Gordon E. Thompson (ed.), Black Music, Black Poetry: Blues and Jazz's Impact on African American Versification (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, £60.00). Pp. 205. isbn978 1 4094 2836 7.

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIO DUNKEL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Poetry

Black Music USA: From African to African American Music

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Robert Sacré
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Deep South ◽  
African American Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Work Songs

This chapter discusses the history of African American Music. Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. As such, every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree. Work songs and the related prison songs are precursors of the blues. One can assume that primitive forms of pre-blues appeared around 1885, mostly in the Deep South and predominantly in the state of Mississippi. However, it was several more years before the famous AAB twelve-bar structure appeared, and when it did, one of its leading practitioners was Charley Patton.

scholarly journals The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE COGDELL DJEDJE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Black People ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Musical Traditions

AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.

Eileen Southern

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-379
Author(s):  
David Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
College Administration ◽  
Music Department ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Renaissance Music

Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).

The Impact of a Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cardiac Failure ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
African American Music ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Made In

This chapter examines Harry T. Burleigh's legacy in African American music. Burleigh retired in 1946 from his position as baritone soloist at St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church, marking the end of an exceptional public career. He died of cardiac failure on September 12, 1949. All too soon after the influx of laudatory obituaries, the press got wind of the conflict over Burleigh's estate. This chapter first considers the trial involving Burleigh's two wills, both of which were challenged by Louise Alston Burleigh and their son Alston because they suspected his longtime housekeeper, Thelma Hall—a recipient of the second will together with her son James—of exerting undue influence on Burleigh. It also looks at various tributes made in Burleigh's honor, including one from Will Marion Cook, and concludes with an emphasis on the importance of black music to the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh's mastery in arranging African American spirituals, and the newfound respect for his art songs.

scholarly journals  African Past, American Future: Uplift Ideology in Early 20th Century Opera

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hujsa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
American Composers ◽  
African American Music ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
African American Composers

         This paper explores how two African American composers, Scott Joplin (c. 1868-1917) and Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954), advocated for Black Advancement and uplift ideology through their syncretic operas in the early 1900s. What is presented here however is the introductory content of a larger work.         Joplin and Freeman were intimately conscious and supportive of national debates for Black Advancement, propelled especially by W.E.B. DuBois, and both employed rhetorical strategies paradigmatic of the movement. They were both interested in showing White and Black Americans alike that African American music, such as gospel, spiritual, and ragtime, could be held to the same high esteem as music of the Western canon, just as Black academics often endeavored to prove their intellectual prowess to their White counterparts. To this end, Joplin and Freeman combined “Black” music and classical styles in their operas to declare the equality and richness of an integrated sound.          The thematic content of these operas, Treemonisha and Voodoo, respectively, interact with the Black Advancement movement’s drive for progress and education as well. They present Black Americans’ struggle for modernity as a conflict between the “superstitious” West African religious customs still ingrained in emancipated communities and Christianity. However, Joplin and Freeman’s works diverge aesthetically and ideologically from this point forward. Joplin’s aesthetic considerations derived chiefly from ragtime, a modern African American musical form genre, while Freeman took inspiration not only from African ethnic music but Africa itself. Joplin’s form of uplift was found in the education of small Black communities, while Freeman framed his work in a nationalistic and pan-Africanist context. These distinct choices, though crafted with the same aim, help reveal subtle divergences in argumentation within the Black Advancement movement.    

scholarly journals Ragtime Country

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-62
Author(s):  
Wayne Marshall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Common Root ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Rock N Roll

In 1955, Elvis Presley and Ray Charles each stormed the pop charts with songs employing the same propulsive rhythm. Both would soon be hailed as rock 'n' roll stars, but today the two songs would likely be described as quintessential examples, respectively, of rockabilly and soul. While seeming by the mid-50s to issue from different cultural universes mapping neatly onto Jim Crow apartheid, their parallel polyrhythms point to a revealing common root: ragtime. Coming to prominence via Maple Leaf Rag (1899) and other ragtime best-sellers, the rhythm in question is exceedingly rare in the Caribbean compared to variations on its triple-duple cousins, such as the Cuban clave. Instead, it offers a distinctive, U.S.-based instantiation of Afrodiasporic aesthetics—one which, for all its remarkable presence across myriad music scenes and eras, has received little attention as an African-American “rhythmic key” that has proven utterly key to the history of American popular music, not least for the sound and story of country. Tracing this particular rhythm reveals how musical figures once clearly heard and marketed as African-American inventions have been absorbed by, foregrounded in, and whitened by country music while they persist in myriad forms of black music in the century since ragtime reigned.

The Vamp

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Pollack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
American Composer

Latouche and African-American composer James Mundy originally set out to write an all black music called Samson and Lila Dee, based on the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. But this project evolved into the 1955 musical farce about the early days of the Hollywood film industry, The Vamp, starring Carol Channing. The out-of-town reviews were good, but the show flopped on Broadway. This chapter also surveys Latouche’s popular songs from this period, including collaborations with Leonard Bernstein, Donald Fuller, Ulpio Minucci, John Strauss, Marvin Fisher, and others.

Tear down the walls: Jefferson Airplane, race, and revolutionary rhetoric in 1960s rock

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Burke
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Music ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractWhile the notion of the ‘rock revolution’ of the 1960s has by now become commonplace, scholars have rarely addressed the racial implications of this purported revolution. This article examines a notorious 1968 blackface performance by Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, to shed light on a significant tendency in 1960s rock: white musicians casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting an idealised vision of African American identity. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by black music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. Jefferson Airplane's references to black culture and politics were multifaceted and involved both condescending or naïve radical posturing and sincere respect for African American music. The Airplane appear to have been engaged in a complex if imperfect attempt to create a contemporary musical form that reflected African American influences without asserting dominance over those influences. Their example suggests that closer attention to racial issues allows us to address the revolutionary ambitions of 1960s rock without romanticising or trivialising them.

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