Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (review)

Abstract

In Deep River Anderson's primary goal is "to understand how certain intellectuals, writers, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance period . . . argued for distinctive interpretations of music and social memory" (12). He discusses the shifting positions of music in relation to the thought of important historical figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, John Hammond, and Roger Pryor Dodge. Amongst the intellectuals, critics, reviewers, and writers, he splices musical reflections by singers and musicians, such as Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman. Deep River presents an intellectual history of music's relationship to familiar [End Page 339] issues of the Harlem Renaissance: Du Bois's idea of double consciousness; primitivist modernism; the sublimation of folk authenticity in concert music; the talented tenth and the racial mission of the New Negro; and organic versus classical forms. Apart from an accomplished cataloguing of intellectual perspectives, the book often seems to have little of its own to say about these matters. Often I felt as though the ideas were taken to the river, washed in the water—only to be left in the sun to dry.