Producers' Note
by Patrick Milligan, Shawn Amos & Quincy Newell

Introduction
by Quincy Jones

Joy! Celebrating Black Music in America
by David Ritz

America Is a Harsh Mistress:
The Tragedy and Triumph of
African American History
by Gerald Early

From Ragtime to Rock 'n'Roll:
The African American Experience Through Song
by Ingrid Monson

America in Living Color
by Ernest Hardy

Track List

Production Credits

None of us would have bet that one white guy and two black guys from three different corners of class, consciousness, and circumstance—all blasting James Brown, Motown, Howlin’ Wolf, and Charlie Parker records out of their respective bedrooms as kids—would end up here, documenting 100 years of black music on six CDs. Then again, none of us would have bet on half the things that have happened in America over the past 100 years. How things change.

For more than two years while working on this collection, we have retraced our steps across America. The view has been both harrowing and humbling. We sat together for days on end listening to the music of Otis, Aretha, Miles, and Muddy and speeches from Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson. It’s been a reminder for us of the tragedy and triumph that has always been—and will always be—America.
This collection has reminded us of our heroes, our villains, and the foot soldiers who challenged them both. It has made us believe all over again in the promise of those 45s we wore out on our turntables, and it’s made us realize that, despite our differences, we all have this incredible music in common. Most of all, it’s made us dance. Perhaps that was the idea in the first place.

Say It Loud! also gave us the chance to show the progress of a major cultural force and to present the influences and common themes throughout many genres of music. While there have been many overviews of the various types of music included here, we think that the ability to cross back and forth between gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock, and even country & western puts all of these individual recordings in an insightful, historical context.

This is one story about black America. There are admittedly many different ones. Ours tells a tale of the struggle and the strength summoned to overcome. This is not Black Music’s Greatest Hits. This is Black Music’s Greatest Triumphs.
Black American music didn’t just change our world. It changed the entire world.
—Patrick Milligan, Shawn Amos & Quincy Newell

A Note About the Realities of Licensing
Compiling a boxed set chronicling nearly a century of music is an ambitious task. And while we stand behind the statement made on this collection, there are undoubtedly artists whose absence herein will be questioned.

In compiling our initial wish lists for what to include, we had to make some tough choices due to obvious space limitations. Additionally, during the process of clearing the recordings, many key artists have proven to be unlicensable due to various label and artist restrictions. It’s been a tough process to fine-tune the final repertoire for this collection, but rather than obsess about what we were not able to include, we’d rather celebrate all the great artists and music that are represented here. Hopefully, this set will inspire you to seek out those artists we were not able to include and to continue this celebration on your own well into the 21st century.This is a scrapbook of a more than 100-year journey. This is the family album kept by those relatives who were determined to not let us forget where we came from and where we are headed. This is the music of my people. Of our people.

The history of black music in America is the history of America itself. The two are inextricably intertwined. The Civil Rights movement demonstrations of the 1960s could not exist without Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and the ’70s Black Power movement walks hand-in-hand with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Throughout this last century, black music has documented our every triumph and our every sorrow. Black music—American music—has constantly held a mirror to all of our black, white, red, yellow, and brown faces, and we are better for the clear view.

This is music that could be made in no other place in the world. Like our young country, it is bold, turbulent, and yearning. And like all tangled love affairs, America and black music continue to kiss, shout, beg, and holler at each other. Black music continues to demand the best from America. America is a better place because of it.
Peace & Respect,
Quincy Jones
Los Angeles, 2001

Joy! Celebrating Black Music in America
Some music,” Marvin Gaye explained, “gives pleasure. Our music gives joy. Our music is about awakening the spirit. When joy comes to call, no one can ignore the message.”
I heard the message as a small child. I was ten when my parents took me to Carnegie Hall in 1953 to hear Louis Armstrong. Before the music began, I was uncomfortable. My woolen trousers chafed my thighs; I squirmed impatiently, struggling to see around the tall man seated in front of me. But when the groove got going, when Louis banged out “Basin Street Blues” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” I was gone. My little-boy heart caught fire. My little-boy body found itself dancing in the aisle. If it had been church, I would have dashed to the altar and devoted my life to the glory of God. I was transformed, not merely by the intoxication of hot rhythm but also by a spirit unlike any I had ever encountered. The spirit was joy.

The joy that coursed through my veins as a kid is the same joy that sustains my passion for black music today. It is the joy that informs my writing, the joy that excites me now as I consider the deeply complex charisma that characterizes this extraordinary art form. I write autobiographically because the music I love so immoderately is itself autobiographical. If a personal God resides in the very soul of this music, its practitioners invariably express personal points of view. The dialogue—whether between the artist and the deity or the artist and the devil—is also personal. The music speaks to us personally, altering our lives, shaping our relationship to the spirit world, formulating our personalities and perceptions with all the intimacy and impact of a parent.

Because my father is an intellectual, it’s no wonder I intellectualized the music. I regarded jazz as high art. In my cultural hierarchy, jazz sat at the pinnacle. From Armstrong to Ellington, and later from Bird to Diz, I viewed the art as incorruptible. I studied at Birdland on Broadway when kids were admitted to the peanut gallery and Mingus and Miles, mysterious as high priests, held forth. I memorized Metronome and Down Beat magazines as though they were holy texts. I worshipped at the shrine of bebop. To remove me from that shrine was tantamount to removing the Dodgers from Brooklyn. It all happened around the same time—the mid-’50s—that my family moved to Texas. I was devastated.

Ultimately, though, I was enlightened. Just when I turned 13, I experienced a set of epiphanies as powerful as the Armstrong concert. Dallas was especially rich in black music, but it was the kind I knew nothing about. Jimmy Reed and his gut-bucket rhythm & blues ripped off the top of my head. “You Got Me Dizzy” got me crazy, convincing me that Reed displayed no less grace or grit than John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. B.B. King and Bobby Bland seemed to pass through every week, and when Ray Charles came to the Fort Worth livestock arena, which was ripe with the funk of cow manure, the heavens opened and dark light filled the air.

Suddenly my world was raining blues. And just as suddenly, down at the Sportatorium, the gospel miracle workers—Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, Dixie Hummingbirds, The Soul Stirrers, Sensational Nightingales, and Swan Silvertones—thrilled me with still another brand of vocal and harmonic wonder. Joy took a new form and ferocity for me, a religiosity rooted in the bone and marrow of the human body. I watched the saints pass out, only to have nurses revive them with smelling salts. I was stunned by this genius genre; the blood and guts of gospel rivaled any drama cooked up by the Elizabethans or Greeks. When Mahalia came to sing at the baseball park and her microphone failed, I was there when she shouted, “They had singing way before electricity. And they gonna have singing after all the electricity in the world blows itself up. And we’re gonna have singing tonight, because tonight we’re celebrating.”

I saw celebration as the key—celebrating the spirit and the body, the act of creation, the here-and-now, the moment of eternal ecstasy. My hierarchies were threatened. Was Chuck Berry any less important than Bud Powell? Was Clara Ward inferior to Betty Carter? Was the country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins purer than the urban electricity of T-Bone Walker? The questions were silly because the joy was everywhere. Joy came pouring in from Miles’ Kind Of Blue and James Brown’s “Try Me.” I was trying my best to deconstruct the myths of categorical ranking left over from childhood, but college got in the way. It was only years after college, when I decided to pursue my passion for this music and turn it into a livelihood, that my ideas began to change. They changed not through abstract study, but by seeking out those artists who moved me most and learning to listen to their stories.

I became a ghostwriter. My models were William Dufty, who ghostwrote Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings The Blues, and Alex Haley, who gave form to The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. Both authors disappeared into the voices of their subjects. In working with my first subject, Ray Charles, I understood that to assume his character I would not only have to hear the voice emanating from his head but also, on adeeper level, the voice of his heart. That required silence on my part. And it required suspending my own preconceived notions about his music. That experience, culminating with the publication of Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story in 1978, altered my perception of the psychological and practical properties of black music. The feeling of joy was never absent. Ray was a wonderfully joyful interviewee, a joyful collaborator who relished the process with the same exuberance he brought to his music. As Ray narrated his journey, though, I heard another strain that enriched my understanding of who he was. Certainly creativity was a central theme, the feel-good wonder of making music. But a twin theme—survival at any cost—emerged as a key component.

When Ray started out, for example, he imitated Nat “King” Cole. He loved Nat’s style, but, as he said, “I knew Nat sold to whites. I also knew whites had the money. To get that money, I needed a style that pleased them. Why not borrow Nat’s?” He did so for a decade. Finding the courage to raise his own voice and his own style, however, was also pragmatic. “A label owner,” Ray remembered, “told me I better sound unique if I want to sell records.” Years later, Ray’s remarkable innovation—merging gospel songs with sexy secular messages—was similarly motivated. “I wanted a hit,” he said, “and I was sure those old country church songs had the right sparks. All I had to do was replace ‘my Lord’ with ‘my baby,’ and the fire would burn like crazy.”

It’s more than money. It’s no accident that once Ray Charles achieved international success and began his own label, he called it Crossover. The notion of deliverance, of crossing over to the promised land, is surely biblical. In the context of African American history, the drive to raise one’s status, to rise from enslavement to freedom, has mighty social and political implications. Those implications are present in the music. The miracle of the music is its ability to contain every tension—from sex to salvation, from passivity to rage, from the hunger for money to the hunger for hope—without losing its essential identity. The music embraces all the influences and ambitions of the artist without changing color. The music stays black.

In one way or another, the story stays the same. B.B. King and Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Etta James, Smokey Robinson and Aaron Neville—each offers versions of a similar tale. Their strategies for survival involve a careful reading of the marketplace, a keen understanding of their own gifts, and a synthesis of art and commerce that results in sensational music. The music does more than contain contradictions; it benefits from them. When Marvin, for instance, vacillates between spiritual desire and sensual indulgence, his songs, from “What’s Going On” to “Let’s Get It On,” radiate with a complex beauty unique in our culture. Whether the messages are blatant (James Brown’s “Say It Loud-I’m Black And I’m Proud” and Aretha’s “Respect”) or subtle, the conversation—between singer and society, between man and woman, between blacks and blacks or blacks and whites—resonates on many levels.

The most profound level is where joy resides. Those are the grooves that get us going, where tension and relaxation miraculously merge. The grooves—Charlie Parker’s or Chuck Berry’s or Dr. Dre’s—are the foundations upon which this art form rests. If we anticipate the groove, we lose it. If we’re dead-on the beat, the rhythm stiffens; swing collapses. The righteous groove, the phenomenon musicians call “the pocket,” is at the very back of the beat. The groove is loose. By relaxing, you let it breathe; it comes to life, as steady as your heartbeat. “The groove,” the great drummer Tony Williams once told me, “is nothing more than the heartbeat of God.” To submit to the groove requires faith or, as Mahalia put it, “relaxing in the bosom of God.” At the same time, the groove, because it is eternal and cosmic, serves as a steady platform for the most furious riffs—John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”—or the sweetest, Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing),” D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar.”
Joy springs from the soul of the singer, the musician, the storyteller who, in the moment of execution, is at peace with the elements. The joy is in the artist who silently understands that his art transcends worldly conditions. Son House singing in the Delta and Q-Tip rapping in Queens are both fully conscious of the luminous miracle of their medium. That consciousness is conveyed to us, the congregants, who absorb the excitement and embrace the joy. The joy, the essential celebration that defines black music as it evolves in these bizarre United States, is informed by a simple truth, as absolute and improbable today as it was a century ago—that the human heart, no matter how brutally assaulted, continues to soar.
—David Ritz
David Ritz, cocomposer of “Sexual Healing,” wrote the series Stories From The Soul: A Look At Black Music In America and biographies of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, B.B. King, Smokey Robinson, The Neville Brothers, and producer Jerry Wexler

America Is a Harsh Mistress:
The Tragedy and Triumph of African American History
“. . . the goal of America is freedom.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

“The history of the Negro in America is the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms. . . . The Negro is America’s metaphor.”
—Richard Wright, “The Literature Of The Negro In The United States”
in White Man, Listen!

Martin Luther King, Jr., was right: the goal of America is freedom. Almost everyone who came to America had freedom as a goal: religious freedom, political freedom, or economic freedom. And the United States defined itself, in its revolution against England to become an independent country, as the bastion of liberty, as the site and source of freedom. It is, of course, an irony that the land of freedom for so long was also the land of slavery and that a significant group of people, the Africans, came here, not in the quest of freedom, but in utter subjugation. They represented the opposite of freedom; indeed, for a time they represented the opposite of human, as they were considered merely property—things, not people. Theirs became the story of seeking freedom in the land of freedom, where for so long it had been denied them, of seeking democracy in the land that professed itself a democracy for everyone but them. Our land was an errand in the wilderness for more than just the Pilgrims; the stridently powerful feminine symbol of the Statue of Liberty has been, for many, a harsh, obdurate mistress.
Famed novelist Richard Wright was also correct when he suggested that the story of America is the story of African Americans, the story of the relationship between a people and the land, a subject people and their oppressors, bloody and vivid, compelling and starkly beautiful in its courageous spirit and joyous communion, even as it is horribly grotesque in its inhumanity and evil.
So, the idea that blacks are America’s metaphor makes sense. The lives of black people represent the unfolding of American democracy and, just as important, the unfolding of American culture as a vital force in the world. If American culture is considered by many to be cheap, materialistic, anti-intellectual, crude, tasteless, and bawdy, then the presence of African Americans, who have had the single biggest impact on American popular culture (aside from Jews) of any group, has given it a spirituality, a depth, a sense of discipline, and a pattern of beauty that it might otherwise have lacked.
Moreover, African Americans, inspired by the idea of freedom more than, perhaps, any other group because they were ferociously denied freedom, have given a sense of liberation, of improvisation, of play to the nation’s popular culture. This is not to say that American popular culture would not have these elements if blacks had never become such major players in it, but rather that blacks added a kind of poetic poignancy and sharp audacity it would not have had but for their unique view of what it means to be an American or having the experience of being unfree in a free country. A version of that story of African Americans in America, as the metaphor for freedom and for the denial of freedom, might go something like this:

On March 6, 1857, the famous, or infamous—depending on whether one was pro- or antislavery—Dred Scott decision was handed down. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a wealthy Southerner who had freed his own slaves but always supported the institution of slavery, and whose brother-in-law, Francis Scott Key, composed “The Star Spangled Banner,” delivered the opinion of the court. (There were six separate concurring opinions in the 7-to-2 decision.) It said that blacks were not considered citizens of the United States at the time of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and could not be considered so now. Taney wrote:
“. . . the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, not their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.”
He continued:
“The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.”
He further stated:
“No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily; all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise. The number that had been emancipated at that time were but few in comparison with those held in slavery; and they were identified in the public mind with the race to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free. It is obvious that they were not even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union.”

Certainly, Taney was right about the status of blacks at the time the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written and adopted. One of those documents’ major architects, Thomas Jefferson, was deeply troubled by slavery and feared for the republic’s future if slavery were to continue, but he decided not to oppose it or make the freedom of African slaves a necessary condition for binding together the states. Jefferson thought it impossible for the United States ever to become a mixed-race or multirace society. In his mind, blacks could exist in the nation only as slaves or not at all. He had a very poor opinion of blacks, thinking them scarcely human and capable of only imitating whites in a low and amusing way in intellectual matters.

Jefferson’s thinking was fairly representative of that of the propertied white men of his time. It was also fairly representative of the thinking of white men during Taney’s time, some 70 years later. Taney was suggesting that it was not only a hidebound cultural tradition that whites did not consider blacks citizens of the country but, indeed, a political fact. Thus, Dred Scott, a Virginia slave who had lived with his master for extended periods in the free state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery, was unsuccessful in his suit for freedom on what his lawyers felt were the very legitimate grounds that he had resided in places where slavery was illegal.

Taney argued that freeing slaves in areas where slavery was not allowed was a violation of the Fifth Amendment: taking property (slaves were chattel, after all, as Taney makes clear in his decision) without due process. He also ruled that the Missouri Compromise, which, in 1820, had effectively and legally split the United States in half—the non-slave-holding North and the slave-holding South—was unconstitutional as well. Congress, he decided, had no power to legislate for the territories.

But what was most important at this crucial moment in 1857, especially for the nation’s 4.4 million black residents, was Taney’s question: “Can a negro [sic], whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?” His answer was, emphatically, no. Taney wrote:
“[The blacks] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro [sic] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery. . . .”
The determination that “. . . they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” bitterly haunted black Americans for decades after and remains today one of the most somberly remembered and inhumanly wrought pieces of obiter dictum in any Supreme Court ruling.

To say that this decision was disheartening to the roughly 400,000 free blacks living mostly in the northern United States scarcely begins to describe their reaction. The decision was catastrophic, a tragedy, a blasting and blighting of the faith of several million African-descended people, slave and free, who believed in this country and hoped that its institutions spoke not only to them but for them as well. There had been talk among blacks of mass emigration to Africa, Haiti, or Canada over the previous decades of the 19th century. This talk was particularly stressed by such leaders as the militant, dark-skinned Martin Delany; the Jamaican-born editor of the first black newspaper, John B. Russwurm; and the stern, very dark Alexander Crummell, the American Episcopal minister who spent nearly 20 years in Liberia—the colony established by the American Colonization Society, which proclaimed independence in 1847, to transport black Americans wanting to return to Africa. But this talk was never very popular with most blacks, who wanted to make it in this country and who wanted very much to be Americans. Frederick Douglass, the great orator, abolitionist, legendary fugitive slave, newspaper editor, autobiographer, and first national black leader, always vigorously opposed emigration. But even he was so discouraged after the Dred Scott decision that he began to entertain schemes of those blacks who could leave America doing so en masse.
The Dred Scott decision told blacks in no uncertain terms that they lived in a white man’s country—that it was a white man’s country in its inception, it was a white man’s country in its political ideology, and that it would remain a white man’s country forever. Blacks lived in the country but were not of it. They, in no way, belonged to it, not even if they were free. If you were black in America, the situation in 1857 looked hopeless: to be free was to exist as a completely disenfranchised, utterly stigmatized noncitizen, nonbeing; to be a slave was to be a slave forever, as would be one’s children and one’s children’s children.

On the afternoon of September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln, in no casual humor as was his wont when dealing with his advisors, called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to announce that he had decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in territories that were still at war with the Union. (The Proclamation did not free slaves in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.) He told cabinet members that he wanted help with the wording of the document. He did not wish to discuss the principle or the necessity of it, for he had already decided that. On January 1, 1863, the Proclamation was publicly announced. Lincoln, who had for the first few years of the Civil War resisted the idea of making the liberation of the slaves the main issue, now did just that with the Proclamation.

As he wrote in a letter (reprinted in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches And Writings 1859-1865, Library of America), “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the ‘institution’; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand.” As he said in September 1862, “I admit that slavery is the root of the rebellion, or at least its sine qua non. The ambition of politicians may have instigated them to act, but they would have been impotent without slavery as their instrument.”

As a result of the Proclamation, the door was fully opened for black enlistment in the Army, something that Lincoln thought was essential for the cause and for blacks themselves. In the span of six years, blacks had gone from the Dred Scott decision to the Emancipation Proclamation, from being defined legally as noncitizens and perpetually stigmatized beings to becoming the central issue of the war and being granted the first major aspects of citizenship—freedom from coerced labor, the right to move about in the country as anyone else, and the right to defend the country with their lives. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery forever and everywhere in the United States. On July 28, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress, granting blacks both state and federal citizenship.

Blacks living in 1857 could hardly have imagined that a mere ten years later, they would not only be free but also would be full legal citizens of the country. The rub, of course, was that in reality, despite the constitutional amendments, they were not full citizens. One struggle had ended. Black folk were free. Out of the wanton and incomprehensible violence of the Middle Passage, out of the brutality, cruelty, and degrading paternalism of bondage, out of the blood and smoke of the Civil War, a new people had come forth: black Americans, Americans of African descent. But another struggle had just begun that was to produce its own blood, smoke, degradation, brutality, and mind-numbing violence, because Africans in America, despite the new amendments and the dawning of a new era, were still not quite Americans and would not be for some time to come.

Part Two: “Remove the Stone”
The privacy or obscurity of Negro life,” James Baldwin wrote in 1951, “makes that life capable, in our imaginations, of producing anything . . .” It might be said that one of the reasons for the abuse and misunderstanding blacks have endured has been because their lives are so poorly known, so improperly grasped, by whites. In this way, all sorts of pathologies and all sorts of secret pleasures and passions have been laid on the psychic doorstep of blacks. On the other hand, African Americans are and have been for some time a very public people, often in ways they did not wish to be, but sometimes because they felt that their struggle had to be public. In some ways, the story of how blacks went from being slaves to citizens, from Africans to Americans, is a story of how black people became a very public group and how they had to cope with the ways in which their lives, their hopes, their desires, their folk-ways and mannerisms, were made public.

On October 6, 1871, George L. White, school treasurer, self-taught choral instructor, and a white driven by mission as much as paternalism, set out with a group of 12 students on a fund-raising singing tour of the North and East to save their financially stricken school, which had opened its doors five years earlier in Nashville. He named the students the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and together they introduced spirituals not only to a broad American audience but to Europe as well. The Fisk Jubilee Singers became, as Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey In The Rock pointed out, the first crossover group in America. The success of their tour saved their tiny school from closing.

Few people, aside from Southern slaves, were familiar with authentic black music. Minstrelsy, of course, was the popular music of America both before the Civil War and during the era of Reconstruction. Indeed, minstrelsy was the dominant form of American popular music and American musical theater for virtually all of the 19th century. Whites adopting blackface was not unique to America, nor was it invented in the United States; it dated back almost to the time when the races first came in contact with one another and often had no particular racial connotation at all. But the development of something specifically racial—that is, white men performing onstage as a professional entertainment some kind of comic imitation of plantation blacks—began to emerge in the 1830s. Thomas D. Rice, adopting a song he titled “Jim Crow” that he (probably) heard by chance in 1828 sung by a crippled black stable-hand, is typically credited with starting the craze. By the 1850s plantation songs and minstrel acts dominated the American stage. Stephen Foster became America’s first major songwriter, composing such songs as “Camptown Races” and “Old Folks At Home.” Not even the staunchly antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, could escape the minstrel treatment. Indeed, Tom went on to become the most popular and enduring of all minstrel shows, its antislavery message muted, if not completely bowdlerized, by a sea of racist stereotypes and pop culture clichés.

Before the Civil War, blacks rarely performed this type of music. Whatever its musical merits and whatever the comic virtues of the acts, minstrelsy was not authentic black music, and “Ethiopian Delineations,” as they were called, were not authentic presentations of black people as theatrical personas—they were exaggerations that intensified racist stereotypes. This public image of black people has had an enduring and, some might say, nearly indelible power. Thus, the emergence and success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers during Reconstruction was so revolutionary, even if it all seemed so elementary: that is, black people performing a traditional, authentic black music.
It was during this period of Reconstruction, a revolutionary time in itself, that blacks tried to exercise the rights of their citizenship by voting, holding public office, and acquiring land, with support in the early years from the federal Freedmen’s Bureau and from Northern whites who came South to make a quick buck or to genuinely help a downtrodden people get on their feet. It was during these years of 1865 to 1877 that black colleges, such as Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta Universities and others, were established, supported by Northern white schoolteachers who came South on a mission (and who were completely ostracized by the native white Southern populace), by white Northern philanthropy, and by black self-sacrifice.

It was also during these years that African Americans began to emerge as American entertainers and musical artists, with the Fisk Jubilee Singers (they spawned many black imitators) and with black minstrels doing plantation material similar to the sort of material that whites had done. Some of the black performers had to wear blackface. But a good many did not, and many white audiences were surprised by the variety of skin tones among blacks. Always black performers billed themselves as the genuine article, bona fide, the real thing—black people who had actually lived on plantations, performing the music and comedy, the art, if you will, that the plantation produced. But the black minstrels were far more constrained than the Fisk Jubilee Singers, because a tradition had been established with minstrelsy, a set of expectations about how this form of entertainment was supposed to be.

Nonetheless, with the emergence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and black minstrels, the two strands of black music and entertainment were clearly defined. The Fisk Jubilee Singers represented black sacred music, as well as the aspect of black music that was to attract so-called “serious” arrangers and composers—including Harry Thacker Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, and later, William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay, and even James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington to a degree—who were to develop a formal black choral and symphonic art. In contrast, the minstrels represented black secular music, as well as the aspect of black music that was to attract “popular” composers and performers, who were to develop not only black “show” music or “stage” music but also black popular dance music. It was through this latter music, rather than through the realm of so-called “serious” composition, art-music, that African Americans were to have a huge impact on the nation and the world.

By 1877 Reconstruction was formally ended when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to win a Presidential election so close it had to be decided by Congress, chose to remove the last of the federal troops still occupying the South. In effect, the North, tired of the “Negro Problem,” decided to turn over all matters concerning handling racial issues to white Southerners, who now, state-by-state, reclaimed political power. For white Southerners, the South was, at last, “redeemed.” There had been no shortage of efforts on their part to effect this “redemption” through violence, brutal intimidation, slur and smear, and a chilling hostility to any attempt by blacks to become anything other than the slaves they had been. The Ku Klux Klan, started in Tennessee in 1868 by famed Confederate general and former slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest, is the longest-standing terrorist organization in U.S. history. It was one of several such organizations of its type started at this time. (It must also be emphasized that pogroms against blacks were nothing new in the United States. They had a long history and would continue throughout the rest of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Blacks in the North were routinely subjected to acts of white mob violence well before the Civil War. One of the worst acts of violence committed against blacks during the 19th century, the Draft Riot of 1863, occurred in New York City.) After Reconstruction, blacks were systematically stripped of their political rights, reduced to economic dependence on whites and to the menial positions in Southern society, brutally treated by both an official police force and by the mob violence of outraged white vigilantes, and exploited by a convict lease system.

Despite this, black music continued to develop apace. By the 1880s blacks had a solid foothold as performers, managers, composers, musicians, and the like in minstrelsy and the American musical stage. Indeed, by the 1890s the famed comic song-and-dance team George Walker & Bert Williams had become major stars on the black theater circuit. Several blacks had become important composers and performers in this realm, including James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, Bob Cole, Ernest Hogan (who billed himself as “The Unbleached American”), Will Marion Cook, and Will Vodery. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the noted African American poet, cowrote some musical shows at this time. Among the best black musicals of this period were A Trip To Coontown, Clorindy; Or The Origin Of The Cakewalk, In Dahomey, and In Abyssinia. These shows, some appearing on Broadway, were clearly the forerunners to later shows during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Runnin’ Wild and Shuffle Along.

By the 1890s blacks had made many inroads in American popular culture, as popular culture itself was becoming an all-consuming force in American life. Several blacks had become prominent in such sports as boxing, horse racing, and race walking. Although blacks had been banned from professional baseball since 1867, they were constantly organizing their own teams and tried, unsuccessfully during these years, to organize their own leagues. But there was enough black baseball activity in the 1890s and the early 1900s to justify the publication of Sol White’s History Of Colored Base Ball in 1907. In the realm of literature, Paul Laurence Dunbar had become probably the most well-known black literary figure in American history. Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Sutton Griggs, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper all published significant fiction during these years.

But what was most crucial during the 1890s was that African Americans developed new national leadership with sharply different approaches to their problems. Frederick Douglass, the great black leader of the 19th century, died in February 1895. Although black leaders during the days of abolition had their differences—some favoring moral suasion, others political engagement, while still others advocated outright slave insurrection—all agreed that slavery had to be destroyed. There was never to be quite the same unity of vision among black leadership again.

Booker T. Washington, a former slave and principal of the Tuskegee Institute, a black industrial arts school founded in 1881, rose to national stature as a result of his successful, tireless campaign among Northern white philanthropists for funds to support his school and by his acceptance of the rigid segregation and black subjugation in the South. In 1895 Washington delivered one of the most famous speeches ever made by an American. It was to an Atlanta audience at the Cotton States International Exposition that he said: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” To this end, Washington championed industrial education for blacks to the virtual exclusion of all other types: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” He saw no connection between the political and social status of a group and its ability to make economic progress, to make itself useful to society through thrift, hard work, and developing skills that were realistic in the labor market in which they had to operate.

One year later, in 1896, with Plessy vs. Ferguson the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law mandating racially segregated seating on public transportation, opening the door for legalized segregation of virtually all facets of social, political, and cultural life in the South. As Justice Henry B. Brown, delivering the majority opinion, wrote: “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or to re-establish a state of involuntary servitude.”
Washington, a conservative who abhorred labor unions and radical politics, became one of the most powerful black men in American history, conferring with Presidents and heavily influencing both political patronage and white philanthropic largess in the black community. So powerful was he between 1895 and 1910 that he was privately referred to as The Wizard (like Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini, both contemporaries), and his operation was called the Tuskegee Machine. Some of Washington’s conservative ideas are championed today by a number of thinkers, including economist Thomas Sowell, author Dinesh D’Souza, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Washington’s chief opponent was W.E.B. Du Bois, a Northern-born black, educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, who was one of the leading intellectuals of his day. Du Bois was not opposed to industrial education, but he was opposed to the idea that it was the only education for which blacks were fit. More importantly, he vigorously opposed Washington’s acquiescence to segregation, to the ceding of blacks’ political rights, their fundamental privileges as citizens. Du Bois was joined by other black radicals in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905. This led, in turn, to the formation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization, run for the most part by liberal whites, that supported Du Bois’ philosophy of agitation for black political rights.
Du Bois also became the editor of Crisis magazine, the NAACP’s official publication. It became, during the years of Du Bois’ editorship, one of the most influential black publications in the country. It was Du Bois, in his most famous book, The Souls Of Black Folk—published in 1903 and one of the most significant books ever written by an African American—who formulated the psychological crisis that black people faced, being torn between their aspiration to be American and the realization that they are Negroes:
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
It was also Du Bois, in the same book, who said: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line . . .” In his formulation of the division in the black American mind, he was poetically perceptive; in his summation of the reality of politics in the modern world, he was prescient.

Part Three: What We’ve Come Here to Find
“Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, become quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.”
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

People, of any color, seldom run, unless there be something to run from,” said Abraham Lincoln in December 1862. And this is true of black people as well but only the partial truth. In 1915 black people, the vast majority of whom lived in the South, began to move, in ever-increasing numbers, to the North and the West, from the country to the city, from being mostly unskilled agricultural laborers to becoming unskilled factory workers, from peasant to proletariat.

Successive years of bad cotton crops blighted by a boll weevil infestation, a few instances of severe floods, and the intense, often violent racism of whites (pogroms and lynchings) pushed blacks from the South; the lure of better-paying industrial work, a less intensely racist atmosphere, and the hope that their children might have a chance to become something more in life than just sharecroppers, lured blacks to the North. Also, moving to a city simply gave people more opportunities to amuse or improve themselves during their free time. As Alain Locke, one of the intellectual giants of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in 1925: “The tide of Negro migration, Northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.” This Great Migration, as it came to be called, continued into the 1950s, by which point, for the first time in American history, more blacks lived in cities outside the South than anywhere in the South, something that no one in early 1900s would ever have dreamed could happen. This shift was to have a profound effect upon black people and upon American life
in general.

Rampant and massive urbanization in America accelerated the growth of popular culture as, increasingly, there was a greater audience within easy reach as a market with a growing need to have their leisure occupied with activities of some sort. By the eve of the First World War, amateur and professional sports, movies, vaudeville, department stores, mass-produced formula novels, and electronic recordings of music had become the staples of American life, aspects of a huge entertainment engine that was only to grow bigger as the number of consumers and the amount of leisure time increased. By the 1920s the engine revved up to full throttle as popular culture exploded as an unprecendented force in American life, intensified, in part, by Prohibition, a law that no one obeyed and whose disobedience produced a subculture in which black entertainment flourished. And, of course, there was the advent of radio.

In 1915 the most popular movie in America was Southerner D. W. Griffith’s epic The Birth Of A Nation—based on Thomas Dixon’s rabidly racist novel The Clansman—a melodramatic yet poetically touching film that celebrated the “white redemption” of the South from the hands of Northern carpetbaggers and uppity, white-women-crazed Negroes. By 1930 the most popular show on radio was Amos ’n’ Andy, the continuing comic story of two black men and the urban black world they occupied. Two white men, in the spirit of 19th-century minstrelsy, played the lead roles. One might say that from 1915 to 1930, blacks, as icons in American culture, experienced a strange kind of progress.

Black folk’s politics diversified as a result of urbanization and became increasingly sophisticated, both ideologically and organizationally. By the end of the First World War, in 1918, blacks were developing politically into a full-fledged pressure group, launching boycotts, demonstrations, and protests to press their claims. As years passed, they would learn to use these tactics more effectively and more insistently than in the 1920s. Their leadership was becoming broader. By 1920 not only did the NAACP (considered radical and threatening by most mainstream whites, who still believed racism was a scientific fact and a historical reality) exist, with Du Bois still prominent as the editor of the Crisis, James Weldon Johnson as the executive secretary, and Walter White as the assistant executive director, but there was also the National Urban League, an interracial group that engaged issues of black economic development and published the influential magazine Opportunity: A Journal Of Negro Life. On the margins but still important were

A. Philip Randolph’s and Chandler Owen’s hard-core socialist publication, The Messenger, which called for black workers to join white workers in a class struggle against the bosses and corporate powers, and the African Blood Brotherhood, a highly militant, leftist oriented group. Generally, as a result of the Russian Revolution, leftist ideas began to appeal more and more to certain members of the black intelligentsia. This would intensify in the 1930s.

But the most influential group, by far, among blacks in the early 1920s was Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. This nationalistic group espoused black entrepreneurship (not a new approach, as Booker T. Washington had done the same), a worldwide political and cultural connection among all black people (a kind of black Zionism that evolved into Pan-Africanism), the liberation of Africa from European colonial rule (while Garvey’s followers opposed European colonialism, they were sufficiently impressed with it to envision an African empire of their own), ardent racial segregation and racial purity (like many whites, Garvey’s followers were strong believers in pseudo-scientific notions of race and in Social Darwinism), and the eventual repatriation of black Americans to Africa (an idea that had existed among black Americans since the end of the 18th century with only slight-to-moderate interest). The sheer, persistent internationalism of his vision was not new, but it was startling, exciting, and seemingly less farfetched to blacks than it might have otherwise been a few decades earlier. Indeed, Garvey suggested that blacks had once been important players on the world’s stage and that they should return to their former prominence. Also, Garvey’s entrepreneurship—evidenced by his purchase of the ships that were to constitute his Black Star Line, which was to be the foundation of his re-formation of a black world empire—seemed to strike a deep chord among blacks. It must be remembered that the Jazz Age was the time of a boom market, of ordinary people investing in the stock market. Andrew “Rube” Foster’s launching of the National Negro Baseball League in 1920, the fortunes amassed by Madame C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone for their hair care products, and the rise and fall of the Black Swan record label all seemed for blacks harbingers of the time, indications of blacks becoming financial players in their own communities as well as in the larger world.

Garvey, a Jamaican (and during this time in America the most radical, that is, the most racially militant black leaders, such as Hubert H. Harrison, W. A. Domingo, Richard B. Moore, and Cyril Briggs, tended to be West Indians), came to the United States after a brief sojourn in England, where, under the influence of Duse Mohammed Ali, an actor and newspaper editor, he developed his nationalist and Pan-Africanist beliefs. Garvey wanted to meet Booker T. Washington, his hero—he greatly admired Washington as the founder of a practical, all-black institution. He was interested in starting a school like Tuskegee in Jamaica, but Washington died in 1915, before Garvey could enact his plans. He returned to Jamaica briefly but decided to come back to the United States to raise money and get his movement off the ground, incorporating his Universal Negro Improvement Association in the United States in 1917.

Garvey was a powerful speaker who soon became a formidable presence on the street-corner lecture circuit, and his ascent was astonishingly rapid and extraordinarily colorful. He made black nationalism a mass sentiment; indeed, his organization became the biggest black organization in the United States with the exception of the National Baptist Convention, which remains today the largest of all African American organizations. Blacks were attracted to Garvey, especially after 1918, in large part because of the incredible violence by whites against them during and after the First World War (East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919, and Tulsa in 1921 were among the worst instances, but there were several others as well) and the great disappointment blacks felt after their participation in the war. Many black leaders, Du Bois most explicitly, thought that if blacks fought with bravery in the war, they would reap the benefits at home with better treatment, perhaps even garnering the full citizenship that they had been denied since the end of Reconstruction. Things did not turn out as expected. Racism, if anything, was more intense than ever among whites, as the KKK enjoyed a resurgence and virtually nothing was done to stop lynchings. Moreover, blacks discovered that going north was no trip to paradise, herded as they were into ghettoes and confined to the least lucrative, most menial employment.

So, Garvey’s cries of “Africa for the Africans,” “One God, One Aim, One Destiny,” and “Up, You Mighty Race” fell on very receptive ears. His massive parades and rallies, his attempt to start trade and investment for blacks by buying ships (a miserable failure that ultimately put Garvey in prison for mail fraud), and his militant, aggressive, race-proud rhetoric were very uplifting to a downtrodden people who were alternately seen as a social menace and a biological mistake. Interestingly, Garvey’s bitter criticism of Du Bois and other mainstream black leaders of his day was echoed by Malcolm X in the 1960s about such leaders as King, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney M. Young, Jr. And this criticism was effective, in that the black masses certainly took a great deal of it to heart, because Garvey (and, later, Malcolm X) did not talk about rights as other black leaders did, nor did he speak of jobs and opportunity, but rather he spoke about POWER! “We represent a new line of thought among Negroes,” Garvey said in a 1922 speech (included in The Philosophy And Opinions Of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa For The Africans, The Majority Press), “Whether you call it advanced thought or reactionary thought, I do not care. If it is reactionary for people to seek independence in government, then we are reactionary. If it is advanced thought for people to seek liberty and freedom, then we represent the advanced school of thought among the Negroes of this country. We of the U.N.I.A. believe that what is good for the other fellow is good for us. If government is something that is worth while; if government is something that is appreciable and helpful and protective to others, then we also want to experiment in government. We do not mean a government that will make us citizens without rights or subjects without consideration. We mean the kind of government that will place our race in control, even as other races are in control of their own governments. . . . We are not engaged in domestic politics, in church building or in social uplift work, but we are engaged in nation building.”

No black American leader before Garvey had ever spoken in quite this way. One of Garvey’s most famous epigrams was “A race without authority and power, is a race without respect.” Thus, with the appearance of Garvey, black leadership in the United States was effectively splintered into a radical camp and an establishment camp. The radicals totally opposed the idea of fighting racism and changing American society; instead, they wished to withdraw from it in solidarity with blacks around the world to form their own social, economic, and cultural order, indeed, their own cosmos. The establishment leaders hoped to change the political and economic condition of black Americans by pressuring for their full citizenship rights and privileges and vigorously opposing segregation. This fault line has continued, at some points more pronounced than at others, to exist in the present day.

As black people became more urban, their cultural expressions changed, too, becoming increasingly sophisticated as they absorbed influences from a diversified and energized environment in cities, centers for the production of commerce and culture. The Harlem or New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s was the first attempt by blacks to create, with some success, a self-conscious artistic school, a race-based artistic movement. What helped fuel the Renaissance was that, as poet Langston Hughes put it, “the Negro was in vogue.” Primitivism had become very popular with white intellectuals and white audiences. (Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion during most of the 1920s, represented a kind of primitive type; he was usually described in savage or animal terms. So was Babe Ruth, the other major sports star of the period. Both were considered nature’s children, and they were white men!) Freudian psychology had become popular, as well, intensifying the romanticizing of the primitive and the sexual. No American group represented the primitive and the sexual in urban culture as well as African Americans did, at least according to many whites. Black shows on Broadway became popular, as did black dance styles. Josephine Baker and Florence Mills became stars as a result of their appearance in black Broadway shows, and Baker, especially, represented, to the white mind, the sexual and the primitive.

The Renaissance exploited this vogue; more black writers were published in the 1920s by white publishing houses than at any previous time in American history. Countee Cullen, Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston all produced important work during these years. For some of these writers, like Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Toomer, it might be said that they produced virtually all their major work at this time. Even whites such as Sherwood Anderson, DuBose Heyward, and Carl Van Vechten, to name only a few, wrote novels that featured major black characters, that were indeed black novels. Playwright Eugene O’Neill had written The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, both starring vehicles for Paul Robeson, who was, without question, the single biggest black star of the 1920s and 1930s. Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology, The New Negro, which featured many of these writers, as well as Rudolph Fisher, J. A. Rogers, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, E. Franklin Frazier, and Arthur A. Schomburg, seemed to capture the mood of the age: a new black person had been born—urban, militant, racially proud, artistically vibrant. As Locke wrote: “. . . the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. . . . With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase.”

Of all the art blacks produced in the 1920s, jazz and blues were, by far, the most impressive and the most influential. Both were to have a far bigger impact than ragtime, thanks partly to timing: ragtime was largely sold by sheet music or piano rolls; it was a huge fad during its heyday of 1895 to 1910, but it was a limited music, often for piano, with an almost crude, oom-pa rhythm. Blues was more malleable and offered much greater range, even within its formulaic limits, for a large number of variations—in tempo, in rhythm, in mood, in structure.

Jazz was even more elastic in the elements it could absorb: blues themselves, show tunes, country music, classical, virtually anything. Jazz was more developed and rhythmically complex, a far better dance music than ragtime. Finally, jazz and blues emerged during the age of phonograph records, when how people consumed music and how musicians were influenced by it were totally transformed by the ubiquity of records. This gave jazz and blues a permanence and pervasiveness that no other popular music before them ever had. To their detractors, they were a plague, infecting everything. Jazz was also a city music: New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, San Francisco. Blues, too, was a city music, an urban music, but it was also intimately tied to African American Southern and rural roots.

So, it was in this climate of the 1920s—as blacks became more urban, more politically diverse, and more concerned about producing an authentic cultural product that would accurately and with great emotional power convey their experience—that jazz had its first genius-hero, Louis Armstrong (who came from New Orleans through Chicago to New York), and its first genius-composer, Duke Ellington (who came from Washington, D.C., to New York). Blues, too, in this era produced its first genius-interpreter in Bessie Smith, arguably the most influential popular singer in American history as well as a cohort of able women singers, from Ida Cox and Ethel Waters to Alberta Hunter and Mamie Smith (no relation to Bessie). Of course, the church remained the most important of all black institutions, politically and socially, and the source, inspirational and actual, for a good deal of black music. These three sources—jazz, blues, and African American church music—produced all subsequent popular African American music and were responsible for a good deal of American popular music generally. This was also the era of race records, so black music and the black fans who supported it became commodified as a separate product and a separate audience by the white companies that produced it; black music remains a distinctly marketed music to this day, spawning a number of industries in its wake, including black nightclubs and dance halls, black radio, and black recording companies.

In jazz, both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington not only established the artistic legitimacy of the music but also unquestionably stamped it as an African American art form. But jazz is not, indeed, never was, even in the days of James Reese Europe, an ethnic or folk art but rather is a highly developed music of great complexity and technical verve with universal appeal. Whites were drawn to it from the very beginning as both players and listeners, and the very first jazz recording was by whites: The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” in 1917. Paul Whiteman, a major white bandleader, was known as the King of Jazz, although very little of his band’s music could be considered jazz. He was, nonetheless, fascinated by the music and commissioned George Gershwin to write a symphonic jazz piece, Rhapsody In Blue, that premiered in 1924. One of the finest of all jazz soloists, Bix Beiderbecke, a white cornetist from Iowa, came to prominence at this time as well.

So, jazz, an African American invention with strong evidence of borrowing from white sources, was, from its beginnings, a music of tremendous cultural force, a music that many whites felt spoke for them, just as African Americans felt it spoke for them, aesthetically capturing the nature of their experience. Jazz was not the first, but it was the most remarkable fusion music ever made, a music that was for the whites who adopted it a virtual admission of their black cultural antecedents, and for the blacks who played it, an admission of the influence of European art and aesthetics upon their lives. This idea of jazz as a fusion music, linking black and white in powerfully creative ways, even as they were separated socially and politically, became the guiding principle, whether acknowledged or not, of several important, even epochal, forms of popular music that came after, most importantly, rock ’n’ roll. What made jazz revolutionary was that it acknowledged and celebrated, as the best of popular culture has done, the diversity of American life. What else is also clear is that black music in the United States, as it has developed, cannot be understood apart from African American social and political history.

Part Four: “And the Sources of Light Seemed So Near Yet So Far”
“So I threw off the sheets, and walked out of the tomb.”
—Terry Callier, “Lazarus Man”

Black people have used many Biblical myths to symbolize their experience in America, the Moses story and Exodus being the most popular. But blacks have made use of others, including that of Joseph and his brothers, Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. One of the most remarkable and most subtly insistent has been the story of Lazarus, with its idea of rising from the dead. Black Herman, the famous black magician of the 1920s—follower of Marcus Garvey and hero of Ishmael Reed’s satirical Harlem Renaissance novel, Mumbo Jumbo—regularly raised a buried woman from a grave as part of his act, a graphic metaphor of resurrecting the race. Garvey himself constantly used metaphors of resurrection when he spoke about the destiny of African Americans. “Lift up yourselves, men,” he wrote, “take yourselves out of the mire and hitch your hopes to the stars; yes, rise as high as the very stars themselves.” Indeed, the term renaissance itself, so commonly used even during the 1920s, to describe that period of African American social history, implies rebirth and regeneration. Of course, the idea of resurrection from their degraded, socially debilitated status struck and fired the black imagination as far back as the early 19th century; such imagery is featured in the writings and speeches of black leaders Alexander Crummell, Richard Allen, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet. But this imagery intensified in the 20th century. Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, spoke of the “Lost-Found Nation” of American Negroes and blacks as “deaf, dumb, and blind,” needing to be awakened and regenerated. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of blacks and whites needing to be awakened and reborn, changed, transformed through nonviolent action against racism and segregation.

The prevalence, the ubiquity of this imagery of the metaphors of rebirth, regeneration, and resurrection, suggests that African American music as a whole perhaps has been misunderstood by many. It is not simply a sensual expression, nor just rhythmic ingenuity or innovation, nor simply an intense emotionalism. Blues has often been described as a fatalistic music, a music of resignation. Rhythm & blues, which emerged in the 1940s, has been seen as a dance music, an erotic music, a juvenile music. Jazz, too, has had its moments of being perceived in this way: as erotic, dance-oriented, formulaic. In short, many have seen black music as an art form of escapism for an oppressed people. This is, in part, true—but black music also has a strong spiritual cast. The influence of the church, of spirituals and gospel music, and of Christian morality looms large; so, there is much in black music that expresses hope, defiance, solidarity, as well as the idea of resurrection and rebirth. These qualities can be found in a wide range of black music: from Ellington’s “Black, Brown And Beige” to Martha & The Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Street,” from Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” to Dyke And The Blazers’ “We Got More Soul,” from The Dixie Hummingbirds’ “Christian Automobile” to The Impressions’ “Keep On Pushing,” from Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody (Part 1)” to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” from Bo Diddley’s’ “I’m A Man” to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” These qualities of hope, defiance, solidarity, resurrection, and rebirth were also associated with the Civil Rights movement, the most important social reform movement of 20th-century American social history and, arguably, one of the most significant movements of social change in the history of the world, rivaling the Abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is greatly debated when the Civil Rights movement actually began, but a sensible starting date would be the summer of 1941, when A. Philip Randolph started a movement to march on Washington. In 1920 Randolph, a socialist considered by the federal government to be one of the most dangerous Negroes in America (he had advised blacks not to fight in World War I, saying it was a white, capitalist war), had, after many years of struggle, succeeded in getting the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters recognized as an official union by the Pullman Company. By 1940 he was probably the most influential black leader in America. As the war in Europe intensified, blacks benefited little from the expansion of war materiel production in various industries because of intractable discrimination. Randolph, a strong believer in the power of pressure tactics, decided to force the hand of private industry by going to the government, which was providing many defense industry contracts and thus stimulating, if not creating, the boom. He threatened a major march on Washington in the summer of 1941, claiming that he could produce as many as 10,000 blacks (the number eventually escalated to 50,000) to protest in front of the Lincoln Memorial. President Roosevelt, fearful of how public safety might be compromised by such a number of disgruntled, angry blacks in a highly segregated city with a racist police force, eventually signed Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in the defense industry and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, not a particularly strong government oversight agency but a symbolically important one and clearly a harbinger of how the quest for civil rights and for the end to racial discrimination would become bureaucratized in the federal government, particularly in the Department of Justice. Randolph showed that pressure tactics, something that blacks had not used with much success before, could work. (He was to use this same tactic after the war to force President Truman to issue an executive order to integrate the armed services.) It was a lesson that had a big impact on younger blacks, especially those who were teenagers or very young adults in 1941 and who would provide the leadership for the opening stages of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s.

By 1956 it might be said that the movement was now engaged and the entire legal and social edifice of white supremacy that had been constructed since the end of Reconstruction was now being systematically torn down. Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in major league baseball in 1947. The following year, in Shelly v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court declared racially restrictive housing covenants to be unconstitutional. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 helped to dramatize the problem of racial segregation and the heroic struggle of blacks against it. Led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a newly minted Ph.D from Boston University and the son of a renowned minister from Atlanta, blacks boycotted segregated city buses for more than a year. And in 1955, as part of the growing independence movement among colonized nations, the Afro-Asian Unity Conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia, where virtually every “colored” colonized nation was asked to send representatives, but no white or European nation (or Israel) was invited; the anticolonialism movement was inspirational to many black civil rights leaders in the United States.

Culturally, urbanization, improved educational opportunities, and association with leftist politics aided the development of black writers. Richard Wright, who left Mississippi for Memphis, then Chicago, in 1925, developed his skills at New Masses and Daily Worker, two Communist Front publications. His 1938 collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, was a critical and commercial success. He emerged as a major literary voice in 1940 with the publication of his protest novel, Native Son, and he became the most highly regarded black writer of his day, indeed, the most highly regarded black writer in the history of American letters to that point. (It must be admitted, however, that Wright did not publish the most influential book by a black writer in the 1930s. That honor would go to indefatigable scholar Carter G. Woodson, inventor of Negro History Week and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education Of The Negro, published in 1933, describes how blacks are educated against understanding what is in their own best political and cultural interest; it remains among black readers today one of the most popular titles ever written. It is also one of the most scathing critiques of the educated black elite ever written, second in that regard only to E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 sociological treatise, Black Bourgeoisie.)

By the 1950s a new class of black writers emerged, including Ralph Ellison, author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man—considered by many the best American novel of the post-World War II era—and winner in 1953 of the National Book Award, the first black so honored; James Baldwin, whose books include Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), the first novel by a black writer that dealt straightforwardly with homosexuality, and Notes Of A Native Son (1955), a collection of essays; and Gwendolyn Brooks, author of the 1949 collection Annie Allen, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, another first for a black. Other important black writers of the 1950s include playwright Lorraine Hansberry; novelists William Demby, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes; and journalist Carl Rowan. Generally, these writers differed from the Richard Wright of the 1930s and 1940s in that they tended not to write protest literature that dealt explicitly with the social condition of blacks or to see literature principally as a political weapon. (Some of these writers felt more strongly about this than others.) It was a time when black writers, even more so than during the Harlem Renaissance, were enjoying a certain crossover vogue, and it was the first time that the white critical establishment thought that some black writers had skills equal to that of the best white writers.

In music, World War II wrought radical changes, including the death of the big bands that had been so popular in the 1930s. Only a small number of big bands continued to function in the 1950s: Duke Ellington and Count Basie both led black bands, and Stan Kenton, a white band; the three were among the only viable ones left that continued to make new, challenging, artistically vibrant music. Jazz became largely a small-group music. Black jazz musicians during this period became less concerned with making dance music and more preoccupied with being self-conscious artists. Also, there was a tendency among them to see jazz in more political terms—as a form of social protest or as a music capable of being a self-consciously black art form—or in more spiritual terms. A number of noted black musicians, such as Yusef Lateef, Art Blakey, Dakota Staton, and Ahmad Jamal, became Muslims. (Doubtless, the presence of musicians like Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a jazz bassist who also played the oud, accentuated this interest in the East among black jazz musicians.) This tendency was to intensify in the 1960s, when jazz was openly embraced by some younger black musicians, including Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, as a form of political as well as aesthetic expression and when jazz became an openly spiritual music with the advent of Ellington’s sacred concerts, the contributions of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, and increased attention to Indian music. Much of the “Orientalism” that began to affect jazz in the 1950s and 1960s was not new to American culture or to American art. As far back as the American literary renaissance of the 1850s, one can see occasional but pronounced strands of an “Eastern aesthetic” in American art. Blacks during the Cold War era were becoming more interested in aspects of the East; because of the anticolonial movement, things Eastern often became highly romanticized by African Americans in an effort to form an identity exclusive of white or European influence.

The other radical change was in black popular dance music. With the departure of big bands, dance music was now played by smaller combos relying on simpler arrangements. Saxophonist Louis Jordan, who had cut his musical teeth with the Savoy Ballroom big band of drummer Chick Webb, led this musical movement called rhythm & blues, the new name Billboard magazine created for race records. It was enormously popular with urban blacks, spawning not only a number of new artists but also a number of record companies as well. What else had happened as a result of the war was the rise of independent record labels that catered to, among other audiences, the new market of urban blacks: Specialty, Duke/Peacock, Federal/King, Vee Jay, Sun, Chess, and Atlantic were among the independent labels—most white-owned, some black-owned—that grew up in Cold War America, catering in whole or in part to black urban audiences. The success of these companies made possible in 1959 Detroit’s Motown, the most famous of all independent record companies and the most famous of all black-owned American businesses.

Black dance music changed rapidly in the 1950s, from the adult-oriented music of Louis Jordan, the Ink Spots, and (Aaron) T-Bone Walker to the more youth-oriented music of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Indeed, the rise of a youth culture after the Second World War, largely as a result of unprecedented prosperity and the relentless tide of urbanization, in which children and teens were no longer required by their families to work, dramatically changed the nature and marketing of American popular music. Here was a huge population with disposable income and a great deal of leisure time, so it was no surprise that popular culture became increasingly directed toward the young, particularly music that had the twin attractions for that audience of requiring a largely emotional or physical reaction (that is, being anti-intellectual) and of being something that could be highly romanticized.

At first, in an effort to stave off the influence of black rhythm & blues, which was growing in its appeal to white suburban youth, several record companies introduced the use of the white “cover” artist, a vocalist-musician who would rerecord a successful R&B tune done by a black. Pat Boone did several such covers in the early part of his career. Part of this was due to the sexual aspect of music—white girls made up an inordinate number of rock ’n’ roll fans, and it was thought by most whites to be dangerous and disgusting for a white girl to have a romantic crush on a black male performer. (Nonetheless, even this barrier was broken in the 1950s, with the mainstream rise of such black romantic balladeers as Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., Arthur Prysock, Joe Williams, Harry Belafonte, and Johnny Mathis. With the hit song “The Twist,” Chubby Checker broke new ground in 1961 when he became, at age 20, the first bona fide black teen idol with unabashed crossover appeal; indeed, he appealed more to white girls than to blacks.) In some respects, Elvis Presley might be considered the most successful of all white cover acts, but his presence had the effect of liberating American music across racial lines as he so blatantly borrowed from black performers. While white rock ’n’ roll certainly grew as the 1950s progressed, Presley’s presence tended to intensify, rather than diminish, interest in black popular dance music, although his popularity spawned a number of white teen idols, from Del Shannon to Frankie Avalon, of varying quality. The British Invasion of the mid-1960s—featuring performers such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream, singing the praises and the songs of black R&B and blues artists—would have an even more pronounced effect in this regard among young white listeners. Without this youth culture movement and an intense interest among young whites in black music, Motown would not have enjoyed quite the success that it did as the “Sound of Young America.”

The major consequence of the burgeoning youth culture movement was to escalate the Civil Rights movement as a civil disobedience crusade. Attitudes about race had been changing in America since the end of World War II. When the extent of Hitler’s atrocities became well-known, racism as an ideology began to lose its acceptance and certainly its respectability as the liberal intelligentsia increasingly denounced it as a pathological condition—a form of hatred, not a philosophy. The integration of the armed forces starting with the Korean War in 1950 (President Truman had ordered that the armed forces be integrated in July of 1948, but the war drastically sped up the process) and the integration of baseball with Jackie Robinson had an especially profound effect on younger whites and younger blacks as well. In 1960 black college students started the sit-ins at segregated restaurants and other public establishments in the South, and black and white college students joined together for the freedom rides to desegregate interstate public conveyances and their passenger facilities. Young people, black and white, were to be crucial to the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s, the resurgence of a New Leftist politics in America, and the rise of rock ’n’ roll music as a major commercial force.

The Civil Rights movement enjoyed a number of successes, including the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislation that has enormously changed the political, social, and economic lives of most black Americans and many whites as well. But the movement ran into a number of problems, the most significant being the constant infighting among the major leaders as well as effective criticism from such nationalist groups as the Nation of Islam, particularly its charismatic minister Malcolm X, who thought the aims of the movement were not in the best interests of most blacks. Malcolm X was especially opposed to the ideology of nonviolence, which was the governing principle of the King-led civil rights campaigns and to the idea of integration. His martyr-like death in 1965 exacerbated the dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights movement felt by young blacks, who were growing increasingly impatient with the rate of change and the seemingly intractable nature of racism in American society.
There was also a severe “backlash” by whites, not simply Southern whites who opposed integration and the destruction of their cherished Jim Crow institutions, but also Northern whites, particularly blue-collar ethnics, who thought too much was being given to blacks at everyone else’s expense and who, themselves, were especially opposed to the integration of their neighborhoods and idea of bussing to achieve integration in their schools. Their resistance to the Civil Rights movement led to rise of such law-and-order ethnic politicians as Frank Rizzo, who became mayor of Philadelphia in 1971, largely in response to the racial unrest of the 1960s. What worsened this backlash was the outbreak of urban riots in black communities across Northern and Western America in the middle 1960s, the worst occurring in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967 and 1968. These riots, which caused millions of dollars in damage and destroyed many inner-city neighborhoods so thoroughly that they never recovered, were largely the result of frustration on the part of Northern, urban blacks who felt that the Civil Rights movement had done little to improve their lives.

Two extremist political factions arose as a result of these riots: among blacks, more leftist, violent, so-called revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party came into being, as well as groups that utterly opposed integration and wanted complete social and political control of black communities, such as the Congress of Afrikan Peoples; among whites, law-and-order candidates began to run for public office promising severe crackdowns, thus the rise of tough cop Frank Rizzo. The most popular of these candidates was Alabama governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist; the most successful was former Vice-President Richard Nixon, who was elected President in 1968 on a law-and-order platform. Everyone seemed to be arming for a coming race war.
As younger blacks became more nationalist, more opposed to the ideology of nonviolence and to racial integration, more willing to think about overthrowing the entire American system, much cultural change was wrought in the black community. Blacks began to wear African-style clothing and large Afros and to “clean up their diets” by forswearing pork, even if they weren’t Muslims. Young black writers launched a Black Arts Movement, which produced highly politicized art that was to be used for “the liberation of black people,” as the phrase went at the time. Most of the poetry and other writings this movement produced was agitprop—highly didactic, espousing black pride, praising armed resistance, and envisioning a new black world without whites—and not especially competent. But some memorable literary figures emerged from this era, including Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Nikki Giovanni, Eldridge Cleaver, and, particularly, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), poet, playwright, and social critic.

There was, as with the Harlem Renaissance, a sense of renewal or rebirth among black people during this period. It was reflected in facets of black music that greatly aspired to a spirituality, to being authentic black expression. This influence continued well into the 1970s, and its creative godfather was saxophonist John Coltrane, who died of liver cancer in 1967. Coltrane was able, in a striking way, to combine the idea of black renewal and rebirth with a sort of universal spirituality. His influence can be heard in such jazz artists as Doug and Jean Carn, Pharoah Sanders, The Awakening, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and many others. But Coltrane also influenced nonjazz artists, including Santana; Terry Callier; Earth, Wind & Fire; and Gil Scott-Heron, the latter being especially important because his chanted poetry was instrumental in starting a new musical genre, rap. Chanting poetry was not new: Langston Hughes had recorded poetry to jazz music, as had Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other white Beat writers. Moreover, there was among blacks a form of chanted folk poetry called toasts (usually obscene) that had existed for many years. Scott-Heron combined agitprop with the rhythm of toasts against a jazz background to make something new. Kurtis Blow, without the agitprop, was doing much the same thing in black popular dance music. Together, this became the foundation of rap music.

The death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, in the same year that the federal government passed an open housing bill, brought to an end the Civil Rights movement, at least, its most dramatic and highly publicized stage. Ending the Vietnam War would consume much of the energy of the American Left and of the American political mainstream over the next several years. Moreover, other reformist movements had arisen: environmentalism and feminism. These new concerns further fractured the coalition that had been built in support of black civil rights and certainly absorbed the attention of reform-minded young whites, many of whom had fled the Civil Rights movement once blacks began espousing black power and making it clear that they did not desire integration or working with whites to effect change. But by 1970 nearly everything had been put in place to change the lives of blacks, including expanded voting protection that would produce greater black representation on both the local and national levels; Medicare, food stamps, and Medicaid, the safety net for the poor; greater legal leverage to sue for acts of discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the government an active agent in seeking out discrimination in the marketplace; and affirmative action, a public policy of giving preference for employment and college admissions to blacks and other members of persecuted groups that faced discrimination in the past. This policy continues to produce bitter debate to this day, and not even all blacks support it, although clearly a majority does.

The death of King ended the brief era when blacks were, more or less, united behind one leader. (In public opinion polls, despite the rise of the Panthers and the like and the appeal of militant revolt, King was still supported by most American blacks. And he remains the most revered of all black leaders since his death.) In subsequent years, other black leaders have come to prominence, including Jesse Jackson, who twice made credible runs for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency; Louis Farrakhan, head of a revived Nation of Islam after the death of Elijah Muhammad, who continues to speak in the nationalistic tones of Garvey and Malcolm X and who organized the 1995 Million Man March, the single biggest demonstration in American history; Al Sharpton, the controversial New York minister; Hugh B. Price; Julian Bond; Benjamin Hooks; and others.

What has been most striking about black life in America since 1970 has been the rise in the number of black public figures in the political, business, and cultural arenas. At no time in American history have so many blacks been so conspicuous in such a diversity of fields, and never at any time in American history have so many occupied positions of real authority. Also, the black middle class has grown at an accelerated rate since the 1950s, when the Civil Rights movement really got off the ground. As a result, blacks have more money, more of a market presence, and more financial clout in the United States than at any other time in their history. Blacks have shown their power as a pressure group by getting American companies to divest from South Africa and by helping to play an important role in the downfall of apartheid in that country. In short, blacks are more educated, have more property, and have achieved greater success than anyone would have thought possible 50 or even 30 years ago.

But blacks still remain an afflicted population: they have an incarceration rate that is more than three times their percentage in the general populace. Nearly a third of black households live in poverty. Blacks have the highest divorce rate and lowest marriage rate of any group in the country. They have the highest rate of children born out of wedlock and children who live in single-parent homes. They have the lowest SAT scores of any group, including Hispanics and American Indians. Blacks are the American population most affected by AIDS and the one with the fewest resources to deal with it. The cause of many of these problems can be traced to the lingering effects of racism and discrimination in the United States, but there are other complex contributing factors as well, and the solutions will not be easy. This is perhaps a reason why blacks seem, in many respects, so politically splintered today—the problems they face do not admit apparent solutions, and direct-action protests and pressure tactics, which proved so effective in the past, will not be so today.

In the realm of culture, the African American presence is more pervasive today than ever. There are a number of extremely successful black writers, including Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as best-selling authors E. Lynn Harris and Bebe Moore Campbell. Indeed, blacks have become such a market force in American popular and literary culture that there are bookstores totally devoted to carrying the works of black writers as well as other cultural products designed especially for African Americans, such as games, videos, and toys. In film, there are a number of highly visible and highly paid black actors, including Will Smith, Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Whoopi Goldberg. Spike Lee and John Singleton, among others, have emerged as important mainstream filmmakers. In music, blacks have come to dominate the categories of rap, hip-hop, and rhythm & blues and still remain a significant presence in jazz. Contemporary hitmakers such as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill, Puff Daddy, Babyface, and others come on the heels of those who dominated the 1980s, including Prince, Public Enemy, and Michael Jackson—demonstrating that blacks still are among the best-selling artists in the world.

There also remains in black cultural expression the vital concern with renewal and rebirth. Doubtless, this steadfast preoccupation—obsession, if you will—is best represented in the rise of Afrocentrism, which began around 1980 when Ronald Reagan became President. Afrocentrism clearly arose in reaction to Reagan’s conservative ideology, but that is probably not the sole reason for its existence. The ideas of Afrocentrism are not new, bringing together as they do strands of Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Ethiopianism, and the belief that black people have a special destiny to fulfill in the world. These ideas are: first, that there is an African consciousness that is antithetical to a European consciousness; second, that there are African values that support an African consciousness; third, that there are cultural and political links that bind all African-descended peoples; fourth, that a knowledge of African history, particularly the history of ancient Egypt, is essential to the mental health and political consciousness of black Americans; fifth, that ancient Egypt is the fount of Western knowledge and civilization and that whites have tried for several centuries to obscure this fact. Whether one agrees with all these ideas or not, their sum points to a continuing effort on the part of blacks to resurrect themselves in the eyes of the world as a people who have done things to shape the course of civilization and who are capable of being, once again, major actors on the world’s stage. Afrocentrism also points to the continuing effort on the part of black people to raise themselves in their own eyes, to reinvent themselves as a new people, not as the creation or instrument of whites.

The fact that blacks have become an important market in the United States and that there are more professional, middle-class blacks than ever points to the continued vitality of Afrocentrism, as it is an expression that is so much directed by consumerism and ideas—from artifacts for Kwanzaa to the books of Ivan Van Sertima, Molefi K. Asante, Yosef ben-Jochannan, Chancellor Williams, and Martin Bernal, a prominent white scholar who has written in support of aspects of Afrocentrism. What drives Afrocentrism, which reveals much about the advance made by blacks over the last 50 years, is disposable income and the need for a political creed with historical validity.

Nonetheless, the quest of black people remains a spiritual and spirited one in American life, a search for “higher ground,” as black preachers so often put it, and it still remains essential in our overall understanding of American life and the various meanings attached to it. For most black folk believe in the morality and the ultimate redemption and salvation inherent in their experience, as singer Des’ree so aptly says in “Crazy Maze,” “Light’s at the end of the tunnel, sometimes the journey is long.”
—Gerald Early
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis.

From Ragtime to Rock ’n’ Roll:
The African American Experience Through Song

Music, more than any other cultural form, has been the ultimate embodiment of African American cultural sensibility. One reason for music’s centrality surely lies in its ability to coordinate and combine several highly valued modes of cultural expression, including song, verbal recitation, instrumental performance, dance, religious worship, and visual display. Another rests in the ability of music to create a space of freedom in a society that systematically denied it to its African American citizens. Throughout the 20th century, music has been a place of African American cultural leadership—shifting mainstream American tastes in an African American direction and providing transient, but recurrent, relief from the everyday humiliations of racism.
Say It Loud! A Celebration Of Black Music In America, loudly proclaims the beauty of African American music by offering an overview of landmark 20th-century recordings, with selections drawn from ragtime, jazz, blues, spirituals, gospel, rhythm & blues, rock ’n’ roll, pop music, jump blues, soul, Motown, funk, and hip-hop. The collection provides listeners a welcome opportunity to hear a full range of African American musical expression, as well as the interrelationships among the individual genres.

There have been many attempts to describe that “shared something” that runs through the continuum of African American musical expression. Blues People by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Stomping The Blues by Albert Murray locate that shared feeling in the blues, the musical genre that has most often been taken as the point of departure for African American musical sensibility. Baraka stressed the weight of the blues in the psyches of black people and their importance in marking the path enslaved Africans took to citizenship: “when a man looked up in some anonymous field and shouted, ‘Oh, Ahm tired a dis mess,/Oh yes, Ahm so tired a dis miss,’ you can be sure he was an American.” Murray saw in the blues a ritual of purification and resilience that served not only to embody courage, honor, and heroism but also to provide “equipment for living” and joy for those afflicted by the blues.

Although Murray recognized that many aspects of the blues were derived from the black church, he saw the secular domain as the one that defied the status quo and affirmed everyday life. In The Power Of Black Music, by contrast, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., emphasizes the sacred, by locating the center of African American aesthetics in what he calls ring shout elements: a complex of musical traits, including cries, hollers, blue notes, verbal interjections, moans, vocables, call-and-response organization, and timbral alteration. Call-and-response organization is key here, as different dimensions of musical expression are constantly recombined but united by their shared emphasis on communal participation. Since African American music in the 20th century has included styles as diverse as the down-home blues of Son House and Charlie Patton, the exuberant jazz improvisation of Louis Armstrong, the close vocal harmony of The Soul Stirrers, the introspective muted sound of Miles Davis, and the classically trained contralto of Marian Anderson, it is difficult to claim that there is a single black aesthetic. Rather, there are a variety of African American aesthetics composed of interrelated musical sounds and values, each of which embodies particular dimensions of the black experience in the 20th century.

The Teens and ’20s
The earliest recording in this collection is “Maple Leaf Rag,” the piano roll version made by composer Scott Joplin in 1916. “Maple Leaf Rag” was originally published in 1899 amidst a growing controversy over the popularity of ragtime—a genre that included not only piano performance but also songs and ensemble versions of this syncopated music. The cultural debate over ragtime announced themes that would recur throughout the 20th century in connection with black music. The wide popularity of the style generated a backlash that accused ragtime of lowering musical taste and corrupting moral values. What the antiragtime forces feared most was the spectre of an America “falling prey to the collective soul of the negro,” as one propagandist put it in 1913. In general, the advent of recording technology made it ultimately impossible to control the embrace of African American musical aesthetics by a larger American public, many valiant attempts notwithstanding.

Shortly after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 (which established the doctrine of “separate but equal”), Buddy Bolden’s band dazzled New Orleans with a distinctive sound that heralded the synthesis of ragtime, blues, spirituals, classical music, marches, and popular song that became jazz. Not until its greatest exponents had migrated northward and westward did jazz become a national genre, evoking the same kinds of racial anxiety that had accompanied debate over ragtime. The Great Migration of 1915 to 1920—during which time somewhere between 500,000 and one million or more black people left the South—included such New Orleans jazz pioneers as Joe “King” Oliver, Edward “Kid” Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton. Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver’s band in Chicago in 1922 and played along “The Stroll,” a thriving nightlife district on South State Street, featuring several African American-owned clubs—the Deluxe Café, the Pekin Theater, and the Dreamland Café. Armstrong’s recordings between 1926 and 1929 set the standard for the improvisational language of early jazz with his exuberant, rich-toned trumpet. His commanding sound also established him as a cultural hero in the black community, a triumphant role model for those aspiring to a better life. “Heebie Jeebies” (1926), from Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings, offers a chance to hear both his trumpet and his equally original vocal style. Armstrong’s use of vocables toward the end is often cited as the first example of scat-singing in jazz, although there are actually many earlier recorded examples of this vocal style. Armstrong’s authoritative voice (as well as the wide distribution of “Heebie Jeebies”), nevertheless, established scatting as an integral style for jazz. The previous year Armstrong was heard in call-and-response with Bessie Smith on her classic recording of “The St. Louis Blues” (1925). The Empress of the Blues delivered a solo voice with a power to match Armstrong’s trumpet, and their interplay surely counts as some of the most inspired in early jazz.

Another achievement of the 1920s was Paul Robeson’s appearance in the London production of Show Boat (1928). Robeson sang one song,
“Ol’ Man River,” a crossover success with the white public. Nevertheless, some segments of the black community, including J.A. Rogers of New York’s Amsterdam News, objected to Robeson’s appearance in a grossly stereotypical role. Robeson later omitted the song’s most offensive lyrics.

The towering bandleaders of the 1920s included Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp” provides an example of excellent ensemble performance in early jazz. Unlike the Hot Five recordings, which omitted bass and drums, Morton’s 1926 recordings boast one of the best rhythm sections in early jazz. Stop-time, double-time feels and two-beat and four-beat bass lines (the latter anticipating the walking bass line that came to prominence in the swing era) provide great excitement and variety.

Stride piano flourished in Harlem as James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Luckey Roberts, and Fats Waller elaborated with great virtuosity upon ragtime. Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (1929), perhaps his best known composition, offers a glimpse of his simultaneously playful and artful approach to the instrument. Waller’s favorite pianist was Art Tatum, who began dazzling the musical world in the late ’20s, but did not record until 1933. Tatum’s version of “Tiger Rag” (1940) heard here demonstrates his unparalleled virtuosity on the most widely recorded tune in the early jazz repertory.

The 1930s
The music industry of the 1930s was marked by corporate consolidation and a expanded role for broadcasting in the dissemination of popular music. Radio broadcasts from major hotels, clubs, and dance halls were crucial in establishing and maintaining the reputations of the bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Benny Goodman. There were two types of radio broadcasts: “sustaining programs,” originating late at night from hotels and clubs and featuring a variety of bands, and sponsored programs, for which a company such as Coca-Cola or Lucky Strike hired particular bands for long-term contracts. Access to these radio opportunities was racially structured with white bands at an advantage in both types of engagements. White bands were more likely to be booked at hotels and clubs with broadcast capability, since most had segregated booking policies. Even so, many black bands did make appearances on sustaining programs from locations that would hire them, such as the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom, or Chicago’s Grand Terrace, but sponsored programs were out of the question for them until the mid-1940s. The public dominance of white bands in the mid-1930s masked the importance of the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington—“It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (1932)—and Earl Hines in establishing swing as a musical style, since the broader public came to know the style through bands such as Goodman’s and Tommy Dorsey’s.

The segregation of the public arena caused interracial collaborations of various kinds to occur in less visible ways. Hiring arrangers from across the color line was one; recording (but not appearing) with a mixed ensemble was another. Fletcher Henderson’s compositions and arrangements, some of which Benny Goodman bought in 1934, served as the principal component of the band’s repertory as it established a national profile. Goodman later hired African Americans Henderson and Jimmy Mundy as staff arrangers and defied the performance color line by hiring Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian. Teddy Wilson recorded with the Benny Goodman trio a year prior to his famous 1936 appearance with the bandleader at Chicago’s Congress Hotel. Although white musicians had long been free to cross the color line in black settings, a black musician appearing in a mixed ensemble in an upscale white venue was something new.

One hallmark of swing music was its extensive use of riffs (short ostinato figures) in ensemble textures. Riffs were used in several ways: 1) as melodies, 2) in call-and-response with another riff or an improvised passage, 3) as a continuous supporting texture underneath a soloist or written passage, and 4) in layers. Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ At The Woodside” (1938) is pervaded by riffs used in all of these ways. Notice, for example, the opening saxophone melody (a riff) and the brass riff in response. The artful use of repetition, which served as a solid anchor for dancers, was one hallmark of swing style and something extremely important in later rhythm & blues.

If the recording industry of the early ’20s first noticed the commercial potential of classic blues (Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter) and jazz, both distributed as race records, it soon began to realize the commercial potential of down-home (or rural) blues and gospel. Eddie James “Son” House, Jr., born near Clarksdale, Mississippi (the homeland of the Delta Blues), began recording for Paramount in 1930, shortly after the death of “Blind” Lemon Jefferson, one of the first down-home blues recording stars. Like Jefferson, Son House recorded lyrics that were both sacred and secular. “My Black Mama (Part 1)” (1930) was recorded at the same session as “Preachin’ The Blues (Parts I and II).” One celebrated black pride (“My black mama’s face shine like the sun/Oh, lipstick and powder sure won’t help her none”), the other considered the life of the church (“Oh, I’m gonna get me a religion, I’m gonna join the Baptist Church/I’m gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won’t have to work”).1 Son House’s slide guitar work was an inspiration to other Delta bluesmen, including, most prominently, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Had he lived longer, Charlie Patton (“Pony Blues,” 1929) may have been an influence of similar strength. Patton, whose recording career began a year before Son’s, worked with him in the early ’30s before his untimely death in 1934.

The ’20s and ’30s also witnessed the development of two important streams in African American gospel music—the Pentecostal/Holiness style, which included instruments in performance, and the jubilee quartet style that focused on unaccompanied a capella singing. Jubilee quartet singing took its inspiration from the Fisk Jubilee Quartet and barbershop singing (something with a venerable black tradition as well as white). While the Fisk Jubilee Singers preferred the vocal tone color of Western classical music, the Pentecostal/Holiness churches sang with an abandoned style that included throatier moments of shouting. The jubilee quartet movement preferred a tone color somewhere in between these two boundaries.

The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet was the most well-known gospel quartet before World War II. The Golden Gates came to prominence through live radio broadcasts from WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina, where their close harmony and rhythmic drive appealed to both black and white listeners. “Rock My Soul” (1938) provides an excellent example of their combination of rhythmic intensity and plaintive leads. The quartet’s radio broadcasts brought them not only to the attention of Victor Records, which signed them in 1937, but also to John Hammond, who featured them in his second famous “From Spirituals To Swing” Carnegie Hall concert held in 1939. They crossed over to a more secular repertory after appearing at Café Society in 1940. After World War II, The Soul Stirrers dominated quartet singing, during what has come to be known as the Golden Age of Gospel.
The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet was inspired by the Mills Brothers. The Brothers’ recording of “Tiger Rag” (1931) features rhythmically driving close vocal harmony, a scatted vocal solo, and what seems to be a muted trumpet solo, which was, in fact, sung by Harry Mills. Fans of Bobby McFerrin (who has amazed late 20th-century audiences with his ability to sound like an entire instrumental ensemble) may be interested in the continuity. “Tiger Rag” and “Dinah” (with Bing Crosby), brought enormous popular success to the Mills Brothers, which, in turn, inspired the proliferation of quartet singing. The Ink Spots was one such group. After struggling for nearly ten years on the margins of the music business, they finally achieved success with a ballad titled “If I Didn’t Care” (1939). The buttery tenor lead of Bill Kenny is contrasted with a spoken verse by bass Orville “Hoppy” Jones, a format that reappears later in doo wop.

The 1940s
With World War II came not only a new aesthetic in jazz but also a new attitude in African American communities. The Double V campaign (which called for victory over racism at home as well as victory for democracy in Europe) perhaps symbolized the transition best, as African American soldiers—deemed fit to risk their lives in battle—chafed at glaring racial injustices at home. Working as a professional jazz musician accorded greater personal freedom, mobility, and prosperity than most occupations available to black Americans, and musicians reveled in their comparative liberty. The symbolic value of their hard-won success and freedom to the broader African American community—which vicariously celebrated their every defiant move—was enormous.

During the war years, jazz musicians, who had become frustrated with the limited possibilities for extended improvisation in big bands and dismayed by the dominance of white bands in the popular music market, forged an ambitious improvisational style that came to be known as bebop. No longer content to be entertainers, the younger jazz musicians demanded to be taken seriously as artists. The heroes of this movement were Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, and Bud Powell.

Bebop’s musical innovations affected several dimensions of the music—instrumental virtuosity, harmony, phrasing, rhythmic feel, timbre, and tempo. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie reharmonized and/or wrote new melodies for standard jazz tunes—such as “Cherokee,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “What Is This Thing Called Love”—increasing the harmonic rhythm and the tempo, and improvising highly subdivided phrases that set a new standard for instrumental virtuosity. Drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach (picking up where Count Basie drummer Jo Jones left off) transferred the standard ride rhythm of the swing era from hi-hat cymbals to the suspended ride cymbal, altering both the timbral color of the time-keeping pattern and increasing its volume. They also began “breaking up the time” by inserting off-beat accents on the bass drum and snare, creating greater rhythmic variety and dialogue in the rhythm section accompaniment.

Charlie Parker’s legendary solo on “Ko Ko” (based on the chord changes to “Cherokee”) illustrates many of the signature features of bebop melodic style. The blistering tempo of the performance dazzled contemporary listeners. Notice the long succession of continuous eighth notes, the use of chromatic approach notes often alternating with arpeggiation, and the use of sequences, such as the one at the beginning of the first bridge. Parker’s particular penchant for interpolating complex figurations around skeletal melodies can be seen in his famous bridge to the second chorus of “Ko Ko,” where a varied melody of “Tea For Two” serves to anchor a rapid series of arpeggiations. Parker was also widely admired for his varied accentuation of long successions of eighth notes in a manner that served to emphasize the most harmonically pleasing moments of the voice leading and for his distinctive tone color.

The bebop movement (the musicians called it modern music) was not only a shift in musical style but also in attitude and politics. Through incomparable musical achievement African American musicians acquired the mantle of genius and demanded to be treated accordingly. The mask of subservience was to be discarded, and non-African American audience members were expected to adjust. The bebop pantheon offered a new type of cultural hero: an uncompromising figure who deployed the values of modernist aesthetics in service of black advancement.
Nevertheless, the music of bebop did not often contain direct political references. Although Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker admired Paul Robeson, their music did not overtly advertise their interest in his politics. The most explicitly political recording of the era was Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939), the lyrics of which directly addressed the issue of lynching. Holiday debuted the Lewis Allan song at the Café Society, a left-leaning establishment in New York’s Greenwich Village. She later appeared at events honoring Paul Robeson, who was widely known for his antiracist and anticolonialist politics, as did several other prominent jazz musicians, including Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, and Ella Fitzgerald.

By the end of the 1940s bebop’s fast tempos and greater dissonance, as well as a preference for concert or nightclub performance venues rather than dances, had caused many listeners to seek out more accessible musical styles. There were several small bands from the 1940s that made use of jazz instrumentation and improvisational skill, which tend to be overlooked in accounts of either jazz or rhythm & blues. Tracks from the bands of Nat “King” Cole, Louis Jordan, and T-Bone Walker are three included here.
Nat Cole, who earned his greatest fame in the 1950s as a velvety-toned ballad singer, began his career as a jazz pianist greatly inspired by the example of Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson. Although Cole grew up in Chicago, the King Cole trio—with Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on bass—came to prominence in Los Angeles. Appearances on many national radio shows, including NBC’s Kraft Music Hall and Swing Soiree, brought Cole to national prominence. Cole became the first black with a sponsored radio show—King Cole Trio Time—a 15-minute weekly show that debuted in 1946. Cole’s ballad style was later emulated by such singers as Johnny Mathis, whose “Misty” (1959) is included here.

“Straighten Up And Fly Right” (1944), one of the trio’s first big hits, demonstrates their ability to swing, as well as Cole’s sophisticated piano and vocal styles. It also provides an example of the so-called jive numbers—such as Cab Calloway’s “Minnie The Moocher” (1931) and Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry (Parts I & II)” (1949)—which were tremendously popular with both black and white audiences. The lyrics of these pieces tell humorous and entertaining stories accompanied by an urbane, swing-influenced accompanimental style. Jordan’s Tympany Five (which usually had seven) featured Jordan’s alto saxophone and vocals and a swinging rhythm section and made much use of the Count Basie band’s riffing tradition. The style came to be known as jump blues, and Jordan’s trademark shuffle boogie beat (perhaps best exemplified in “Choo Choo Ch’boogie”) became a standard feel used not only in R&B of the early 1950s but also in rock ’n’ roll.

Aaron Thibeaux (T-Bone) Walker’s influential electric guitar playing is another example of a musical style that straddled the boundaries of blues and jazz. Too urbane to fit into the dominant urban blues story that follows Muddy Waters from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Chicago (T-Bone went from Texas to Los Angeles), and too bluesy to fit into the progression from swing to bebop,

T-Bone’s passionate guitar, heard here on 1947’s “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad),” pioneered an electric guitar sound that was later taken up by B.B. King. Charles Brown (“In The Evening When The Sun Goes Down,” 1949) also made the move from Texas to Los Angeles, where T-Bone’s example inspired his own particular synthesis of the blues and urban jazz. Ruth Brown’s style, heard here in 1953’s “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” also came out of a similar synthesis.

The 1950s
In the early 1950s R&B included a wide variety of styles, drawing in various combinations from blues, jazz, and gospel. In Chicago the electrification of such Delta blues artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker (all from Mississippi), created a new urban blues style that was recorded by Chess Records and Vee Jay, an African American-owned label. “I Feel Like Going Home” (1948), Muddy Waters’ first major hit, featured an electrified slide guitar and Waters’ rich voice, crossing the boundary between a singing- and storytelling-style delivery. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen’,” sung (and spoken) over a spellbinding electrified one-chord guitar riff, reached #1 on the 1949 R&B chart. Howlin’ Wolf’s full band recording of Willie Dixon’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” (1962) provides a more typical example of the Chicago blues sound, a style with tremendous appeal to that city’s enormous number of recent migrants from the South. This Delta blues musical lineage, in its urban and rural forms, subsequently served as inspiration for white rock ’n’ roll artists of the 1960s, including The Rolling Stones (who named their band after a Muddy Waters song) and Eric Clapton, whose band Cream had a hit version of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” introducing a generation of white listeners to the legendary bluesman.

The emergence of gospel in the R&B sound took two different paths in the 1950s. From the gospel quartet tradition came doo wop and the velvety-toned voice of Sam Cooke, whose defection from The Soul Stirrers in 1957 shocked the gospel world. Cooke had been the lead singer since Rebert H. Harris’ retirement in 1951, and he was much beloved for his passionately melismatic yet sweet vocal delivery. On “Touch The Hem Of His Garment” (1956) Cooke’s tenor soars over the lightly rhythmic vocal texture, with a complex intensity that never quite made it into his secular hits, such as “You Send Me” or “Cupid.” Mahalia Jackson was another gospel artist who was often courted by the secular music industry, but she steadfastly refused to be recast as a jazz or R&B singer. “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1963) illustrates clearly why she came to be known as “the world’s greatest gospel singer.”

Ray Charles’ “I’ve Got A Woman” (1954) brought the musical feeling of Pentecostal/Holiness church into R&B by adapting the gospel classic “There’s A Man Going Round Taking Names.” At first Charles came under intense fire from the black community for shamelessly combining the sound of the church with lyrics about love and sex, but was later embraced as Brother Ray, progenitor of the prideful sound of soul music. Both streams of gospel music reemerge in the 1960s, first in the Motown sound, which built bands around vocal groups, and in the soul music of Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket ‘88’” (1951) is considered by many to be the first rock ’n’ roll recording. Its shuffle-boogie rhythm, teen lyrics (about a car), impassioned saxophone solo, and Fats Domino-style piano all support this claim. Say It Loud! includes the original versions of several R&B tunes that achieved their greatest fame when covered by white rock ’n’ roll musicians. These include The Drifters’ “Money Honey” (1953, covered by Elvis Presley), Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It A Shame” (1955, covered by Pat Boone), Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (1956, covered by Pat Boone and The Beatles), and Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle And Roll” (1954, covered by Bill Haley And His Comets and Elvis Presley). The covers generally earned more money for white artists than the original versions had earned for their African American performers and tended to obscure from view the African American roots of the musical style.

The practice of covering is different than what might be called versioning, a transformation of a song that offers a new interpretation or arrangement of a particular tune. A jazz performance of a standard popular song, for example, uses the tune as the basis of a series of extended improvisations and does not duplicate the details of a particular performance. The cover versions of the 1950s generally duplicated the entire textures of the originals, toning down the intensity of the rhythm and vocal styles. Pat Boone’s covers are perhaps the most notorious. African American artists generally had little basis for contesting this practice, since many had forfeited their publishing rights in order to receive a recording contract (something many labels insisted upon). Among the labels most involved in the cover market were Decca,
Mercury, and Dot.

Elvis Presley’s 1956 covers of Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti,” Ray Charles’ “I’ve Got A Woman,” and Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” mainstreamed the sound of R&B under the label of rock ’n’ roll. The new genre was accused of lowering musical taste and corrupting moral values, just as ragtime and jazz had been earlier in the century. This time the social context driving white fear of the African American influence on popular culture was the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, the strength of which multiplied in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the Montgomery bus boycott (1956). White Citizens’ Councils actively organized against rock ’n’ roll, denouncing it as the music of integration and racial mixing, despite the fact that none of the principal rock ’n’ roll bands were integrated. None of the major early rock ’n’ roll artists (Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis) ever challenged the color line in the way some white swing bands did in the 1930s. The change in the name—from R&B to rock ’n’ roll—also erased the African American heritage of the genre more thoroughly than if the genre had retained its name when it crossed over. Although white bands had come to dominate public perception of swing in the 1930s, African American bands were at least considered to be part of the same genre.

The last few years of the decade were excellent ones for jazz, as bands as diverse as Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers, the Miles Davis Quintet, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus consolidated what has come to be known as the golden age of modern jazz. Charles Mingus’ “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” (1959) transformed the sanctified sound of the Pentecostal/Holiness church into an up-tempo 6/8 feel where the horns do the shouting and testifying without ever losing their swing. The Miles Davis Quintet, featuring Davis on trumpet and John Coltrane on tenor sax, gave voice to a jazz sound both hard-driving and introspective. Davis’ 1959 album Kind Of Blue is generally credited with launching the modal sound in jazz, and although his refusal to announce tunes, or otherwise accommodate the ordinary expectations placed on a performer, earned him criticism in some quarters, to his fans he perfectly embodied the proud, uncompromising black artist of the new era. Soon after, John Coltrane would become the towering figure in jazz. In 1960 he announced his readiness with his astonishingly virtuosic solo on “Giant Steps,” a piece of his own composition built upon one of the most demanding chord progressions in all of jazz.

During the first six decades of the 20th century, African American musicians created an incredibly diverse and influential body of music in spite of the institutionalized racism in the music industry that hampered their every move. Despite efforts to impose restrictions on the dissemination of African American musics, the broader American public bought recordings, attended performances, and otherwise refused to restrict their musical tastes to ethnically bounded limits. While African American music liberated a great deal of territory, American society continues to await the day when its social freedoms rise to match its musical ones.
—Ingrid Monson
Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of
African American Music at Harvard University.

America in Living Color
America is a Rashomon experiment gone awry. Ask 50 different people to define this country, to tell its history and predict its future, to sum up its character and define its persona, to analyze its art, culture, and politics, and you’re likely to get hundreds of different responses—with each person offering multiple and contradictory, if not contrarian, answers. The peace sign and the middle finger duke it out for iconic prominence. Mickey Mouse and Huey Newton battle in a celebrity death match with the prize being pop-culture market share. Marilyn Monroe’s bottle of peroxide is weighed against Angela Davis’ Afro pick on a scale of feminine desirability. What you’re finally likely to realize is that America is constructed from a stacked deck of identity cards, and that each card is a lie or a delusion: there is freedom of speech; we hold this truth to be self-evident—all men are created equal; ours is a classless society; the color of a man’s skin doesn’t matter. These lies are being exposed every day of the week, as they have been for four centuries now, with the most consistent and effective interrogator being African American life. African American music.

Race music.

Race music is America’s greatest contribution to world culture. It’s where this country’s defining struggles and triumphs, strengths and flaws, truths and lies, heady ideals and low-down, juke-joint (and daytime talk-show) characteristics have been stripped to their bare essences. Race music has defined and then redefined cool, taught the world what it is to be a man, to be a woman, and how to transcend racial, gender, or class barriers. It’s also where social and political hypocrisy, abandoned-lover pain, and the high cost of being not just Black, not just American, but of being human has been spelled out in grooves, words, and breathtaking riffs that rank with the greatest art the world has ever known. It would startle the good ol’ boys club known as our founding fathers to know this, but America is as simple and as complex as Aretha Franklin’s wordless blue-flame moan, Otis Redding’s ecstatic secular shouts, Andraé Crouch’s wholly holy incantations, or Chuck D.’s fiery street orations. If you want to honestly grapple with America—its truths, its horrors, and its breathtaking possibilities—this is where you turn for insights. Race music.

The music is where boys learned to be cats named Cab, Duke, Monk, and Miles, and then passed those lessons down until they reached guys named 2Pac, Ike, Gil, and Biggie. (You can argue forever about what was gained or lost in the transition.) It’s where girls with steely ambition and the talent to back it up were transformed into goddesses and social warriors who were—and are—so fierce that they could go by a single name and still be instantly recognized: Lena, Nina, Mahalia, Odetta. What’s most remarkable about African American music is the way it adapts timeless struggles to timely, era-specific genre forms that themselves become timeless. Old Negro spirituals reverberate powerfully throughout rap, techno, and house, with stops through gospel, the blues, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll along the way. Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River,” with its plaintive longing juxtaposed against the sheer force of the singer’s powerful voice and his controversial activist persona, is a pungent piece of social commentary that gives way over the decades to the more lyrically explicit “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” where the cool, no-nonsense tones of Gil Scott-Heron burn off all traces of melancholy, warning of an impending social apocalypse borne of centuries of injustice and pent-up frustrations that can no longer be dulled, contained, or diminished by the drugs of capitalism:

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner . . .
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant re-play . . .
Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damn relevant . . . because black people will be in the streets looking for a brighter day . . .
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal . . .
The revolution will not go better with Coke . . .2

To really grasp the heart of America and African American music, you have to dismantle one of this country’s biggest lies that it tells about itself—that there is no such thing as class struggle. We are a culture steeped in class-consciousness and class shame, but we lie to ourselves and to the world about that fact. Our movies and literature are filled with paeans to the everyday working Joe, and politicians—like clockwork every election season—swear that he’s the heart and soul of America and pledge to work on his behalf. But to be honest, this blue-collar/working-class Everyman is condescended to, patronized, spoken at, not to, or ignored altogether. Rarely is he allowed to speak for himself, and even then he’s not really listened to. This is doubly true if he is a man “of color.”

Ironically, 21st-century folks who are tired of talking about race and the myriad issues surrounding it like to parrot the notion that class, and not race, is the pressing issue of the day. In truth, class and race are too deeply intertwined to be split off and played against one another in some simplistic mimicry (or mockery) of meaningful political discourse. Race is the cornerstone of class distinction and privilege in this country. The one was used to create and sustain the other. This is important to understand because African American music has always originated from the “lower classes” of the African American community. It’s been from the vantage point of the lowest social rung that the blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, house/techno, and hip-hop were sprung. These musics were the voice of the truly disenfranchised: poor and struggling black folk.

Middle-class blacks have traditionally been disdainful of these various genres of music when they first arrived in their respective cultural eras. They were just a little too black: uncouth, tacky, country. “Ghetto,” before the word became fabulous. They were a source of shame in their celebrations of unapologetic blackness—celebrations that called out “I’m Black And I’m Proud” years before James Brown gave words to the sentiment and then again years after the sentiment (or at least the political consciousness behind it) was out of vogue. They were a source of shame in that the battles they outlined (whether in Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” or Ice-T’s “Colors”) and the joy they encapsulated (as exemplified in Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” or The O’Jay’s “Love Train”) were spoken in the vernacular of everyday, working-class black folk, and as art they didn’t aspire to or mimic the aesthetic and social standards of middle-class white folk—who, ironically, were sometimes more receptive to the work than their black counterparts.

In his 1962 speech/essay, “The Myth Of A ‘Negro Literature,’” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes, “[O]ne of the most persistent and aggravating reasons for the absence of achievement among serious Negro artists, except in Negro music, is that in most cases the Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes. Negro music alone, because it drew its strengths and beauties out of the depth of the black man’s soul, and because to a large extent its traditions could be carried on by the lowest classes of Negroes, has been able to survive the constant and willful dilutions of the black middle class. Blues and jazz have been the only consistent exhibitors of ‘Negritude’ in formal American culture simply because the bearers of its tradition maintained their essential identities as Negroes; in no other art (and I will persist in calling Negro music, Art) has this been possible.”

And in respecting, honoring, and giving voice to the multifaceted quantity known as “Negritude,” the artists were and are able to be honest about what it is to be American, about what America is, period.

There was an America before there was slavery, but it didn’t amount to much. (And this fledgling “America” is not the same thing as the “new world” that existed before the pilgrims set foot on the land at all. That was a different place, a different state of mind. That was an incarnation that had to be shattered altogether in order for the experiment known as “America” to begin.)

The embryonic “America” was cast with religious zealots who’d been invited out of their native homeland for being pains in the ass, who lucked into a gig whereby they could simultaneously colonize a new country for business prospects and stake out territory where their religious views could thrive untrammeled. Once they landed on the shores of their new country, they played the victim card until the red-skinned native folk took pity on them, fed them, and showed them how to battle the unforgiving climate and emerge victorious. For their hospitality, these red-skinned people were tagged “primitive” and “savage” and had their land snatched from under them.

By the time Africans were being imported wholesale, “America” was almost a fully realized entity. The DNA had been mapped, the blueprint drawn up. The concept of demonized “other” was in full effect, with all the dehumanizing and soul-crushing fallout of that construct already playing out in the lives of a host of Native American tribes. Also in effect was the use of violence, thievery, and genocide to justify the inalienable right of white folk to take what they wanted and call it progress. By the time the first slave shacks were built, America was already soaked in the stuff that makes up the blues, but the Native people had been silenced too effectively to sing the songs—at least where anyone could hear the tunes but themselves.

It took the slave-ship arrival and systemic abuse of black folk (and our resulting centuries-long battles to reclaim, assert, and celebrate our humanity) for America to gain real clarity of identity and purpose, for America to know who she was—even if she was lying to herself and much of the world about who and what that really was. The struggle between Europe and Africa, between black-brown and white peoples, and over what is meant by the concepts of freedom, justice, community, progress—these are all at the core of America. Not so much the concepts themselves, but the struggle to realize them, to put them into practice. The struggle. To make sure that these “staples” of democracy are truly accessible to the majority. To make sure that the reaching toward these ideals is always in progress.

This is what black music, race music, Negro music is: the sound of the reach, the sound of the struggle. But it’s also about propelling both the audience and the artists into a future when the goal has finally been grasped. That is the joy in the music. But we can’t truly appreciate that joy until we go back to the beginning, to the roots of the songs, and know where the journey began.

In her essay, “Black Is The Noun,” poet-activist-professor Nikki Giovanni writes, “[T]he slaves told their story through song. Isn’t that why we sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’? Isn’t that why we know ‘Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior’? Isn’t that the reason our legacy is ‘You Got To Walk This Lonesome Valley?’ ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?’ To [W.E.B.] Du Bois, the spirituals were sorrow songs, perhaps because he saw himself as so different from the slaves who sang them. But the spirituals were not and are not today sorrow songs but records of our history. How else would a people tell their story if not through the means available? . . . We made a song to be a quilt to wrap us ‘in the bosom of Abraham.’ We brought a faith to the barbarians among whom we found ourselves, and the very humbleness of our souls defeated the power of their whips, ropes, chains and money. . . . Who would have remembered us had we not raised our voices?”

Those spirituals, the faith and resilience that they celebrated and recounted, are found in Mahalia Jackson’s gospel classic “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” wherein she asks her higher power to extend a hand of comfort. But it’s not just comfort she wants from that hand, but guidance to a better place, somewhere beyond the earthly plane. She knows there is such a place because there has to be. And the struggle—for freedom, to hold on to sanity, to absorb the blows of persecution without being broken—is all right there in her voice. The ecstasy she longs for—and that is such a powerful undercurrent in her vocals—would have no resonance, no potency, if the trials to achieve it weren’t clearly the fuel driving her onward and upward.

Much is made of the fact that the roots of rhythm & blues are gospel music, and while that’s true, what’s equally true is that those same roots—when tapped into and brought to bear fruit in other musical genres—allowed black artists to transform “standards” and show tunes into something else altogether. When jazz and the blues (themselves derivatives of gospel) are factored into the transformative process, the results can be stunning. Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington proved that. And Lena Horne’s “Stormy Weather” is another prime example. By the time the legendary icon sang the title song to the 1943 movie, she’d already been embraced by black folk as one of our most beloved and important cultural figures. Though she came from “bourgeois,” good family stock (with the requisite light skin, Anglo features, and good hair), Horne’s family was also composed of intellectuals and well-respected political activists. So, it was no stretch for her to speak out on issues of racial injustice throughout her career, refusing to play maids in Hollywood and going out of her way to reach out to African American G.I.s when the military had her play before segregated audiences of World War II American soldiers. Her “Stormy Weather” immediately transcended its aesthetic boundaries as a sublime torch song and pristine standard, and became the signature song of a black freedom fighter. As such, its memorable lament—“keeps raining all the time”—spoke as much to the relentless assault of daily racism and oppression as it did to the heartache of a forlorn lover.

Decades after Ms. Horne carved a place for herself in both the black American psyche and the pop culture pantheon, Gladys Knight checked in with her own recording about lost love that doubled as something else again. “Midnight Train To Georgia,” one of the most instantly recognizable tunes from the ’70s, is another song that snakes its way out of the fractures of a broken heart. But it also functions as a show of solidarity between a black woman and her black man—listen closely to the lyrics, and what you hear is an incredibly sympathetic reaction to a man’s dreams crumbling at his feet. And as he retreats home to lick his wounds, Gladys follows right behind, reminding him that he’s still loved and that he still has value. As we gingerly step into the 21st century and are swamped with endless state-of-the-art rhythm & blues songs that reflect a bleak and incredibly bitter war of the sexes (love is rarely mentioned at all, while cheating, financial trickery, and sexual one-upmanship ooze from the lyrics), this song is a reminder of a time when we were proud to be black, and that pride was reflected in the way we treated one another, in the care we took with each other’s hearts.

While Lena, Gladys, and their countless female peers were stretching and reconfiguring notions of femininity, blackness, and the woman artist, the brothers were pulling similar duties across the gender divide. Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” brought Calypso rhythms to the masses, and while the tune has become a kitsch classic, there is much that was (and is) quite radical beneath the singer’s much-imitated, heavily accented delivery. For folks in the ’50s—both black and white—who may not have had an idea of Pan-African anything, Belafonte’s record outlined the fact that backbreaking struggle was a common denominator in the lives of black folk around the globe—as was the ability to celebrate life and to find humorous relief in even dire situations. It also announced the elevated political consciousness of an entertainer who still agitates on behalf of freedom and equality.

So many of our current notions of cool, hip, and avant-garde artistry are simply reworkings of archetypes that were forged not so long ago by men like Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Nat “King” Cole, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong. Their larger-than-life, behind-the-scenes antics made them mythological figures while they walked the Earth. Their personal battles with booze, drugs, women, the music industry, racism, and their complicated and sometimes fickle muses were the stuff of gossip and legend. Their battles with America’s fear of a black planet (especially black maleness) fed their work in ways both painful and sublime. So, Monk’s “’Round About Midnight” exists in—and takes his listeners to—a place beyond words. It’s escapist fare, social commentary, and a stalwart foundation block in the jazz canon that serious musicians will draw upon for generations to come. His personal eccentricity, confidence in his artistry even when others doubted he had real talent at all, and private demons all come into play in his work.
On the other side of the equation, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong has been the subject of so many (often dismissive, often controversial) critical interpretations precisely because he didn’t fit neatly under the rubric of “tortured artist.” His persona has alternately been heralded as one that was either complex and greatly misunderstood—or a straight-up Tom. Joy has always been a tricky thing for black folk to navigate in America—especially beyond the confines of “home.” If your public face is too happy, you run the risk of being labeled crazy; if that happiness is something that might also bring white folk some bit of joy or entertainment, you run the risk of being called a sell-out, regardless of your own intentions or motives—or lack thereof. What a track like “Heebie Jeebies” does is strip away efforts to dismiss or diminish the man’s craftsmanship. It serves to remind us that Armstrong was a top-notch musician as well as an entertainer. Unfortunately, his persona so overshadowed his art—especially in his later years—that a lot of folk forget what a hugely influential force he was on other musicians, especially in the period from the ’20s through the ’40s. His gravelly voice, huge grin, and bugged eyes were just the visual and entertainment hooks; he was a serious and formidable artist beneath it all.

One of the most interesting aspects of race music—no matter the specific genres—is the way artists speak to one another across time, across categories. Not just in a neat continuum of the music—this begat that, which begat that, which spun off from that—but in a real interplay of ideas and notions, politics and philosophies, that travel circularly, at first, and then in crisscrossing motions, until themes, phrases, and riffs from one era or genre make contact with and comment upon or underscore (or challenge) the music from another era or genre. It’s a way for forefathers and foremothers to commune with their descendants, to check on the progress that’s been made and the ground that’s been lost. It’s a way to pass knowledge on, as well as receive it.

It’s easy to tilt your head a bit, focus your ears, and imagine Duke Ellington’s irresistible
“It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” which was one generation’s call to the dance floor (with it being understood that getting dolled up in your finest, slickest gear was mandatory) being in a conversation with Run-D.M.C.’s “Proud To Be Black,” a celebration of—among other aspects of blackness—our style, our resilience, and our constant inventiveness. And then those two tracks turning up the heat on the celebration by reaching across stylistic (and Holy Ghost) barriers to go to church on the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet’s “Rock My Soul” or Andraé Crouch’s “My Tribute.”

What would Marian Anderson’s refined, high-art rendition of “Sometime I Feel Like A Motherless Child” say to Ike & Tina Turner’s funky, impossibly sexy “I Want To Take You Higher”? Or Little Richard’s raucous “Long Tall Sally”? Would their different routes and reasons preclude them from admitting that they wanted the same thing? Catharsis. Transcendence.

Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall as Nina Simone’s protest-cum-tribute song, “To Be Young, Gifted And Black” (inspired by the play of the same title by her friend Lorraine Hansberry), shouts over the din of political assassinations, fire hoses, barking police dogs, and civil rights marches in the ’60s in order to make conversation with the relatively brief moment of glory in the ’70s when black consciousness was simply a given, a deep and rich cultural and political vein that seemed to promise so much, as exemplified by Roebuck “Pop” Staples and his three diva daughters lovingly reminding us to always “Respect Yourself”? And all while Isaac Hayes’ 1971 hit “Theme From Shaft”—the soundtrack for a new breed of black male who was confident, unabashedly sexual, and never caught unprepared—floats in the background. And what would Nina’s “To Be Young, Gifted And Black” have to say to N.W.A.’s angry, alienated, and cynical 1989 hip-hop smash, “Express Yourself,” a song whose deceptively upbeat hook and grooves (lifted wholesale from the Charles Wright And The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s ’70s funk classic of the same name) conjure a party atmosphere that just barely contains the Compton collective’s bottomless frustration? Would anyone at the gathering note the uncanny similarities between the feel-good grooves that flow on both sides of the enormous divide between ’70s hopeful funk and hip-hop’s end-of-the-millennium nihilism and despair? And is it withering parody or unintentional irony that the bass lines, twitchy guitar, and blaring horns that once signaled a revolution almost won would come to be the soundtrack to a revolution all but collapsed?

Meanwhile, in a corner, Dionne Warwick’s elegant “Walk On By” and Bessie Smith’s primordial “The St. Louis Blues” swap war-of-the-heart tales with Al Green’s “Tired Of Being Alone” and T-Bone Walker’s “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad),” because sometimes black folk—like everybody else—have their hearts broken in the most banal of ways: spotting an old lover on the street and not knowing how to react; aching for someone to hold late at night, with no prospects in sight; being in a relationship with a no-good woman or man, and seeing no way out . . . and maybe not even really wanting to be out.

Perhaps the dialogue that would be the most obviously uplifting—in spiritual terms—would be the one that centered on the exchange between Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star” (an ode to the power of positivity and non-narcissistic self-love) and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody (Part 1),” a loving plea for a sparked collective consciousness. “Wake Up . . .” is a call for folks to take concrete action that also maps out specific societal ills to be addressed; its real triumph is that it manages to convey the sense that nothing is beyond remedy. When coupled together, these two songs span sadness and exuberance, despair and redemption. They’re both about shaking yourself from a slumber, looking around you and within you, and making a change in your perceptions, in the way you go through the world. “Wake Up . . .” is firmly rooted in the crushing detail of everyday life, and it says that transcendence lies in the fight against the status quo, against indifference to poverty, injustice, and the myriad forms of oppression that are manifest in our world. “Shining Star” is on a more spiritual tip—deep, slightly abstract, laced tight with metaphor, but anchored in a funky groove, and that keeps the message from floating off in some esoteric cloud.

What finally makes that last conversation so powerful—so potent—is that it gives a glimpse of the struggle fulfilled, gives a nod to the dream realized and no longer deferred. From “Wake Up Everybody (Part 1)” to “Shining Star” is the road we still have to travel, from a mixture of mild despondency that slowly gives way to cautious optimism, to an explosive a celebration. Living Colour’s “Elvis Is Dead” will blast from the speakers, a soundtrack choice that not only restores rock ’n’ roll to its rightful place as a child of African American culture, but that will also challenge the notion that white folk must be at the center of America—its art, its politics, its culture—in order for the center to hold steady or be valid. We are far, far from realizing that ideal. And as the last notes of “Elvis Is Dead” play out, what we will realize is that America, too, is dead.

For if “America” has established itself as the place of struggle, as the place where glorious ideals take toddler’s steps forward and then crash onto the floor—as the place where its heroic founders were mired in breathtaking hypocrisy as they penned constitutions and amendments and declarations celebrating the individual and bestowing rights on all who reside inside the country’s borders—then the actual achievement of liberty and justice for all, of laws that protect equally and are enforced fairly, of opportunity that truly is available for anyone willing to work for it, will mean “America” will have transformed itself into something else. It will have shed a skin and come into its own. It’s the same way that a gawky, self-conscious and vaguely angry teenage boy morphs into a poised, reflective, compassionate adult. (Hopefully. Ideally.) The child exists no more; the adult lives.

For now, however, America is still in its tortured adolescence. It’s a notion waiting to be made real. It’s contradicting stories and competing perceptions all waiting to be harnessed into a coherent narrative: Rashomon run amok. We hear strains of heartache in Odetta’s “Cotton Fields.” We hear hard-earned joy in Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp.” Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ko Ko” slides into Charlie Patton’s “Pony Blues,” then melts into Charles Brown’s “In The Evening When The Sun Goes Down.” And Nat “King” Cole’s admonishment to “Straighten Up And Fly Right” hovers over it all. And the words aren’t just aimed at an errant lover, but at America itself. Straighten up and fly right; it’s time you became what you were meant to be.
—Ernest Hardy
Ernest Hardy is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers film and music for the LA Weekly. His criticism has also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Film.com, and Rolling Stone. A Sundance Fellow, he is currently working on a collection of poetry and a book on race, sexuality, and pop culture.

Lyric Reprints:

1“Preachin’ Blues”
(Son House)
© 1965, 1992 Renewed, Sondick Music (BMI) (Adm. By Bug)

2“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
(Gil Scott-Heron)
© 1971, 1988 Bienstock Publishing Company (ASCAP)

Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

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