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This chapter explores the rise of the Negro spirituals and the career and the racial-uplift coding of James Monroe Trotter’s book Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878). White Americans first encountered the African American spirituality through music that expressed African American sorrow over their predicament of being slaves. Trotter’s book gave the first comprehensive history of black music in America, focusing on several musicians such as the Georgia Minstrels, Justin Holland, and the Luca Family.

Black music, like Black Power, took on multivalent meanings as artists and audiences claimed the symbolic power of jazz for their particular purposes. Within the jazz world, the debate over integration and Black Power was played out in tandem with the aesthetic debate over free jazz. Both revolutionary and cultural nationalists claimed the New Thing as a musical symbol of the transformation of African American consciousness and the ascendancy of Black Power. This chapter shows that the political activism of jazz musicians during the civil rights and Black Power years took a wide variety of forms and included musicians ranging from the most eminent, straight-ahead players, to the prophets of jazz experimentalism.

This chapter examines Europe's role in producing and selling his music ensembles, the role of the labor union, and developments in rhythmic black music more generally in New York City between 1910 and 1912. Europe capitalized on opportunities to break into social dance markets before World War I. Although never completely divorced from minstrel performance and its cultural legacies, Europe's music, uplift agenda, and professionalism challenged normative representations of African Americans throughout New York and the United States more broadly. Yet his successes also helped narrow the meaning of black ragtime, turning it from a commercially produced American cultural commodity into the exclusive cultural expression of African Americans. As Europe both reinforced and challenged stereotypical understandings of black culture, he continued to seduce white cultural elites by fulfilling their assumptions about the natural and inherent racial difference.

The spread of African-based “ratty” music beyond seedy nightclubs represented a kind of racial mixing, in effect bringing black culture to Creoles and whites. The music's popularity catapulted it beyond the few whites and Creole musicians who would venture into disrespectable neighborhoods to hear it. Yet audience enthusiasm only partly explains the creation and dissemination of the impure music called jazz. To get a fuller picture, this chapter looks at the lives of New Orleans musicians themselves, focusing on their role in facilitating the circulation of the music across racial lines. It discusses songsters, roustabouts, and brass bands as well as black church, racism, the Creole struggle to embrace jazz and how they learned black music, and white musicians.

In this book, the author offers a method to the study of black music consistent with the music itself. The book follows the implications of “Ring Shout!,” significantly adding depth to the presented ideas. It is an analysis of the origin and development of African American music and musical culture. Figures and events that are important in achieving the goal of this book have been treated, regardless of their significance in the history of African American music. The book is based on the assumption that African musical traits and cultural practices played a foremost role in the growth and expansion of African American music. This book is intended as a medium of understanding the differences between vernacular and classical, formal and folk, academic and popular approaches of knowing, attending to, and criticizing music.

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

The tradition of African American hymn singing known as “Dr. Watts” derives from the collection of hymn texts written in the eighteenth century by the Dissenting English theologian Isaac Watts and others, including Charles Wesley, brother of the founder of Methodism. The Dr. Watts tradition, embracing intoned sermons, prayers, testimonies, moans, shouts, and songs, as well as hymns, stems from the fervent evangelical Christianity of the North American frontier and from an African lineage more ancient and multifarious. Dr. Watts hymn singing plays a seminal role in the transition from spirituals to classic gospel. This book explores lining out as one of the “invisible” (or autonomous) forms of music in contemporary black churches and considers it in relation to language and ritual. The rubric “Dr. Watts,” which is heard chiefly among African Americans, coincides with the prophetic implications of Isaac Watts's “system of praise” for the evolution of black musical identity. The book presents a new interpretation of rhythmic styles in lining out and other black music genres from the period between 1800 and 1970.

Musicologists have acknowledged the importance of speech rhythms to black music from the blues forward, but the focus of the analysis has not explained their primacy. The obscurity of the hymns—despite their affinity to the spirituals that have been reinvented as a concert form—typifies the hidden significance of speech to black music. Proceeding from an English tradition that was no less oral in derivation, the performance tradition of Dr. Watts hymns brought to an African oral inheritance a heightened awareness of English poetic meters and rhyming patterns, along with a racialized theology, which slaves revitalized and subverted as their own voice of liberation. As sermons unfold the scriptures in black worship, hymns and songs freight spoken symbols with the burden of human thoughts and feelings. This chapter examines the musical implications of words as shapers of pitch, rhythm, and timbre.

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its innovative adaptations of African American vernacular forms, including the blues and jazz. Situating Davis within recent scholarly reassessment of the Black Chicago Renaissance, this chapter demonstrates how Davis’s jazz writing, as a journalist, critic, and poet, exemplifies the global orientation of the Black Chicago Renaissance that is becoming increasingly recognized. Davis’s jazz writing is especially important, for the subsequent Black Arts generation as well as for his Popular Front contemporaries, not only because of his development of inventive vernacular forms, but also because of his insistence on the African roots of African American music. In articulating how African musical principles inform jazz, Davis also underscored the international and interracial importance of jazz for black and working-class social progress.

This chapter discusses Nathaniel Dett’s contribution in the advancement of black American music. It explains that Dett was one of the few learned African American composers who championed the cause of the use of black American folk songs as a basis for Western Classical compositions in the romantic-nationalist thought. This chapter adds that throughout his life, Dett advocated the use of “Negro music” in larger forms, as seen from his book The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1938).

From the beginnings of the African presence in New Orleans, authorities feared the potential of unsupervised black music making. Whites dreaded the possibility that the disrespectable music and dance would spread to the broader population, threatening racial purity. The same fears came to the fore during the time of the birth of jazz. The milieu that gave birth to jazz was a compound consisting of lower-class blacks, sensual dances, and “ratty” music. These three elements together constituted a whole ethos, and defenders of purity and the Protestant ethic directed their wrath at each of them. However, in the eyes of the authorities, the most objectionable feature of these clubs was their facilitation of racial mixing. The push for racial purity and respectability even pervaded the disrespectable red light district, Storyville. The attack on jazz came from two emerging strands of ideology: the idea that the poor, immigrants, and people of color lack reason and self-control, the capacity for “labor and self-denial,” and the notion that mass culture appeals to base, anti-social desires.

This chapter discusses African American Modernism, Signifyin(g), and Black Music. Booker T. Washington's idea had raised opportunities among the black populace, perhaps even helping to bring about this spirit of “renaissancism,” this spirit of nationalistic engagement that began with intellectuals, artists, and spokespersons at the turn of the African American Modernism, Signifyin(g), and Black Music century. This spirit flourished in Harlem in the 1920s, engaging the entire African diaspora for more than four decades between around 1910 and 1950. During the Negro Renaissance, spirituals, ragtime, blues, jazz, and gospel music would go through significant development, and Signifyin(g) would play a role: the musicians would become signifiers par excellence—musical tricksters who would help define the music and the culture of the United States.

Faulkner clearly paid attention to the trends and directions of modernist writing in the early 1920s, but what is less obvious is how the work of African Americans contributed to his “making it new,” as Pound suggested for creating a modern poetics. This essay explores the soundings from Black cultural and literary production that Faulkner drew upon and melded into his writerly voice and modernist aesthetic. From the blues and jazz music of Black musicians, such as W. C. Handy, through the fictive realms of modernist writers (e.g., Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford) whose artistry drew on Black voices, to the aesthetic work of modern Black writers (in particular, James Weldon Johnson’s sermons in verse), Faulkner found models for rendering the sounds of Black life in his literary art. These Black soundings remain audible though not transparent in Faulkner’s fiction and practice through the 1920s and beyond.

The early 1950s were exciting times for gospel and for African American musical performers of all kinds. Record sales were healthy. Radio stations were spreading the music beyond color lines. Artists like Nat Cole, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Jordan were enjoying crossover appeal like never before. At the same time, African Americans were gaining power as consumers of entertainment. In 1951, Columbia Records revived their Okeh imprint, a subsidiary that had been dormant for a number of years. Picked to head the new subsidiary, Danny Kessler, in charge of Columbia's fledgling R&B department at the time, would ultimately record gospel as well as R&B sides. Kessler's gospel signings included the R. S. B. Gospel Singers, Brother Rodney, the Bailey Gospel Singers-and most important, the Dixie Hummingbirds.

The seven years between 1952 and 1959 were an extraordinarily rich period for the Dixie Hummingbirds and also for African American cultural history. African American artists of every kind continued to the forefront of popular entertainment, particularly in the field of music. Although rhythm and blues especially succeeded in the pop mainstream and influenced more popular genres such as rock ‘n’ roll, gospel remained primarily “insider” music, culture bound, and still celebrated mostly within the African American community. Black gospel occasionally did reach multiracial audiences via radio, records, television, and news stories, but throughout the 1950s, the stars of gospel were for the most part stars within the sphere of African American entertainment.

The book opens by unpacking Mahalia Jackson’s January 20, 1952, appearance on the nationally televised CBS variety show Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan. Jackson’s performance of the W. Herbert Brewster gospel song “These Are They” raises a host of issues that situates her and contemporary performers within the black gospel field. The Sullivan appearance carried considerable significance for African Americans, introducing both Jackson and black gospel singing to a national television audience. The latter half of the chapter assesses the attribution of exceptionalism to black vernacular culture and the literature on Jackson and on gospel music, and closes by delineating a field analysis approach that helps identify forms of prestige that gave meaning to the practice of gospel singing after World War II.

This chapter discusses whiteness, masculine desire, and the animating absent black presence now inverted since its inception in minstrelsy. It shows how the triumph of hardcore rap makes it clear that the transgressive black body, primitivism, and cross-racial desire continue to find value in the marketplace of global popular culture well into the new millennium. The chapter also looks at a number of successful white performers of black music styles, including Elvis Presley, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and Brother Ali; and addresses whether there are more or less ethical ways in which white and other youth may engage hip-hop culture and appropriations of black male subjectivity.

The practice of Dr. Watts hymn singing among black Baptists in the nineteenth century both revitalized an existing ritual context for music performance and popularized among the black masses the forms and rhythms of English verse. African Americans have demonstrated an especially strong predilection toward speech-like song and its complement, song-like speech, as a deceptively simple means of evoking the divine presence. Two essays on black music by Olly Wilson underscore the interrelatedness of sound and movement not only in worship but in the whole of African-derived cultures. Walter Pitts has identified two ritual “frames” in black Baptist worship: the opening devotion, which may include lining-out hymns, prayers, and other cherished forms that have, over time, been formalized; and the service, including solo and choral performances, announcements, prayer, and scripture readings, all directed toward the sermon as the symbolic place of divine–human interaction and the focal point of celebration. This chapter focuses on what Pitts has called “a continuum of spiritual uplifting.”.