African American Musicians Research Articles

The African American Collections Relating to Music at Emory University’s Rose Library

ABSTRACT: United States music history has for years privileged whiteness and largely ignored or disregarded the contributions of African Americans. The Stuart R. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, houses over thirty collections (and growing) related to African American musicians that could be used to both uncover and recover the critical role African Americans played in the music culture of the United States. This article presents a brief overview of these holdings to date, including the papers of composers (such as William Dawson, George Walker, and Undine Smith Moore), entertainers (such as Victoria Spivey, Bricktop, and Geoffrey Holder), and researchers (such as Rae Linda Brown, Geneva Southall, and Delilah Jackson). Types of materials held include manuscript letters and scores, photographs, and published music (both print and recorded) by and about African Americans.

Yusef Lateef, Islam, and jazz

ABSTRACT A notable characteristic of the jazz scene of 1940s–1960s North America was the large number of African American musicians who converted to Islam. Focusing on the case of the jazz saxophonist and scholar Yusef Lateef (1920–2013), alongside an extensive and newly created list of many other musician converts, this article explores some of the social, historical, and religious factors underlying this phenomenon. It is argued that Islamic conversion and the rise of Bebop should be understood in the context of the polemics of Black philosophers and leaders, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey—a point not adequately addressed in previous scholarship. The complexities and contradictions surrounding the conversion of jazz musicians are also explored. These include the negotiation of Islamic attitudes to music, and instances of the negation of Black identity, but also examples of deep commitment to the Islamic faith, spirituality, and proselytisation (da’wa). Lateef, in particular, is shown to have created an Islamic jazz amalgam that incorporated ‘Eastern’ elements into his ‘autophysiopsychic music’ (his preferred term for ‘jazz’).

Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France

Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France

:Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France

:<i>Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France</i>

Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France. By Celeste Day Moore

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore has woven together a compelling book that sheds new light on the Black (American) experience in twentieth century France. Her critical intervention is to show that although the circulation and reception of Black music in postwar France seemed emancipatory, the reality was more complex. Moore outlines the tensions between an idealized rhetoric of racial freedom in France and the real erasures and stereotyping that characterized the transmission and reception of music of the African diaspora. She uses approaches from social and cultural history, popular culture studies, sound studies, and French colonial and postcolonial studies. Moore’s nuanced account of the emancipatory and constraining effects of soundscapes is central to understanding the complexity of “race” and racialization in France. She focuses on the time period after the Second World War although, as she points out, these characteristics are typical of earlier periods and continue to this day.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Reviewed by: The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries by Anna Maria Busse Berger Sarah Clemmens Waltz The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries. By Anna Maria Busse Berger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 360 + 25 halftones, 12 musical examples, 2 tables. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0226740348. The disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology currently exist in an uneasy tension as scholars begin to question what distinguishes "ethno"-musicology from the "historical" musicology developed by German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century. Busse Berger's The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries exemplifies the historical underpinnings of this tension by demonstrating the original entanglement of those disciplines through the scholarship and valuation of medieval music. The story of how (and what) music was treated in four different missions in the German East African colony (now Tanzania) connects through the foundations of German musical scholarship, contemporaneous German ideals about collective music-making, the development of scholarship and historical narrative about medieval music, and the birth of "ethnomusicology" from the old "comparative musicology." Above all, Busse Berger's examination of scholarship about and in Africa, occasionally by African scholars, suggests the way forward for a less-blinkered musicological discipline. The historiography in this examination makes it a critical read for musicologists, but the book is also very much of interest to the general humanist. Little of a technical nature intrudes except a few excurses on pentatonic (five-note) scales. German scholars' deliberate invocation of comparative linguistics in developing comparative musicology is a fascinating opening, leading to a covert throughline comparing those who claimed the Indo-European proto-language as superior to those who claimed harmony as a peculiarly Western accomplishment. We find, however, that the book's intriguing "cast of characters" (helpfully referenced in an appendix) was not uniformly motivated by evolutionist notions of culture. The work is in three parts, corresponding to the "scholars, singers, missionaries" of the subtitle. Part I explains the beginning of comparative musicology among German scholars (often of medieval music, not coincidentally) and also how the study of ethnomusicology impacted the discipline of historical musicology. Individual scholars' [End Page 159] work is investigated in detail. Their proto-ethnomusicological work provoked a number of theories now verified by medievalists if still overlooked: that medieval polyphony was most likely improvised, and that polyphony—far from being a purely Western development—existed in a global context of improvised multi-voiced music-making. Especially compelling is the chapter on Nicholas Ballanta, an African scholar born in Sierra Leone who, in the 1920s, described African music from an African perspective. Though Ballanta received the first Guggenheim for music research, his story shows how, despite great support for Ballanta's ability, Western scholarship was unprepared for his research, which was derailed by seemingly surmountable issues—various travel roadblocks, recordings he sent which were lost, leading in the end to a loss of support and inappropriately negative reviews of his research. By detailing Ballanta's publications, compositions, and arguments (for the use of African music and against the use of medieval modes and Western notation), the chapter greatly contributes to the restoration of African scholarship's role in African and African American music. Part II is about the role of group music-making, the use of medieval music, and contemporaneous comparisons to music-making in the missions in Africa as reflected in the growing communal music-making movements in Germany: the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung. These chapters re-center our image of medieval music from, perhaps, arcane esoterica toward an Arcadian realm of simplicity in the contemporary German imagination, explaining how many of those called to mission work were attracted to the idea of simple community life, which also attracted them to medieval music. A historiography of medieval musicology, including landmark performances of the 1920s, blossoms from this. Busse Berger notes that revivals of folk song, the Middle Ages, and interest in nature contributed not just to the development of musicology but to ordinary life: "It is no exaggeration to say that this movement profoundly affected every German in...

Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France by Celeste Day Moore (review)

Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France by Celeste Day Moore (review)

COSMOPOLITAN CAIRO OF THE 1920S AND THE QUEEN OF THE "TARAB"1 MUNIRA AL-MAHDIYYA

The 1920s were full of drastic changes in Egypt's political, social and cultural life. On the one hand, the new anti-European movement formed in the wake of the 1919 uprising, and on the other hand, the vibrant nightlife of cosmopolitan Cairo, were the two main lines defining the character of this period. In the 1920s, Cairo was also part of the great international disturbance. After the World War I, many people left Europe and moved to Cairo in search of new opportunities. The search for a new life led many of them to Azbakiya (الأزبكية), the center of Cairo's nightlife at that time. In the 1920s, Cairo also proved to be a great place for some African American musicians. In 1923, in a letter published in the American newspaper The Chicago Defender, two African American residents of Azbakiya wrote how they were fascinated by the Cairo nightlife where they decided to stay. In December 1922, the news of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb was covered by the world press. Egypt was on the front pages of magazines and newspapers, which brought even more fame to Cairo and even more people headed to its theaters, cabarets and clubs. In 1905, an influential person from Cairo listened to the little girl singing in one of the villages of Al-Sharqiya and, attracted by her voice, offered her to move to Cairo and sing in his cafe. This is how Munira started her musical journey in Cairo.

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

Contributors to This Issue

Contributors to This Issue

Framing the Black Atlantic

Music is an integral part of human culture. The history of African American music is greatly tied to the music that was transfered through the Atlantic trade networks. In analyzing the musical culture of sailors and the musical traditions of tribal music in Africa there is a distinct cultural transfer that led to unique slave music. The Black Atlantic, coined by Paul Gilroy in his book The Black Atlantic, was a framework of trade not only of material goods, but cultural ideas. The slave trade thrived within this fabric of interconnecting societies and led to the modern day ramifications that so affects modern day African American music. This paper will demonstarte the plantation culture that emerged from this trade, but first it will look at the key influences that shaped this music. It will assert that the slave trade profoundly affected modern music and that the key proponent of this was the space that the Atlantic created.

Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty

Reviewed by: Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty James Ruchala Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes. By Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty. Fenton, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2021. [212 p. ISBN 9781513466378 (paperback), $24.99; ISBN 9781513459936 (e-book), $19.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, map, tune indexes. This book is an attempt to provide “a well-rounded survey and exploration of the fiddle music of the Appalachian Region” of the United States (p. 5). The Appalachian region comprises all or part of thirteen states, though this book focuses on only six of those: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Vir -ginia. The three authors present a brief bullet-point overview of the history and characteristics of the Appalachian fiddle tradition—also called “old-time fiddling.” The tradition started with the immigration of settlers from Great Britain into the region and absorbed the [End Page 89] influence of Native Americans, German immigrants, African American musicians, and published popular and spiritual music. The radio and recording industries popularized some fiddlers early in the twentieth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, surviving culture-bearers became teachers to generations of revivalists both within and without the region. The broad outlines of this history will be well known to most practitioners of old-time fiddling, and this book does not seek to make a broader interpretation of that history. What it does do is delve into the technical and musical detail of what these fiddle players were doing, as far as can be determined from extant recorded performances. The bulk of the book is dedicated to chapters on six Appalachian states, with sections on six to nine representative fiddlers from each state. Old-time music has been recorded in several different contexts, and this book includes musicians from each of them. There are some of the legends of the early recording era, like John Carson, Lowe Stokes, and Charlie Bowman; some whose influence comes to us mainly through field recordings made by researchers or family members, including John M. Salyer, Henry Reed, Bill Stepp, and Luther Strong; and some of the revival-era mentors like Tommy Jarrell, Melvin Wine, and Clyde Daven-port. West Virginia’s Clark Kessinger was a recording artist in the 1920s who lived into the revivalist era. Some figures are lesser known but just as worthy of study, including Emma Lee Dickerson, Osey Helton, and Sarah Singleton. One of the lessons to be derived from this book is the strength of the tradition and the high level of artistry to be found in all these contexts. Roy Andrade offers a short overview of the history of fiddling in each state and a capsule biography of each of the musicians. The bulk of the book—and the collection’s real value—comprises Drew Beisswenger’s detailed transcriptions of the tunes as played by these historic musicians, along with analytical notes. Each transcription includes references to help find the specific recording from which it was made. Most of the performances are from old commercial recordings on 78-rpm records or from field recordings. Many have not been reissued commercially but can be found for streaming or purchase on the internet, and the authors helpfully provide resources for locating these recordings. Most transcriptions of recordings fall somewhere between strictly descriptive and prescr iptive, while the quality and detail of the transcriptions is better than I’ve seen in comparable works. Having done some transcriptions of fiddling, I know that it can be both frustrating and enlightening. Most often, one hears more in the music than can be put on paper. Beisswengers’s transcriptions include many more details of ornamentation than found in comparable books like Jeff Todd Titon’s Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001) and Miles Krassens’s Masters of Old-Time Fiddling (New York: Oak Publications, 1983), both of which the authors acknowledge as influential. In some cases, the gap between what can be heard and what is notated begins to show. Benton Flippen’s frequent use of slides is...

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II ParisJazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation

Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II ParisJazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation

Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity

Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Alisha Lola Jones Vaughn A. Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, 2020) Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians’ performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Booker’s titular pun—Lift Every Voice and Swing—follows a tide of publications over the last decade on anthems (see Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora [2013]) and particularly on “the Negro National Anthem”—J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—profiled in Imani Perry’s May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio- cultural performance practices that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, to echo Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s signature 1931 composition, “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing. ” [End Page 131] With a keen awareness of the African philosophical worldview that there is no bifurcation of the “sacred” and “secular,” Booker confirms that for many African American jazz and other musicians there is only a continuum between the religious and non-religious in the artistic discourses accessible to them. To illuminate this observation, he explores the extent to which four jazz tastemakers’ (networks’) commentary and performances influenced religious expression in multi-faith/transdenominational liturgy and popular religio-cultural portrayals: Cab Calloway, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams. In the introduction, Booker establishes the parameters of “sacred” Afro-Protestant aesthetics, offering insight on the “swing concept” of vibraphonist and convert from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science Lionel Hampton. Hampton asserted that it was sacrilege for bands to swing (Negro) spirituals, especially in cinematic portrayals, presumably because of the sultry and sensuous musical associations that swinging prompts: “Sacred African American music was a cultural possession of Hampton and other African Americans, and, in his view, to transform it into a festive or entertaining commodity was to commit sacrilege and racial offense” (1). Hampton’s commentary reveals the extent to which Afro-Protestant religious expression is culture among African Americans, regardless of one’s personal belief. The first part of the book, entitled “Representations of Religion and Race,” comprises four chapters. Readers will note that Booker places taste-makers Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald into the conversation by innovative means, tapping into often overlooked autobiographical material about Calloway, and, and taking alternative measures for Fitzgerald, who rarely interviewed and never produced an autobiography. The first chapter introduces a group of religious race professionals beyond male clergy who are middle-class leaders of Afro-Protestant denominations, organizations, and churches. In the second chapter, Booker concentrates on maestro Cab Calloway’s early jazz career and the extent to which, as a person who did not participate in institutional religion, he deploys religious humor to push the limits. Instead of typically centering Black male musicians within Bebop jazz discourse, the third chapter centers on the vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s efforts to fashion her raced, gendered, and (non-)religious identity. Racial and religious reverence are investigated in the fourth chapter through Duke Ellington’s musical compositions in which he explores biblical and historical African civilizations. [End Page 132] Part two, “Missions and Legacies,” spans five chapters. The fifth chapter attends to Duke Ellington who was influential in religious literature while maintaining core conversation partners who were not formed in Christianity. We learn in the sixth chapter about Ellington’s theology through his recorded private thoughts in relation to his compositional practice. Composer Mary Lou Williams is featured in the seventh chapter, which examines her religious thoughts following her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Following Williams through her business archives...

Wary and StrangeCast-Iron Pansexual

When I was invited to write an album review for this issue, I perused several volumes of JAS media reviews. Many thoughtful and well-written reviews highlighted albums readily legible as “Appalachian” through repertoire, style, and genre. Reflecting on this issue's focus on queerness, I decided to cover the work of two artists whose work invites audiences to listen carefully to the subtleties and nuances of queerness in and from the region. Yet both, in their own ways, also elide, bend, and “queer” canonic styles, genres, and aesthetics commonly associated with Appalachia and Appalachian studies.Over the past decade, Amythyst Kiah's work has implicitly centered the sounds and voices of African American musicians elided in canonic “Appalachian” music, while subtly opening space for queer performance and listening. Born in Chattanooga and an alumnus of East Tennessee State University's Bluegrass program and Old-Time Pride Band, Kiah's debut acoustic album Dig (self-released 2012) curated a “southern gothic” aesthetic that spanned traditional Appalachian ballads to songs by Dink Roberts and Son House. Here, Kiah's covers of these songs and her original tunes frequently invite queer readings through ambiguous representations of gender and narratives that subtly avoid heteronormative tropes. Her second album, Amythyst Kiah &amp; Her Chest of Glass (Soul Step Records 2017), pushes these avenues further, using an electric blues and rock and roll sound (inspired by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) to re-invigorate tunes by Veera Hall (for example, “Troubles So Hard”), and less opaquely queer lyrics in Kiah's original songs like “Wildebeest.”An album comprised of original material, Wary and Strange (2021) more stridently articulates these intersectional priorities through new facets of Kiah's genre-bending sound. Kiah's Grammy nominated “Black Myself” signals the album's bolder songwriting through an anthem of black feminist resilience, liberation, and solidarity. Originally written and recorded for the acoustic roots Songs of Our Native Daughters project (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2019), Kiah's electrified and pop-produced version on Wary and Strange infuses the anthem with new energy and urgency. These political overtones resonate with more subtle songs that critique empty political rhetoric (“Soapbox”) as well as complacency in contemporary Western culture (“Fancy Drones [Fracture Me]”). However, Kiah continues to open space for queerness in narratives about relationships through including a country-influenced song about unrequited love (“Ballad of the Lost”) and rock ballads that address the difficulties of ending a fraught relationship (“Sleeping Queen” and “Opaque”). In these songs and others (“Firewater” and “Wild Turkey”), Kiah squarely addresses the importance of attending to mental health, particularly unresolved trauma.A self-proclaimed non-binary country singer based in northeast Tennessee, Adeem the Artist's 2021 album Cast-Iron Pansexual presents a similar queer ethic and politics. As an experienced singer-songwriter whose recorded output spans a decade and nearly as many styles, Cast-Iron Pansexual represents a more recent turn toward queerness in their work. Adeem explains in the album's visually and poetically beautiful lyric ’zine that they wrote the songs while reading gender theory, reflecting on their sexuality, and exploring their “divine femininity” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, 1). This led to their coming out as non-binary and “drifting with the waters pace towards wholeness” (Adeem 2021, 1).In this spirit, most songs on Cast-Iron Pansexual work through unacknowledged and unarticulated queer experiences and desires. The album's lead track “I Never Came Out” describes not having words to say you're “not straight or gay” in order to reflect on recognizing and overcoming internalized misogyny. While personal, inward-facing reflections on gender and sexuality permeate the album (“Apartment,” “Honeysuckle Hipbilly Homoerotica”), Adeem's songs leverage commentaries on social, cultural, and political norms in contemporary Appalachia and the South. Sentiments about religion and spirituality range from ambivalence and gender-bending re-imagination (“Fervent for the Hunger”) to slapstick queer humor (“Going to Heaven”). “I Wish You Would've Been a Cowboy” moves beyond the parody the title implies, to launch a critique of masculinity and nationalism in both Toby Keith's music and the politics of early 2000s commercial country music. The album's titular track delivers the most direct political statement within an already queer Appalachian world replete with interdimensional pansexuals, Marxists, a restaurant where you don't pay anything, tarot readings, and plenty of barbeque and cornbread. However, accompanied by pithy banjo picking, the song's final verse calls for a “radical movement towards equity (and justice) to dismantle white supremacy entirely, brick by brick, by hand, together.”The works of Amythyst Kiah and Adeem the Artist stand out for constructing musically compelling spaces that call listeners to imagine and build intersectional queer solidarities, healing, community, and activism. Their albums also implicitly ask us to listen to the numerous queer musicians and performers in the region who work within and against narrow definitions of Appalachia and, in so doing, re-imagine queerness more expansively.

Review: Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, by Eric Weisbard

Review: <i>Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music</i>, by Eric Weisbard

Cariocas de New Orleans: Brazilian Interpretations of North American Jazz

This article focuses on three Brazilian accounts of jazz history and argues that North American music, often dismissed as a “foreign influence,” was an indispensable component of Brazilian national identity to many carioca intellectuals. These texts, “O Jazz: Sua crônica, seus homens e seus mistérios,” by Vinicius de Moraes; Jazz Panorama, by Jorge Guinle; and Pequena história do jazz, by Sérgio Porto, were written between 1951 and 1953 and give us a window into the ways popular music in Rio de Janeiro was being compared (and becoming comparable) to jazz throughout the twentieth century. They used jazz, envisioned through African American musicians in New Orleans, as a model to determine authentic and inauthentic forms of popular music. The idea that different genres, rhythms, harmonies, and lyrics could originate from similar social processes and be applied in new ways from a cultural and aesthetic point of view emerged as a critical approach in the works of Moraes, Guinle, and Porto (whose trajectories are closely analyzed in this article), foreshadowing future perspectives to socio-racial matters in Brazil and the United States.