Du Bois’ “Sorrow Songs”: Identity and the Question of Race

Abstract

William E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) articulated an influential conception of African-American racial identity grounded in the musical traditions of a racially defined “folk” in his chapter “Of the Sorrow Songs” included in his monumental The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Racialized thinking about cultural forms has proven remarkably resilient; it has had a long history in African-American, Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies. The challenge is not only to examine and correct the racist ideologies that delimit separate white and black cultures, but also to treat seriously relevant pieces of evidence when Du Bois considers the overlap, for example, of music and other cultural forms, in areas such as: ritual, spirituality, ethnography and the arts. As this paper tries to demonstrate in the following discussion, musical forms encode and reveal layers of historical meaning which are fundamental in the (re)construction of African-American identities since the beginning of the twentieth century, and we would do well to research and listen to them.