Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

Abstract

Guthrie Ramsey’s Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop is a fascinating account of the relationship between music and African American identity. Surveying an array of black music styles – blues, bebop, rhythm and blues, soul music, gospel music, and hip hop in films – Ramsey explores ways that African Americans have identified themselves in music. He draws upon his experience as a jazz and gospel pianist and his family’s participation in the Great Migration to generate an ethnographic method positioning family narrative at the intersection of racial identity and musical expression. He is also concerned with the ways in which African Americans have used music to construct positive and flexible concepts of “race.” As Ramsey argues early in the book: “My use of the term race music intentionally seeks to recapture some of the historical ethnocentric energy that circulated in these styles, even as they appealed to many listeners throughout America and abroad. […] I use the word race […] not to embrace a naive position of racial essentialism, but as an attempt to convey the worldviews of cultural actors from a specific historical moment.” (3, original italics) Ramsey’s explanation of “race music” or, rather, raced music, resonates in interesting ways with the concept of “race records” that emerged in the young American recording industry in the 1920s. The success of Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues” prompted early record labels to initiate marketing campaigns targeting African Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and others as distinct markets with specific musical tastes connected to their racial and ethnic identities. This trend substantiated a form of racial essentialism in sounds; record company executives assumed a homology between race and music consumption. In reality, however, American listening habits traversed racial and ethnic boundaries, creating a series of musical intercultures (see Slobin; Stanyek) evidenced in listening habits during the so-called “Jazz Age” and “Swing Era” of the 1920s and 30s. During this period, African American music became America’s popular music. While this intercultural listening challenged the marketing of “race records,” assumptions about racial identity and musical meaning continued to structure the way African American music was portrayed in American popular culture. Race Music strategically reclaims the notion of “race” from the inside out, from an emic or insider’s view of black music and its relationship to African American culture. Ramsey’s race music (re)presents the creative strategies African Americans employed in crafting their own identities in sound and how those sounds circulate as symbols in a variety of social contexts. Like the New Negro discourse of the Harlem Renaissance and the concept of Black Art during the 1960s and ‘70s, Ramsey’s race music is about self-determination, about reclaiming the ability to define oneself in sound. Ramsey develops three historical frameworks for locating the articulation of music and identity: Afro-modernism in the 1940s, black nationalism and soul music in the 1960s, and the “post-industrial moment” of the 1990s. These three historical frames illustrate important moments in which new understandings about the relationship between racial and musical identity were conceived in African American culture. One moment focuses on musical experimentalism and ideas about “modernity” in the 1940s that led to the creation of bebop. Ramsey also demonstrates how critical