Celebration or pathology? Commodity or art? The dilemma of African-American expressive culture.

In the mid-1970s, Ralph Ellison and a white social historian shared a panel on blacks in Hollywood film. The historian analyzed in agonizing detail the demeaning role that Hollywood had assigned to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in a Shirley Temple movie and attacked the representation as pure and simple racism. Clearly, this film confirmed Stanley Elkins' pathology thesis, popularly known as "Samboism." When Ellison's turn came to judge the film's merits, he merely asked, "Did you notice how Mr. Robinson danced?" The African Americans in the audience instantly got his point and chuckled. Ellison had signified on the pathology thesis by celebrating Bojangles' artistry, which, although back-grounded in the film and incidental to its plot, no amount of pathological ascription could write out of the picture. How times have changed. On the back page of Dissent, Todd Gitlin (1999) reports the following social drama:

   In 1995 employees of the Library of Congress protested a photographic show,
   "Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation," that
   documented the buildings where slaves led their lives around the plantation
   manors, juxtaposing photos to the texts of slave narratives. Employees
   protested that the show made them feel bad, whereupon squeamish Library
   administrators took it down. The president of an African-American Cultural
   Association told a reporter, "An exhibit is supposed to celebrate something
   positive."

Gitlin comments that, as painful as the bad news in history may be, "a smiley-face theory of history is worse." The celebratory turn in African-American Studies may be identified as an all-American or, pace Albert Murray, omni-American affirmative commodification of symbolic cultural capital.

African-American historical memory is torn between the dual and alternating heritages of pathological ascription and celebratory achievement, between outside habits of racist ascription and the appreciative inside view, and between past significance and present meaning. Both poles are inscribed, as overlayered palimpsests, in the representational logic of black cultural productions. They have settled in historically grown patterns of commodification that are in turn controlled by an ever-changing tyranny of expectations. To complicate things further, the social playing field in which these representations are made public is marked by the binary push and pull of the color line, a racialized killer opposition that controls and choreographs the conceptual frameworks and discursive traditions. To balance these conflicting narratives of achievement or ascription and to negotiate solomonically between the dual pull of past (historical) significance and present (political) meaning is anything but easy. Several new voices from outside the United States have entered this contested public sphere and tried to do new justice to African-American expressive culture. They address themselves to the conflict-ridden discursive traditions in the push and pull of ascription and achievement. Individually, these new studies cover much new ground, but when placed in conversation with each other and with past debates, they help us map the territory in which black music acquires its political place and its cultural meaning.

Like Gitlin, I suspect that the market and the Arminian disposition of American popular culture, both of which are subject to local contingencies and present passions, join forces to favor, in the long run, smiley-face theories of history. In that spirit, one of these new studies, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture (White and White 1998), successfully celebrates the je ne sais quoi of black style, not only in the dance style of "Bojangles" Robinson but also in dress, in the grooming of hair, in body gestures, in the kinesics of music or dance, and in second-line parades. The period covered extends from early slavery to the zoot-suit riots of the 1940s. Chief evidence and witness is the black body, both that of rural slaves and of urban free blacks, with more attention paid to black men than to black women. The authors dutifully take note of the scars of slavery and therefore view black bodies as "contested terrain, the sites on which a struggle between racial groups was often destructively played out" (4). But even more so, it was played out creatively, as the authors demonstrate in overwhelming detail, and with far greater enthusiasm. Their central thesis is that a distinctive African-American style emerged early and continued to develop both in the South and North, albeit within the constraints of race relations and of the shifting rural-to-urban demographic parameters. But throughout these changes, as the infectious enthusiasm of the authors suggests, the emerging styles are grounds for current celebration.

The story begins with the characteristics of black attire under conditions of slavery. White and White isolate three black sartorial habits that were in place quite early: the use of bright and clashing colors, bizarre juxtapositions of clothes items, and a tendency to dress not down but up. They identify the first two characteristics as West African, on the authority of Robert Farris Thompson (1983); the third invites a New World explanation. In a process that Orlando Patterson (1982) identified as the "social death" of Africans in a New World, slave society gave to dress, the second skin, an overdetermined cultural function. The intention of slaveholders was to deny slaves any social space, in order to cultivate attitudes of absolute dependence, and to let no slave escape that iron rule (Berlin 1998, 1-14). Hence, sartorial transgressions acquired an existential political significance and social urgency. By stealing clothes of the master and "dressing up," White and White (1998) state, slaves gained a modicum of respect. We tend to forget that, in contrast to our postmodern dressing habits, Victorian culture held to a highly normative dress code as a marker of identity. Gentility and status were clearly coded, as were the dress guidelines for slaves. Yet the sartorial markers of station and respect were not only rigorously maintained but also easily copied, transgressed, and exaggerated in parody. In doing so, the authors aver, blacks were not, as white observers claimed, merely "imitating" white values but were also "subverting white authority" (16). To control such aspirations or to assuage white fears, the minstrel show, a ritualistic and parodic mirror of racist ascription, added the "overdressed" Zip Coons to the "underdressed" Jim Crows and thus completed the range of black character types on the American popular stage (Ostendorf 1979).

Slaves were not only of African origin but were also part of the New World commodity culture that at times could encourage such survivals. When cloth imports from Britain stopped after 1776, slaves needed to make their own clothes, and here the West African traditions of dye making could be maintained and even expanded. White and White pay special attention to dressing up for carnivals and feast days, times that represented moments and spaces of freedom (Fabian 1998). As a reprieve from the backbreaking work of slavery, such days were particularly important to the slaves. At the Pinkster festival, Negro Election Day, or Jonkonnu, a king or governor would be elected and presented in great finery. This elevation of one of their own was an "act of cultural bricolage, the imaginative meditation of an African born slave in a new, European dominated environment" (White and White 1998, 19). John Winslow Homer's painting Dressing for Carnival (1877) is reproduced but only in black and white (34); considering that the clashing of colors is the chief point of the illustration, this flattening of visual effect is unfortunate. The authors pick up the discussion about dress with blacks moving into freedom. The end of slavery made new sartorial options available to free blacks enter the Dandy--but it also problematized the relationship between urban blacks and working-class whites on a contested urban turf.

Motor behavior and kinesics are particularly hard to address in the history of African-American cultural expression. Whereas the coding of sartorial behavior was relatively precise, the way in which slaves were supposed to look or direct their gaze in black-white interaction rituals, or how they were supposed to dance, was more difficult to control. Courtesy manuals on master and servant relations forbade looking the master in the face. Slaves had to master the downward or averted look--as did subaltern groups in Europe. This was even truer for free blacks in the South, where as little as a wrong look by a black male could result in his being lynched. Yet, next to existential fear as the shaping force of behavior were also ancestral habits. Quoting Thompson, White and White (1998, 70) claim that the averted face with eyes closed is a typically African expression of resistance or denial. To wit, on Mathias Grunewald's 1517 Isenheim altarpiece, young Mary receives Archangel Gabriel's annunciation with an averted face, raised eyebrows, and semi-closed eyes. If this body language is African, how did this "Africanism" make it to Alsace? Unilateral derivations, whether from Africa or Europe, are always problematic. Hence, the celebratory recognition of an African past often ignores other anthropological family resemblances. Here lies a problem to which the authors did not give the analytical and comparative rigor that its complexity deserves.

In the context of African derivations, black dance, although an equally complicated matter, provides a more promising track. "Gimme the knee bone bent" is the invitation to assume a "black" posture in jazz dance, which, argues Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996, 59-81), George Ballanchine was the first to translate into modern classical ballet. Bent knees, lowering the body, and galvanizing the pelvis all seemed singularly obscene to early white observers. What whites considered obscene in such African-derived dancing, blacks found particularly laudable; they in turn considered the body posture required by the schottische or by minuets grounds for parody (Ostendorf 1979, 577-580). This crossing of purposes and of desires gave rise to an endless series of parody, travesty, and imitation. Since the early days, both groups copied and imitated each other on- and offstage in a two-sided ritual of antagonistic acculturation (Devereux and Loeb 1943). Black dance deemphasized body parts that Europeans saw as communicative, namely, arms and legs, and emphasized those body parts that Europeans tried to repress, like the pelvis. This exchange at racial cross-purposes fanned out into modern vernacular dance, where both traditions ultimately prevailed and merged. Patting juba is a particularly good example of how African multiple meters inform black dance in such a way that different body parts follow different meters and drummers. This tradition clearly cannot be explained outside of Africa. Hence, the role of dance is, according to Zora Neal Hurston, central to black music and culture: "Negro songs are one and all based on a dance-possible rhythm" (quoted in White and White 1998, 178). And most of these were not known in Europe.

Parades and processions were popular among blacks, slaves or free. Free-black associations mushroomed after 1800, with many parades and formal balls. These caused a certain lampooning in the press, which blacks picked up and appropriated as self-mockery. But, White and White assert, "it was this parodic element in African-American culture, coupled with the impossibility of determining any precise meaning of black celebratory events, that made blacks such a good vehicle for whites who wished to criticize their own society" (101). The authors missed Harriet Martineau's quip: "The Americans possess an advantage in regard to the teaching of manners which they do not yet appreciate. They have before their eyes, in the manners of the coloured race, a perpetual caricature of their own follies; a mirror of conventionalism from which they can never escape" (quoted in Ostendorf 1979, 580). As happened so often, the public debate was mirrored within black society: middle-class members criticized the "foolish exhibitions of ourselves" and referred to the "degrading frivolous amusement of the parades" (White and White 1998, 103). Frederick Douglass was most prominent among the critics (137). Fear of miscegenation energized the minstrelized put-down of black aspirations. One example was the Grand Bobalition Ball Caricature in 1821 in Boston newspapers, which was straightforward minstrelsy of the Zip Coon kind. Eric Lott (1993) has charted the role of the minstrel show in the racialization of urban white workers. Indeed, urban life in the North was extremely precarious and politically volatile so that urban blacks were in a permanent state of behavioral alert. In 1843, while touring Georgia, Bishop Benjamin Whipple described slaves strutting along with a parade in a manner that would fit the current second line in New Orleans. The Union victory gave blacks more scope in staging parades with a purpose. Hitherto, they had been victims of a white process of signification. Now blacks used "public arena to reenact the slave auction and the conditions of slavery and were taking power over signification" (White and White 1998, 132). In Charleston, slavery itself was put into the grave in a mock music funeral (150). Most striking about the immediate post-Civil War period is the enormous associational activity: between 1866 and 1880 there were 226 registered African-American associations in New Orleans alone. Black militias were forming everywhere, and whenever possible, public parades were staged in the centers of towns despite dangers of confrontation. Blacks in Washington made sure that their parade passed the White House. The authors describe these efforts as battles in the ceremonial and ritualistic uses of the street to contest social space.

White and White treat jazz as the first fusion of African-American and Western parade patterns and music making. It was in New Orleans that military parades began to swing and where, late in the nineteenth century, the second line began to materialize. New Orleans could well be called the city of parades, a place where their mise-en-scene is particularly colorful and splendid. Here, the authors rightly focus on the figure of the marshal (popularly called Nelson), who had to be an expert in the aesthetics of black dance; he needed improvisational skills and physical dexterity and had to lead in unexpected changes, turns, and juxtapositions of steps and dance styles. This historical observation can be corroborated today: the marshal leads and inspires his second line to do the cakewalk, turkey trot, shimmy, the wobbly, Georgia grind, and peacock strut or the monkey, twists, the alligator, and the dog. Such styling shifts into high gear during the New Orleans Zulu parade at Mardi Gras time. It has been argued that Zulu is the only public parade that remains true to the spirit of carnival (Roach 1996, 18-25). The official parades (Rex, Comus), with their highly regimented, socially exclusive, and blatantly racist crewes, introduced Elizabethan pageantry for the purpose of crowd control some time after the Louisiana Purchase, when the indigenous Creole carnival was getting out of hand. Zulu mocks these hegemonic pretensions in a carnivalesque spirit by blacking up and turning such designs upside down.

The colorful Mardi Gras Indians provide another example of New World bricolage. Black Mardi Gras Indians "signify" on the genocide of Native Americans and in doing so present themselves as warriors in a common cause: the control of urban turf and of spaces of freedom maintained against the will of the local police. White and White do not develop all the historical lineages of the Mardi Gras Indians, including European, North American, South American, Caribbean, and African antecedents. (1) The authors refer to the tribe of "Yellow Poker Hunters," which of course refers to the "Yellow Pocahontas," albeit in the ribald spirit of Zulu malapropism.

The period between 1890 and 1930 witnessed the emergence of a black entertainment culture that would give American culture, as Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison have argued, its "jazz cadence" (O'Meally 1998). During this period, the minstrel show that had dominated the stage during the nineteenth century fanned out into new forms of stage entertainment that blacks instead of whites helped to shape (Ostendorf 1979). It is telling how many future blues and jazz artists received their training on the minstrel circuit. The cultural practice that was emerging in places such as New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and Harlem may have looked "pathological" to some, but it was fun and most attractive not only to slumming whites but also to an emerging black urban audience. White and White attribute to Rufus Thomas a much older bromide: "If you were black for one Saturday night, you'd never want to be white again." Or as Moms Mabley put it, "nothin' like being us." So much for an Australian celebration of black culture.

Both the older pathological and the current celebratory mode raise questions of historical method and memory. Black expressive culture developed in a dialectic cognitive and moral setting that, according to W.E.B. Du Bois ([1902] 1997, 38), created a double consciousness. A binary, Manichaean arena stabilized by the asymmetrical power relation of a racialized social system provided a dynamic epistemological matrix that Melvin Herskovits called socialized ambivalence (cited in Ostendorf 1975, 217-218). This concept explains the many shifts in allegiance and in cultural choice for the individuals, as well as the ambivalent interpretability of black cultural data. African Americans, slaves or free, lived in two sets of counterposed value systems and behavioral alternatives--affirmation or rejection of Africanisms, affirmation and or rejection of Europeanisms (French, English, Spanish)--with myriad hybrids of creolizing compromises in between.

The controversies between Franklin Frazier and Neville Herskovits, or between Ralph Ellison and Gunnar Myrdal, over the meaning of black culture are telling examples of how differently similar evidence can be read (see Mintz and Price 1992). Recently, South African anthropologist Adam Kuper (1999) uncovered the dangerous political contradictions in the American concepts of culture and style. This sort of Problembewusstsein is lacking in White and White's politically correct and "contemporary" book on styling. In fact, it was precisely the interpretation of style that remained a controversial issue in a dominant, strongly normative, yet changing culture of white America. Therefore, the very tropes of slave historiography need careful scrutiny, for in many cases they have been encased, as Herbert Gutman put it, in snug and static historical opposites (quoted in Berlin 1998, 5).

The contact history of Africa and the United States, choreographed by the Manichaean rigor of the color line, has left its epistemological habits. The latter has cemented what I would call a binary compulsion in the hermeneutics of black culture. To African retentions, to New World interpretations, to acts of symbolic cultural resistance, and to the signifying appropriation of European forms--to all and any of these cultural options--the reaction of whites and blacks could be positive and negative. The reaction depended very much on the needs, fears, and desires of each specific historical group. Even the new syncretisms of the Creole cultures have been read positively as New World innovations and negatively as New World mongrelizations--the latter whenever Old World purity constituted the tacit background assumption (Ostendorf 1998). These sets of binary switches over the years have become nearly compulsive and are fed by the hidden logic of an overdetermined color line. This social and political overdetermination combined with an aesthetic indeterminacy makes the hermeneutic task of interpreting New World African-American sources exceedingly difficult and turns each interpretation into a potential battle ground (Kelley 2000). It may be one definition of political correctness to sacrifice negative past significance to positive present meanings--in short, to celebrate--but it does not do justice to the contradictory heritage of the black culture.

The same expressive cultural evidence that led white southern racists `to call blacks "uncivilized" could, overlayered by the patina of nostalgia and in a changing cultural matrix, become cause for celebration. Similarly, the conk or process that black cultural nationalists of the 1960s put down as self-hate or self-destruction may, under the current aegis of celebration, be rescued as "creative adaptation." This slow change in the framing of judgments itself needs to be historicized and read in the context of a commodifying culture. The transformative power of humor facilitated the step from pathology to celebration. Black stand-up comedians celebrated in the face of white bourgeois disdain the "badness" of black style, as did Lou Rawls in his popular "Streetcorner Hustler's Blues" or Rudy Ray Moore in his under-the-counter records. The great folk philosopher Moms Mabley "celebrated," or rather "signified" on, the very celebration of black culture in the guise of a cleaning lady, possibly the least legitimate carrier of culture. Such signifying inversions are legion.

The question remains: How should historians deal with these epistemological quandaries and the shifts in the norms of cultural value? It seems a historiography of style needs theoretical inspiration from a critical anthropology and should study not only the manifest aspects of the historic game but also its hidden rules, which are operative in their construction. Pure celebration, that is, a mere recoding of the manifest and phenomenological evidence, takes out the hidden complexity, signification, and tragedy of the story. Such theoretical gentrification ignores the painful social contradictions that Ellison saw buried in the black aesthetic. In his critical review of Myrdal's An American Dilemma, Ellison ([1945] 1966) warns that in judgments of historic black culture, all sorts of current irrational desires and hidden agendas are being hidden. He cites Robert E. Park as a well-meaning but misguided analyst who proposed that the African American "has always been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than its reconstruction or reformation.... He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, [the] lady among the races" (294).

The withdrawal from "reconstruction," "reformation," and "action" into expression and style finds a current equivalent in the withdrawal of inner-city bloods into the glamorous world of consumption. Both withdrawals indicate a form of political paralysis. Alex Kotlowitz (1999, 65-72) elaborates how an accent on styling may lead to the social dead end of hip consumerism. Inner-city poor "equate classiness with suburban whites while those same suburban whites equate classiness with the inner-city poor." Hence, "commercialism may be our most powerful link, one that in the end only accentuates and prolongs the myths we have built up about each other." The urban poor are today allowed to set the trends and define new styles for consumption; they select Tommy Hilfiger, Hush Puppies, Timberland, Nike, Reebok, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Coach wallets, and Guess. Kotlowitz quotes Sarah Young, an inner-city business consultant, who understands styling as a compensation for the lack of power: "Those who don't have much control over other aspects of their life find comfort in having at least some control over something--style" (70). These unexplored tacit background assumptions in White and White's (1998) work indicate that Ellison's warnings are still apropos? However well-intentioned their cultural celebration, it contains some significant social and political contradictions.

A related problem is one of method. The celebration of black culture has a tendency to treat all sources and evidence with equal cheer and without a rigorous historicizing of the sources. The principal method remains that of gathering every scrap of available evidence. Advertisements of runaways, travelers' accounts, interviews with slaves, sociological surveys, black autobiography, paintings, photographs, caricatures, newspapers, and West-African traditions are scrutinized, often with a certain predictability, for evidence of style. Certainly, the authors cannot be faulted for the nature of and family resemblance in the evidence. As a rule, they treat sources not only with commonsensical discrimination but with political correctness. With it, the historicity and anthropological import of the sources simply get lost or are realigned in that triadic pattern: African retention, symbolic resistance, appropriation of European forms. Herbert Gutman, who was profoundly involved in combating the "black pathology" argument, once said that in the thick and morally loaded history of black-white interaction, the resulting cultural forms release their meaning only when observed (and judged) over a long period of time and when the forms are understood as links that surrender their meaning only when seen as part of a long-range dialectic. Although White and White deserve praise for the sheer mass of evidence that they have gathered, their book remains locked in an ahistorical, short-range posture of celebration that is held in place by the need to counteract residual memories of pathology.

With wit and erudition, George Steiner (1998) writes about the intimate and complicated relationship between music and politics. Throughout history, danceable music, due to its infectious powers of suasion, has inspired political fear. Plato considered music potentially subversive and would only allow selected rhythms and clean keys into his republic. Since then, a surprising number of political systems have shared his caveats. The ancien regime suspected the waltz of inspiring revolutionary fear. The Nazis diagnosed in jazz a black poison concocted by Jews for the destruction of the Aryan body politic, a sentiment by no means unheard of in the United States when the search was on for a great white musical hope in the early twentieth century. Stalin considered jazz and rock `n' roll fiendish strategies of monopoly capitalism to undermine the project of communism. American fundamentalists (and monopoly capitalists) joined this round of critics and saw in Elvis Presley's pelvic thrusts the subliminal workings of a communist master plan ready to brainwash American youth with the help of "African-derived" rhythms (Ostendorf 1998). The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, not only shared this dim view of African rhythms but pursued a group of mild-mannered folk singers, Pete Seeger in particular, with a quasi-religious, relentless passion--for singing dangerous songs such as "We Shall Overcome" or "If I Had a Hammer." Music, as hegemonic fundamentalists of all nations have agreed, is potentially suspect. But why? Is music intrinsically subversive of politics or is it merely a willing handmaiden to any ideological design? Is the Ring des Nibelungen inherently fascist, as some critics have claimed, or did the Nazis merely instrumentalize Wagner's siren song? The Times Literary Supplement (Horowitz 1998) reports that in a lecture at Bayreuth, Joseph Horowitz reassured an assembly of Wagnerites that Wagner was and still is the favorite composer of many Jews. Did not Theodor Herzl have his first vision of the state of Israel while under the spell of Tristan ? Maybe so, but Hitler allegedly fleshed out his worldview while hypnotized by the Ring des Nibelungen. Admittedly, for fascist and Zionist nationalists, music may have been a potent force. But what about music in a liberal democracy? How does rock `n' roll or rhythm and blues connect with politics in the ages of Eisenhower and Nixon, if at all? Armed with this question, we enter the debate begun by Brian Ward (1998) in his book on black music in the Civil Rights era.

It is interesting to note how quickly the passionate controversies over all forms of popular music, from folk to rock, that raged not so long ago have been all but forgotten. Just My Soul Responding, Brian Ward's fact-filled examination of "Rhythm and Blues, black consciousness, and race relations" focuses on the short span between 1954 and 1970. It is theoretically more sophisticated than White and White's work. Although Ward's book represents ethnomusicological historiography at its best, its judgments have not gone unchallenged (see Kelley 2000). The author begins his narrative in 1954, when the black freedom struggle achieved a victory in Brown v. Board of Education. In March of that year, the Chords, a black six-man R&B vocal group, recorded "Sh-boom." By July, the tune had crossed the color line and become a hit on the white best-seller list. Until that momentous threshold was crossed, black hits were "domesticated" and given a white "cover version" on the assumption that black performance styles were too rough, too sensual, and too outspoken for white middle-class audiences. Pat Boone reformatted Little Richard's songs in whiteface, and white jazz musicians were second-lining Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie for a smoother version of bop. For both jazz and pop audiences, there existed separate black and white structures of feelings and music markets.

What, Ward asks, is the significance of this coincidence between the freedom struggle and a pop song crossing the color line, thus ending a system of both legal and musical apartheid? How have the Civil Rights movement and the development of a commodified music market been connected since that date? In asking these questions, Ward tries to avoid false romanticization of the "counterhegemonic power" of popular culture. At the same time, he faults the Frankfurt school for its dismissal of mass culture as either false harmonization or as social pathology. He rejects both ahistorical celebration and the wound-worshiping habits of the pathology school. This is an excellent starting point. Ward puts it solomonically: rhythm and blues both "challenged and stabilized" the system. But in trying to determine how to assess that forever-shifting balance between challenge and stabilization lies another can of worms. For Ward, the color line functions as the main social orientation. The crossing of that line by music and musicians interests him most. From about 1954 to about 1963, in the early phases of the Civil Rights movement, an integrationist sentiment prevailed among black journals and critics. Although black and white audiences maintained separate social spheres, music and musicians began to cross the color line in an unexpected fashion. In the current cult of blackness entertained by whites, it is often forgotten that until the 19608, many middle-class blacks expressed a liking for the music of white crooners and for middle-class pop; and Chuck Berry played before southern white collegiate audiences. These facts and the news of a crossover hit strengthened the optimism for integration--that the two races would finally come together. This belief was supported by reverse crossovers when black audiences cheered Elvis Presley as one who "spoke their language." Yet blacks soon discovered that white enthusiasm for black music did not necessarily reflect changing racial attitudes. Rhythm and blues lyrics remained refreshingly skeptical. Chuck Berry comments in his 1964 hit "Promised Land" on the ill-fated Freedom Rides and their goal to integrate the interstate bus system. The journey began in Norfolk, Virginia. In Alabama, bombs were thrown, and the riders were beaten in Birmingham: "We had most trouble, it turned into a struggle, half-way across Alabam. And that hound broke down and left us all stranded, in downtown Birmingham." Then he got "off the bus," bought a "through train ticket, right across Mississippi," and called folks in Norfolk to tell them that he had arrived safely in the promised land: California. (3) Ward reminds us that, despite their active support for black music, white collegians during that period retained their racist views of black culture; indeed, their desire fed on the hidden apprehension and stereotypical envy of black sexuality. The binary trap of such positive reification of black ecstasy is an old topic that Bernard Wolfe ([1948] 1972) and Norman Mailer (1957) have explored much earlier. White youth in search of ecstasy represented merely the other side of the racist coin. But their adoption of black music was also part of a generational drama. Whereas white youth courted black ecstasy as a "liberating counterculture," the parent generation saw in that same black ecstasy a corrosive influence and cultural decline or mongrelization. David Noebel (1966), a Protestant minister, expressed a common fear about African-American "rhythm, riots, and revolution" (Ostendorf 1998) that linked Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Soviet regime. As previously noted, even the current white celebration of black culture cannot cancel this old historical mortgage that began in the minstrel show (see Ostendorf 1979).

The evolution of a black consciousness and of a separate cultural sphere--this time with some economic self-determination, yet embedded in the same capitalist music market--began after 1963. Its emergence led to a diversification of political and cultural options within the black community. The goal of black-movement intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka or Stokeley Carmichael shifted from integration to black cultural nationalism and Black Power. In the previous system of musical apartheid, the social and cultural reservation of black music had been ascribed, yet inside these spaces, blacks maintained their own culture. Now a space opened for a differential culture of "blackness" that, despite its more separatist stance, continued to fascinate white listeners. Indeed, the previous system of musical apartheid of production and consumption all but disappeared. The movement intellectuals of Black Power began to demand more solidarity from R&B artists at the very moment when these artists became interested in making some real money with their music. In this new cultural and political realignment between black and white markets, a debate began about the authenticity of black music vis-a-vis the commercial sellout to the mainstream. Despite educated projections and prescriptions as to what is genuine, the "folk" continued to consume whatever they preferred, against better advice from their educated peers--often with open disregard for the color line. Ward (1998, 8) writes, "It is important to recognize that, although rooted deeply in the particularities of the African American experience, Rhythm and Blues has demonstrated a phenomenal capacity to move hearts, minds, feet and sundry other extremities, irrespective of boundaries of race, class, gender, religion or nationality." In fact, its danceable rhythms were designed for crossover.

Just as religion and politics converged in Martin Luther King's marches, so a fusion of sacred and secular structure of feeling energized the new black musical sphere. These ironic reversals of secularization and sacralization occurred in two steps. After the migration into the northern cities, a gospelization of church music occurred from the 1920s onward that some church elders deplored as a form of secularization. But this secularization also implied a black assertion of black religious liturgy. After 1963, pop music in turn was gospelized, a reverse process that reintroduced into the dance tradition elements that were previously deemed secular but that now were enriched with religious passion from the church. Brian Ward obviously likes the music about which he writes, although one detects residual qualms about the music's mass cultural provenance. Contrary to cultural custodians, who have a clear and selective idea of what "authentic" black music is supposed to sound like, Ward uses as evidence what people actually listened to and what they bought in the market. He thus makes use of a "lower order" of sources--Billboard charts and other informational grapevines of the mass market--and treats fanzines as a serious source. Although he scrupulously weighs their representativeness and accuracy, by and large he puts greater faith in what people do than in what specialists preach. Proven commercial success, not artistic merit, is his measuring rod.

Hitherto, most historians of black music preferred the more "authentic" expression of blackness--gospel, blues, and jazz--rather than commodified R&B, and most of them started from a set of clear, selective criteria. Ward's approach is evenhanded: "Any attempt to use twentieth century black popular music forms to probe black mass consciousness which fails to view them as simultaneously cultural commodities and creative forms of individual and communal expression is deeply suspect" (11). This is vintage Adorno: each cultural item is both a fait social and an aesthetic form. This refreshing and no-nonsense approach merits some reflection on historical change not only of commodities but also of our attitude toward them. With time, after thirty or forty years, commodified forms take on a patina of authenticity. Indeed, they begin to look more genuine than artistic and creative forms that are currently in the process of commodification. I remember well when movement intellectuals criticized James Cleveland's "commodified" performance of "Peace Be Still" in a manner that thirty years later would seem totally misplaced. Today, Cleveland's best-selling performance (in a series of Savoy records that included Parker and Coltrane) is part of the musical pantheon. Who cares today whether it was commodified then?

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (1998) address the question of authenticity in folk music. There was hardly a musical genre and group for which the question of authenticity was more heatedly debated than folk. The examples of Alan Lomax and Harry Smith are telling (see Weisbard 1998). Alan Lomax, established folk ethnographer and well known editor, staged and choreographed his "authentic" folk informants and urged them to assume an authentic pose. As a rule, this consisted of reaching back to a putatively more genuine or "older" form of presentation, the sort of flat unaccompanied delivery many have come to associate with Appalachain folk singers. When these same informants let go on the dance floor, which folk collectors such as Lomax tried to ignore, they sounded different--more like what Harry Smith collected, more intense, passionate and raucous. (4) Today, Harry Smth--who influenced many of rank and fame, including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez--wins out over the pruned and edited version of pure Lomax-style folk. The same process, it seems, has occurred with R&B. Ward (1998) courageously takes an antipurity stance and joins those who call black culture a mulatto culture that was energized by hybridity and mixture. He therefore criticizes the quest for mythically "authentic" black soul, "unadulterated" by white influence. This futile quest for formal purity, which is an inversion of the erstwhile white Aryan search for racial purity, continues today on both sides of the racial divide: "Ironically, however, this sort of racial essentialism actually undervalues the dazzling complexity and syncretic brilliance which have characterized black American musical forms in favour of a desperate search for African roots and retentions, as if these comprised the only criteria for evaluating the worth and relevance of contemporary African American music" (11). Amen.

Ward also focuses attention on power and the market. Black-oriented radio stations were, and remained, a minority. Black styles dominated among announcers, whose delivery was copied by white announcers, but the ownership of production remained mostly white. And even black capitalism subordinated racial concerns to their economic success; Berry Gordy Jr. of Motown fame is a good example. Ward observes, "American dreams to the core, black capitalists and professionals invariably pursued the rewards of the mainstream rather than settle for success in some segregated racial enclave" (13). And they were wary of revolution that might upset the capitalist applecart. In essence, R&B did not associate too closely with movement activities, at least until the Black Power arena had opened and charted new black cultural markets to be serviced. With a few exceptions, the movement intellectuals were, as a rule, not cognizant of mass taste and were often critical of R&B artists. Nina Simone arrived after 1967 with a black cultural nationalist agenda, and Harry Belafonte openly supported the movement. The rest were neither leaders nor messengers in the movement. Even James Brown was first an American capitalist and then a supporter of political platforms. But that may in retrospect have been the right choice because it was of greater service to the black community.

Returning to the question of whether R&B or music of any kind challenges or stabilizes the market, although Ward avoids the false choices of pathology or celebration, he sits squarely and somewhat helplessly on the fence. In my view, the question should be given another turn of the screw, and some consequences should be drawn from the details of Ward's story. The challenges, it turns out, were mostly local, ephemeral, and contingent, whereas the stabilizations are long range and systematic. Here, a bit of Ward's own methodological advice given at the beginning of the book might have helped to unravel that yam a little further. Hegemony comes into play in defining the extent of options and choices that the market offers, for markets are like gods who permit nothing outside of marketable choices. And when choice is reduced to Burger King or McDonald's, that exclusive "or" needs to be addressed. The evidence certainly is available in the book, and in that sense, the success of black music is not so much a political as an economic, all-American success story that continues to this day. Apart from this reticence, the book is methodologically a trailblazer. In the introduction, Ward sets the parameters guiding his tracking devices and his judgment of evidence. Each piece of music, he argues convincingly, must be seen at the intersection of musical, economic, legal, and racial forces that are in turn influenced by the factors of gender, class, and generation. These shaping forces interact in the dual arenas of production and consumption. In the arena of production, songwriters, musicians, engineers, producers, label owners, lawyers, accountants, music publishers, marketing executives, deejays, and radio programmers come together as individual agents of musical change. Ward pays attention to all of these factors and agents. In the arena of consumption, Ward further notes, one needs to distinguish selective audiences, which would include individual listeners and their judgments and also collective communities of listeners grouped around fanzines, as well as black and white rural and urban audiences, divided by high-, middle-, or working-class orientations. Their separate taste cultures are not stable entities but mesh and merge over time. This premise holds that white or black popular audiences have never been passive recipients of a "homogenized" Tin Pan Alley fare. They have always made choices and discriminated, often in unsuspected ways. The victimization and manipulation theses therefore needed revision--I fully agree--but the arguments of the Frankfurt school on commodification are by no means invalidated. (5) As Walter Benjamin argued, it is not only commodities that are mass produced but also audiences and their taste cultures. Ward's book is an important contribution to the argument.

On one level, popular music impinges powerfully on politics; it creates social spaces--in Johannes Fabian's words, "moments of freedom" (1998)--in which a sense of selfhood and community may flourish. This is Eyerman's and Jamison's (1998) central thesis, one that is wrapped in much sociological theorizing but which dovetails nicely with Ward's historic sweep. Their book is an elaboration of theories developed in a research group at the University of Upsala, parts of which appeared previously in an article written by Eyerman and Scott Baretta (1996). Eyerman and Jamison speculate on the dialectical push and pull and mutual mobilization of music and politics in a changing social and political sphere from the nineteenth century to the present. How were cultural traditions and collective identities shaped by folk music, and who were the movers and shakers? The authors combine their sociological theorizing with historical research ranging from nineteenth-century populism to immigration history and current ethnic politics. They consider folk and country music as well as black popular music. Although the book lacks the empirical specificity of Ward's book, it supplements and corroborates his findings.

Social movements, so runs Eyerman and Jamison's thesis, create new structures of the public sphere, spaces of collective socialization, in which new ethnic and interethnic personal and group identities may be formed. These loose clusters of social movements create their own ritual practice. These new structures of feeling and spaces of socialization in turn prepare social change and help set it in motion. American folk song, first heard in the rural areas toward the end of the nineteenth century and collected by urban amateur musiciologists with a pastoral bent, was reinvented as "working class and political song" in the 1930s and 1940s. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger put it to work in the social-reform movement. The Highlander school in Tennessee, a center-leftist pedagological experiment, translated both folk and religious music into the Civil Rights movement. There, movement songsters recoded African-American religious songs to foster interracial solidarity and to mobilize political action. "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the movement, began as a gospel tune, but a small change in the lyrics made it political. It is a striking example of "sacralization" of political goals and of the integration of black religious passion into the mainstream of the Civil Rights movement.

The authors admit that the relationship between politics and music in the 1960s, which began as a third "folk" revival, is again a different matter. Surely, music played an important role in the mobilization of the anti-Vietnam movement, but were the Rolling Stones "political?" Frank Zappa provided an answer when he called music the "language" of youth. Music was the medium in which a particular structure of feeling, which at best expressed a political tendency but which had no political focus, could grow and thrive. It became an erotically fixated "counter-hegemonic" public sphere set off from an adult mainstream dominated by the military industrial complex. Hence, music as medium acquired a particular "truth-bearing" aura that no other medium at that time possessed. Dylan provides an interesting case in point. After initial public involvement, he distanced himself from a blunt politicization of music, and others such as Phil Ochs failed to carry that sort of politicization through. But even Dylan remained oddly political, although in a postmodern, displaced form. "The times they are a-changing" sacralizes the "change" of the anything-goes era (see Ostendorf 1990).

Eyerman and Jamison (1998, 173) conclude in their book: "It has been our contention here that music, as an aspect of the cognitive praxis of social movements, has been a resource in the transformation of culture at this fundamental existential level, helping reconstitute the structures of feeling, the cognitive codes and the collective dispositions to act, that are culture." It is a little heavy on the side of jargon, but it makes sense. In that regard, R&B created the social spaces for a revival of an African-American expressive culture. It not only made such black culture, to quote Freud, "figurable" for a larger, U.S. and world market but solidified and strengthened a sense of musical community.

Each of the three books discussed here pursues its thesis, but the fuller story emerges as we make a tour d'horizon of interpretation that has accompanied the painful but ultimately victorious struggle for recognition of black American music. Having salvaged and kept alive its rich musical heritage despite infinite pathological ascriptions is in itself grounds for celebration. This is what one ground bass of black culture, the blues, is all about.

(1.) Here, the work of Michael Smith (1994) would have helped to thicken the plot of history and to decode some of the signifying that occurs.

(2.) Ellison speculated in 1945 on the effects that such teaching might have on black youth (Ellison 1966). Forty years later, one of my black students at the University of New Orleans refused to read an assigned book: "I'm not into reading, that is a white thing." Cultural expression in the sense of stylin' would have been more to his liking.

(3.) The story of California as a musical promised land is told in DjeDje and Meadows (1998).

(4.) Harry Smith was an interdisciplinarian maverick who moved in avant-garde circles, including film, literature, music, and photography. His anthology of folk music, first issued in 1952, remains an all-time classic.

(5.) With their complaints about Adorno's elitism (see Ward 1998), American critics fail to get his point: his animus was primarily directed at the workings of a culture industry. His failure to understand jazz is due to the fact that he hardly ever listened to what we today would call jazz. Frankfurt radio played mostly Zez Confrey and Paul Whiteman but rarely Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. Adorno's strictures sound quite reasonable when applied to the music to which he actually listened and which he falsely labeled jazz.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Berry, Chuck. Promised land. Chess 1916 (1964).

Rawls, Lou. Street corner hustler's blues. Lou Rawls Live. Capitol Records ST 2459.

Smith, Harry, ed. Anthology of American folk music. 3 vols. Smithsonian Institution Folkways FR, 251-253 (1997). (Reissue of Folkways recording, 1952.)

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Berndt Ostendorf is Professor of North American Cultural History and Director of the Amerika Institut, University of Munchen, Germany. His books include Black Literature in White America (1982), Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1992), and Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft: Modell Amerika? (1995).