Riots, Rituals, and Ceremonials: The Multifunctionality of Rhythm and Blues and Soul as Generational Music in David Henderson's Early Poetry

Abstract

The poets who converged to form the Umbra group at the beginning of the 1960s in New York City’s Lower East Side combined the activist spirit of groups like On Guard for Freedom and the Organization for Young Men with the artistic preoccupations of avant-garde praxes. Tom Dent claims that investing their writing with “[their] history and . . . folk experience” to articulate an “independent artistic vision” (qtd. in Thomas, “Need” 335), Umbra writers affirmed a form of cultural nationalism that correlated with the political struggles for social equality. In many ways, black music was the encyclopedic cultural memory that contained the “history and folk experience” Umbra members sought to refashion for political and aesthetic purposes. Music has historically represented the medium through which African Americans have not only upheld their humanity in the face of constant dehumanization and demonization but also expressed and performed their history. In that sense, music performed the dual role of experiential reservoir and archive of the black struggle in a racist world. It is not surprising that in the 1960s, in the context of the reevaluation of black historical consciousness and black identity, Umbra writers sought to define a black aesthetic grounded in vernacular culture and cultural memory in a way that would reflect the “musical activism” (Porter 173) artists often heard in the music, more precisely in jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul, what Amiri Baraka called “The New Black Music.” On the one hand, Max Roach’s album We Insist! Freedom Now Suites (1960) and Charles Mingus’s works during the decade were considered “synoptic work[s] of black history” (Saul 93) that affirmed the need for blacks to reclaim their historical memory and their cultural consciousness, which, in turn, inspired “collective action for social change” (Ongiri 124). On the other hand, Umbra’s Archie Shepp released the militant Fire Music (1965), which echoed the contestation and militant spirit of black nationalists. The soul and rhythm and blues of James Brown’s “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) or The