African American Cultural History Research Articles

"Boogie Chillen": Uncovering Detroit's African-American Cultural History

In 1948 John Lee Hooker recorded his first and arguably greatest song, Chillen. The single, pressed on Detroit's Modern label, stands as watershed in blues history. The recording was phenomenal success in the urban blues market, selling approximately one million copies. As point of comparison, Muddy Waters had hit only one year earlier with his song, I Can't Be Satisfied, which sold approximately seventy thousand to eighty thousand copies. Hooker's million seller proved that the appeal of the urban blues could reach farther than anyone previously had imagined. The amazing popularity of the song begs for an explanation. As many blues scholars and music writers have noted, Chillen is perhaps most striking in its simplicity. In his classic work, Deep Blues, Robert Palmer writes that the song was essentially, backcountry, pre blues sort of music?a droning, open-ended stomp without fixed verse form that lent itself to building up cumulative, trancelike effect.1 In his recent biography of Hooker, Boogie Man, Charles Shaar Murray describes the song as a one-man show with zero chord changes, repetitive lyrics and litde melody (p. 18). Yet most analysts of the song also agree that Chillen's stark musical style, which combines Delta blues traditions with distinctive urban edginess, is essential to understanding the song's wide appeal. Musically and lyrically, the recording captures the tension and excitement many African Americans experienced during the Great Migration when their southern cultural traditions confronted and merged with the industrial world of the urban North. For historians, particularly historians of Detroit's African-American cultural life, Chillen is not only legendary blues recording but also rich and evocative primary source. In the song John Lee Hooker sings in the persona of young man whose desire to boogie woogie defies his parents' wishes. The young man, who recendy migrated from

The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader

The Oxford W.E.B. Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 680 pages. $26.95 paper. quality of reader or anthology can be determined largely by how teachable it makes subject that it documents and how accurately it outlines parameters of that subject, The Oxford W.E.B. Bois Reader, edited by Eric Sundquist, is exemplary. Despite his almost unchallenged prominence as intellectual patriarch of African American cultural and history and his self-conscious desire to write history of African American culture, Bois has always been somewhat difficult figure to integrate into literature and cultural studies courses. Much of this difficulty has stemmed from sheer range of his accomplishments and interests. As Sundquist points out, Du Bois wrote alternately and equally well as sociologist, an economist, political scientist, an educator, an artist, and civil rights advocate, and more often than not, several of these intellectual roles were combined in any given speech or essay. The generic singularity of Bois's two major literary works, The Souls of Black Folk, often considered ur-text of African American modernity, and brilliant and under-appreciated Darkwater, text that Sundquist accurately sees as anticipating as well as instigating modern Pan-Africanism and culture of anticolonialism that has come to play such prominent role in Western (or anti-Western) literature of late twentieth century, has also contributed to under-reading of Bois's work. Both of these texts are included in their entirety in this reader and their juxtaposition makes clear value of reading them in relation to each other, If The Souls of Black Folk became century's most important statement of African American resistance to segregation, Darkwater joined battle for black civil rights in United States to broader campaign against European colonial rule abroad, especially in Africa. Placed under five broad headings (Concepts of Race, Representative Men, Literature and Art, Politics, Economics, and Education, and Africa and Colonialism), other essays that Sundquist has collected provide an exhaustive documentation of Bois's intellectual and ideological development. They effectively cover practically entire range of his non-literary writings. In its entirety reader's representation of Bois's constant engagement with current events and arguments, offers political history of diasporically self-conscious Blackness as experienced by man whose narrated life begins during presidency of Andrew and ends just short of presidency of Lyndon Johnson and whose roles were, among others, those of a historian, sociologist, teacher, cofounder of National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), magazine editor, novelist, governmental envoy, Pan-Africanist, spokesman for socialism, and an opponent of anticommunism. The one significant problem with Sundquist's choice of texts is that critical selections on Literature and Art are scanty and finally unsatisfying. Sundquist may have felt that because the great bulk of Bois's writing ... is devoted to politics, economics, and education and his critical writings on literature are ones most readily available elsewhere, this de-emphasizing of Bois was necessary. …

The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation

Melville J. Herskovits (e.g., 1966, 1941) argued that African Americans in virtually every American nation “retained” some greater or lesser cultural “memory” of the African past. Assuming that the cultures of the West African Fon, Yorùbá, and Ashanti (as reconstructed in the “ethnographic present”) represented the extant “base line,” or starting point, of African-American cultural history, Herskovits' “ethnohistorical” method posited that less-acculturated African-American groups instantiated the earlier historical stages of the more acculturated African-American groups. Thus, for example, spirit possession in the Brazilian Candomblé, could be taken to demonstrate the African derivation of “shouting,” or the behavior of those “filled with the Holy Spirit,” in black North American churches (Herskovits 1958[1941]:220–1). No less, the Candomblé, could be taken to represent an earlier stage of black North Americans' gradual syncretic adaptation, accommodation, and acculturation (Herskovits 1958[1941]:218). Herskovits' descriptions tend to represent the distinctive qualities of African-American cultures, in terms of enduring “deep-seated drives,” “bents,” and “underlying patterns.” On the other hand, Herskovits gives little attention to proximate historical and sociological mechanisms of their transmission. Dozens of scholars have usefully employed similar methods in the study of African cultural “memory” and adaptations. E.g., Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Ruth Landes, and Roger Bastide on Afro-Brazilians; Lydia Cabrera on Afro-Cubans; Herskovits himself on Haitians and Surinam Maroons; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán on Afro-Mexicans; W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Holloway, Sterling Stuckey, Albert Raboteau, Robert Farris Thompson and Margaret Creel on blacks in the United States; and so forth. This study revises Herskovits' cultural history of the African diaspora and proposes, at the Afro-Latin American locus classicus of Herskovitsian studies, some non-linear alternatives to Herskovits' and others' visions of diasporas generally.

Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990

Foreword by Val Wilmer Introduction New Jazz Chronology African American Cultural History and the Arts The New Jazz: 1959-1990 General Works Country and Regional Studies United States Europe and Beyond The Jazz Collectives The New York Loft and Club Scene Biographical and Critical Studies General Works Individual Artists Appendix I: Reference Works Appendix II: Archives and Research Centers Appendix III: List of New Jazz Artists by Country Appendix IV: List of New Jazz Artists by Instrument Artist Index Subject Index Author Index