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Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2003. [281p. ISBN: 0520210484 $ 29.95 (hd.)]
- The work of
late Eileen Southern and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) are the twin pillars
of Black Music scholarship in the United States. Trained as a musicologist,
Southern was best known for her classic study The Music of Black
Americans: A History.
Baraka, of course,
is the author of the groundbreaking Blues People, a book
that 40 years after its publication is generally recognized as the
foundation of African-American Cultural Studies. Whereas Southern
may have been most concerned with the music, Baraka was most concerned
with the music’s political connotations, specifically in the
context of black cultural nationalism in the 1960s. It is this seeming
divide that Guthrie P. Ramsey largely recovers in his book Race
Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. An ambitious effort,
Ramsey’s Race Music is an interdisciplinary explosion,
finding grounding in the amorphous, theoretical, and familial aspects
of black life and culture, or what he refers to as the “Afro-modernist”
impulse.
- “For African
Americans,” Ramsey argues, “the thrust of Afro-modernism
has always been…defined primarily within sociopolitical arena:
as the quest for liberation, freedom, and literacy as well as the
seeking of upward mobility and enlarged possibilities within the American
capitalist system” (106). Given these desires African-Americans
attached quite a bit of importance to forms of black expressive culture
that entered into the mainstream of American culture in the early
decades of the 20th century. Black literature, art, and music were
perceived as vehicles to counteract racist constructs of black culture
and identity emanating from popular science journals, the burgeoning
film industry and the advertising industry. Many black elites, most
notably W.E.B. Du Bois, understood this as putting forth the best
“face” of the race. Ramsey’s use of the post-World
War II period as a point of entry into his study is useful because
the war provided an urgency to black political demands for fair treatment
and also marks a definitive break—generationally, culturally,
aesthetically, socially, and geographically—from the sanctioned
face of black expressive culture in the 20th century, at least as
forwarded by black cultural gatekeepers.
- Specifically
Ramsey links Afro-modernism to the “heady momentum of sociopolitical
progress during the first half of the twentieth century, and
the changing
sense of what constituted African American culture (and even American
culture generally speaking) at the postwar moment” (28).
Echoing the oft-cited work of Robin D.G. Kelley and Eric Lott,
Ramsey locates
a dramatic tension in the post-world war II period. Instead of privileging
the work of be-bop artists, as Kelley and Lott do in their seminal
essays, Ramsey suggests that the musical styles of mid-century blues
figures like Louis Jordan, Cootie Williams and Dinah Washington—styles
that would have been targeted and disparaged by some before
the war—became
central tenets of the developing Afro-modern world. For example,
Ramsey sees a recording like “It’s
Just the Blues” (1945) by the Four Jumps of Jive
as “drenched
in Afro-modernist sensibilities. The recording codified a specific
moment or urbanity for African Americans. Even the ‘commercialism’
of the piece is suggestive of the aggressively new economic clout
of African Americans, particularly those who lived in the urban
north”
(51). The song's "happy-go-lucky" reflected a sense among
some African-Anmerican artists in the era that their music was worthy
enough to be freely shared beyond segregated black communities and
that they could sustain themselves economically in the process.
- Though Ramsey’s
definition of Afro-modernism fits into the interpretive framework
of Baraka’s Blues People, Ramsey deftly roots this
impulse within the intimacy of black family life. Thus Race Music
begins with Ramsey’s discussion of the role of music in his
family. As he writes in opening chapter, the autobiographical impulse
throughout Race Music, “brings into high relief, some
of the theoretical and intellectual points that I will explore throughout
the book. As an African American scholar and musician, I believe there
is value in exploring the historical grounding of my own musical profile
and revealing this to readers” (4). As such, the chapter’s
title, “Daddy’s Second Line”—a reference to
the death of Ramsey’s father and New Orleans styled funeral
rituals—takes on an added significance. Ramsey’s recollection
of his father’s funeral (occurring at a time when he was finishing
his dissertation) and the centrality of music in his family’s
collective mourning process comprise what he refers to as “community
theaters”—“sites of cultural memory” that
“include but are not limited to cinema, family narratives and
histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating
rink, and even literature” (4). In this regard, Ramsey’s
work owes a great deal to that of early Birmingham School cultural
theorists like Raymond Williams, who found value in the study of everyday
life. While so much of African-American Cultural Studies has focused
on the “everyday” spectacle—think here of virtually
every scholarly study of hip-hop music and culture—Ramsey brings
his analysis back to the more mundane aspects of everyday black life.
In other words how do black people and black families use black music
to cope with the everyday realities of black life in the United States?
- Like the industry
term “race records,” which supposedly marked racial segregation
in American listening practices, Ramsey’s Race Music
privileges practices in which the black masses used the very logic
of racial segregation to create moments of catharsis, recovery, and
pleasure. Not simply relying on his own cultural memories, Ramsey
devotes an entire chapter to the community theater of his extended
family. For example, a song like Ray Charles’s “(Night
Time Is) The Right Time” can be read as a metaphor for the
ways that some
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Ray
Charles |
blacks used late
night leisure spaces—dancehalls, theaters, after-hours clubs,
and various other “chitlin’ circuit” entities—as
a means of recovering their humanity in the face of arduous and debilitating
60-hour work weeks. The ability of these leisure seekers to transcend
their daily routines by finding some semblance of freedom on the dancefloor
or listening to the riffs of an organ-sax R&B combo is an example
of the kinds of catharsis that Ramsey locates within community theater.
Ramsey’s argument about the centrality of community theaters
to the study of black life and culture is most compelling in chapter
six (“‘Goin’ to Chicago’: Memories, Histories,
and a Little Bit of Soul”), the book’s strongest chapter.
In many ways the chapter, which examines three distinct community
theaters, synthesizes the book’s often disparate and competing
energies.
- Ramsey notes
that the “subjugated knowledge”— which can be
found in community theater—“represents a particular
work of the imagination or collective memory of a specific family.
These memories
embody a cultural sensibility that should be a factor in the interpretation
of African American music from this period and beyond” (94).
In addition to the communal memories of the “kin folk,”
Ramsey also cites the scholarly discourses of “blackness”
that emerged in the 1960s (of which Southern’s work figures
prominently) and the music itself. In this latter arena, Ramsey
specifically,
cites James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud”
(1968) as “emblematic of [that] era’s new expression
of Black pride” (151). He further argues
that Brown, as an artist, “stood at the crossroads between
the Civil Rights and Black Power movements” and “between
the celebration of black sensuality and wholesome, Afro-styled
family
values” (151). Like Brown, Southern also negotiated between
spaces, notably the ‘whiteness” of the academy and the
hyper-blackness of the Black Arts Movement and the patriarchy that
manifested itself in both spaces. Ramsey’s
book explores the same spaces Southern negotiated in the 1960s. Many
of the intricate claims that Ramsey makes about community theater
could not have been made without the import of Cultural Studies
(including
Baraka) onto the field of Black Music Studies, but throughout Race
Music Ramsey maintains an attention to musical detail, which
was the hallmark of Southern’s work.
- Ramsey’s
study could have legitimately ended with Chapter 6, but he relates
his thesis to contemporary black popular music forms, or more generally
the post-industrial moment. Though “Scoring a Black Nation:
Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop” (Chapter 7)
and “‘Santa Claus Ain’t Got Nothing on This!’:
Hip-Hop Hybridity and the Black Church Muse” (Chapter 8) seem
like an obligatory attempt to make Race Music relevant to hip-hop
era scholarship, both chapters offer valuable insight in their own
right as stand-alone essays. Ramsey finds value in the music of gospel
artists like Kirk Franklin and Karen Clark-Sheard, whose abilities
at “mixing and matching musical genres with distinct histories”
allow them to “powerfully critique current ideas about secularism,
sacredness and the intense commercialism that is part and parcel of
hip-hop culture” (215). While the black church has been an important
site for the constitution of community within black communities, it
has been increasingly as odds with the decidedly secular and profane
nature of black expressive culture in the post-Civil Rights era. Artists
like Clark-Sheard, Franklin, and others like Mary Mary and Tonex has
sought to collapse the largely generational divide by providing the
context in which the secular sensibilities of hip-hop could be “churched.”
- Maintaining
the spirit of community that pervades the book, Ramsey presents a
unique vantage point to access hip-hop’s relationship to the
genres of black music developed before it. Ramsey looks specifically
at Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), John Singleton’s
Boyz N the Hood (1991) (films powerfully linked to hip-hop’s
move into the mainstream in the late 1980s and early 1990s) and Theodore
Witcher’s Love Jones (1997) (loosely aligned to the
Neo-soul moment of the late 1990s). Throughout the three films, Ramsey
notes that “music is linked to other black cultural practices
such as the dozens, dance, card playing, and so on. Music is central
to constructing black characters within these films’ narratives”
(186). So rather than seeing hip-hop era film and popular music as
out of sync with the very notions of “community” that
black popular music has often constructed, Ramsey brings “hip-hop”
back into the family fold. Ramsey’s take here is refreshing
given that so much of the logic within hip-hop studies either consciously
or unwittingly aims to establish hip-hop in isolation of genres of
popular black music that emerged before it.
- As a working
jazz musician and former musical director for a church, Ramsey has
a first-hand perspective on the intimacy between the music
and the folk. As an interdisciplinary scholar trained as
an ethnomusicologist he is also cognizant of the music and
the formal academic modes of its study. The great success of Race
Music is that Ramsey never loses sight of either of these worlds
and that fact alone makes Race Music a groundbreaking addition
to the fields of Ethnomusicology and African-American Studies.
Mark Anthony Neal
Duke University
Works Cited
Baraka,
Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Blues People: Negro Music in White America.
New York: W. Morrow, 1963.
Southern,
Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1971.
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