Vernacular Music: A Naming Compass

Abstract

European conquerors and colonists reached the New World with considerable cultural baggage: sacred belief, identity formula, legal code, dialectal pattern, musical style. African slaves on Caribbean Islands, and continental coastal plains to the north and south, insured that American speech and music would depart forever from native, European, and African antecedents. The mix of transoceanic strangers with indigenous people from Cape Horn to the Arctic Circle has continued for five hundred years. We remain ambivalent about labels that mark such mingling: mestizo, creole, mulatto, half-breed. In 1781, Princeton's president John Witherspoon coined Americanism to treat new words shaped in transition from British colony to revolutionary nation. During a three-decade span, 1920-1950, H. L. Mencken popularized the rubric American language; no parents have claimed fame for joining America to music in voice or print. American music serves as a naming bin spacious enough to hold classical, avant-garde, folk, and tribal material. Charles Ives, Marian Anderson, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Aunt Molly Jackson, Lydia Mendoza, Gene Autry, and Madonna all qualify as composers or performers of American music. What singular thread binds them? By conjuring metaphors of naming bins and binding threads, we confess difficulty in linking Carnegie Hall, Tin Pan Alley, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Mississippi Delta. We question our premises in running together Kodiak Island, Bourbon Street, Music City, and MacDowell Colony. Critics, composers, performers, and auditors together have sought to make sense of American music as a term of category. In this task we mark musical boundaries by genre, theme, or form-by nativity site, or circumstance of performance. The quest never ends for fresh or functional labels to modify American music. In this vein, vernacular music appeared on the Manhattan scene a half century ago. Here, I explore our naming construct, conscious that language itself molds thought about and response to artistic expression.