This is from my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), pp. 269-273. I’m working a new post on identity and this will be useful background.
African Americans were naturally offended by white America’s obsession with their sexuality. Denunciation of such foolishness was one of Malcolm X’s themes. But this recognition is older than the Civil Rights era. After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a
narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.
Thus we have a white obsession born out of emotional repression and the black critique of that obsession. That critique reflects common sense grounded in a black frame of reference, not a white one.
The black rejection of white mythology is grounded in a black sense of cultural and social identity that is different from the identity assigned to black folks by whites. Identity in this sense is about how individuals feel themselves connected to the broader currents of history. Few of us ever become one of the “great men” whose acts get recounted in history books, nor do many of us have personal acquaintance with them. But we identify with nations, and national histories are typically told through stories of the deeds of these great men, both real and legendary. Our national identity is our means of connecting with history.
This realization of identity emerges with striking force in Ken Burns’ recent documentary history of jazz. Much of the narration and expert commentary is about how jazz is America’s music. Not only did jazz originate in American but, as Wynton Marsalis says at the opening of the first episode, “jazz music objectifies America” (Episode One, Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns). With that statement and with countless others that follow we’re told that jazz captures some American essence, that it is what Americans are as a people. When you listen to jazz, you listen, not only to an American voice, but to the voice of America.
This nationalist concern with the nature of America and its people dates back to the early 19th century, when American intellectuals began to weave a new mythology about “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefined by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelled,” an individual who was thereby separated from Europe (Lewis, American Adam, 1955, p5). As David Stowe has shown, jazz became woven into this fabric during the 1930s, in part as “a musical thumbing of the nose at fascism, whose Nazi theorists regarded swing as a debased creation of Jews and blacks” (Swing Changes, 194, p. 53) Once installed in the temple of Americanism jazz remained there.
But not without considerable tension and, with the publication of Amari Baraka’s Blues People in 1963, open conflict and dissension. Baraka, a very angry, militant and brilliant black poet and playwright, saw African-Americans as blues people and jazz as a son of the blues. As such it was essentially black music, but one “that offered such a profound reflection of America that it could attract white Americans to want play it or listen to it for exactly that reason. ... It made a common cultural ground where black and white America seemed only day and night in the same city...”(Blues People, 159-60). The ethnic and national character of jazz has been a matter of open contention ever since.
As I suggested above, the question of jazz’s “identity” is insoluble precisely because it is framed in nationalist terms. Long before it became assimilated to the concept of the nation-state, “nation” was used in English to designate a racial group. In come contexts, it still retains the sense of racial or ethnic identity. The concept of a nation thus tends to work against the cultural plurality that has been critical in the origins and development of jazz and its descendants.
There is no doubt, for example, that Ellington thought of himself as a “race man,” to use the term of the times. It was as a race man that, in 1943, he wrote “Black, Brown, and Beige” as a musical portrait of (in the terminology of the day) Negro America. Like many African Americans, Ellington had little difficulty in thinking of himself as simultaneously a Negro, a race man, and a patriotic American citizen. In the words of Hannah Nelson, who was interviewed by John Langston Gwaltney for his study of “core black culture,”
I think it was Frederick Douglass who said we were a nation within a nation. I know that will probably bother your white readers, but it is nonetheless true that black people think of themselves as an entity. . . . We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation. This ground we have buried our dead in for so long is the only ground most of us have ever stood upon. . . . Most of our people are remarkably merciful to Africa, when you consider how Africa has used us. (Drylongso, 1993, p. 5)
Clifford Yancy, “a prudent grandfather in his later fifties” also interviewed by Gwaltney, expressed the practical significance of this separateness:
White people and black people are both people, so they’re alike in most ways, but they don’t think the same about some things. Your white man might be a little weaker, but that’s just because they generally have easier work. I think they are probably as smart as we are because I have seen them doing any kind of work that any of us can do. Now, some of these young white boys might get a job they can’t handle just because they know somebody, but, I mean, an experienced white man can do anything an experienced black man can do. I go by what I see going down out here and that’s the way it looks to me.
This statement is perfectly matter of fact in its assumption that black performance is the standard by which all performance is to be judged. Yancy is not worried about what white people think about him. He has his own frame of reference. That is what it means to be a member of a nation within a nation: it means you have your own frame of reference.
That’s what the discussion of jazz, black, white, and America is about: What is the framework for discussion, analysis and judgment? Who says so? The history of jazz is also a history of arguments about the nature of jazz. Is swing real jazz, or is New Orleans the only true jazz? Is bebop jazz or is it just a commercial stunt, as some of its detractors thought? Is Ornette Coleman playing jazz, or is he playing all those wrong notes because he can’t play the saxophone? Does jazz-rock fusion qualify as jazz or not? At every point in its history, critics, journalists, fans and scholars have argued about the nature of true jazz. Blues, rock and hip hop have occasioned similar arguments. To the extent that these discussions have taken place in trade journals, fan magazines, and the commercial press, they shade into the need to commodify the music so that it can be marketed to the appropriate consumers.
These arguments are rarely merely about separating apples from oranges so you can price them right. They are moral arguments. Jazzers argued that rock was inferior and immoral and rockers countered that jazz is old and dried-up. These arguments are passionate because they are about personal and cultural identity.
Such arguments are impossible in the social and culture worlds we looked at in Chapter 9. Those societies may have recognized differences between children’s and adult music, men’s and women’s songs, songs belonging to particular clans, and so forth. But all of the songs are in the same tradition, the only one members of these homogenous societies feel they must answer to. Their identity is not at issue—an innocence that is rapidly vanishing as these societies become absorbed into the political life of larger nation-states. In complex cultural pluralities like the United States, people have to negotiate a new identity for each arena in which they function, home, church, work, social club, political party, whatever. They have many bodies of music to choose from. Musical preference thus becomes a matter of personal choices that imply specific connections to the larger currents of history.
This is the world in which jazz has sought its way. Not only did it emerge from a diversity of rags, blues, tangos, marches, ballads, Broadway tunes, and so forth, but it feeds into a similar diversity. Beyond this, we must consider the evidence presented by Charlie Keil and his students, who have found that individuals listen to a variety of different kinds of music. Someone who likes jazz may also like country and western and a bit of classical. This variety of musical interests is no doubt abetted by the ready availability of recordings, which didn’t happen until the first quarter of the 20th Century. But it is quite clear that the musical ensembles in the 19th century—brass bands, string bands, minstrel shows—all played a variety of musical styles.
Frameworks of ethnic and national identity set up social boundaries. Even as memes migrate across these boundaries to serve people’s emotional and physical needs, thereby reducing the differences between groups, the need to maintain boundaries asserts itself. It also results in new musical styles as black Americans continue to create music they can think of as specifically theirs. This is the mechanism that Amiri Baraka identified in Blues People. It is the mechanism that has been driving American popular culture through the 20th Century and into this one.
Note: I have elaborated on Baraka's dynamic in my article, Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues, in Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed.,
Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press. pp. 189-233,
https://www.academia.edu/8668332/Music_Making_History_Africa_Meets_Europe_in_the_United_States_of_the_Blues
