The Music in African American Fiction

Robert H. Cataliotti, Robert H. Cataliotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429753275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Originally published in 1995, The Music of African American Fiction is a historical analysis of the tradition of representing music in African American fiction. The book examines the impact of evolving musical styles and innovative musicians on black culture as is manifested in the literature. The analysis begins with the slave narratives and the emergence of the first black fiction of the antebellum years and moves through the Reconstruction. This is followed by analyses of definitive fictional representations of African American music from the turn-of-the-century through Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and World War II eras through the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement. The representation of black music shapes a lineage that extends from the initial chronicles written in response to sub-human bondage to the declarations of an autonomous "black aesthetic" and dramatically influences the evolution of an African American literary tradition.

III
“The Only True History of the Times”

“I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.

Through the storm, through the night,

Lead me on to the light,

Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.”

- Thomas A. Dorsey

“I love the word jazz; it means life.”

- Dexter Gordon

“Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm begin to roll

Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.

Den I went an ’ stood upon some high ol’ lonesome hill,

An’ looked down on the house where I used to live.”

- Bessie Smith

“When I think of jazz, being a jazz musician, I think of it as being instantaneous composition, creation. I think of it as something that never happened before anywhere but in America because of the great diversity of people we have here.”

- Milt Hinton

“Tell Automatic Slim, tell razor totin’ Jim,

Tell butcher knife totin’ Annie, tell fast talkin’ Fanny,

We gonna pitch a ball down to the union hall.

We gonna romp and tromp ‘til midnight

We gonna fuss and fight ‘til daylight

We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle

All night long, all night long, all night long.”

- Willie Dixon

“When I look back on my life, I wasn’t conscious of these things, but you know everybody has a cross to bear and mine is that I’ve got to make music and please my fellow human beings. I hope things will turn around and people will become happy. That’s why I’ve come back out on the street. There’s nothing greater than to have a smile and a twinkle in the eye.”

- George “Big Nick” Nicholas

1.
“NOT MANY PEOPLE EVER REALLY HEAR IT”:
RICHARD WRIGHT, ANN PETRY & JAMES BALDWIN

While the Depression may have led to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance, during this period and continuing through the 1940s African American musicians continued to develop contemporary musical forms that derived from the folk tradition—blues, jazz and an emerging style called gospel—to unprecedented levels of both technical proficiency and emotive expression.

The blues endured as a vital and poignant artistic and cultural tradition which conveyed the essence of what it meant to be black in America—that ironic understanding of an approach to life summed up in the blues axiom “You got to laugh to keep from crying.” Stylistically, the Classic Blues declined in popularity, and the traditional country blues—which encompassed wide idiomatic distinctions based on geographic regions including the Mississippi Delta, Carolina Piedmont and Texas styles—gained widespread exposure both through the field recordings made in the South and blues artists who transplanted their careers to northern urban centers. Performers such as Big Bill Broonzy, Leroy Carr, Blind Boy Fuller, Son House and Memphis Minnie Douglas were a part of this second wave of blues recording artists. The hard driving blues piano style known as “boogie-woogie” also came to the forefront during the Depression years through such musicians as Albert Ammons, Jimmy Yancey, Roosevelt Sykes and Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman).¹

The blues artist who epitomized the virtuostic refinement and culmination of the country blues idiom was the Mississippi-born guitarist/vocalist Robert Johnson. He developed his distinctive slide guitar style by emulating the established blues men he encountered in the Delta, such as Willie Brown, Charlie Patton and Son House. Yet, he played the blues as they had never been played before; he brought a singular emotional intensity and incredible technical facility to the traditional form which allowed him to articulate a conception of a song as a complete thematic statement. Johnson captured the spirit of the rural black man attempting to fit into the rapidly urbanizing U.S. society during the years between world wars—the celebration of freewheeling mobility coupled with the realization that he must “keep movin’” or be caught up in the menace of hostility and limited possibility that was a fact of American life. Johnson’s composition “Hellhound On My Trail” captures this double-edged world view:

I got to keep movin’

I’ve got to keep movin’

blues fallin’ down like hail

blues fallin’ down like hail

Ummm mmm mmm mmm

blues fallin’ down like hail

blues fallin’ down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin’ me

there’s a hellhound on my trail

hellhound on my trail

hellhound on my trail (38)

Johnson flashed across the scene like a shooting star, leaving an indelible legacy for the blues tradition. He recorded twenty-nine songs (in addition, twelve alternate takes are extant) at five sessions in Texas recording studios between November of 1936 and June of 1937. The menace of American life, that hellhound on his trail, caught up with Robert Johnson in 1938 when at age twenty-six he died of pneumonia which he contracted after a love rival poisoned him with strychnine-laced whiskey—”blues fallin’ down like hail” indeed.²

The presence of the blues during the Depression was not only felt through the down home stylings of country blues artists, for the blues was a key ingredient in the music that captured the pulse of contemporary urban life in the U.S.A.—jazz. Even if jazz artists were performing material that did not derive from the standard twelve-bar blues form, such as ballads or popular show tunes, a “blues sensibility,” an avoidance of sentimentality and an ironic awareness of the dualistic nature of life, linked them to African American folk expression. American popular culture during the 1930s and early 1940s was referred to as the “Swing Era,” a name drawn from the rhythmic beat of big band jazz which was glorified in Duke Ellington’s composition “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The black orchestras of Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Chick Webb, Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford formed the vanguard of this musical approach, which featured highly inventive arrangements performed by brass (trumpets and trombones) and reed (saxophones and clarinets) sections propelled by a hard driving rhythm section (piano, acoustic bass, trap drums and guitar). But perhaps what is more significant in terms of African American artistic expression than the buoyant underpinning the big band rhythms and arrangements provided for dancers was the format’s allowance for solo improvisation by individual band members. The bands featured outstanding musicians on each instrument who combined impeccable and innovative technique with a personal sound and style and above all the ability to imbue everything they played with that infectious, ineffable sense called swing. Arrangements were written with slots for soloists to improvise spontaneously on the chord changes of the composition, to “do their thing,” in dialogue with the catchy rhythmic figures or “riffs” played by the sections.

Each instrument within the tradition of the jazz idiom developed a lineage of innovations and variations as unique stylists expanded this new “language” of African American musical expression. In Stomping the Blues Albert Murray has asserted that musicians were conscious of the evolution of each lineage and their creative responses to what had preceded them were more important than “impulse” in producing innovations: “It is thus far more a matter of imitation and variation and counterstatement than of originality. It is not so much what the blues musicians bring out of themselves on the spur of the moment as what they do with existing conventions. Sometimes they follow them by extending that which they like or accept, and sometimes by counterstating that which they reject” (126).

Jazz improvisation had found its first master in trumpeter Louis Armstrong during the 1920s; his harmonic and rhythmic innovations revolutionized modern music-making. The first musician to apply the bravura of Armstrong’s brash sound and hard driving attack to the saxophone was Coleman Hawkins, whose sound and approach set the standard for saxophone stylings. The premium placed on originality by the players within the jazz tradition is testified to by the innovations of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who created a soft, airy, laid-back approach to his horn that contrasted dramatically with Hawkins’s style, establishing two “schools” that future generations of saxophonists could follow and/or blend as they carved their own places in the tradition. In addition to an innovative personal approach to his horn, Young had a penchant for creating his own hipster spoken language. In an interview just prior to his death in 1959 he commented: “In my mind, the way I play, I try not to be a repeater pencil, you dig? I’m always loosening spaces, laying out, or something like that. Don’t catch me like that. I’m always reaching.”³ Even though Young had secured a place for himself with a landmark style, he refused to rest on his laurels and continuously strove to articulate new ideas on his horn.

More than the public band performances, the informal gatherings of musicians known as “jam sessions” in which instrumentalists challenged each other in “cutting contests” to prove who was the most inventive and resourceful soloist were the testing grounds where jazz musicians established themselves and extended the tradition. Some of the most legendary jam sessions took place in Kansas City during the early 1930s. The competition was often unrelenting; one story tells of tenor saxophonist Ben Webster rushing to pianist Mary Lou Williams’s bedroom window at four in the morning to get her to come to a club because the contest between tenor players had gone on so long all the pianists in the house were worn out. The censure for failure to perform up to standards could be devastating; another story relates how early in his career the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was “sitting in” with the Basie band and attempted to demonstrate his personal approach to improvisation without the technical ability to execute his ideas. When Parker floundered drummer Jo Jones threw his cymbal at the saxophonist, driving him from the bandstand in humiliation and forcing him to go “woodshed” or practice until he developed his abilities up to the standards the established players demanded. While the jam session demanded that a participant contribute something new, it also insisted that the contribution be grounded in what had already been established. In the essay “Living with Music” (1955) Ralph Ellison states that he learned “something of the discipline and devotion to his art required of the artist” from the territory band jam sessions which he attended as a young man in Oklahoma:

These jazzmen, many of them now world-famous, lived for and with music intensely. Their driving motivation was neither money nor fame, but the will to achieve the most eloquent expression of the idea-emotions through the technical mastery of their instruments (which, incidentally, some of them wore as a priest wears the cross) and the give and take, the subtle rhythmical shaping and blending of idea, tone and imagination demanded of group improvisation. The delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the group during those early jam sessions was a marvel of social organization. I had learned too that the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition and that this tradition insisted that each artist achieve his creativity within its frame. He must learn the best of the past, and add to it his personal vision. (189)

The soloist’s statement had to be crafted within the framework provided by the ensemble, and this retention of the cornerstone duality of the individual tied to the communal rooted this modern music in the African American folk heritage. These “after hours” gatherings were insider rituals that gave African American artists control over the forging of what is the most creative form of artistic expression to emerge during the twentieth century.

Blues and jazz may have been going through unparalleled creative growth during the years before World War II, but by no means did they gain wholesale acceptance in the black community. The split between the sacred and the secular in African American music continued to exist. Many blacks held steadfastly to the belief that music which did not praise the Lord was the Devil’s music.⁴ Even between denominations of black churches there was a division in terms of what was acceptable in terms of sacred music. After Emancipation many of the existing or newly established black churches tried to divorce themselves from a primitivism they perceived in the spirituals and adopted the more staid hymnal forms of white religions.⁵ The development of Holiness, Sanctified or Pentecostal sects among lower class blacks brought the influence of secular musical styles and a reassertion of folk elements to black religious worship.⁶ Call and response, improvisation and a driving, sophisticated rhythmic sensibility were the building blocks for this new church music that crystallized as a form through the compositions of pianist Thomas A. Dorsey. The storefront churches that sprang up as blacks poured into northern cities readily adopted it. Gaining his initial recognition as “Georgia Tom,” a blues pianist and composer who was best known as an accompanist and music director for Ma Rainey, Dorsey began writing religious music after being inspired by a performance he heard at a black religious convention during the early 1920s. By the end of decade he was selling his songs to various churches as he traveled around the South and Midwest. Dorsey was the first person to use the term “gospel” to describe African American religious music, and he gained widespread recognition in 1930 when his composition “If You See My Saviour” was performed at the National Baptist Convention. Acknowledged as the “Father of Gospel Music,” Dorsey wrote over one thousand songs. While the lyric content of his songs may have had a sacred focus, the accompanying music was certainly secular. As Dorsey described his songs: “I started putting a little of the beat into gospel that we had in jazz. I also put in what we called the riff, or repetitive (rhythmic) phrases. These songs sold three times as fast as those that went straight along on the paper without riffs or repetition.”⁷ Zora Neale Hurston witnessed this interchange between the sacred and the secular in the music of black religious songs while researching folklore in Florida. In a W. P. A. Federal Writer’s Project manuscript written in 1938 she reported: “In recent years has come an increased popularity of the swinging type of music, even in the churches. In Jacksonville there is a jazz pianist who seldom has a free night; nearly as much of his business comes from playing for ‘Sanctified’ church services as for parties. Standing outside of the church it is difficult to determine just which kind of engagement he is filling at the moment.”⁸

The influence of African American secular music on the formation of the gospel sound is testified to by the emergence of singer Mahalia Jackson, whose musical initiation in New Orleans included hearing the songs of the neighborhood Sanctified church, the hallmark jazz bands of her native city and the blues, particularly the records of Bessie Smith. When Jackson moved to Chicago in 1927 the mainstream black churches looked down on her rocking approach to religious songs, but during the 1930s the power of her performances that packed the city’s storefront churches soon won her a devoted following. Jackson worked with Dorsey who wrote for her what became the all time most well-known gospel song “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” By the end of World War II Jackson was a national recording artist, eventually gaining international renown.

While the gospel sound certainly exhibited the crossover influences of jazz and blues, the lyrical content of this music was imbued with a message of Christian faith and hope. Thematically, gospel songs also featured lyrics with distinct differences from the sentiments expressed in their folk ancestors, the spirituals. The lyrics of gospel songs lacked the immediacy of the spirituals’ lyrics and were more focused on a spiritual better day.⁹ Nonetheless, the message of better days coming was perfect for the Depression era. As Dorsey commented on the popularity of the form he helped create:

I wrote to give them something to lift them out of that Depression. They could sing at church but the singing had no life, no spirit. . . . We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the downtrodden. This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel.¹⁰

Just as hard times pushed African American musicians toward innovative forms and new levels of creativity, black writers continued to expand the literary tradition in the years following the decline of the Harlem Renaissance. During this era, the acquisition of equal rights and opportunities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• I “They Sang a Song of Triumph”
• II “Depths to Which Mere Sound Had No Business to Go”
• III “The Only True History of the Times”
• IV “The Length of the Music Was the Only Form”
• Coda: “What Good Is a Liturgy Without a Text?”
• Selected Bibliography
• Selected Discography
• Index