“Mike Fright”

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ryan Jay Friedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Complex Product ◽  
Technological Medium ◽  
Vocal Mimicry ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Duke Ellington

This chapter examines the racialization of sound and language during the transitional period in Hollywood. It argues that the studios’ interest in African American representation in the talkies participated in the ongoing construction in US popular culture of the “Black voice” and of ethnically marked ways of speaking as signifiers of substance and vitality. Tracing the genealogy of this “thrown” voice back through white radio comedians’ vocal mimicry, dialect fiction written by white authors, and blackface minstrelsy, the chapter demonstrates that the talkies were a technological medium of racial ventriloquism. Examining the popular RKO feature Check and Double Check (1930)—a complex product both of radio minstrelsy and the early sound era “vogue” for African American musical performance—the chapter centers on a highly revealing gesture of counter-ventriloquism by the members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, who refuse to adopt the thrown “Black voice” scripted for them, appropriating white singers’ voices instead.

Lift Every Voice and Swing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
American Protestantism

In the twentieth century, jazz professionals became race representatives who also played an important part in shaping the religious landscape of twentieth-century African American Protestantism. They wielded the power to both define their religious communities and craft novel religious voices and performances. These music celebrities released religious recordings and put on religious concerts, and they became integral to the artistry of African American religious expression. This book argues that with the emergence of new representatives in jazz, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople in popular culture beyond traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. It examines jazz musicians’ expressions of belief, practice, and unconventional positions of religious authority. It demonstrates that these jazz professionals enacted theological beliefs and religious practices that echoed, contested with, and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. The lives and work of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams anchor this book’s narrative of racial and religious representations as well as of religious beliefs and practices in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through these African American jazz women and men, this book illuminates the significant Afro-Protestant cultural presence that informed, surrounded, and opposed their professional and personal lives while also contributing significantly to their artistry. This book’s focus on jazz musicians offers a novel rethinking of African American religious history by bringing the significant artistic dimensions of Afro-Protestant religion into focus as it impacted black popular culture in the twentieth century.

Call Your "Mutha"

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Caputi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Mother Nature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mother Earth ◽  
Made In

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.

The Literary Ellington

2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Hayes Edwards
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
American History ◽  
African American History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Formal Relationship

The literary plays an indispensable role in the creative process and compositional technique of the great jazz composer and orchestra leader Duke Ellington. It is well known that he based a number of his pieces on literary sources and that many of his larger works in particular rely on narrative written by Ellington and/or his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, whether it was programmatic, recitative, or lyric. In all his music, Ellington was concerned with ''telling tales'' in language, not only in sounds - or more precisely, in both: composing in ways that combined words and music. This imperative is evidenced in the pieces Ellington called ''parallels,'' a word he chose in particular to highlight the formal relationship between music and literature. In some, such as the ''Shakespearean Suite'' known as ''Such Sweet Thunder,'' he used various structural approaches and instrumental techniques to achieve portraiture through the interrelationship between the musical and the literary. In other pieces, such as ''My People'' and especially ''Black, Brown and Beige,'' Ellington attempted to integrate literary texts into his music in a manner that is not programmatic. The longer pieces demonstrate that for Ellington's aesthetic, the representation of African American history necessitated a mixed, multimedia form.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Presence ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

This introductory chapter considers what called William Styron's fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. Styron had written The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which represented itself as the autobiographical narrative of the African American slave-turned-rebel leader, Nat Turner. The chapter asks what made his work a “meditation on history”—and why it failed. It also takes a look at whether it might be possible to redeem Nat Turner from endless deferral—the effect of multiple attempts to “understand” him as a figment of text without listening to (or for) him as a person. African American popular culture has tried, with some success, to retrieve Nat Turner, to recognize and assimilate him to itself, without deferral. However, this chapter considers whether or not he will ever be able to achieve a historical presence of his own that is other than past, and how.

The Big Bang and Real Jazz

Boom's Blues ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Wim Verbei
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
Netherlands Introduction

This chapter details the Netherlands' introduction to African American blues music. Most people believe that that the Netherlands' first became acquainted with African American blues music in the second half of the 1960s, during the American Folk Blues Festivals (AFBFs). However, AFBF of 1965 was not the first blues concert in the Netherlands. That privilege fell to the guitarist/singer Big Bill Broonzy, who more than a decade earlier had conquered the Netherlands on his own. The chapter also describes the beginning of the Dutch blues era in 1926 and Amsterdammer Frans Boom's attendance of Duke Ellington concert in 1939.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
American Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
James Weldon Johnson ◽  
Career Trajectory ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Love Song ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Transnational Engagement

This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.

‘Satyre upon a Saxaphone’: Fitzgerald and Music

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-113
Author(s):  
Jade Broughton Adams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Popular Magazine

This chapter demonstrates how Fitzgerald invokes music in his short fiction, which heavily features jazz. Fitzgerald shows how white artists such as the Castles and Irving Berlin often profited from the appropriation of African American musical culture such as jazz and blues. Fitzgerald’s explorations of Tin Pan Alley’s output demonstrate that a more malleable treatment of established formulae can yield valuable results. This book draws parallels between Irving Berlin’s subversion of tired Tin Pan Alley formulae, and Fitzgerald’s own manipulations of the popular magazine short story genre. In his later use of music, Fitzgerald explores the limitations of language, the role of the artist in society, and questions the value of popular culture itself. He satirises the conventions of popular songs, and subtly parodies short story conventions (particularly romantic short story conventions). Fitzgerald identifies with the songwriter, whose role is to provoke emotion and forge an intimacy with the consumer, much like the commercial short storyist. By positioning Fitzgerald’s thematic and character repetitions and concessions to the magazine format as deliberate rather than desperate, this chapter suggests that his self-parody is a conscious aesthetic decision in the process of exploring the identity of the authentic literary craftsman, dancer, or musician.

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