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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Religion And Race

The introduction defines the scope of the book, its position in existing literature on African American religious history, and its sources and subjects for studying religion and race through African American jazz musicians. It defines the concept of race representation as it operates throughout the book, offers an overview of the consumer challenge to cultivating Christian race representatives, and discusses popular black religious representation in various forms of entertainment in the twentieth century. The introduction discusses the organization of the book: part 1, “Representations of Religion and Race,” and part 2, “Missions and Legacies.” Part 1 presents thematic studies of African American religious history through jazz artistry. Part 2 includes close studies of individual religious expression through the work of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and a consideration of the posthumous legacies of these musicians. The introduction also outlines the chapter structure of the book and previews key takeaways for understanding Afro-Protestantism through artistic expression and religious culture in the conclusion.

“Counter-Bopaganda” and “Torn Riffs”

Between Beats ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 109-149
Author(s):  
Christi Jay Wells
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Oral History ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Off Time

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.

“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.

Black Chicago Pioneers in the Training of Dancers

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Clovis E. Semmes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Renaissance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
American Society

This chapter examines the life of pioneer dance instructor Hazel Thompson Davis in early twentieth-century Black Chicago. Contextually, diverse venues for live entertainment in the broad spectrum of American society created significant demand for a trained theatrical workforce, of which varieties of dancers were major components. By 1916, Chicago’s Hazel Thompson Davis began to meet this demand through the school she created and the performing artists she trained. A pioneer and innovator in her field, the Chicago tradition in dance instruction and performance initiated by Davis would make Chicago a powerful force in the instruction of an African American theatrical workforce nationally and internationally, in the broader cultural renaissance taking place in Black communities across the country, and in the evolution of American popular culture.

Part of the Times, Personally and Professionally

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Andy Propst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Arthur Laurents

During the early and middle part of the 1960s Betty Comden and Adolph Green were no longer splitting their time between working on shows for Broadway and movies in Hollywood, and as a result they were able to dedicate more time to their personal lives. And while they might have been spending time with the elite of New York’s society, they were not unaware of the issues facing the country. This informed a pair of stand-alone songs they penned with Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein as well as their next musical, Hallelujah, Baby! Featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, the show chronicled the African-American experience during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Uggams was the star of what was ultimately an unconventional tuner that had music by Jule Styne and went on to win a Tony Award as best musical

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

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