started doing this African black magic chanting. Heavy
mysterious folk music. So I said to Dizzy: ‘you should open the whole
middle section up, bring Chano out in front, let him do this.’ We built a
whole thing out of it.
We tried it that night at Boston Symphony Hall and, to show the temper of
the times, the black people in the audience were embarrassed by it. The
cultural snow job had worked so ruthlessly that for the black race in
America at the time its native culture was severed from it completely.
They were taught to be ashamed of it, and so the black people in the
Boston audience were noticeable because they started to laugh when
Chano came on stage in his native costume and began.83
Russell’s reference to Pozo’s “native costume” is more than a little ironic, given that, in
Cuba, Chano typically performed in an immaculate white suit.84 His remarks, however,
reveal an interesting set of gulfs between the musicians’ presentation of this “heavy,
mysterious folk music” which they understand as being deeply connected to jazz, and
how differing audiences saw and heard it. What white newspaper writers and jazz critics
typically understood as an exotic musical authenticity, middle class black audiences
sometimes perceived an embarrassing primitivism. These two views reflect the differing
investments of these audience members and the way that these investments informed
their construction of the genre. Even in 1948, a decade after the emergence of what Paul
Lopes calls a “jazz art world,” critics came to the concert seeking (and found) romantic
160
actualizations of what Ted Gioia refers to as the “primitivist myth” of jazz.85 Concert
goers and casual fans drawn from the black middle class, on the other hand, came for a
night of sophisticated entertainment by professional musicians. We can also understand
something about this particular audience’s expectations by thinking not only about their
class location, but also their physical location, in Boston Symphony Hall. As Lopes
reminds us, “Jazz concerts not only presented jazz as a serious art form, but when located
in concert halls usually reserved for European cultivated music also represented for jazz
enthusiasts the new legitimate status of this music.”86 Whatever else they may have
thought about Chano Pozo’s performance, it is doubtful that it confirmed anyone’s
notions of the music’s legitimate status, a status which, like the audience’s class status,
was far from assured and not to be taken for granted.
Russell’s proscriptive rhetoric regarding the audiences’ reaction to “their native
culture” is interesting as well. It illustrates the way that Chano’s solo, placed in the
middle of a jazz concert in a symphony hall, could function as a citation of a narrative of
origins for the entire genre. But in doing so, Russell naturalizes Pozo’s repertoire,
reducing what he brings to the stage via his experiences as a singer, dancer and drummer
in a wide variety of contexts, to a “natural” expression of Africanism. Here, I believe
that Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonial notion of “strategic essentialism”—the mobilization
of essentialist discourses and stereotypes by subordinated colonial subjects in the service
of anti-colonialist aims—is helpful in understanding how Pozo’s performance occupies
the space where constructions of the exotic African “other” by Russell, the audience, and
various critics all meet.87 Chano Pozo was, according to Sublette and others, a canny
performer. His rise from the poverty of El Solar Africa, one of the roughest and poorest
161
barrios in Havana, to the stages of Paris, Stockholm, New York, and Boston should be
understood as depending not only on a virtuosic mobilization of many components of
Cuba’s rich, African-derived musical folklore, but also a similarly expert command of the
ways in which those folkloric musical elements are apprehended by a variety of
audiences. His in-concert transformation from smiling, dapper, white-suited drummer to
shirtless, spinning, grinning dervish was more the work of a skilled craftsman than the
instinctual expression of, in Gillespie’s words, a “stone African.”88 In some ways, the
Boston audience’s recoil from, and Russell’s embrace of, Pozo’s performance are both
symptoms of a kind of “cultural snow job.” Both register the power of the image of
Africa in the U.S. black public sphere at this moment, indicating the ways that image had
been used for centuries and the ways it might be used differently in the years to come.89
Earlier in this chapter I argued that the creation and practice of Afro-Cuban jazz
was deeply imbricated into a crossover narrative on the grandest scale. By arguing that
the fusion of African American and Afro-Cuban musical practices amounted to a return
of vital musical elements eliminated by slavery, musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, George
Russell, and others added an international, diasporic past to a music whose present and
future they defined as a combination of U.S. vernacular and European high art practices.
I want to revisit and extend that argument slightly, in two ways. One is by placing the
performances of this music, particularly performances of “Manteca,” in the context of a
long crossover moment, a complex and ongoing set of negotiations between musicians,
critics, audience members, and industry actors over the boundaries and meanings of a
variety of musical practices, which by proxy indicate negotiations over the boundaries
and meanings of racial identity, public space, and citizenship. The same year that the
162
Gillespie band brought Afro-Cuban jazz to the stages of the Boston Symphony Hall, a
young white, Jewish Billboard staff writer named Jerry Wexler, who would go on to
produce records considered definitive of the African American experience by artists like
Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, renamed the “Harlem Hit Parade” (which had formerly
been the magazine’s “Race Records” chart) as the Rhythm and Blues chart.90 Many of
the records that appeared on this chart were made by musicians like Louis Jordan, who
had, at the encouragement of promoters, left their place as sidemen in large swing
orchestras and begun to work fronting more profitable small combos. This same year, a
gifted African American pianist and singer named Nat Cole sold more than a million
copies of two different records, a feat which gave him two number one singles on the
Popular, not the Rhythm and Blues charts.
The other point to make here regarding crossover narratives is that Gillespie is,
verbally and textually, an active participant in the public discourse regarding the meaning
and place of jazz and jazz musicians in American life. Because of this, his interventions
in the crafting of the narratives which define the genre, and define his place within the
genre, are much more direct than those of a performer like Cole, despite the fact that Cole
reached a wider mass audience at the time. Musicians like Gillespie, Thelonious Monk,
Charles Mingus, and other modernist innovators understood that their ability to profitably
make the music they wanted to make depended on the meanings generated by the critical
infrastructure of textual interlocutors that had emerged around jazz—the first popular
music to invite sustained textual analysis—since the 1920s. Unwilling, unable, or
uninterested in pursuing the kind of well crafted pop music that Cole undertook as his
main focus, they directly entered into the process of negotiating their music’s place in the
163
public sphere by intervening socially and textually in the smaller counterpublic which
had grown up around the genre.91 One of the ways to see and hear the versions of
“Manteca” which occupy the remainder of this chapter is as artifacts of these
negotiations.
There are, in total, only four publicly available live recordings of the Gillespie
band with Chano Pozo. The only one of those that does not include an extended conga
solo consists of only four songs, one half of an LP recorded in 1947 in Stockholm
Sweden.92 The other recordings are the 1947 Carnegie Hall Concert and the 1948
Concert at La Salle Pleyel in Paris, in which the solo occurs during “Cubana Be-Cubana
Bop,” and a recording from Pasadena, California in the summer of 1948 where Chano’s
percussion showcase has been moved to “Manteca.”93 The version of “Manteca” closes
the show here, as it would on the State Department tours eight years later. The Pasadena
concert was released on a LP in 1949 as Dizzy Gillespie and his Big Band in Concert
featuring Chano Pozo. The cover is dominated by a cartoon image of Gillespie,
identified by a beret, goatee, and a set of horn-rimmed glasses attached to a giant,
grinning bright red face, floating in space near a trumpet, and a much smaller cartoon of
Chano Pozo, a featureless dark-skinned stick figure in a suit in front of a large drum.
These images, and the pictures inside of a grinning Gillespie arm in arm with promoter
Gene Norman, who is himself wearing glasses, beret, and a fake goatee, remind us that,
of all of the jazz modernists, Gillespie was the most eager to embrace the term “be-bop”
and did less to disassociate himself from fads like “bopcorn.”
164
Figure 3: The 1948 LP Dizzy Gillespie and His Big Band in Concert
After Pozo’s death in 1948, “Manteca” disappears from Gillespie’s catalog of
publicly recorded compositions. During this period, Gillespie undertakes various
strategies in order to pursue his aesthetic and commercial agendas, including starting his
own record label, DeeGee records, with friend and associate Dave Usher. Unable to keep
the big band together in the face of commercial pressures, including the increasing
popularity of rhythm and blues as the definitive dance music for African American adults
165
and a growing number of white teenagers, he works in small combos and even tours as a
sideman for bandleader Stan Kenton. In fact, during the early 1950s, virtually the only
profitable big bands playing any kind of modern jazz are Kenton’s ensemble, which
includes several “Latin” arrangements, and Machito and his Afro-Cuban All Stars, who
are the centerpiece of a flourishing Afro-Latin Jazz scene in New York. The problems
that Gillespie and other jazz modernists faced in attracting dance-interested popular
audiences to their work was, in some ways, exacerbated by Gillespie’s own innovations
during the post-World War Two era when the jazz avant-garde and the musical
mainstream were briefly co-identified. As Sublette points out
The R&B revolution signified a rupture with the previous generation of
big-band swing—not only in the use of combos instead of big bands, the
dominance of the electric guitar, and a more aggressive attitude—but with
a variety of post-Machito, post “Manteca” devices from Cuban music.
The “rhythm” part of rhythm and blues took advantage of the Other Great
Tradition: the clave-and-tumbao bass-line ostinatos and repeated vocal
phrases of Cuban music, sometimes in swing time, sometimes not. Not
that the musicians necessarily thought of it that way, any more than a
Cuban thought about the Earl of Sandwich when he [sic] asked for a
sangueesh. It had been almost twenty years since “El Manisero” kicked
off the rhumba boom, and young American musicians had never known a
world without clave. By this time the musics were mixing thoroughly, and
even high school jazz bands had Latin numbers in their books. All black
musicians knew “Manteca.”94
The popularity of “Manteca” and particularly its axial appeal as a modernist piece
that was at once sophisticated and danceable, “Latin” and “Black,” made it a natural
focus for an ambitious project intended to return Gillespie to the aesthetic and
commercial forefront. This project—the LP Afro, released in 1955—would, however,
present the song in an entirely different context.95 Afro’s cover seems at first to offer an
immediate contrast with “Dizzy Gillespie and his Big Band in Concert Featuring Chano
166
Pozo”: a charcoal sketch of a muscular, nearly naked black woman’s body is captured in
three still poses, one with her back turned, one facing the viewer, one in profile, arranged
serially behind asymmetrical swaths of translucent blue, red, and yellow, with a narrow
white space between the blue and the white. The serial placement of the three figures,
sketched in rough, dark, lines, suggests dancing, and the middle figure, whose body is
facing the viewer, has arms raised and crossed over her face, blocking her eyes and
rendering her unable to return the viewer’s gaze. On the woman’s face, only her mouth,
half open with teeth bared, is visible.
Figure 4: The 1956 LP Afro
167
Despite their obvious stylistic differences, and, as we shall see, differing musical
approaches in the recordings, there are similarities that sit just below the surfaces of the
two cover illustrations. Both offer the prospective musical consumer visions of “black
music” as the sound of exoticized others, and both can be seen as either commercial
exploitation of essentialist stereotypes or as examples of post-colonial strategies which
draw upon, recast, and reconfigure dominant notions of subaltern identity. Their
differences, evident in the contrast between the small cartoonish figure of Chano Pozo on
the 1949 LP and the provocative dancing woman on the cover of Afro, point to the
differences that just a few years had made in the marketing of the exotic. Significantly,
both figures are dark, but Afro’s cover emphasized the music’s sensuality in a manner
consonant with both the mainstreaming of images of female nudity in Playboy magazine,
and with representational currents of primitivism and minimalism in modern art. As
such, it offered a promise that the music within would be sexy, exotic, and, at the same
time, culturally legitimate, qualities virtually guaranteed to attract the attention of the
largely male and collegiate jazz aficionados of the mid-1950s.
Norman Granz, who produced the record, claims the album in the liner notes as
“another one of my experiments in Afro-Cuban music.”96 It is a pretentious-sounding
claim, and seems to contradict the ethos in modern jazz that locates authentic artistic
merit in the acts of individual musicians participating in collective improvisation. It is a
small reminder that this ethos, which we are likely to think of as defining jazz in general,
comes directly out of a set of arguments about musical meaning-making, mounted by
people involved in musicking under the sign of jazz, and specifically be-bop or modern
jazz. The effect of generic criticism and generic history and generic discourse is to
168
naturalize such arguments, concealing differences and contradictions, such as Granz’s
claim of the record as one of “my” experiments without having played a single note. And
this claim is not just an example of an outmoded or obsolete show business understanding
of who “makes” a jazz record, although it is to some degree that. Granz had thought of
the project, recruited musicians and introduced them to each other, paid them for their
time, and paid for recording time and overseen the recording and the personnel involved
in the recording. He almost certainly participated in the choice of songs, had some input
on arrangements, and released the record on his own label. These are all things that
producers and executive producers and record company officials and promoters do in the
music business, then and now, and Granz was all of these. but his purpose in doing so, as
he understood and explained it, was to create a jazz record: an instance and a recording of
that same act of individuals participating in collective musical improvisation. The
contradiction that we hear between his largely financial, non-musical role and his claim
to authorship is, ironically, a product of the success of the modernist narrative in making
the physical and economic conditions of production largely invisible in the genre’s
narrative of authentic meaning. It is not something intrinsic to jazz, or at least it was not
firmly so then, and it is now only because of the actions and arguments of musicians like
Gillespie, and, ironically, promoters like Granz.
Granz had, over the past two decades, funded and produced a number of AfroCuban jazz events and recordings, and Afro, the first of a series that Gillespie would
release on his Granz’s label, had been at least partially Granz’s conception, as had the
choice of Chico O’Farrill, a composer and recent Cuban émigré, as primary arranger. In
many ways, Afro can be accurately deemed a strategic commercial and aesthetic
169
collaboration between Norman Granz, Chico O’Farrill, and Dizzy Gillespie, each of
whom came to the project with a specific agenda. For O'Farrill, whose background was
in Cuba’s formal conservatories rather than the barrios where Chano Pozo came from, it
helped to consolidate his growing reputation as the preeminent arranger of Afro-Cuban
jazz. For Granz, it allowed him to be associated with both aesthetic and technological
innovation, as Afro not only featured prestigious and well known musicians like Gillespie
and rising stars like O’Farrill, drummer Charlie Persip, and trumpeter Quincy Jones, it
was also one of the first records to take full advantage of the “Long Playing” (LP) format
that allowed for longer compositions like "Manteca Suite," which occupied the entire first
side. For Gillespie it does several things worth considering here: it offers an unusually
flexible vehicle capable of triangulating his pursuit of Cuban rhythm, art music, and the
dance floor.
Gillespie and O'Farrill's "Manteca Suite" elaborated and divided “Manteca” into
four movements, entitled "Manteca Theme," "Contraste," "Jungla," and "RhumbaFinale." These interlocking sections are performed by a fourteen-piece big band
supplemented by Cuban percussionists (including future salsa pioneer Mongo
Santamaria) and a Cuban pianist and bassist. Each of these sections expanded on riffs,
rhythmic and melodic figures found in the original song. This renovation and
reconfiguration of elements that had been preserved in Abakuá chant for centuries before
Chano Pozo introduced them into popular song suggests again the tremendous reach
across time and space of the soundscape forged by Africans in the Americas, a reach that
Gillespie’s album title made explicit. The second side of the LP further elaborated on the
possibilities inherent in the album’s diasporic conversations by translating three modern
170
jazz standards, Gillespie's "Con Alma" and "A Night in Tunisia" and Duke Ellington's
"Caravan" into the language of a Cuban rhythm section, with melodic accompaniment
and solos by Gillespie and flautist Gilberto Valdes.
One of Afro’s most important strategic moves was, I believe, to tie the animating idea of
a culturally legitimated Afro-diasporic identity to the popularity of the mambo, a dance
craze rooted in Afro-Cuban music, but which was widely considered “Latin” rather than
“black.” The mambo’s most visible cultural representatives were both light-skinned
Cubans: Desi Arnaz, who played bandleader Ricky Ricardo on the immensely popular
TV comedy I Love Lucy; and Perez Prado, who spent a decade establishing himself as a
popular bandleader in Mexico City before releasing records in the U.S. and moving to
Los Angeles in 1952. Although Prado, the “king of the Mambo,” was largely rejected by
the community of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and other Latin American immigrants in New
York, whose dances at the Palladium were nurturing what would in a little over a decade
become the genre known as salsa, his adventurous compositions combined the
commercial appeal of cartoon exoticism with devices drawn from Cuban vernacular
music and sprinklings of modern jazz. In many ways, Prado’s music can be understood as
occupying a liminal space between the energetic purism of the New York Latin jazz
community and popular appropriations as ersatz as Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon” or
Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano.”97 Despite Prado’s ethnic, national, and aesthetic
background, hits like “Mambo No. 5” and “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”
[which was actually a cha-cha] represented the mambo, and by extension all “Latin”
music to consumers as something that was, if not quite white, at least not “Black.” Afro
can be seen as an attempt to reclaim this territory.
171
Afro’s strategy of explicitly claiming the blackness of “Latin” music suggests, on
a much deeper rhetorical level, the kind of articulation that Stuart Hall called a “complex
unity in difference” that is reflected in other quarters. The term “diaspora” will not be
used to describe the historical displacement and rhetorically contain the historical
mobility of the descendents of Africans until 1965, but, as Edwards notes, “The
[Africanist] use of diaspora emerges directly out of the growing scholarly interest in the
Pan-African movement in particular, and black internationalism in general that began to
develop in the 1950s.”98 It was not just a scholarly interest, either. The relationship
between Africa and jazz that had been such a fertile ground for intimations of primitivist
authenticity in the hands of jazz critics since the 1930s had begun, in the 1950s, to yield
something different. Already, in 1955, Duke Ellington had begun work on Drum is a
Woman, an extended bricolage performance piece which connected African rhythm,
personified by a character named Madame Zajj, with his sophisticated swing
compositions and which would be presented as a television production in 1956. Louis
Armstrong, whose 1956 tour of Africa had forced the State Department advisory board to
choose Gillespie as the first jazz ambassador, was filmed walking and playing trumpet on
the beach in Ghana for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS TV show See It Now that same year.
Hearing Gillespie’s investment in Norman Granz’s “experiment” as an attempt to
intervene in these scholarly and popular conversations and tie this narrative to what
Lopes identifies as “a progressive jazz tradition from folk art, to popular art, to modernist
high art” is, I believe, entirely harmonious with the interests, beliefs, and understandings
that Gillespie had demonstrated since becoming interested in Afro-Cuban music in the
late 1930s. It also allows us to hear Afro as a predecessor of a coming explosion of
172
efforts by American jazz artists to mobilize the image and idea of a complex vision of
African interest in musical form, including major work by Machito, Randy Weston, Guy
Warren, and John Coltrane.99
Hearing Afro, with its extended versions of “Manteca,” in this black
internationalist context allows us to return to the version by the State Department band
with new ears and hear another set of articulations. These articulate connections occur
between the emergence of an understanding of jazz as an aesthetically legitimated
transnational music with African origins, and the emergence of the modern civil rights
movement in the southern U.S.100 If—even acknowledging that it was not a discrete
eruption but instead a new phase in an extensive previous strategy of legal and political
work going back decades by the NAACP—we mark that emergence at the beginning of
the Montgomery Bus Boycott on December 1, 1955, we can hear the narrative presented
by the Gillespie State Department band as something quite different than the “good
propaganda” that Marshall Stearns Saturday Evening Post approvingly labels it. And we
can most clearly hear this in the chant “I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia” which appears,
for the first time, during rehearsals for the tour, in April of 1956, just a month after the
state of Georgia officially changes the design of the state flag to incorporate the stars and
bars of the Confederacy.101
In the context of the tour, the narratives of jazz’s generic history which the tour
presents, and the State Department big band’s version of “Manteca,” it is appropriate to
turn, for interpretation, to the term “strategic historicism,” a variant of Gayatri Spivak’s
“strategic essentialism” deployed by queer studies theorist and historian Valerie Traub to
indicate "a mode of historical inquiry attuned to continuity and rupture, similarity and
173
difference."102 Strategic historicism, I argue, is helpful for unpacking the chant of “I’ll
never go back to Georgia.” More than just a gesture of protest, the chant diagrams a
narrative that places the slave trading ports of coastal Georgia behind the narrator, and
the promise of a post-colonial future ahead. Its attunement to “continuity and rupture,
similarity and difference” is underscored by the way it rhetorically ties U.S. Civil Rights
and post-colonial agendas, and by the integrated band which gives it voice. This leaves
us yet another set of paradoxes to ponder: the creative genrification of jazz, including
Afro-Cuban jazz as “black music” (rather than African American music) by an integrated
band of U.S. citizens, and the vigorous argument mounted by that same band, under the
auspices of the U.S. State Department, that said “black music” is the practical expression
of black internationalism.
Coda: Newport and New York City
I say this because jazz, the music I play most often, has never really been
accepted as an art form by the people of my own country…I believe that
the great mass of the American people still consider jazz as lowbrow
music…To them, jazz is music for kids and dope addicts. Music to get
high to. Music to take a fling to. Music to rub bodies to. Not “serious”
music. Not concert hall material. Not music to listen to. Not music to
study. Not music to enjoy purely for its listening kicks.
Dizzy Gillespie,103
Down through the generations Africa has persisted as hazy presence in the
universe of Negro Americans, an image now receding, now advancing,
taking on different shapes, occupying different places in Negro mental
landscapes. Now it is an ancestral land, dimly known, forgotten, denied,
or thrust away both as a place and as a memory, dark, torrid, dangerous, a
deeply unwanted piece of oneself. Or now it is, as the white man has said
and his Providence has ordained, a savage, heathen land awaiting a tardy
redemption on which even Negro slavery could be seen as a deposit. Or
again, it is the shadowy wisp of a far past, nostalgically or romantically
remembered, or woven unrecognized into bits and corners of a great
folklore. Or a promised land…
Harold B. Isaacs104
174
Following the State Department tours, the big band gathered by Dizzy returned
and undertook an extensive tour of the U.S. While the band benefited from the publicity
generated by their tour, the practical economies of touring such a large ensemble were
little better than they had been in earlier in the decade. The emergence of rock and roll in
the middle years of the 1950s widened a split between what was perceived as highbrow
and lowbrow for white audiences interested in “black music,” and black audiences were
increasingly captured by a new kind of crossover music: soul, which, following the lead
of former Nat Cole imitator Ray Charles, added vocal, rhythmic, and instrumental
devices drawn from the ecstatic practices of African American gospel to pop songs that
were decidedly secular in content. Despite the popularity on jukeboxes of the Gillespie
Big Band’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” released on a single by Roulette
Records, Gillespie turned his attention away from the popular market, penning an essay
for Esquire entitled “Jazz is Too Good For Americans” in 1957 and breaking up the big
band in 1958.105
Before it was disbanded, the band released a live album, recorded at the 1957
Newport Jazz Festival.106 The festival, organized in the small, wealthy enclave of
Newport, Rhode Island by wealthy promoter George Wein, reflected Jazz’s new role in
American culture as the soundtrack for highbrow leisure, and, in many ways, embodied
the contradictions inherent in that emplacement. Those contradictions between the
populist appeal of jazz and other “black” music featured at the festival, including blues
and soul, and the imprimatur of exclusivity defined by the festival’s small seating area,
175
would be unleashed in a riot in 1960 by thousands of white college students denied
admission to the main performance area. Scott Saul notes that, throughout the 1950s, the
festival had grown in stature and popularity, yielding profitable spin off franchises in
other cities and a similarly themed folk festival in the same town. Saul points out, the
resemblance between the festival’s economic organization and the emergence of
“corporate giantism” in American cultural life in the 1950s, but argues that “Rather than
being a protest of this corporate giantism however, the riot sprang out of the festival’s
central tension: the Newport fest had grown rapidly by promising a new public freedom
to its audience at the same time that it hoped to leash this freedom to a corporate ideal of
orderliness.”107
On that warm afternoon in 1957, however, there seems to have been little
evidence of these tensions, although Gillespie, fronting an augmented State Department
Band which included pianist Mary Lou Williams, certainly noted and exploited the
contradictions inherent in his surroundings. Introducing “Doodlin’,” a showcase for
saxophonist Pee Wee Moore, Gillespie, with sly accompaniment from the band, signified
upon the twin discourses of vernacular authenticity and high art pretension which
animated his vision of jazz as a genre:
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. (in mock French accent)
Silence, silence please. For our next tune, we’d like to feature the star of
the band. No, not you. (pauses) No, not you either. This young man is
destined to go down in history as one of the fine greats (sic) of his
particular instrument. As a matter of fact he is one of the kings of his
particular instrument, and one of the major forces in the development of
our (speaking slowly and over-enunciating for dramatic effect) native art
form…jazz. He’s played with all of the major bands, such as the suave
Stan Kenton, the wonderful Woody Herman, the lous—(interrupts self
before completing the word “lousy” then starts again)—the lovely
Lawrence Welk. Without anymore ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to
176
you, the inimitable (saxophones quietly punctuate), the incomparable
(slightly louder), the dynamic (cymbal crash) the soulful (scattered, quiet
beats on cymbals and mournful saxophone notes) the formidable (with
faux-French pronunciation and silence from the band) the magnifique
(high-pitched, minor key piano figure)…Pee Wee Moore!108
The band’s repertoire further tied their performance to the themes I have argued for here,
including a performance of “School Days,” a song whose lyrical references to the black
sheep and the white child from the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” takes on
new light in the wake of the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High only a month earlier.109
The album also included the first version of “Manteca” released on record in the U. S.
introduced by the chant of “I’ll never go back to Georgia,” given gleeful, full-throated
voice here.
Gillespie continued to use this chant to introduce “Manteca” in subsequent years,
substituting “I’ll never go back to Little Rock” for the second repetition of the line in a
version from Newport in 1959, and adding “or Selma” in a version from Carnegie Hall in
1961 arranged by Lalo Schiffrin, a young Venezuelan composer that he met on the State
Department tour of South America. After that, the song is retired for almost a decade,
and when it reappears in 1970, it does so without any verbal introduction. However, the
chant itself makes one more noteworthy appearance, again signifying musical crossover,
but in a different generic context. Almost a decade after Gillespie’s State Department
Big Band first declared “I’ll never go back to Georgia,” the Joe Cuba Sextet, a group of
mostly Puerto Rican-descended musicians working in New York, borrowed the same
chant as part of a strategy intended to court the African American dancers who came to
their Sunday night shows at the Palladium. What began as a spontaneous call to the
crowd by vocalist Jimmy Sabatar, using a phrase that must have come to him from
177
hearing the Live at Newport LP, became a key part of their 1966 hit song, “El Pito,”
which helped initiate a dance craze called boogaloo.110 Although the fusion of English
lyrics, rhythm and blues chord changes, and African American and Latin dance styles
that characterized boogaloo would be, within a few years, subsumed by the demands for
linguistic and rhythmic purity which accompanied the rise of salsa as a genre, Sabatar’s
improvisation speaks to the sympathetic alignment New York’s black and Latin
communities shared during this historical moment, and to the currency of protest as
popular culture. It also suggests the re-appropriation of Gillespie and Chano Pozo’s
musical innovation back into what Sublette identifies as “The Other Great Tradition” in
American popular music.111 That tradition, long consigned to being an influence or a
“tinge” in other genres, would finally be genrified itself under the contested and
contingent signifier “salsa,” where a tiny portion of the history I have tried to detail here
finds purchase.
Jimmy Sabatar’s spontaneous, friendly appropriation echoes a much older
practice of immigrants using African American culture to signify Americaness.
Famously, the first widely distributed sound picture, The Jazz Singer, depicted this act of
cultural, ethnic, and national ventriloquism, as Al Jolson’s character, the son of Jewish
immigrants, finds a voice that articulates his identification with America through
performances of the minstrel appropriation of “Black music,” a practice whose
representations seem to us now both repugnant and cartoonish, but whose more subtle
manifestations still pervade our popular culture. The Joe Cuba Sextet’s voicing of the
“Manteca” chant also comes just a year after another widely influential act of
appropriation and ventriloquism, as, in 1965, a British historian of Scottish descent
178
named George Shepperson, in a paper presented at the International Congress of African
Historians at University College, Dar es Salaam, borrowed the term diaspora from Jewish
history and argued for its usefulness in understanding and representing the worldhistorical experience of people of African descent. Since that time, the term “African
Diaspora” has become so ubiquitous a device for conceptualizing black internationalism
that its original status as a kind of crossover term has been obscured. I mention it here
not to place Shepperson, whose work built on that of others, including many black
intellectuals of varying nationalities, as an originator. Indeed, according to Edwards,
“Shepperson has insisted that the use of the expression was ‘certainly established’ in
scholarly vocabulary before the 1965 Dar es Salaam Conference.”112 Instead, I want to
highlight it as yet another articulation, this time of disparate ethnic histories, and as
another way in which those histories of mobility and containment have been made
available as multivocal identificatory strategies in this long crossover moment.
179
Notes
1
Quoted in Austerlitz, Paul. Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. p. 119.
2
Quoted in Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play
the Cold War. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. p. 11
3
The U.S. Cold War strategy of containment of the Soviet Union and of Communism in
general can be traced back to the period immediately following World War Two. The
origins of the policy are usually held to be a telegram written in 1947 by George F.
Keenan, known as the “long Telegram.” Keenan followed up on this analysis with an
article published anonymously in the magazine Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of
Soviet Conduct.” The term “containment” was coined in this article and later uses in this
context stem from it. See Kennan, George Frost. American Diplomacy. Penguin Group
U.S.A, 1985. Kennan, Georges F. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs 65 (1987): 852–868.
4
This is not to argue that the full complexity of Gilroy’s conceptualization of a circumAtlantic “counterculture of modernity” is implicit in the ideas that emerge from Gillespie
and other diaspora-conscious jazz musicians during this time. See Gilroy, Paul. The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993. I would argue, however, that the visualization of a diasporic musical history rooted
in the displacement of Africans in the “new world” is an oft-unacknowledged strand in
the conceptualization of a “global south” which is one of the earmarks of the scholarly
subfield known as new southern studies. That it is arguably un-or under acknowledged is
probably due the fact that, up to this point, it has been constituted mostly by literary
scholars. A partial bibliography of that subfield would include: Aparicio, Frances R, and
Antonio Benítez Rojo. “Performing the Caribbean in American Studies.” American
Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1998). Baker, Houston A. Turning South Again: Re-thinking
Modernism/re-reading Booker T. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Brown,
Kimberly Nichele. “Sniffing the ‘Calypso Magnolia’: Unearthing the Caribbean Presence
in the South (Response).” South Central Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 81–86. Cobb, James C.
Globalization and the American South. Athens, Georgia: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2005.
Cohn, Deborah N. History and Memory in the Two Souths Recent southern and Spanish
American Fiction. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Cohn, Deborah. “U.S.
Southern Studies and Latin American Studies: Windows onto Postcolonial Studies.”
American Literature; a Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography. 78, no. 4
(2006): 704. Duck, Leigh Anne. The Nation’s Region: southern Modernism,
Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Ford,
Sarah Gilbreath. “Listening to the Ghosts: The ‘New Southern Studies’.” South Central
Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 19–25. Glissant, Édouard, and J. Michael Dash. Caribbean
Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Jones,
Suzanne Whitmore, and Sharon Monteith. South to a New Place: Region, Literature,
Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Joseph, Philip. American
180
Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2007. Kreyling, Michael. “Toward ‘A New southern Studies’.” South Central Review 22,
no. 1 (2005): 4–18. Ladd, B. “Dismantling the Monolith: southern Places - Past, Present,
and Future.” Critical Survey. 12 (2000): 28–42. Lowe, J. “Reconstruction Revisited:
Plantation School Writers, Postcolonial Theory, and Confederates in Brazil.” Mississippi
Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2004): 5–26. Lowe, John. “‘Calypso Magnolia’: The Caribbean Side
of the South.” South Central Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 54–80. McPherson, Tara. “On
Wal-Mart and southern Studies.” American Literature; a Journal of Literary History,
Criticism and Bibliography. 78, no. 4 (2006): 695. McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing
Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 2003. Painter, Nell Irvin. southern History Across the Color Line.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Polet, François. The State of
Resistance: Popular Struggles in the Global South. London; New York; New York: Zed
Books; Distributed in the U.S.A by Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Roach, Joseph R. Cities
of the Dead: circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Smith, Jon, and Deborah N Cohn. Look Away!: the U.S. South in New World Studies.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Stecopoulos, Harry. Reconstructing the World:
southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2008. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing southern Women’s Writing,
1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
5
In this overview and throughout, my description of the Gillespie Big Band Jazz
Ambassador’s tour draws upon several primary and secondary sources: Austerlitz, Paul.
Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. Middletown Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2005. Carletta, D.M. “Those White Guys Are Working for Me’’: Dizzy
Gillespie, Jazz, and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War During the Eisenhower
Administration.” International Social Science Review -Kansas- 82, no. 3/4 (2007): 115–
134. Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold
War. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in
South America Official U.S. State Department Tour, 1956. Detroit, Mich.: Red Anchor
Productions, 1999. ———. Dizzy in South America. Official U.S. State Department
Tour, 1956. Detroit, MI: Red Anchor Productions, 1999. ———. Dizzy in South
America. Tangos, Samba, Interviews, and More Big Band Be-bop. Detroit, MI:
Consolidated Artists Productions/Red Anchor Productions, 2001. Gillespie, Dizzy, and
Al Fraser. To Be, or Not-- to Bop. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Maggin, Donald L. Dizzy: the Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie. New York: Harper
Entertainment, 2005. McFarlin, B. “Dizzy Gillespie: Jazz Ambassador.” Jazz Educators
Journal 28, no. 4 (1996): 27–34. Monson, Ingrid T. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call
Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shipton,
Alyn. Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York: Oxford University Press,
1999. Stearns, Marshall. “Is Jazz Good Propaganda? The Dizzy Gillespie Tour.”
Saturday Review XXXIX, no. 28 (July 14, 1956): 28–31. Wilkins, Timothy P. “Natural
Ambassadors: Dizzy Gillespie in Cuba”, 2009. Winterscene (Firm);Studio-on-Hudson
(Firm);Chiasma Productions; Cubana Bop Partners.;Docurama (Firm);New Video Group;
181
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Cuba), and Dizzy Gillespie. A Night in Havana Dizzy
Gillespie in Cuba. [United States] [New York, N.Y.]: Docurama; Distributed by New
Video Group, 2005. Wright, Josephine R. B, and John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie.
“Conversation with John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, Pioneer of Jazz.” The Black
Perspective in Music 4, no. 1 (1976): 82–89. Of these, the analysis and synthesis by
Monson and Von Eschen have been particularly useful, as have been the recordings of
the Gillespie Big Band in South America, especially the included audio interviews and
liner notes. I have also drawn upon personal correspondence with Phil Woods, Dave
Usher, and Charli Persip conducted via email between 11/2010 and 2/2011.
6
Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold
War. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. p. 34.
7
Ibid p. 7.
8
Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows up the World.
9
Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: from the First Drums to the Mambo. 1st ed.
Chicago Ill.: Chicago Press Review, 2004. p. 537.
10
Gillespie and Fraser. To Be or Not To Bop. p. 483.
11
Herskovits, Melville. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. For a
short but informative biographical; entry on Herskovits, see Baron, Robert. “Herskovits,
Melville J. (1895-1963).” African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. (2004): 167–169. For
critical treatments of Herskovits’ thought and influence, see, for example, Coundouriotis,
Eleni. “Nation, History, and the Idea of Cultural Origin in Melville Herskovits.”
Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies (2001). Donald, R. Kevin. “Melville J.
Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge by Jerry Gershenhorn.” Transforming
Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010): 99–100
12
Gillespie, Dizzy, and Al Fraser. To Be, or Not— to Bop. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009. p. 397.
13
In both senses, my use of the term “articulation” should be understood as following and
being informed by that of Stuart Hall. See Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation, and Societies
Structured in Dominance.” In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, 306–344.
University of Chicago Press, 1996. See also Hall, Stuart, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing
Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London; New York:
Routledge, 1996.
14
The only small group arrangement I have found is a performance recorded for Ralph J.
Gleason’s Jazz Casual TV series in 1961, featuring Lalo Schifrin on piano, Leo Wright
on alto sax, Bob Cunningham on bass and Chuck Lampkin on drums. Shifrin had made
182
Gillespie’s acquaintance during the State Department tour of South America and later
emigrated from Venezuela to the United States and played with Gillespie. He also
appears on the version of “Manteca” recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1961. Neither of these
versions features the “I’ll never go back to Georgia” chant. For the video in question, see
Jazz Casual - Dizzy Gillespie & Mel Torme. Jazz Casual, 2003. The performance of
Manteca can also be seen on Youtube.com: Dizzy Gillespie - Manteca - 1959, 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1s5CWbYyao&feature=youtube_gdata_player. For
the Carnegie Hall concert featuring Lalo Shifrin, see Gillespie, Dizzy, and Dizzy
Gillespie Big Band. Carnegie Hall Concert. [United States]: Verve Records, 1961. This
is also available on CD as Gillespie, Dizzy, and Dizzy Gillespie. “Gillespiana and,
Carnegie Hall Concert”, 1993. .
15
Woods, Phil. Personal Communication via email. 1/23/2011.
16
Quoted in Monson, Ingrid T. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and
Africa. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 113.
17
One of the only live examples of Chano Pozo performing “Manteca” with the big band
can be found on Gillespie, Dizzy, Chano Pozo, James Moody, and Ernie Henry. Dizzy
Gillespie and His Big Band in Concert Featuring Chano Pozo. Hollywood, CA:
GNP/Crescendo Records, 1993.
18
For a general overview of Abakuá (also spelled Abacua, and Abakwá) and its
connections with Cuban music, see Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: from the First
Drums to the Mambo. 1st ed. Chicago: Chicago Press Review, 2004. For a more general
look at the interface between Abakua and Cuban popular culture, see Miller, Ivor. “A
Secret Society Goes Public: the Relationship Between Abakuá and Cuban Popular
Culture.” African Studies Review. 43 (2000): 161–188. See Miller again for a broader
and deeper history of African fraternal groups in Cuba: Miller, Ivor L. Voice of the
Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009. For a treatment of Cuban music and official Cuban folkloric performance,
including the influence of Abakua (spelled Abakwá) practices, see Hagedorn, Katherine
J. Divine Utterances: the Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
19
From audio interview with Bennie Golson and Rod Leavitt conducted by Dave Usher,
transcribed by the author. Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in South America Vol. 3. Tangos,
Samba, Interviews, and More Big Band Be-bop. Detroit, MI: Consolidated Artists
Productions/Red Anchor Productions, 2001.
20
Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour, 1956.
Detroit, Mich.: Red Anchor Productions, 1999.
183
21
Carletta, David M. “‘Those White Guys Are Working for Me’: Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz,
and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War During the Eisenhower Administration.”
International Social Science Review. 82, no. 3 (2007): 115-130. p. 117. My account of
the interagency constitution of the Jazz Ambassadors program is also drawn from Von
Eschen and Monson’s treatments, but Carletta’s is the most detailed in this regard.
22
Anonymous. “Remote Lands to Hear Old Democracy Boogie.” New York Times,
November 18, 1955. Also quoted in Von Eschen. Satchmo Blows Up The World. p. 6.
23
Powell, Adam Clayton Jr. Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton
Powell Jr. Kensington Books, 2002. (Originally published 1970) p. 70 The account of
his antic torment of congressional segregationists is also found in Yarwood, Dean L.
When Congress Makes a Joke: Congressional Humor Then and Now. Rowan &
Littlefield, 2004. p. 71.
24
Stearns, Marshall. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
25
Stearns, Marshall. “Is Jazz Good Propaganda? The Dizzy Gillespie Tour.” Saturday
Review XXXIX, no. 28 (July 14, 1956): 28–31. p. 29.
26
Stearns. The Story of Jazz. p. 218.
27
Von Eschen. Satchmo Blows Up the World. p. 19.
28
Gillespie and Fraser. To Be or Not To Bop. p. 20.
29
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New
York: Free Press, 1996. p. 172.
30
“Gone with the Draft” is available on any number of reissues of the King Cole Trio
recordings, including King Cole Trio. Hit That Jive, Jack. New York, NY: MCA
Records, 1996.
31
Gillespie and Fraser. To Be or Not To Bop. p. 414.
32
Von Eschen. Satchmo Blows Up The World. p. 23.
33
Austerlitz, Paul. Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005. p. xiv.
34
Stearns, Marshall. “Is Jazz Good Propaganda? The Dizzy Gillespie Tour.” Saturday
Review XXXIX, no. 28 (July 14, 1956): 28–31. p. 30.
184
35
Sublette’s “history of music from a Cuban point of view” makes a compelling case for
its massive worldwide popularity and influence, arguing that “in the United States, Cuban
music has to be regarded as the Other Great Tradition, a fundamental music of the New
World. You can hear its influence in classical music, ragtime, tango, jazz, rhythm and
blues, country, rock and roll, funk, and hip-hop, to say nothing of salsa. The imprint of
Cuban music is everywhere, and Cuba is still a world power in music today.” (p. vii) As
his narrative makes clear, this influence and popularity had reached a then-new high
watermark in the U.S. during the mid-20th Century as part of a worldwide craze for
“Latin music.” Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: from the First Drums to the Mambo.
1st ed. Chicago Ill.: Chicago Press Review, 2004.
36
For example, see Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz. New York: Knopf,
1958. Or, see Ramsey, Frederic, and Charles Edward Smith. Jazzme,. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.
37
Jones, Quincy. Q: the Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001. p.
112 Also quoted in Monson. Freedom Sounds. p. 118.
38
Shipton, Alyn. Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999. p. 284.
39
Monson. Freedom Sounds. p. 118.
40
Gillespie quoted by Stearns in Stearns, Marshall. “Is Jazz Good Propaganda? The
Dizzy Gillespie Tour.” Saturday Review XXXIX, no. 28 (July 14, 1956): 28–31. Also
quoted in Monson. Freedom Sounds. p. 117 and Von Eschen. Satchmo Blows Up The
World. p. 35.
41
From audio interview with Charli Persip conducted by Dave Usher, transcribed by the
author. The disc on which this appears also includes recordings of some of Gillespie’s
performances with the local musicians. See Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in South America
Vol. 3. Tangos, Samba, Interviews, and More Big Band Be-bop. Detroit, MI:
Consolidated Artists Productions/Red Anchor Productions, 2001.
42
Gillespie and Fraser. To Be or Not To Bop. 440. Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in South
America Official U.S. State Department Tour, 1956. Vol.1. Detroit: Red Anchor
Productions, 1999.
43
Ibid. p. 440. Liston had actually given up playing and performing in the years between
her two stints with the Gillespie band. Following her work with the State Department
band, however, she rose to prominence as an arranger, writer and soloist, especially in
collaboration with Randy Weston. In her work with Weston, especially, she has
continued to explore both African music and social justice themes. See Dahl, Linda.
185
Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984.
44
Ibid p. 438.
45
Ibid p. 421.
46
Monson, Freedom Sounds. p. 19.
47
Audio interview with Dizzy Gillespie by Dave Usher. Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy in South
America. Tangos, Samba, Interviews, and More Big Band Be-bop. Detroit: Consolidated
Artists Productions/Red Anchor Productions, 2001. Transcribed by the author.
48
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993. p. 1, 5, ff. The term “counterculture of modernity”
itself is from Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Left as the Counter-Culture of Modernity.” Telos
1986, no. 70 (December 21, 1986): 81–93.
.
49
Monson, Freedom Sounds. p.115.
50
Ibid.
51
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Cuba), and Dizzy Gillespie. A Night in Havana Dizzy
Gillespie in Cuba. Docurama; Distributed by New Video Group, 2005. Transcribed by
the author.
52
Edwards, Brent. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. p. 7.
53
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop. 321.
54
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
55
Heble, Ajay. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice.
New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 95
56
Anonymous. “This Trumpet Madness” Newsweek, Vol. 46, No. 25, December 19th,
1955. p. 19
57
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be Or Not To Bop. 319.
58
Ibid 318.
186
59
Gott, Richard. Cuba: a New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. p. 75125.
60
Guridy, Frank Andre. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a
World of Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. p.
7.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid 8.
63
Austerlitz, Paul. Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. Middletown Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005. p. 46.
64
Ibid 66.
65
Ibid 55.
66
Ibid 66.
67
Hall, Stuart. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Baker,
Houston A, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H Lindeborg. Black British Cultural Studies: a
Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Also quoted in Edwards, Brent.
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. p. 4.
68
Edwards, Brent. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. p.14.
69
Merod, Jim, and Benny Golson. “Forward Motion: An Interview with Benny Golson.”
Boundary 2 22, no. 2 (1995): 53–93. p. 55.
70
DuBois, W. E. B. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has
Played in World History. (1946; expanded ed., New York: International Publishers,
1965) p. 7.
71
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be Or Not To Bop p. 319.
72
Levin, Michael. “Dizzy, Bird, Ella Pack Carnegie.” Downbeat, October 21, 1947.
73
Quoted in Shipton, Alyn. Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 205.
74
Shipton, Groovin’ High. p. 206
187
75
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be Or Not To Bop 319.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Wilson, John S. “Bird Wrong: Bop Must Get a Beat: Diz” Downbeat October 7, 1949.
79
Rumors abounded for years afterwards about Chano Pozo’s death: that he had died two
years to the day of his arrival in the U.S.; that he had been killed as fulfillment of a curse
for sharing Abakuá secrets, or that the killing actually occurred because he had stolen
money from the secret society while in Cuba. During a 1982 trip to Cuba, Gillespie put
on a remarkable performance, raising this litany of rumors in a filmed interview with
Pozo’s sister. Widening his eyes for dramatic effect, Gillespie invokes a series of
exaggerated and cartoonish images of voodoo curses and thievery while Pozo’s sister
looks on stone-faced. At the conclusion of this narrative, Gillespie then says firmly
“These stories, there’s absolutely nothing to them, correct?” At this, a huge smile of
relief spreads across the woman’s face and she answers “Si!” nodding her head. See
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Cuba), and Dizzy Gillespie. A Night in Havana Dizzy
Gillespie in Cuba. Docurama; Distributed by New Video Group, 2005.
80
Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness. p. 74 See also Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. p. 333424.
81
Osmundsen, John. “Diz Presents Milwaukee A ‘Clean’ Band.” DownBeat October 20,
1948. p. 11.
82
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Cuba), and Dizzy Gillespie. A Night in Havana Dizzy
Gillespie in Cuba.
83
Shipton, Alyn. Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999. p. 200.
84
Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. p. 458.
85
Gioia, Ted. “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth.” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January
1, 1989): 130–143.
86
Lopes, Jazz Art World. 166.
87
Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness. p. xiv.
88
Gillespie and Fraser, To Be Or Not to Bop. p. 320.
188
89
For more on the image of Africa in African American music during this period, see
Africa Speaks, America Answers Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times. Harvard
University Press, 2012. And Weinstein, Norman C. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of
Africa in Jazz. New York: Limelight, 1994.
90
Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. p. 453. See also Wexler, Jerry, and David Ritz. Rhythm
and the Blues: a Life in American Music. New York: Knopf, 1993.
91
For more on what I call the “jazz counterpublic,” see Lopes, Jazz Art World. In
general, the social and textual interaction between jazz musicians and jazz critics can be
gleaned from any attentively written history of the genre, but Lopes foregrounds the role
that these interactions played in establishing the meaning of jazz in American public life,
which is exactly the kind of information that genre histories that assume the evolutionary
inevitability of their subject tend to elide.
92
Jackson, Chubby, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Fifth Dimensional Jazz Group., and
Gösta Törner’s Jam Session Band. Be-bop Enters Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden: Dragon,
1981. See also Gillespie, Dizzy, FNAC Music., and Wotre music. Dizzy Gillespie Big
Band Be-bop Enters Sweden 1947-49. Paris; Paris: FNAC Music Wotre music, 1993.
93
Gillespie, Dizzy. The Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra at the Salle Pleyel, Paris, France,
1948., 1970. Parker, Charlie, and Dizzy Gillespie. Diz N Bird at Carnegie Hall. Blue
Note Records, 1997.
94
Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. p. 543.
95
Gillespie, Dizzy. Afro. U.S.: Norgran Records, 1950. ———. Afro. U.S.: Norgran
Records, 2002.
96
97
Ibid, liner notes.
Although there is a tendency to think of Chuck Berry as a “pure” rock and roll
musician based on his standing in genre histories and the simplicity of his approach to
playing and singing, I would argue that his first full-length record, Afterschool Session
reveals instead a kind of pop auteur, interested in synthesizing a variety of popular styles
within a flexible, rhythm and blues-based trio format. Besides the light pseudo-Latin
“Havana Moon,” there is a slow blues (“Wee Wee Hours”) a pair of sentimental pop
ballads (“Together We Will Always Be” and “Drifting Heart”), a country-based rock and
roll tune (“Maybelline”) a guitar instrumental (“Berry Picking”) a fast, shuffle-based
rhythm and blues song with hoodoo imagery (“Down Bound Train”) and several of the
catchy rock and roll tunes that Berry is better known for, all written by him. See Berry,
Chuck. After School Session. [S.l.]; Santa Monica, CA: Chess; Geffen Records:
Distributed by Universal Music & Video Distribution, 2004. For a short but authoritative
189
account of the Mambo’s popularity in the United States, see Sublette. Cuba and Its Music
p. 471-473. Also see Sublette p. 554-562 for a more favorable appraisal of Perez Prado
than is given in most genre histories of Latin jazz or salsa that even mention him.
Sublette’s historical treatment of this period, from 547-566, does an excellent job of
tracing corresponding developments in “Latin (Cuban) music” as they passed along a
transnational circuit that included Havana, Mexico City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and
New York City. For Sublette’s treatment of Arnez, see 581-582. For recordings, see
Arnaz, Desi. The Best of Desi Arnaz: The Mambo King. RCA Records Label, 1992.
Clooney, Rosemary. The Essential Rosemary Clooney. New York, NY.: Sony Columbia
Legacy, 2004. Prado, Perez. Havana 3 A.m; Mambo Mania. Vollersode: Bear Family
Records, 1990.
98
Edwards, “Uses of Diaspora.” p. 47.
99
For textual treatments of this material, see Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern
Jazz in Revolutionary Times. Harvard University Press, 2012. And Weinstein, Norman
C. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz. New York: Limelight, 1994.
100
For more on the term diaspora and its mobilization in reference to Africa, see
Edwards, Brent. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text, no. 66 (2001): 45-90.
101
For a detailed treatment of the events leading up to and including the adoption of a
design based on the battle flag of the Confederacy for the Georgia state flag, see Azarian,
Alexander J., Eden Fesshazion, and Georgia. General Assembly. Senate. Research
Office. The State Flag of Georgia: The 1956 Change in Its Historical Context. Senate
Research Office, 2000.
102
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge
University Press, 2002. p. 28
103
Gillespie, Dizzy. “Jazz Is Too Good For Americans” Esquire, June, 1957. p. 55-57.
104
Isaacs, Harold R. The New World of Negro Americans. A Study from the Center for
International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. New York: Viking Press,
1969. (originally published 1963.) p. 59.
105
106
Ibid.
Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy Gillespie at Newport., n.d.
107
Saul, Freedom Is. p.119.
108
Gillespie, Dizzy at Newport. Transcription by Author.
190
109
For an important revisionist overview of conventional historical thinking on the
Central High Crisis, one which disputes prevailing class narratives of the events and
introduces evidence regarding local labor unions working on the side of integration, see
Pierce, M. “Historians Of Tthe Central High Crisis and Little Rock’s Working Class
Whites: a Review Essay.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. 70, no. 4 (2011): 468–483.
110
Originally released on LP. Joe Cuba Sextet. Estamos Haciendo Algo Bien! We Must
Be Doing Something Right. LP. New York: Tico Records. That record is also available
on CD: Joe Cuba Sextet. Estamos Haciendo Algo Bien! We Must Be Doing Something
Right! [S.l.]: Fania, 2010. For a good sampling of The Joe Cuba Sextet’s work, see The
Joe Cuba Sextet. The Best of Joe Cuba Lo Mejor De Joe Cuba. [S.l.]: Tico Records,
1995.
111
Sublette, Cuba and Its Music. p. vii.
112
Ewards, “Uses of Diaspora.” p. 53.
191
&+$37(53. THE BLUES IN A STATE OF NATURE: ORIGINS, REVIVALS, AND
REVISIONS
In the first two decades of this century, it was possible for a man or
woman, rich or poor, black or white, rural or urban, to experience what we
now call culture shock without setting foot outside his or her hometown.
Talking pictures, the Model T Ford, and the Kodak Box Camera were only
the half of it. In 1917, Birdseye developed a process for freezing
vegetables. Two years later, the initial Piggly Wiggly store–soon to
become the nation’s first chain of self-service food stores, opened its doors
in Memphis. By 1920, no matter where you lived, you could buy what
amounted to the same loaf of bread or the same phonograph record. That
year, Okeh released Mamie Smith’s version of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy
Blues,” the record that identified black America as a consumer group and
opened the doors for the wholesale recording of black performers. The
history of the blues, in one sense, is the history of folk art in the age of
mechanical reproduction.
Francis Davis1
Although they call it the blues today, the original name given to this kind
of music was “reals.” And it was real because it made the truth available
to the people in the songs.
Henry Townsend2
Festivals, Revivals, and Revisions: Newport, Rhode Island, 1959
In 1958, a year after the Dizzy Gillespie and his big band first used the site to
publicly voice the declaration “I’ll never go back to Georgia” on American soil, the
Newport Jazz Festival was the subject of a film by noted advertising photographer Bert
Sterns, entitled Jazz on a Summer’s Day.3 Sterns’s gorgeously photographed and
recorded film, which largely documents the festival’s performances, but which also
includes a loose, and in fact unfinished, framing story, provides a fascinating set of
contrasts and juxtapositions. The most obvious and most commented-upon center on the
visible and audible manifestations of race and its associated socioeconomic and
geographic milieus: (mostly) black performers in front of a (mostly) white audience,
192
musicians dressed in nightclub suits sweating under the afternoon sun, urban-forged
sounds floating through the pastoral Rhode Island countryside, jazz and sailing, and so
on.4 Less noticeable is the contrast that the film offers between performers who we do
and do not understand as jazz musicians according to the way we know the genre today.
Despite the differing arguments offered on their behalf regarding what it meant to play
jazz, there is little debate that both Thelonious Monk’s afternoon set and Louis
Armstrong’s headlining performance later in the evening were examples of jazz. It is
much harder to make that argument for other performers on the bill, like Big Maybelle,
Chuck Berry, and Mahalia Jackson. Their presentation at Newport in 1958 as part of an
upscale and high-profile jazz festival at least confirms that, then and now, festival
promoters understand that their audiences will often accept a broad and impure
implementation of genre terminology, at least in terms of support acts, if not headliners.
But their presences and performances also underscore arguments that I have made
previously: that retroactively narrated genre conventions, such as the one which places
early rock and rollers like Chuck Berry in opposition to accepted notions of what
constitutes “jazz,” are uncertain guides at best to the historical experiences of audiences
and musicians; that racial identification served and serves as a kind of covert meta-genre,
uniting supposedly distinct musical categories into commercially coherent presentations;
and that the period between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s was a time when our
modern notions of generic musical belonging were still settling into recognizable
formations.
In that context, the inclusion of these performers on this bill is worth a second
look. All three are African American, and though they might have been understood in
193
1958 as representing the divisions within “black music,” which might have been
synonymous with “jazz,” they are more often understood now as inhabiting separate and
distinct genres. Chuck Berry, who would also play at Newport at the 1966 Folk Festival,
is now considered one of the founding architects of rock and roll. Mahalia Jackson is
remembered as an iconic black gospel performer who, from the late 1950s on, was the
voice and face of African American sacred music in both popular and political spaces.
Despite her prominent status on the Newport Jazz Festival bill, and her powerful and
well-received performance onstage and in the film, Big Maybelle, or Mabel Smith, is
more obscure to us today. A veteran of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm (the first
integrated all-women’s swing band in the United States), she had, since going solo in the
early 1950s, placed several songs on the upper reaches of the Billboard Rhythm and
Blues chart.5 Audiences at Newport might have thought of her as a rhythm and blues
singer and might also have understood “rhythm and blues” to be a subgenre of jazz.
However, her performance of “I Ain’t Mad At You,” with its fiercely growled vocal, its
exhortations to “Let it roll, let it roll, all night long,” and its final insistence that “I ain’t
mad at you, no matter what you do,” bears a great musical and thematic resemblance to
the electric blues that Muddy Waters was performing and recording at the same time in
Chicago. Moreover, it would fit comfortably onstage in any contemporary blues festival
and could easily be taken as an iteration of contemporary blues performance by any
modern listener familiar with the genre.
Maybelle herself is easily understood now not only as a blues singer but
specifically as a representative of the subgenre known as “women’s blues,” a category
that’s been mobilized to include performers as different as Big Maybelle, Bessie Smith,
194
and Billie Holliday. “Women’s blues,” or even more specifically “black women’s
blues,” is a critical revision mounted by feminists and feminist academics of the
longstanding and still-used designation “classic blues,” a term used to describe the female
singers who, in the 1920s, were the genre’s first commercial and artistic stars. As
deployed by scholars like Angela Y. Davis and Hazel Carby, black women’s blues
narrates a particular relationship between the singers and their audiences, positing that
their performances and recordings should be heard as a kind of pre-feminist (or as Davis
argues, a “womanist”) archive of working class resistance to racial hegemony. As I will
argue in more depth later in this chapter, this is a fruitful but sometimes problematic
argument, one which poses some historical difficulties that the generic framework that I
have proposed throughout this dissertation may help resolve. It also represents another
rhetorical attempt to contain the mobile sonics of musical expression within the evershifting boundaries of generic authenticity. Although my reference to women’s blues as
a subgenre is consistent with dominant understandings of blues as a generic field, the
primacy of singers like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith to the music’s original
commercial and aesthetic success make it tempting to argue that, at least for the sake of
historical accuracy, “men’s blues” should more properly be considered the subgenre.
Despite Big Maybelle’s easily discernible connections to critically and
commercially lauded blues styles from the genre’s contemporary and originating eras,
within only a year or two of her well-received performance at Newport, a new, popularcritical infrastructure would emerge which would, while it held sway with an emergent
and mostly white blues audience, judge Maybelle’s horn-driven, electric, urban sound as
impure and diluted. Within the genre community defined by this new audience, electric
195
blues like Maybelle’s or even that of male performers like Muddy Waters and John Lee
Hooker was often considered only a pale shadow of the authentic blues. Authentic blues
was understood within these borders to have been played by men on acoustic guitars
during the 1920s and 1930s, and preserved on poorly distributed records, the more
obscure the better. This narrative emerged from what was known as the folk revival, an
often politically-oriented resurgence of interest in antiquated and pseudo-antiquated
acoustic music, which asserted itself in folk clubs on college campuses and in the rise of
songs like the Kingston Trio’s version of “Tom Dooley” to the top of the Billboard charts
in the late 50s. But, where “blues” and ‘folk” had been largely undistinguished among
folk enthusiasts during the 1950s, the new blues enthusiasts often expressed their
appreciation in specifically racialized and romanticized terms. As Francis Davis notes,
“
white liberals in the awkward position of rejecting as tainted goods the amplified blues
which masses of black adults in rural as well as in urban areas then still listened.”6
While a certain purism would persist among blues fans, the rural or country blues,
later known and genrified as the Delta blues because of its strong (and not always
accurate) identification with the Mississippi Delta region, would eventually be reconciled
with electric blues as that music, in turn, crossed over to a largely white audience later in
the 1960s. It did so through a narrative, perhaps best told in Robert Palmer’s 1982 book
Deep Blues, which largely bypassed the so-called classic blues singers and drew a direct
line from Depression-era Mississippi to post-World-War Chicago, following the path
taken that would come to be called the “great migration” of millions of African
Americans out of the rural south throughout the 20th century.7 This narrative, wherein, at
196
its fullest extension, rural acoustic blues begets electric urban blues, which, along with
Elvis Presley’s generation of rockabilly singers, begets the electric and eclectic rock
styles of the 1960s, mobilizes the received meanings attached to the Delta blues in order
to paradoxically authenticate the dominant genre in popular music as an expression of
resistance and rebellion, with roots that lie beyond the rapacious reach of the
marketplace. Deconstructing the ideological underpinnings of this narrative and
investigating its generic effects is one of the foci of this dissertation which will be
addressed in this chapter.
In previous chapters I have used biographical subjects like Nat Cole and Dizzy
Gillespie to emphasize the inability of genre narratives to entirely contain the embodied
histories of performance that they claim to articulate. Here, I want to emphasize instead
the way that genre structures the received meaning of musical performances and artifacts.
In order to do so I will examine and analyze the performances—spoken and written rather
than sung or played—which structure the genre narrative of the blues. These
performances are largely by critics and intellectuals rather than musicians, and even those
by musicians such as W.C. Handy and James Luther Dickinson are non-musical in
nature. Where previous chapters have worked to illuminate the cultural practice of
musical performance under generic regimes, my aim here is to depict critical
performance as the practice of intervening in generic discourse.
Careful readers may note that all of the musical performances presented in this
chapter are presented in mediation. Beneath the layer of mediation provided by my own
text, these performances are filmed, recorded in various formats, or depicted in writing.
Like the focus on critical performance, this is intentional and should highlight a
197
fundamental paradox at the heart of blues as a genre: that despite the rhetoric of realness
and authenticity that surrounds the music, the history of its apprehension by its audiences
is defined at key points by discursive and technological mediation and representation.
The revival of the country blues in the very late 1950s, and its subsequent
institutionalization as the Delta blues in the early 1960s, shapes the meaning and uses of
Blues as a genre going forward, including the notions of gender roles, the discourses
regarding memory and technology, rurality and urbanism, regional identification and
racial essence that are cemented in this small-scale but influential explosion of popular
interest. The revival takes a genre established almost entirely by women singers and recenters it around the figure of the guitar-playing “bluesman,” makes musical celebrities
out of some of the last-surviving “bluesmen,” and lays the groundwork for a large scale
transformation in the rhythms and textures of popular music. By the late 20th and early
21st centuries, blues as (re)defined in the early 1960s can be heard in homes, barrooms,
and classrooms all across America. Its legacy can be encountered metaphorically in the
braggadocious themes of hip-hop, and literally in museums and tourist venues across the
American South as well as far-flung sites that attempt, with varying degrees of success, to
recreate the highly mythologized landscapes associated with the music’s origins in the
rural South and important waystations in the urban North.
But, despite all of this contemporary activity, the blues is paradoxically frozen in
time, its performative apparatus and received meanings largely defined by the forms that
they took when they first reached a mass, largely white audience, between approximately
1959 and 1971. As Elijah Wald notes
It is startling to think that all of the evolution from the first Bessie Smith
record to the first Rolling Stones record took only forty years. When Skip
198
James and John Hurt appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, they were
greeted as emissaries from an ancient, vanished world, but it was only
three decades since they had first entered a recording studio—that is, they
were about as ancient as disco is to us today. No one can argue that blues
has continued to make similar progress since the 1960s. […] As a result,
virtually all present-day blues artists, whether black or white, are largely
recreators, acting the part of characters that came of age when blues was
still black popular music.8
One of the assumptions shared broadly across many of these performative recreations is
that blues is in some way inherently, rather than simply historically, black music. This
assumption of racial authenticity has persisted even as, or perhaps especially as, white
musicians have taken up the form. Wald argues however that this focus on racial
authenticity has obscured the folkloricization of the form
Some fans will continue to find black performers more convincing than
white ones, but that is a question of verisimilitude. A young black man
from New York or Colorado–or even Mississippi—who is trying to sound
like someone from his grandfather’s time may well produce a better
simulacrum than a young white man trying to do the same thing, and the
quest for a personal heritage may provide links that a quest to master a
foreign language does not. Nonetheless, it remains a fundamentally
different effort from playing music of one’s own time and place. Which is
to say no young musician who is playing anything that sounds like Robert
Johnson is making an artistic decision that even vaguely resembles
Johnson’s. 9
While Wald’s analysis is accurate, and important to my arguments here, it is
important to note that those factors which render a contemporary blues player’s aesthetic
decisions so different from those of someone like Robert Johnson’s do not make the
contemporary blues scene illegitimate or unworthy of consideration. Adam Gussow has
argued that the modern blues-making community is marked by interracial cooperation,
class-conscious exploration of near-universal themes, and a deep commitment to a shared
humanness to such a degree that it can be considered an expression of what Martin
Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community.”10 Nor should we understand the
199
museumized and ritualized nature of contemporary blues stylistic practice as somehow
rendering the experiences of musicians and audiences inauthentic. Such an
understanding, based on the notion that authentic blues belongs in juke joints rather than
museums, is entirely consonant with, and, as I argue, a discernible effect of, the ideology
of the 1960s blues revival. This ideology, which paradoxically both shapes and seems to
be at odds with a modern blues scene where one can visit virtual juke joints inside
museums and restaurants, or stay overnight in a hotel room that was once a real
sharecropper’s shack, is the subject of this investigation, rather than its guide.11
In a little more than a century, the blues has gone from being defined in the
popular imagination as a style of commercial popular music to a kind of folk music to a
kind of popular music that embodies and extends folk traditions. First understood as
“black music” and marketed for African American audiences, it has become even more
surely “black music” even while played primarily for white audiences and often by
musicians of European American descent. Its initial stars were female singers, and it is
now dominated by male instrumentalists. It has been condemned as sinful and immoral
and praised as the sound of cultural resistance, so often that both characterizations verge
on cliché. While it is not practical to attempt to explore every facet of these fascinating
transformations, I do want to portray the way in which these changes in the genre have
been narrated and illustrate the tensions between narrators, whether they are musicians,
audience members, industry actors, popular critics, or scholars, or, as is usually the case,
people who play some combination of these roles. My overall conceptual argument, here
as elsewhere in this dissertation, is that the blues, like other genres in popular music, is
constituted and reproduced as a genre through the arguments mounted by these genre
200
users rather than through some discoverable constellation of essential characteristics.
Blues history combines the commercial and the vernacular; its present sites include juke
joints and museums; its current and historical practitioners may be female or male, white
or black. Although this music was borne of and primarily maintained and innovated by
African American musicians for decades, no combination of the above elements can
guarantee or preclude “authenticity,” a quality which I argue is in the final analysis a
discursive characterization rather than an innate characteristic. As Bruner argues, “the
more fundamental question to ask here is not whether an object or a site is authentic, but
rather who has the authority to authenticate—or to put it another way, who has the power
to tell the story of the site. This is a matter of power.”12
In this chapter, rather than focus on a set of events or materials relating to a
particular musician, I want to explore how the meaning-making apparatus surrounding
the Delta blues has served to authenticate the larger genre of blues itself, as that genre not
only gained an entirely new audience across established racial lines, but came to be
hailed in sometimes problematic terms, as an essential part of the folk heritage of the
United States. To some degree this narrative resembles the narrative of origins that
Marshall Stearns, Dizzy Gillespie, and others offered for jazz, but with one important
difference: Where jazz is, in that critical narrative, legitimated as a high art by both its
unique combination of transnational vernacular roots and constant refinement at the
hands of African American musicians, blues is critically authenticated by its supposed
purity and primitivism, its unvarnished expression of the human condition, and by its
ambivalent status as both folk and popular music. As with previous chapters, the social
201
role of race is crucial, but here I want to also pay close attention to the constitution of
gender in revivalist blues discourse.
As I chart the progress of this narrative, I will be making a distinction similar to
the one that Elijah Wald makes in his revisionist history of iconic Delta blues player
Robert Johnson and working with “the blues” defined primarily as a genre of popular
music, not as an African American cultural tradition.13 In doing so, I will focus on
commercial musical artifacts and performances and the discourse that has shaped the
reception of those artifacts and performances. And, though I will investigate the claims
that connect these artifacts and expressive iterations to African American vernacular
practices, I will do so skeptically, not because I believe that these connections are
anything but sturdy and verifiable, but because, specifically in the claims that I
investigate, the meanings deduced from these connections have been charged with
primitivism, romantic idealism, and racial essentialism to such a degree that they often
obscure more than they reveal about the music’s origins and social meaning.
The link between blues and folk culture is not always made on revivalist grounds,
and there is a considerable body of scholarship dedicated to accurately historicizing that
connection, some of which I draw upon here. But the discursive nature of generic
communications means that “blues,” like any musical genre, is an unpredictable signifier,
one whose unspoken meanings and ideological uses this dissertation chapter is intended
to clarify. Genres are used by listeners to identify and understand musical texts. My
intention is to tease out the historical construction of publicly available narratives that
purport to define the blues as a musical genre, particularly those influential narratives
which, I argue, sometimes mystify the actual history of the form.
202
In many ways, this is not a story about the blues at all. It is a story about
revivalist critics, musicians, and audiences, largely white, who heard the blues as a
distinctly racialized musical form and who, in response to what they heard, constructed
the musical genre we call the blues, a construction that musicians, authors, and audiences,
and crucially, African American musicians, authors, and audiences, have, throughout the
20th and into the 21st centuries, negotiated, contested, and revised. This may sound
alarmingly like I am suggesting that white critics invented the blues, but this is not the
case. Like Adam Gussow, whose Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the
Blues is one of the most deeply historicized accounts of the origins of the blues aesthetic,
I believe that the musical basis for the forms we identify as blues emerged in Texas,
Louisiana, and Mississippi in the 1890s, and they did so
In the midst of virulent racism and violent repression, the blues emerged
out of a creative tension between black grievance and disillusionment on
the one hand and black freedom and expressive license on the other. The
blues came into being as a new musical idiom within which footloose,
guitar-playing, young black male musicians—and their female equivalents
on the black vaudeville circuit—could grapple with the violent and
dehumanizing constraints on their lives by lyricizing and singing the
freedoms that they were in the process of exploring.14
But—and this is a crucial “but”—most of our evidence regarding the art that came out of
this collision between newfound black mobility and hysterical white containment, is
evidence that was filtered through recording and publishing industries, academic folklore
departments, or the sensibilities of amateur folklore collectors, all of which were
beholden to the views regarding race that dominated American life in the early decades of
the 20th century. At their best, these individuals and institutions were committed to
romantic visions of black primitive purity; at their worst, they understood African
Americans to be their racial inferiors. In either case, the structures that shaped the forms
203
through which this “lyricizing and singing” found its way into the archive of popular
memory were dependent on visions of racial difference, an arrangement that the singers
and musicians understood and negotiated.
Until recently, most histories of the blues as a musical form, or of individual blues
musicians, paid little attention to the role market forces and racial ideology in shaping the
selection of expressions that we identify as the authentic roots of the blues. This comes
from an understandable desire to honor the creative accomplishments of the individuals
and the communities who shaped the music, as well as from the tendency, identified by
Altman and other critical scholars of genre, for genre criticism to naturalize the
construction of generic canons. In many ways, this focus has itself been intended as a
corrective for the ways that African American musicians have been exploited by the
popular music industry. But the attention paid there has come at the expense of attention
to the structures and discourses that shaped the birth of the music which came to be called
blues. In the following pages, my attempt to clarify the structures and discourses that
shaped the narratives of the birth of the blues is indebted to revisionist scholarship from
both academic and nonacademic sources, including previously mentioned scholars like
Gussow, Carby, and Davis, but also including important work by Marybeth Hamilton,
Elijah Wald, William G. Roy, and Karl Hagstrom Miller.15
“The Weirdest Music I Have Ever Heard.”
To grasp the meaning of a piece of music is to hear something not simply
present to the ear. It is to understand a musical culture, to have a ‘scheme
of interpretation.’…The ‘meaning’ of music describes, in short, not just an
interpretive but a social process: musical meaning is not inherent (however
ambiguously) in the text.
Simon Frith16
204
The blues has as many origin stories. As noted previously, both Melville
Herskovits and Marshall Stearns, and many since, argued that its most characteristic
musical devices were survivals of the middle passage and of the southern slave regime.17
W. C. Handy, who is known as “the Father of the Blues,” described in his autobiography
of the same name, a chance encounter in 1903 with a guitarist at a train station in
Tutwiler, Mississippi, who fretted his strings by sliding a knife across the neck, “in the
manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists” and sang that he was “Goin’ where the
Southern cross the Dog,” [referring to the Southern and Yellow Dog railroad lines]).
According to Handy, the unknown player “repeated the line three times, accompanying
himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.”18 Although numerous
scholars have since pointed out that the guitar player Handy heard would likely have
called what he was playing a “reel” and not “blues,” that song, along with other music
Handy encountered in rural Mississippi, influenced such compositions as “The Memphis
Blues” and “The St. Louis Blues,” songs which, despite bearing little musical
resemblance to what is taken as “blues” today, would establish Handy’s iconic status.
Marybeth Hamilton calls Handy’s story—a story repeated by virtually every
chronicler of the music’s origins—a “foundation myth” and notes that it “captures the
blues in a state of nature, before the record companies got hold of it.”19 While
Hamilton’s analysis is perceptive, I argue that it is more accurate to say that the story
portrays or narrates, rather than “captures” the blues as existing in a “state of nature,” in
that placing the blues in such a state, outside of, and in many ways opposed to, the
commercial recording industry which produces the artifacts and performances through
which blues is actually known, and where blues musicians make their living, is an
205
ideological move, one which, as Hamilton notes, has appealed to blues enthusiasts for
decades even as she herself rhetorically reproduces it for her own audience.
The story of Handy’s meeting with the unknown guitarist has the effect of
discursively establishing for the music in question an essence which renders its various
representations, in commercial or field recordings, or in texts, as signs indicating an
essence that they cannot fully contain. It is telling that, at its base, our understanding of
the origins of the blues depends on written words, representing a sound which we are told
we can hear echoed in compositions that are transcribed on paper and recorded in various
instances. In each case, the sign points back to an ephemeral and unlocated essence
which affirms, paradoxically through its absence, both the limitations and legitimacy of
the sign itself. In an age dominated by the proliferating products of duplicable media,
this substantial lack may be taken as a surer sign of authenticity than any original because
unlike an original, it resists reproduction absolutely. To adopt Diana Taylor’s terms, this
describes a process whereby meaning is transmitted through the interdependent
interactions of “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents,
buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge
(i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”20
According to Taylor’s formulation of archive and repertoire, each “surpasses” the
other in terms of mnemonic function, working together in complementary fashion in the
transmission of socially shared memory. She argues that the repertoire “both keeps and
transforms choreographies of memory,” and that as “embodied memory,” the repertoire
“because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it.” On the other hand, “Insofar
as it constitutes materials that seem to endure over time, the archive exceeds the live.”21
206
Because musical genres involve both archives (texts, recordings, photographs, movies)
and repertoires (performances, discussions, teaching, etc.) these terms seem immediately
fruitful. They are particularly applicable to the way that histories of the blues have largely
been told, as a collision between an African American repertoire and an industrial archive
dominated and controlled largely by Americans of European descent. But this is only
partially true, and a more critical approach to the use of these tools reveals something
entirely different and less consonant with standard blues narratives.
First, we should avoid hearing “archive” and “repertoire” as an absolute binary,
especially when applied concretely to musicking situations.22 Archives such as
recordings or texts depend on certain kinds of performative practices—the acts of
imaginative listening or reading, for instance—in order to function as archives. And,
perhaps more obviously, repertoires are shaped not only by what past performances may
be available in an archive, but also by the performer’s awareness of what kinds of
performances are likely to be archived, as inclusion in the enduring and portable archive
may be commensurate with monetary reward, fame, influence, and inclusion in a canon.
As noted in my first chapter, and as we will see later, this particular knowledge has had
an influential but often unacknowledged effect in shaping our understanding of how
musics like blues functioned in the putative states of nature they were thought to inhabit
before coming into contact with commercial or documentary recording apparatuses.
Second, while the manner in which presently-existing archives and repertoires
may together constitute a musical genre is fairly straightforward, the application of these
ideas to a genre’s historical development is, although commonplace, much more
problematic. For example, we can locate a genre in the present moment by describing its
207
canonical texts as an archive and identifying certain performances—which may be selfidentified by participants—as expressions of the genre’s repertoire of embodied practice.
This is the act of discursive genrification which I have argued is an important part of how
musicians and audiences understand, remember, and reproduce their experience of
musicking. But, as I have also argued, this process of reproduction depends on and takes
place in the construction of discursive formations or narratives which establish meaning
for and offer listeners a stake in a genre’s boundaries and origins. Handy’s tale of the
encounter with the Tutwiler guitarist links his later compositions, called blues, to what
Naomi Greyser might term the “affective geography” of the rural South, and to musicmaking traditions presumed to be orally transmitted, embodied, and isolated from the
industrial production of pop music.23 Handy’s story invites us to hear, in his songs, what
we imagine might have sounded in the Tutwiler train station, just as the titles of many of
his songs—“The Beale Street Blues,” “The Memphis Blues,” “Atlanta Blues,” “The St.
Louis Blues,” etc—invite us to hear the songs as “natural” expressions of southern spatial
(and racial) authenticity, an invitation with commercial appeal in both Handy’s era, and,
differently encoded, in our own.
As Hamilton noted, Handy’s text describes the blues, “in a state of nature,” and in
most histories of the blues it and similar textual accounts by folklorists and songcollectors serve to establish a connection between the archive of blues music and its
vernacular repertoire. But, as Taylor constructs the term, “the repertoire requires
presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being
there,’ being a part of the transmission.”24 Following this line of reasoning, I argue that
rather than a “natural” repertoire, which the record companies “got hold of,” we have
208
instead a set of mutually modifying archives, one largely audible, the other largely
textual, both of which fail to fully capture whatever original repertoire they refer back to,
and in that failure, structure the future repertoire of embodied blues performance.
This argument is not intended to doubt or discredit Handy’s account of what he
heard or its effect on him. Nor is it intended to fully uncouple the history of recorded
blues from the vernacular music of the Mississippi Delta region. But it should help us to
be skeptical of the primacy placed on such accounts in blues genre histories, and to
illuminate the role those accounts play in establishing blues as a commercial music that
transcends commercial interests. Ultimately, Handy’s guitarist is a chimera, a signifying
phantasm, and one who, had Handy asked him, would likely have called his song a
“reel,” rather than a “blues.” While the connections between reels and blues are indeed
real and more than worthy of investigation, we should look elsewhere if we want to
concretely historicize the birth of the blues.
In 1912, the song “Dallas Blues” was published as sheet music, credited to a
Kansas-born druggist of German extraction named Hart A. Wand, and given the title
because a black workman in Wand’s employ supposedly remarked that the melody “gave
him the blues to go back to Dallas.”25 It is unclear whether the tune originated with
Wand, an amateur musician who lived in Oklahoma City and had spent time in New
Orleans, or with the workman, but its melody and 12-bar structure clearly have much in
common with what we know of reels and with other songs also called “blues,” published
in the ensuing decade by both black and white songwriters, including Handy. These
songs, particularly Handy’s, sold briskly, first as sheet music and then as recordings,
replacing the sentimental ballads written in approximations of black dialect which had
209
dominated what market there was for black song or the doppelgangers of black song.
According to musicologist Karl Hagstrom Miller:
In the decade 1910–1920, African American commercial composers
embraced the blues as a fresh new sound of the black south. They found
that the blues was capable of articulating a wider range of thoughts and
feelings and spoke more directly to the experience and needs of African
Americans than the dialect love songs ever could. The blues ostensibly
were by black southerners in a way that dialect songs could only be about
them. They also promised a windfall to anyone who could figure out how
to sell them in mass.26
It’s important to note, because of the way that the genealogies implied by genre
terminology can erase historical distinctions, that the blues that Miller refers to were
orchestrated, mainly instrumental compositions. Although they did not sound exactly
like either one, these initial blues do share some structural similarities, including the use
of scales which include “blue” notes and of the 12-bar form, with both what we think of
as blues today, and with the “classic blues” vocal recordings of the 1920s, which would
extend the commercial presence of blues for another decade. The fact that the orchestral
blues of the 1910s and the “classic blues” of the 1920s are both more musically
sophisticated than the “country blues” recorded in the 1930s presents a confounding
paradox to popular conceptions of the genre’s history which connect the more “primitive”
sounds of the “country blues’ to the music’s vernacular roots I am attempting to unwind.
This is an example of what Robert Stam, discussing film criticism, calls “biologism” in
genre, a tendency to imagine generic development in terms of a life cycle that leads
inexorably from simpler to more complex forms.27
In 1919, Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues,” which sparked an explosion of
recorded vocal blues and, as the first hugely successful “race record,” cemented the
segmentation of the popular music market along racial lines.28 As I have noted, and as
210
others have explored at length, this market was dominated by female singers, including
most notably Bessie Smith, who was hailed and championed by both black audiences and
critics like Langston Hughes, and by influential white critics like John Hammond and
Carl Van Vechten. By the middle of the decade, southern talent scouts had begun to
record and release race records by male artists, most of whom were instrumentalists as
well as singers, including guitar virtuoso Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Gus Canon, who
played a five-string banjo and accompanied himself by blowing across the top of a jug
strapped around his neck. Miller, Wald, and others have noted that, while these
musicians’ live repertoire likely included reels, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and songs that were
categorized as “old time” or “hillbilly” songs when recorded by white southerners, the
companies that recorded them were only interested in the blues numbers which they
could easily market to black audiences.
By the end of the 1920s, however, blues had seemingly run its course as a purely
commercial enterprise, a decline that was hastened within a year or two by the onset of
the Great Depression. While blues was still being recorded well into the 1930s, it was
largely a matter of rural singers whose recordings were marketed to rural audiences.
Even as the recording industry as a whole began to recover in the latter part of the
decade, African American audiences, especially those in urban settings who purchased
the greatest volume of records, had largely moved on. As noted previously, both the
discursive nature of the genre and periodic “revivals” of interest make it hard to establish
an exact timeline for blues as commercial popular music, but I would argue that we could
date such period approximately from the publication of “Dallas Blues” in 1912, to 1933,
when Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” whose records were definitive for the
211
music’s original audiences, made her last recordings. The latter date is somewhat
arbitrary, but useful: in vocal style, song selection, and in the accompaniment chosen by
producer John Hammond, the songs produced at the session, including “Take Me for a
Buggy Ride” and “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer,” feature a nearly inaudible
Benny Goodman on clarinet and altogether suggest the ascendance of swing as a
commercial paradigm and the retreat of blues into nostalgia, novelty, and, eventually,
revivalism.29
As I have argued, the very real connection between African American vernacular
music and the commercial musical style known as the blues has, in histories of the blues
as genre, been used to authenticate blues as an actual folk style. However, in terms of the
causal dynamics of American popular memory, the actual relationship between the
commercial and vernacular repositories of African American musical style is almost the
exact opposite: The perception of the blues as both a viable commercial vehicle and an
authentic expression of black desire and identification during its initial two decades of
popularity helped to, in the 1930s, legitimate African American folk music as an integral
expression of the American folk heritage. This connection had, of course, been argued
for during the initial phase of blues popularity by African American writers and critics,
including Langston Hughes, who began incorporating blues forms into his poetry in the
1920s.30 And Zora Neale Hurston’s folklore opus Mules and Men and Alain Locke’s The
Negro and His Music, both published in the mid-1930s, were substantial parts of the middecade valorization of black folk music and the documentation of its links with black
commercial music.31 But, it was only after this shift had taken place that a folk cipher
like the unknown Tutwiler guitarist who appears in Handy’s 1941 autobiography, could,
212
in the mid of the larger public, function as he does in the blues genre narrative: rooting
the music in a pre-modern and idealized “state of nature.”
As Filene, Hamilton, and Miller point out, academic folklore studies from the late
1800s through the early decades of the 20th century were primarily concerned with the
figure of the “white ballad singer” of the Appalachians and the Ozarks, whose songs,
rooted in the British Isles, were held to constitute the folksong heritage of the United
States. These scholars had slightly differing conceptions of what made the songs they
collected valuable and of the ideal application of their scholarship, but they shared some
key beliefs: that the folk song was a disappearing resource preserved only in isolated
communities; that these songs represented the collective memory of the communities that
held them rather than the work of individual singers or musicians; and that this orally
transmitted archive was an affirmation of America’s unique folk heritage.32 They also
had little or no use for what we now think of as African American vernacular music,
particularly secular African American vernacular music, which most of them did not even
consider within the purview of their folklore studies. As Filene observes, “The main
collector to study African American songs in the early 1900s, Howard Odum, depicted
them as the manifestations of a bizarre alien culture.”33 Odum, seems, says Filene, to
have “gathered songs less to preserve an American heritage than to discover what made
those strange Negroes tick.”34
This is not to say that there was no interest in what we now think of as African
American folk song, just that it was, until the 1930s, not named as such and denied
entrance to the authoritative and authentic canon that folklorists were compiling. As
Filene also notes, “interest in African American folk song actually predated interest in
213
Appalachian mountain music. It was probably the first American music to be popular in
communities outside of those in which it had been originated.”35 But, crucially, the
venues by which this music became popular were either commercial, such as minstrelsy’s
commodification of supposedly authentic blackness, or touched by commercialism, like
the spirituals, which were hailed by both black and white audiences and critics as
legitimate expressions of African American identity, but which first came to public notice
as a fundraising project for Fisk University by the Fisk Jubilee singers.36 While both
white and black discourse surrounding the spirituals would inexorably link them to
African American culture and to authoritatively authenticated notions of black identity,
they remained largely segregated from the scholarly apparatus surrounding the emerging
folk project.
The taint of commercialism, along with the dramatic novelty of black otherness
which minstrel performers both black and white exploited for gain, combined with the
folklorists’ own notions of racialized nationalism to exclude black vernacular music from
the emerging official archive of authentic folksongs. However, the decades-long
popularity of minstrelsy and its offshoots like black dialect love songs and dialect poetry
meant that notions of black authenticity were currency in the popular market, even if,
with the exception of Howard Odum and Dorothy Scarborough, they held little value for
most folklorists. Miller’s extensive and detailed study of southern musicians and the
early music industry reveals that, although severely compromised in terms of their actual
relation to black identity, these forms allowed African American composers, musicians,
publishers, and audiences opportunities for professionalism and pleasure, and some
degree of leverage over what did and did not signal blackness. This leverage was
214
increased by the emergence of the blues. According to Miller, “Black audiences forced
touring African American performers to replace stylized dialect pop songs with the blues,
northern fantasies about the South with indigenous southern sounds. Between 1910 and
1914, the blues became a new musical marker for black authenticity.”37 In understanding
this claim, it is important to note that Miller is using both “blues” and “black
authenticity” in their historical sense, indicating the market value of this new form of
music as a whole. One of the problems with genre terminology is that its everyday use
tends towards a kind of ahistorical idealism which purposefully elides the way that the
terms indicate change over time. The emergent blues that Miller refers to is different
from what is called “blues” today, although the genre’s implicit narrative binds the two
together; and as we shall see, the degree of authenticity accorded various blues styles
within that narrative changes as the genre community doing the narrating changes, over
time.
If we want, for the sake of argument, to posit a beginning point to the folkloric
embrace of African American vernacular music and therefore the folkloric stage of blues
production, we could do worse than to start with a song-collecting trip taken by John
Lomax and his son Alan in 1933, the same year that Bessie Smith recorded her last
session. As Filene describes it, “The Lomaxes had a complicated agenda for this
expedition. Their collecting methods and attitude make the trip, from today’s perspective
seem part talent search, part sociological survey and part safari.”38 Their itinerary
included folksong recording sessions in five southern prisons, as John Lomax had long
considered prisons, particularly in the south, an excellent example of the kind of isolated
“eddies where such songs are created.”39 While the Lomaxes, particularly John, held
215
with the basic folkloric worldview, positing a collective, pre-modern orally transmitted
memory constantly retreating from a fragmented, modern, technologically-driven
amnesia, the trip produced a book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, which marks a
departure from the older discourse in several important ways. One was the notion,
encapsulated in the quote above, that these “eddies” they sought could breed, rather than
simply maintain authentic folk songs, suggesting that the purest example of musical
vernacular was not simply the oldest and least-changed, but the one most expressive and
responsive to the group that “bred” it. This emphasis on an evolving and responsive
conception of folksong is underscored by the Lomaxes’ decision to compile composite
“best” versions of the songs they collected rather than to catalog variants in search of the
eldest, a practice that was tantamount to heresy in the eyes of old-line folklore scholars.
While this formulation is still problematic in its marking off of particular people as “folk”
and its refusal to contemplate the full range of material, including popular song, which
“the folk” might find expressive and thus produce and reproduce, it does rest upon a
much more democratic and egalitarian vision of vernacular music making.
However, the divergence that we are most concerned with here is the book’s
claim that African Americans created “the most distinctive of folk songs—the most
interesting, the most appealing, and the greatest in quantity.”40 This transformed racial
consciousness can almost entirely be attributed to Alan Lomax, who clashed with his
father over matters of race and politics. While there was more than a hint of primitivism
and fascination with the exotic other in Alan’s embrace of African American music and
culture, his father was a conservative white southerner of his times, one whose exploitive
relationship with the duo’s most famous prison “discovery,” the singer Huddie
216
“Leadbelly” Ledbetter, has been cited by many as deeply illustrative of the dangers of
folkloric excess.41
While its true that the Lomaxes did together, as Roy observes, “shape the canon”
of what he calls the “second folk project,” the differences between father and son are at
least as noteworthy as the differences between the two folklore projects, suggesting that
in many ways John Lomax could be seen as a liminal figure while his son more
wholeheartedly embodied the beliefs and ideologies that have led folk music to be
understood as people’s music.42 Those differences include not only a broader and more
racially inclusive view of who “the folk” were, but also a greater attentiveness to what
they actually listened to and sang. Most early folklore scholars had assiduously separated
what they heard as folk songs from what Theodore Roosevelt, in the introduction to John
Lomax’s 1910 Cowboy Songs and other Frontier Ballads called “ill-smelling, clever,
music hall songs.”43 Alan, however, was tolerant of popular music, particularly enjoying
blues and old-time or hillbilly music, which he considered only slightly diluted and
commoditized forms of folk music. Alan’s differing views here speak to his more
sympathetic engagement with poor black and white southerners, and his closer
observation of the pleasures that these people took in this music. They also speak to his
developing Marxist-informed political views, which colored his basic conception of the
adversarial relationship between folk and commercial culture. Where his father saw the
folk world as simply retreating before modernism, and sought to conserve it, Alan saw
folk forms as capable of resisting modernity’s exploitive reach. 44 Since it was a
commercialized musical style related to folk song, the blues was vulnerable to dilution
but had the potential to transcend its commercial origins and was, because of this,
217
perhaps uniquely suited to express the alienating effects of capitalism on marginalized
people. As he saw it, “the folklorist’s job was to link the people who were voiceless and
had no way to tell their story with the big mainstream of world culture.”45 Although any
claim to such an interlocutory position should be examined critically, as the stories that
come through such links are often quite different than the stories that the voiceless would
have told absent such mediation, there is no doubt that Lomax undertook this work
wholeheartedly and had a profound impact on the shape of American culture and memory
because of it.
The reinvention of folk music as the people’s music and blues as a form of folk
music depends, of course, on more than just Alan Lomax’s more expansive and vibrant
definition of folk music.46 But, as an ambitious, energetic, politically engaged folklore
scholar, Lomax was connected with most of the major currents that lead into 1930s
revivalism, including the Popular Front, a “broad, culturally rich left-wing movement”
that grew out of the Communist Party’s adoption of an inclusive, anti-fascist strategy.47
William G. Roy’s monograph Reds, Whites, and Blues details the way that the party’s
infrastructure and allied organizations were mobilized to organize “cultural workers as
workers and creative artists as artists,” arguing that “It was in this context that the left
adopted folk music as the people’s music and mounted a cultural project that would
transform the meaning of radical music.”48 This represented an about-face for the party’s
musical theorists in terms of folk music. As late as 1932, Charles Seeger had articulated
the official party line, arguing that “Many folksongs are complacent, melancholy,
defeatist, intended to make slaves endure their lot—pretty, but not the stuff for a militant
proletariat to feed upon.”49 However, by January 1934, George Maynard was citing
218
“Negro and Hillbilly music” in The Daily Worker as proof of the people’s creativity,
arguing that “Since time began the masses of the people have been the truest creators of
music. Love, fear, worship and bondage have been some of the themes which have given
birth to folk music. The theme of revolt has been rarer, but strong and compelling when
it appeared.”50 As Diana Taylor theorizes, despite the seeming stability of archives like
those collected by folklore scholars or record producers, “what changes over time is the
value, relevance and meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted,
even embodied.”51 The changing status of “Negro and Hillbilly music” among the party
literati illustrates this.
Michael Denning, whose work on the cultural front is largely considered
definitive, has called the decade and a half that the cultural front occupies “a moment of
transition between the Fordist modernism that reigned before the crash, and the
postmodernism of the American century that emerged from the ruins of Hiroshima.”52
Putting aside the necessary inexactitude of such narrative characterizations, Denning’s
description suggests that during this transitional period, both paradigms might be
operative, as the hierarchical rationalism of modernity overlaps postmodernism’s
irreducible representations. I argue that this is true, and that we can see, and hear,
symptoms of both in a single performance, one where the articulated conjunction of
commercial blues, African American vernacular music, American institutional heritage,
and left-wing idealism is hailed as a single archive and performed for a new audience.
The Authentic Music of the American Negro: Carnegie Hall, 1938
There’s a blues revival every ten or twenty years, it seems, usually
coinciding with the end of a decade. In a sense, the first of these was in
the late thirties and early forties when blues records distributed almost
exclusively to southern blacks a decade earlier wound up in the hands of
219
white leftist intellectuals who tended to view blues performers as
representatives of a rural underclass further disadvantaged by race.
Francis Davis53
Recording has always been a means of social control, a stake in politics,
regardless of the available technologies. Power is no longer content to
enact its legitimacy; it records and reproduces the society it rules.
Stockpiling memory, retaining history or time, distributing speech, and
manipulating information has always been an attribute of priestly power,
beginning with the Tables of the Law.
Jacques Attali54
John Hammond, the wealthy record producer, talent scout, jazz patron, and
organizer of the evening’s concert, a program of otherwise live music and lectures
entitled ““From Spirituals To Swing”,” strides rapidly across the stage at Carnegie Hall in
New York City. As he crosses in front of the footlights, his movements are animated,
manifesting a contagious, almost gleeful sense of purpose. Pausing before a massive
Victrola record player, Hammond’s tall frame is silhouetted in the spotlight as he lifts the
tone arm and carefully places the needle on a rapidly spinning black shellac disc. The
record, issued on the Vocalion label, had been recorded in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas
just two years earlier, by a young singer and guitar player from Mississippi named Robert
Johnson. Hammond first plays “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” and then
returns to his folding chair placed just to the side of the stage and sits, head bobbing and
knee bouncing in time to the record’s syncopated guitar and rough, near falsetto vocal.
After that record ends, he plays another, the title of which he announces as “Walkin’
Blues.”55
Neither Hammond nor anyone in the audience has ever seen or heard Johnson
perform live. Hammond had searched unsuccessfully for Johnson all across the South
220
during the previous year, and only news of Johnson’s death ended his plans to bring him
to New York for this show. And, although Hammond had worked very hard to make sure
that this was an integrated concert, none of the rural African American farmhands and
day laborers who Johnson had regularly played for was present that evening. If any of the
people who constituted Robert Johnson’s public, such as it was, had been present, they
might have wondered why Hammond, if he was going to play Johnson’s records, didn’t
play “Terraplane Blues,” Johnson’s regional hit, the only song that anyone had ever heard
of. But anyone who wondered about that likely would have been positively shocked that
a well-known performer like Big Bill Broonzy was appearing at this concert as a
substitute for the virtually unknown Robert Johnson, and that Broonzy, who had spent the
previous decade performing, recording, and working as a session musician in Chicago,
would be introduced to the crowd as having been “prevailed upon to leave his Arkansas
farm and mule and make his first trek to the big city” just for the occasion, and that, as
the program’s representative of rural or country blues, Big Bill would have to compete
with a record player and an obscure singer who had been dead for six months.56
The 1938 “From Spirituals To Swing” concert was conceived and produced by
John Hammond, and sponsored by The New Masses, a weekly leftist magazine located in
New York City. In its conception and execution, the concert provides a good example of
the way that cultural front strategies depended upon collaborations between actors with
varying agendas and ideologies. Not, by any means, a radical, Hammond was politically
liberal and an outspoken—although, owing to his numerous financial engagements in the
music business, somewhat self-interested—advocate for African American musicians. In
later interviews he claimed that the editors of The New Masses “hated the music” and
221
only participated in order to further ideological ends.57 For their part, the editors of The
New Masses, which had been intended more as a literary journal than a narrowly political
magazine, considered Hammond, who was a scion of the Vanderbilt family, something of
a dilettante. We can see a similar set of tensions in the evening’s program guide, as
appeals for aid to feed the children of anti-fascist forces in Spain face off against ads for
records by African American artists, almost all of them on Columbia Records, where
Hammond held an executive position.58
This concert, which was followed by a similarly themed performance a year later,
was the highest profile attempt by the pre-World-War Two American left to use music,
particularly African American music, to mobilize popular consciousness. As such, it had
mixed results. William G. Roy argues that although the performances “succeeded [in]
parlaying the popularity of such stars as Benny Goodman [whose integrated band
included pioneering black guitarist Charlie Christian] to launch performers like the
Golden Gate Quartet and inject popular music with African American sensibilities,” it
“was not able to change the musical taste of…the American working class.”59 Putting
aside the question of exactly how a concert at a bastion of upper-class fine art
performance like Carnegie Hall was supposed to change the taste of the working class,
““From Spirituals To Swing”” was a watershed moment at least in the public presentation
of “black music.” While performances by African American musicians for white
audiences were commonplace, placing such a performance in a refined space like
Carnegie Hall was not. More importantly, the evening was framed as presentation of art,
not simply entertainment, setting an important precedent for future attempts to leverage
Carnegie Hall’s elite associations in support of the cultural legitimacy of African
222
American music, such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s performance with Chano
Pozo a decade later. As I have argued previously, Gillespie and Parker’s concert offered
a progressive narration of jazz emerging from transnational folk roots and culminating in
be-bop’s complex and decidedly modern harmonic experiments. ““From Spirituals To
Swing”” articulated a different narrative, one that Gillespie and Parker’s was intended in
part to counter. Like the be-bop narrative, the swing narrative presented in 1938 was
rhetorically rooted in a romanticized aural Africanness; Hammond even began the show
by playing LP recordings of “tribal” African music. But here, the authentic racial and
artistic path was defined not by modernist experimentation but instead by a supposedly
transparent and instinctive expression of the music’s vernacular origins, a formulation
which critic Winthrop Seargent had expressed earlier in the year when he argued that
“those who create [jazz] are the ones who know the least about its abstract structure. The
Negro, like all folk musicians, expresses himself intuitively.”60 And, more importantly, it
was defined almost solely by critics rather than by musicians in conversation with critics.
While the proper genrification of swing music was the primary ground of
aesthetic contestation that evening, the first “From Spirituals To Swing” concert has
assumed a retrospective importance in histories of the blues, based almost entirely on
Robert Johnson’s disembodied performance. There are two main components to the way
the concert most often appears. One is speculation about the impact that Johnson might
have made had he in fact played the show, including the impact of other musicians on
Johnson and the impact he might have made at the time.61 The other component is a
retelling of the dramatic spectacle suggested by John Hammond’s encounter with Robert
Johnson’s records, his daring quest into the exotic terrain of the rural South to find
223
Johnson, and his failure to do so, which is highlighted by Hammond playing Johnson’s
recordings from the stage.62 In both cases, Johnson’s absence is crucial to the ways that
members of the genre community of the blues involve themselves in the extension of the
blues genre narrative. The speculation involved in the first example allows critics and
knowledgeable readers to bring to bear comparative musical historiographies, mobilizing
otherwise arcane and esoteric knowledge as the discursive power to predict a plausible
outcome. The second involves a fantasy wherein membership in that genre community is
equated with heroic qualities of aesthetic discernment and discovery. Both, but
particularly the second, diagram important strains of revivalism as it has been articulated
in discourses about blues music.
Before proceeding any further, it might be helpful to stop and examine the idea of
genre communities a little more closely. My use of the term is largely appropriated from
Altman, for whom it is part of a project of highlighting the “transactional process
whereby conflict and negotiation among user groups constantly transform generic
designations.”63 For Altman, as for me, “genres actively signify, function and reinforce
solidarity for diverse constituencies’” which can be thought of as “constellated
communities,” composed of “genre users” engaged in acts of “genrification.”64 While I
find this formulation obviously attractive, it is important that the word “community” not
be taken to indicate a lack of hierarchy or contestation. This is particularly true in the
case of blues music, a style largely authored and maintained by African Americans, and
whose “crossover” path (or appropriation) by European Americans we are tracking in this
chapter. Certainly the thought of John and Alan Lomax auditioning black inmates to sing
in a southern prison, or of John Hammond selecting musicians for a career-boosting stage
224
appearance at Carnegie Hall, should remind us that these “communities” are rooted in
“communication” (however compromised by imbalances of power and authority) rather
than “communalism.” This also raises another issue: the obvious limitations of using
powerful voices to illustrate a discursive field that exists between a larger number of
speakers. While I acknowledge those limitations, and that there is more work to be done
in order to fully understand the historical development of blues as a genre, I also believe
that people like Alan Lomax and John Hammond, who actively worked to shape the
acceptance and understanding of the blues by white audiences, can tell us something
about this process, especially if we are prepared to critically interrogate the roles that
their normative notions of gender, race, and intellectual authority played in their
engagement with the music.
Although his primary professional responsibilities at Columbia were in the area of
Artists and Repertoire, John Hammond’s privileged background allowed him to
maximize his influence in the sphere of popular music by synergistically combining the
roles of talent scout, textual critic, nightclub owner, and personal manager/unpaid advisor
of musicians into a singular position as advocate and arbiter of what he found to be
“right” and “real” in popular music. Says Wald, “He [Hammond] had a gift for
persuading other people to share his enthusiasms, and his place in history is less as a
producer than as the most effective of fans, the man who would force Benny Goodman to
listen to Charlie Christian or insist that friends come down to a bar to hear Billie
Holiday.”65 And, while Hammond certainly accomplished a lot of good in his 70-year
career in the US popular music industry, his notions of what was right and real for
African American artists seem to have, at least during the 1920 and 1930s, been shaped
225
by the same kind of earnest primitivism which afflicted Hammond’s friend, Carl Van
Vechten, and other white, liberal negrophiles associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
In a New York Times article written to publicize the first “From Spirituals To
Swing” concert, Hammond approvingly notes an increased awareness of and interest in
African American music by the general public. At the same time, he complains that
“despite all this welcome discussion of Negro music, the fact is that, not only the
American music lover, even the American musician himself, knows next to nothing about
the authentic music of the American Negro.”66 He concedes that the public may have
heard
torch singers like Ethel Waters sing dreamy Broadway ballads such as
“Stormy Weather,” highly sophisticated groups such as the Hall Johnson
singers do arrangements of traditional Negro spirituals, with harmonies
carefully adjusted for delicate ears, and the magnificent trained soloists
like Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson make of the
primitive spiritual and blues something akin to the art songs of other
nations, with unrhythmical and fancy piano accompaniment.67
Which he dismisses, declaring that “All of this, we believe, has very little to do with
authentic Negro music.”68
Hammond’s formulation of what “authentic Negro music” isn’t—sophisticated,
delicate, “unrhythmical”—is fairly commonplace for his time, reflecting romantic notions
of a divide between mind and body mapped onto fantasies of racial division and
misconceptions about “African” music. But his criterion for “authentic Negro music” is
more than just the inverse of these qualities. Here, from that same introduction, he
defines black musical authenticity in terms of geography and relation to the
professionalized production of popular music:
The Carolinas, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri have
been combed to find artists who right now are playing and singing the
226
traditional music of the Negro. These are artists who, for the most part,
have had no formal training of any kind, cannot read musical notations,
and have never played before white audiences or in any formal way before
colored audiences. Musicians, in other words, whose enormous talents
have never been appreciated by the great American musical public.69
While Hammond, in this article, lavishes extensive praise on all of the artists performing
at “From Spirituals To Swing”, he claims that the “most extraordinary of the groups”
presented on stage will be Mitchell’s Christian Singers, because
They are virtually unknown, even in their own State and county, for they
are four men who work for a living during the week (one is a truck driver,
another a hand in a tobacco factory, still another the owner of a minute ice
and coal business, and the last is a bricklayer). After their jobs they get
together and sing, and on Sundays they wander around to various Negro
country churches and even to chain gangs, singing spirituals and work
songs from their enormous repertory, none of which has ever been heard
in the North. None of these men reads music, yet all have perfect pitch,
magnificent full voices which know nothing of auditorium microphones;
exceptional control of dynamics, and a warmth only to be found in the
great Negro singers.70
Authenticity then is defined in terms of distance: distance from northern urban centers,
distance from formal standards of musical instruction, and especially, as he carefully
notes the day-jobs of each member of Mitchell’s Christian Singers, distance from the
corrupted and corrupting world of commercial music making.
If this sounds familiar, it should, as it pervades our sense of what associates “folk
music” with “the folk,” their lack of professional status. Here is Alan Lomax, from an
essay entitled “Music in Your Own Back Yard,” published in 1940: “Since the beginning
of the world, people have told their feelings in song. And they’re still doing it. Doing it
mostly in lonely spots where there are no radios and phonographs, no movies and
concerts, where they have to entertain themselves.”71 As Barker and Taylor observe,
regarding this essay, “Lomax is laying out a new, if hidden, criterion for what makes a
227
song “folk”: it is sung without expectation of remuneration.”72 It is a song like the one
that Handy would, in his autobiography published a year after Lomax’s essay, describe
hearing from the unknown guitarist in the Tutwiler train station, a song in a state of
nature.
The paradox here is that this anti-commercial discourse, which would become a
staple of revivalism, is being applied to a music which is understood by its musicians and
audiences as a commercial music. As Wald notes in his revisionist biography of the
blues musician who was, through the magic of duplicable media, both present at and
absent from the stage at Carnegie Hall:
Robert Johnson and his peers were intelligent professionals, well versed in
the trends of their day and the tastes of their audiences. Some were more
sophisticated than others, but all were competent entertainers, and their
music reflected the demands of a very active and critical public. Among
other things, that public saw them as symbols of success, people who
could flash fat rolls of banknotes and wear nice suits, and who did not
have to sweat in the fields from sunrise to sunset.73
Revivalism, as it is constituted in the late 1930s and enters the discourse of the blues
genre community that emerges around well-meaning but wrongheaded engagements with
the music, thus elides one of the most important qualities in the original relationship
between blues musicians and audiences: the music’s ability to articulate a compelling
disidentification with the laborious regimes that the African American blues audience
suffered under. Contrary to folkloric notions of authenticity, Wald’s statement suggests
that it was the music’s engagement with commercial culture, at whatever level was
available, that forged the genre’s original authentic performative bond between listener
and player.
228
The application of folkloric discourse to blues, as illustrated in Hammond’s
remarks, reformulates the archives of folk and commercial song, generating a
paradoxically powerful notion of what commercial music could be, and what many of its
listeners then and since wanted to hear it as. In an attempt to capture that paradoxical
desire I have coined the term “unpopular popular music”: popular music whose identity
in the commercial marketplace is defined by its supposed distance from or opposition to
that same market. My intention in deploying this term is to capture—without necessarily
resolving—the tension inherent in musical genres whose constellated communities hold
vastly different and contradictory understandings of what it means to play and hear that
music, including understandings—and often practices—intended to contravene the
modes of production which brought that music to those communities in the first place.
Hearing the blues as unpopular popular music means foregrounding the commercial
imbrication of the genre—an entanglement that is elided in folkloric discourse—while
refusing to accept the notion that such an entanglement is necessarily totalizing. I admit
that such a position is rife with contradiction, but the point of this exposition, and I argue,
the point of much revisionist blues scholarship, is to make those contradictions which
well up around the music and its role in American popular memory audible.
As Francis Davis points out, the white audiences who began to engage with the
blues during the era of the cultural front were confronted squarely with this same set of
tensions, tensions which were doubtless exacerbated by their ideological disposition to
hear mass culture as necessarily debasing, and their newfound conviction that folk culture
was necessarily noble
Part of the appeal of the blues to the alienated white leftist intellectuals
who embraced it in the 1930s and 1940s must have been their perception
229
of it (and of “traditional” jazz) as the music of America’s last remaining
folk culture. Yet the phonograph records on which most of these
intellectuals first encountered the blues were themselves evidence to the
contrary—emblems of an emerging mass culture in which black
Americans were to play no small part, and which would eventually render
the very notion of “folk culture” obsolete.74
Davis is an astute and critical musical scholar, but I would argue that, instead of
becoming obsolete, the notion of “folk culture” would be absorbed into the generic
discourse of popular music, becoming an integral part of the production and reproduction
of unpopular popular music as part of mass culture understood to be apart from mass
culture. In the original program book for the first “From Spirituals To Swing” concert,
there is a hint of how this might work. An ad for Harry Sultan’s Record Shop, located at
26th E. 23rd St., New York, NY, offers the following text:
To the indomitable spirit of that great-souled people, the American
Negro, and to their deathless and towering contribution to American Folk
Music–we offer a salute in appreciation…REMARKABLE NEW
RECORD PLAYER UNATTACHED! PLAYS THROUGH YOUR
RADIO BY REMOTE CONTROL. FULL SIZE 10-INCH
TURNTABLE. A.C. Electric Motor. Plugs in anywhere. Beautiful
Rubbed wood cabinet with piano hinged cover that closes while 12-inch
record is being played!!! $19.9575
Implicit in the text is the notion that mass consumer leisure culture could operate as a
legitimate channel for interfacing between the concert-going audience and those
imagined as “the folk,” as well as the notion that all African American cultural
production is, in the final analysis, folk culture. By this logic, Robert Johnson’s
recordings are no mere commercial products. Instead, like the field recordings made on
the enormous disc-cutting machines that John and Alan Lomax hauled into southern
prisons, they are presented as documentary evidence of unlettered genius, a presentation
which elides the motivations of Johnson, the producer Don Law, and just about everyone
230
involved in any way with the original production and dissemination of the recordings. At
the same time, the idea is also made available that Johnson himself was such a uniquely
talented interpreter of the folk process that it is necessary to present a recorded
simulacrum of his performance rather than just substitute another member of “the folk”
performing the same material. Hammond’s phonographic reanimation of Robert Johnson
here functions as a kind of predictive hermeneutic, foreshadowing the ways that the
discourses of romantic individualism and salvage anthropology would be twinned in the
presentation of blues recordings for decades to come.
Under the weight of this ideological enterprise, the phonographic, near-literal
“revival” of Robert Johnson onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1938 signifies authenticity in a
way his material body making music in the world never could, the absences and aural
imperfections of the recording always pointing provocatively towards what the audience
might have seen and heard if they had only encountered him live. There is an appealing
symmetry between the significant, almost totemic role that Johnson’s recordings played
at “From Spirituals to Swing” and the equally salutary role that those recordings—
captured on shellac or vinyl or laserdisc—would play in subsequent blues revivals, where
the imperfect testimony of his archive of recorded songs would function as an endlessly
replicable and revivable archive, defining an economy of scarcity in futile reference back
to the unrecoverable repertoire of his unrecorded live performances.
In 1961, John Hammond compiled and served as executive producer for King of
the Delta Blues Singers, an LP which, although only moderately successful in overall
sales, had a lasting effect on critics, musicians, and a growing coterie of music fans.76
Greil Marcus claims that, after hearing the album, he was unable to listen to any other
231
music for a month; according to Eric Clapton, until he was 25, he “literally would not talk
to you if you hadn’t listened to Robert Johnson.”77 The album included 12 songs drawn
from Hammond’s two recording sessions in San Antonio, including both songs played
onstage during “From Spirituals To Swing”. The title, King of the Delta Blues Singers,
was prophetic: Delta blues would come to serve as both a specific designation of a
regional style rooted in the Mississippi Delta, and as a name for the overall genre of
acoustic rural blues, and Robert Johnson, who was a moderately successful regional artist
in his lifetime, would come to be considered the king of both. A second LP, King of the
Delta Blues Singers Volume Two, was issued in 1967.78 In 1992, on the eve of another
blues revival, all 42 of Johnson’s recordings, including discarded takes of several of the
36 individual songs, were released on compact disc in a two-CD boxed set, Robert
Johnson: The Complete Recordings.79 The project had been envisioned as both a favor to
producer Beryl Cohen Porter, who thought that Johnson’s work should be made available
in the new format, and, like many blues reissues, was also a way for Columbia, now
owned by CBS, to make new profits from existing recordings. An initial run of 20,000
copies was pressed. The boxed set sold 1.5 million copies and won a Grammy for Best
Historical Album. In 2011, Columbia released two different remastered editions of
Johnson’s recordings, one, The Centennial Collection, a 2-CD compilation of all 42
songs, and the other, The Complete Original Masters, a luxurious, limited edition boxed
set containing 12 45-RPM singles reproducing the 12 78-RPM singles released on the
Vocalion label in his lifetime, as well as both CDs of the Centennial Collection, a CD of
contemporaneous blues recordings, and a biographical DVD.80 All of this is housed in a
reproduction of the kinds of albums that 78s were originally housed in, and which the
232
term “album,” which has come to mean any collection of recorded material of sufficient
length, has come to mean.
Because of his posthumous fame, Robert Johnson has been written about
extensively in both popular and academic venues. He, or his ghost, has appeared in
novels, notably Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, and movies and other people’s
songs.81 Rather than divert my own narrative to rehearse what is available elsewhere, I
will just say that for my purposes it is helpful to distinguish between Robert Johnson the
musician and the shade of Robert Johnson, phonographically revived for the first time at
Carnegie Hall in 1938. The former was a minor figure in a vernacular and professional
musical tradition maintained largely by African Americans, one which would, in the
decades following the first “From Spirituals To Swing” concert, become the largely
urban and electric genre which Jerry Wexler, working as a staff writer at Billboard
magazine, named “Rhythm and Blues” in 1948. It is hard to overemphasize just how
little Robert Johnson, the musician who recorded for the Vocalion label in 1936, figured
into this tradition, until the blues revival of the 1960s. As independent blues scholar
Tony Thomas notes, “Johnson obtains an importance not due to his role in the real
discourse of the African American blues as a vernacular music appreciated and developed
and lived by African Americans, but by appreciation of it by white people or African
Americans who come to it as a result of their own involvement with the revival.”82
On the other hand, it is just as hard to overemphasize the importance of Johnson’s
recordings, and of recordings in general, to the discourse and practice of revivalism that
is performed at “From Spirituals To Swing” and maintained in the following decades by a
network of devoted aficionados, folklorists, critics, and record collectors. One part of
233
this network is the politically infused folk music infrastructure which developed out of
the Popular Front, and which tended to fold “blues” into the larger idea of folk music
which, following Alan Lomax’s formulation, they saw as “a voice of the voiceless, the
heartfelt expression of ordinary working people who could not write books or enjoy
access to the academy or high society.”83 The other part is the loosely affiliated group of
record collectors that Wald calls the “cult of the blues” and who, according to Hamilton,
referred to themselves as the “blues mafia.” It was this group, whose activities searching
out, trading, and writing about the scratched and battered “race records they found in the
backs of old record shops, warehouses, and private homes, which most directly infused
the ethos of the 1960s revivalists and of the future of the blues as a genre. It was the
blues mafia who, as Hamilton explains in great detail, first brought into focus the nowiconic figure of the “bluesman” which they constructed out of the meeting between the
records they found and their own imaginations. In the US music industry and in the
American popular imagination, Robert Johnson’s dislocated phonographic presence has
come to fill in the details absent from this image.
The 1938 and 1939 “From Spirituals To Swing” concerts mark the approximate
time when Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy traded places. Johnson, although he
was a sophisticated player who idolized the urbane, melancholy sound of Leroy Carr,
was, during his lifetime, of “the folk” as only a moderately successful itinerant musician
can be, until Hammond’s posthumous advocacy places him in a position to be discovered
later as a blues icon and founder of rock and roll.84 Broonzy, whose popular (with black
audiences) Chicago recordings from the 1920s are much more clearly identifiable as
stylistic forebears of rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is transformed into a popular
234
folksinger, a role that he would parlay into a successful second career in front of mostly
white audiences in cafes and folk clubs, where he patterned his style after that of Josh
White, who sang topical, sometimes political songs and accompanied himself on acoustic
guitar.85 Broonzy’s musical aesthetic was slightly rougher than White’s, and though he
was less successful than White on the folk circuit, Broonzy’s adopted public persona as a
plainspoken rural storyteller served him well. In 1951, when asked by Time magazine to
comment on what made a song a folk song, he observed that “I guess all songs is folk
songs. I never heard no horse sing 'em.”86
Vernacular Transformations/Transforming the Vernacular
When Sam Charters wrote the book of Country Blues in 1959 it was the
first book on the blues. Although it's filled with misinformation, it's still
probably the best book on the rural blues. [… ]I knew the music was there,
somewhere out in the bushes, but I couldn't get to it. Through books, I
thought I could.
James Luther Dickinson87
The governing metaphor at the time for what we were doing was
“discovery” and “rediscovery,” as if what we were doing was finding
something that was unknown or had been lost. But the notion of discovery
is complex, as anyone knows who has thought about the grade school
“fact” that Columbus discovered America. Our discoveries, like those of
the European explorers, were mixtures of invention and interpretation, and
in a way, instead of finding our object, blues, we constituted it.
Jeff Todd Titon88
There were actually two ghosts at the 1938 “From Spirituals To Swing” concert.
In the pre-concert publicity and in the concert program, the evening was dedicated to the
memory of Bessie Smith, who had died in a car wreck 14 months before the show, and
whose niece, Ruby Smith, performed two songs accompanied by pianist James p.
Johnson, one of which, “Backwater Blues,” had been composed by Johnson and Bessie
Smith. Ruby Smith, who had sung and danced for more than 10 years in her aunt’s
235
chorus under her given name, Ruby Walker, went on to make several records over the
next decade for the Bluebird label under her new name, including sessions produced by
Johnson, which yielded another version of “Backwater Blues.”89 While she never
approached her aunt’s critical or commercial success, Ruby Smith easily fit into a
genealogy which begins with Bessie Smith’s mentor, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey; runs
through Bessie Smith and her niece; includes (among many others) Wille Mae “Big
Mama” Thornton, whose version of the Leiber and Stoller song “Hound Dog” inspired
Elvis Presley’s crossover version in 1956; and arrives at, but hardly concludes with, Big
Maybelle, whose performance at Newport in 1958 opened this chapter.
Billboard Magazine described Ruby Smith in the 1940s as a singer of “downhome” blues.90 A modern critic trying to describe her according to her style and lineage
might call her a late-period classic blues singer, or a singer of black women’s blues.
Another, categorizing according to commonly-understood chronological definitions,
might consider her an early rhythm and blues singer, a definition that only makes sense
after rhythm and blues and jazz distinguished themselves from each other in the late
1940s and early 1950s, with one the former becoming clearly dance music while the
latter became clearly art music. Despite the differences suggested by these categorical
choices, one of the threads that unites them is the notion of blues as repertoire of stylistic
and performative choices which encompasses several distinct and historically contingent
genrifications of musical content, a kind of meta-genre with musical, historical,
psychological, and racial resonances, and one that has been mobilized in literary criticism
as well.91 In terms of musicking, this is related to blues in the sense that a jazz band
might play “a blues,” implying a mid-tempo or slower tune with rhythmic emphasis, an
236
elegiac and/or celebratory theme, and structural features including a call and response
dynamic and an AABA verse and chorus structure. Overall it is a format that draws upon
professionalized vernacular musical practice and one that has long provided a structure
that everyone in the community was familiar with and could improvise within. This is, in
many ways, a definition of blues that reaches back to the very first commercial music
marketed as blues, and one that defines blues as an important part of what Mark Anthony
Neal described as the “tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass
consumerism.”92
Amiri Baraka, whose 1963 volume Blues People was the first book about blues by
an African American author, described this repertory as the aural common ground for
differing iterations of African American musical practice, arguing that “even though
ragtime, Dixieland, and jazz are all dependent upon blues for their existence in any
degree of authenticity, the terms themselves relate to a broader reference than blues.
Blues means a Negro experience; it is the one music the Negro made that could not be
transferred into a more general significance than the one the Negro gave it initially.”93 In
Blues People, Baraka’s formulation is largely progressivist, extending the diasporic,
vernacular-to-high art narrative that Dizzy Gillespie had proffered in writings and public
statements in the 1950s. Blues was a communal unity in Baraka’s narrative, but most of
the stylistic or generic forms that bore its name, like classic blues or rhythm and blues,
were slighter, commercialized expressions, rendered obsolete by the high modernism of
be bop and free jazz. He revised this framework in the 1966 essay “The Changing Same
(R&B and the New Black Music),” arguing that rhythm and blues, soul, and funk were,
237
like jazz, expressions of “the blues impulse,” which was “the exact replication of The
Black Man In The West.”94
While there are definite resemblances—including the emphasis on the music’s
essential, extra-commercial existence as part of the racially-bound vernacular known as
“black music” in particular—this formulation of the word “blues” is not the blues that is
revived by a new, largely white, audience in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The revival
definition is much narrower, excluding both the musically sophisticated practices and the
proto-nationalist associations that Baraka subsumed under the term. If it were the same,
Samuel Charters—whose 1959 book The Country Blues was a, and perhaps the,
foundational revivalist text for the era—could hardly have looked back on a decade of
unparalleled successful commercial and musical development by African American
musicians working in blues-based forms and lamented that “the 1950s have been difficult
years for the blues singers, despite new activity in the recording companies.”95 Here, the
difference in who is and who isn’t a “blues singer” yields entirely different histories.
But, revivalist rhetoric and the principle of the changing same do overlap in that they
both envision what they call the blues as an African American art form on both practical
and ideological terms. Charters, an enthusiast whose interest in blues began with civil
rights work and jazz, echoes earlier revivalists like John Hammond and Alan Lomax
when he declares that “the country blues were an intense individual expression of the
deepest strains of Negro music in the South.”96 Baraka, an “insider looking out”
according to Charles Keil, instead finds communal, ethnic, and national meaning, citing
the blues as “one beginning of the American Negro,” observing that97
What is so often forgotten in any discussion of the Negro’s “place” in
American society is the fact that it was only as a slave that he really had
238
one. The post-slave society had no place for the black American, and if
there were to be any area of the society where the Negro might have an
integral function, that area would have to be the one that he created for
himself.98
In Blues People, “blues” is both the way through which former slaves made a place for
themselves in the post-emancipation society, and, metaphorically, the place itself. This
is, on the one hand, entirely true, as blues did represent a field of both aesthetic and
commercial identity-making for its earliest practitioners. At the same time, Baraka’s
attempts to define the blues as it progresses from that point solely in relation to African
American experience, and entirely in opposition to the European American “mainstream”
drew a pointed response from Ralph Ellison, who, in a review of Blues People, argued
that “Negro musicians have never, as a group, felt alienated from any music sounded
within their hearing, and it is my theory that it would be impossible to pinpoint a time
when they were not shaping what Jones [Baraka] calls the mainstream of American
music. Indeed, what group of musicians has made more of the sound of the American
experience?”99
The space defined by the conflict between Ellison and Baraka is a thorny area for
anyone attempting to write about the history of African American music making in the
context of American popular music. On the one hand, there is the need to acknowledge
not only the skill and creativity of the individual musicians and communities who
nurtured the musical styles we associate with African American traditions, and the socioeconomic and legal barriers instituted by the racial regimes under which these individuals
and communities labored. On the other hand, there is the need to avoid naturalizing these
barriers in the language in which the histories of this music making are so often written.
This is especially difficult because these histories mobilize a language of genre, which, as
239
Derrida argues, “has deemed natural structures or typical forms whose history is hardly
natural but, rather, quite to the contrary, complex and heterogeneous.”100 Both in
ongoing discourse, and in retrospect, African American musical traditions have
historically been constituted in the U.S. pop music marketplace as “black music” through
racialized notions of genre which simplify the actual and potential aural experiences of
most Americans. While it is correct to view these “structures or typical forms” as
proscribing and limiting the ideal opportunities for musicians and audiences to make
meaningful contact with each other, they also provide venues for modifying the meaning
of those same structures, whether it is black audiences turning segregation into
congregation, as Earl Lewis has argued, or white audiences leveraging the racio-musical
“other” in crossover narratives as a critique of the dominant politics of culture.101 Even as
I maintain the critique I have mounted here of the limiting and essentializing nature of
revivalist discourse, I want to also make space to recognize within that same discourse
animating impulses that have moved people towards a number of praiseworthy ends: the
breach of racial barriers, the rejection of received hierarchies, the search for egalitarian
human contact, and the quest for the kind of meaningful musical expression that occurs
within and brings into being an open and like-minded community. My critique is, in
many ways, informed by a desire to see those possibilities realized as they can be only
following the recognition of their previous racial excesses.
Baraka’s use of “blues” to indicate and co-identify both a specific musical form
and African American musical production in general should be understood as both
strategic essentialism and as an attempted critical revision in response not only to a surge
in interest in the blues by white musicians and audiences, but also by attempts by white
240
revivalists like Charters to define blues according to their own standards of generic
purity. His use of a spatial metaphor in the quote above speaks to a larger strategy of
occupying and defining the territory of the blues and asserting the primacy of African
American critics, audiences, and musicians in the mapping of that terrain. As such, Blues
People and “The Changing Same” were and remain laudable acts of critical imagination
and valuable and useful interventions. However, the naturalization of blues as essentially
and programmatically “black music”—by both revivalists like Charters and politically
minded revisionists like Baraka—at the exact moment of its popular and profitable
“discovery” by white musicians and audiences (and its abandonment by younger black
musicians and audiences) creates a kind of historical rupture going forward and
backwards from this point. In both cases, this rupture, a kind of historiographic crisis of
legitimacy, stems from the revivalist adoption of the Delta bluesman as an iconographic
representation of musical authenticity, one whose transformative power in their lives
depended upon the implicit critique of mainstream consumer culture that the revivalists
found in what they understood to be the vernacular music of a marginalized group.
It is easy to forget that, in 1959, there was no such thing as the Delta blues. There
was only The Country Blues; a newly-released book written by Samuel Charters that
came with a companion LP of recordings which Charters had collected to illustrate his
subject.102 All of the recordings, originally released as Race Records between 1927 and
1936, are by men, including selections by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Gus Cannon, and
Robert Johnson. Charters’ book includes 21 chapters, not including the two appendixes
and the introduction. Thirteen of these chapters, including the introduction and final
chapter which reconstruct Charters’ interviews with Texas musician Sam “Lightnin’”
241
Hopkins, are specifically biographical, focusing entirely on male performers. Female
blues singers and instrumentalists are not absent from Charters’ account, but are folded
into chapters that deal with recording and publishing companies, record labels, and other
aspects of the business of music, reflecting the even-then longstanding revivalist division
between blues in its “natural” state, and what became of it in the commercial
marketplace, and identifying male performers with the former and female performers
with the latter.
Although Charters, much more than the revivalists who followed him, “tried to
keep the emphasis, as much as possible, where the black audience would have placed it,”
this gendered division between rural and urban blues represented a serious and influential
departure from that audience’s evaluations.103 As Wald explains:
The idea that some blues singers were “realer” than others would become
a commonplace (and a source of infinite arguments) among white
enthusiasts, but in the late 1930s it was quite new. Of course, plenty of
black record buyers appreciated blues as “real”–one of the music’s
greatest strengths had always been that it expressed what listeners were
experiencing in their daily lives–but they did not consider Bessie Smith’s
songs less real because she was wearing expensive gowns and backed by
painted sets and a jazz band, or Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson less real
because of their cool, urbane vocals.104
In fact, both Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson, sophisticated singers and instrumentalists
who came from rural backgrounds and made records in big cities which were popular
with both rural and urban black audiences, were included on the LP and discussed at
length in the text of The Country Blues. As Jeff Todd Titon notes, “Charters’ definitive
book reveals romantic enthusiasm born of existential commitment, and a conflict between
his personal taste and the aesthetic criteria he inferred from the black record audience.”105
242
The chapter on Lonnie Johnson, in particular, shows Charters straining to
reconcile his sincere commitment to honor the taste of black audiences with his own
revivalist sensibilities. He dismisses Johnson’s very successful recordings of “thin,
suggestive, or tasteless blues like “I Got The Best Jelly Roll In Town” and effusively
praises “the muted, personal blues that failed to reach a large audience,” casting the songs
where Johnson “sang with the emotional depth of a country singer, accompanying
himself with an individual style based on rural traditions” as exemplary pieces of what I
have termed unpopular popular music, authentic performances whose particular virtues
rendered them unsuitable for consumption by mass audiences in the thrall of disposable
popular products.106 Such a formulation, of course, also implicitly makes the case for the
critic, or in this case the critically minded activist and researcher, whose immersion in
authentic materials provides the discernment necessary to distinguish between the two.
For some, however, Charters wasn’t discerning enough. Within a year, Pete
Whelan and Bill Givens, veterans of the group of record collectors who had met during
the 1950s and half-jokingly dubbed themselves the “blues mafia,” had started a whole
record label dedicated to correcting what they saw as Charters’ failure to identify the
authentic canon of the rural blues in the book that had taken their private obsession with
obscure blues recordings and shared it with a much wider public. The first release on the
Origins Jazz Library label in 1960 was The Immortal Charlie Patton, a compilation of
sides by an obscure, intense, rough-voiced Mississippi Delta guitarist and singer who had
been the central focus of the group, and particularly of James McKune, a collector who
served as the group’s unofficial ringleader and guide. The second OJL release, entitled
Really! The Country Blues, featured songs by male performers mostly but not entirely
243
from the Delta like Son House, Skip James, and Ishmon Bracey, and was intended
specifically as a refutation of Charters book and compilation.107 Really! The Country
Blues included liner notes by jazz critic Marshall Stearns, whose glowing review in the
New York Times of The Country Blues had helped elevate the book’s profile and
popularize this new interest in obscure, decades-old African American performers.108
There were differences between Charters and the OJL contingent that went deeper
than what might seem, on the surface, like a cutting contest over critical authority. While
not explicitly political, Charters’s book was, as Hamilton says, “a work of advocacy,”
one which placed the blues squarely at the center of a romanticized but sincere portrait of
a black culture whose vibrant contributions to American culture were, in Charters’
opinion, obscured by racism.109 Charters later characterized his aim in publishing the
book as “a kind of naïve belief that if America could be made to face its problems it
would begin the effort to solve them.”110
In contrast to Charters’ populist textual activism and his stated but inconsistently
applied intention to be guided by the interest of African American audiences, the
members of the “blues mafia” were vanguardist aesthetes who considered black popular
taste a no more reliable guide than white popular taste and took the neglect of figures like
Patton, whose sides had not sold well even on the limited market for race records, as
proof. For them, the rare records they had spent considerable time and resources
collecting, categorizing, and arguing over represented a trove of knowledge. James B.
Dougan argues that “what galled virtually all of the blues record collectors who read
Charters was his disinterest in mastering a corpus of information that centered on dates,
244
places, record labels and matrix numbers.”111 As Pete Whelan, interviewed in 2001
argued, “The Country Blues was real, just not real enough.”112
In the end, the effect of these competing discourses was cumulative. Both the OJL
reissues and The Country Blues LP were part of a wave of recorded material released in
the late 1950s and early 1960s which represents an alchemical use of this corpus of
information: the transmutation of obscure commercial recordings into documentary
artifacts and the production of new documentary artifacts which also functioned as
commercial recordings.113 This process had been persuasively codified on Harry Smith’s
1952 six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music which collected, under the banner of
“American folk music,” early race and old-time records reclassified idiosyncratically by
Smith as ”Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs,” a schema which, significantly, erased
the racial division instituted when the material was originally issued.114 Much has been
written about Smith’s anthology, and it is rightly recognized as a touchstone for the larger
folk revival, for which it archived an otherwise scarcely available repertoire.115 Most of
the writing about it, particularly in Greil Marcus’ 1999 monograph The Old Weird
America, stresses the collection’s unique place in the history of American recorded song,
and the immediate and lasting impact it had on those who encountered it, both of which
are confirmed by the tendency of those affected to refer it simply as “The Anthology.”116
Despite its singular impact, however, I would argue that we can also see The Anthology
of American Folk Music, especially in its 1997 CD reissue edition, as part of the
transformational process of unpopular popular music, wherein commercial recordings are
recast and preserved and eventually marketed as authentic vernacular expression. As
such, The Anthology continued and concretized a revivalist discourse that understood the
245
sounds of rural black and white southerners as occurring in a state of nature; the same
discourse which animated John Hammond Sr.’s performance of phonographic revivalism
onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1938.
Such a discourse places a premium on obscurity and dislocation, constructing the
most poorly represented performances, in terms of either sonic fidelity or market
presence, or both, as the most authentic. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the
publication of Charters’ text and Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the
Folk Blues, examples of this odd combination of curatorial snobbery and salvage
anthropology began to occupy a small but significant corner of the pop marketplace.117
There, it provided “a meaningful musical alternative to the vapid insistency of rock and
roll” and “one way of asserting humanity in an absurd universe” for a constituency that
musicologist and American Studies scholar Jeff Todd Titon, who counted himself as one
of that constituency, described as “feeling confined by the small world of our high school
and the getting-and-spending of our parents.”118 A complete accounting of the blues
recordings that inspired this constituency would occupy at least another chapter, but a
few instructive examples include Charters’ own recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins and
Furry Lewis, issued in 1959 and 1961 respectively, on Moses Asch’s Folkways Records
label, like The Country Blues, and The Anthology had been, a Library of Congress LP of
recordings that Alan Lomax and John Work III had made in the Mississippi Delta in
1942, and new recordings of a Texas sharecropper named Mance Lipscomb which
appeared on the fledgling Arhoolie label.119
Arhoolie’s founder, Chris Strachwitz, had gone to Texas in 1960 hoping to record
his favorite guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins, but had been unable to do so because Hopkins,
246
capitalizing on his appearance in Charters’ book, was in California performing at a folk
festival. That Hopkins, who had recorded electric, rhythm and blues oriented sides for a
dizzying number of small labels during the late 1940s and early 1950s, had so quickly
reinvented himself as a folk artist suggests the increasingly elastic nature of the barrier
between popular and vernacular, as well as the suddenly evident rewards for casting
oneself as a folk performer. That Strachwitz, unable to find the musician he sought, was
able to successfully interest the new country blues audience in an unknown, guitarplaying farmer suggests not only that Strachwitz had an ear for talent, but also that the
blues revivalists had begun to countenance the notion of living, and not just recorded
vernacular texts. Within a few months, John Fahey, a musician and a graduate of the
University of California at Berkeley’s folklore program, had found Son House, an early
idol of Robert Johnson’s who was featured on Really! The Country Blues, living in a
housing project in New Jersey, and within the year other veterans of Depression-era
country blues, including Skip James, Bukka White, and Mississippi John Hurt, were
located.120
Jeff Todd Titon has said, regarding blues revivalist activities:
The governing metaphor at the time for what we were doing was
“discovery” and “rediscovery,” as if what we were doing was finding
something that was unknown or had been lost. But the notion of discovery
is complex, and as anyone knows who has thought about the grade school
“fact” that Columbus discovered America. Our discoveries, like those of
the European explorers, were mixtures of invention and interpretation, and
in a way, instead of finding our object, blues, we constituted it.”121
In his important book Blues Music in the 60s, Ulrich Adelt has shown how the
“rediscovery” of these musicians often “revealed white fantasies of an unthreatening and
pastoral southern past,” and, exposed them to yet another round of financial exploitation
247
at the hands of a still white-dominated recording industry.122 Without contradicting
these insightful, critical observations, I want to carefully introduce another perspective,
one which complicates rather than refutes these analyses and which suggests that the (re)
constitution of the blues by revivalists could engender more than pastoral fantasies. In
order to do so, I will quote, at length, two versions of the same story by James Luther
“Jim” Dickinson, a Memphis musician and record collector who came of age in the late
1950s. As he explains in the section that precede this one, his first exposures to blues
were both accidental: As a child, he saw members of the Memphis Jug Band performing
on Beale Street, and later, when his father went to do some repair work at a radio station,
he encountered Howlin’ Wolf in live performance. Here, he explains how Charters’s
book gave him a frame of reference for these experiences:
When Sam Charters wrote the book of Country Blues in 1959 it was the
first book on the blues. Although it's filled with misinformation, it's still
probably the best book on the rural blues. I assumed incorrectly this music
was antique. I should have known from seeing Howlin' Wolf on the radio
broadcasting from West Memphis, Arkansas. I didn't know who he was,
but heard the music, followed the music, saw the strange black man
playing, till my father came and got me, just like with the jug band.
I knew the music was there, somewhere out in the bushes, but I couldn't
get to it. Through books, I thought I could. When Charters came through
Memphis, being a Yankee and relatively insensitive, he cut quite a wide
path. I just followed his path. By following his path I found Gus Cannon,
who was first for me. He was right there, cutting somebody's yard. Gus
told me where Furry [Lewis] was. Hell, I thought Furry Lewis was dead.
He was sweeping Beale Street twice a day with a garbage can on wheels
and a push broom. He did it for 36 years. When he retired, the city found
out he had only had one leg, which made him disabled therefore
unemployable, so he didn't get any of his benefits. And that's why they call
it the blues.123
Below is another version of Dickinson’s account of this history, also a recorded oral
narrative.
248
In the summer of 1960, a friend and I followed the trail that Charters left
to Gus Cannon… He was the yardman for an anthropology professor. Gus
had told this family that he used to make records and he had been on RCA
and they’d say, “Yeah Gus, sure: cut the grass.” … He lived on the
property, back over a garage, and he took us up into his room, and on the
wall he had a certificate for sales from ‘Walk Right In’, for which of
course he didn’t get any money. And he had a copy of the record that
Charters had made for Folkways, but he had no record-player. That was a
real good introduction to the blues.124
I have quoted Dickinson at length because his account illustrates the imaginative
and transformative power of the white encounter with the black “other” in blues music,
and because it does so in a way that suggests that, even as such crossover moments reify
the barriers whose crossing they celebrate, they also engender possibilities for knowledge
of self and place, and knowledge of those barriers themselves. We should note in the
accounts above that in both cases the understanding that Dickinson describes as “an
introduction to the blues” is an understanding of uneven rewards and of racialized
structural barriers. Furry Lewis, a living and gifted exponent of African American
musical traditions, is exploited twice-over by the city of Memphis, once as a laborer and
once in retirement. Gus Canon, another living exponent of African American musical
traditions, is employed doing yard work for a white professor who is, ironically, a
professional expert on “culture.” In both cases, Dickinson leads us towards the raced and
classed hierarchies that structure life in Memphis, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta,
the region which would eventually become more deeply identified with the genre that
Charters had called the country blues than any other.
The adaptation of the term “Delta blues” for this genre seems to be
overdetermined and, like almost any successful act of genrification, difficult to trace to
any concrete source. Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues, a popular press
249
monograph drawn from Hamilton’s scholarly work published in peer reviewed journals,
functions as a an in-depth account of the genre’s formation, despite not referring
explicitly to genre theory. Hamilton offers no specific source, but notes that “By the late
1960s, the phrase “country blues” being perhaps too tainted by Charters’
misapprehensions, aficionados relabeled the music “Delta blues.”125 Dougan points out
that “many of Origin Jazz Library’s subsequent releases…contributed to canon formation
by offering aural evidence supporting Whelan’s argument (an argument traceable to
Charles Peabody in 1903) that the music of the Mississippi Delta was the ur-text of the
blues tradition.”126 But it was Robert Johnson, a singer featured in The Country Blues,
whose 1963 Columbia LP The King of the Delta Blues Singers became a touchstone for
the music, thanks in part to the prominence of that LP and to the embrace of Johnson by
prominent white guitarists, especially Eric Clapton, who was particularly vocal about
Johnson’s effect on his own playing.127
One cannot, I think, simply credit this LP and Johnson’s posthumous career with
the widespread acceptance of the term, but it is hard to separate them, and their meanings
in American public memory have become thoroughly co-identified. The Robert Johnson
mythos has a strong geographical component, from his identification as a rootless, rural
wanderer, to the search for the mythical crossroads where he supposedly sold his soul to
the devil, to the dispute over where his physical body is buried. The Mississippi Delta, a
fertile triangle of land bound by the Mississippi River on the west and the Yazoo River
on the east, serves, in this mythos, as affective geography: a landscape whose physical
and historical attributes embody linkages between ideas and emotions that circulate as
structures of feeling and knowing. The Delta contains some of the richest land in the
250
Southeastern cotton belt and is, in many ways, ground zero for the post-bellum Southern
plantation economy, whose structures of labor and loss Johnson sought to escape by
working as a wandering musician rather than a sharecropper. While the story of his
Faustian bargain has been debunked, the high stakes invoked by the narrative speak to the
conditions of the Delta and the extreme measures that African American inhabitants
considered as means of survival and escape. And, of course, both sets of crossroads and
all three gravesites claimed to be those in the Johnson narrative are found within the
Delta’s borders.
The reconstruction of the Delta in the popular imagination of blues enthusiasts
diverges from the actual Delta in a number of ways. Like the “country” blues which it
replaced, the Delta blues is understood to be a “rural” music, and its practitioners to be
“rural” residents. But the Delta has not historically been a typical rural environment (to
the degree that such a thing exists) and in many ways it challenges the notion of discrete
boundaries between rural and urban environments. David Evans argues that, during the
decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, when these “rural” blues were
originally recorded, “The highly intensified plantation and sharecropping system made
the region somewhat like a rural factory.”128 And Alan Lomax, whose revival-era
writings did as much as any to shape the image of the Delta as rural and pre-modern,
described it in 1993 as “a sort of industrial frontier,” whose conditions informed the
music that emerged from it.129 According to Lomax, “Feelings of anomie and alienation,
of orphaning and rootlessness: the sense of being a commodity rather than a person; the
loss of love and of family and of place—this modern syndrome was the norm for the
cotton farmers and the transient laborers of the Deep South a hundred years ago.”130 Tony
251
Thomas offers a more practical explanation for the region’s rich African American
soundscape, noting the large black population, the vibrant cash economy for workers, the
presence of the Mississippi River and multiple railroads, the imbrication with nearby
Memphis and with St. Louis and Chicago, and “the density of settlements and plantations
[which] encouraged musical exchange.”131
Its worth noting that neither “Delta blues” nor “country blues” has any greater
objective authenticity, if any genre term could be held to even have such a quality.
Neither term has any historical basis in usage by the music’s black audience, who would
have, and still do, refer to this music as “downhome blues,” but who, in using that term,
do not distinguish so discretely between urban and rural forms.132 It is also worth noting
that the Delta did produce a startling number of influential blues musicians besides
Robert Johnson, and that many of these musicians do share enough stylistic traits to use
the term “Delta blues” to indicate a particular style, a style marked by a percussive
approach to the guitar, the simultaneous fingerpicking of basslines and upper-register
melodic counterpoint, and a plaintive, sometimes falsetto vocal.133 But, these
characteristics are shared by blues players from outside the region, and there are plenty of
musicians from the Delta, such as Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis, who sound
completely different. This is not to say that it’s a meaningless designation, but that, in its
common vernacular usage as a generic title, its imaginative associations are more
important and coherent than its musical associations.
As the Delta blues emerged in the early 1960s, those imaginative associations
coalesced around the figures of “re-discovered” rural blues players like Son House and
Skip James, who, in the imagination of researchers and fans, became iconic figures,
252
signifying a mysterious, unreachable, pastoral past. As such, these men offered to young
white bohemians a romantic vision of blackness, one that contrasted with the one
projected by an increasingly militant civil rights movement. In his 1966 book Urban
Blues, musicologist Charles Keil drew a scathing portrait of the architects of the blues
revival and the figure of the Delta bluesman that they had constructed:
Samuel Charters, Paul Oliver, Harold Courlander, Harry Oster, Pete
Welding, Mack McCormick—even Alan Lomax until recently—share a
number of interests of preoccupations, first and foremost of which is a
quest for the “real blues.” The criteria for a real blues singer, implicit or
explicit, are the following. Old age: the performer should preferably be
more than sixty years old, blind, arthritic, and toothless (as Lonnie
Johnson put it when first approached for an interview, “are you another
one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?”). Obscurity:
the blues singer should not have performed in public or made a recording
in at least twenty years; among deceased bluesmen, the best seem to be
those who appeared in a big city one day in the 1920s, made from four to
six recordings, and then disappeared into the countryside forever. Correct
tutelage: the singer should have played with or been taught by some
legendary figure. Agrarian milieu: a bluesman should have lived the bulk
of his life as a sharecropper, coaxing mules, picking cotton,
uncontaminated by city influence.134
Keil also offered an explanation for the appeal of this construction:
There is an honest and laudable interest in alleviating Negro suffering, or
at least to make it known to the world in every blues book, Paul Oliver’s
Blues Fell this Morning being a notable example. Yet I can almost
imagine some of these authors helping to set up a “reservation” or
Bantustan for old bluesmen; it is often that sort of liberalism. There is
also an escapist element in these writings. By concentrating on old timers
and scorning today’s blues as commercial or decadent, the writer can
effectively avert his eyes from the urban ghetto conditions that spawn
contemporary forms.135
Its worth noting that the imaginative construction of the Delta and its inhabitants elided
not only contemporary urban conditions for African Americans, but rural ones as well. At
the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Alan Lomax and other festival organizers arranged to
have the blues players who performed there housed in rough shacks intended to
253
approximate Depression-era Delta levee camp conditions.136 That same year, in the
actual Delta, local civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and civil rights workers James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered for trying to organize
politically disenfranchised Delta residents in order to change conditions like this.
Keil’s book is perhaps the first really substantial book on the blues, substantial in
its attention to musical detail, historical fact, and social context. There is no book on
blues from this era that is similarly unsentimental. But, like the revivalist writers he
scorns, and like Baraka, who he critiques more carefully and generously, Keil
concentrates on male blues performers. As he notes in his introduction, Keil was
“primarily concerned with an expressive male role within urban lower-class Negro
culture—that of the contemporary bluesman.”137 Like the term “Delta blues,” the term
“bluesman” has become such a fundamental part of our musical-historical vocabulary
that its distorting effects, although widely felt, are almost impossible to see. Adam
Gussow notes that, until his research showed otherwise, he had assumed that the term
predated the revival of the early 1960s, but this is not the case.138 In fact, the revivalists’
constitution of and investment in the Delta bluesman re-narrated the music’s past by delegitimizing the urban, female performers who formed the music’s original core of
commercially successful, influential performers.
Marybeth Hamilton, in her analysis of the critical infrastructure of male scholars
and record collectors whose discursive work undergirds the revival, describes the
revivalist construction of the bluesman as an imaginative expression of thoughts and
feelings that were otherwise inexpressible within contemporaneous structures of
masculinity:
254
As revivalists drew him, the bluesman could swagger, but he could also be
vulnerable, and it was his vulnerability—Son House’s weeping body—
that drew them most profoundly into his music. Embedded in their search
for the authentic was a sensitivity to emotion, a desire to be deeply moved
by manifestations of inner feelings. In their hands, the search for authentic
black voices was a spiritual quest infused with what for men were
forbidden desires: to dissolve boundaries, renounce autonomy, merge with
the wellsprings of life. Revivalists channeled that search for life sources
into the blues and in the process remade the tradition. At their most
positive, they enriched understanding and broadened white horizons. At
their worst, they fed on a faintly colonialist romance with black suffering,
an eroticization of African American despair.139
Hamilton’s analysis offers us the chance to understand the bluesman as the central
character in a genre narrative that functions, in Burkean or Jamesonian terms, as a
socially symbolic act: one that resolves lived or felt contradictions within an expressive
framework. In this case, what the narrative resolves are the contradictions of hegemonic
masculinity in American culture before the emergence of second wave feminism. Not
only does the bluesman construct, as Hamilton argues, a voice for “forbidden desires,”
his rootless mobility also suggests a freedom from the routine containment necessitated
by middle-class striving. It may seem strikingly short-sighted that, in the years before the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a rural black
man from Mississippi, where upwards of 90% of the black population could not legally
vote, would function as a cipher for white dreams of freedom from the constraints of
relative privilege. But, this perhaps makes more sense if we consider the delta bluesman
as the rural mirror of the urban African Americans who so long occupied the center of
similar fantasies for the white hipsters lionized to the point of caricature in Norman
Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” that they
have simply become unremarkable.140 Viewed in this light, the revivalist affection for
255
the rural Delta bluesman is a restrained shadow of the quest to become a “voluntary
Negro” detailed by Jewish swing clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow in his 1948 autobiography
Really The Blues.141 More so than most crossover narratives, Mezzrow’s evocative and
almost tragically Negrophilic tale ultimately affirms the barriers whose breach it so
proudly announces.142 The near-religious adoration by revivalists of performers such as
Mississippi John Hurt is part of the same long process.143 Except here, what Andrew
Ross calls “The everyday, plagiaristic, commerce between white and black musics” has
another effect: the revivalist embrace of the acoustic, rural, male blues musician as the
iconographic embodiment of folkloric authenticity delegitimizes urban, female blues
singers by virtue of the role played by the latter in the commercial history of the blues.144
While, as Keil notes in his critique of the 1960s revivalist, purists showed little
interest in electric, urban blues, the same could not be said for white rock players like
Clapton, Robbie Robertson, and Mike Bloomfield, who paid homage to rural bluesmen
while playing music that sounded more like the urban, electric blues that Keil analyzed.
Their discourse and their musical practice combined help to popularize a narrative that
constructed the rural blues, understood to be the province of male musicians, as the direct
antecedent of rock and roll. It is this narrative that places Chuck Berry, who, along with
Mahalia Jackson and Big Maybelle, had performed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958,
at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. It is this narrative that is invoked in 1967, when
Furry Lewis is introduced at a Memphis coffeehouse by the proprietor, who explains that
“without the tradition of American Negro music, there would be no rock music.”145
And, the same narrative is invoked by Greil Marcus in 1975 when he writes that
“[Robert] Johnson seemed to take more pure pleasure out of making music than any other
256
Delta singer; there is rock’n’roll fun in his guitar playing you can hear anytime you like.
He was, I think, working out a whole new aesthetic that rock’n’roll eventually
completed.”146
As with most such narratives, it is not so much that it is untrue as it is that it is not
the whole truth: there are significant musical connections between the kind of rural blues
that were practiced mostly by men in Depression-era Mississippi and rock and roll. But,
my concern in isolating it here has less to do with its truth value than in its effects on
blues and rock and roll as they function in American popular memory, eclipsing the role
of women in founding the former, while legitimating the latter as authentic unpopular
popular music. In the genre narrative of rock and roll, the notion that the Delta blues sits
at the music’s root lends it credibility as both folk music and “black music,” a credibility
that is critically narrated just as rock and roll, re-cast as “rock,” becomes the single
dominant genre in the popular market. The paradox here is easily illustrated by William
G. Roy’s analysis of how these notions work in popular discourse:
Folk music inverts the conventional relationship between cultural and
social hierarchy. The cultural elite of the folk project have valorized folk
music precisely because it is the music of the common folk…Analogous
to the way that folk music inverts the association of refinement and high
status, popular music inverts the ordinary hierarchy of race. “Black” is
typically a term of affirmation, and “white” carries a connotation of
lifelessness or dullness.147
The work that the Delta blues does in affirming rock music as the most popular of any
unpopular popular music is, as I have argued, based on fundamental misapprehensions
about the men who played it and their relation to the genre as a whole. Rather than
simply wandering troubadours who carried music that came to them “naturally,” these
men were professional musicians, whose wandering reflected the Depression-era
257
breakdown of the tent show and music hall circuit operated by the Theater Owners
Booking Agency (TOBA).148 Their presence on the margins of the capitalist economy
reflects neither their essential alienation from mainstream society (at least not any more
than it would any other marginalized worker) nor their special entrée into the vernacular
enclave of authenticity that comprises “the folk” in popular discourse. It does, however,
reflect the fact that their most gainful musical employment had been in the context of
shows largely headlined by female performers.
This is not to argue that the quality of realness, what we might call verisimilitude
(but which is often identified as authenticity) that countless musicians, critics, and fans
have identified as a central characteristic of the blues is entirely a creation of
overenthusiastic revivalist outsiders. Blues has historically dealt with the hard facts of
African American life. But the fact that it has done so reflects not only a deep
relationship between the music and the African American communities that its forms
were nurtured in, it also reflects the negotiations between musicians and audiences who
were members of those communities and a larger, national public, through a music
industry and a folklore establishment guided by essentialist notions of what the “black
music” that emanated from those communities should sound like. The blues is vernacular
music, although not in the sense that “vernacular” is an exact synonym for “folk.”
Rather, the blues is vernacular music in the sense that the word refers to the language of
everyday speech in a world where, even for musicians, the everyday is structured by
labor and work. The revivalist insistence that the authentic blues spoke to or sang a
world that was somehow free of these strictures meant that the voices of the women
whose musical labor first provided pleasure, leisure, and narratives of resistance to
258
oppression for African American audiences, were largely muted in the wake of the 1960s
blues revival.
Coda: Really The Blues!
Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were among the first women blues singers to
be recorded, and with Clara Smith, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox,
Rosa Henderson, Victoria Spivey and Lucille Hegamin, they dominated
the blues-recording industry throughout the twenties.[sic] It has often
been asserted that this recording of the blues compromised and adulterated
a pure folk form of the blues, but the combination of the vaudeville,
carnival, and minstrel shows and the phonograph meant that the “folk
blues” and the culture industry product were inextricably mixed in the
twenties. By 1928 the blues sung by blacks were only secondarily of folk
origin, and the primary source for the group transmission of the blues was
by phonograph, which was then joined by radio.
Hazel Carby149
The revival of Bessie Smith, the other ghost at the 1938 “From Spirituals To
Swing” concert, likely begins at the first annual Conference on Sexuality, Politics, and
Power, held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley Massachusetts, in September of
1986. It is not Carnegie Hall, but it is a stage of sorts. The revival is conducted by Hazel
Carby, a Marxist-feminist theorist born in England of Welsh and Jamaican parents who
had, two years earlier, earned a PhD from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
in Birmingham, where she had attended graduate school after spending almost a decade
as a high school history teacher. Carby is delivering a paper entitled “It Jus’ Be’s Dat
Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Black Women’s Blues.”150 In this presentation,
Carby argues that “what has been called the ‘Classic Blues,’ the women’s blues of the
twenties and early thirties, is a discourse that articulates a cultural and political struggle
over sexual relations: a struggle that is directed against the objectification of female
sexuality within a patriarchal order, but which also tries to reclaim women’s bodies as the
sexual and sensual subjects of women’s song.”151 It is tempting to think of the revival as
259
textual, as opposed to Hammond’s phonographic one, but here I want to recover to some
degree the oral and aural nature of presenting such a work, something that is often lost in
academic references to academic writing, even as such performances remain crucial to
establishing careers in academia.
It is, I think, important to at least note the essay’s oral performance because
Carby’s intent was to intervene in a discourse of academic feminism that she found too
focused on the written word. In that essay, she argues that:
Within feminist theory, the cultural production of black women writers
has been analyzed in isolation from other forms of women’s culture and
cultural presence and has neglected to relate particular texts and issues to a
larger discourse of culture and cultural politics. I want to show how the
representation of black female sexuality in black women’s fiction and in
women’s blues is clearly different. I argue that different cultural forms
negotiate and resolve very different sets of social contradictions.152
Carby’s concern was to elucidate the way that a feminist focus on black women’s writing
from the 1920s accidentally replicated middle-class discourses regarding sexuality and
muted the voices of working class and poor women. Drawing on the work of Sandra
Lieb and Shirley Anne Williams, and on lyrics to songs sung by Bessie Smith, Ida Cox,
and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Carby noted the ways that what she called “women’s blues”
articulated the positions of these women in regard to mobility and migration, gender
relations, and queer sexuality.
Around the same time, a trio of African American women who called themselves
Saffire the Uppity Blues Women began performing around the Washington, DC area. In
1987 they put out a cassette-only recording entitled Middle Age Blues on their own label,
and in 1990 signed to Alligator Records and released Uppity Women Blues. Over the next
two decades, Saffire released ten recordings that featured both covers of songs like “Wild
260
Women Don’t Get The Blues” from the classic blues era, and original songs such as “The
Equalizer,” “Dump That Chump,” and “Bitch With Attitude” before disbanding in 2009.
Their records are consistently marked by assertive, feminist themes, ribald humor, and an
anti-ageist stance reflecting the fact that they were middle-aged when they started
performing, a rarity in a music business that has consistently survived by marketing youth
to youth.
In highlighting Saffire and the Uppity Blues Women here, I do not wish to create
the impression that there was no female presence in the blues from the end of the 1960s
revival until the 1980s. Although the figure of the bluesman—electric or acoustic—
dominated post-revival blues musicking, singers like Etta James and Koko Taylor did
manage to forge fairly high-profile careers through the 1970s. Easily the most prominent
blues-playing female performer was and is Bonnie Raitt, a white singer and slide guitarist
who began playing coffeehouses in Boston during the 1960s revival and went on to have
several increasingly less blues-themed hit records in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early
1980s, Jessie Mae Hemphill—a North Mississippi hill country singer, guitarist, and
percussionist whose grandfather, Sid Hemphill, had been recorded by Alan Lomax in the
1940s—began performing at festivals in and around Memphis before releasing albums
and eventually touring the United States and Europe. Hemphill, who called herself the
She-Wolf, had appeared in field recordings made by George Mitchell in 1967, and had
begun working with folklore scholar David Evans of the University of Mississippi in
1973. She often performed by herself, using the heels and spurs of her cowboy boots to
provide percussive accompaniment for the repetitive riffs and hypnotic, one-chord vamps
which she often sang over. Her music drew upon the rhythmic patterns and melodic
261
figures associated with the blues-styles music of the north Mississippi hill country, and
she also played snare and bass drum in the fife and drum ensembles native to the region.
Although all of these women represented anomalies in a male-dominated blues milieu,
Hemphill—a rural-sounding, African American, female, multi-instrumentalist—
particularly complicated received notions of what a blues performer might look and
sound like. The fact that Hemphill’s music is informed not only by her “folk” roots but
also by the songs and sounds of performers like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters whose
commercial recordings travelled back down to Memphis and the Delta from Chicago also
represents a contradiction to the standard rural to urban, South to North narrative that
most often explains the development of the blues.
Saffire’s unique contribution, however, was to recuperate the “classic blues” of
the 1920s in the popular realm, even as niche performers, and it is remarkable that they
began doing that just as a textual recuperation of that same material got underway.
Probably the most prominent contribution to the re-genrification of classic blues is
Angela Davis 1995 Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Billie Holliday153. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism operates primarily
through close readings of these women’s songs and is, according to Davis, “an inquiry
into the ways their recorded performances divulge unacknowledged traditions of feminist
consciousness in working-class black communities.”154
Davis’ book, which draws upon the same musically broad and ethnically-centered
definition of blues as Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, incorporating “bluesy” jazz singers
like Billie Holiday into the genre, provides an important corrective to the androcentric
focus shared by Baraka and the revivalist tradition of blues scholarship. As such, it
262
remains in important intervention into the ways that race, class, and gender have shaped
American memory and culture as a whole. It does, however, have some limitations as a
resource for investigating either blues as a genre or the historical contingencies that
shaped the production of the songs she investigates. These limitations are part and parcel
of the book’s focus and methodology, as Davis notes early on that “while I try and situate
their recorded performances, the primary material with which I work, in relation to
historical developments of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, I am most concerned with how
these women’s performances appear through the prism of the present, and with what
these interpretations can tell us about past and present forms of social consciousness.”155
Although her analysis of the aesthetic materials she surveys is intellectually sophisticated
and insightful, and her survey of materials is broad and detailed, her analysis is
(purposefully) not contextualized within a clear portrait of the commercial structures
these women, the male musicians who accompanied them and their audiences operated
under. This is to some degree a necessary by-product of the creative recuperation of
women’s blues as a distinct subgenre within the larger genre of blues in general, and as
an argument for the meaning of that particular category rather than a detailed historical
analysis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is quite effective.
Carby’s writings on blues women are decidedly less expansive but are arguably
marked by a greater historical specificity and a more complex theorization of economic
structures. Although both are valuable, Carby’s is, in my estimation, the more satisfying,
though much shorter text. If there is a shared limitation here, and I believe there is, it is
that both work from the notion that there is or was such a thing as “classic blues,” a
discrete, objectively formed canon of songs, singers, and performances whose
263
investigation awaits their analysis rather than being created by their analysis previous to
its transformation into the genre of black women’s blues. Carby uses this genre to point
to ways that we can learn things about the lives of black women in the 1920s that African
American women’s writing cannot tell us; Davis reinvents it convincingly in the present
as a womanist archive, a newly-usable past. However, I believe that accepting classic
blues as a genre—without attending to its status as a discursive separation of the blues
that women dominated the commercial market with from the authentic(ated), folkloric
blues that W.C. Handy discovered in a “state of nature” is, I argue, unnecessarily
conceding the larger territory at stake in these negotiations.
264
Notes
1
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues: the Roots, the Music, the People, from
Charley Patton to Robert Cray. New York: Hyperion Books, 1995. p. 9.
2
Barlow, William. “Looking up at down”: the Emergence of Blues Culture.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. p. 326. Also quoted in Wald, Elijah.
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York:
Amistad, 2004. p. 282. Wald notes that “Both Josh White in South Carolina, and Henry
Townsend in the Mississippi Delta, recalled their parents referring to their blues records
ad “reels.” Fred McDowell, who was a generation or so younger than either White or
Townsend also claims that “the old songs, the real old songs, they don’t have nothin’ to
do with no blues. They was called reels was what they was called” in a snippet of
recorded in-studio dialogue appended to the beginning of one of his songs on the rereleased and expanded version of his album I Do Not Play no Rock and Roll. See
McDowell, Fred. I Do Not Play No Rock “N” Roll. [Hollywood, CA]: Capitol Records,
1995. (Originally released 1968).
3
Eli’s Chosen Six.; New Yorker Films.; Galaxy Attractions (Firm); Raven Films.; New
Yorker Video (Firm), and Bert Sterns. Jazz on a Summer’s Day. New York, NY: New
Yorker Films; Distributed by New Yorker Video, 2000.
4
For example, see Appel, Alfred, and Bert Stern. “Review of Jazz on a Summer’s Day.”
Film Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1960): 56–57. Banfield, William C. Representing Black Music
Culture: Then, Now, and When Again? Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2011.
Christopher A. Waterman and Larry Starr. American Popular Music: from Minstrelsy to
MP3. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Murphy, Paula. “Films for the
Black Music Researcher.” Black Music Research Journal 7 (January 1, 1987): 45–64.
O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. Uptown
Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Columbia University Press, 2004. Saul, Scott.
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003. Thomajan, D. “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” Film
Comment 33, no. 4 (1997): 38–39. Werner, Craig Hansen. A Change Is Gonna Come:
Music, Race & the Soul of America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
5
For more on The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, see Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift:
“All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
6
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995. p. 14.
7
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press, 1981.
8
Wald, Escaping the Delta. p. 254.
265
Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st ed.
New York: Amistad, 2004. p. 255.
9
.
10
Gussow, Adam. “‘Where Is the Love?’: Racial Violence, Racial Healing, and Blues
Communities.” Southern Cultures 12, no. 4 (2006): 33–54. This article also appears in
Gussow, Adam. Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to
Post-9 11 New York. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
11
For analysis of the spaces, venues, and structures of blues tourism, see Dempsey, Brian
Davis. “Refuse to Fold: Blues Heritage Tourism and the Mississippi Delta”, 2009. Ferris,
W. “Local Color: Fostering an American Sense of Place—Journeys Through the
Mississippi Delta Hold Important Lessons for Museums About Cultural Tourism and
Self-discovery.” Museum News -Washington- 75, no. 5 (1996): 42–49.
Fry, Robert Webb, and Frank D Gunderson. “We Are the Blues: Individual and
Communal Performances of the King Biscuit Tradition”. 2010. King, Stephen A. “Blues
Tourism in the Mississippi Delta: The Functions of Blues Festivals.” Popular Music &
Society 27, no. 4 (2004): 455–475. ———. I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues
Tourism and the Mississippi Delta. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. King,
Stephen. “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums: Constructive Authenticity and the
Primitive Blues Subject.” Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 3 (2006): 235–250.
McGinley, Paige A, and Speech and Dance Brown University. Dept. of Theatre. “Sound
Travels: Performing Diaspora and the Imagined American South.”, 2008. Osteen,
Katherine, and University of Mississippi. Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “The
Blues Is Alright Blues Music as a Root for Cultural Tourism and Public History”, 2011.
Prichard, Forrest Ansel. “Fighting the Blues with Blues How Indianola, Mississippi Used
Delta Blues Tourism to Develop a New Identity”, 2010. Raussert, Wilfried, and
Christine Seeliger. “What Did I Do to Be so Global and Blue?’’: Blues as Commodity:
Tourism, Politics of Authenticity, and Blues Clubs in Chicago Today.” Selling Ethnicity
(2011): 41–54.
12
Bruner, Edward M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005. p. 150.
13
Wald, Escaping the Delta.
14
The quote is from Gussow, Adam. “Racing Down the Blues, an Interview with Adam
Gussow”, n.d. http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/310981in.html. For a full citation
of Gussow’s monograph Seems Like Murder Here, see note 17.
15
A bibliography of revisionist histories of the origins of the blues would have to include
the following texts: Banfield, William C. Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now,
and When Again? Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2011. Carby, Hazel. The Sexual
Politics of Women’s Blues. Ann Arbor: ProQuest Information and Learning, 2005.
Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical
Inquiry 18, no. 4 (July 1, 1992): 738–755. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Random House
266
Digital, Inc., 2011. Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York:
Hyperion, 1995. Gussow, Adam. Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from
Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9 11 New York. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
2007. ———. Mister Satan’s Apprentice: a Blues Memoir. 1st Ed. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1998. ———. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search
of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009. ———. “Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the
Blues Tradition.” Past & Present, no. 169 (November 1, 2000): 132–160. Lawson, R. A.
Jim Crow’s Counterculture: the Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound:
Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010.
Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Radano, Ronald Michael, and Philip Vilas
Bohlman. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000. Ramsey, Guthrie. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. Roy, William G. Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social
Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the
Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Amistad, 2004.
16
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996. p. 249-250.
17
Herskovits, Melville. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
18
Handy, W. C, and Arna Bontemps. Father of the Blues, an Autobiography. New York:
The Macmillan Co., 1941. p.74.
19
Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009. p. 45.
20
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. p. 19.
21
Ibid.
22
“Musicking” is Christopher Small’s wonderfully useful term intended to defeat the
reifying effects that follow the construction of an abstract “thing” called music from the
concrete and diverse array of socially embedded musical practices. See Small,
Christopher. Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1998.
23
Although Greyser did not originate the term “affective geography, it is here use of it
that I am most influenced by. See Greyser, Naomi. “Affective Geographies: Sojourner
Truth’s Narrative, Feminism, and the Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism.” American
267
Literature; a Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography. 79, no. 2 (2007):
275.
24
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. p. 20.
25
Charters, Samuel Barclay. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. p. 35.
26
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age
of Jim Crow. Duke University Press, 2010. p. 148.
27
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: an Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. p. 128.
28
“Crazy Blues” can be found on Smith, Mamie. Crazy Blues the Best of Mamie Smith.
New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy, 2004. For such a historically important recording,
there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues.”
An insightful exception is Gussow, Adam. “‘Shoot Myself a Cop’: Mamie Smith’s
‘Crazy Blues’ as Social Text.” Callaloo 25, no. 1 (2002): 8–44. An expanded version of
this article can be found as the first chapter in Gussow, Adam. Seems Like Murder Here:
Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
29
Both are available on Smith, Bessie. The Essential Bessie Smith. New York:
Columbia/Legacy, 1997. For more on Smith, see the authoritative biography by Chris
Albertson: Albertson, Chris. Bessie. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.
30
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926.
31
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
Locke, Alain LeRoy. The Negro and His Music. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press,
1968.
32
See Filene, Romancing the Folk. Hamilton, Searching for the Blues. Miller,
Segregating Sound. For a critical history of folklore studies as a discipline, see also
Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity the Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
33
Filene, Romancing the Folk. p. 31.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid p. 48.
36
Miller, Segregating Sound. p.89
37
Ibid, 148.
268
38
Filene, Romancing the Folk. p. 50.
39
Lomax, John A, Alan Lomax, and Harold William Thompson. “American Ballads and
Folk Songs”. Macmillan Co., 1934. p. xxvii.
40
Ibid xxxiv.
41
The Lomax-Leadbelly relationship really has been extensively analyzed in many
studies of this material because it presents such a dramatic microcosm of the worst
excesses of the paternalistic relations implied by the unequal relationships between
folklore scholars and their informants. Lomax was instrumental in securing Ledbetter’s
release from prison, but at the same time he employed him for a pittance to work as a
servant, demanded fully half of his profits from live performances and recordings,
decided what material he could record, and forced him to wear prison clothes during his
public appearances. For more, see Filene, Romancing the Folk, Hamilton, In Search of
the Blues, and Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues.
42
Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues. p. 115.
43
Lomax, John A, Alan Lomax, and Edward N Waters. Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads. New York: The Macmillan company, 1938. p. vi. Also quoted in
Miller, Segregating Sound. p. 85.
44
For a fuller and quite sympathetic treatment of Lomax, see Szwed, John F. Alan
Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.
45
Lomax, Alan, and Ronald D. Cohen. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997.
Psychology Press, 2003. p. 93. Also quoted in Roy, Blacks, Whites, and Blues, 116.
46
Roy, in Reds, Whites and Blues goes to great lengths to examine the institutional
structures that supported the leftist embrace of and redefinition of folk music and warns
the reader specifically to avoid overemphasizing the work of well-known scholars and
musicians in this enterprise. On the other hand, he also observes that “Without the
Lomaxes and Seegers, it is likely that American folk music would still have the quaint
nationalist connotations of English folk music, if it had any connotation at all. See Roy,
Reds, Whites, and Blues, p. 101.
47
Roy, Reds, Whites and Blues, 89.
48
Ibid.
49
Quoted in Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues, p. 102.
50
Ibid 93.
269
51
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. p. 19.
52
Denning, Michael. The cultural front: the Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century. London; New York: Verso, 1998. p. 37.
53
Davis, History of the Blues. p. 13.
54
Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985. p. 87.
55
My account of Hammond’s performance of the phonograph is constructed from the
following sources: Anderson, Paul Allen. ““From Spirituals To Swing”: Harlem
Renaissance Intellectuals, the Folk Inheritance, and the Prospects of Jazz”, 1997. Count
Basie Orchestra.; Kansas City Five.; Mitchell’s Christian Singers.; New Orleans
Feetwarmers (Musical group);Kansas City Six.; Golden Gate Quartet.; Benny Goodman
Sextet., and Hot Page. From Spirituals To Swing. Santa Monica: Vanguard, 1999.
Erenberg, Lewis A. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American
Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hammond, John, and Irving Townsend.
John Hammond on Record: an Autobiography. New York: Ridge Press, 1977. Kolodin,
Irving. “Number One Swing Man.” Harper’s (September 1939): 431–433. Lopes, Paul
Douglas. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press, Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Smith, Wendy. “The Man Who Got His
Way: John Hammond, Scion of White Privilege, Helped Integrate Popular Music.”
American Scholar 75, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 110–114. Stearns, Marshall. The Story of
Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta:
Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Amistad, 2004. ——
—. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock “n” Roll: an Alternative History of American
Popular Music. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Wald, Gayle. “From
Spirituals To Swing”: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover.” American Quarterly
55, no. 3 (2003).
56
There is probably more extensive scholarship on Johnson than on any other blues
performer, and certainly more than on any blues performer with such a short catalog.
Wald’s revisionist history is probably overall the best treatment of Johnson’s musical life
and easily the best at placing him in context with his audiences and other performers. My
point here, that the Johnson remembered at the Spirituals to Swing concert and since
bears little resemblance to the one who actually recorded those songs, owes much to
Wald’s work. See Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention
of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Amistad, 2004. For other credible scholarship on
Johnson’s life and music, see Charters, Samuel Barclay, and Robert Johnson. Robert
Johnson,. New York: Oak Publications, 1973. Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues.
1st Ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson.
New York: Dutton, 1989. Johnson, Robert. Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues
Singers., 1961. Lipsitz, George. “Remembering Robert Johnson: Romance and Reality.”
270
Popular Music and Society Popular Music and Society 21, no. 4 (1997): 39–50. Palmer,
Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill
McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Rothenbuhler, E. W. “For-the-record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a
Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music -Cambridge- 26, no. 1 (2007): 65–82.
Schroeder, Patricia R. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American
Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
57
Quoted in Anderson, Paul Allen. ““From Spirituals To Swing”: Harlem Renaissance
Intellectuals, the Folk Inheritance, and the Prospects of Jazz”, 1997. p. 214.
58
A reproduction of the program for the 1938 concert can be found in Hammond, John,
Count Basie, Helen Humes, Meade Lewis, Joe Turner, and Kansas City Five. From
Spirituals To Swing the Legendary 1938 & 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts. Santa Monica,
CA: Vanguard, 1999.
59
Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues. p. 1.
60
Quoted in Gioia, Ted. “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth.” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1
(January 1, 1989): 130–143. p. 135. Also quoted in Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: on
the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. p. 128.
61
See for instance Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock “n” Roll
Music. 1st Ed. New York: E.p. Dutton, 1975. And, Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New
York: Viking Press, 1981.
62
For perhaps the most dramatic example of this, see the liner notes to Johnson, Robert.
King of the Delta Blues Singers. [New York]: Columbia, 1961. See also Marcus, Mystery
Train.
63
Altman, Rick, and British Film Institute. Film/genre. London: BFI Pub., 1999. p. 166.
64
Ibid.
65
Wald, Escaping the Delta. p. 230.
66
Hammond, John. “‘From Spirituals To Swing’.” The New York Times, December 18,
1938.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
271
70
Ibid.
71
Lomax, Alan, and Ronald D. Cohen. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997.
Psychology Press, 2003. p. 164.
72
Barker, Hugh, and Taylor, Linval. Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular
Music. 1st Ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. p. 63.
73
Wald, Escaping the Delta. p. 8.
74
Davis; The History of the Blues. p. 7-8.
75
Reproduced in the liner notes to Hammond, John, Count Basie, Helen Humes, Meade
Lewis, Joe Turner, and Kansas City Five. From Spirituals To Swing the Legendary 1938
& 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts. Santa Monica, CA: Vanguard, 1999. p. 6.
76
77
Johnson, Robert. King of the Delta Blues Singers. [New York]: Columbia, 1961.
Marcus, Mystery Train 28.
78
Johnson, Robert. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Volume II. Don Mills, Ont.: Mfd. by
CBS Records, 1967.
79
Johnson, Robert. Robert Johnson the Complete Recordings. New York, NY: Columbia,
1990.
80
Johnson, Robert. The Centennial Collection. New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy, 2011.
———. The Complete Original Masters. New York, N.Y.: Columbia/Legacy: Sony
Music, 2011.
81
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
82
Thomas, Tony. Personal correspondence 10/11/2011.
83
Roy; Reds, Whites, and Blues. p. 230.
84
For a selection of Carr’s work, see Carr, Leroy, Scrapper Blackwell, and Josh White.
Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I Crave the Best of Leroy Carr. New York,
NY: Columbia/Legacy, 2004.
85
For Broonzy’s early blues recordings, see Broonzy, Big Bill. The Young Big Bill
Broonzy, 1928-1935. Newton, N.J.: Yazoo Records, 1990. for an overview of the
material he is best known for, see Broonzy, Big Bill. An Introduction to Big Bill
Broonzy.: Fuel: Distributed by UMGD and Varèse Sarabande, 2007. For an excellent
272
compilation of White’s material, see White, Josh. Free and Equal Blues. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Folkways, 1998.
86
Anonymous. “Folk Singing.” Time, November 23, 1962. 54-60. For more on the
context and implications of Broonzy’s statement, see Kelley, Robin D. G. “Notes on
Deconstructing ‘The Folk’.” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1,
1992): 1400–1408. See also Miller, Segregating Sound. p. 240-282
87
Patoski, Joe Nick. “James Luther Dickinson.” Notes and Musings, August 15, 2009.
http://joenickp.blogspot.com/2009/08/james-luther-dickinson.html. Accessed 3/06/2012.
88
Titon, Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.”
In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Rosenberg, Neil V.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. p. 222.
89
Smith, Ruby, James P Johnson, Henry Red Allen, Jay Higginbotham, James P. Johnson
and his orchestra., Gene Sedric, Al Casey, John Williams, and Sid Catlett. Back Water
Blues. [Hicksville, N.Y.]; Meritt Record Society producer: Meritt;, 1981.
90
Nielsen Business Media. Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc., 1944.
91
Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: a Vernacular
Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
92
Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. p. 17.
93
Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow,
1963. p. 94.
94
Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: W. Morrow, 1967. p. 180.
95
Charters, Samuel Barclay. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. p.
243.
96
Ibid, 48.
97
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. p. 39.
Baraka, Blues People. 48.
98
99
Baraka, Blues People. p. 55.
Ellison, Ralph. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. New York: Modern
Library, 2001. p. 129.
273
100
Derrida, Jacques, and Avital Ronell. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1
(1980): 55–81. p. 60.
101
Lewis, Earl. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-century
Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Lewis argues that
“congregation,” meaning the voluntary association of African Americans under
segregation, has been a powerful force in transforming spaces of potential oppression into
spaces of potential resistance.
102
Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: RBF Records, 1959.
103
Charters, The Country Blues. p. xv. The quote is from the new introduction to the
1975 edition.
104
Wald, Escaping the Delta. p. 232.
105
Titon, Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.”
In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Rosenberg, Neil V.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. p. 228.
106
107
Charters, The Country Blues. p. 74, 79.
Johnson, Tommy. Really! The Country Blues. Berkeley: Origin Jazz, 1966.
108
For more, see Dougan, John M. “Two Steps from the Blues: Creating Discourse and
Constructing Canons in Blues Criticism”, 2001. and, see also Hamilton, Marybeth. In
Search of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009. ———. “Sexuality, Authenticity and the
Making of the Blues Tradition.” Past & Present, no. 169 (November 1, 2000): 132–160.
———. “The Blues, the Folk, and African-American History.” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 11, no. 1 (2001): 17–35.
109
Hamilton, In Search of the Blues. p. 225.
110
Charters, The Country Blues. p.xvi.
111
Dougan, Two Steps From the Blues. p. 185.
112
Whelan, Pete, Slotnikoff, Joel, and Lornell, Kip. “Pete Whelan Interview.” Blues
World, February 13, 1997. http://www.bluesworld.com/PeteWhelanInterview.html.
Accessed 3/06/2012.
113
While a complete accounting of this activity would warrant at least a whole chapter, if
not a whole book, some of the highlights are particularly instructive. In 1959, Moses
Asche’s Folkways Records, which had been recording and releasing “people’s music”
including most notably records by Woody Guthrie, since 1948, released Blues in the
274
Mississippi Night, a compilation of interviews and music by Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis
Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson that Alan Lomax had recorded in 1947, but had not
released at the musicians’ request because they felt that their candid remarks about
racism would hurt their recording careers. Lomax’s field recordings from a research trip
into the Mississippi Delta that he had undertaken with the guidance and help of
musicologist John W. Work III in 1942, and which included the first recordings by
Muddy Waters, was issued for sale on LP by the Library of Congress in 1962 as Negro
Blues and Hollers.
114
Smith, Harry Everett. An Anthology of American Folk Music. New York, NY:
Folkways Records, 1952. It was reissued on CD in 1997: Smith, Harry Everett.
Anthology of American Folk Music. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways/Sony
Music Special Products, 1997.
115
Need reviews and articles about the anthology of American folk music here.
116
Rosenberg notes this tendency to refer to the collection simply as “The Anthology” as
if there were no other, in the liner notes to the 1997 edition. See Rosenberg, Neil V.
“Anthology of American Folk Music” (1997). Marcus’ book The Old Weird America
was first released under the title Invisible Republic. See Marcus, Greil, and Bob Dylan.
The Old, Weird America: the World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Picador,
2001. Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: H.
Holt & Co., 1997.
117
Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning; the Meaning of the Blues. New York: Horizon
Press, 1961.
118
Titon, Reconstructing the Blues. p. 222.
119
For more on the formation of the revivalist canon of recordings, see Dougan, Two
Steps from the Blues. For the recordings listed, see Hopkins, Lightnin’, and Samuel
Barclay Charters. Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. New York, N.Y.: Folkways Records, 1959.
Lewis, Furry, and Samuel Barclay Charters. Furry Lewis., 1960. Lipscomb, Mance.
Mance Lipscomb. Berkeley, Calif.: Arhoolie, 1960. Lomax, Alan, and Archive of
American Folk Song. Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads. Washington,
D.C.: Library of Congress, Division of Music, Recording Laboratory, 1956.
120
This account of the “rediscovery” of blues performers at the dawn of the 1960s revival
draws upon several sources, including: Adelt, Ulrich. Blues Music in the Sixties a Story in
Black and White. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Barker, Hugh,
and Taylor, Linval. Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. 1st Ed. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Booth, Stanley. Rythm Oil: a Journey Through the Music of
the American South. 1st American Ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Dougan,
John M. “Two Steps from the Blues: Creating Discourse and Constructing Canons in
275
Blues Criticism”, 2001. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory &
American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Gordon,
Robert. It Came from Memphis. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009. ———. “Sexuality,
Authenticity and the Making of the Blues Tradition.” Past & Present, no. 169 (November
1, 2000): 132–160. ———. “The Blues, The Folk, and African American History.”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11, no. 1 (2001): 17–35. Patoski, Joe Nick.
“James Luther Dickinson.” Notes and Musings, August 15, 2009.
http://joenickp.blogspot.com/2009/08/james-luther-dickinson.html. Rosenberg, Neil V.
Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993. Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert
Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st Ed. New York: Amistad, 2004. Whelan,
Pete, Slotnikoff, Joel, and Lornell, Kip. “Pete Whelan Interview.” Blues World, February
13, 1997. http://www.bluesworld.com/PeteWhelanInterview.html.
121
Titon, Reconstructing the Blues. p. 222.
122
Adelt, Blues Music in the 60s. p. 49.
123
Patoski, James Luther Dickinson.
124
Gray, Michael. “33 1/3: The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.” 33 1/3, n.d.
http://33third.blogspot.com/2006/05/bob-dylan-encyclopedia_17.html. Accessed
3/06/2012.
125
Hamilton, In Search of the Blues. p. 237.
126
Dougan, Two steps From the Blues. p. 191.
127
For a critical perspective on Clapton’s relationship to the blues and to Johnson in
particular, see Adelt, Blues Music in the 1960s.
128
Evans, David. Mississippi Blues Today and its Future” in Robert Sacre, Ed. The
Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions, Influence, and
Comparisons: an International Symposium. Liege: Presses Universitaires de Liege,
1987. p. 318. Also quoted in Thomas, Tony. “Gus Cannon—‘The Colored Champion
Banjo Pugilist of the World.’” Unpublished manuscript. 2012. p. 5.
129
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. 1st Ed. New York: Pantheon Books,
1993. p. ix.
130
Ibid.
276
131
Thomas, Tony. “Gus Cannon.” p. 4-6. For more on the Delta, see Cobb, James C.
The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional
Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. For more on the Delta specifically
as a fertile grounds for blues music, see Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition and
Creativity in the Folk Blues. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. For very
useful corrective to and context for Lomax’s romanticized vision, see Work, John W,
Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C Adams, Robert Gordon, and Bruce Nemerov. Lost Delta
Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study,
1941-1942. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. For a critical cultural history
of the Delta, see Woods, Clyde Adrian. Development Arrested: the Blues and Plantation
Power in the Mississippi Delta. London; New York: Verso, 1998.
132
For more on this term and its usage, see Titon, Early Downhome Blues.
133
For a critical examination of how John Hurt is classified as a “Delta blues” performer
despite his poor fit with the purported components of the style, see Barker and Taylor,
Faking It.
134
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. 34.
135
Ibid. p. 39.
136
See Adelt, Blues Music in the 1960s. p. 34.
137
Keil, Urban Blues. p. 1.
138
Gussow, Adam. Personal Communication, via email. 11/13/2011.
139
Hamilton, In Search of the Blues. p. 243.
140
Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. San Francisco: City lights, 1969.
141
Mezzrow, Mezz, and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Random House,
1946.
142
Mezzrow’s book is to some degree, a quandary. It is beautifully written and informed
by a deeply humanistic ethos and an unmistakably joyous voice, as well as offering
insights and revealing anecdotes about the early history of jazz from someone who was
there as the history took place. On the other hand, Really The Blues is also so deeply
committed to the exposition of an essentialist paradigm that places a purely good “black”
culture always in opposition to an irredeemably bad “white” culture that the humanistic
sentiments are only reserved for the side of the racial divide that Mezzrow wishes to
cross over to. In the end, despite a well-intentioned desire to vanquish racism the book is
far too invested in race-thinking to succeed.
277
143
See Adelt, Blues Music in the 60s, p. 45-47 for an analysis of the treatment by
revivalists of John Hurt specifically as a kind of beatific figure.
144
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge,
1989. p. 68.
145
Booth, Stanley. Rythm Oil: a Journey Through the Music of the American South. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1991. p. 35.
146
Marcus, Mystery Train. p. 30.
147
Roy, Reds, Whites and Blues. p. 19.
148
Davis makes this point so effectively that it arrives with the force of revelation. It is
possible to spend years reading about the Depression-era blues without ever wondering
why it is that there seemed to be so many men with guitars wandering through the region
that stretches roughly from Houston, Texas in the Southwest, to Atlanta, Georgia in the
Southeast. In fact, arguably, reading about the Depression era rural blues almost
mitigates against an understanding of the connections between these musicians and the
commercial structures of the TOBA, because the extant corpus of materials is so
dominated by revivalist notions of either folkloric communalism or romantic
individualism, or both. See Davis, The History of the Blues. p. 219.
149
Carby, Hazel. “Sometimes It Jus’ Bes Dat Way: The Sexual Politics of Women’s
Blues.” Radical America 20, no. 4 (July 1986). p. 475 Carby’s essay also appears in
Carby, Hazel. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. London; New
York: Verso, 1999. O’Meally, Robert G. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid. p. 474.
152
Ibid. 471.
153
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Billie Holiday. Random House Digital, Inc., 2011.
154
Ibid. p. xi.
155
Ibid.
278
CONCLUSION: ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE
The blackface performer is in effect a perfect metaphor for one culture’s
ventriloquial self-expression through the art forms of someone else’s.
Perhaps the sheer strangeness of this predicament is—after the jazz age,
after early rock and roll-now lost to us. Some of its reasons, or at least
some of its effects, will, I hope, eventually become clear. […] Popular
forms and popular audiences are less fixed referents than sites of continual
reconstitution, the popular less an object than a space.
Eric Lott1
If archaic music consisted of songs sung at harvests, we have progressed
to harvest songs adopted for performance in dance halls and from there to
songs about dance halls performed nowhere in particular, perhaps not
performed at all but merely pieced together from a menu of morphable
blips. You stick them in your ear and stroll into the field, or into where
the field used to be before they built the Wal-Mart.
Geoffrey O’Brien2
All rock is post-modern. It is at the heart of the genre. There is no
authenticity. Rock was born as a mongrel. Stop arguing about it.
David Lowery3
As I noted in the introduction to this dissertation, I am drawn to anomalies,
events, individuals, or instances which do not, on their surface, make sense, and which
thereby call into question the rules by which sense, or common sense in the gramscian
mode, is made. Like the assault on Nat Cole in a segregated venue in Birmingham,
Alabama which preceded it by only 9 years but which seems to be comparatively ancient
in pop music historical terms, Bob Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival in
1965, and its attendant furor, seems on the surface to make no sense at all. Dylan, who
had previously played live only with acoustic guitar and harmonica, performed with the
backing of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, prompting a barrage of outrage from the
crowd and from festival organizers and folk-world luminaries like Pete Seeger and Alan
Lomax. Lomax had, a day earlier, provoked the performance, by publicly questioning
279
the authenticity of the electric and multi-racial Butterfield Band In his onstage
introduction, Lomax declared that there
used to be a time when a farmer would take a box, glue an axe handle to it,
put some strings on it, sit down in the shade of a tree and play some blues
for himself and his friends. Now here we’ve got these guys and they need
all this fancy hardware to play the blues. We’ve got some of the greatest
blues musicians in the world playing their simple music on simple
instruments. Lets find out if they can play at all.4
Dylan responded to this tirade by gathering the members of the Butterfield Band for a
quick rehearsal that night, and, to the surprise of everyone except Dylan’s manager,
Albert Grossman, and the musicians themselves, inviting them onstage the next day.
During the ensuing performance, Pete Seeger wished aloud for an axe to use to cut the
cables which fed the PA system, generating a long-lived myth that he was literally
searching for an axe in order to shut down the noisy spectacle by any means necessary.5
The genealogy of rock and roll, informed by the crossover narrative that I have
attempted to excavate in my chapters, suggests that the ire of Seeger, Lomax, and the
Newport folk establishment was misplaced, by positioning rock and roll as an extension
of the folk music process, a descendent of the music of Robert Johnson and Muddy
Waters, carried across the color line in the mid-1950s by a series white country boys,
most notably Elvis Presley. If this is true, then how do we explain the uproar at
Newport? The explanation that is usually given is, more or less, correct: that the staid
and narrow-minded folk establishment (and audience) was offended by the exuberance
and volume of Dylan’s performance and did not accept the notion of rock and roll (or
rock, as the rock and roll-descended music that preceded forward from this era would
come to be called) was indeed a kind of folk music.6
280
I say more or less correct because to say that Seeger, Lomax, and much of the
audience misunderstood rock and roll’s relation to folk music presupposes that this
relation is an essential characteristic of the genre, and as I have argued throughout this
dissertation, genres are better understood as accretions of narrative claims than as strict
categories defined by essential characteristics. This seems especially relevant when the
“characteristic” is, as in this case, an origin story. Like the audience who saw and heard
Nat “King” Cole and his band performing “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock and Roll” in Las Vegas
in 1960, the Newport audience in 1965 “knew” that rock and roll was showbiz, a
disposable expression of the power and efficiency of the music industry as it mobilized
the transient desires of teenagers in pursuit of endless profit. They did not understand
rock and roll’s relation to folk music—and most specifically to the music that
“rediscovered” blues musicians like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House had been feted
for performing at past festivals—because the narrative that asserted that relation was only
just emerging from those very events, and had yet to be codified, much less
institutionalized as it has been by now. Ironically, one of the earliest members of the folk
establishment to argue that rock and roll was—in popular and diluted form—an
outgrowth of folk music, was none other than Alan Lomax, suggesting that his remarks
introducing the Butterfield Band had as much to do with the territorial politics of the
Newport Folk Festival as it did with Lomax’s overall world view.7
As an authenticating event, or chain of events, Dylan’s mind-1960s crossover
from (supposedly) pure folk music into the commercial realm has taken on the same
authenticating narrative force that Elvis Presley’s recordings and performances,
particularly his televised performances, play in the original mid-1950s crossover
281
narrative. If one wishes to engage in an act of genrification and argue for a bright line
separating “rock and roll” from “rock” music, Dylan’s performance at Newport in 1965
and his subsequent tour backed by members of The Hawks is a more than serviceable
place to do so. But, despite the resemblance between these two tales of cultural breach,
the latter is more of a mirror than a shadow of the former, one that reverses, rather than
replicates, important details. Instead of asserting for audiences the privilege of listening
to, and purchasing, music across racialized marketing categories, Dylan’s performance
asserts, for the recording artist, the privilege of marketing his music in a way that satisfies
both his own aesthetic imperatives and his record company’s interest in the bottom line.
The gendered nature of this privilege—much more readily available to male performers
than to female performers in the post-Newport 1965 popular music world—is not
accidental either, being contingent on the distinction between authentic male performers
and inauthentic and commercial female performers inherent in the genre narrative of the
folk blues.
This should not be taken as an invitation to overlook the fact that Dylan did, as he
has asserted in writing and interviews, and as numerous chroniclers have observed, feel
hemmed in both personally and aesthetically by the folk music movement that claimed
him as an iconic representative.8 And we should not ignore the fact that Alan Lomax’s
authenticity-baiting of the Butterfield Blues Band illustrated the fetish for essentialism
and museumization which pervaded the folk music establishment that the Newport
Festival embodied and emplaced. Moreover it is hard to argue with the commonplace
critical observation that Dylan went on to make his most vital and ambitious music as a
rock performer. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the telling of this incident also
282
makes the implicit argument that the music that was most marketable, that was at the
center of popular interest, could also be the most authentic, an argument which stands in
direct opposition to the folk revivalists’ understanding of how art, commerce and
people’s culture was supposed to work.. As Greil Marcus observes, “to some people in
the crowd at Newport, rock’n’roll was pandering to the crowd, cheapening everything
that was good in yourself by selling yourself to the highest bidder, putting advertising
slogans on your back if that’s what it took.”9
The focus on volume, transgression, and technology in the standard rock history
narrative of this event reifies the way that those qualities, and specifically the
relationships between those qualities, have become part of the rhetorical repertoire of
rock as a genre.10 Getting past that allows us to listen more closely to the substance of
the folk establishment’s critique of rock and roll, which was, despite its idealized
construction of folk music, commendable in its skepticism of the U.S. musical-industrial
complex.11 This is especially true given the success that the music industry has had over
the past four decades mustering that rhetoric of transgression and rebellion in order to sell
rock as what I have termed unpopular popular music: popular music defined in the
marketplace by its transcendence of the market, a transcendence usually affirmed by a
generic narrative which relates it, either historically to an authentic and unalienated
vernacular past, or categorically, as part of a “structure of feeling” (to borrow Raymond
Williams’ term) which articulates—in the expressive sense—the current moment’s
potential for achieving such an unalienated state.12 To the degree that such a structure of
feeling is incorporated into the attempt to construct rationalized and purportedly objective
genres with discrete and discoverable histories, we could also term them, as T.M.
283
Scruggs has pointed out, “structures of thinking.”13 We see the historical affirmation in
the narratives of origin which I have dealt with at length in the previous chapters, and we
see the categorical affirmation in attempts, by a variety of interested parties, to recuperate
rock music as an honest broker for a rebellious and potentially revolutionary youth
culture in the years following Dylan’s performance at Newport in 1965.
Such claims may seem laughable when they are made by record companies, as in
Columbia Records’ 1969 ad campaign which boasted that “The Man Can’t Bust Our
Music.”14 However, critics like Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ralph J. Gleason and Lester
Bangs, whose work helped make up the first serious textual engagement with (and
construction of ) rock as a genre, offered, in their reviews and essays, examples of how
the music could function in such a manner.15 Writing in 1969, Marcus explains that
Dylan’s song “Memphis Blues Again” articulates his reaction to the riots at the 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago better than any “protest song,” complaining that
“There isn’t any way one can talk about “digging” a protest song—first off, you had to
agree with it” and, explaining that
I didn’t “interpret” the words to ‘Memphis Blues,’ [sic] they interpreted
my situation. They existed to act on me, not for me to figure out ‘what
they mean.’ They’ll mean something else the next time I hear them. The
music carries those words—I might never have heard them without the
jangling of the guitar that caught my ear and made them jump. But the
words don’t exist as statements; they exist as part of a song, as a moment
on that journey I was trying to get through.16
Marcus’s “decoding” (in the sense that Stuart Hall proposed the term) of Dylan’s song in
order to “get through” a moment of disgust and depression brought on by the narrowing
of options in contemporary politics suggests, in some ways, a use of music in a functional
sense not so far removed from the way that Lomax’s imagined field hands might have
284
used the “simple music” that they made “for themselves and their friends under the shade
of a tree” to relax and escape from the dead-end labor of sharecropping. In mobilizing
Dylan’s song for this purpose, Marcus neglects to critique the role of Columbia Records
in making Dylan’s music available to him, eliding the fact that listeners simply “getting
through” the realization of their narrowing options might serve the interests of both
Columbia Records and those who brutally quashed dissent in Chicago in the summer of
1968. Alan Lomax, just as surely, neglects the fact that real pastoral musicians like the
ones he imagines would likely trade their axe-handles for well-crafted instruments and
recording contracts in an instant given the opportunity, and that much of the music they
made was far from “simple” in either musical or social terms. In both cases, what
Adorno identified as “the top-down integration of the culture industry” is present in the
musical moment and the articulation of that moment within a structure of capitalized
communication.17 However, as Stuart Hall maintains, even within such a structure, “no
one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated,” meaning
that even that ever-present top-down integration fails to fully account for, or totalize, the
possibilities in a given “determinate moment” of encoding or decoding.18 Genre
narratives, which accrue from an ongoing series of such moments and from our shared
attempts to make social sense of what we decode, have multiple authors, and, though the
voices of some of those authors are more powerful than others, genre remains a space that
can always be remapped by social practice.
What is really at issue here is the tension between economic determinist and
agency-centered models for evaluating the meaning and function of aesthetic expression
and communication under capitalism, a tension expressed in competing and contradictory
285
claims to authenticity. As I have tried to make clear throughout this dissertation, I
advocate a critical cultural studies approach to these questions, one which recognizes that
economic forces—particularly class structures—shape the options available to the
participants in the cultural politics of popular culture, and which also recognizes—
without succumbing to celebratory invocations of agency—the role of individual and
shared consciousness in, however gradually and minutely, altering and modifying the
outcomes structured by those forces. Such an approach follows Stuart Hall’s description
of popular culture as “the arena of consent and resistance…partly where hegemony arises
and where it is secured.”19 As I have argued at various points here, the quality of
realness, or authenticity, is less an intrinsic characteristic than a narrative construction, an
argument in favor of the value and meaning of particular experiences and of the artifacts
and expressions which by which those experiences are procured. Genre, as I have also
argued, provides a framework for structuring those narratives.
In the preceding chapters I have tried to illustrate attempts to fix what is
experienced as “authentic” within categories defined by (but not actually composed of)
determinate characteristics, and the consequences and implications of these attempts.
The crossover narrative which defined rock and roll’s authenticity in terms of its relation
to “black” music excluded Nat Cole’s sophisticated and intimate pop, despite the
experiences of listeners—including fans and Klansmen—who decoded his performances
as both emotionally authentic and authentically black. Dizzy Gillespie’s attempts to
define authentic jazz, through a complex, progressive narrative linking its origins in the
African diaspora to its virtuosic expression of a contemporary African American
condition in the post-World War Two era, helped to legitimate jazz as a fine art music,
286
but were unable to bridge the gap between fine art institutions and an audience who
found authentic experience on the dance floor. Blues revivalists, from the 1930s to the
1960s, found, in their authentic responses to the poorly-distributed records by rural
African-American singers, a critique of the commercial music industry that these
musicians tried to take part in. The popular acceptance of the revivalists’ definition of
what constituted the authentic blues excluded the women whose successful careers the
rural bluesmen sought to emulate. Arguing that we should attend to the construction,
rather than the discovery, of authenticity—even as that construction presents itself as
discovery—does not mean dismissing the efforts involved in that construction. Those
efforts, which comprise part of the negotiations that Hall describes above, may often
elide the dehumanizing rationalizations of capitalist economies, but they can also be seen
as attempts to wring some possibility of undetermined, unalienated pleasure from within
those structures.
While I have drawn upon a variety of source materials for analysis in this
dissertation, several key texts which appeared in the approximate half-decade between
the end of the American war in Vietnam and the first year or two of Ronald Reagan’s
first term as President bear another look. Those texts include Greil Marcus’ Mystery
Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music (1977), Dizzy Gillespie and Al
Fraser’s To Be or Not To Bop (1979), Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues: A Musical and
Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta, and the revised edition (with new introduction)
of Samuel Charters’ The Country Blues.20 Taken together, I argue that they can be seen
as parts of a shared attempt to establish a usable past for popular music through the
construction of narratives that root popular musical genres in vernacular histories that
287
summon images of communities defined by shared resources and egalitarian relations. As
such, they echo similar themes present in a variety of forms during this decade, from the
1950s craze inspired by the 1973 film American Graffiti, to the adoption of Afrocentric
fashions among African Americans, to the journeys “back to the land” taken by some
middle class white Americans. In the world of popular music, the 1970s are often
associated with global musical commerce, and glittering artificiality, but the decade is
also shot through with demands for authenticity, from the rise of “cosmic cowboy” music
in Austin Texas, to the commercial release of Bob Dylan and The Band’s legendary
bootleg, The Basement Tapes, an album that Greil Marcus described as sounding “as
intimate as a living room and as slick as a barbed wire fence,” to punk rock’s radical
return-to-roots critique of mainstream rock excess.21 In this context, I argue, these
parables by Charters, Gillespie and Fraser, Marcus, and Palmer should be heard as
attempts to not merely resist, but to resolve what Andreas Killen called the “crisis of
authenticity” of the 1970s.22
This is not to overstate the libratory possibilities posed by this narrative tendency
as it asserts itself in the core constellation of texts that I have drawn upon here. It should
be immediately apparent that these texts were all written by men, and that the narratives
they relate, in jazz, blues, and rock and roll posit an implicit relation between maleness
and authenticity that is ripe for critique, a critique that I have tried to make apparent in
these pages. These narratives also draw upon racialized notions of authenticity, to
various degrees, as I have also tried to attend to here. My point is not to celebrate or
condemn this impulse to re-narrate the roots of popular musical forms, but to argue that,
like its component genre narratives, this shared narrative amounts to what Frederic
288
Jameson, echoing Kenneth Burke termed a “socially symbolic narrative,” a narrative
which attempts the aesthetic resolution of real, felt contradiction in human relations as
structured under capitalism.23 In order to illustrate what kinds of felt contradictions might
be at issue here, I turn to Samuel Charters’ 1975 introduction to the revised edition of The
Country Blues, where he explains that:
The books, articles, and field recording I’d been doing [throughout the
1950s leading up to the publication of The Country Blues in 1959] were
my own private revolution. In simple terms I was trying to effect a change
in American consciousness by presenting an alternative consciousness. I
felt that much of what was stifling America was its racism, and what it
desperately needed was to be forced to see that the hypocrisy of its racial
attitudes was warping the nation’s outlook on every other major problem.
And I also felt that the black culture itself was a necessary element in the
society. The white culture itself had developed the same kind of defensive
hypocrisy to so many elements of its life, from sexuality to personal
mores. In the black expression I found a directness, an openness and an
immediacy I didn’t find in the white. The texts of the blues were honest,
using language in a way the white culture hadn’t used it for hundreds of
years….I found that the awareness of the real sources of power in the
society, the consciousness of social inequalities, and the direct expression
of sexuality in the was so much closer to the American reality that I felt I
somehow had to make people conscious of what these other voices were
saying.24
To some, limited, degree we can see that change in consciousness that Charters hoped for
in the adoption, by mainstream of American popular culture, of the carnivalesque reversal
of power relations envisioned within what William G. Roy calls “the folk project.” As
Roy argues,
Folk music inverts the conventional relationship between cultural and
social hierarchy. The cultural elite of the folk project have valorized folk
music precisely because it is the music of the common folk…Analogous
to the way that folk music inverts the association of refinement and high
status, popular music inverts the ordinary hierarchy of race. “Black” is
typically a term of affirmation, and “white” carries a connotation of
lifelessness or dullness. Just as musical skills allowed talented slaves
access to special privileges and benefits without unsettling the
fundamental social relations of slavery, so the inversion of broader racial
289
hierarchy has allowed some African Americans to achieve fame and, for a
few, even wealth without threatening the basic racial hierarchy.25
This inversion of the meaning of “black” and “white” in a popular music industry whose
foundations were built on coon songs and other ethnic caricatures is, in its own right
notable. But given the small successes and sharp failures of the libratory political
mobilizations of the 1960s—including the splintering of the southern civil rights
movement, the decimation of black neighborhoods by urban renewal, and the flight of
middle class African Americans to the suburbs—and the specter of the American version
of what Stuart Hall identified in Thatcherism as “authoritarian populism” in the active
grassroots of the soon-to-be-ascendant American conservative movement, this
affirmation would seem to be small comfort indeed.26 As Frederic Jameson noted, in an
oft-quoted passage, “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable
limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and
ironic reversals of their overt intention.”27 The disparity between the cultural positioning
of blackness in popular musical discourse, and the real situations faced by black people in
the neighborhoods of America’s post-industrial metropolises seems to me to effectively
diagram one of the “grisly and ironic reversals” that Jameson refers to.
I do not want to suggest a too-direct and easily discernible correspondence
between these narratives and the apparent-but-absent causes which inform their telling;
Jameson, in the same passage, points out that that “history can be apprehended only
through its effects and never directly as some reified force.”28 Reading the socially
symbolic purpose of these narratives in a convincing and thorough manner would require
a more extended and less speculative argument that I am mounting here. Even so, while
it may seem absurd to suggest that these re-narrations of the roots of popular musical
290
forms speak so plainly to the larger looming political and socio-economic climate of their
times, it is just as absurd to ignore the way that the moment of their telling works its way
into the story of the past that is being told. How could the return of these crossover
narratives to the public consciousness at this moment not be suggestive of the inexorable,
grinding sense of diminished possibilities determined by the reinvigoration of structural
barriers after the onslaught of the 1960s?
Each of these crossover narratives that I have attended to announces the breach of
some barrier, and claims for itself a new purity born of its hybrid origins and pure,
authentic, trajectory. Each, as I have argued throughout, also reifies those same barriers
to some degree, instantiating them as narrative necessities even while claiming to consign
them to history. It is possible to hear this argument itself as a declaration of futility, as
Jameson seems to in the last sentence of this famous passage from The Political
Unconscious, a text written in the same historical moment as these musical recuperations.
There, he declares that “This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History [sic] as ground
and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure
that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore
them.”29 I would argue, however, that we can find the potential for something different
in these ongoing attempts to wring transcendence out of the marketplace. I believe that
the crafting and the telling of these socially symbolic narratives of musical meaning
speaks to our continued contestation of those alienating necessities, rather than our
attempts to ignore them.
291
Notes
1
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993. p. 92.
2
O’Brien, Geoffrey. Sonata For Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life.
New York: Counterpoint, 2004. p. 173.
3
David Lowery is the singer and primary songwriter of the band’s Cracker and Camper
Van Beethoven, as well as the author of the blog 300 songs. He also teaches a course on
the popular music industry at the University of Georgia. See Lowery, David. “#73: South
California Revisited – St. Cajetan.” David Lowery - 300 Songs Blog, n.d.
http://www.davidlowerymusic.com/300songsblog.cfm?feature=1650209&postid=110349
6.
4
Von Schmidt, Eric and Jim Rooney. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated
Story of the Cambridge Folk Years. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979. p. 253.
Also quoted in Adelt, Blues Music in the 60s. p. 52.
5
We should note that Seeger denies that his intent was to interrupt Dylan’s performance,
claiming that the volume of the band was overloading the PA system, making the words
that Dylan was singing unintelligible. Recordings and contemporaneous accounts
confirm that the sound system was overloaded and out of balance and that Dylan’s words
were indeed largely incomprehensible. Cutting the sound system off entirely wouldn’t
have helped of course, since the Butterfield Band was playing through their own
amplifiers and the unamplified drums were quite loud as well. Cutting the power to the
stage entirely would have left Dylan singing, at least momentarily, over just drums,
which would have been interesting but likely not any more intelligible. It is likely that
none of this occurred to Seeger clearly in the heat of the moment. While the notion that
Seeger wished to censor Dylan’s performance concurs nicely with the narrative of rock as
fundamentally transgressive and rebellious music, it contradicts what we know of Seeger
who, however displeased or offended he was, would likely have found the idea of acting
as a censor equally repugnant.
6
Bob Dylan’s performance at Newport in 1965 is one of the most oft-mentioned and
cited events in the history of rock music. An exhaustive bibliography of treatments of it
would likely be more than the length of this entire dissertation. A shorter list of useful
sources would include: Barker, Hugh, and Taylor, Linval. Faking It: the Quest for
Authenticity in Popular Music. 1st Ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: the Folk Music Revival and American Society, 19401970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory
& American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Jan
Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom, and Bloomfield, Michael. Michael Bloomfield: If You Love
These Blues. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 2000. Marcus, Greil. The Old,
292
Weird America: the World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Picador, 2001.
Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Public
Affairs, 2006. Roy, William G. Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music,
and Race in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Szwed, John
F. Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.
Wein, George, and Nate Chinen. Myself Among Others. Da Capo, 2003. For an excellent
documentary treatment of Dylan’s performances at Newport in 1963, 1964, and 1965,
sans narration, see Lerner, Murray. The Other Side of the Mirror. Sony BMG Music
Entertainment, 2009.
7
Lomax had in fact included an African American group that he considered a rock and
roll band, The Cadillacs, at a Carnegie Hall event in 1959 called Folksong ’59. See
Lomax, Alan, and Ronald D. Cohen. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997.
Psychology Press, 2003. It is interesting, and entirely fitting with publicly available
knowledge of his personality that Lomax would welcome the chance to disrupt the
environs of Carnegie Hall with rock and roll, and, at the same time, object to the
encroachment of commercial, electrified musical performance at the Newport Folk
Festival, which he saw as an ideal space for presenting explicitly non-commercial music.
See Szwed, John F. Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking
Penguin, 2010.
8
See Dylan, Chronicles. p. 115.
9
Marcus, Greil. Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Public
Affairs, 2006. p. 157.
10
For critical treatments of how this works in social space and in genre, respectively, see
Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: the Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil:
Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1993.
11
Dave Laing is the source of the excellent term “musical-industrial complex.” See
Laing, Dave. “World Music and the Global Music Industry.” Popular Music History 3,
no. 3 (2009): 213–231.
12
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.
13
14
Scruggs, T. M. Personal communication, 2009.
Among record collectors, Warner Brothers’s 1969 ad campaign that used the slogan
“The man can’t bust our music” has long been a poster child for clumsy attempts by
corporations to merchandise the counterculture. See Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of
293
Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. University of
Chicago Press, 1998. p. 7
15
See my first chapter for an extended treatment of these critics and their argument.
16
Marcus, Greil. “A New Awakening” in R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson
Eds. The Sounds of Social Change. New York: Rand McNally, 1972.
17
Adorno, T. “Cultural Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12–19.
p. 12.
18
Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham
[England]: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973. p. 508.
19
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” edited by Raphael Samuel.
London: Routledge, 1981. p .453.
20
Charters, Samuel Barclay. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.
Gillespie, Dizzy, and Al Fraser. To Be, or Not-- to BoP. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock “n”
Roll Music. 1st Ed. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New
York: Viking Press, 1981.
21
“Cosmic cowboy music,” also called “redneck rock” or “outlaw country” was al fusion
of post-1960s countercultural and traditional country musical and social tendencies. It
emerged in and around Austin, Texas in the very late 1960s and had its commercial
heyday around 1974. For more, see Reid, Jan. The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock: New Edition.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004 (originally published 1974). The Basement Tapes has
been as or more mythologized than any artifact in the rock music canon. Most of the
recordings on the 1975 LP were made as songwriting and publishing demos by Bob
Dylan and (except for drummer and vocalist Levon Helm) musicians from The Band,
(known at the time as The Hawks), in the basement of a house in Woodstock, New York,
in 1967. Sometime in 1968 pirated copies of these recordings began to appear on LPs
packaged in plain white cardboard sleeves credited to “Blind Boy Grunt and the Hawks.”
This LP, known as the Great White Wonder because of the anonymous sleeve, is
generally considered the first rock bootleg. Like the Robert Johnson recordings I analyze
in my third chapter, the recordings on Great White Wonder drew upon their obscurity,
their existence outside of normal commercial channels, and the supposedly unselfconscious music they contained to gather an imprimatur of authenticity. As such, they
have a mythic ethos that remains undisturbed by the widely known fact that they were
originally recorded in order to help Dylan, who was recovering from a motorcycle
accident, garner some much-needed publishing income. The 1975 LP contains, alongside
the basement recordings, several demos recorded by the members of The Band, without
Dylan but with Levon Helm, at Capitol Studios in New York in early 1968. Greil
Marcus’s 1997 book Invisible Republic (since re-titled The Old Weird America)
294
postulates a relation of some kind between the original basement recordings and Harry
Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. See Marcus, Greil,. The Old, Weird
America: the World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Picador, 2001. For a
less mythic and more straightforward examination of the basement recordings, see
Griffin, Sid. Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes.
London: Jawbone, 2007.
22
Killen, Andreas. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of PostSixties America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. p. 54-56
23
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Psychology Press, 2002. p. 65, and p. 174.
24
Charters, The Country Blues. p.10.
25
Roy, Reds, Whites, and Blues. p 19.
26
Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.
London; New York: Verso, 1988.
27
Jameson, The Political Unconscious. p. 101.
28
Ibid
.
29
Ibid.
295
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books, Book Chapters, and Articles
Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,”
and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Adelt, Ulrich. Blues Music in the Sixties a Story in Black and White. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2010.
Adorno, T. “Cultural Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12–19.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, 1997.
Albertson, Chris. Bessie. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
Allen, Robert Clyde. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary
Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3
(April 1, 1984): 6–18.
———. Film/Genre. London: BFI Pub., 1999.
Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.
Aparicio, Frances R, and Antonio Benítez Rojo. “Performing the Caribbean in American
Studies.” American Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1998).
Appel, Alfred, and Bert Stern. “Review of Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” Film Quarterly 14, no. 1
(1960): 56–57.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985.
Atton, Chris. “Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the ‘Democratic
Conversation’.” Popular Music and Society 33, no. 4 (2010): 517–531.
———. “Writing About Listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism.” Popular
Music 28, no. 01 (2009): 53–67.
296
Austerlitz, Paul. Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2005.
Baker, Houston A. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/re-reading Booker T.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
———. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: a Vernacular Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Banfield, William C. Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again?
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2011.
Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: W. Morrow, 1967.
———. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: W. Morrow, 1963.
Barker, Hugh, and Taylor, Linval. Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. 1st
ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Barlow, William. “Looking up at down”: the Emergence of Blues Culture. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1989.
———. Voice over: the Making of Black Radio. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press,
1999.
Baron, Robert. “Herskovits, Melville J. (1895-1963).” African Folklore: An Encyclopedia.
(2004): 167–169.
Barthes, Roland, Honoré de Balzac, Richard Miller, and Richard Howard. S/Z. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1974.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Left as the Counter-Culture of Modernity.” Telos 1986, no. 70
(December 21, 1986): 81–93.
Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity the Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, Wis.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968.
———. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008.
Bennighof, J. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic
Value in Delta Blues.” American Music 15, no. 2 (1997): 137–158.
Berg, Charles Merrell. “Cinema Sings the Blues.” Cinema Journal 17, no. 2 (April 1, 1978):
1–12.
297
Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry: the Autobiography. New York: Harmony Books, 1987.
Bertrand, Michael T. Race, Rock, and Elvis. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Blake, Casey Nelson, Richard Handler, Eric Gable, Roy Rosenzweig, and David Thelen. “The
Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary
America.” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3 (1999): 423–435.
Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets, a History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1958.
Booth, Stanley. Rythm Oil: a Journey Through the Music of the American South. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1991.
Borthwick, Stuart, and Ron Moy. Popular Music Genres: an Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Bourguignon, Erika. “Relativism and Ambivalence in the Work of M. J. Herskovits.” Ethos
28, no. 1 (2000): 103–114.
Brackett, David. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Brown, David H. The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. 1st ed.
Smithsonian Books, 2003.
Brown, Kimberly Nichele. “Sniffing the ‘Calypso Magnolia’: Unearthing the Caribbean
Presence in the South (Response).” South Central Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 81–86.
Brown, Robert N. “Traveling Riverside Blues: Landscapes of Robert Johnson in the YazooMississippi Delta.” Focus on Geography 49, no. 3 (2006): 22–28.
Brundage, W. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Bruner, Edward M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.
Bryant, Clora. Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.
Burke, Kenneth. “Methodological Repression And/or Strategies of Containment.” Critical
Inquiry 5, no. 2 (December 1, 1978): 401–416.
———. The Philosophy of Literary Form; Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1967.
298
Burnim, Mellonee V, and Portia K Maultsby. African American Music: an Introduction. New
York: Routledge, 2006.
Carby, Hazel. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. New York: Verso,
1999.
———. “Sometimes It Jus’ Bes Dat Way: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” Radical
America 20, no. 4 (July 1986).
Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry
18, no. 4 (July 1, 1992): 738–755.
Carletta, David M. “‘Those White Guys Are Working for Me’: Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz, and the
Cultural Politics of the Cold War During the Eisenhower Administration.” International
Social Science Review. 82, no. 3 (2007): 115.
Carter, Forrest. Gone to Texas. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975.
———. The Education of Little Tree. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.
Casey, Bernadette. Television Studies: The Key Concepts. Taylor & Francis, 2008.
Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1941.
Charters, Samuel Barclay, and Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson,. New York: Oak
Publications, 1973.
Charters, Samuel Barclay. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.
Christopher A. Waterman, and Larry Starr. American Popular Music: from Minstrelsy to MP3.
3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Clooney, Rosemary, and Joan Barthel. Girl Singer: An Autobiography. Random House
Digital, Inc., 2001.
Cobb, James C. Globalization and the American South. Athens: University. of Georgia Press,
2005.
Cogan, Jim, and William Clark. Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios.
Chronicle Books, 2003.
Cohen, Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17, no. 2 (1986): 203–218.
Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: the Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
299
Cohn, Deborah N. History and Memory in the Two Souths Recent Southern and Spanish
American Fiction. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
Cohn, Deborah. “U.S. Southern Studies and Latin American Studies: Windows onto
Postcolonial Studies.” American Literature; a Journal of Literary History, Criticism and
Bibliography. 78, no. 4 (2006): 704.
Cole, Maria, and Louie Robinson. Nat King Cole; an Intimate Biography. New York: W.
Morrow, 1971.
Cole, Natalie. Angel on My Shoulder: an Autobiography. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
Connerly, Charles E. “The Most Segregated City in America”: City Planning and Civil Rights
in Birmingham, 1920-1980. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994.
Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Nation, History, and the Idea of Cultural Origin in Melville
Herskovits.” Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies (2001).
Crist, Stephen A. “Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics.” The Journal of
Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009): 133–174.
Dahl, Linda. Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984.
Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions: the South in the 1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith,
and Billie Holiday. Random House Digital, Inc., 2011.
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century. London; New York: Verso, 1998.
Derrida, Jacques, and Avital Ronell. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980):
55–81.
Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American
Culture Between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
300
DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell, and Eddie S Meadows. California Soul: Music of African
Americans in the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Donald, R. Kevin. “Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge by Jerry
Gershenhorn.” Transforming Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010): 99–100.
Duarte, Joao Ferreira. “Introduction: Genre Matters.” European Journal of English Studies 3,
no. 1 (1999): 3–10.
Duck, Leigh Anne. The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S.
Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Duff, David. Modern Genre Theory. Harlow England;New York: Longman, 2000.
Dugan, James, and John Hammond. “An Early Black-Music Concert from Spirituals to
Swing.” The Black Perspective in Music 2, no. 2 (1974): 191–207.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1980.
During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. Psychology Press, 1999.
Dworkin, D. “Joel Pfister. Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left
Studies.” American Historical Review 116, no. 4 (2011): 1077.
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Edwards, Brent. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
———. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text, no. 66 (2001): 45.
Edwards, David Honeyboy. The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta
Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. Chicago Review Press, 2000.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995.
———. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Epstein, Daniel. Nat King Cole. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999.
Erenberg, Lewis A. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture.
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Von Eschen, Penny. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
301
———. Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: the Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights
Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982.
Eyre, Banning. In Griot Time: an American Guitarist in Mali. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2000.
Fabbri, Franco. “What Kind of Music?” Popular Music: a Year Book 2 (1982): 131–143.
Fast, Susan. “Genre, Subjectivity and Back-up Singing in Rock Music.” The Ashgate Research
Companion to Popular Musicology (2009): 171–188.
Ferris, W. “Local Color: Fostering an American Sense of Place - Journeys Through the
Mississippi Delta Hold Important Lessons for Museums About Cultural Tourism and
Self-discovery.” Museum News -washington- 75, no. 5 (1996): 42–49.
Feuer, Jane. “Genre Study and Television.” In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled:
Contemporary Television Criticism, edited by Allen, Robert C., 138–159. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Floyd, Samuel A. “Troping the Blues: From Spirituals to the Concert Hall.” Black Music
Research Journal 13, no. 1 (April 1, 1993): 31–51.
Ford, Sarah Gilbreath. “Listening to the Ghosts: The ‘New Southern Studies’.” South Central
Review 22, no. 1 (2005): 19–25.
Foucault, Michel. Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2010.
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books,
1984.
Frank, G. “Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and
Modern Anthropology.” Identities -newark- 8 (2001): 173–210.
Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
302
Freedman, Aviva, and Peter Medway. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, 1995.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996.
———. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’roll. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981.
———. “‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock
Community.” Popular Music 1 (1981): 159–168.
Furia, Philip, and Michael L. Lasser. America’s Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of
Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. CRC Press, 2006.
Garcia, David. “‘We Both Speak African’: A Dialogic Study of Afro-Cuban Jazz.” Journal of
the Society for American Music 5, no. 2 (2011): 195–233.
George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Gillespie, Dizzy, and Al Fraser. To Be, or Not—to Bop. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009.
———. “Jazz Is Too Good For Americans.” Esquire (June 1957): 55–58.
Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Outerbridge &
Dienstfrey; Distributed by E.P. Dutton, 1970.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
———. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gioia, Ted. “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth.” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January 1,
1989): 130–143.
Glissant, Édouard, and J. Michael Dash. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Gordon, Robert. It Came from Memphis. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Gott, Richard. Cuba: a New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Gourse, Leslie. Unforgettable: the Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole. 1st ed. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991.
303
Griffin, Sid. Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes. London:
Jawbone, 2007.
Gramsci, Antonio, and David Forgacs. An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 19161935. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.
Grandt, Jürgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Ohio
State University Press, 2004.
Grenier, L. “In Search of an Archive: Methodological Issues in the Genealogical Analysis of
the Popular Music Industry in Quebec.” Communication Abstracts 25, no. 4 (2002): 431–
586.
Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997.
Guralnick, Peter. Dream Boogie: the Triumph of Sam Cooke. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.
———. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Paw Prints, 2008.
———. Searching for Robert Johnson. New York: Dutton, 1989.
Guridy, Frank Andre. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of
Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Gussow, Adam. Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to
Post-9 11 New York. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
———. Mister Satan’s Apprentice: a Blues Memoir. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books,
1998.
———. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
———. “‘Shoot Myself a Cop’: Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ as Social Text.” Callaloo 25,
no. 1 (2002): 8–44.
———. “‘Where Is the Love?’: Racial Violence, Racial Healing, and Blues Communities.”
Southern Cultures 12, no. 4 (2006): 33–54.
Hagedorn, Katherine J. Divine Utterances: the Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with
Rebellion in Postwar America. Oxford University Press, 2011.
304
Hall, Stuart. Culture, Media, Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79.
London: Routledge in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
University of Birmingham, 1992.
———. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham [England]: Centre
for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973.
———. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” edited by Samuel, Raphael. London:
Routledge, 1981.
———. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London; New
York: Verso, 1988.
———. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Black British
Cultural Studies: A Reader, 306–344. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Hall, Stuart, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies. London; New York: Routledge, 1996.
Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. Basic Books, 2009.
———. “Sexuality, Authenticity and the Making of the Blues Tradition.” Past & Present, no.
169 (November 1, 2000): 132–160.
———. “The Blues, The Folk, and African American History.” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 11, no. 1 (2001): 17–35.
Hammond, John, and Irving Townsend. John Hammond on Record: an Autobiography. New
York: Ridge Press, 1977.
Handy, W. C, and Arna Bontemps. Father of the Blues, an Autobiography. New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1941.
Haskins, James. Nat King Cole. New York: Stein and Day, 1984.
Heble, Ajay. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
Henninger, Katherine Renee. “How New? What Place?: Southern Studies and the Rest of the
World.” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 1 (2004): 177–185.
Herskovits, Melville. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
Hesmondhalgh, David. “Audiences and Everyday Aesthetics.” European Journal of Cultural
Studies 10, no. 4 (November 1, 2007): 507–507–527.
305
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Keith Negus. Popular Music Studies. London; New York: Arnold;
Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hine, Darlene Clark, and Jacqueline McLeod. Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of
Black People in Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Hoskyns, Barney. Across the Great Divide: The Band and America. Hal Leonard Corporation,
2006.
———. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
Isaacs, Harold R. The New World of Negro Americans. A Study from the Center for
International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. New York: Viking Press,
1969.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 2. print.
London [u.a.]: Verso, 1993.
Jameson, Fredric R. “Ideology and Symbolic Action.” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (December 1,
1978): 417–422.
———. “The Symbolic Inference; Or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Critical
Inquiry 4, no. 3 (April 1, 1978): 507–523.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Psychology Press, 2002.
Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom, and (first) Bloomfield, Michael. Michael Bloomfield: If You
Love These Blues. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 2000.
Jasen, David A, and Gene Jones. Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters,
1880-1930. New York; London: Schirmer Books; Prentice Hall International, 1998.
Johnson, Robert. King of the Delta Blues Singers. [S.l.]: Columbia, 1937.
Johnson, Tommy. Really! The Country Blues. Berkeley, CA: Origin Jazz, 1966.
Jones, Quincy. Q: the Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
306
Jones, Suzanne Whitmore, and Sharon Monteith. South to a New Place: Region, Literature,
Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
Joseph, Philip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2007.
Keightley, Keir. “‘Turn It down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space and High Fidelity,
1948-1959.” Popular Music: a Year Book 15, no. 2 (1996): 149–177.
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Kelley, Norman. R&B, Rhythm and Business: the Political Economy of Black Music. New
York: Akashic, 2002.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York:
Free Press: Distributed by Simon & Schuster, 1996.
———. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’.” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5
(December 1, 1992): 1400–1408.
———. Africa Speaks, America Answers Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times. Harvard
University Press, 2012.
Kennan, George Frost. American Diplomacy. Penguin Group USA, 1985.
———. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs 65 (1987): 852–
868.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997.
Killen, Andreas. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-sixties
America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Kimsey, John. “Land of California: The Ambiguities of ‘Sweet Home Chicago.’” Journal of
Prevention & Intervention in the Community 30, no. 1/2 (2005): 75–90.
King, Stephen A. “Blues Tourism in the Mississippi Delta: The Functions of Blues Festivals.”
Popular Music & Society 27, no. 4 (2004): 455–475.
———. I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
———. “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums: Constructive Authenticity and the Primitive
Blues Subject.” Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 3 (2006): 235–250.
307
Kreyling, Michael. “Toward ‘A New Southern Studies’.” South Central Review 22, no. 1
(2005): 4–18.
Kulczak, D.E, and L.L Jetton. “"Lexicon of Love’’: Genre Description of Popular Music Is
Not as Simple as ABC.” Music Reference Services Quarterly 14, no. 4 (2011): 210–238.
Ladd, B. “Dismantling the Monolith: Southern Places - Past, Present, and Future.” Critical
Survey. 12 (2000): 28–42.
Laing, Dave. “A Voice Without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890s.”
Popular Music 10, no. 1 (1991): 1–9.
———. “World Music and the Global Music Industry.” Popular Music History 3, no. 3
(2009): 213–231.
Lawson, R. A. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: the Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Lee, George W. Beale Street, Where the Blues Began. College Park, Md.: McGrath Pub. Co.,
1969.
Lees, Gene. You Can’t Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt, and Nat. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001.
Lewis, Earl. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-century Norfolk,
Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Lewis, Nghana tamu. “In a Different Chord: Interpreting the Relations Among Black Female
Sexuality, Agency, and the Blues.” African American Review 37, no. 4 (2003): 599–609.
Lhamon, W. Deliberate Speed: the Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
Lieberfeld, Daniel. “Million-Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture.” African
American Review 29, no. 2 (1995): 217–221.
Lindelof, Anja Mølle. “Look! It’s Rock’n’roll! How Television Participated in Shaping the
Visual Genre Conventions of Popular Music.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1,
no. 2 (2009): 141–159.
Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001.
———. Footsteps in the Dark: the Hidden Histories of Popular Music. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
308
———. “Remembering Robert Johnson: Romance and Reality.” Popular Music and Society
Popular Music and Society 21, no. 4 (1997): 39–50.
———. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Locke, Alain LeRoy. The Negro and His Music. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press,
1968.
Lomax, Alan, and Ronald D. Cohen. Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997. Psychology
Press, 2003.
Lomax, Alan, Edwin E Erickson, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of
Science, 1968.
Lomax, Alan. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-hit People: [American Folk Songs of the
Depression and the Labor Movement of the 1930’s]. New York: Oak Publications, 1967.
———. The Land Where the Blues Began. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Lomax, John A, Alan Lomax, and Harold William Thompson. American Ballads and Folk
Songs. Macmillan Co., 1934.
Lomax, John A, Alan Lomax, and Edward N Waters. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier
Ballads. New York: The Macmillan company, 1938.
Lomax, John. Our Singing Country. New York: Macmillan Co., 1941.
Lopes, Paul Douglas. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lowe, J. “Reconstruction Revisited: Plantation School Writers, Postcolonial Theory, and
Confederates in Brazil.” Mississippi Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2004): 5–26.
Lowe, John. “‘Calypso Magnolia’: The Caribbean Side of the South.” South Central Review
22, no. 1 (2005): 54–80.
Maddox, Lucy. Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Maggin, Donald L. Dizzy: the Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie. New York:
HarperEntertainment, 2005.
309
Marcus, Greil. Rock and Roll Will Stand. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
———. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock “n” Roll Music. 1st ed. New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1975.
———. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1997.
———. “Comment on Mark Mazullo, ‘The Man Whom the World Sold’.” Musical Quarterly
84 (2000): 750–753.
———. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.
Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Mazullo, Mark. “Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train as Rock ‘n’ Roll History.”
The Musical Quarterly. 81, no. 2 (1997): 145.
———. “Institutions, Technology, and Economics - Response to Greil Marcus.” The Musical
Quarterly. 84, no. 4 (2000): 754.
McDonald, Lisa E. “Jazz and the Cold War.” In Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of
Black People in Diaspora, edited by Hine, Darline Clark and Mcleod, Jacqueline, 282–
315. 1st ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
McDonnell, Evelyn, and Ann Powers. Rock She Wrote. New York: Delta, 1995.
McFarlin, B. “Dizzy Gillespie: Jazz Ambassador.” Jazz Educators Journal 28, no. 4 (1996):
27–34.
McGurl, Mark. “Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture.”
The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2005): 243–267.
McKaie, Andy. Chuck Berry. Universal City: Chess, 1988.
McKee, Kathryn, and Annette Trefzer. Global Contexts, Local Literatures: the New Southern
Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke, 2006.
Mcleod, Kembrew. “A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America.” Popular Music 20, no.
01 (2001): 47–60.
310
Mcpherson, Tara. “On Wal-Mart and Southern Studies.” American Literature; a Journal of
Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography. 78, no. 4 (2006): 695.
McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgi in the Imagined South.
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003.
Merod, Jim, and Benny Golson. “Forward Motion: An Interview with Benny Golson.”
Boundary 2 22, no. 2 (1995): 53–93.
Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Mezzrow, Mezz, and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946.
Middleton, Richard. Voicing the Popular: on the Subjects of Popular Music. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984):
151–67.
Miller, Ivor. “A Secret Society Goes Public: the Relationship Between Abakuá and Cuban
Popular Culture.” African Studies Review. 43 (2000): 161–188.
Miller, Ivor L. Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. “Working Musicians: Exploring the Rhetorical Ties Between Musical
Labour and Leisure.” Leisure Studies 27, no. 4 (2008): 427–441.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim
Crow. Duke University Press, 2010.
Monson, Ingrid T. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Moore, Allan F. “Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre.” Music &
Letters 82, no. 3 (2001): 432–442.
Moreno, Jairo. “Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean.”
The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States The Afro-Latin@
Reader: History and Culture in the United States / Ed. by Miriam Jiménez Román and
Juan Flores (2010): 177–186.
Murphy, Paula. “Films for the Black Music Researcher.” Black Music Research Journal 7
(January 1, 1987): 45–64.
311
Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1999.
Neale, Stephen. Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
O’Brien, Geoffrey. Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life. New
York: Counterpoint, 2004.
O’Meally, Robert G. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.
O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. Uptown
Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning: the Meaning of the Blues. New York: Horizon Press,
1961.
Otis, Johnny. Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue. Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1993.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking Press, 1981.
Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Pease, Donald E, and Robyn Wiegman. The Futures of American Studies. Durham [N.C.]:
Duke University Press, 2002.
Pérez Sarduy, Pedro, Jean Stubbs, and Center for Cuban Studies. AfroCuba: an Anthology of
Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture. Melbourne, Vic.; London; New York, NY,
USA: Ocean Press; Latin American Bureau; Distributed in the USA by the Talman Co.,
1993.
Pierce, M. “Historians of the Central High Crisis and Little Rock’s Working Class Whites: a
Review Essay.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. 70, no. 4 (2011): 468–483.
Pillai, Poonam. “Rereading Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding Model.” Communication Theory
2, no. 3 (August 1, 1992): 221–233.
Polet, François. The State of Resistance: Popular Struggles in the Global South. London; New
York; New York: Zed Books; Distributed in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
312
Porter, Lewis. “Review of Dizzy Gillespie and His Big Band: Live in Hi-Fi from Birdland,
Summer 1956.” The Black Perspective in Music 13, no. 2 (1985): 238–239.
Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Kensington Books, 2002.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Taylor & Francis,
2008.
Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Radano, Ronald Michael, and Philip Vilas Bohlman. Music and the Racial Imagination.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Radano, Ronald Michael. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003.
Ramsey, Frederic, and Charles Edward Smith. Jazzmen. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
company, 1939.
Ramsey, Guthrie. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003.
Raussert, Wilfried, and Christine Seeliger. “’What Did I Do To Be So Global and Blue?’:
Blues as Commodity: Tourism, Politics of Authenticity, and Blues Clubs in Chicago
Today.” Selling Ethnicity (2011): 41–54.
Reddick, L. D. “Persons and Places: Dizzy Gillespie in Atlanta.” Phylon. Vol. 10, no. 1
(1949): 44–49.
Reid, Jan. The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock : New Edition. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2004.
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd; a Study of the Changing American Character. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
Ripani, Richard J. The New Blue Music: Changes in Rhythm and Blues, 1950-1999. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996.
Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M. Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural
Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
313
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Wesleyan
University Press, 1994.
———. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1993.
Rosenzweig, Roy, and David P Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
———. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Rothenbuhler, E. W. “For-the-record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a
Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music. Vol. 26, no. 1 (2007): 65–82.
Roy, William G. Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the
United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Salem, James. The Late, Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R & B to Rock “n” Roll’.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Samuel, Raphael. People’s History and Socialist Theory. London; Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981.
Sanjek, David. “Pleasure and Principles: Issues of Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock ‘n’
Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4, no. 2 (March 1, 1992): 12–21.
Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Scherman, Tony. Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1999.
Schroeder, Patricia R. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Scott, Michelle R. Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging
Urban South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Scott, Michelle R. Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging
Urban South. University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Service, Smithsonian Institution. Traveling Exhibition. Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on
Jazz. Chronicle Books, 1997.
314
Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: the Rock “n” Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 1994.
Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: the Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York:
Macmillan, 1978.
Shepperson, George. “African Diaspora: Concept and Context.” Global Dimensions of the
African Diaspora. (1982): 46–53.
Shipton, Alyn. Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
Sloat, Susanna. Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
Small, Christopher. Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1998.
Smith, Jon, and Deborah N Cohn. Look Away!: the U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004.
Smith, Wendy. “The Man Who Got His Way: John Hammond, Scion of White Privilege,
Helped Integrate Popular Music.” American Scholar 75, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 110–114.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: a History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.
Sprayberry, Gary S. “Inturrupted Melody: The Attack on Nat ‘KIng’ Cole.” Alabama
Heritage, no. 71 (Winter 2004): 16–24.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: an Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.
Stankovic, Peter. “Hip Hop in Slovenia: Music Genre as a Medium of Construction of
Modernist Subjectivity?” Boundaries, Blockades & Bridges (2007).
Stearns, Marshall. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
———. “Is Jazz Good Propaganda? The Dizzy Gillespie Tour.” Saturday Review XXXIX, no.
28 (July 14, 1956): 28–31.
Stecopoulos, Harry. Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms,
1898-1976. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader. Pearson Education, 1998.
Stubbs, Jean, and Pedro Perez Sarduy, eds. AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on
Race, Politics and Culture. 1st ed. Ocean Press, 2002.
315
Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: from the First Drums to the Mambo. 1st ed. Chicago Ill.:
Chicago Press Review, 2004.
Szwed, John F. Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin,
2010.
———. Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Teubig, Klaus. Straighten up and Fly Right: a Chronology and Discography of Nat “King”
Cole. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.
The Popular Music Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Thomajan, D. “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” Film Comment 33, no. 4 (1997): 38–39.
Tition, Jeff Todd. “Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival.” In
Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Rosenberg, Neil V.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977.
———. “Thematic Pattern in Downhome Blues Lyrics: The Evidence on Commercial
Phonograph Records Since World War II.” Journal of American Folklore 90, no. 357
(1977).
Tosches, Nick. Unsung Heroes of Rock “n” Roll. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1984.
Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Turpin, Andrea L. “The Ideological Origins of the Women’s College: Religion, Class, and
Curriculum in the Educational Visions of Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon.” History of
Education Quarterly 50, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 133–158.
316
Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 1st ed. New
York: Amistad, 2004.
———. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock “n” Roll: an Alternative History of American
Popular Music. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wald, Gayle. “From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover.”
American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003).
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.
Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993.
Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race
Relations. Taylor & Francis, 1998.
Wardlow, Gayle, and Edward M Komara. Chasin’ That Devil Music Searching for the Blues.
San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998.
Ware, Vron. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002.
Waterman, Christopher. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina’, and the Excluded
Middle.” In Ronald Radano, Ed. Music and the Racial Imagination 2000.
Wein, George, and Nate Chinen. Myself Among Others. Da Capo, 2003.
Weinstein, Norman C. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz. New York: Limelight,
1994.
Wells, A, and H Tokinoya. “The Genre Preferences of Western Popular Music by Japanese
Adolescents.” Popular Music and Society. 22, no. 1 (1998): 41.
Wexler, Jerry, and David Ritz. Rhythm and the Blues: a Life in American Music. New York:
Knopf, 1993.
Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956.
Wilentz, Sean, and Greil Marcus. The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the
American Ballad. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Wilkinson, Alec. The Protest Singer: an Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2009.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. Columbia University Press, 1958.
317
———. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Williams, Sean. “Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997-2001.” The
Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2010): 396–397.
Wilson, Bobby M. Race and Place in Birmingham: the Civil Rights and Neighborhood
Movements. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. London: Cassell, 1956.
Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: a Strategy for Grounded Inquiry.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1980.
———. “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the
Movement.” American Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1979): 293–337.
———. “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies.” Prospects 4 (1979):
517–547.
Work, John W, Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C Adams, Robert Gordon, and Bruce Nemerov.
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma
County Study, 1941-1942. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Woods, Clyde Adrian. Development Arrested: the Blues and Plantation Power in the
Mississippi Delta. London; New York: Verso, 1998
Wren-Lewis, Justin. “The Encoding / Decoding Model: Criticisms and Redevelopments for
Research on Decoding.” Media, Culture & Society 5, no. 2 (April 1, 1983): 179 –197.
Wright, Josephine. “Conversation with John Birks ‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, Pioneer of Jazz.” The
Black Perspective in Music 4, no. 1 (1976): 82.
Wright, Josephine R. B, and John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. “Conversation with John Birks
‘Dizzy’ Gillespie, Pioneer of Jazz.” The Black Perspective in Music 4, no. 1 (1976): 82–
89.
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Yarwood, Dean L. When Congress Makes a Joke: Congressional Humor Then and Now. New
York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: the Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the
Americas. Cambridge; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
318
Audio Recordings
Arnaz, Desi. The Best of Desi Arnaz: The Mambo King. RCA Records Label, 1992.
Berry, Chuck. After School Session. Santa Monica: Chess; Geffen Records: Distributed by
Universal Music & Video Distribution, 2004.
Big Maybelle. Blues, Candy & Big Maybelle. New York, NY: Savoy Jazz, 1986.
Broonzy, Big Bill. An Introduction to Big Bill Broonzy. Los Angeles: Fuel, Distributed by
UMGD and Varèse Sarabande, 2007.
———. The Young Big Bill Broonzy, 1928-1935. Newton, N.J.: Yazoo Records, 1990.
Carr, Leroy, Scrapper Blackwell, and Josh White. Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I
Crave the Best of Leroy Carr. New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy, 2004.
Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: RBF Records , 1959.
Clooney, Rosemary. The Essential Rosemary Clooney. New York: Sony Columbia Legacy,
2004.
Cole, Nat King. Re:Generations. New York: Capitol Records, 2009.
Cole, Nat King. Nat King Cole at the Sands. Los Angeles: Capitol Jazz, 2002.
———. Voices Of Change, Then And Now. Capitol, 2009.
Cole, Natalie, and Nat King Cole. Still Unforgettable. Burbank: DMI Records/Atco;
Manufactured & marketed by Rhino, 2008.
Cole, Natalie. Unforgettable. Beverly Hills, CA: Elektra, 1991.
Dylan, Bob, and The Band. The Basement Tapes. New York: Columbia, 1975.
Gillespie, Dizzy. Dizzy Gillespie and His Big Band in Concert Featuring Chano Pozo.
Hollywood: GNP/Crescendo Records, 1948.
———. Afro. U.S.: Norgran Records, 1956.
———. Dizzy Gillespie at Newport. New York: Polygram, 1957.
———. The Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra at the Salle Pleyel, Paris, France, 1948., 1970
319
———. Dizzy Gillespie Big Band Bebop Enters Sweden 1947-49. Paris: FNAC Music, 1993.
———. Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour, 1956. Vol.1. Detroit:
Red Anchor Productions, 1999.
———. Dizzy in South America. Official U.S. State Department Tour, 1956. Vol. 2. Detroit,
MI: Red Anchor Productions, 1999.
———. Dizzy in South America. Tangos, Samba, Interviews, and More Big Band Be-bop.
Detroit, MI: Consolidated Artists Productions/Red Anchor Productions, 2001.
Gillespie, Dizzy, and Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Carnegie Hall Concert. New York: Verve
Records, 1961.
Hammond, John, Count Basie, Helen Humes, Meade Lewis, Joe Turner, and Kansas City
Five. From Spirituals to Swing the Legendary 1938 & 1939 Carnegie Hall Concerts.
Santa Monica, CA: Vanguard, 1999.
Hopkins, Lightnin’, and Samuel Barclay Charters. Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. New York,
N.Y.: Folkways Records, 1959.
Jackson, Chubby, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Fifth Dimensional Jazz Group., and Gösta
Törner’s Jam Session Band. Bebop Enters Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden: Dragon, 1981.
Johnson, Robert. The Centennial Collection. New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy, 2011.
———. The Complete Original Masters. New York, N.Y.: Columbia/Legacy: Sony Music,
2011.
———. Robert Johnson the Complete Recordings. New York, NY: Columbia, 1990.
———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. New York: Columbia, 1961.
———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Volume II. Don Mills, Ont.: Mfd. by CBS Records
Canada, 1967.
Joe Cuba Sextet.. The Best of Joe Cuba. New York: Tico Records, 1995.
King Cole Trio. Hit That Jive, Jack. New York, NY: MCA Records, 1996.
Lewis, Furry, and Samuel Barclay Charters. Furry Lewis., 1960.
Lipscomb, Mance. Mance Lipscomb. Berkeley, Calif.: Arhoolie, 1960.
320
Lomax, Alan, and Archive of American Folk Song. Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs,
and Ballads. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Division of Music, Recording
Laboratory, 1956.
McDowell, Fred. I Do Not Play No Rock “n” Roll. Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1995.
McGhee, Brownie. Blues Is Truth. Concord: Blues Alliance, 1996.
Waters, Muddy. Hard Again. New York: Blue Sky, 1987.
Parker, Charlie, and Dizzy Gillespie. Diz N Bird at Carnegie Hall. New York: Blue Note
Records, 1997.
Platters. The Very Best of the Platters. New York: Mercury, 1991.
Prado, Perez. Havana 3 A.m./Mambo Mania. Vollersode: Bear Family Records, 1990.
Rainey, Ma. The Very Best of Ma Rainey. Los Angeles: Shout! Factory, 2003.
Smith, Bessie. The Essential Bessie Smith. New York: Columbia/Legacy, 1997.
Smith, Harry Everett. An Anthology of American Folk Music. New York: Folkways Records,
1952.
———. Anthology of American Folk Music. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways/Sony
Music Special Products, 1997.
Smith, Mamie. Crazy Blues the Best of Mamie Smith. New York: Columbia/Legacy, 2004.
Smith, Ruby, and James P Johnson. Back Water Blues. Hicksville: Meritt Record Society,
1981.
Taylor, Cecil. Unit Structures. New York: Blue Note Records, 1970.
Thornton, Big Mama. Big Mama Thornton. Santa Monica: Vanguard Records, 2007.
White, Josh. Free and Equal Blues. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways, 1998.
Williams, Hank. Greatest Hits III. Burbank: Warner Bros., 1989.
———. The Bocephus Box the Hank Williams Jr. Collection, 1979-1992. Nashville:
Curb/Capricorn, 1992.
Films and Video
Burns, Ken,. Jazz. New York: PBS Home Video: Distributed by Warner Home Video, 2000.
321
Cole, Nat. The Nat “King” Cole Show Live 1957 Broadcasts. Sandy Hook: Sandy Hook
Records, 1981.
Dizzy Gillespie - Manteca - 1959, 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1s5CWbYyao&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Eastwood, Clint, Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney, John Vernon, Philip Kaufman,
Sonia Chernus, Forrest Carter, and Malpaso (Company). The Outlaw Josey Wales.
Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999.
Sterns, Burt. Jazz on a Summer’s Day. New York: New Yorker Films, Distributed by New
Yorker Video, 2000.
HMV102,Sweet Lorraine,The King Cole Trio, 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRPs3gp55Zo&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Lerner, Murray. The Other Side of the Mirror. Los Angeles: Sony BMG music entertainment,
2009.
Nat King Cole - When I Fall In Love - Live, 2008.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h649I7ETaHI&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Nat King Cole Re:Generations Album Sizzle Reel, 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVJ7F5Cr6I&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Roy, Don. Memphis: The Original Broadway Production. Shout Factory!, 2011.
Thorsen, Karen, Douglas K Dempsey, Susan Lacy, Albert Maysles, William Miles, California
Newsreel (Firm), Maysles Films., and N.Y.) WNET (Television station: New York.
James Baldwin the Price of the Ticket. San Francisco, Calif.: California Newsreel
[distributor], 1989.
Walkin My Baby Back Home Prod by The Roots for RE:GENERATION, 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MleJqRn_05w&feature=youtube_gdata_player.
Williams, Hank, and Hank Williams. In the Hank Williams Tradition. West Long Branch, NJ:
White Star, 2000.
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Cuba), and Dizzy Gillespie. A Night in Havana: Dizzy
Gillespie in Cuba. New York: Docurama, Distributed by New Video Group, 2005.
Newspapers, Magazines, and Trade Publications
“6 Arrested For Attack On Nat Cole.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago,
Ill., April 12, 1956.
322
“A Lesson For Nat Cole.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April
12, 1956.
“A Triumph for Common Sense.” The Guardian, April 14, 2009, sec. World news.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/us-cuban-relations-gott.
“Ala. Rally Flops; Cite Nat Attack.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago,
Ill., April 19, 1956.
Alabama Anti-Saloon League. “The Alabama Citizen.” The Alabama Citizen. Birmingham,
Ala., 1906.
Anonymous. “Remote Lands to Hear Old Democracy Boogie.” New York Times, November
18, 1955.
“Argument Over Nat Cole Ends In Murder Charge.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition)
(1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., May 12, 1956.
Calvin, Delores. “Maybe There Is Another Side To Cole’s Silence.” Daily Defender (Daily
Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 19, 1956.
“Chicago Defender.” Chicago Defender. Chicago, Ill., 1973.
“Cole Cites Race Haters In Attack.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago,
Ill., April 12, 1956.
“Cole’s Sluggers ‘Didn’t Mean To’.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago,
Ill., April 17, 1956.
“Don’t Tear down Boutwell Auditorium - It’s an Important Part of Birmingham History.” The
Birmingham News - Al.com, n.d.
http://blog.al.com/bn/2008/01/dont_tear_down_boutwell_audito.html.
Freed, Alan. “Just Where Did Rock ‘n’ Roll Get Its Start Is Question.” Daily Defender (Daily
Edition) (1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., July 23, 1956.
“Harlem Disc Jockey Says Rock ’n Roll Not ‘Sepian’.” The Chicago Defender (National
Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., April 14, 1956.
“Irked By Stand Harlem Taverns Ban Cole Discs.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (19561960). Chicago, Ill., April 17, 1956.
“Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure.” The New York
Times, August 26, 1976.
.
323
Johnson, Ziggy. “Hurt! And Plenty, Is Nat Cole’s Reaction.” The Chicago Defender (National
Edition) (1921-1967). Chicago, Ill., May 12, 1956.
‘King’ Cole Takes Out $500 Life Membership In NAACP.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition)
(1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 24, 1956.
Kolodin, Irving. “Number One Swing Man.” Harper’s (September 1939): 431–433.
Lee, Felicia R. “Best Seller Is a Fake, Professor Asserts.” The New York Times, October 4,
1991, sec. U.S.
“Our Opinions: The King Messes Up.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (19211967). Chicago, Ill., April 21, 1956.
Rosen, Jody. “The Perils of Poptimism.” Slate, May 9, 2006.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2006/05/the_perils_of_poptimism.html.
Rosenberg, Neil V. “Anthology of American Folk Music” (1997).
“Sammy Kaye Joins Group Defending ’Rock ’n Roll".” Daily Defender (Daily Edition)
(1956-1960). Chicago, Ill., April 5, 1956.
Sanneh, Kelefa. “The Rap Against Rockism.” The New York Times, October 31, 2004, sec.
Arts / Music. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/31sann.html.
“The Education of Little Fraud”, n.d. http://www.salon.com/2001/12/20/carter_6/.
“What If Latin America Ruled the World? by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.” The Guardian, July 3,
2010, sec. Books. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/latin-america-oscarguardiola-rivera.
Government and Official Documents
Azarian, Alexander J., Eden Fesshazion, and Georgia. General Assembly. Senate. Research
Office. “The State Flag of Georgia: The 1956 Change in Its Historical Context”. Senate
Research Office, 2000.
Mississippi. Division of Tourism Development., and Mississippi. Dept. of Economic and
Community Development. Mississippi Delta Blues. Jackson,: Mississippi Department of
Economic and Community Development: Division of Tourism Development.
Web Resources
“1931 HMV 102 - The World’s Finest Portable”, n.d.
http://myvintagetv.com/updatepages1/changer%20videos/Best%20Portables/HMV102.ht
m.
324
“A Pile o’ Cole’s Nat King Cole Website - 1956 Sessions”, n.d.
http://apileocole.alongthehall.com/sessions/session1956.html#session4.
“Blue Note Records.” Nat King Cole: “Voices Of Change, Then & Now” Digital EP -Available Now, n.d.
http://bluenote.com/ArtistNewsDetail.aspx?newsId=12328&artistId=902093.
“Capitol/EMI Releases Nat King Cole ’Voices Of Change, Then & - Bloomberg”, n.d.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGXXHYRAcyUM.
Chandler, Daniel. “Introduction to Genre Theory.” An Introduction to Genre Theory, n.d.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html.
Christgau, Robert. “Robert Christgau: The Race Factor.” Robertchristgau.com, n.d.
http://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/race-sea.php.
———. “Women’s Work”, n.d. http://robertchristgau.com/xg/music/96-af.php.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Thoughts on the Rihanna-Chris Brown Collaboration”, February 22,
2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/thoughts-on-therihanna-chris-brown-collaboration/253466/.
“‘Cool Records Don’t Make The Basis For Good History’: A Chat About The Perils Of
Record Collecting (And Weird Biases Of Nick Hornby) With Cultural Guru Karl
Hagstrom Miller - New York Music - Sound of the City”, n.d.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2010/04/cool_records_do.php.
“David Lowery - 300 Songs Blog”, n.d.
http://www.davidlowerymusic.com/300songsblog.cfm?feature=1650209&postid=110349
6.
“Elvis Presley 1953-1955: The Hillbilly Cat”, n.d.
http://www.elvispresleymusic.com.au/elvis_presley_1953_1955.html.
Gac, Scott. “Jazz Strategy: Dizzy, Foreign Policy, and Government in 1956.” Americana: The
Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to Present. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2005).
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2005/gac.htm.
Gray, Michael. “33 1/3: The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.” 33 1/3, n.d.
http://33third.blogspot.com/2006/05/bob-dylan-encyclopedia_17.html.
Gussow, Adam. “Racing Down the Blues, an Interview with Adam Gussow”, n.d.
http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/310981in.html.
“Jazz Columns: Evansing the Score: The Politics of Exclusion in Ken Burns’ Jazz - By Stuart
Nicholson — Jazz Articles”, n.d. http://jazztimes.com/articles/20327-evansing-the-scorethe-politics-of-exclusion-in-ken-burns-jazz.
325
“Jazz/Jerry Jazz Musician/Jazz Critic Gene Lees Interview”, n.d.
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/linernotes/gene_lees.html.
Lowery, David. “#73: South California Revisited – St. Cajetan.” David Lowery - 300 Songs
Blog, n.d.
http://www.davidlowerymusic.com/300songsblog.cfm?feature=1650209&postid=110349
6.
“Mrcole.page”, n.d. http://webspace.webring.com/people/sb/blackprincess123/mrcole.html.
“Nat King Cole - RE:GENERATIONS Historic Mural Creation.” YouTube, n.d.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9OSAWM3SUQ.
Osteen, Katherine, and University of Mississippi. Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
“The Blues Is Alright Blues Music as a Root for Cultural Tourism and Public History”,
2011. http://0search.proquest.com.umiss.lib.olemiss.edu/pqdtlocal1006592/docview/881642508/fulltex
tPDF/1349AC2E4FB4A1D4921/1?accountid=14588.
Prichard, Forrest Ansel. “Fighting the Blues with Blues How Indianola, Mississippi Used
Delta Blues Tourism to Develop a New Identity”, 2010.
http://library.msstate.edu/etd/show.asp?etd=etd-07072010-181929.
“Robert Christgau: Decade: Rockism Faces the World”, n.d.
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/decade-89.php.
“The Transformation of a Klansman - New York Times”, n.d.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/04/opinion/the-transformation-of-a-klansman.html.
Whelan, Pete, Slotnikoff, Joel, and Lornell, Kip. “Pete Whelan Interview.” Blues World,
February 13, 1997. http://www.bluesworld.com/PeteWhelanInterview.html.