Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"title":"Prince Modupe: An African in Early Hollywood","authors":"Kari Patterson","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0029","url":null,"abstract":"An African expatriate who went by the name Prince Modupe entered the Hollywood scene in the mid-i930s. He had been raised in a village in the hinterland of French West Africa (contemporary Guinea) and arrived in Los Angeles around 1935 following an appearance at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933-34. During this time in the American entertainment industry, Africans were generally thought of as \"primitives.\" Media images of Africa and Africans were often conjectural or exaggerated to fit preconceived notions. Into the midst of this environment, Modupe brought a measure of traditional (or indigenous) Africa to Los Angeles while deftly negotiating and contracting with the power brokers in the Hollywood entertainment industry. In the media of the time (and to some degree today), the many nations and diverse cultures of Africa were subsumed under the single term African. However, in 1935, reports regarding Modupe that appeared in the Los Angeles Times identified a discrete African nation: Nigeria. Modupe was described as an Oxford-educated Nigerian royal and producer of the stage extravaganza Zungaroo. In Los Angeles, Modupe worked as a composer, choreographer, theatrical producer, music consultant for film, and a lecturer and educator, managing to bridge a formidable sociocultural gap between the races. In this essay, I discuss the life of the enigmatic Modupe and his activities in Los Angeles, focusing on his 1935 stage production of Zungaroo. Black Los Angeles in the 1930s In the year 1935, the big-band era had begun. Black jazz musicians were finding ever-expanding ways to create and perform this uniquely African-American genre. What had been the jazz of the urban South was now appropriated, commodified, and integrated into national white popular urban culture and media. By the mid-i930S, the relatively localized and even insular awakening of black cultural consciousness, the Harlem Renaissance that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century, had stimulated similar cultural awakenings in other cities. For example, Bette Cox (1993,3) argues that the rise of Central Avenue in Los Angeles during the thirties is a repercussion to activities that took place in New York City in the twenties. By 1935, blacks were making headway as major contributors to American culture at large. In Los Angeles during the 1930s, Central Avenue was the hub of opportunity for black musicians. Yet, in other parts of the city, discrimination was very entrenched. Barred from membership in Local 47, the white musicians' union, blacks started their own union, Local 767, which continued into the early 1950s. Similar to earlier years, whites held black culture with both fascination and contempt. During the minstrelsy and jazz heydays, urban whites were the primary patrons of performance. It was also true that, in Depression-era Los Angeles, the white population thought of blacks as either servants or entertainers (Sides 2003, 26). Modupe's Zungaroo When Zungaroo was prese","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"318 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120974523","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":"Building “Zyon” in Babylon: Holy Hip Hop and Geographies of Conversion","authors":"Christina Zanfagna","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0145","url":null,"abstract":"Khanchuz (pronounced \"conscious\") locks the doors of his metallic beige Cadillac and swaggers slowly up the side street towards Los Angeles's Leimert Park Village, his faux diamond cross swinging gently across his chest. Formerly known as \"Sleep\" in his early days as a secular rapper, his eyes are wide and awake, drinking in the dark night's surroundings. We walk down the street and pass Sonny's Spot--a tiny cavern of a jazz club. The walls are tagged with layers of writing and papered with old posters and paintings of jazz musicians. We lean against a black-and-white photograph of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band as the pianist solos on \"Nina's Dream.\" Our final destination is Kaotic Sound--home to the infamous weekly underground hip hop open-mic Project Blowed. Tonight we are here for something else--a monthly Christian hip hop open mic called Klub Zyon. Zyon, the open mic's founders explain, is where we are going--the ultimate place, a spiritual homeland for wandering travelers. A decade earlier, Khanchuz was at Project Blowed rapping in street-corner battles about slingin' drugs, pimpin' women, and gang bangin . Now he raps for Christ. His first God-inspired rap was delivered in a jail cell in Colorado to the rhythm of metal spoons clanking against the bars. As we approach the front door of Klub Zyon, Khanchuz steps back and reflects on the conversion of both his sold and this place. ********** In this essay, I investigate how holy hip hop practitioners, through their musical practices and discourses, work with and on what I refer to as the living architecture of the city to create sites of gospel rap production. Specifically, I am interested in how gospel rappers perceive and perform place as a converting body and a site for the potential conversion of religious subjects, as well as how they undergo and enact conversion as both a spiritual transformation and a spatial practice. By spatial practices, I am referring to the manifold ways in which people move through, use, alter, and make meaning out of space. Holy hip hop (a.k.a. gospel rap or Christian rap) represents a highly complex field of practices comprised of music labels, localized scenes, ministries, radio programs, award shows, artistic crews, and collectives that function in an astonishing variety of buildings and locations, deemed both religious and nonreligious. Sometimes considered musical mavericks in the church, corny Bible-thumpers in the streets or in hip hop clubs, and criminal youth by law enforcement in the so-called ghettos of Los Angeles, gospel rappers are often strained by accusations that their ways of being and expressing are blasphemous and/or inauthentic. These competing critiques constitute the triple bind of holy hip hop's multif ronted struggle to uphold their contingent positioning and find a spiritual/musical dwelling place--to find \"Zyon.\" In fact, holy hip hop is one of the few religiomusical movements and genres in African-American culture where the church--o","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131549203","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":"African-American Voices of Traditional Sacred Music in Twentieth-Century and Twenty-first Century Los Angeles","authors":"Hansonia L. Caldwell","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0163","url":null,"abstract":"��� Over a span of some 390 years, the African diaspora has developed a rich musical heritage within the United States, generating several important genres that have been nurtured throughout the country by numerous musicians who were introduced to the foundations of the music in the church and through school experiences of their childhood. This heritage, rooted originally in the southern United States, has been transported to California. A number of blacks who became the musicians (performers, teachers, composers, and scholars) of Los Angeles arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from states (e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Maryland) that had strong African-American communities suffused with the musical culture of the African diaspora. Their migration transformed the spiritual, gospel music, blues, and jazz in California (see DjeDje and Meadows 1998) while concurrently cultivating an appreciation for and an expertise in the performance of traditional European classical music. A s new musicians visited and/or permanently settled, they began to nurture the talent of those who were native to the state. John A. Gray came from Norfolk, Virginia, and opened the Gray Conservatory of Music. William T. Wilkins came from Little Rock, Arkansas, and started the Wilkins Piano Academy (opened in 1912 as the first Interracial School of Music in the City of Los Angeles). As explained by Irma Jean Juniel Prescott, a Zion Hill Baptist Church musician from Shreveport, Louisiana, who became a Los Angeles–community piano teacher, “Those individuals who are quali","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130299733","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":"Seeking John Carter and Bobby Bradford: Free Jazz and Community in Los Angeles","authors":"Charles Sharp","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0065","url":null,"abstract":"Jazz, experimentation, and Los Angeles are ineluctably linked by history. The city and its active jazz scene were and continue to be a fertile ground for musicians who seek to challenge the boundaries of genre. Unfortunately, the city also has a reputation for being a very difficult place for experimenters. Such influential musicians as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman all left Los Angeles before becoming well known. Those who remained, like Gerald Wilson and Horace Tapscott, seem almost as well known for their obscurity as their music. Fortunately, more recent publications have corrected this, bringing the music and stories of these Los Angeles innovators to broader audiences (Bryant et al. 1998; Tapscott and Isoardi 2001; Isoardi 2006; Dailey 2007; Sharp 2008). This essay examines the early career of two of the most overlooked, yet locally influential, musicians: John Carter and Bobby Bradford. I focus on their collaboration in a group called the New Art Jazz Ensemble, which was active from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Carter and Bradford's music emphasized the decisions and choices of the musicians. Because this music did not fit easily into the commercial jazz world, the group found alternative places to present their music. Their music and actions inspired the formation of an active experimental music scene that still exists today. Paths to Los Angeles John Carter was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1929 and attended the same high school as Ornette Coleman, and also like Coleman, he played saxophone in rhythm-and-blues bands around the Dallas-Fort Worth area while being inspired by the new sounds of bebop. Unlike Coleman, Carter received a formal music education and pursued teaching as a career. After graduating from high school at age fifteen, Carter received a bachelor's degree in music education from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1949. While at Lincoln University, he also performed with various music groups in clubs in nearby Kansas City and St. Louis. He married, had a son, and began teaching elementary school in Fort Worth when only nineteen years old. Carter then earned a master of arts degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1956. Attending graduate school in Colorado was more of a necessity than a choice because it was still difficult for African Americans to receive advanced degrees in Texas at the time (see Carter 1992, 9; Dailey 2007, 38-40). The Carters moved to Los Angeles in 1961, where John secured a job as an elementary school music teacher. Like many other African Americans, Carter believed Los Angeles held the promise of greater opportunity for himself as well as his growing family (Sides 2003). As a musician, Carter was also attracted to what he thought was the city's active jazz scene. There was also the possibility of lucrative studio work to augment his teacher's salary. Unfortunately, what had been an active jazz scene was in rapid decline by the early 1960s, and stud","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129442568","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":"Clifford Brown in Los Angeles","authors":"Eddie S. Meadows","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0045","url":null,"abstract":"��� Throughout its history, jazz has been chronicled as both a southern-midwestern-eastern U.S. phenomenon and an art form centered primarily in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York City. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is often portrayed as a city that has both exported and imported talented jazz artists. Except for West Coast jazz, which is identified with the region rather than the city, rarely is Los Angeles acknowledged as a setting that stimulated innovations or new developments. Within this context, West Coast jazz musicians have been marginalized, except those like Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes, Frank Morgan, and Charles Mingus who left Los Angeles to achieve greatness on the East Coast. Jazz artists native to Los Angeles (e.g., Buddy Collette) or those who migrated and permanently settled in the city (e.g., Horace Silver) have been recognized but seldom are featured or highlighted in jazz scholarship. This essay is unique in that it does not focus on someone who is native to the city nor does it deal with a longtime resident. Rather, it chronicles the impact that trumpeter Clifford Brown’s (1930–56) historic March to August 30, 1954, stay in Los Angeles had on his life and jazz career. Specifically, I focus on the events that led to the LaRue Anderson (1933–2005) and Clifford Brown marriage, 1 the founding of the Clifford Brown–Max Roach Quintet, and Brown’s recordings with several Los Angeles–based jazz musicians. Before delving into Brown’s time in Los Angeles, I present a concise overview of his musical life before he arrived.","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121807468","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":"Talking Drums in Los Angeles: Brokering Culture in an American Metropolis","authors":"Jesse Ruskin","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.31.1.0085","url":null,"abstract":"My mission in life is not only to make the dundun a universal instrument, but also to transmit the family aspect of African life to all the people of the universe. I am interested in using this medium to unify the people of all races and colors. My students at present are reflecting this dream, because I have students from all ethnic groups learning to play the drum. Francis Awe, liner notes to Oro ljinle (1997) Nigerian musician Francis Awe has been performing and promoting dundun, a family of Yoruba \"talking drums,\" in Los Angeles concert halls, communities, and classrooms for over twenty-five years. Awe exhibits a persona both rooted and worldly: a Yoruba talking drummer on a mission to bring his music to the people of the world. Adopted as his home in 1983, Los Angeles would come to embody this world--a global metropolis in which he would realize much of his life's work. Performing in American film and television, and recording with major-label stars like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, Awe adapted dundun to new idioms and contexts. He used the instrument to enter into cross-cultural dialogues with Cuban and Indian musicians, and opened up new creative and commercial potential by designing a signature drum for Remo World Percussion. Awe's expansive vision is evident, as well, in the multiethnic composition of his Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble, an accomplishment about which he expresses great pride. In pedagogy and performance, Awe aims to make Yoruba music accessible and meaningful in new contexts while at the same time retaining the particular symbols and organizational principles that ground it in Yoruba musical heritage. Whether working with public school students or prison inmates, Awe tries to articulate the social and cultural dimensions of his music in ways relevant to the diverse audiences he encounters. In this way, he seeks to \"universalize\" the Yoruba talking drum tradition and weave African cultural wisdom, as he interprets it, into the fabric of American life. Awe's work is more than savvy cultural marketing; it is grounded in a sense of mission and commitment to human emancipation. This global musician, then, not only adapts music to foreign contexts, but also uses music to transform those contexts. The concept of the culture broker is useful in highlighting Francis Awe's self-defined role as both culture bearer and cultural mediator. As one who was, in his words, \"born into a drumming family,\" Awe may be viewed as a culture bearer; that is, an embodiment or representative of a Yoruba performance tradition. At the same time, he is reflexively engaged with this tradition, idiosyncratically interpreting it and mediating its reception in new contexts. More generally, the idea of culture brokering begs attention to individual agency and its conditions of possibility in the global remapping of musical traditions. Cosmopolitan musicians like Francis Awe may be creatively reformulating tradition, but they are doing so, as anthropol","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128256889","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":"Schedule of SSO-Related U.S. Passport Applications","authors":"Howard Rye","doi":"10.5406/blacmusiresej.30.1.0071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/blacmusiresej.30.1.0071","url":null,"abstract":"80442 Adolph Crawford 23 Apr 1919 1; 3 80443 Louisa Crawford 23 Apr 1919 1; 3 80444 Edgar Miller 22 Apr 1919 1 80445 Jesse Williams 22 Apr 1919 1 Letter filed with Passport # 80444. 80446 DeWitte Joseph Martin 22 Apr 1919 1; 3 80447 Andrew Aasbruy 17 Apr 1919 1; 3 Copeland 80448 Nathaniel Nunez 7 May 1919 1; 3 80449 Dan Parrish 7 May 1919 1; 3; 4 80450 William P. Nehemiah 24 Apr 1919 1; 3 Claim to be in 15th N.Y. Infantry Band queried. 80451 James Shaw 25 Apr 1919 1; 3; 4 80452 James Parker 25 Apr 1919 1; 3 80453 Herbert Diemer 25 Apr 1919 1; 3 80454 Victor H. Greene 22 Apr 1919 1; 3 “Check with Military Intelligence. No file found.” 80455 Eugene P. Holland 24 Apr 1919 1; 3 80456 James W. Wheeler 24 Apr 1919 1; 3 80457 Elwin Ross 24 Apr 1919 2; 3 80458 Joe Jordan 14 Apr 1919 See Lattimore passports. 80459 Walter Cooper 22 Apr 1919 2; 3","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116104795","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":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"Howard Rye","doi":"10.1353/pal.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129092625","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":"On Ownership and Value: Response","authors":"Shane White","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.30.2.0379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.30.2.0379","url":null,"abstract":"I would like to try to put one of Radano's points in a different, perhaps older, context. He writes of the increasing references to African-American music in the 1840s and talks about the discourse of folk authenticity that was used to describe it. In my view at least, the 1840s and 1850s were a key time in the development of slave culture. Examining the written record for these years, one finds fewer references among whites to barbarism or the strangeness of African-American sounds. There seems an almost palpable sense that, finally, after a century and a half of living check by jowl a growing number of whites are beginning to appreciate black culture. Not only did you have whites as spectators on plantations at corn shuckings (and they are really a post-1830 development, as Roger Abrahams has shown), funerals and the like, but whites in cities such as Richmond in the 1850s actively sought out opportunities to come in contact with black culture. They observed slaves singing as they worked in the tobacco factories and, most importantly, they filled the amen benches in churches and watched and listened to blacks pray and, particularly, sing. These people were the forebears of the whites who would listen to blues and jazz in the twentieth century and this too is the line out of which John and Alan Lomax came. There is another group of whites that do not get talked about much that I find fascinating. I am particularly drawn to moments when white observers, mostly writers of some sort, despite an intense and very unpleasant racism that was a commonplace of the time, are forced, no matter how reluctantly, to concede that there was \"something\" to black life. More often than hot these occasions centered on some aspect of African-American expressive culture, most commonly music and/or dance and most commonly what moved them was a highly syncretic performance of some sort or other. On an evening in late June 1840 in New York City, the residents of Park Place were waked up, such as were asleep, by a strain of most exquisite harmony, in which the bugle predominated. \"The last rose of summer\" was the air, and most beautifully was it played. If was followed by \"Away with melancholy,\" with the variations, executed by the bugle solo, such as seldom have been heard in that quiet neighborhood. The moon was just rising over the turrets and trees to the east, and many of the windows in the street were thrown open, with fair eyes peeping forth upon the night scene. From Broadway a considerable crowd was attracted to the spot where the Serenaders stood. This spot was opposite some trees opposite No. 10 Park Place. After several other strains, executed with the same exquisite beauty, the Serenaders slowly withdrew towards the College grounds below, and soon disappeared in the shades of night. (New York Herald 1840) The Serenaders were in fact Francis Johnson and seven or eight members of his band, all black. …","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121423539","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":"On Ownership and Value","authors":"R. Radano","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.30.2.0363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.30.2.0363","url":null,"abstract":"A key issue that continues to inform discussions of black musical value is the concept of authenticity. Authenticity is hot, of course, an idea that is peculiar to music. We look for authenticity in a number of places and in a variety of forms. Journalists debate the authenticity of political candidates; on public television, antiques experts size up the authenticity of a special object, and home contractors restore old houses to their original, authentic form. But it is in music, and specifically in black music, that many of us find our greatest cultural truths. For well over a hundred years, black music has been held up as a symbol of the grandeur and distinctiveness of the nation, bringing into discernible sonic form all that which unites and divides us. In the performances of Bird, Mahalia, Aretha, and JB--artists so familiar that we refer to them by their first names and nicknames--we often seem to hear a certain coalescence of the multitude. Authenticity and truth appear as a sonic resolution of out unities and differences. Yet acknowledging the rhetoric that has traditionally accompanied black music is not the same thing as understanding its powers of affect. And it is curious to note how little thought we have given to the matter. Why is black music regarded as fundamentally authentic? Why do we so often assume black music to be inherently superior to nonblack forms? Why do youth audiences in particular gravitate to black music for what they hold to be the key to life's secrets? And why have they done so at least since the rise of twentieth-century popular culture? Conventional wisdom tells us that black musical value grows out of the musical forms themselves. Great black music is great because it displays essential qualities that speak the truth of the black experience. We can readily put this argument aside, however, since it is ultimately based on what we like: those qualities deemed great are the same as the ones we find most appealing. More sophisticated arguments steer away from such claims and attribute authenticity to cultural factors, typically those arising from the experience of resisting the oppressive forces of white supremacy. While there is certainly relevance to this argument, it also runs into trouble, above all by relying on stereotypical views of black poverty and oppression in order to explain creativity. The historical sites of black racial struggle--the plantation, the Delta, the urban streets--become the domains of authenticity. According to this view, the truest African Americans are those who have lived the most oppressed, and therefore, most authentic lives. It is this struggle that supposedly enables them to produce \"real\" black music. Even this brief summary of a couple of the popular debates surrounding black music suggests how difficult explaining authenticity really is. We may recognize black music's remarkable social contributions, but we find it challenging to specify that power and appeal. We may celebrat","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"113 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117284117","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}