{"title":"Harry T. Burleigh, \"One of Erie's Most Popular Church Singers\"","authors":"Janet E. Snyder","doi":"10.2307/4145491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145491","url":null,"abstract":"Harry T. Burleigh has been recognized primarily as the singer who introduced Antonin Dvorak to plantation songs and spirituals and as a pioneer arranger of African-American spirituals. In the past several decades, more and more singers have discovered the art songs that in the first quarter of the twentieth century earned Burleigh distinction as one of the most respected composers of American art songs. But other important aspects of his career are less well known, such as his more than thirty years as an editor at the New York office of Ricordi Music Publishing Company, headquartered in Milan, Italy. His role as vocal coach and mentor to a number of singers--including Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Carol Brice, Abbey Mitchell, Revella Hughes, and Ella Belle Davis--has been overshadowed by the greater fame of those he assisted. Even less understood is Burleigh's success as a recital performer, which drew these younger singers to seek his help in developing their own singing careers. His fifty-two-year tenure as baritone soloist at the wealthy St. George's Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square in New York City merely hints at the importance of Burleigh's role as a link between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American concert singers such as sopranos Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Madame Marie Selika, and Madame Sissieretta Jones; tenors Wallace King, Harry A. Williams, and Sydney Woodward; and baritones John Luca and Theodore Drury and the younger singers who followed him and have become established in our collective memory as \"the first\" generation of African-American concert singers: Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson. The Burleigh family papers hold programs and clippings of reviews of Burleigh performances that document a significant recital career along the eastern seaboard, particularly through New England, with a few appearances as far west as Minneapolis and Chicago and as far south as Nashville and Atlanta. In fact, Burleigh saw himself primarily as a singer, particularly in the first twenty years of his career in New York City. It was to become a serious classical singer that he left Erie, Pennsylvania, in January 1892 to audition at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where Antonin Dvorak would be director the following September. In an interview with A. Walter Kramer (1916) at the height of his fame as an art song composer, Burleigh declared, \"I never even dreamed of being a composer--at least not out loud. I was going to be a singer and I am.\" As Kramer's article emphasized, despite Burleigh's modest protests, he was indeed a genuine composer as well as a singer. Burleigh's skill as a song composer was rooted in his thorough knowledge of German lieder and American song repertoire, along with Italian and French opera arias, and the vocal facility of his songwriting grew from a public singing career that began in his teenage years in Erie. Burleigh described his January 1892 audi","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117192264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"A CERTAIN STRANGENESS\": HARRY T. BURLEIGH'S ART SONGS AND SPIRITUAL ARRANGEMENTS","authors":"Ann Sears","doi":"10.2307/4145492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145492","url":null,"abstract":"\"It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them,\" wrote poet Hilaire Belloc (1917, 6). Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) certainly enjoyed the best of both pursuits, combining a long, distinguished performing career with an equally productive life as a composer. Unfortunately, Burleigh never recorded while in his prime as a baritone soloist, and we must evaluate his singing through the reviews of others and the prestige of the venues in which he appeared. As a composer, however, Burleigh left a highly accessible legacy of spiritual arrangements and art songs. Many of the spiritual arrangements have remained in print and in repertoire since their initial publication in the first half of the twentieth century. The art songs have not fared so well; most are still out of print, and we are only now beginning to decide their place in the art-song canon. Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the American bicentennial celebration in 1976, music historians have mined the long-dormant riches of American music in earnest, at last acknowledging the contributions of African-American composers, women composers, and other previously marginalized composers. Burleigh has proved to be one of the most important African-American composers of his generation; indeed, he produced the most widely admired spiritual arrangements of his time as well as a substantial body of lovely art songs. Burleigh and the other American song composers of the early twentieth century deserve to be studied according to rigorous musicological standards so that their songs, having thus been scrutinized and analyzed, may find their proper place in indexes, on recordings, and in the concert hall. Academic communities frequently discuss analysis and argue how it is best done. Evaluation is serious business, and the criteria used to judge and compare should be well designed. For several decades, academic musicians have had a protracted debate about the canon, as the traditional European-centered curriculum has been infiltrated by many \"other\" musics, for example, world music, American popular music, and gender-identified music. In the deluge of new ideas and new music for our classrooms and concert halls, it is interesting to look at the comments of Virgil Thomson, a composer and influential critic of the twentieth century, who pondered how to evaluate music well before the historical investigations of the 1960s and 1970s had yielded the remarkable feast of American music now available to us. Speaking in 1947 at the Harvard Symposium on Music Criticism, Thomson (1968, 7) posited that a critical opinion of music depended on music being memorable, and that the phenomenon of music lodging in the listener's memory is due to certain attributes of the music: (1) the ability of a work to hold one's attention, (2) one's ability to remember it vividly, and (3) a certain strangeness in the musical texture, that is to say, the presence of technical invention, such as n","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130279384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Harry Burleigh as Ethnomusicologist? Transcription, Arranging, and the Old Songs Hymnal","authors":"Brian Moon","doi":"10.2307/4145495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145495","url":null,"abstract":"Harry Burleigh's demeanor has been described variously by some of the younger artists of the Harlem Renaissance as elegant and refined or as aloof and removed. Although many saw dignity in Burleigh's bearing as well as in his artistic arrangements of spirituals, others saw something else. Harlem Renaissance choral arranger and director Eva Jessye intimated that Burleigh's deportment was \"related to his desire to disclaim his racial heritage\" (quoted in Spencer 1997, 6). Zora Neale Hurston struck a similar note in a 1931 letter to Charlotte Mason, asserting that Harry Burleigh \"has less sympathy for the Negro than anyone ... [that I] can imagine\" (6). Either complaint may have stemmed partly from Burleigh's focus on art song arrangements of spirituals instead of a more folk-centric attempt at presenting this music. And yet, it is interesting to note that during the 1920s and early 1930s, Harry Burleigh regularly traveled to rural Georgia to transcribe spirituals from black tenant farmers. Burleigh was well aware of the spiritual as it existed in the folk sphere in the 1920s, not to mention the plight of southern Negros and issues surrounding the preservation of their racial heritage. Of the more than 600 extant transcriptions that Burleigh made of African-American folksongs (Burleigh [ca. 1929]), 187 spirituals were published jointly with Burleigh's collaborator, Dorothy Bolton, in a hymnal titled The Old Songs Hymnal, Words and Melodies from the State of Georgia (Bolton and Burleigh 1929). Burleigh's work on this hymnal and his journey to transcribe folk tunes in rural Georgia remain an unknown but significant chapter in his biography. In order to fill in this lacuna, this article briefly surveys Burleigh's transcriptions and arrangements of spirituals, as well as the known biographies of some of his informants and his collaborator, Dorothy Bolton. The details of Burleigh's work in rural Georgia must be inferred from the extant manuscripts and the Old Songs Hymnal. The majority of both Dorothy Bolton's and Harry Burleigh's personal correspondence appears to have been destroyed, which precludes definitive conclusions about motives and methods. The only oral accounts of Burleigh's trip come from Dorothy Bolton's grandsons, who are now in possession of Burleigh's manuscripts. They claim that Bolton employed Burleigh because she saw him as the leading expert on spirituals in America (Bolton 2003). Although Bolton had collected the texts of many African-American folktales and folksongs, she could not transcribe the music. According to her descendants, Bolton transcribed the lyrics of the spirituals, and Burleigh transcribed the tunes. Later, the two published a hymnal containing many of these songs. Neither grandson remembers Burleigh, although both were alive (under ten years old) and living nearby during his last datable visit in 1933. There are two types of manuscripts extant. The first is a legible transcription of a spiritual, with the music hand","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127055624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Invisibility and Fame of Harry T. Burleigh: Retrospect and Prospect","authors":"Samuel A. Floyd","doi":"10.2307/4145490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145490","url":null,"abstract":"April 2, 2003, saw the opening of a three-day conference, The Heritage and Legacy of Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949), designed to address and celebrate the contributions of this singer, composer, vocal coach, pianist, teacher, editor, and producer. (1) The presenters explored issues ranging from who influenced Burleigh's career to whom he influenced; from his musical prowess to his work as a composer; from his arranging to his singing; from his songs to his choral works; from his spirituals to his popular and concert music. This occasion was the first to address comprehensively so many aspects of this individual's career and to provide interpretations that reach beneath the surface of previous writings to support his status as a key figure in the history of American music; for over the decades, discussions of his contributions to American music have been virtually absent in the tomes that document and extol that history. There are acceptable reasons for this silence, including the fact that until recently there have existed serious gaps in our knowledge about African-American music and musicians and a dearth of the kind of information that would reveal Burleigh as even semisignificant in the history of American music. In fact, in the large majority of cases, Burleigh's name does not appear unless Antonin Dvorak's does, not even in most black-oriented, black-authored, and black-produced publications. When his name is mentioned without Dvorak's, the context in which it appears carries the implication that Burleigh must have been a great singer since he was a featured soloist at a white church--St. George's Episcopal Church in New York--for fifty years, from 1894 to 1946. (2) Not even in my edited Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (Floyd 1990) was Burleigh given more than a modicum of space, scattered throughout the volume. In order to place my observations in context, I will divert for a moment. The late musicologist Eileen Southern has told of colleagues at NYU questioning her decision to write a book about black music, one asking, \"What is there to learn about black music? There's nothing there--just jazz and spirituals. How could you possibly find enough material to make a course?\" (Wright 1992, 6). Well, she certainly proved his assumption to be wrong, producing a massive musicological tome about black music and black music making that ranges chronologically from pre-nineteenth-century American slave music to contemporary European-derived and American-based concert music, The Music of Black Americans. Since that landmark work first appeared, in 1971, an abundance of information has been revealed in scholarly journals, including her own trailblazing journal The Black Perspective in Music, Jon Michael Spencer's Journal of Black Sacred Music, and my own Black Music Research Journal, and in research tools and monographs on black music. A second edition of Southern's book was published in 1983, and a third in 1997. Each new edition contained much ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"444 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125766481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE USE OF DIALECT IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPIRITUALS, POPULAR SONGS, AND FOLK SONGS","authors":"John Graziano","doi":"10.2307/4145494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145494","url":null,"abstract":"The presence of vocal works that use dialect in African-American culture has been a controversial and difficult area of inquiry for those investigating the phenomenon. Dialect songs were first heard in the minstrel shows that toured the United States and Europe before the Civil War (Mahar 1999). They continued to be performed after the war as well, although not as frequently by professional troupes. Textually, many minstrel songs presented derogatory caricatures of African-American and slave culture known from depictions of southern plantations. By the 1870s, African-American dialect was still heard, most often in minstrelsy, although probably in some sacred repertory as well. While spirituals and jubilees sung in churches may have used dialect, existing evidence suggests that touring college groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Students, avoided the use of dialect when they performed spirituals as part of their programs. The Fisk Singers' book The Story of the Jubilee Singers (Marsh 1880) and their later recordings (after 1909) offer their repertory in standard English. Ditson's (1887) publication Jubilee and Plantation Songs likewise eschews dialect. Undoubtedly, the use of standard English in these publications and in public performances reflected a desire to demonstrate that African Americans were educated and could speak and sing in standard English. Toward the end of the 1880s, a number of African-American vocal quartets began to appear in various venues, including vaudeville, country fairs, and variety shows. One of the most famous was the Standard Quartet, which toured with the South before the War company. The group made a number of cylinders in the early 1890s, of which one, \"Keep Movin',\" also sung in standard English, has survived (Brooks 2004, 96-97). However, the popularity of the antebellum spirituals and jubilees influenced a number of black minstrels to write and perform sacred dialect songs in their shows. James Bland's \"Oh, Dem Golden Slippers\" (1879) and Sam Lucas's \"Put On My Long White Robe\" (1879) are two examples of this sacred genre that migrated from the church and concert stage to the minstrel show. Lucas's song has no derogatory sense. Rather, the dialect conveys an African-American perspective (similar to that heard in spirituals) on the voyage that follows death. De gospel Trumpet am sounding loud, Put on my long white robe. See all de children a slipping proud, All up an' down de road, When dey get near de pearly gate, Put on my long white robe, You can go inside if you ain't too late, And den how happy you'll feel. Chorus Oh! wait 'till I put on my long white robe, My starry crown and my golden shoes, I pass through the gates of de golden city Den I carry de news. During the 1890s, the most controversial dialect lyrics, which harkened back to the early days of minstrelsy, were set to ragtime melodies; this new genre is usually identified as the \"coon\" song. It was sung in a multiplicity of venue","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133827927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Predicting Black Musical Innovation and Integration: The 1850 Mance Index for Appalachia","authors":"Bob Eagle","doi":"10.2307/4145500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145500","url":null,"abstract":"Imagine, if you will, that you are an open-minded musical enthusiast whose only exposure has been to the classical European tradition, with no knowledge of North American music of the last century or before. You are suddenly exposed to the music of, say, Bessie Smith and Josh White (to name just two diverse African-American performers with Appalachian backgrounds). Among the first shocks would be to find that these individuals are clearly working to different standards and modes of performance than their European counterparts. For example, there is an emphasis on rhythmic complexity and syncopation that is largely foreign to European notions, while the European attention to melody development and scalar range is largely absent. Bessie Smith and Josh White are at the same time typical and atypical of African-American performance in the Appalachian context. They are typical in that a number of performers work or worked in similar styles. They are atypical in being recognized as superior in their respective fields. Even white North American music, whether \"serious\" or otherwise, has departed from standards and modes so central to European thought. Those standards and modes had been so dominant in the European mind that they had once been assumed to apply universally. Why has North American music been so different? Much can be explained by an interaction between the European habits brought by the white settlers and African practices retained, by permission or otherwise, by the slaves brought across the Atlantic. The introduced European music had considerable variety. There were the hymns, dirges, and fugues associated with the church, there was folksong from all parts of the British Isles and any number of parallel continental traditions, and there was the art music, developed over several centuries, by the finest minds working in the \"classical\" traditions of European music. There was also variety in the music known to the slaves. From West Africa's forests came people who could make drums \"talk,\" to such a perceived degree that tales of the banning of drum playing (to reduce the chance of slave rebellion) are legion. From the Savannah and Sahel adjacent to the Sahara Desert came players of trumpet-like instruments and the stringed forerunners of fiddles, banjoes, and guitars. Was it metaphor alone that led Blind Willie McTell to sing of \"Searching the Desert for the Blues\"? Why did spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and the blues originate in the United States and not in Iberian America, or even in the Protestant colonies of the Caribbean? The answers are not easy. Perhaps the explanation lies partly in the longer lives of slaves in nontropical climates, permitting some development of standards in performance. Perhaps the vitality and variety of British society, in contrast to the then-decaying Portuguese and Spanish empires, played some part. And although slaves in the United States typically worked to produce commercial crops, the prohibitions against im","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134256210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preliminary Bibliography of Best-Known Black Appalachian Musicians","authors":"Mark M. Freed","doi":"10.2307/4145501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145501","url":null,"abstract":"African-American musicians have lived in, contributed to, and influenced Appalachian music since the introduction of the banjo and African work songs and chants through modern blues, jazz, gospel, pop, and rock music. While some of these musicians have been documented for their individual achievements, only recently have they been considered collectively in terms of the Appalachian region. This bibliography is not a comprehensive collection of all black music in Appalachia, but it highlights the best-known artists who were born within the Appalachian region. It does not include scores or record reviews. It favors blues and folk music over sacred, jazz, RB however, only those about whom there is published material in print--books, articles, newspaper columns, sound recordings, or videos--are listed in this index. Sources containing information about three or more included musicians or containing a general discussion of black music in Appalachia can be found under General Sources. Sources for individual musicians and groups follow the general headings and are categorized alphabetically by musician, then by category of material, then by entry. While this project reflects time restraints and the methodology does not cover every black Appalachian musician exhaustively, it is the first to compile the major known sources of the black artists in the region. General Sources General Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Guides Arnaudon, Jean-Claude. 1977. Dictionnaire du blues. Paris: Filipacchi. Carr, Ian. 1988. Jazz: The essential companion. New York: Prentice-Hall. Clarke, Donald. 1989. The Penguin encyclopedia of popular music. New York: Viking Penguin. Cowley, John, and Paul Oliver. 1996. The new Blackwell guide to recorded blues. Oxford: Blackwell. Harris, Sheldon. 1979. Blues who's who. 5th ed. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House. Kernfeld, Barry, ed. 2002. The new Grove dictionary of jazz. 3rd ed. New York: Grove's Dictionaries. Kinkle, Roger D. 1974. The complete encyclopedia of popular music and jazz, 1900-1950. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House. Larkin, Colin. 1993. The Guinness who's who of blues. 2nd ed. Enfield, England: Guinness World Records. --. 1998. The encyclopedia of popular music. 3rd ed. New York: Muze; distributed in the U.S. by Grove Dictionaries. Santelli, Robert. …","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122193191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Directory of African-Appalachian Musicians","authors":"Bob Eagle","doi":"10.2307/4145499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/4145499","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this guide is to fix significant positions for musical activity onto specific portions of the landscape, with a view to assisting future research. It is not intended to fulfill the tourist expectation of finding, say, that \"Blind Boy Fuller slept here.\" Therefore, it does not record where a particular artist appeared on one night of a whirlwind one-night tour, but if that same artist habitually played in the location for decades, it can be hoped that he or she will be found here. The intention is to set down, so far as can be known at this remove, the main places where particular Appalachian musicians (specifically African Americans) were born, spent their lives, learned from others, performed, influenced others, or died. African-American churches, so important in black communities and frequently the location of significant musical activity, have been included when they could be identified definitely. There has been an attempt to date musicians' activity and to point to other locations within the guide that they may be found; suggestions for enhancing the simplicity and improving the presentation of the guide are welcomed. The usual magazines and references have been consulted, albeit with inevitable omissions by the compiler, but the work also largely draws on substantial original research in the indexed census records of 1920 and 1930. The definition of \"Appalachia\" chosen is that promulgated by the Appalachian Regional Commission, with the proviso that certain Virginia Piedmont and Valley cities and counties that were initially included in the region by the Appalachian Regional Commission have been reincorporated. Attempts have been made to avoid the use of abbreviations, but some are so pervasive as to require their usage. COGIC Church of God in Christ AME African Methodist Episcopal (Church) AMEZ African Methodist Episcopal Zion (Church) The directory is presented alphabetically by state, then by county, and then by city. In some cases, there is additional general information that is pertinent to either a state or a county preceding the presentation of the next category. For example, the Alabama state heading is followed by information about songs that mention the state, sociological trends that influenced the music, important performers that hailed from the state, and demographic statistics; then the county listings begin. Alabama Alabama has been an important state for gospel music but, in recent decades, is less influential as a source of blues music. The traditional song \"Alabama Bound\" has the sense more of rambling than of specifically going to Alabama. Examples include \"'Bama Bound Blues\" by Ida Cox, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Charlie Patton; \"Alabama Bound\" by Bowlegs (Library of Congress); \"Alabama Bound\" by Uncle Rich Brown. Apart from \"Alabama Bound,\" a number of songs mention the state, including \"Alabama Mis-Treater\" by Davenport and Carr (Okeh 8306, recorded March 11, 1926), \"Alabama Strut\" by Cow Cow Davenport and Iv","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127009041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"APPALACHIAN JAZZ: SOME PRELIMINARY NOTES","authors":"Todd Wright, John Higby","doi":"10.2307/3593208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3593208","url":null,"abstract":"It hardly seems necessary to justify the study of jazz and jazz musicians, in this case Americans of African descent, in any effort to understand this music as the product of real individuals, people who belong to a place and who are formed in some measure by the place where they live and work. The Americans here to be considered are roughly 11 percent of the American people; the place to be considered is the Appalachian region, which makes up a sizable part of eastern America. As for the music, it is hardly possible to discuss jazz without considering the role of black America in its origins and evolution. Although no racial or ethnic group is likely to be distributed evenly over the American landscape, common sense tells us that, given the size of Appalachia and the number of Americans who originally came from Africa, a good many of them will be found in this area. Furthermore, given the genius of these people for the improvisational music that we call jazz, a certain number of them will be jazz musicians. So we begin with a people, a place, and a vital part of American musical culture. The first step is easy, although no thoughtful consideration of the topic at hand is likely to remain easy for long. One way to begin is to establish what is intended in the following consideration of jazz and its creators. Another article in this issue discusses the blues (Pearson 2005). This form of musical expression tends to overlap with jazz, particularly because it is found among black Americans; but since this musical topic is treated elsewhere, it will not be addressed here. We make no attempt at historiography-the origins of jazz or earliest manifestations in Appalachia; rather, we consider the melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically complex music, frequently spontaneous TODD WRIGHT is Director of Jazz Studies in the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian State University. He is a professional musician who plays frequent club dates. He feels that his playing has in some measure been formed by his admiration for Cannonball Adderley. JOHN HIGBY, an amateur musician, taught English at Appalachian State University from 1967 to 2001. He has a particular interest in, and admiration for, piano players.","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124145724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MOVIN' THE MOUNTAINS: AN OVERVIEW OF RHYTHM AND BLUES AND ITS PRESENCE IN APPALACHIA","authors":"J. J. Zolten","doi":"10.2307/3593209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3593209","url":null,"abstract":"Think of Appalachian music and, initially, the associations are likely Anglo. Terms like \"bluegrass,\" \"country,\" \"old-timey,\" \"string band,\" \"hillbilly,\" and \"mountain music\" spring to mind. However, given the enormous sweep of Appalachia-from the northeast corner of Mississippi across northern Alabama, through northern Georgia to the western corner of South Carolina, then on north through adjacent sections of North Carolina and Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky, all of West Virginia, across to Ohio, and into Pennsylvania before finally trailing off in southern New York State-logic dictates that African-American music in all its manifestations, rhythm and blues included, must have been a part of the historical regional mix. Indeed, rhythm and blues was and continues to be a viable presence in the Appalachian cultural region. Whereas older genres of African-American music-blues, jazz, gospel-blossomed early in the twentieth century, rhythm and blues flowered at midcentury, a time when mass media sources, especially radio and records, afforded access literally to any ears that cared to listen. Riding in on the airwaves, rhythm and blues from its inception reached every corner of Appalachia. As a result, while it was initially a black performance genre marketed to black audiences, rhythm and blues rapidly developed cross-ethnic appeal, as Hugh Gregory (1998, 7) observed, \"to include a young, white audience\" and in the process achieved \"a wider JERRY ZOLTEN, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and American Studies at Penn State Altoona, is the author of numerous liner notes and profiles for blues and gospel artists and of the book Great God a 'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds (Oxford,","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130605699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}