Black Musicians Research Articles

Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 by Michael James Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 by Michael James Roberts John Pippen Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968. By Michael James Roberts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. [xv, 254 p. ISBN 9780822354635 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822354758 (paperback), $23.95; (e-book), various.] Photographs, bibliography, index. The labor of music has recently gained new prominence in academic circles, and Michael James Roberts’s Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, The Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 is a welcome addition to this discussion. Roberts examines archived records of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), as well as popular press discussions from the period covered, to situate rock ’n’ roll within the context of class and race struggles. The result is a compelling account of rock ’n’ roll as bound up in the turmoil of the time. Roberts pays particular attention to the impact of recorded sound on the AFM and its attempts to come to terms with rock ’n’ roll’s successful development of this medium. This book will add to any discussion on intersections between music, labor, and aesthetics, especially for students newly interested in rock ’n’ roll. Roberts’s primary argument is that the AFM’s tendency toward elitist anti-rock and anti-recording attitudes undermined its strength at the bargaining table. Through a Marxist analysis of economics and cultural products, Roberts traces the conflicting pressures that created rock ’n’ roll and that contributed to its reception as a deviant musical genre. Crucially, Roberts attends to both the class pressures between whites and blacks and among black musicians themselves in his study. The result is a rich account of class struggle that adds nuance to the story of rock’s place in American history. Roberts begins with a thorough rehashing of the AFM’s struggle to deal with the proliferation of recorded music in the 1930s. AFM President Joseph Weber responded to the loss of union jobs to recordings with an expensive publicity campaign designed to persuade the public that recordings were less desirable than live musicians. This campaign explicitly reinforced high/low divisions between classical music and various popular forms associated with race records, such as rhythm and blues and hillbilly music. In comparison, James Petrillo, head of the Chicago AFM, negotiated better pay for musicians and fought successfully against the use of recordings by threatening mass strikes. After other AFM locals adopted similar tactics, Weber decided to retire, and Petrillo became president of the AFM nationwide. Petrillo actively argued against high/low divisions and regarded all working musicians, regardless of genre, as potential AFM members. Petrillo went on to organize a general strike on recording sessions in 1941, which led to a multiyear showdown between the AFM and the major record labels. By 1944, all of the labels had given in to Petrillo’s demands. Roberts argues convincingly that Petrillo’s inclusive attitude toward musical genres was a major factor in his overall success. Chapter 2 situates rhythm and blues (R&B) as part of the class conflicts of the 1940s and 1950s. Key figures including Louis Jordan, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and others, drew on rural blues, big-band swing, and honky tonk to give sound to the strayers of working-class life. Central to this was the devilment of performative gestures—bright suits, dancing, and comedic lyrics and movement—that [End Page 365] became, later, part of rock ’n’ roll in general. Here, Roberts draws on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin to establish jump blues and honky tonk as the “counter-logic of labor” (p. 52). As Roberts’s most compelling claim, this concept is meant to work against histories of rock that romanticize the “danger” associated with the genre. Placing rock in the context of World War II, labor conflict, and racial tensions allows Roberts to portray R&B and rock as sounding out the noisiness of working-class life (e.g., cars, factories, and bars). Chapter 3 examines the interactions between bebop and rock musicians and the tangle of cultural meanings associated with these forms. Despite...

"He’s Calling His Flock Now": Black Music and Postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris

J. Griffith Rollefson is lecturer in popular music studies at University College Cork, National University of Ireland. He has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar. His research has been supported by the Berlin Program, DAAD, ACLS, and British Academy and is published in Black Music Research Journal, Popular Music and Society, TwentiethCentury Music, and Music and Letters and in the collections Crosscurrents: European and American Music in Interaction 1900–2000 (ed. Meyer, Oja, Rathert, and Shreffler), Native Tongues: An African Hip Hop Reader (ed. Saucier), and Hip Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows (ed. Nitzsche and Grunzweig). He is currently preparing for publication his book European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality, based on fieldwork with hip hop communities in Paris, Berlin, and London.

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black-Owned Theater

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black-Owned Theater

WORLD MUSIC, INDIGENOUS MUSIC AND MUSIC TELEVISION IN AUSTRALIA

This article surveys the air time and attention given to Black and non-Anglo musicians in the Australian music television market, finding that mainstream, Anglo performers continue to prevail and examining some of the possible reasons for this, including the suggestion that politically and socially conservative view points resist the often radical lyrics and performance styles of rap and non-mainstream genres.

“Different Placements of Spirit”: The Unity Music of William Parker’s Curtis Mayfield Project

This article explores the politics of musical process and historiographic revision in bassist William Parker’s project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield. Comprising veteran “downtown” improvisers and poet Amiri Baraka, Parker’s group reimagines Mayfield’s music and message for the twenty-first century, reconstructing form and content anew in the moment of performance. In revisiting Mayfield’s songs, Parker transgresses the genre boundaries of jazz, framing his project instead within a broader lineage of “black music,” a gesture that recalls Baraka’s vision of a revolutionary “Unity Music” from his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” By revisiting the 1970s cultural politics of Black Power, uplift, and resistance immanent in Mayfield’s songs, Parker’s project both foregrounds and collapses historical distance, creating a space in which musical and textual interventions signify on the “changing same” of the political landscape. The analyses in this article focus on versions of the song “We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” considering three versions recorded by Mayfield (1970, 1971, 1996), as well as two recorded by Parker and his ensemble (2004, 2008). I argue that both Mayfield’s 1996 revision and a 2004 recording by Parker’s ensemble might be understood as varied responses to the collapse of movement politics in the decades since the song’s conception, and, ultimately, I contend that the interpretive practices Parker fosters within his ensemble enact their own form of spiritual and political liberation.

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann

and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. x, 260 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). Editors Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann have put together an excellent collection of essays on the history of Germany's connections to the black diaspora their book, and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914. The book's strength lies the fact that it is not centered on the twentieth century. It demands that we tie transnational connections between people of African descent and German-speaking Europe to an earlier time and place. What we have long understood as twentieth-century phenomena (black soldiers on German soil; black entertainers German culture) are nothing of the sort; these encounters--and German responses to them--belong to older historical discourses. The advantage to covering pre-WWI German-speaking Europe for a project such as this is that it encourages specificity. Because the majority of essays this collection concentrate on Germany before it existed as a unified nation-state, the book gives us more nuanced and highly contextualized portraits of black-white encounters on German-speaking lands. In this volume we find regional histories addition to global ones, micro-histories of black musicians at a Baroque court Bayreuth placed side by side with a century-long history of black American travel. For example, her chapter, Ambiguous Duty : Black Servants at German Ancien Regime Courts, Anne Kuhlmann demonstrates the diverse opportunities available to blacks within and outside German courts the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that permitted them to lead different lives. Local cultures at different regional courts made it possible for blacks such as Anton Wilhelm Amo to be potentially upwardly or downwardly mobile. Paradoxically, the other strength of this volume comes from the seven centuries-long timeframe the editors constructed. Because the book spans such a long time period, the reader can zoom in to local stories and also zoom out to see larger shifts over time German perception of blacks. For example, the authors effectively illustrate the evolution of language depicting people of African descent from the thirteenth century to WWI. Whereas the medieval and early modern eras German speakers labeled people of African descent Moors, by the nineteenth century that word had been replaced by the transatlantic term, Negroes. This switch, the editors argue, represents an unfortunate downgrading of the position of people of African descent German life. While connoted brave warriors, Christian saints, and the riches of Africa, the term Negro, they write, alluded instead to a trading commodity; a childish, cheap, and unskilled hand (p. 3). In Part I, called Saints and Slaves, Moors and Hessians, the authors demonstrate how shockingly different and sometimes egalitarian German treatment of blacks were prior to the Enlightenment. In their chapters examining medieval and early modern German artistic representations of blacks, Paul H.D. Kaplan and Kate Lowe encourage us to look beyond the category of exoticism to instead consider how an image of a black saint or a black slave functioned German courtly life. …

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967

O legado das canções escravas nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil: diálogos musicais no pós-abolição

O objetivo maior do artigo é trazer para o campo dos estudos históricos do pós-abolição uma recente reflexão sobre o legado da canção escrava - ou do "som do cativeiro" - nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil. A estratégia, mais do que evidenciar as conhecidas diferenças entre os dois países, é destacar os possíveis diálogos e aproximações em torno das disputas e significados desse legado. Como recurso, além da historiografia especializada, utilizo as avaliações de dois exemplares intelectuais, do final do século XIX, que tiveram contato com as canções dos descendentes de escravos nas Américas e refletiram sobre os seus sentidos políticos: Du Bois e Coelho Netto. Suas avaliações inseriam-se num contexto mais amplo de internacionalização da música negra e de projeção dos músicos negros no pós-abolição.

Bill Dixon's Voice (Letter)

AbstractIn November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 by Amy Absher (review)

The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 by Amy Absher (review)

Spinning Wheels: The Circular Evolution of Jive, Toasting, and Rap

(2015). Spinning Wheels: The Circular Evolution of Jive, Toasting, and Rap. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 61, Why Jamaica?, pp. 60-74.

Swinging Hava Nagila: “Jewish Jazz” And Jewish Identity

This essay examines “Jewish jazz”—attempts to combine “Jewish music” and jazz into a new genre—from the perspective of Jewish ethnic identity. The movement began with two albums in the early 1960s and then reemerged in a second wave in the 1990s. I analyze these musical forays as attempts to explore and expand modern American Jewish identity. Jewish jazz began tentatively, reflecting the assimilationist leanings of American Jews in the post-World War II era. As multiculturalism emerged in the late twentieth century, Jewish jazz became brasher in proclaiming its Jewishness. These performances sought to expand Jewish identity to fit a multicultural society, and sometimes black musicians stretched their identities as well by expanding into Jewish music. At its best, Jewish jazz reaffirmed Jewishness while revealing connections with African Americans, with whom Jews have shared a diasporic, urban American culture. Such assertion and expansion of identity encountered fierce resistance in a society that is still attached to rigid ethnic categories.

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

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

"Myriad Subtleties": Subverting Racism through Irony in the Music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie

In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie recognizes the impact racism had on his youthful behavior and acknowledges his misreading of Louis Armstrong's minstrelsy-influenced performance style: Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of of accommodating itself to basically unjust situation. ... Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops's [Armstrong's] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile (2009, 296). Since jazz, from its origins in the early 1900s in New Orleans, was increasingly performed by black musicians for white audiences, African-American jazz musicians have often been focal point for racial conflict in the United States, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gillespie suggests, black musicians frequently dealt with racial prejudice by relying on strategies derived from African-American culture, in particular signifying, which includes variety of rhetorical strategies including indirection, irony, and verbal disjunction. Tomming, reference to the eponymous character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ([1852] 1982), is generally used pejoratively to criticize blacks who apparently ingratiate themselves with white society by unctuous and exaggerated servility; however, this persona might equally be regarded as form of signifyin(g), or more specifically, indirection or masking that facilitates ironic subversion. Although the guise it took in jazz performance changed from apparent submission to feigned aggression, signifying often characterized black dealings with the dominant white culture both in slavery and during the 1940s when the social changes that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century gradually began to mitigate the racist oppression African Americans had suffered for several centuries. Critical Approach The primary focus of this discussion is on the gradual decline in irony used in jazz during the first half of the twentieth century as political (Gates 1988, 45) and satiric tool to attack the ideology of white supremacy. During this period, the parodic revisioning of the various elements that constitute jazz performance (e.g., musical narrativity, costume, gesture, and language), which has been seminal characteristic of jazz since its inception, gradually achieved greater expression and became significant factor in the emergence of bebop. A discussion of this nature is problematized by the complexity of irony and the related genres of satire and parody, the still relatively opaque nature of musical meaning, and the difficulty of tracking microlevel social change. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon argues, is a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual) (1994, 10). It also involves, according to Margaret Rose, a statement of an ambiguous character, which includes containing at least two messages, one of which is the concealed message of the ironist to an 'initiated' audience, and the other the more readily perceived but 'ironically meant' message of the code (1993, 87). Thus, there are several key elements that must be in place for ironic communication to take place: (1) the social context in which the irony occurs; (2) the decoders or interpreters whose comprehension of the ironic message is often based on community of understanding they share with the encoder that excludes those who don't grasp the ironic meaning; (3) the encoders or ironists who perceive ironic incongruity and fashion message reflecting that insight; and (4) the message itself, which can be transmitted in performance by various means. Irony, moreover, is foundational to both satire, which aims at correcting social or extramural ills, and parody, which focuses on the form of discourse or the intramural. …

Kenny Clarke and the Desire for More Inclusive “Black Music”

Kenny Clarke and the Desire for More Inclusive “Black Music” Rashida K. Braggs1 (bio) Kenny Clarke was a master drummer, who kept time for greats like Miles Davis. But few have heard of him. Clarke helped invent the bebop style of jazz in 1940s Minton’s Playhouse. Introducing distinctive “klook-mop” counter rhythms, he supported Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. But his contribution has faded in jazz histories. Despite this lack of recognition, however, Kenny Clarke was instrumental in disseminating jazz throughout Europe and teaching others to play in bebop and swing styles. In this essay, I explore the role Kenny Clarke played in migrating the music and thus prompting a shift in perceptions of jazz from an authentically black music to a more inclusive music. Throughout his career in the United States, France, and Germany, Kenny Clarke guided this transition as a teacher, mentor, and collaborator; still, his strides toward musical integration occurred alongside persistent racialized difference. Jazz and Racialized Difference “How did it happen that the white musician ended up with the black man’s music? Kenny felt the integration was the worst thing that could have happened. Segregation was a ‘blessing’ because black people had their own business.”2 In 1956, Kenny Clarke was done with the jazz business. He was bitter over how the jazz industry was always controlled by white people, and he was particularly frustrated by white appropriation of black music. At least with [End Page 155] segregated services, he saw a way to rise, but in the current power exchange black musicians were performing but not getting credit or money for their accomplishments.3 So Clarke quit. Rather than work in an industry that financially empowered whites, Clarke chose to stop playing, declining even the requests of Miles Davis.4 He was looking to escape not only a system that ignored black achievement but also a social environment where racism was rampant. This was not his first attempt to avoid limitations and dangers of racial prejudice. When Clarke was drafted into the army during World War II, his treatment in the Deep South led him to go AWOL (Away Without Leave) during his military service in Alabama.5 Later, believing that the Christian faith was not inclusive of blacks,6 Clarke converted to Islam and changed his name to Liaquat Ali Salaam at a time of popularity for groups like the Nation of Islam. However, while he identified in part with the political movements of Malcolm X and black Muslims, he did not promote a political agenda.7 Instead, Clarke’s conversion supported his view of life and he became devout in his daily prayer rituals. Conversion to Islam was also a way of resisting the hypocritical Christian world’s treatment of blacks.8 His decision to change his name to a Muslim name may have also helped him to further resist racial prejudice. Mike Zwerin writes that showing an identification card with a Muslim name could help African Americans negotiate a foreign status; with this code switching came greater cultural capital that was too often denied African Americans.9 All of these life events were signs that Kenny Clarke was frustrated with the racism that so strongly shaped his life and work, and saw escape from the United States as his only way of resisting racialized differences and seeking equality. The promise of a contract with Michel Legrand in France would lift Clarke from his musical funk.10 After his wartime tour in Europe, Clarke had been impressed by the European lifestyle, saying, “I promised myself that I would return as a civilian some day and spend some time there. In fact, the whole European way of life appealed to me. The tempo of life is slow and easy, and the people are not so superficial.”11 From 1956 until his death in 1985, the people would keep him in Europe just as he would bring people together through his music. For Clarke’s move to France was not escapism; rather, his move prompted more diverse, inclusive interactions. The Path to Authentic Jazz: Strengthening the French “Weak Link...

Softly, with feeling: Joe Wilder and the breaking of barriers in American music

Softly With Feeling: Joe Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music. By Edward Berger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 378pp, numerous b & w photographs, discography/solography, index, ISBN 978-1-4399-1127-3, $25.37. Softly, With Feeling is first and foremost a very well researched and clearly written biography of a jazz trumpet icon who also distinguished himself in the classical idiom. It is also a book about race in America in the 1930s and the decades that followed, and offers insight into the music business, especially pertaining to the role of African Americans. Edward Berger, whose previous works include biographies of Benny Carter, Teddy Reig, and George Duvivier, does his usual thorough job of penetrating his subjects through interviews and extensive archival research to produce another excellent work on an important figure in American music. In Softly, With Feeling, Mr. Berger relates Wilder's story starting with his upbringing in a working class, interracial neighborhood in Philadelphia. As has historically been the case, children have always been more racially tolerant of their peers than adults. For instance, Wilder talked about getting along with his white playmates as a child even befriending a white girl, Helen Gibbons. Even in that world, racism would occasionally surface and it would be something that Wilder would have to deal with throughout his life. The book is filled with numerous incidents detailing how cruel some white people were to Wilder and his fellow African Americans. That the trumpeter emerged without bitterness, and refused to characterize all white people as racists speaks volumes about his character. As he noted, for every prejudiced individual he encountered there were always whites who treated him with the respect he deserved. His musical training began with trumpet lessons from a family friend then progressed when he started studying with a local cornet legend, Frederick D. Griffin. Griffin was not a jazz player so Wilder was exposed early to classical music, which became a life-long passion even though it would be decades before he was accepted in a white symphony orchestra. Like so many other talented black musicians with classical aspirations he turned to jazz as a way of making a living. The book details his tenures with some of the big bands of the day, including the orchestras of Les Hite, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie. Because of his classical training he often found himself playing lead in these bands with limited opportunity to solo, but he eventually developed into a very lyrical, technically adept improviser with a beautiful tone reminiscent of the great Bix Beiderbecke. …

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, by Marc A. Hertzman

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil, by Marc A. Hertzman. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xvii, 364 pp. $25.95 US (paper). Based on diverse sources that include memoirs, newspapers, arrest records, recording company papers, and the registrations by which musicians claimed of songs, Marc Hertzman's book lives up to the title's bold claim. This new history of race and Brazilian music deserves a wide readership for its linkage of samba's development, the emergence of a music market, intellectual property law, and the rise of the now discredited view that Brazil was a racial democracy. Hertzman challenges widely-held assumptions about samba, explains their origins, and presents a sophisticated analysis about the interplay between race and music that moves elegantly from the police blotter to the arcana of royalty distributions. A conventional story holds that the first successful samba (the term refers both to the genre and to an individual piece of music) was Pelo telefone, registered in 1916 by a young black musician nicknamed Donga; recorded early the next year by Casa Edison, it became the hit of 1917's Carnival. Within a few years, samba had taken the country by storm and, by the 1920s, the term referred to any Carnival music. Donga's attempt to claim was controversial and other black musicians accused him of claiming their work as his own and of seeking to profit from his fellow Affo-Brazilians. For decades, musicians, folklorists, and historians have held that, prior to about 1920, the police actively repressed samba. Based on 400 vagrancy trials and other court cases involving well-known samba musicians, Hertzman finds little evidence for this punishment paradigm. While musicians were occasionally arrested for vagrancy, and some well-known ones fell afoul of the law for other reasons, music scarcely concerned the police. Through the punishment paradigm, samba musicians later denounced police racism and claimed authenticity, but it also allowed some to avoid admitting their involvement in more serious crimes, particularly against women. Instead, Rio de Janeiro's Afro-Brazilian musicians faced more subtle and insidious legal and economic challenges, as well as discursive and cultural ones. Analysis of these questions is the core of Hertzman's book. Brazil's first intellectual property law, passed in 1898, gave authors the sole right to authorize reproductions of their work and the surviving contracts between Fred Figner's Casa Edison (which dominated the music industry in the early twentieth century) and its musicians show how little most of them made. Figner promoted some Afro-Brazilian musicians, among them Eduardo das Neves, who struggled against racialized assumptions about wealth, ownership, and authorship (p. 81). Writer Joao do Rio dismissed him as out-of-place and uppity malandro (hustler, an image that many samba musicians cultivated); others ridiculed such upwardly-mobile Afro-Brazilians. The music market was a highly-visible venue in which black musicians were not just entertainers; they crystalized racial fears and fantasies (p. 92) and raised questions about the very nature of Brazil. …

The black musician and the white city: race and music in Chicago, 1900-1967

The black musician and the white city: race and music in Chicago, 1900-1967

Studying the Lied:

Research Article| August 01 2014 Studying the Lied:Hermeneutic Traditions and the Challenge of Performance Jennifer Ronyak, Jennifer Ronyak Convenor Jennifer Ronyak is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her work on the German lied has been published in 19th-Century Music and the Jahrbuch Musik und Gender. She is currently completing a monograph on the problem of intimate expression in relationship to salon and concert performances of lieder at the start of the nineteenth century. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Benjamin Binder, Benjamin Binder Benjamin Binder is Assistant Professor of Music at Duquesne University. His research interests range widely within German Romanticism and Lied studies. Essays on Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner have appeared in Current Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the volume Rethinking Schubert (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He is also a collaborative pianist who serves as director of the Song Scholarship and Performance Program at the Vancouver International Song Institute. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Laura Tunbridge, Laura Tunbridge Laura Tunbridge is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester. Recent publications include “Frieda Hempel in the Historical Imagination,” this Journal 66 (2013); and “Singing Translations: The Politics of Listening between the Wars,” Representations 123 (2013). She is completing a book on classical vocal recitals in New York and London during the interwar period. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wayne Heisler, Jr., Wayne Heisler, Jr. Wayne Heisler Jr. is Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music at The College of New Jersey. His publications include The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (University of Rochester Press, 2009) and “Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies and the Affirmation of Mahler's Body, 1937–1947” (Dance Chronicle 36, no. 2 [2013]). Forthcoming are an essay on choreographies of Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder as “total art” and a guest-edited issue of Opera Quarterly focusing on Strauss. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kira Thurman, Kira Thurman Kira Thurman is Assistant Professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Akron in Ohio. Her research investigates the history of black musicians in Germany and Austria. Her article, “Black Venus, White Bayreuth: Race, Sexuality, and the De-Politicization of Wagner in Postwar West Germany” won the German Studies Association's prize for Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student in 2011 and appeared in German Studies Review in 2012. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jonathan Dunsby Jonathan Dunsby Jonathan Dunsby is Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. His many publications include Performing Music: Shared Concerns (Oxford University Press, 1995), Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song (Cambridge University Press, 2004), “La vocalité de Debussy: Une vision herméneutique du ‘Tombeau des Naïades’” in the multiauthored Regards sur Debussy (Fayard, 2013), and “Reflections on Music Theory Pedagogy: Virtual and Archeological Known Unknowns” (Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 2010). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2014) 67 (2): 543–582. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.2.543 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Ronyak, Benjamin Binder, Laura Tunbridge, Wayne Heisler, Kira Thurman, Jonathan Dunsby; Studying the Lied:Hermeneutic Traditions and the Challenge of Performance. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2014; 67 (2): 543–582. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.2.543 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search © 2014 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.2014 You do not currently have access to this content.

“The Best Notes Made the Most Votes”: W. C. Handy, E. H. Crump, and Black Music as Politics

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1909, three white politicians--Edward H. Crump, Joseph J. Williams, and Walter W. Talbert--vied to become the next mayor of Memphis. Each of the candidates utilized traditional campaign tactics to win the office, such as speeches, rallies, advertisements, and posters. In a common move among southern office-seekers, they also employed black musicians to campaign on their behalf. As African American musician and bandleader William Christopher Handy explained, [I]n Memphis as in Clarksdale it was known to politicians that the best notes made the most votes, and there came a time when we were called upon to do our bit for good government. The 1909 Memphis mayoral election provides a particularly compelling example of a common relationship between white politicians and black musicians during the Jim Crow era. It advanced the careers of Handy, a musician who became known for compositions including Street Blues, and Crump, a Democrat who dominated Memphis politics from 1909 until 1948. According to Handy, Crump hired his band because Beale Street was expected to cast a lot of votes, and it was squarely up to us to get them. By employing black musicians, Crump and other white southern politicians hoped to attract key votes, but black musicians like Handy also seized the opportunity for their own purposes. Performing on behalf of a campaign provided economic opportunity and access to white audiences. In addition, it allowed black bands to manipulate white southerners' stereotypes of African Americans, and thus, to resist oppression. Handy used his music to influence Memphis politics and to help a white politician gain power, but he also seized the opportunity to gain power for himself and his race. To play their respective roles, both Crump and Handy relied on a long tradition of using music for political purposes, which had its roots in slavery. (1) A LONG TRADITION Early relationships between black and white Americans and black music, which developed during slavery and changed after emancipation, helped shape the ways in which each group later used black music for political purposes. In the first contact between Europeans and Africans, travelers remarked that African people possessed a natural musical ability and made better music than any other race. Thomas Jefferson expanded on this idea in later years, writing, [In] music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and His statement stood in sharp contrast to other characterizations he put forth, including never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. Perhaps that is why he questioned the very talent he praised, asking, [whether] they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. In contrast to European styles of music, African music, from the white southern perspective, seemed childlike and primitive. By observing African slaves playing music, many white Americans assumed that slaves enjoyed their lives and their status and characterized the African people as fun loving and joyful. (2) For the most part, white slaveholders encouraged enslaved people to play and sing at work, and many African Americans embraced the opportunity. They sang songs, usually in call-and-response form, to set the pace of work, to lessen the monotony of a long day, and to lift the spirits of workers. Enslaved people used the music to make their work more endurable while also reinvigorating their African culture in the New World. (3) Often at the encouragement of their masters, African Americans also played music and sang songs on their own time, specifically in the evenings and on Sundays, as well as at festivals, funerals, and religious ceremonies. During such times, African musicians used drums to set the rhythm for a variety of dances, such as patting juba, which consisted of slapping hands to feet and shoulders while keeping time. …