Ronald Radano. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music.

Ronald Radano. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 436 pp. $75.00 cloth/$27.50 paper.

Ronald Radano, a professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written an important, provocative, and courageous new cultural history of the idea of Black Music in the United States. In his book, Radano enters into intellectual battle with racial binaries, essentialism of the sort that posits "an immutable black musical essence that [characterizes the music of all black Americans who have performed in the United States, one that] survives apart from the contingencies of social and cultural change." While these essentialist narratives emerged from the laudable goal of drawing serious critical attention to black vernacular music, they also placed Afro-centric music outside of the cultural mainstream and even beyond American history and culture. This trend has rationalized the relegation of black music to a secondary status among American musicologists and a tertiary status in the dialogues on literature and on history. Following the lead of Paul Gilroy, whose The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) challenged black cultural absolutes, Radano defines black music as an unstable, socially contingent expression, and he re-situates it within a diversity of black diasporic social and historical encounters. By no means seeking to overturn blackness in the name of an American mainstream, this book, which builds upon the insights of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Houston Baker, and Franz Fanon, describes black music's centrality to the mainstream itself. As he sees it, the stakes of his scholarly project are high since an emphasis on black musical essentialism leaves us with either "a black exclusivism or a liberal pluralism that imagines music as separate but equal." Either of these stances perpetuates the color line and denies the limitless possibility of invention by making difference an inalterable way of life.

Radano's introduction and four chapters develop his hypotheses in a generally chronological pattern. His treatment of the period of the Middle Passage and colonial American enslavement highlights the destructive impact of these centuries on African culture, the relative absence of primary source documentation of African music in the 17th- and 18th-century British North American colonies, and examples of local and regional social patterns, such as diverse regional configurations of the slave system and descriptions of black Christian vocalizing during the Great Awakening, both of which shaped slave musical cultures. Radano discovers in what he calls "resonances of racial absence" the formative influence of European travel writers, missionaries, and Jean Jacques Rousseau on creating ideas of the Primitive/Primal and of "Noise" to explain away to themselves the fact that their own European musical cultures, which they took to be superior to all others, seemed, strangely, to have had no influence in the other lands of the world.

Turning in his second chapter to the antebellum period in the southern United States, this richly researched and often beautifully written book argues that white "depictions of slave performances came to occupy a central place in the representation of African-American culture to the point of drowning out all other characteristics." Proliferating statements about the "authenticity" of black music emerged from cross-racial encounters in which difference was constructed through patterns of white authority that refused to consider blackness as something within "whites." In a succinct formulation of his central hypothesis, Radano, using the present tense to give immediacy to music in an historical context, writes that "slaves' sounding practices resonate outward, colliding and shifting as they intersect with the discourses of observation that guide, limit, and feed back into slave performative aesthetics." Radano argues forcefully that the intermingling of black and white worshippers during Second Great Awakening had a far deeper and more pervasive impact on white spirituality than most historians have admitted. Under religious conviction, whites and blacks cried, "What shall we do to be saved? The holy answer appears as a hymn, received by the congregation and sung.... Sacred singing articulated a return of the racial repressed." Since such moments of interracial experience afforded by the revivals implied that blackness was not a separate but rather a shared dimension of life, minstrelsy's ridicule of black music making reasserted white superiority.

Chapter Three charts attempts by northerners and abolitionists to make distinctions between what they considered authentic black spirituals and the corrupted songs born of minstrelsy by manufacturing sheet music of the spirituals intended for the pianos of the American parlor. Radano argues that notation created art objects essential to modern black musical art forms. It also performed a colonialist function by creating a "textually invented 'Negro sound.'"

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concern of the last chapter, the trope of Hot Rhythm became the pounding signifier of a spreading infection of primitive rhythm in the Western world. The drums had rarely attracted the attention of Euro-American commentators up to this time. Rhythm became a crucial musical element in the New Negro's musical protests against discrimination and, for white racialists, a means of differentiating racially "superior" European music from "primal" African and African American jazz. Tropes that had also been important to late 19th-century German theorists of the superiority of "Classical Music," primitive rhythm and the drums became the modernist sign of social changes in the United States as the Great Migration of African Americans from the deep South to northern and midwestern industrial cities provoked widespread concerns with the control of migrant populations. Jazz Age performance spaces were usually controlled by whites, encouraging thereby accommodations to white racial notions among black musicians who performed in them.

In his pursuit of a more historically informed musicology, Radano has read widely and deeply in primary printed sources--collections of the printed letters and essays of travel writers, explorers, missionaries, evangelists, naturalists, northern abolitionists, and soldiers who wrote down their observations of black music. He interprets these sources with frequent references to the work of such leading historians and scholars of black culture such as Ira Berlin, Philip Morgan, and George M. Fredrickson. Cultural theorists, who include Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, Stuart Hall, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Michel Foucault, influence the ways in which he moves from fact to interpretation.

This book issues a clarion call for more research by scholars of literature and history into the particular social and historical circumstances of music in general and black music in particular. In chastising eurocentrism in the discipline of musicology and drawing his readers into the intricate probing of culture studies, Radano writes primarily for graduate students and university scholars across the humanities. The book has a tightly woven, complex, and subtle fabric. It offers intellectual rewards and, it seemed to me, communicated a deep respect for the work of all scholars of black music, both those with whom he agrees and those with whom he disagrees.

It also seems to me that a careful reading of Lying Up a Nation leaves ample room for the survival of a widely shared, if not universal spirit born of black suffering and resistance within the doubleness of the particular social and historical encounters that, as Radano asserts, shaped it. In his conclusion, the author harkens back to Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks, finding in its marvelous evocation of doubled experience evidence of "true racial freedom in an unresolved dialectical relationship with white America, in a kind of stability in instability." The gift of black song and instrumental performance destabilizes those who accept it, even those who poison the gift by never thinking to reciprocate.

William Kenney

Kent State University