Ring shout! Literary studies, historical studies, and black music inquiry.

Over the past ten years, black scholars in the field of English literature have identified a black literary tradition and developed critical strategies for studying that tradition from within black culture. And black historians have also been writing black history and American history from a black perspective. In the field of history, their works include Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987) and Mary Berry's and John Blassingame's Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982), and in literary criticism, Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984) and Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). By taking an insider's view of black cultural and literary traditions, these books offer insights that cannot be achieved through more conventional means. The success of an Afrocentric perspective in these fields invites black music scholarship to move beyond the standard approaches of musicology and ethnomusicology, by learning from the theoretical insights of black historians and literary scholars and applying that knowledge to the study of black music.

For a glimpse of what existing theories of Afro-American history and letters offer to black music scholars, I will examine the hypothesis of Stuckey and the theory of Gates with musical implications in mind. In doing so, I will use Stuckey and Gates to read black music, Stuckey to read Gates, and Gates to read Stuckey, while recognizing that although literature, history, and music are all different things, certain aspects of black experience may be seen as common to all three.

What I will propose here is a mode of inquiry that is consistent with the nature of black music, that is grounded in black music, and that is more appropriate than other, existing modes for the perception, study, and evaluation of black musical products.

The Ring Shout: The Foundation of Afro-American Music

One of the central tenets of Stuckey's Slave Culture is that "the ring shout was the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them--the values of ancestor worship and contact, communication and teaching through storytelling and trickster expressions, and of various other symbolic devices. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African provenance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms" (Stuckey 1987, 16).

The shout was an early Negro "holy dance" in which "the circling about in a circle is the prime essential" (Gordon 1981, 447). From contemporaneous descriptions of the shout we learn that the participants stood in a ring and began to walk around it in a shuffle, with the feet keeping in contact with or close proximity to the floor, and that there were "jerking," "hitching" motions, particularly in the shoulders. These movements were usually accompanied by a spiritual, sung by lead singers, "based" by others in the group (probably with some kind of responsorial device and by hand-clapping and knee-slapping). The "thud" of the basic rhythm was continuous, without pause or hesitation. And the singing that took place in the shout made use of interjections of various kinds, elisions, blue-notes, and call-and-response devices, with the sound of the feet against the floor serving as an accompanying device. (1)

The shout has been identified as an African survival by Courlander (1963). The earliest on record in the United States dates from 1845 (Epstein 1977, 232), but the practice in this country clearly antedates that record. As Epstein, Courlander, and numerous other scholars have shown, all ring shouts had essentially the same elements, with variations manifesting themselves here and there depending on locale and other factors.

From all accounts, the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which the slaves made music and derived their musical styles. Stuckey points particularly to the origin and function of the spirituals in the ring, contending that they should therefore be studied in relation to their ceremonial, slave-ritual context rather than strictly from the standpoint of Christian religious institutions.

Early on, the shout was central to the cultural convergence of African traditions in Afro-America. In New Orleans, for example, the ring became an essential part of the burial ceremonies of Afro-Americans, in which "from the start of the ceremonies in the graveyard, complementary characteristics of a religion, expressed through song, dance, and priestly communication with the ancestors, were organic to Africans in America[;] and their movement in a counterclockwise direction in ancestral ceremonies was a recognizable and vital point of cultural convergence" (Stuckey 1987, 23). What Stuckey does not say, but which will be clear to readers familiar with black culture, is that from these burial ceremonies, the ring straightened itself to become the Second Line of jazz funerals, in which the movements of the participants were identical to those of the participants in the ring--even to the point of individual counterclockwise movements by Second Line participants, where the ring was absent because of the necessity of the participants to move to a particular remote destination (the return to the town from the burial ground). And the dirge-to-jazz structure of the jazz funeral parallels the walk-to-shout structure of the ring shout, where "the slow and dignified measure of the 'walk' is followed by a double quick, tripping measure in the 'shout'" (Gordon 1981, 449). Today, the ring shout has practically disappeared from rural black culture, but remnants of it persist in black churches in solo forms of the dance.

I should point out here that this "straightening" of the ring into the Second Line does not affect the integrity of the shout. Krehbiel tells us, in what can be considered explanation of this contention, that "The 'shout' of the slaves ... was a march--circular only because that is the only kind of march which will not carry the dancers away from the gathering place" (Krehbiel [1914] 1967, 95). And Courlander reinforces Krehbiel's support as he tells us that the dance is what defines a shout; for, shouting was in reality dancing (Courlander 1963, 195-197), whether, I might add, it is or is not in a ring. It seems, however, that the ritual aspects of the shout are enhanced in the ring, because of symbolic implications that had their origin in Africa.

Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from throughout black culture converged in the spiritual. These included elements of the calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game-rivalry; hand-clapping, foot-patting, and approximations thereof; and the metronomic foundational pulse that underlies all Afro-American music. (2) Consequently, since all of the defining elements of black music are present in the ring, Stuckey's formulation can be seen as a frame in which all black-music analysis and interpretation can take place--a formulation that can confirm the importance of the performance practices crucial to black musical expression.

Because the ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated (Gordon 1981, 451), I must note here the similar conflation--indeed, near-inseparability--of Afro-American music and dance in black culture, both in the ring and outside it. Indeed, the appreciation of black music and its traits, elements, and practices depends upon our understanding these features (outlined in the previous paragraph) as accompaniments to and ingredients of black dance. For our initial strategies must accept black music as a facilitator and beneficiary of black dance. The shuffling, angular, off-beat, additive, repetitive, and intensive unflagging rhythms of shout and jubilee spirituals, ragtime, and rhythm and blues; the less vigorous but equally insistent and characteristic rhythms of the slower "sorrow songs" and the blues; and the descendants and derivatives of all these genres have been shaped and defined by black dance, within and without the ring, throughout the history of the tradition. In the movements that took place in the ring and in dances such as the breakdown, buck dance, and buzzard lope of early slave culture, through those of the Virginia Essence and the slow drag of the late nineteenth century, on through those of the black bottom, Charleston, and lindy hop of the present century's early years, to the line dances of more recent days can be seen movements that mirror the rhythms of all of the black-music genres. It was in the ring that these terpsichorean and sonic conflations had their origin and early development and from the ring that they emerged and took many different forms. From their basis in the ring, the sonic practices in these conflations remained singular to the development of all forms of black music. For in moving outside the ring, these musical practices retained the features that made them central to the ring and its expressive values, particularly the elements of call-and-response, the unflagging and off-beat rhythms, and the vocal production techniques.

Throughout the history of black music, its black listeners have also been dancers. Having emerged from the ring, black music, in the words of Albert Murray, "disposes the listeners to bump and bounce, to slow-drag and steady shuffle, to grind, hop, jump, kick, rock, roll, shout, stomp" (Murray 1978, 144). This relationship between black music and black dance has implications for the reading of Gates's hermeneutics, as we shall see. For in his stress on the material aspects of black cultural practices, there are significant implications for a cultural-studies approach to inquiry into black music.

On Interpretive Strategies

The inspiration for Gates's hermeneutics, as developed in The Signifying Monkey, is Esu-Elegbara (Nigeria), or Legba (Benin), the mythical "classical figure of mediation who is interpreter of black culture," "guardian of the crossroads," "master of style," connector of "the grammar of divination with its rhetorical structures," and trickster, all rolled into one. This figure of African myth possesses many traits: "individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture," and a host of others (Gates 1988, 6). The symbolism of Esu, this guardian and inspirer of the art of interpretation, is profound and has significant metaphors in the black music tradition. Legba (the devil) here appears as guardian of the crossroads and grantor of interpretive skills; as trickster, he is embodied most obviously in the gladiatorial improviser of the jazz tradition.

Esu's Afro-American descendant, for Gates, is the Signifying Monkey of Afro-American vernacular culture. In black America, the Signifying Monkey is a symbol of antimediation, as Gates puts it. The Monkey's use of language in the well-known tales inverts the status of the Lion "by supposedly repeating a series of insults purportedly uttered by the [tale's] Elephant about the Lion's closest relatives (his wife, his mama, and his grandma, too!)" (56). These insults proceed through a series of events, with the Monkey emerging triumphant, escaping the Lion's revenge, and living to continue Signifying on later occasions (see Gates 1988; Abrahams 1970). The tale is filled with sexual innuendo, intimations of abuse and violation, bragging, and put-downs that constitute "versions of day dreams" and "chiastic fantasies of reversal of power relationships" based in vernacular speech, with colloquial, monosyllabic vocabulary and phrasing (Gates 1988, 59, 60). "To signify," Gates tells us, "is to engage in certain rhetorical games" (48). "Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of ... associative and semantic relations" (49). After differentiating the black concept of "Signifyin(g)" from the Standard English meaning of "signifying" and tracing its origins to the Signifying Monkey tales of Afro-American vernacular culture, Gates describes Signifyin(g) as "the black trope of tropes, the figure for black rhetorical figures" (51)--a point to which we shall return later. Signifyin(g) is figurative, implicative speech; it is a complex rhetorical device that requires the possession and application of appropriate modes of interpretation and understanding on the part of listeners (something the Lion did not possess). Signifyin(g) is an art, in itself, to which anyone who has the ability has the right--but a right that must be earned through contest and conquest. (Some individual masters of the art of Signifyin(g) have been H. Rap Brown and Muhammed Ali.) As "source and encoded keeper of Signifyin(g)," the Signifying Monkey is Afro-America's functional equivalent to Esu-Elegbara, his Pan-African cousin (75).

The Signifying Monkey uses the hermeneutics suggested by the myth of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey poems to present a theory of literary inquiry. The theory proposes the "reading" of (i.e. the criticizing of the works of) the black literary tradition by means of the meanings and implications of the myth of Esu and the rhetoric of the Monkey narratives, exploring "the relation of the black vernacular tradition to the Afro-American literary tradition" (xix). In Gates's theory, Esu-Elegbara is central to interpretation strategies and "stands for discourse upon a text," and "his Pan-African kinsman, the Signifying Monkey, stands for the rhetorical strategies of which each literary text consists"--"the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse" (21, 44). Together, this duality, of Esu and the Signifying Monkey, serves as the basis for Gates's theory.

Gates uses the vernacular to examine the formal, assuming that the vernacular contains within it the very critical principles by which it can be read, that "the vernacular informs and becomes the foundation for black formal literature" (xxii). For Gates, "the vernacular tradition Signifies upon the tradition of letters" (22). He assumes that the black tradition has a "fundamental idea of itself, buried or encoded in its primal myths--ambiguous, enigmatic, profoundly figurative, complex rhetorical structures" that can be used for the development of its own critical strategies (23).

Gates's theory implies that the musical practices of Stuckey's ring can provide the means for discourse on the musical performances of which they came to be a part. By the same token, they can also serve as Signifiers on and rhetorical strategies of the black music tradition. In vernacular oral culture the black rhetorical tropes subsumed under Signifyin(g) include "marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens, and so on" (52). In the same way, in music, calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony, and the various rhythmic, melodic, and other musical practices of the ring serve as Signifyin(g) musical figures and are used as such in musical compositions and performances. These musical figures, as well as others, are used to comment (Signify) on other figures, on the performances themselves, on other performances of the same pieces, and on other and completely different works of music. Moreover, genres also Signify on other genres: ragtime Signifies on European and early Euro-American dance music, including the march; blues on the ballad; the spiritual on the hymn; jazz on blues and ragtime; gospel on the hymn, the spiritual, and the blues; rhythm and blues on blues and jazz; rock 'n' roll on rhythm and blues; soul on rhythm and blues and rock; funk on soul; rap on funk; bebop on swing, ragtime rhythms, and blues. And the Negro spirituals were Signifyin(g) tropes in their day, with the slave community using their texts to Signify on other ideas, through indirection, in the surreptitious communication so necessary in slave culture.

Musical Signifyin(g) is not the same, simply, as the borrowing and restating of pre-existing material, or the performing of variations on preexisting material, or even the simple reworking of pre-existing material. While it is all of these, what makes it different from simple borrowing, varying, or reworking is its transformation of such material by using it rhetorically or figuratively--through troping, in other words--by trifling with, teasing, or censuring it in some way (Wentworth and Flexman 1960; Major 1970). Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastiche, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech or narration, and other troping mechanisms. As Gates (1988, 48, 49) puts it, "To Signify ... is to engage in certain rhetorical games ... through the free play of associative rhetorical and semantic relations." It "luxuriates ... in free play." Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values.

A twelve-bar blues in which a two-measure instrumental "response" answers a two-measure sung "call" is a classic example of Signifyin(g): here, the instrument performs a kind of sonic mimesis, creating the illusion of speech or narrative conversation. And when performers of gospel music begin a new phrase while the other musicians are only completing the old one, they may be Signifyin(g) on what is occuring and what is to come through implication and anticipation. The implication is that "I'm already there"; when soloists hang back, hesitating for a moment to claim their rightful place in the flow of things, they're saying "but I wasn't, really." This kind of Signifyin(g) is a way of being in both places at the same time.

Signifyin(g) is an essential element of the "Toast" of Afro-American culture. These "long oral epic poems," with their "complex metrical arrangements," varying meters, and swing, whose tellers are "entitled to make [their] own modifications or additions," recall jazz improvisation (Labov et al. 1981, 331; Mitchell-Kernan 1981, 341). And jazz improvisations are toasts--metaphoric renditions of the troping and Signifyin(g) strategies of Afro-American oral toasts (which include "The Signifying Monkey," "The Titanic," "Stackolee," "Squad Twenty-Two," "The Great MacDaddy," and others). The theatrical recitations of these narrative poems by black toast-tellers, which can be heard on street corners, in barbershops, and in pool halls throughout Afro-America, allow great freedom within the restrictions of their form and are characterized by ironic comment; oppositional balance, e.g., "Hand full of chives, pocket full of herbs" (Abrahams 1970, 99); quick, fluid, and dramatic rendition; situational and textural variation; and what Abrahams calls "tropisms, those elements toward which the performers of the group are attracted" (174). Toasts make use variously of all of the six techniques and strategies of black talk, as identified by Kochman: "running it down, rapping and capping, shucking and jiving, gripping and copping a plea, signifying, and playing or sounding" (quoted in Baker 1972, 114). Contests are based around these toasts and are akin to--perhaps led to--the cutting contests that were so prevalent in early jazz and ragtime music. Such Afro-American musical contests metaphorically trope these characteristically Afro-American toasting contests, reflecting the mutability of the expressive structures and strategies that exist in various aspects of Afro-American culture.

To recapitulate, the Signifiers we observed in the ring--call-and-response, blue notes and elisions, pendular thirds, etc.--became part of the black-idiom-informed musical genres that emerged from the shout, so that all Afro-American musical products become models to be revised through a continuing Signifyin(g) process, as also do some European genres. It is through this musical troping and Signifyin(g) that the more profound meanings of black music are expressed and communicated. As Gates (1988, 81) tells us, "the ensuing alteration of deviation of meaning makes Signifyin(g) the black trope for all other tropes, the trope of tropes, the figure of figures. Signifyin(g) is troping." And when used in works composed for the concert hall, it informs that music with Afro-American vernacular meanings, as is evident in works by black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price, William Dawson, and T. J. Anderson, and in some works by white composers such as Aaron Copland, Morton Gould, Charles Ives, and others.

A word should be said here about the concept of "swing" in Afro-American music, for it is an essential element and a most elusive quality of black music. Most commentators ignore it or assume that to try to explain it is futile; others provide overly elaborate explanations of it (Schuller 1986, 5; 1989, 222-225). From the perspective of the interpretive strategies I am proposing here, however, swing is a natural and perfectly explicable product or by-product of the tropings of black music. When sound-events Signify on the time-line, against the flow of its pulse, making the pulse itself lilt freely--swing has been effected. This troping of the time-line by the placement of events against its flow creates the slight resistances that result in the lilt that, while common to all black music, is most pronounced, evident, and persistent in jazz, where this driving, rhythmic persistence in a relaxed atmosphere is typical. Swing is an essential quality of black music. Swing is a dance-related legacy of the ring shout. And the effectiveness of the Signifyin(g) tropes of black music can be measured in part by the extent to which they create and contribute to it. The power of swing is such that even in the absence of motivic and thematic ideas, its presence creates a sense of eventful continuity in a work of music.

The relationship of Signifyin(g) to the presence and relationship of dance to music in the ring must be considered. Gates makes the point that Signifyin(g), by redirecting attention from the signified to the signifier, places the stress of the experience on the materiality of the signifier: "the importance of the Signifying Monkey poems is their repeated stress on the sheer materiality, and the willful play, of the signifier itself" (Gates 1988, 59). There is a strong relationship between Gates's point and the physical presence of the body in the ring shout (clapping, shuffling, jerking of the shoulders, etc.) and in subsequent music/dance derivatives of black music. Such dance movements are material signifiers in the music/dance experience, joining the Signifyin(g) musical tropes, discussed above, as material elements that should be the focus of our perceptual and analytical attention. For in Signifyin(g), the materiality of the signifier becomes "the dominant mode of discourse" (58). It is this materiality and its solid cultural grounding that prove the impropriety and futility of applying to black music, as aesthetic determinant, the European notion of transcendant, abstract beauty (which leads to formalist analysis and criticism in which "good intonation," "ensemble blend and balance," "proper harmonic progressions," "precise attacks," and other such concerns take precedence over the content of what is expressed and communicated), and that therefore suggest, or demand, a cultural-studies approach to black music--that is, the ring shout itself contains within it the very basis for inquiry from within the tradition. For it is in this way that black culture understands itself.

In sum, I believe that the frame of the ring, the interpretive strategies of Esu-Elegbara, and the Signifyin(g) figures derived from the Monkey tales can coalesce to form the background for a mode of musical inquiry that can expand black music scholarship's intellectual reach. The critical approach introduced below is based on two assumptions: that inquiry into the music of black Americans, including all genres from spirituals to Afro-influenced, Europe-oriented concert works, should engage perceptions, beliefs, and assumptions from within Afro-American culture, and that the expressive values of the ring provide the best means of achieving that goal. The test of this approach will lie in its power to produce culturally and musically meaningful evaluation and criticism.

On Criticism of the Music

Gates and Stuckey in their work have identified black vernacular traditions that can be effectively examined for their analytical and interpretive implications. And Gates, together with others, has identified a canon--a tradition--of black literature. Through their works, these scholars and those from other disciplines invite us to "step outside the white hermeneutical circle into the black" (Gates 1988, 258) and to invent other modes of inquiry that reveal the distinctive qualities of the black music tradition.

Explanations of musical works and performances as realizations of "ideal form," achievements of "organic unity," or as functional artifacts are insufficient for black music inquiry because they all separate the works from their cultural and aesthetic foundations. And conventional musical analysis is in itself inadequate for the demands of black music scholarship and criticism. In its concern for recognizing previously sanctioned and favored harmonic progressions, melodic contours, rhythmic conventions, formal structures and their implications and deviations (recognitions that merely stand and substitute for musical evaluation and judgment), traditional musicology has given little attention to the development of judgmental criteria and has ignored fundamental cultural concerns, having found both areas of concern to be subjective and speculative, and the latter to be "social, not musical." Therefore, it is imperative that music scholarship develop criteria for the aesthetic evaluation of works and for the fundamental cultural concerns of every repertory.

The key to effective criticism lies in understanding the tropings and Signifyin(g)s of black music-making, for such practices are criticism--perceptive and evaluative acts and expressions of approval and disapproval, validation and invalidation through the respectful, ironic, satirizing imitation, manipulation, extension, and elaboration of previously created and presented tropes and new ideas. For our purposes, therefore, criticism may be seen as the act of discovering, distinguishing, and explaining cultural and musical value in works of black music through the identification of the elements that captivate our attention and mediate our perceptions and reactions. Attention to this task implies the responsibility of explaining how well or, indeed, whether composers and performers have succeeded in capturing and mediating our perception.

As culture-based and culture-wise observers respond to poorly done oral-verbal Signifyin(g) with such disapproving comments as "That's phoney" and "That's lame" (Mitchell-Kernan 1981, 324) and to well-done Signifyin(g) with positive comments and expressions--recognizing the effectiveness of the intended witty put-downs and other poetic constructions of oral Signifyin(g) artists--such observers of black music-making respond similarly to musical Signifyin(g) tropes. Whether in verbal or musical arts, this responding customarily often takes place during rather than after performances, creating as a counterpoint to them a variety of call-and-response events. In this way, the black-music experience is, to a large degree, self-criticizing and self-validating, with criticism taking place as the experience progresses. Comments such as "Oh yeah," "Say it," "He's cookin'," and "That's bad," (in response to Signifyin(g) musical events) show approval of those events and, as Murray would say, their extensions, elaborations, and refinements. Musical Signifyin(g) by the performers elicits response and interaction from a knowledgeable and sensitive audience, which participates by responding either vigorously or calmly to the performance. The musical "toasting" that is improvisation is particularly noted by black-music audiences. To paraphrase Mitchell-Kernan (1981, 325), a Signifyin(g) act that surpasses another in an excellent performance is particularly treasured, while incompetent performances are "likely to involve confusion, annoyance, boredom, and ... indifference" (Murray 1973, 87). Those who know the culture know when the notes and the rhythms do not fit the context and when the idiomatic orientation is wrong. So must critics. If they are to be taken seriously within the tradition they are criticizing, they must recognize their duty "to increase the accessibility of aesthetic presentation.... [It is] primarily a matter of coming to terms with such special peculiarities as may be involved in a given process of stylization" (Murray 1978, 196).

(The self-criticizing process operates spontaneously where performers sing and play in contact with their cultural base. But it cannot function the same way when, for example, blues, jazz, or gospel music are performed for audiences whose behavior is governed by the customs of the European concert hall.)

All of this implies that Signifyin(g) tropes must be decoded before they can be appreciated and explained (Mitchell-Kernan 1981, 327). Indeed, decoding and explaining are what I have tried to do below in my analyses of the Morton and Still pieces. Such decodings and explanations are the stuff of interpretation, and they will vary somewhat from critic to critic. Therefore, we must not eschew differing interpretations of a particular work; but we can insist that they result in warrantably assertible statements of value-perception.

"Call-Response": The Musical Trope of Tropes

The musical practices present in the ring (see above)are all musical tropes (3) that can be subsumed under the master musical trope of Call-Response, (4) a concept embracing all the other musical tropes (as the black literary concept of Signifyin(g) embraces the rhetorical tropes of the dozens, rapping, loud-talking, etc.). (5) The term Call-Response is used here to convey the dialogical, conversational character of black music. Its processes include the Signifyin(g), troping practices of the early calls, cries, whoops, and hollers of early Afro-American culture, which themselves were tropes from which evolved--through extension, elaboration, and refinement--varieties of the subtropes: call-and-response, elision, multimeter, pendular and blue thirds, and all the rest, including interlocking rhythms, monosyllabic melodic expressions, instrumental imitations of vocal qualities, parlando, and other processes that have a kind of implicative musical, as well as semantic, value.

The lyrics of a work of black music obviously have semantic value--value whose meaning can easily be understood by informed auditors. And for those familiar with black musical culture, the semantic value of instrumental music is equally evident. Such non-verbal semantic value is explained by Albert Murray in The Hero and the Blues, where he contends that the musician is concerned with "achieving a telling effect" (emphasis mine, Murray 1973, 10). Murray describes how the solo instruments in Ellington's band, for example, state, assert, allege, quest, request, and imply, while others mock, concur, groan, "or signify misgivings and even suspicions" (86). But this semantic meaning, this telling effect, is not external to the music. In one sense, at least, Murray's "telling effect" is synonymous with Gates's "semantic relations" (see Gates 1988, 48); and both concepts can account for and intellectualize what black vernacular musicians feel and assume as they nonchalantly claim that when they play they are "telling a story." Another aspect of semantic value is the exhortative potential of such instrumental music: the tropes, Signifyin(g)s, and other constructions can exhort soloists to create ever more exciting improvisations and riffs, these exhortations carrying the semantic values of urging, beseeching, and daring. What is being asserted, implied, mocked, exhorted--indeed, Signified--here are the musical tropes of Call-Response: tropes that carry with them the values, sensibilities, and cultural derivatives of the ring.

Call-Response--this master trope, this musical trope of tropes--functions in black music as Signifyin(g) functions in black literature and can therefore be said to Signify. It implies the presence within it of Signifyin(g) figures (Calls) and Signifyin(g) revisions (Responses, in various guises) that can be one or the other, depending on their context. For example, when pendular thirds are used in an original melodic statement, they may constitute a "Call"; when they are used to comment upon, or "trope," a pre-existing use of such thirds, they can be said to constitute a "Response," or Signifyin(g) revision. This concept of Call-Response, although suggested by Gates's rhetorical trope of Signifyin(g), is implied by and derived from the musical processes of Stuckey's ring, as described on pages 50 and 51 above; it is subject to the hermeneutical strategies of Gates's Esu.

The theory implied here assumes that works of music are not just objects, but cultural transactions between human beings and organized sound--transactions that take place in specific idiomatic cultural contexts, that are fraught with the values of the original contexts from which they spring, that require some translation by auditors in pursuit of the understanding and aesthetic substance they can offer. With this in mind, I turn now to the application of this approach to two recorded performances, building in the first instance on Gunther Schuller's analysis of Jelly Roll Morton's "Black Bottom Stomp" and then on Orin Moe's provocative analysis of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony.

"Black Bottom Stomp"

The performers in "Black Bottom Stomp" are Morton, piano; George Mitchell, trumpet; Kid Ory, trombone; Omer Simeon, clarinet; Johnny St. Cyr, banjo; John Lindsay, bass; and Andrew Hillaire, drums. Together they form the typical New Orleans ensemble: trumpet, clarinet, and trombone fronting a rhythm section. The recording was made on September 15, 1926, as Victor 20221. For my analysis here, I used the Smithsonian Institution's reissue in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz set. Gunther Schuller's analysis, Illustrated on a chart in his Early Jazz (1968), divides the performance into thirteen "structural divisions" in which he notes the instrumentation and number of bars in each and points out other matters of structural interest such as "breaks," "stop-time" events, and modulations. (Since, by press time, permission to reproduce Schuller's chart had not been forthcoming, I am compelled to refer readers to page 157 in Early Jazz.) Schuller's narrative reveals "at least four different themes and one variant," "a brilliantly stomping Trio," the usual key relationships and chord progressions, the appearances of solos, varieties of rhythm, metric fragments, and use of instruments (Schuller 1968, 155-161). Schuller's analysis, as usual, is perceptive, revealing, and informative. I would like now to expand upon it from the perspective established in the preceding pages.

In "Black Bottom Stomp" the "exuberance and vitality," the "unique forward momentum," and what constitutes those "Morton ingredients," all mentioned but not explained by Schuller, are the very derivations from the ring that are basic to Afro-American music. The performance is governed by the Call-Response principle, relying upon the Signifying) elisions, responses to calls, improvisations (in fact or in style), continuous rhythmic drive, and timbral and pitch distortions that I have identified as retentions from the ring. At every point, "Black Bottom Stomp" Signifies on black dance rhythms. Underlying it all is the time-line concept of African music: as rhythmic foundation for the entire piece, but kept in the background for the most part and sometimes only implied, there is a continuous rhythm that subdivides Morton's two beats per bar into an underlying rhythm of eight pulses. This continuous, implied, and sometimes-sounded pulse serves the function of a time-line over which the foreground two-beat metric pattern has been placed, and it serves as the reference pulse for the two-beat and four-beat metric structures and the cross-rhythms and additive rhythms that occur throughout the performance. The clarinet and the banjo frequently emphasize this time-line with added volume, thereby bringing it into the foreground as a Signifyin(g) trope, as in, especially [B.sup.2] and [B.sup.5], respectively, but also throughout the performance. At [B.sup.2] the clarinet revises and emphasizes the "stomp" rhythm introduced in [A.sup.3], as well as the time-line, with cross-rhythms derived from African performance practices; in [B.sup.5] the banjo does the same. This is accomplished by these instruments' filling in the quarter-note values and the eighth-note rest of the [A.sup.3] pattern with repeated eighth notes in which the accents expected on beat three of each measure are anticipated by a half beat. It is against and around the time-line that all other rhythmic organization and activity take place. The four-beat rhythm that occurs in [B.sup.1], [B.sup.3], and [B.sup.5], the breaks that occur in [B.sup.1] and [B.sup.7] and the stop-time of [B.sup.4], the accented cross-rhythm of the drummer in [B.sup.2] and [B.sup.6], the "stomp" rhythm highlighted in [A.sup.3] (clarinet) and [B.sup.7], and the after-beats on the tom-toms in [B.sup.7] all signify on and serve as enhancements of the time-line. The activity in [B.sup.5] that Schuller calls "partly 4-beat" is particularly effective, and the breaks serve effectively as goal-delay devices that Signify on the goal-directedness of the piece's melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures.

It is within this rhythmic and structural frame that improvisation takes place--improvisation that Signifies on (1) the structure of the piece itself, (2) the current Signifyin(g)s of the other players in the group, and (3) the players' own and others' Signifyin(g)s in previous performances. These Signifyin(g)s take place at the same time the performers are placing within the frame and including within their improvisations timbral and melodic derivations from the ring--the trombone's smears (elisions) in [A.sup.1], the trombone's Signifyin(g) smear on the clarinet's note in [B.sup.1], the muted trumpet with its elided phrase endings in [B.sup.4], the cymbal break in [B.sup.5], the trombone smears (cries) and the new tom-tom timbre in [B.sup.7]. Highlighting the entire structure is the string of solos that occur between [B.sup.1] and [B.sup.5] and then the out-chorus ([B.sup.7]). Like Martin Williams (1963) and unlike Schuller, I hear the exchange between the trumpet and the full band in [A.sup.2] as a call-and-response structure, albeit composed (the calls change, the response remains the same), as I do the exchanges in the modulatory interlude following [A.sup.3]--revising tropes that extend and elaborate, or update, the call-and-response device, which operates on many different structural levels. I also hear the trombone's held-notes in the out-chorus ([B.sup.7]) as evocative "shouts" that Signify black religious shouting and its counterpart expression in secular life--calls, cries, and hollers--and I hear Morton's solo in [B.sup.3] as Signifyin(g) on ragtime, which itself Signifies on the foot-patting, handclapping after-beats of the shout (with a "pretty" and embroidered version of the style) and on the stomp rhythm by playing on the time-line while introducing a four-beat rhythm (i.e., the bass player or drummer plays on every beat instead of every other one). The banjo's strummed solo ([B.sup.5]) does not repeat the melody that preceded it but Signifies on it and on the accompanying harmony. And the out-chorus Signifies on all that has gone before it. The entire performance, of course, Signifies on the stomp rhythm first heard in [A.sup.3], a troping that validates the title of the piece.

Throughout the performance, the breaks, riffs, four-beat tropings, and trombone smears serve as exhortations to the soloists, exciting and inciting them to create more inspired solos, as for example, in [B.sup.1] (four-beat), [B.sup.2] (additive accents), [B.sup.4] (stop-time and turn-around), [B.sup.6] (four-beat and additive accents), and [B.sup.7] (trombone smears and break). And the performance swings--exhibiting that essential quality of products of the ring--with the normal tropings of the time-line throughout the performance. This quality is pronounced at points where off-beats, back-beats, cross-rhythms, and four-beat rhythms occur--sometimes subtle, sometimes pronounced--such as in the interlude; at [B.sup.1], [B.sup.4], and [B.sup.5], where the bass and the drums trope the time-line and the banjo's phrasings; and in the last three measures of [B.sup.3]. The back-beats of the out-chorus ([B.sup.7]) are particularly effective in this regard. Related to this quality is the constant filling of the musical space by the banjo as it tropes the time-line by sounding all its notes, when the other instruments lay out, except in stop-time passages, as at [A.sup.3]. Swing is particularly pronounced in the sections for full band, where several instruments trope the time-line together, in different ways, and at different points.

The elisions (smears), call-and-response devices, meter changes, accented cross-rhythms, after-beats, breaks, stop-time tropes--indeed, all the shuckin' and jivin' Signifyin(g) figures in the piece (particularly those of the clarinet and piano)--are rhetorical Call-Response figures that Signify on the musical values and expressions of the ring and its musical derivations; each improvisation Signifies on Morton's melodies and on the inventions of some of the other musicians; and the structure of the piece Signifies, most immediately, on ragtime and, though perhaps indirectly, on European social dance music (which, by the way, includes the compositions of the black composer Frank Johnson who, a century earlier, also improvised on and added inventions to the form with rhetorical tropes, as in his Voice Quadrilles and some of his marches).

"Black Bottom Stomp" is fraught with the referentiality that Gates describes as "semantic value," exemplifying (1) how performers contribute to the success of a performance with musical statements, assertions, allegations, questings, requestings, implications, mockings, and concurrences that result in the "telling effect" Murray has described and (2) what black performers mean when they say that they "tell a story" when they improvise.

Much more could be said about this piece along similar lines, but my goal in discussing it has been simply to suggest that, heard in this way, the Morton band's performance of "Black Bottom Stomp" is fraught with funded meanings from the Afro-American musical tradition, and its grounding in the ring is unmistakably evident. The expression and communication of the performance, in other words, is fully and deeply rooted in black culture. Like the descendants of Esu--the tricksters of Afro-American culture--its performers combine the ritual teasing and critical insinuations of Signifyin(g) with self-empowering wit, cunning, and guile.

Afro-American Symphony

Orin Moe--like Schuller, not an Afro-American (as are Stuckey, Gates, and Murray) but sensitive to both the cultural and musical values of both the European and Afro-American traditions--shows an understanding of the dual lineage of black music in two articles: "William Grant Still: Songs of Separation" (1980) and "A Question of Value: Black Concert Music and Criticism" (1986). Moe's work is superb, as far as it goes, and as with Schuller's analysis, I want to use it as the basis for my own inquiry.

In "A Question of Value: Black Concert Music and Criticism," Moe discusses William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony as a "long blues meditation," a "blues-dominated symphony rather than symphonically dominated blues" in which "the black materials fundamentally alter the inherited shape of the symphony" as the composer "bends the forms to control much of the musical flow." Moe hears Still's intended four movements as five--"two faster outer movements, with two slow movements surrounding a central scherzo," sections "one, three, and five ... unmistakably black in inspiration," "two and four ... predominantly American." Moe finds Still emphasizing "flow and sectionalization, the variation structure of the blues over the architectonic structure of the symphony" (Moe 1986, 62--64). Moe's brief analysis is revealing and provocative. It is also a good starting point for more detailed investigation and interpretation from the perspective of our new mode of inquiry.

Afro-American Symphony begins with the Afro-American trope of the blues. Following a brief, six-measure introduction in 4/4 time, a twelve-bar blues is presented as the first theme of the sonata form under which it is structurally subsumed. The first chorus is accompanied by a three-note/two-note rift in the horns and trombones, the second by a steady "walking" rhythm in the strings and rifling figures in the woodwinds in call-and-response dialogue with the clarinet's melody. This is followed by a modulating transition passage that Signifies on figures from the two blues choruses by their loving and approving repetition and revision first through upward transpositions then by turning the repetitions downward again; this transition leads to a second theme area of thirty-two measures, with the second eight measures, and more, being Signifyin(g) revisions created by melodic embellishments and timbral variations. The latter Signifies on the Afro-American spiritual and possesses many of the characteristics and qualities of that genre, including call-and-response between oboe and flutes/clarinets. This is followed by a brief but vigorous and unusual "development" section that Signifies on the second theme and its figures--actually a songqike section in which the themes--unlike those of development sections in the traditional European symphony--remain intact. Then the second theme recurs in revised form in a different key, with a different instrumentation and accompaniment Signifyin(g) on itself and on the activity that took place in the development section. A four-bar vamp with a two-note rift signals the return of the first theme in muted trumpets, this time over a Signifyin(g) walking accompaniment in the strings and Signifyin(g) comments by the bassoon, horns, and woodwinds. The section features muted trumpets; and accompanying the blues theme are two-note riffs in the French horns and Signifyin(g) figures in the strings and woodwinds. In the truncated second chorus we hear overlapping call-and-response between the clarinet, which carries the theme, and the answering flutes, over a "walking" accompaniment in the strings. A brief troping coda, featuring lower woodwinds and Signifyin(g) on the blues theme, brings the movement to a close.

The second movement begins with a six-measure introduction that tropes fragments from the blues theme of the first movement. A primary theme of eight measures is stated twice, followed by extensions and elaborations of it in a brief transition that leads to a second theme--a Signifyin(g) revision of the blues theme of the first movement. This second theme, four measures long, is repeated and then is itself extensively elaborated. The first theme is then Signified upon with extensions and elaborations and then is restated. As Moe suggests, this movement is more American, or European, than Afro-American in character, showing little of the troping and Signifyin(g) of the black cultural tradition (in spite of the blue notes and modal tinges and the timpani's suggestions of dance-beats). But this does not reflect on the value of the movement; it simply means that the application of Call-Response criteria to formulations based in the Western European tradition is as invalid as the reverse application. Such application trivializes our criteria, just as the methods of traditional musicology, when applied to Afro-American music, have tended to seem trivial and ineffective to those familiar with black culture.

The third movement, a scherzo in 2/4, tropes Afro-American secular dance and dance music, employing the banjo--an African retention--playing idiomatic, Call-Response back-beats as accompaniment to the movement's single melody. (What Haas [1975, 30] hears as a second theme I hear as a variation of the initial statement.) In the rhythmically free introduction, the rhythmic and intervallic structure of the theme is foreshadowed successively by the lower winds, horns, trombones, strings, and trumpets. Then enters the complete melody, recalling the shout spiritual, with its banjo accompaniment. Call-and-response figures occur throughout the movement, particularly in transition and development passages. The back-beats of the banjo (a Call-Response instrument par excellence) and the cross-rhythms that result from the syncopations in the melody trope the underlying time-line of sixteen pulses per measure, creating a swinging environment that is a Signifyin(g) revision of the third movement of the classical symphony of Western European lineage.

The work's fourth movement--slow, in triple meter--opens with a brand new theme, which is followed first by an extended elaboration of itself and then by a second theme that Signifies on the blues theme of the first movement. The latter theme then receives extensions and elaborations that lead to a variation of the movement's first theme. These appearances of the themes and their variations occur at several different speeds and key centers, Signifyin(g) on tempo and tonal stability. What Moe hears as a fifth movement and others hear as further variation (Haas 1975, 38), I hear as an extended troping coda that Signifies on the work as a whole, summing up the composer's Signifyin(g) revisions of the romantic symphony and Afro-American folk song. Melodic rhetorical tropes in the form of the falling and pendular thirds that characterize Afro-American melodic expression are prominent throughout the complete movement; muted trumpets Signify on classical trumpet timbre and on the black expressive practice of timbral distortion.

Murray's "telling effect" is strongly evident in the Afro-American Symphony, particularly in the first and fourth movements--two of Moe's "Afro-American" sections--and the third movement suggests dance, is a dance movement, with its flirtatious, stomping, and shouting implications; but even here, the melody is a "telling" one, carrying significant semantic value in its call-and-response construction, statements, and assertions. In the first and fourth movements, the semantic value of the statements, assertions, and allegations made in the expositions are transformed in the development sections of those movements into Murray's suspicions, misgivings, questings, and requestings, together resulting in extended dialogical, rhetorical tropes.

This analysis of Still's Afro-American Symphony confirms, I believe, the contention that there can be--and in this case there is--a significant relationship between the black vernacular tradition and that of black concert music, and that the use of the vernacular to examine the formal is a productive and revealing approach to musical analysis and interpretation.

Summary and Conclusions

"Analysis" is an activity that emerged and matured as a way of examining chiefly European works of music, and it can shed some light on works from the African-American tradition also, as evidenced by Schuller's treatment of "Black Bottom Stomp." But there are many elements of African-American music that it will not uncover. For those, an Afrocentric approach is indispensable--an approach that must be based on the following elements: (1) a system of referencing, here called Signifyin(g), drawn from Afro-American folk music; (2) a tendency to make performances occasions in which the audience participates, in reaction to what performers do, which leads in turn to (3) a framework of continuous self-criticism that accompanies performance in its indigenous cultural context; (4) an emphasis on competitive values that keep performers on their mettle; and (5) the complete intertwining of black music and dance. All these elements combine to create, foster, and define what I have called here Call-Response.

Perhaps continuing application of this theory, together with its refinement and additional research, will tell us more about its efficacy and its limits. But my preliminary analyses suggest that the mode of inquiry introduced here can be applied successfully to music as diverse as Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues," Thomas A. Dorsey's "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," Olly Wilson's Akwan, and T. J. Anderson's Variations on a Theme by M. B. Tolson.

The relationship of black music and dance is evident in the very existence and character of "Black Bottom Stomp," which is unadulerated Signifyin(g) black dance music, and in the expressions of the Afro-American Symphony, where the themes have been modeled on blues and spiritual melodies and where the rhythmic character of the music could support dancing, particularly the slow drag of turn-of-the-century black culture. Our awareness of this interdependence, which had its genesis in the ring, will enhance our understanding of the nature and character of the music and its Signifyin(g) revisions. And our critical interpretations should take into account this relationship, as I have tried to do in the cases of the Morton and Still pieces.

The approach offered here is intended to address directly these issues in a way that will allow students of the music to recognize, explain, and judge the drama of the progression, juxtaposition, and Signification of the idiomatic tropes of black music-making. Perhaps this beginning will lead to increasing refinement of this mode of inquiry, with the expectation that it will increasingly illuminate black music as a much more complex and richly textured art than has been made clear by more traditional and inappropriate analytical procedures.

Originally published in BMRJ vol. 11, no. 2 (1991)

DISCOGRAPHY 

Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Black bottom stomp. RCA Victor 1649. (Available in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.)

Still, William Grant. Afro-American symphony. London Symphony Orchestra. Columbia M32782. Black Composers Series. (Available from The College Music Society.)

REFERENCES

Abrahams, Roger. 1970. Deep down in the jungle: Negro narrative folklore from the streets of Philadelphia. Rev. Ed. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine Publishing Company.

Baker, Houston. 1972. Long black song: Essays in black American literature and culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

--. 1984. Blues, ideology, and Afro-American literature: A vernacular theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--. 1987. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Berry, Mary Frances, and John Blassingame. 1982. Long memory: The black experience in America. New York: Oxford University Press

Courlander, Harold. 1963. Negro folk music, U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cuddon, J. A. 1979. A dictionary of literary terms. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books.

Epstein, Dena J. 1977. Sinful tunes and spirituals: Black folk music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser. 1984. The sources and resources of classic ragtime music. Black Music Research Journal 4: 22-59.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gordon, Robert Winslow. 1981. Negro "shouts" from Georgia. In Mother wit from the laughing barrel: Readings in the interpretation of Afro-American folklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New print, with addendum. New York: Garland.

Grout, Donald J., and Claude Palisca. 1980. A history of Western music. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton.

Haas, Robert Bartlett, ed., with Paul Harold Slatery, Verna Arvey, William Grant Still, and Louis and Annette Kaufman. 1975. William Grant Still and the fusion of cultures in American music. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press.

Krehbiel, Henry Edward. [1914] 1967. Afro-American folksongs: A study in racial and national music. New York: Frederick Unger.

Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. 1981. Toasts. In Mother wit from the laughing barrel: Readings in the interpretation of Afro-American folklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New York: Garland.

Major, Clarence. 1970. Dictionary of Afro-American slang. New York: International Publishers.

Mitchell-Kerman, Claudia. 1981. Signifying. In Mother wit from the laughing barrel: Readings in the interpretation of Afro-American folklore, Alan Dundes, ed. New print, with addendum. New York: Garland.

Moe, Orin, 1980. William Grant Still: Songs of separation. Black Music Research Journal 1: 18-36.

--. 1986. A question of value: Black concert music and criticism. Black Music Research Journal 6: 57-66.

Murray, Albert. 1973. The hero and the blues. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

--1978. Stomping the blues. New York: Doubleday.

Reisser, Marsha J. 1982. Compositional techniques and Afro-American musical traits in selected published works by Howard Swanson. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin.

Schuller, Gunther. 1968. Early jazz: Its roots and musical development. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. 1986. Musings: The musical worlds of Gunther Schuller. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. 1989. The swing era: The development of jazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stuckey, Sterling. 1987. Slave culture: Nationalist theory and the foundations of black America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wentworth, Harold, and Stuart Berg Flexman, comps, and eds. 1960. Dictionary of American slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Williams, Martin. 1963. Jelly Roll Morton. Kings of Jazz series. New York: A. S. Barnes.

(1.) Some of the best descriptions of the shout can be found in Gordon (1981), Epstein (1977), and Courlander (1963); and there are numerous descriptions in the WPA Slave Narratives.

(2.) Certainly, antiphonal, heterophonic, and motivic devices, as well as unflagging rhythm and other such processes, are used in European music. Nevertheless, it is the idiomatic nature and character of these devices and the idiomatic way in which they function in Afro-American music that validate them as definers of the black music tradition. For one of the most recent and perhaps the most thorough discussion of the devices as they have been treated by scholars over the decades, see Reisser (1982).

(3.) The term trope, originally a literary expression, "denotes any rhetorical or figurative device" (Cuddon 1979, 725). It was later used to refer to "a newly composed [literary] addition ... to one of the antiphonal chants," usually as a preface to or interpolation to a chant (Grout 1980, 52-53). The term is used here in its original meaning, but it is applied in this instance to a purely musical device and thus is distantly related to the trope of the Middle Ages known as "sequence." Musical troping, as I have used the term here, is more properly understood as a rhetorical or figurative musical device--a Signifyin(g) musical event.

(4.) Call-Response must not be confused with call-and-response. The latter is a musical device, but Call-Response is meant here to name a musical principle a dialogical musical rhetoric under which are subsumed all the musical tropological devices, including call-and-response.

(5.) I am grateful to Bruce Tucker for putting me onto this idea early in the development of my ideas, when he stated to me that something like the Afro-American musical process of call-and-response, metaphorically speaking, might be considered as the musical trope tropes. Call-and-response seemed to be too limited a concept to embody all of the black musical tropes, but Bruce's statement carried the necessity of a dialogic and descriptive terminology for this all-important, all-encompassing concept. So, in trying to remain as close as possible to the spirit of Bruce's statement and to the dialogic nature of the music, I coined the term Call-Response.

SAMUEL A. FLOYD JR. is founder and director emeritus of the Center for Black Music Research. He is the author of The Power of Black Music (Oxford University Press, 1995) and the editor in chief of the International Dictionary of Black Composers (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999).