Harvard University Press Blog

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

The death last week of legendary American musician Levon Helm has his music back on the minds of many. Helm was best known as the drummer and sometime-singer for the seminal rock group The Band, which consisted of four Canadians and Helm, an Arkansas-native and the band’s American anchor. Perhaps thanks to the perspective afforded by being eighty percent expat, The Band forged a quintessentially American sound, most apparent on their first two records, 1968’s Music from Big Pink and 1969’s The Band. The latter featured “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” one of the highlights of The Band’s catalog and its best showcase for Helm’s powerful southern voice. Though a dispute over its authorship eventually led Helm to stop playing the song, it’s arguably the signature performance of his career.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a story of the last days of the American Civil War, told from the perspective of a poor white farmer from Tennessee named Virgil Kane. Though he’s seen the land around him destroyed by Union soldiers, and lost his brother to the conflict, he carries on, living through the “beautiful sadness” of the South that The Band’s Robbie Robertson says inspired the song. 

Like my father before me
I will work the land
And like my brother above me
Who took a rebel stand
He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a Kane back up
When he's in defeat

In Mystery Train, his classic work of rock criticism and American cultural analysis, Greil Marcus described the song as being less about the Civil War than about “the way each American carries a version of that event within himself.” That description conjures Robert Penn Warren’s claim that the Civil War is America’s only “felt” history, “history lived in our national imagination.” And it rightly situates “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an important reflection of popular memory of the Civil War.

More from Marcus’s Mystery Train:

It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner, raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane’s, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can’t get out from under the singer’s truth—not the whole truth, but his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize this as David Blight territory, and that Robert Penn Warren quote above actually opens the Prologue of Blight’s Race and Reunion. His more recent book, American Oracle, picks up the story of civil war memory at the time of the war’s centennial commemoration in the early 1960s, just a handful of years before The Band recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” In American Oracle, written in the run-up to the war’s sesquicentennial, Blight explores how the stories the nation tells itself about the war play a defining role in the country’s self-conception:

 

Forward Into Things That No One's Ever Heard Before

For years Robin D. G. Kelley has been one of the most well respected scholars of American History, especially within the interdisciplinary circles of American Studies. The publication in 2009 of his wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk helped to propel Kelley’s work to a broad audience outside of the academy, and we’re thrilled to have worked with him on a new book that builds on that study. In the excerpt below, and in the accompanying video, Kelley explains the meditation on modernity that he presents in Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, and how his work helps us to reconsider the origins of jazz itself.

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By exploring the work, conversations, collaborations, and tensions between both African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization, I examine how modern Africa figured in reshaping jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s, how modern jazz figured in the formation of a modern African identity, and how various musical convergences and crossings shaped the political and cultural landscape on both continents. This book is not about the African roots of jazz, nor does it ask how American jazz musicians supported African liberation or “imagined” Africa. Rather, it is about transnational encounters between musicians, or what the ethnomusicologist Jason Stanyek calls “intercultural collaboration,” and encounters between musicians and particular locations (such as Lagos, Chicago, New York, or Cape Town). In other words, it hopes to explain how encounters with specific places, people, movements, cultures, provided fertile ground for new music and musical practices.

As a nod to the great critic and poet A. B. Spellman, whose Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966) serves as a model for this book, I focus on four artists and the various groups they led during the age of African decolonization (roughly 1954–1963). Two of these artists, pianist Randy Weston and bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, hail from the United States (or, more precisely, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn); drummer Guy Warren is Ghanaian; and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is South African. Each of these artists was propelled by the upheavals of the 1950s to seek new musical forms, new collaborations, new fusions across time and space. They shared neither a common agenda nor a common culture, though they recognized and often embraced cultural commonalities, “jazz” being one. Nor did they always succeed. On the contrary, they occasionally clashed with fellow artists, or bumped up against prevailing assumptions, the intransigence of the market, an oppressive state that viewed their music as a threat to order, or consumers whose own stereotypes made them incapable of hearing and appreciating the work.

Yet they all shared a vision of jazz as a path to the future, a vehicle for both Africans and African Americans to articulate and realize their own distinctive modernity while critiquing its Western variant. And, from their vantage point, standing at what appeared to be the precipice of freedom for Africa and black America, the continent represented a beacon of modernity blazing a new path for the rest of the world, but one tempered by deeply spiritual, antimaterialist values. Indeed, I suggest that African American musicians were seeking new spiritual and ideological alternatives to what they saw as a declining West that led them to a deeper exploration of African music and culture. Likewise, African musicians who were drawn to jazz as a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity also saw the need to infuse it with the music of their homeland. Echoing the late poet Aimé Césaire, in the atomic age, when colonialism and the Holocaust left the West spiritually wanting, Africa represented both an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values. This sort of Janus-faced modernism is key to understanding the nexus of jazz and Africa in the age of decolonization. As Veit Erlmann warns, we have to resist the easy binary of modernity and tradition, especially when the subject is music. “Modernity and tradition,” he writes, “are not only the two most significant historical fictions here but also the tropes whose role in the Western discourse about itself and the others is reflected and configured in the very grammar of musical performance itself.”

 

Darker than Blue, from Curtis Mayfield to Paul Gilroy

New this month is a paperback edition of Paul Gilroy’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures. Entitled Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, the lectures and book present Gilroy’s call for a revitalization of Black Atlantic studies. He uses a discussion of the fading political voice of African American music, once represented by such outspoken talents as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Curtis Mayfield, as an entrée to a wider examination of the state of black intellectualism in America. Gilroy suggests that black thinkers should open a new dialogue to address the problems arising from an unsustainable consumer culture in which African American cultural output now circulates as generic Americana.

Gilroy, a DJ and music journalist on top of being an academic, uses music to trace a shift in Black Atlantic culture from group consciousness to individualism. From that analysis, he provides a roadmap to the shifting terrain of identity politics in the “Age of Obama,” critiquing the urban chic championed by Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and the commodification of black politicians and statespersons such as Condi Rice as “diplomatic assets.”

The musicians Gilroy highlights from the 1960s and ’70s appealed to him as a young man in the UK by offering “the traveling truths of a people who were now even darker than an Ellisonian shade of blue.” For Gilroy, the music of that era endures:

Extraordinary things can still be heard in the enduring music of that uniquely soulful era. The live recordings made by Aretha, Curtis Mayfield, and Donny Hathaway have proved particularly durable. As they established new aesthetic criteria for African American popular music, they seemed to invite even their most distant listeners into a collective that felt intimate in spite of its attenuated, outernational character. Eager crowds had been dynamic collaborators in those epoch-making performances. Perhaps that surprising possibility should be recalled, now that the art of live recording has shrunk to fit the hyper-real, pseudo-classical niche in which we are told authentic jazz performances still dwell.

Curtis Mayfield’s concert recordings captured the kernel of this magic. After his shamanic January 1972 shows at the Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, an imaginary line linking him to James Brown (then becoming known as the Godfather) constituted one axis of my own nascent, “uk blak” mindset. The contemporary contrast between Kanye West’s ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent’s scarred, muscular, Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can Mayfield’s dignity and bespectacled seriousness have gone? Not, surely, into the global business enterprise that has been built up so skillfully by brand Jay-Z?

Listening to Louie on St. Patrick’s Day

George Bornstein’s The Colors of Zion is a challenge to the story told by the often-chronicled fissures in the relationships between Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years from the Irish Famine until the end of World War II. In this revelatory transatlantic study, Bornstein shows that the sympathies and cooperative efforts between these three oppressed groups were far greater than generally acknowledged. In the piece below, Bornstein takes the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day to reflect on Louis Armstrong, who embodied the interethnic, cross-cultural affinity that The Colors of Zion documents.

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When making his breakthrough recordings with his Hot Five in 1926, young Louis Armstrong took care to include a new song on which he had collaborated with Percy Venable. Sandwiched between the better-known “You Made Me Love You” and “Willie the Weeper,” came “Irish Black Bottom,” a Celtic take on the original New Orleans jazz classic “Black Bottom.” With Armstrong breaking into raucous laughter at the line “And I was born in Ireland,” the tune ends with the lines, “All over Ireland you can see / The people dancin’ in / Cause Ireland’s gone Black Bottom Crazy now.”

The playful racial masquerade, a reversal of more traditional Irish contributions to blackface minstrelsy, signaled Armstrong’s lifelong artistic devotion to racial and cultural hybridity. “It’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow,” he once remarked. “Race-conscious jazz musicians? Nobody could be who really knew their horns and loved the music.”

Such boundary crossing started early for Satchmo. In an interview with Life magazine he listed among his early influences the all-white “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini (for whom the dish turkey tetrazzini is named), and especially “the Irish tenor, John McCormack—beautiful phrasing.” Later Armstrong became one of the first jazz musicians to play to large audiences in Ireland, with his wildly successful Belfast concert of 1962 and two shows in Dublin five years later attended by 4,000 people.

Armstrong’s connection to other groups than his own didn’t stop with the Irish. Perhaps most important among the others were Jews, beginning with the Karnovsky family who hired, mentored, and looked after him as a boy after he left the Colored Waif’s Home in New Orleans. According to his moving late memoir Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans they fed him regular meals and staked him to his first horn. In tribute to them he wore a Star of David around his neck regularly after that. The jazz photographer Herb Snitzer created a famous photo of Louis on bus tour in 1960 with striped white shirt open, cigarette in hand, and the necklace clearly visible. “He wore the Star his entire life,” recalled Snitzer. “He was the least prejudiced musician I ever knew.”

Satchmo practiced what he preached, welcoming musicians of all backgrounds into a majority African American enterprise. He even dedicated Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family to his Jewish manager Joe Glaser, calling him “the best friend that I've ever had.” Similarly, he featured in concerts and recorded numerous hits by white composers, including Irving Berlin's early “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Louis recorded duets with Ella Fitzgerald of celebrated Berlin classics like “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn't This a Lovely Day,” and “I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” He liked Jewish-themed songs, too, such as his “Shadrach” retelling of the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Book of Daniel.

Such crossovers pervade the history of jazz and of popular music. The African American stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith born four years before Satchmo described his own ancestry as French, Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian, calling himself “an American pianist” in the subtitle of his autobiography. After discovering that he had a Jewish ancestor too, he converted to Judaism, had a Bar Mitzvah, and even served as a cantor between jazz stints. Reciprocally, the Jewish-born clarinetist and saxophonist Mezz Mezrow, who briefly became Armstrong's manager, did his best to be as Black as possible. He moved to Harlem, married a Black woman, and even insisted in prison on being housed with African American inmates. Like Armstrong, he believed that jazz transcended color and brought one of the first mixed-race bands to Broadway. Mezzrow wrote of Jewish religious music that “when I add Negro inflections to it they fit so perfect, it thrills me.”

The linkages and mixtures favored by Armstrong and the others pervade our past. A son of Irish immigrants, mayor John Hynes of Boston slyly undercut fantasies of purity half a century ago in introducing at a rally the first Jew to become mayor of Dublin. “We have here with us two fine fellows—an Irishman and a Jew,” he told the crowd. “I give him to you now, Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe.” Satchmo would have agreed in his consistent opposition to barriers that divide us into separate categories. As he told a group of journalists who challenged his including Israel on a tour of the Mideast with his All Stars, “Let me tell you something, man. That horn. You see that horn? That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language.”

Greil Marcus - "Lipstick Traces Live" @ Columbia November 19

See Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, released this year in a new twentieth anniversary edition, as well as The Dustbin of History, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books, not to mention co-editor of A New Literary History of America, out and making the rounds presently, deliver a "lecture as performance" live at Columbia University. "Lipstick Traces Live" is based on material from the book and will take place November 19 at 6pm, with a signing to follow.

click on flyer for full-sized image

More details here.

Lipstick Traces gets a new look

Greil Marcus's seminal Lipstick Traces is getting a twentieth-anniversary edition later this year. Poster art legend Chuck Sperry has designed a new cover for this treasured tome; the poster version will debut at Book Expo in May, where you can get a silkscreened edition:

Meanwhile, the new edition of Lipstick Traces (link is to the current, "old" -- but still nice! -- edition) hits a shelf near you in November.

(UPDATE: here's the new one!)

Sales rep playlist - April 2008

Being a university press sales rep means a lot of hours on the road. When you're driving from Milwaukee to Dayton to Pittsburgh to Ithaca to Buffalo to Cleveland to Chicago and then back to Milwaukee, as our dear friend John Eklund has just done, you're bound to burn through a CD or two (or fifty). To that end, we asked him for a selection of 2008's best and brightest to help you prepare for the next insane road trip in your future.

INSANE ROAD TRIP MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS, APRIL 2008 EDITION

Erykah Badu - The Healer"
My most obsessively replayed cut from her amazing new album "New Amerykah Part One" - I’m not always sure what she’s talking about but it’s irresistible.

Hawksley Workman - "Piano Blink"
Possibly the perfect pop song, by the criminally under-known (in the US anyway) Canadian singer-songwriter.

The Roches - "No Shoes"
Maggie, Terre and Suzzy are back, and this whimsical ode to being thankful for what you’ve got is in their signature goofball folk vein.

Massive Attack - "Be Thankful for What You’ve Got"
For a somewhat alternative spin on the same sentiment, this one just never gets old.

Istanbul’s Secrets with Sevval Sam & Ufuk - "Yol Turkusu"
A lovely contemporary Turkish pop melody from a fabulous compilation album. I wonder what it’s about?

M.I.A. - "Mango Pickle Down River"
I can’t believe I’m still obsessed with this - the 2007 album of the year in my book.

The Consecos - "Raised by Wolves"
A Toronto quartet that I first heard on the wonderful CBC Radio 3 podcast with Grant Lawrence.

New Order - "Bizarre Love Triangle (Shep Pettibone remix)"
I pretty much replayed this cut all the way across the Indiana Toll Road- seems like it was written for screaming along in one’s car across boring midwest interstates.

Mavis Staples - "Turn Me Around"
Hard to pick a standout cut, they are all so good.  Marching off to freedom land.

Billy Bragg - "Some Days I See the Point"
Achingly beautiful, but probably not the safest road tune because I’m inevitably in tears by the end.

Lovely picks--stay tuned for the next edition ...

Race and Music in America

Justin E. H. Smith draws upon two HUP books--Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves and Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy--among others, in a new essay on "Race and Music in America," posted at 3 Quarks Daily.

Updating the hymn book

From the Associated Press we learn that Jamaican hymn books will soon include songs by reggae legends Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Whether or not the two devout Rastafarians would be pleased to hear this were they still with us is debatable.

Neither Marley nor Tosh made the cut for the new edition of The Harvard University Hymn Book, published this October. The hymnal first appeared in 1892, and this fourth edition replaces the 1964 version, adding over 100 new songs.

The hills are alive with the sound of __________

The New York Times seems to introduce new blogs at a pretty good clip--some are interesting, some kind of miss the point. File their new offering, called "The Score," in the "interesting" bin. It's written by four American composers--Glenn Branca, Alvin Curran, Michael Gordon, and Annie Gosfield--and it consists of their reflections on why they do what they do. Gordon's entry on why he likes "weird music" is a highlight. And the audio samples are a nice touch--Gosfield's "The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory - Part II" is a fantastically kinetic piece of music.

In other music/blog news, there's a nice review of Howard Hampton's Born in Flames at "The Moviegoer":

But I’ve never read a film writer with a voice quite like Howard Hampton. He’s just published a new book of essays entitled Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press, $28.95), and it’s by turns exhilarating and confounding. Imagine Manny Farber on fast-forward, or Lester Bangs if he were addicted to Red Bull instead of cough syrup. Hampton is the master of that dense, can-you-keep-up-with-me style of writing that Film Comment specializes in: full of puns, wordplay and rapid-fire allusions to culture both high and low.

||| More on Born in Flames.