Harvard University Press Blog

On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations,” says Hilton Als, “Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”

The little women lurk at the very heart of the modern, the place where Zora Neale Hurston and her girl Ethel [Waters] are keeping the beat. And of course, they were friends, that Zora and Ethel. It may have taken some time to meet each other “across the footlights,” as Hurston put it in her memoir, but once they connected through their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, the bond between this untrained singer and a woman referred to by some as “the Voice of an Era” was strong and intimate. Aesthetically too, they had more in common than one might think. Born in Philadelphia and raised in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood where, as Waters puts it, “whites, blacks, and yellows, were outcasts…together,” she made use of an “elephant memory and gift of mimicry” in school. As feminist blues archivist Rosetta Reitz contends, “It was this magnificent ear and the awareness that there was authority in language, that gave Ethel Waters an edge which she used to empower her life.”

Like Hurston, she mastered the art of multilingual colloquialisms and phrasings, assumed multiple personas in her vocal performances, and finessed the art of deeply performative storytelling as she crafted a distinctly theatrical, vaudevillian style of blues singing that was magnetic and lasting. Only her peer, the passionately adored stage ingenue Florence Mills (whose 1927 premature death rocked Harlem), could match Waters in this regard, having ushered in the 1920s as “the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling.” Of Waters, Hurston would marvel, “She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Listen to her burning up the scene with her slinky 1926 smash, “Shake That Thing,” and you’ll know what Hurston’s talking about. Dolling out double entendres left and right, Waters shifts personas with the turn of a phrase. She’s the swinging seductress one moment and the cool cultural observer the next. “Now it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,” she assures,

Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing
When everybody can shake that thing
Oh, I mean, shake that thing!
I’m gettin’ tired of telling you how to shake that thing!
Oooh, oooh, with this kind of music, who wouldn’t shake that thing?

Ascendant as the queen of Black 1920s vaudeville, Waters knew how to work the drama and suspense in a jook-joint hot number celebrating the joys of carnal movement. Hers is an anthem that condenses the shifting energies of an epoch encapsulating mammoth change: migrated Black peoples spilling into northern cities, bursting with socioeconomic aspiration and artistic ambition, revolting against the norms that had historically sought to violently police their profit as well as their pleasures. In other words, all that “shaking” was evocative of the tumult in Waters’s midst. As Saidiya Hartman points out, she “made music” out of the “noise” all around her in her adopted city of New York, soaking up and translating into her own sonic language “the sounds of life, the loving and fighting and laughter and suffering,” all the while “describ[ing] the deprivation and vitality of cramped living from the inside” of her own Harlem flat.

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

That Hurston not only theorized the sounds in her scholarship and incorporated them in her folk concerts but also performed them herself makes plain the ways that she embraced the act of singing as an extension of her critical ethnographic work. Zora’s singing traverses the presumptive boundaries between Diana Taylor’s conception of the archive and the repertoire, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” Zora’s singing intervenes in what she believed to be the so called hegemony of Harlem Renaissance Black concert hall culture with its refined music, sounds that she abhorred for, in her opinion, watering down the voices of the folk.

The Devil’s Playlist

Ministers denounced it from their pulpits. Sunday school teachers warned their classes of its demonic origins. Yet Christianity and rock ’n’ roll music were surprisingly intertwined from the time when the music first made national headlines in the mid-1950s, and have remained closely linked ever since. Historian Randall Stephens tells the tale of their relationship in The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll, new this month.

As Stephens shows, the long and complex affair between believers and pop culture has been a dynamic story of how the faithful encountered and reacted to the perceived moral chaos surrounding them. Here’s a bit from the book’s introduction:

Rock ’n’ roll’s exciting, unconventional mix of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues was first broadcast on the nation’s radio stations in the mid-1950s. What had seemed like an undeniable abomination would, after the 1960s countercultural revolution, appear less and less problematic. American Christians eventually made an uneasy peace with the pop music that they had once battled so relentlessly. With each passing decade, it had come to seem less and less threatening to the faithful. Pop genres would become key to American Christian identity and church growth, helping make evangelicalism the largest American religious tradition by 2008. As organs and pianos dominated religious music in earlier eras, guitars, drums, keyboards, and bongos were now typical in evangelical churches. Stripped-down praise choruses became the order of the day. Much of what animates evangelical churches in the twenty-first century comes directly from the unlikely fusion of pentecostal religion, conservative politics, and rock and pop music.

A book about music will of course arouse the ears, so Stephens pulled together a playlist of songs and artists that he considers in The Devil’s Music. Have a listen via the player below.

And, from Stephens’s own archive comes the following string of endorsements from some of the book’s key figures.

Jerry Falwell:

Jimmy Swaggart:

And the Beatles themselves:

Jazz and the Literary Imagination

The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is that the pollination has gone both ways, “an unending back-and-forth between a music that hovers at the edge of language, on the one hand, and a writing that strives for the rhythmic propulsion, emotional charge, and melodic contours of music, on the other.”

In Epistrophies, Edwards comes to terms with this foundational interface by considering the full variety of “jazz literature”—both writing informed by the music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. Here’s a bit from the book:

The term jazz literature tends to bring to mind writing influenced by music. But this other sort of jazz literature—that is, writing by musicians—includes an enormous range of work, including not only autobiography but also music criticism, history, interviews, philosophy, fiction, poetry, drama, technical and instruction manuals, liner notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. Aside from autobiographies this work has received little attention from scholars of either literary studies or jazz studies, but it seems to me that this corpus must not be dismissed as a curiosity. It should be understood, instead, as a persistent impulse. Whether in Sun Ra’s “cosmo-myth rituals” or in Ellington’s “social significance” suites, one encounters again and again an approach to aesthetics that resists any easy distinction between “writing” and “music,” instead viewing both as components in a broader sphere of art making and performance.

Edwards makes his way through studies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams, among others, to consider the uses and implications of jazz writing for artists we tend to think of primarily as composers and improvisers. Here’s Edwards again:

Although all the chapters shuttle between jazz and literature, it is not by coincidence that the first is devoted to Louis Armstrong, in an attempt to take account of the apparent parallels or shared predilections across his work as a singer, an instrumentalist, and a writer. To read and hear Armstrong this way—or Duke Ellington, or Sun Ra, or Mary Lou Williams, or Henry Threadgill—is to shift the fringe of contact between music and language by noting that black musicians so often insist on working in multiple media, not as autonomous areas of activity but in conjunction, insistently crossing circuits, rethinking and expanding the potential of each medium in the way it is like and unlike the other. It is also to insist that the provocation goes both ways: from music to literature, from literature to music.

The book’s title itself points to one of these flowing episodes of provocation. There’s a famous 1941 composition by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke called “Epistrophy”—the title refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses—that Amiri Baraka alluded to decades later with his poem “Epistrophe,” which, not for nothing, never once employs its namesake’s namesake literary device. From a bebop standard, to a Black Arts poem, to Edwards’s dazzling new work of criticism—“Epistrophy” to “Epistrophe” to Epistrophies—consider that architecture well-danced.

Japan’s Popular Song Era

Since the 1980s, popular culture has been one of Japan’s most important and most visible exports, from video games and film to fashion and J-pop. But where did Japanese cool come from? What did it mean for Japan to have a “popular” culture? What was “Japanese culture” before the pop? And did popular just mean “Westernized?”

In Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents, historian Hiromu Nagahara faces all of these questions by tracing the rise of Japan’s pop music industry. As can often be the case with stories of mass culture, Nagahara’s exploration of how and why popular songs came to occupy a central position within twentieth-century Japanese cultural politics centers on concerns for hierarchy and democracy in the production, consumption, and critique of art, media, and culture. Indeed, the book demonstrates how the emergence of a highly capitalized culture industry threatened to upend existing hierarchies of culture and taste, provoking vigorous backlash from the political, cultural, and educational elites of Japan. In doing so, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie offers a new understanding of twentieth-century Japan by connecting the cultural history of mass entertainment with the social and political history of the transformation of the nation into a mass middle class society.

But don’t forget about the songs themselves. Here, courtesy of Nagahara, a playlist of tracks considered in Tokyo Boogie-Woogie:

And here’s a bit from the book:

Between the late 1920s and 1960s, an impressive array of musicians, intellectuals, government officials and other members of Japan’s cultural elite not only debated the merits, or lack thereof, of popular songs, but also made attempts at managing and countering the broader set of societal problems that were associated with the songs. This was true from the very outset of the genre’s emergence in the late 1920s. Produced by record companies that were largely funded by Western capital and disseminated through channels such as cinema, radio, and cafés, popular songs quickly came to be recognized as the audible symbols of what contemporaries called modan (modern)—a term that gained currency in the late 1920s as an adjective to denote all that was seen to be part of Japan’s mass-oriented, speed-driven urban modernity. As such, the popular song genre was immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanization and eroticization of Japanese culture—trends that found critics across the political spectrum and were captured by another, more sensational, contemporary phrase, ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense). In this way, numerous songs came to be identified, with varying degrees of plausibility, with countless contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena, be it mass consumption, war time nationalism, occupation-era poverty, or—as is perhaps true even today—the allegedly ever-degenerating juvenile mores.

 

Chuck Berry and the Racial Imagination of Rock

Rock and roll superstar Chuck Berry, whose early work did so much to define the genre, died at 90 on March 18th. Some of the appreciations published in the days since his passing have noted Berry’s prickly relationship to a rock establishment that championed white musicians who, as Jon Caramanica writes, “had been studying him, and were building up a version of rock ’n’ roll that no longer required Mr. Berry, nor his blackness.” The messy transition from Chuck Berry’s rock and roll to that new “version” is the subject of Jack Hamilton’s Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, which we published last year—the book’s cover depicts Berry sharing a moment with Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, whose bandmate Keith Richards Berry would later punch in the face for helping himself to Berry’s guitar. Hamilton’s opening pages are below.

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In January of 1973—the same month that the Rolling Stones were banned from touring Japan due to prior drug convictions, the same month that a band called Kiss (or KISS) played its first gig in Queens, and the same month that a young New Jerseyan named Bruce Springsteen released his debut album on Columbia Records—Harper’s magazine published an essay by future Pulitzer Prize–winner Margo Jefferson entitled “Ripping Off Black Music.” The piece was partly a broad historical overview of white appropriations of black musical forms, from blackface minstrel pioneer T. D. Rice through the current day, and partly a more personal lament over what Jefferson, an African American critic, had come to see as an incorrigible and endless cycle of cultural plunder. The article’s most striking moment arrived in its penultimate paragraph:

The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites. Future generations, my dream ran, will be taught that while rock may have had its beginnings among blacks, it had its true flowering among whites. The best black artists will thus be studied as remarkable primitives who unconsciously foreshadowed future developments.

That Jefferson’s “dream” came true is so obvious it seems self-evident. According to anthropologist Maureen Mahon, by the mid-1970s young black musicians who wanted to play songs by Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad recalled being ridiculed by white and black peers. In July of 1979 thousands of white rock fans rioted at Chicago’s Comiskey Park at the now mythic “Disco Demolition Night,” burning disco records in what many since have described as an antiblack, antigay, antiwoman, reactionary uprising. In 1985, the Hollywood blockbuster Back to the Future featured a climactic sequence in which history is altered so that Chuck Berry’s “sound” is retroactively invented by a Van Halen–obsessed white teenager. By 2011, when a popular New York “Classic Rock” radio station held a listener poll to determine the “Top 1,043” songs of all time, only twenty-two—roughly 2 percent—were recordings by African American artists, and sixteen of those twenty-two were by the late Jimi Hendrix (the “Jimi” of Jefferson’s dream), the lone black performer whose place in rock music hagiography is entirely secure.

Jefferson’s words above were accurate, and it’s tempting to call them prophetic, but they weren’t: Jefferson’s nightmare had in fact come true before she wrote her article, even before “the night Jimi died.” When Hendrix passed away in 1970, one prominent obituary pointedly described him as “a black man in the alien world of rock,” and throughout Hendrix’s tragically brief stardom the guitarist’s race had been an incessant topic of fascination among fans of the music that had once been known as “rock and roll.” Even in the late 1960s, the hypervisibility of Hendrix’s race confirmed a racial imagination of rock music that was quickly rendering blackness invisible, so much so that at the time of his death the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable—“alien”—in a way that would have been inconceivable for Chuck Berry only a short while earlier.

This is a book about how this happened, how rock and roll music—a genre rooted in African American traditions, and many of whose earliest stars were black—came to be understood as the natural province of whites. Moreover, this is a book about how and why this happened during a decade generally understood to be marked by unprecedented levels of interracial aesthetic exchange, musical collaboration, and commercial crossover more broadly. Many of the most famous moments of 1960s music are marked by interracial fluidity: a young Bob Dylan’s transformation of a nineteenth-century antislavery anthem, “No More Auction Block for Me,” into the basis for a song that would become one of the most indelible musical works of the American civil rights era; or the revolution of Motown Records, in which a black American entrepreneur actually bet against the racism of white America and won, and in doing so created the most successful African American-owned business in the country. Or the previously unimaginable inundation of groups from England, most notably a quartet from Liverpool called the Beatles and a quintet from London called the Rolling Stones, both of whom were tireless evangelists for black American music and would soon hear their own songs performed, frequently, by the very musicians they once idolized. And of course there was Aretha Franklin, the Memphis-born and Detroit-raised daughter of one of America’s most famous black preachers, who linked up with a band of white southerners and transformed R&B music; and Jimi Hendrix himself, a black man from Seattle who’d joined up with a couple of white Englishmen in London, and transformed the possibilities of the electric guitar.

If, then, by the time of Hendrix’s death, rock and roll music had in fact “become white,” how did this happen, and why? And perhaps most importantly, if rock and roll music did “become white,” what does it even mean to say such a thing? What ideological forces and cultural logics conspire to elide the audible imaginary of music with the visual imaginary of race? These are questions that we often assume we know the answers to—after all, to describe a singer as “sounding black” or “sounding white” is to gesture toward entire universes of ill-defined but widely understood aesthetic criteria—and yet we rarely take the time to really ask them, to peel back everything that makes such descriptions both nonsensical and strangely commonsense. If we fix our eyes and ears and step back far enough, the repeated disruptions and reconstitutions of this elision of race and sound begin to resemble something like the history of American music itself.

Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

In the late 1950s Chuck Berry was defining rock and roll, but by the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable. What happened in the interim is the subject of Jack Hamilton’s Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. The book explains how, when, and why rock and roll music “became white,” and in doing so offers an interracial counter-history of Sixties music that rejects the ideals of racial authenticity, denies generic divisions between “rock” and “soul,” and “hears together” artists that have typically been separated by critical and commercial force.

We asked Hamilton to put together a playlist of some of the music threaded through the book. The songs he chose and his comments on their significance are below.

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Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”
Dylan’s 1963 composition, the melody of which is borrowed from a 19th-century anti-slavery song, became an anthem of the civil rights movement and arguably the most famous musical work of the 1960s folk revival.

Sam Cooke, “Bring it on Home to Me” (Live)
This electrifying live recording from Miami’s Harlem Square Club in 1963 finds Cooke in full-throated, gospel-infused showmanship.

Sam Cooke, “Blowin in the Wind” (Live)
This 1964 performance from Manhattan’s Copacabana, recorded and released just a few months before Cooke’s death, shows a completely different side of the singer’s versatility, as Cooke suavely reworks Dylan’s folksong into a gently swinging nightclub number.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come”
Cooke’s most famous composition and one of the most powerful musical works of the civil rights movement, “A Change is Gonna Come” was released in 1964 and directly inspired by both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”
Widely regarded as one of the most important recordings in pop music history, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” became a smash hit in summer of 1965 and decisively marked the singer’s transition from folk revivalist to full-blown rock icon.

Lonnie Donegan, “Rock Island Line”
Donegan’s frenetic version of Leadbelly’s classic “Rock Island Line” shot up the British charts in early 1956 and sparked what would come to be known as the “Skiffle Craze,” a brief, intense musical happening that had drastic ramifications on the future of rock and roll in the UK.

The Rolling Stones, “Not Fade Away”
One of the Rolling Stones’ earliest hits came in the form of this pounding 1964 cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” which finds them reworking Holly’s composition in the style of Bo Diddley.

Barrett Strong, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The first single ever released by what would soon be known as Motown Records, this unbelievably infectious paean to capitalism is the perfect musical microcosm of Berry Gordy’s upstart label.

The Beatles, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The last track on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles (1963), this snarling, punk-ish cover version of Strong’s hit offers an early indication of the massive impact of Gordy’s label on the Fab Four (the fourteen tracks on With the Beatles included three Motown covers).

The Beatles, “Rain”
Paul McCartney’s bass playing on this extraordinary 1966 b-side to “Paperback Writer” shows the remarkable influence of Motown session bass player James Jamerson on the Beatles’ mid-1960s music.

Marvin Gaye, “Yesterday”
Gaye’s stunning 1970 cover of one of the Beatles’ most famous compositions came at the cusp of a major turning point in the singer’s career; just a year later he would release his masterpiece, What’s Going On, the last major Motown album recorded in Detroit.

Stevie Wonder, “We Can Work It Out”
Similar to Gaye’s “Yesterday,” Wonder’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ 1965 hit completely reimagines the original song and foreshadows Wonder’s own emergence as arguably the most influential recording artist of the 1970s.

Aretha Franklin, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)”
The Queen of Soul, in all her splendor: Franklin’s breakthrough hit for Atlantic Records in 1967 heralded the arrival of a transformational talent onto the landscape of 1960s pop.

Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart”
Joplin’s incendiary version of “Piece of My Heart,” a song originally recorded by Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma in 1967 and remade by Joplin in 1968, was one of Joplin’s biggest hits and remains one of her most iconic performances.

Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man”
The British “blue-eyed soul” star Springfield’s evocative rendition of John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins’ composition, the biggest hit from her classic 1968 album Dusty in Memphis, is one of the more beguiling and beautiful recordings of late-60s R&B.

Aretha Franklin, “Son of a Preacher Man”
Hurley and Wilkins had originally written “Son of a Preacher Man” for Franklin, who turned it down; after Springfield had a hit with it, in 1970 Aretha recorded it herself in a churning, gospel-infused style.

Aretha Franklin, “Eleanor Rigby”
Franklin’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” transforms the song from an elegiac, string-octet dirge into a rollicking, bluesy statement of feminist resilience.

Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”
Hendrix’s 1968 recording of Bob Dylan’s composition is one of the guitarist’s most famous performances and one of the most iconic musical markers of Vietnam-era tumult and dread.

Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”
A dazzling display of instrumental and studio virtuosity and the closing track on Hendrix’s 1968 masterpiece Electric Ladyland, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” is an apocalyptic blues that showcases the nearly unfathomable dimensions of Hendrix’s musical abilities.

Jimi Hendrix, “Machine Gun”
Recorded live at Madison Square Garden on the very cusp of the 1970s, “Machine Gun” is one of Hendrix’s most explicitly political compositions and one of the more powerful pieces of anti-war music to emerge from the Vietnam era.

The Rolling Stones, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
After an ill-fated flirtation with psychedelia, 1968’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” breathed new life into the Rolling Stones, and remains one of the most influential rock and roll singles of all time.

The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man”
One of the standout tracks on the Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet, “Street Fighting Man” transports Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 classic “Dancing in the Street” into the global unrest of the summer of 1968.

The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”
This 1969 duet between Mick Jagger and the great black female vocalist Merry Clayton is one of the most visceral depictions of war and terror in all of popular music.

The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar”
The critic Robert Christgau once described this 1971 hit as “a rocker so compelling it discourages exegesis”; stunning, wild, and outlandishly offensive, it is perhaps the quintessential song of the Rolling Stones’ long and complicated career.

A Language Anyone Can Speak

In a new work on old songs, Greil Marcus traces three classically American compositions on their paths to authorlessness. He calls them “founding documents of American identity,” and shows them taking shape over time as they draw on historic melodies and motifs until they find firm shape in the hands of one particular artist. In Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, Marcus’s chosen works—Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was A Mole In the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad Of Hollis Brown”—give us three different ways of being America.

The book starts with Dylan and the only song of the three to have actually been written by the performer with whom it’s most associated. For a young Bob Dylan yearning to embody a faceless tradition of American folk there’d be a certain triumph in penning a song that’d leave him behind, and after a career of nearly sixty years he represents for Marcus a form of speech in constant flux, “a language anyone can speak, as if it were a common coin, no one holding more right to it than anyone else.”

There is a language in the American folk song that, as people speak the same phrases as everyone else, seduces or compels them to add their own shadings, their own cues, elisions, emphases, stresses, images, twists, highlights, effacings, so that any statement can appear at once as commonplace and individual, something anyone might say in a way that no one else would ever say it—a language that allows people to find their own voices, and then disappear into the crowd. A language in which there is, at the source, no original—and if there is no original, there is no copy. Each statement is a thing in itself, and not a thing at all.

There is, too, a language in American cultural criticism with its own shadings and cues, elisions and emphases, such that any statement can appear only as that of Greil Marcus. Three Songs was born as lectures, a form of address that only emphasizes the always-felt sense that Marcus is giving straight to you these stories that merge our shared past with his own sharp ear, as if our whole history is a common map but the route all his own—until it’s yours, too. Listen to it travel along to authorlessness through the playlist below.

UP Week: Backlist or Decemberists?

Every year the Association of American University Presses sponsors a University Press Week during which to highlight the important work of nonprofit scholarly publishers. As in years past, AAUP member presses have come together this week to organize a blog tour, a series of posts demonstrating our many contributions to culture, the academy, and an informed society. Today’s theme: “Throwback Thursday.”

Like many university presses, HUP has a long history and a deep, deep backlist to show for it. Though the varying pace of scholarship across disciplines can limit the useful life of works in some fields, one effect of the cumulative nature of knowledge production is that importance can long outlast relevance. A belief in that enduring importance led us to celebrate our centennial in 2013 by bringing back nearly three thousand titles that had become unavailable in the time since their initial publication.

In perusing that collection we noticed, of course, that many of the works were quite clearly showing their age. Their titles, especially, could betray root in times when patterns of language and habits of publishers were vastly different than they are today. In fact, we found time and again that the titles of these works put us in mind of nothing so much as the “tawny historical verisimilitudes” of the hyper-literary, lyrically-mischievous, artfully-anachronistic indie-folk-pop balladeers The Decemberists. And so, for UP Week’s Throwback Thursday, we present the following score of titles and ask: book or song, vintage or retro, Backlist or Decemberists?

Backlist or Decemberists?

 

The tour continues today at the blogs of the Temple University, Wesleyan University, MIT, University of Washington, and University of Toronto presses.

Baraka’s Blues People

Poet, playwright, activist, and intellectual Amiri Baraka died yesterday at 79. A renaissance man who spent over fifty years fusing art and politics, Baraka was also a brilliant critic whose Blues People: Negro Music in White America has proven an enduring study of black music and its meanings. That work was highlighted in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, where author Scott Saul recounts Baraka’s heralding of John Coltrane as “the heaviest spirit,” exemplar of a black aesthetic. Baraka wrote of Coltrane that he “showed us how to murder the popular song,” an act Baraka rendered emblematic: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” In the following excerpt from Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Saul explores Baraka’s location of a new black consciousness in Coltrane’s music.

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“Find the self, then kill it”: such was Baraka’s prescription for a more vibrant black music and a more vital black community, and he began with himself. His Blues People was an unprecedented work of cultural criticism that told the history of black America through its musical forms, but it was also a personal act of re-making—an attack on the white jazz critics who had given Baraka a platform for his own writing, and a critique of the black middle-class world that he had grown up in, as the child of a postal supervisor and a social worker and as a student at Rutgers and Howard University. The basic thrust of Blues People was to reclaim the blues as a way of looking at the world, not just a music: “each phase of the Negro’s music,” he wrote, “issued directly from the dictates of his social and psychological environment.” Baraka attacked white critics for pretending that all music was equal, that it could be evaluated in isolation from the cultural needs of the community that created it. “The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane’s music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music,” he wrote. The question for the critic was less “What do I think of Coltrane’s scream?” and more “Why does this man—and so many like him—feel compelled to scream in the first place?” The goal of jazz criticism was understanding, not appreciation.

Understanding contemporary black music for Baraka meant locating it as part of a long and complicated struggle, one between the dominant forces of Western modernity and a black countertradition that had often been derided and suppressed. This struggle was grounded in separate worldviews, separate systems of ethics and aesthetics. While the “‘enlightened’ concepts of the Renaissance,” he wrote, “created a schism between what was art and what was life,” black music refused to separate art from living ritual. While American culture was geared to rationalization, compartmentalization, and “economic-mindedness,” black music filtered mystery, tragedy, and joy into a compelling form of consolation and resistance. Baraka used this overarching theoretical framework to understand the cultural work of specific musical genres, from work songs, shouts, and spirituals to the blues and jazz in all its forms. At its most incisive, Blues People told the history of jazz as the history of a hybrid music, the sound of creative social antagonism. One of Blues People’s most powerful passages, for instance, describes how early New Orleans musicians were riven by the contradictory desire both to connect with the black community and to “make it” in white and Creole society, and then links this inner conflict between “freedman” and “citizen” identities to the music’s synthesis of blues timbre and brass-band orchestration.

Indie Disco Pop in the Age of Fracture

It’s a fun old parlor game to seize a nice string of words whence it’s found and note its suitability for rock. “Ha, ‘The Three Lous,’ that sounds like a band name.” “Yes! ‘Put Your Clothes on Robert’ is totally the name of my second album!” Well, it’s a game that the London-based dance-pop band CYMBALS plays for keeps, having named their forthcoming album after historian Daniel T. Rodgers’ Bancroft Prize-winning Age of Fracture.

The British music site Broadway World reports that the band was quite taken with Rodgers’ study of the late-twentieth century unhinging of the collective purposes and meanings—regarding citizenship, gender and racial identities, economic structures, and more—that had provided a sense of social cohesion and consistency. The site quotes CYMBALS singer and guitarist Jack Cleverly on his response to the book: “It hit me that I often feel paralysed by the feeling that everything is ‘too complicated,’ and that many people I know feel that paralysis. I realised that this way of thinking can be traced through these songs.”

The album, which Broadway World describes as having “a cleaner, brighter sound” than the band’s “brattier” prior efforts, is scheduled for an early 2014 release from Tough Love Records.

More from Broadway World:

Singles ‘Like An Animal’, ‘The End’ and ‘The Natural World’ are characterized by an upbeat disco cool and all push the 7-minute mark, whereas ‘Winter 98’, ‘This City’, and ‘Call Me’ are brooding, stark synth-led numbers reminiscent of early-New Order, with some lyrics sung in Jack’s native French.

The literary inspiration runs further through the album. The track ‘The 5%’, more obviously making reference to the themes of the album’s namesake, declares "Time can be erased, you’re stupid if you try and stay in place," over a pulsing bassline and swirling electronics. ‘Like an Animal’ is inspired by the intellectual and moral confusion of the main character in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

What’s more, the band announced the album via this video set to a piece poet/novelist Joe Dunthorne wrote in response to what Cleverly told him of how the book inspired the album:

 

Here’s hoping no one minds if we call this a check in the Transmedia column for HUP.