Performing Ethnicity

Island Gospel ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Melvin L. Butler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Generational Difference ◽  
Contemporary Gospel ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the notion of “religious ethnicity” as a layered mode of self-presentation encompassing Jamaican, Pentecostal, and “black” musical markers of identity. It demonstrates the ways in which believers perform their religious ethnicity through musical style both at home on the island and abroad. Recordings of African American contemporary gospel singers, such as Donnie McClurkin, provide a means for Jamaican youth to perform a modern Pentecostal identity cast as oppositional to the "white-sounding" hymnody preferred in conservative churches. Borrowing from the work of Gerardo Marti, the chapter argues that Pentecostals perform “pan-ethnic,” “ethnic specific,” and “ethnic transcendent” identities. While competing stylistic preferences are sometimes reconciled through discourses of generational difference, many believers choose to live and worship in the complexity of seemingly incompatible musical repertories.

A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Legg
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Conventional Notation ◽  
Analytical Research ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
And Performance

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Marovich
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Tipping Points ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

This book examines the development of gospel music in Chicago during its first five decades, from pioneers such as Thomas A. Dorsey and Sallie Martin to the start of the contemporary gospel era of the 1970s. It chronicles some of the historic tipping points that helped establish what is known today as gospel music, all of them occurring in Chicago, including Arizona Dranes's 1926 recording of “My Soul Is a Witness for My Lord”; the debut of the First Church of Deliverance radio broadcast in 1935; the founding of Martin and Morris Music Studio in 1939; and the 1947 release of Mahalia Jackson's best-selling record “Move on Up a Little Higher.” The book also shows how the gospel music industry grew out of the necessity for entrepreneurship among African American migrants. Finally, it considers how gospel music as developed in Chicago transcended denominational boundaries, along with the contributions of various church denominations to the development of gospel.

Make Me Beautiful

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
A Site ◽  
Beauty Products ◽  
Culture Site

This chapter closely engages African American beauty culture. Advertisements for beauty products such as hair pomades and skin bleaches comprised a significant portion of advertisements in African American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century. The advertisements for beauty products targeting African American women unveil a discourse and an industry that were instrumental to the materialization of a New Negro culture. Through advertisements and open discussions about African American beauty, self-presentation and adornment shifted from an individual/private sphere issue to a formidable public culture site of individual and collective expressivity during the New Negro era. African American beauty culture thrived as a site of reinvention and re-imagining for New Negro women. It also offered multiple authorial roles in which these women could partake, including: producer, consumer, and manufacturer. In Washington, this black women’s beauty culture was a thriving industry as well as a battleground and playground for black women actualizing themselves as New Negro women.

Racial Violence in the Global South

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Global South ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Second World ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the manner in which “explicit and implicit racial and colonial/imperial assumptions” operate in ways that proliferate domestic and international violence. The chapter begins by first examining the moment after the Second World War when there was the impetus for decolonization and a drive for global racial equality emanating from the global South. The second part of the chapter then explores the American intervention in Vietnam as a manifestation of this continued global racial imaginary. American violence in Indochina ran parallel to the exacerbation of racial violence at home. Here the discussion turns to African American writers, in particular Martin Luther King Jr., who were able to clearly see the connections between American violence abroad and the persistence of racial suppression and violence at home.

A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945–1965

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 784-810
Author(s):  
Malia McAndrew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
American Beauty ◽  
Black Beauty ◽  
At Home

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

On the Scenic Route to Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (1942)

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-497
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Production History ◽  
Form Star

This study of Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (Paramount, 1942) considers the collaboration of the film's four primary creative figures: Irving Berlin, Mark Sandrich, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire. Extracted from a wide array of production materials, the story of the making of Holiday Inn demonstrates how archival research can address questions of broad scholarly interest, such as large-scale form, star personas, musical style, musical-dramatic integration, the representation of blackness and African American characters, and political meaning in popular-culture products. Examining details of the film's production history sheds particular light upon the function of songs and musical routines as quasi-autonomous parts of the whole.

“Spinnin' the Webb”: Representational Spaces, Mythic Narratives, and the 1937 Webb/Goodman Battle of Music

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-196
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER J. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
New Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
At Home

AbstractBenny Goodman and Chick Webb's 1937 battle of music has become a mythic event in jazz historical narratives, enshrined as the unique spectacle that defines Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and its legacy. While this battle has been marked as exceptional and unique, as an event it was a relatively typical instantiation of the “battle of music” format, a presentational genre common in black venues during the 1920s and 1930s. Within African American communities, battles of music re-staged ballrooms as symbolically loaded representational spaces where dueling bands regularly served as oppositional totems that indexed differences of locality (Chicago vs. New York), gender (men vs. women), ethnicity (Anglo- or African American vs. Latin), or race (black vs. white). This article details the ten-year history of battles of music that preceded the Webb/Goodman battle and that made its signifying rhetoric legible within African American communities. It then argues that the disconnect between the battle's relatively typical signifying rhetoric and its subsequent enshrinement as an exceptional event occurred due to a specific confluence of circumstances in the mid-1930s that shaped its immediate reception and subsequent legacy: Goodman's emergence as the “King of Swing” during a new period of massive mainstream popularity for swing music, a coterminous vigilance among both white and black jazz writers to credit black artists as jazz's originators and best practitioners, and the emergence of athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as popular black champions symbolically conquering white supremacy at home and abroad.

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