WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

MADIBA WORD MUSIC

 

– A Haiku Sequence for Nelson Mandela

 

 

 

haiku #40

  

nelson busts robben's

rocks like cousin john henry

swinging freedom steel

 

 

 

 

 

haiku #54

  

mandela's teeth cracked

captivity's bones & sucked

resistance marrow

 

 

 

 

 

haiku #61

  

murdered children's deaths

bandoliered cross our chests

we hate apartheid

 

 

 

 

haiku #112

 

emerging from jail

their dragon, our butterfly

his smile is so huge

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

don’t ever grow old

 

don’t ever grow old, he said.

 

i had stood aside for the lady i assumed was his wife. with a painfully visible effort she haltingly scooted out of the narrow seat. i had told her, “take your time.” and then, with a tenuous grip on the seat back, he excruciatingly  rose and looked up at me, hesitating. i told him to go ahead. he chuckled, his eye twinkled and he advised me, don’t ever grow old. from behind me a middle-aged lady wryly intoned, what other option is there?

 

he slowly shuffled down the aisle, i was behind him, taking half steps so that i would not run up on his heels. once off the plane i darted around the old couple, someday i will be old like that but i hope... what do i hope? concerning growing old what hope is there?

 

i stopped at the kiosk where southwest airlines had complimentary orange juice and donuts. while holding down the tap to fill my cup, this guy approaches, picks up a napkin, and tries to decide what kind of donut he wants.

 

“you ever wonder what your life would be like if you and carol had got together?”

 

what? i look up but this guy is not looking at me and doesn’t even seem to be talking to me, even though i clearly heard him. how did he know about carol, about the crush i had on her in 7th grade?

 

“you know there is a parallel universe, another place where the path you didn’t take continues on. if you want, i can put you on that road.”

 

i almost spit up the juice. this time i’m sure the guy’s lips weren’t moving, yet i’m also sure i’m hearing strange things.

 

“but if you go, you can’t come back. you only get one chance to live again. i know you think this is a joke, but it’s not. it’s real.”

 

at that moment, i thought the strangest thought--what if i could be with any of the women i have ever loved, would i take it?

 

“i can hook you up with carol.”

 

i turned away and said in a low voice, no you can’t. carol died of breast cancer about a year ago.

 

“you’re wrong buddy, what i mean is you could rewind and have a life with carol. it wouldn’t stop her from dying but you would be there until she died and, hey, afterwards, you could marry another love, and...”

 

i walked away. i am on my second go-round already, i don’t have to travel back to get here. bustling forward, i mull over marrying a previous love and am forced to acknowledge donut man has a point: choosing one love over another is disconcerting.

 

like the summer i declined to choose jean kelly. at the time, i didn’t even know i was making a choice or, as it were, ignoring a choice i could have made. i simply basked in the moment, giving no thought to what could be. in fact, as many males do, i thought i was fortunate to be able to enjoy without being forced to choose. but then again, if i was not ready to choose, how ready would i have been to deal with the results had i made that choice? i thought about jean because even now, decades later, the residue of her unerasable tenderness continues to reside in the marrow of my being at an address deeper than bone. why couldn’t i then recognize her permanence...?

 

i guess that guy was trying to offer me a chance to both keep and savor two love cakes from the ingredients of one life time, or..., or maybe i’m being sentimental. i always want every love to be true and lasting; don’t we all? or am i just being male and desiring every woman i’ve every wanted? shit, life is too short and too complex to go back.

 

i hang a right at the newsstand where literally hundreds of glossy magazines are strung out in come-hither displays featuring all the flavors of the month, particularly the female-fleshy variety.

 

a security guard gives me a cursory glance. no matter how individual i believe myself to be, i’m still but one of thousands of travelers she scans every day. and then in a flash i know: the most important life choice is not who we hook up with but rather which route we trod. on the road is where we meet our mates, to go one way is to reject another. boy, i can be a philosophizing fool while walking my ass through an airport!

 

on the down escalator i vainly try to gather up my thoughts. few of the travelers around me look happy. are they scowling in disappointment about dead-ended routes?

 

the terminal doors open automatically. i step into the dallas morning sunshine, gently sit down the black briefcase that contains my laptop, unsling  my carry-on from my shoulder, and lean back against a concrete column, reprising my monthly waiting-for-my-ride routine.

 

mr. donut passes without even a glance in my grey-bearded direction. i’m not surprised. when you’re fixated on the past, you don’t recognize the future. on the other hand, to truly know yourself, you must recognize everything and everyone you’ve rejected or avoided.

 

i probably looked somewhat silly, standing there beaming my crooked-tooth smile at life’s little paradox: all the things we are is also a composite of all the things we chose not to be? is this how it feels to grow old?

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

CONGO SQUARE

 

the oumas indians prepared this place for us

centuries before our arrival

a sacred spot where corn festivals

were celebrated & as the colonializers came

they pushed aside our hosts

& introduced us in chains

& by the late 1700s we somehow

recognizing the sacredness of le place de congo,

we somehow, and the how of our persuasive methodologies

is not clear at this moment, but nevertheless,

even as slaves we crafted and created a space

where we could be free to be we

and thusly we countered the sacriligousness of the french

giving great homage to our ancestors as well as

giving praise & thanx to our red blooded brothers & sisters

 

this is an oral libational toast

to congo square

to native americans

to our ancestors

who made a circle in a square

and gave us a way to stay ourselves save ourselves

from the transformatory ugliness of america

which refuses to recognize the spirituality of life

and celebrates death with crosses & crosses, double

& triple crosses, the middle passage the first cross,

christianity the double cross and capitalism

the ultimate triple coup de grace cross of our captivity

 

but the terror of crosses notwithstanding

we sang, we beat, we be, we was & is

hail, congo square

our african gods have not been obliterated

they have merely retreated inside

the beat of us until we are ready

to release them into a world that we

re-create, a world heralded by the beat

be, beat being, beating being

of black heart drums

 

heart beat heart beat heart be/at this place

at this place be heart beat be we

beating place in new world space

beating being in place

in new world preserving our ancient pace

our dance is the god walk

our music, the god talk

 

first thing we do, let's get together

circle ourselves into community

no beginning no end connected together

and singing ringing singing

in a ring

 

second let's be original

aboriginal / be what we were before

we became what we are, be bamboula

dance, be banza music, and sing song words

which have no english translation

 

third let us remember

never to forget even when we can't remember

the specifics we must retain the essentials

the bounce the blood flow the feel the spirit

grow energy, must retain and pass on

the essential us-ness that

others want to dissipate whip out of us

but no matter how much of us they prohibit

deep inside us is us

remains us inside

& needs only

the beat

to set

us free

 

the beat to free us

 

it is morning, a sun day, a field w/out shade but dark

with the people black of us in various shades

eclipsing the sun with our elegance

 

we are centuries later now

and still this sacred ground calls us

to remember / to beat / to be

 

beat CONGO SQUARE be CONGO SQUARE

beat be beat be

remember

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

Another Duke Ellington Story

  

The dance had ended forty-some minutes ago but no one seemed to be in any rush to go anywhere. Though they usually clamored to be on the road, quickly gone from these hick towns after they played, tonight the musicians were casually strewn backstage; some even cradled their still warm horns, occasionally sounding a very soft note or two. Duke grinned inwardly. Collectively, these men were his instrument and it made Ellington feel good when they felt good.

 

As always there was a coterie of jazz aficionados, aspirant entertainers, and non-music-related hopefuls who lingered in the hallway that led to the rear parking lot in which a bus waited to take the band back to the train depot where Duke's private pullman car was parked, well-stocked with appropriate food and other road comforts almost unknown to most musicians who crisscrossed America.

 

One gentleman stood at the end of the slow moving queue crawling along the wall outside Duke's dressing room. This small farmer recently turned salesman patiently awaited his turn to thrust the evening's printed program into Duke's hands so that Mr. Ellington might grace him with the gift of an autograph and, hopefully, also a flash of that fabulous love-you-madly signature smile. A stone-faced woman stood stiffly at his side. She had had a long day, was tired, and was the only audience member not displaying a beatific expression.

 

Unfurling the seduction of his whiskey-tinged baritone, Duke graciously received this last couple. "I am Duke Ellington. With whom do I have the pleasure of making an acquaintance?"

 

"Ah, Squire, Joe Squire. You can just put: To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Squire. Please, I mean if you don't mine."

 

"Mister. And madam. Joseph. Squire. Thank you so very much for gracing us with your appearance tonight. You, your lovely wife, and all the other audience members made each of us feel at home." Duke shook hands cordially and paused to sign the program that Joseph Squire had tentatively proffered. As Duke finished his inscription with a flourish, he turned to the woman who remained starkly still looking as though it would have pained her to move. "Mrs. Squire, I'm sure you have a lovely first name. Might I inquire what it is?" Duke held his gracefully manicured right hand waist high in front of Mrs. Squire.

 

Mrs. Squire was slightly taken aback by the man's forwardness. She had not touched many negroes before and though she appreciated his musicianship she was not interested in any personal contact with this mister Duke Ellington. But he spoke with such manners and deference in his tone, and he bent at the waist slightly in sort of a half bow, and his smile seemed so sincere; her hand floated forward more drawn by Duke's personal magnetism than guided by her own will.

 

"Her, her name is Rosemary," Joseph Squire spoke up on behalf of his silent wife. Joe knew that Rose was past ready to go home and she had begrudgedly accompanied him backstage in his quest for Ellington's autograph. Now that Joseph's search had been successful, they should go.

 

But, she hesitated: Ellington's handshake was so smooth, so warm, so tender as he courteously held Rosemary's farm-roughened palm. "Mrs. Rosemary Squire would you please allow me to show you something stunningly beautiful which I have just recently discovered? Please indulge me. It won't take but a small moment of your time."

 

Duke gently released Rosemary's hand after slowly guiding it back down to her side. He turned to the small group of people surrounding him. "Excuse us one moment please." Without hesitation Duke cleared a path with a regal sweep of his left arm. He touched no one, instead everyone instinctively melted back like room-temperature butter retreating from the radiance of a heated knife. With his right forearm Duke smoothly pushed open the dressing room door.

 

The first object Rosemary admiringly focused on was Duke's stage shoes: a pair of gleaming patent leather pumps which sat languidly atop the dresser table next to a half drunk demitasse of tea--between two slivers of lemon a chamomile tea bag lay beside the china. Had Rosemary glanced at Duke's feet she would have spied black lambskin loafers, but at that moment Rosemary's nostrils flared as she inhaled the fragrance emanating from a spray of cut flowers which freshened the atmosphere as the bouquet lay beneath the over-sized dressing room mirror.

 

Duke sensibly had left the door wide open. At a discreet distance Joseph Squire and a few other people peeped into the room hoping to also see whatever was the beautiful something Ellington had promised to show the tight lipped woman.

 

"Rosemary Squire," Duke guided her forward with the faintest touch to her waist, "regard. Behold something beautiful." She turned to look at Duke. What was he saying? Duke nodded toward the mirror. She turned again. Duke stepped sideways so that he was out of the reflected line of sight. "Notice the elegance of the eyes. The determined jaw line which undoubtedly reflects a willful and passionate personality. But above all, the clean symmetry of the facial plane and the...aghhhhh," Duke intoned wordlessly, "but oh, you can see as well as I." Then Ellington stopped speaking.

 

Someone nearby gasped almost inaudibly. Rosemary virtually transformed before their sight. What had once been a cold mask of tolerance warmed into a tender visage of contentment. And as she started a smile, Duke picked up his pair of shoes from the dresser and backed out of the room. In the hallway Duke paused and touched Joseph lightly on the shoulder, " Never forget , your wife is beautiful. Though youth may leave us, beauty can always find a home within. Sometimes beauty slumbers but even then requires merely an appropriately gentle nudge to reawaken."

 

Then, on padded feet, Duke glided noiselessly down the carpeted corridor just behind Johnny Hodges who was already blasély ambling toward the back exit. Clark Terry had been patiently leaning against the wall opposite Duke's door; he grinned as he too shoved off to take his leave. Terry had seen the master do this many, many times before. Duke was casually adept at reading people and adroitly drawing out their best qualities regardless of how they felt at any given moment.

 

Exhibiting a rainbow of diverse complexions, a small knot of people stood outside the auditorium's rear egress. Sporting their best coats and warmest hats, the locals huddled in the chilly Indian summer night exchanging murmured conversations with Ellington's worldly array of well traveled musicians.

 

"Excuse me, the time of our departure draws neigh and I'm afraid we must bid you good night." Disappointed but understanding sighs drifted through the frosty air as Duke strove to extricate himself from the thinning throng. A lady who would not be denied sought Ellington's attention—an attractively tall woman, slightly darker than cinnamon. Duke signed her program "love you madly" and then climbed into the vehicle, the beginnings of a melody capering in and out of his consciousness.

 

Suddenly realizing where she was, Rosemary Squire pirouetted in slow motion searching the dressing room for Ellington. Ellington however, by then, was reclining aboard the bus. Rosemary's gaze fell directly onto her husband. Joe was a bit blurry as Rose squinted at him through partially damp but very happy eyes. He smiled at her. She beamed back. And they walked off hand in hand.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

[On Saturday, April 28, 2012 at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Kalamu ya Salaam partcipated on a panel on the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. The panel moderator was Dr. Maurice Martinez (filmmaker of The Black Indians of New Orleans), and the other two panelists were Dr. Al Kennedy (author of Big Chief Harrison and the Mardi Gras Indians), and Walter "Sugar Bear" Landry (Big Chief Black Mohawks).]

My Knee Will Bend No More   by: Kalamu ya Salaam  Tootie Montana at Hunter's Field on Super Sunday 2004, the last time he masked Indian. Whenever I met Tootie, wherever I met him, no matter the setting, no matter who was watching, I would bow down on one knee before him. Literally. He would chuckle his soft acknowledgement of my respect for him.  I am a big man, some even find my presence intimidating, so I know it was a strange sight to see: 200-plus pounds of Blackness bowing down to a burnished brass-colored, soft-spoken, neat but not flashily dressed, African-American male. But, there it is. Or was. Kalamu on the ground at Tootie's feet.  Tootie Montana was a culture bearer worthy of the highest respect. What he did was never done before, and will probably not be done again. It was not just more than 50 years of masking. It was not just setting a record for consecutive years of masking. It was not just constantly being the prettiest. Although all of that is true.  I bowed down to Tootie because he used our culture to stop the violence.  Mardi Gras Indian culture was no walk in the park. Hatchets and guns used to be more than mere props and decorative accoutrements. When they sang "Meet The Boys On The Battlefront," they were not just nostalgically whistling Dixie, as do so many who claim fidelity to a bygone era but who are warriors only in their imaginations.  Tootie looked at his world as it was and decided to make it better and more beautiful. He was no police. He was not a politician. He didn't hold political office, nor control a major corporation. From the perspective of all of those indices of modern social status he was just an ordinary-looking common laborer in New Orleans who religiously went to work every day.  But there was something inside of him that was extraordinary, truly beyond the average. Tootie was determined to confront and change the climate of violence in his home town. And he did. Tootie made peace within a culture that gloried in its tradition of war.  There is no police chief or politician who can say that they have stopped the violence in New Orleans. Tootie Montana stopped the violence among the Indians. He lived for peace and he died ... for peace!  He was literally in the forefront of the war against violence. Most New Orleanians have no understanding about that aspect of Tootie Montana. That is why Tootie was at City Hall in the Council chambers on Monday, June 27, 2005. Crazed policemen had attacked the Indians on St. Joseph's night and the Indians were not about to submit to that bullshit. The battle between the official forces of law and order, and the Mardi Gras Indians is historic, but you will notice, the Indians keep on coming. They are not afraid. And the least afraid of them was Tootie Montana.  Even in death, he continues to lead the way. He died on the battlefield. He died fighting. His death challenges all of us -- will we die fighting the good fight, will we die standing up for our beliefs, when we go, will it be in motion, confronting the bad, working to establish the good? Throughout all of his life and even in his death, Tootie Montana set an example.  Celebrate him as an artist, a master of the needle and thread who brought a third dimension to costuming. Celebrate him as a singer -- which is why those near him when he fell immediately broke out in chorus, singing Tootie's signature song: "My Indian Red." Celebrate him for his leadership ability, for holding together a gang for damn near the whole of the last half of the 20th century. Celebrate Tootie howsoever you will, but never forget: Tootie Montana was the man, the only man, who stopped some of the violence in New Orleans!

GO HERE TO VIEW VIDEO FROM TOOTIE'S FUNERAL

New Orleans writer/filmmaker/educator Kalamu ya Salaam wrote the New Orleans Museum of Art catalogue essay on Tootie Montana (available online atwww.louisianafolklife.org/LT/ Virtual_Books/Hes_Prettiest/ hes_the_prettiest_tootie_montana.html). Salaam can be reached at kalamu@aol.com. __________________________ NEW ORLEANS MARDI GRAS INDIANS AND TOOTIE MONTANA BY KALAMU YA SALAAM ALL ART is folk art. Some artifacts are manufactured for commercial reasons or are commissioned by the wealthy, others for utilitarian purposes of simply for pleasure. Some artifacts encompass or exemplify the cultural values of their time, others ostentatiously break with tradition (in the process creating a new tradition and enriching the old tradition--there is no escaping one's cultural legacies). Nevertheless, these, and other important distinctions notwithstanding, all art is created by "folk," by people. However all art/artisans do not represent the same class, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, whether produced by trained professionals or vocational autodidacts, urban sophisticates, or rural recluses, self-conscious creators intent on stretching the boundaries of their discipline or truly naïve innovators simply doing what pleases them, art is essentially humanity expressing itself. As we broaden our appreciation of the category commonly known as "fine art" (sometimes called "high art"), activities, artists, and artifacts which were previously overlooked or taken for granted are now examined more closely. Such is the case with the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. They are a particularly interesting expression of what is labeled "contemporary folk art," and Allison "Tootie" Montana is one of the most revered creators in this tradition. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND. The Mardi Gras Indians are called folk artists essentially because they are self-taught, non-institution sponsored, seemingly craft-centered artisans. They have been studied but never definitively defined, documented but never successfully duplicated. Do we understand them by focusing on their hand-sewn suits or on their rituals, the skill of a particular chief at sewing, singing, or dancing--can any part be comprehended without some feel for the whole? Indeed, who and what are the Mardi Gras Indians? The Mardi Gras Indian tribes (or "gangs") of New Orleans are community-based, socio-cultural institutions over a century old. Like blues, jazz, and other deeply rooted examples of African-American culture, "Injuns" (as neighborhood people affectionately refer to them) date back to the post-reconstruction era. Exactly when and why the colorfully costumed, neighborhood-based gangs started is shrouded in uncertainty but most accounts point to the late 1800s, a significant period of racist repression and outright terror. On September 14, 1874, "Ex-Confederates of the newly formed White League barricaded streets, attacked, and killed many of the interracial Metropolitan Police, and seized the state capitol, which, at the time, was the old St. Louis Hotel. " 1 The Leaguers temporarily installed city officers--within three weeks they were removed. Although they were unable to dominate militarily after the infamous battle, this did mark the beginning of the hey day of segregation in a city which had known slavery under the French and Spanish but which had also always been racially mixed and had also had a significant element of free Blacks. On a more positive note, 1884 to 1885 marked the celebration of a world's fair, the Cotton Centennial Exposition, which historian Leonard Huber assessed "while not a financial success, restored to New Orleans a feeling that the city was at last recovering its former commercial importance.2 These two events are often considered seminal elements in the founding of Mardi Gras Indians. The structures of Jim Crow ensured that the Indians would be a phenomenon that existed cocooned within predominately Black and/or mixed Black/immigrant residential neighborhoods. There would be no Mardi Gras Indian activity up and down Canal Street, St. Charles Avenue or within the riverfront area of the French Quarter. During the 1880s not only the Mardi Gras Indians but also many other benevolent societies, particularly the neighborhood-based Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs (SA&PC) were also founded. This was a period of organizing within the Black community both for self-defense (both literal terms of withstanding segregationist terror and figuratively in terms of associations of mutual aid), as well as organizing for self-expression in formal as well as informal artistic expression--for example, here is when we witness the advent of professional bands, orchestras, and traveling theatrical/musical troupes. The Cotton Centennial is credited by some historians as indirectly providing the raw inspiration for the Mardi Gras Indians' use of the "Indian costume" motif. In 1884 to 1885, concurrent with the Centennial, the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show wintered into New Orleans, and, according to cultural documentarian Michael Smith, "performed regularly, over a four month period, before large crowds in a popular black recreation area known as Oakland Park and Riding Stables (now the New Orleans Country Club)."3 Smith and others speculate that "50 to 60 Plains Indians, including four chiefs, were likely on the streets in New Orleans in their native dress during Mardi Gras 1885."4 Historians who accept Smith's thesis argue the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was the genesis of the Mardi Gras Indians. They specifically point to the name of Creole Wild West to support their argument. Unfortunately, for this point of view, none of the Mardi Gras Indians recall any references to Buffalo Bill's show and some of the Indians, Tootie Montana included, resent the implication that the masking Indian was started by or inspired by Buffalo Bill's show. There is no disputing that the first Mardi Gras Indian tribe, the Creole Wild West, was formed in the mid-to-late 1880s. Cultural historian Maurice Martinez, who also made the first in-depth Mardi Gras Indian film (The Black Indians of New Orleans, 1976) is emphatic in identifying the inception of Mardi Gras Indian tradition. "How did the Mardi Gras Indian tradition get started? In the 1880s, a young man of Indian and African descent masked on Carnival Day as an Indian. This man was the great uncle of Allison "Tuddy" [sic] Montana, today's Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe."5 Despite the uncertainty as to a specific date and the lack of definitive information about who else and how many were in the first gang, most knowledgeable observers (ranging in outlooks from Martinez to Smith) suggest the late 1880s as the birth of Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. However if we step back a moment and look at the Caribbean basin as a whole and look at colonial records in some detail we will note two important phenomenon. One, Mardi Gras Indians are not unique to New Orleans and two, costuming as Indians during Mardi Gras preceded the 1880s. Writing in the catalogue for the exhibition Caribbean Festival Art , Barbara Bridges notes: The Mardi Gras Indians exemplify the creolization at the heart of the pan-Caribbean and North American influences converging to create a fresh aesthetic is similar to what occurred in the West Indies. And although the Amerindian form appears with variations in Toronto, Brooklyn, London, Trinidad, St. Kitts-Nevis, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, nowhere else is it accompanied by quite the same musical refrains, aesthetic form, and artistic technique that characterized New Orleans' Black Indians.6 Bridges is, of course, arguing that New Orleans is the most artistic manifestation of a cultural phenomenon common to the Caribbean basin. Art historian Ute Stebich writing in the Brooklyn Museum's catalogue for the Haitian Art exhibition suggests that Mardi Gras Indians were central to Haitian celebrations. "No carnival parade is complete without a group of Indians. Indian costumes are the most magnificent of all, exemplifying the Haitians' sense of color and the work and love that goes into the detailed planning of masquerades."7 While it is difficult to argue for one national group over another, certainly the development is larger and more pronounced in New Orleans (with sometimes as many as twenty tribes from the 1880s on) than in any of the other Caribbean-basin regions where Mardi Gras Indians are celebrated. Why New Orleans? On the one hand New Orleans is uniquely Caribbean rather than North American in its early history and cultural development, and as a result is the only place in the United States where Mardi Gras is celebrated as a major holiday similar to other parts of the western hemisphere--Mobile, Alabama, actually has an older Mardi Gras celebration but it is much less developed in both size and community participation at all class and ethnic levels. On the other hand, New Orleans also shares the cultural history of the United States, and Native peoples are more interwoven into the cultural fabric of the United States than in other countries in the Americas. Paradoxically, the high visibility of Native peoples in the USA may be because the armed resistance of Native Americans, especially in the "wild west," had a longer, stronger, and more successful history in the United States than anywhere else in the Americas. Active, armed Native resistance to colonialism continued through the turn of the twentieth century. Additionally, there was a higher incidence of African and Native amalgamation in the United States unlike in the Caribbean where the native populations were generally physically eliminated altogether and thus did not provide the opportunity for amalgamation on the order of Seminoles and Blacks in Florida or Blacks and Natchez in the Louisiana territory. In any case, there is a strong historical basis for Native-American images in the general American cultural consciousness as well as a more pronounced and subversive meaning of these images for African-Americans. Also, as Smith notes, both active collaboration between Indians and Africans as well as the "imaging" of Native-Americans by African-Americans dates back to the 1700s. Drawings by A. Debatz suggest the merging of African and native Indian cultures in Louisiana as early as 1735. In 1781 the Spanish governor forbade "masking, the wearing of feathers, gathering at local taverns, and public dancing by negroes" during the carnival season, hinting at what may have been the precursors of "Indian" gangs. Already by then it seems, the collective public fetes of the Afro-Indian-Creole population had developed sufficiently to pose a problem of public order (as perceived by whites). 8 Clearly, the historical background suggests that the idea of "masking Indian" is over two hundred years old. Rather than an anomaly, the Mardi Gras Indians are in fact simply a manifestation of a much broader and older cultural trend than is often supposed. Rather than unique to New Orleans, Mardi Gras Indians are better understood as representative of the historic merging of African and Native peoples--a merger which happened throughout the so-called "new world" both because of as well as in spite of African enslavement and Native genocide. THE BACKGROUND OF BIG CHIEF. On an individual or micro level, more so than any other currently active Mardi Gras Indian, Allison Marcel Montana personifies both the richness and complexity of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Born December 16, 1922, and nicknamed Tootie by his beloved cousin Bea ("my mother's first cousin") when he was very young, Montana's Mardi Gras Indian heritage stretches back through his father and his grandmother's brother. Montana's great uncle, "B.K." (sometimes called "Becate") Batiste, was the legendary founding Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, widely celebrated as the first Mardi Gras Indian tribe. Montana's father, Alfred, was a Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas, a tribe which grew out of the Creole Wild West. Moreover, at seventy-four, Big Chief Tootie Montana is the oldest continuously masking Mardi Gras Indian in New Orleans. He began masking on his own in 1947 and continued for forty straight years before taking a one-year break after Mardi Gras 1986. In 1988 he resumed and capped his long tenure as Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas with a decade-ending last March this past Mardi Gras 1997. Although his father dressed him when Tootie was seven years old, Montana did not actively mask until he was a young man of twenty-five. In the interim years, Montana fondly remembers that for about three years in his early teens he masked as a "skeleton." The Mardi Gras Indians were not the only Mardi Gras masking tradition in the New Orleans Black community. In addition to the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club which sponsors a famous parade, there were also the Skeletons and the Baby Dolls, plus a great deal of cross-dressing by informal groups and individuals. Tootie recalls they had about fifteen members in their skeleton gang, dressed in black, white painted bones on large sculptured heads made of enamel painted cheesecloth stretched over wire frames. Born and reared at 1313 St. Anthony Street between Dorgenois and Morais, Montana's background was Creole. He speaks fluent Creole French. Tootie's parents were separated and he grew up in an extended household of siblings, mother, grandparents, cousins, and in-laws. "It was twenty-one of us living in the house. During those times, people didn't worry about living rooms. There was six bedrooms and three kitchens."10 The men in his family were plasterers and carpenters or related occupations, and Allison eventually apprenticed into the metal lathing trade. This social background prepared Tootie both to understand inter-group dynamics and to do creative work with his hands. The urge to mask hit Tootie in 1947 after he had returned from a three-year stint in California working in shipyards during World War II. His father, who had retired from masking, had decided to start up again when friends asked Tootie's father to be the Big Chief of a new gang they were pulling together. Tootie decided to mask under his father. Tootie's first costume was a "two-week wonder" and his second year masking became the occasion for him to forever break the bond of dependency on others to design and fashion any part of his suit. In 1947 private phones in Black households were nearly nonexistent. Tootie recalled, "I went to his house several times and missed him. So one Saturday, carnival was about two weeks away. I sat on his step for hours and hours--here he comes that Saturday evening. 'Hey, what are you doing around here?' he asks me. I said, 'Man, I've been looking for you a couple of weeks.' He said, 'Yeah, what's the matter?' He got serious. He thought something had happened. I said, 'No, I heard you were pulling a gang from the Eight Ward.' He said, "Yeah, Charlie Brown came and got me.' So I said, 'That's what I had come to see you about. I'm interested. I want to mask.' He laughed at me. He said, 'Oh boy, you've got to be kidding.' I said, no. He said, 'You know Carnival ain't but two weeks off. Can you make a suit that fast.' I said , 'Oh yeah, and I did.'"11 Tootie completed the suit in time but relied on his father to make the crown which didn't get delivered to Tootie until the night before Carnival. After two years of his father making his crown, Tootie vowed to never rely on anyone else again. The second year Tootie Montana masked he was so beautiful, Robert Guidry, the chief who had replaced Tootie's father who declined to mask again, "Whispered in my ear, he said 'Man look, you're prettier than I am.' He said, 'You go ahead and be the chief.' I said, 'No, you're chief this year."12 In 1949 Tootie Montana founded his own gang, the Monogram Hunters, and in approximately 1956, after the Yellow Pocahontas had been inactive for a year, Tootie changed the name of the Monogram Hunters and reformed as the Yellow Pocahontas. He served as Big Chief through 1997 when Tootie Montana passed the stick to his son Darryl "Mutt-Mutt" Montana. Early on, two of Montana's most important characteristics were established. One, his leadership abilities easily won the confidence of his peers. "You see, everybody can't be a chief. A person who masks under you, they have to look at you as a superior in order for them to give you the respect and for you to be their leader. They've got to have that feeling."13 The other was Tootie's genius at designing costumes. "A lot of people think that my father showed me how to make Indian costumes, but he never showed me anything. As a matter of fact, he was surprised. He didn't want to see me out do him either. He had the history for having a pretty crown. If you are really into this like my daddy was and like I am, then you're really proud. I learned by making mistakes. One thing about making those crowns, their feathers didn't flop. Their feathers stay sewn down tight. They didn't move. And he had made the star crown--a new type of crown. I said, 'You know, I remember you having that star crown years ago. I want to make that crown, but how would you make it that it flop?" He just looked at me, put his hand on his chin, and smiled. He would never tell me how it would go. He shook his head like it couldn't be done. But I was determined. I was only sorry that I made that crown after he was dead."14 Tootie Montana has been a major innovator in suit design. He developed the full-length trail crown that spread out horizontally from side to side instead of lengthwise sticking out behind the chief. Moreover, on Montana's suit "Every piece was put on there one at a time. You pick up a sequin, you pick up a bead; even the beads around a stone are threaded and you hook them up one at a time. I use glue after my pieces are put together. I make my pieces like a puzzle."15 Montana also made major innovations in the use of abstract geometric, three-dimensional figures in addition to representational designs. "Everybody was flat. I was flat until I wanted to be different and then I just started doing it. I started raising my pieces up. My daddy did a little--not three-dimensional, he used the carton that the eggs came in."16 Although it is traditional for Mardi Gras Indians to sew a new suit each Carnival, Montana has excelled as an innovator. His creative genius seems inexhaustible. Additionally, Tootie Montana has made major contribution in moving the Mardi Gras Indians away from physical violence to aesthetic competition. "I'm the one who changed it from fighting with the guns to fighting with suits. Everybody in the city, even the rag men, in their mind they think they can outdo me. They be sewing to beat me and they get fooled every time. "My father changed a lot. They had a Magnolia Bridge, not too far from where the Superdome is now. It was a little pontoon bridge any tribe they crossed over that bridge meant they were going to humbug---they used the word "humbug" to mean fight. But my daddy crossed it every year. My daddy was a son-of-a-gun. And he had people with him like Spy Boy Dolphy and Lil Yam Springham. They used to mask with capes over their shoulders. They didn't wear those big heavy crowns like I wear because they had to run. When they would get ready to meet another tribe they would close that cape, fold their arms, and have their hand right on that gun in their waistband. When they'd meet the enemy they would tell them humba. Humba is a Creole word that means get down, set down, or put down."17 Eventually, after repeatedly going uptown every year, the Yellow Pocahontas under Alfred Montana's leadership became so feared that other tribes stopped fighting them and the actual fighting began to die down. AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTFORM. Because of his family history, Tootie Montana is also a repository of Mardi Gras Indian traditions including singing, dancing, and drumming. Few, if any, can match Tootie's knowledge of the traditions surrounding the use of chants and songs, and no one has been able to top his stirring rendition of the anthem, "Indian Red." "I sing Indian Red like my daddy sang it. It's a hymn, like a spiritual. They use that song to open your practice and it is also to identify each member of the tribe and what position they're carrying."18 So while we admire his suits we should not overlook his contributions as a vocalist and dancer, nor should we minimize the genre-changing import of his leadership abilities. Certainly the suits are the most striking aspect of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, but there is a deeper aesthetic than costuming at work. Musicologist John Miller Chernoff, who has intimately studied the social function of African music, argues: In African societies, music fulfills functions which other societies delegate to different types of institutions. In Africa, musical events provide a focus for personal character and encourage the socialization of indigenous philosophical and moral ideals: respect, patience, flexibility and adaptability, collectedness of mind, composure in the exercise of power and in the toleration of powerlessness, a sense of pluralism, and a sense of balance in the perception of personal character and generational filiation. Music serves a crucial integrative function within many types of institutionalized activities, and musicians perform a complex social role in community occasions. Music and dance sometimes provide the generative dynamics of large- and small-scale social movements.19 Chernoff could easily have been describing in detail the function of Mardi Gras Indians in the Black community and especially the influence that Tootie Montana has exerted on both preserving positive Mardi Gras Indian traditions and elevating some of the less savory aspects, especially physical warfare. This traditional art form has changed over the years but the basic elements remain intact. The seminal elements of Mardi Gras Indian culture are threefold. One is masking. Two is procession. Three is ritual. In the case of Mardi Gras Indians, the masking element of the culture offers multiple levels of interpretations. African cultures traditionally use the mask as a vehicle to connect the here and now to the spirit world; to invite the gods to possess the body and to transport the body to another plane of existence. Whether one accepts or understands this level is irrelevant to the fact that masking is near universal among sub-Saharan and particularly West Coast African peoples. Dancing, singing, and parading on Mardi Gras day (or at Indian practices), the Mardi Gras Indians often enter the spirit world of possession akin to catching the spirit in Black church services or being ridden by loa in a voodoo service. Montana explains, "If you're for real and you do it all those years I did it with no excuse, they can't hold you back when you get on that floor. It's just like a sister in church. You're dancing with a spirit, with a feeling. If there are five or six chiefs in my practice, I'll out dance all of them until they short-winded and they have to run outside looking for air. I'll still be on the dance floor soaking wet. Look like I can't stop. My duty was to out dance every one of them. I'm just dancing with a spirit. I'm not just dancing to be dancing."20 The second level of masking is to hide one's essence within a socially acceptable form. In this case the spirit of resistance is "masked" as a Mardi Gras activity. In the early years, Mardi Gras Indians would actually fight each other as well as anyone who got in their way. The loose translations of some of the chants refer to "refusing to bow down" and "kiss my ass." The militant assertion is more than simply macho-inspired behavior, especially when presented in the guise of Indians, the people who waged armed struggle against colonialism. The third level of masking is the goal of body adornment which is socially acceptable to the dominant cultures within the context of Carnival. The desire to produce beauty in dress, beauty in song, and beauty in dance pushes each Indian to and beyond their creative limit. The chiefs in particular tend to be men who take extreme pride in their personal appearance. The multiple levels of masking are sometimes so complex that even the participants are not self-consciously aware of all the possible meanings. Tootie recalls seeing Aztec and African sculpture in a museum. "It was shocking the year I won the National Endowment Award in '87 [Washington, D.C.], we went to New York and Maurice Martinez brought us to a museum. About a quarter of block from where I was standing I could see something look like sculpture and I said, 'Let's go look at that.' Man, when I walked up there, the funniest feeling came over me. I said, 'Lord!' Joyce [Tootie's wife] said, 'Look at that, you remember you had that.' And Maurice too, he said, 'Remember, you wore that same design.' A design that just came out of my head. And it was not one but several pieces that I've done through the years on my suit, particularly in front of my crown. I looked. Three thousand years ago somebody did that. I said, 'I'll be dog-gone.' That stood on my mind. It hit me kind of funny and stayed on my mind. I knew I had never been to New York, less alone been to that museum. It was no copy job. I think my creativity is greater than copying. Like people get books and copy things out of a book. I don't trust that. I know they made more than one book."21 Tootie had never seen Aztec stone sculpture and traditional African beadwork before except in its "masked form as Mardi Gras Indian crowns and beadwork. The element of procession is an equally important part of the aesthetic. Unlike the Eurocentric tradition of a centralized place (museums, galleries, exhibitions, etc.) which the people go to in order to view the best artwork, the African tradition emphasizes literally moving the art through the community. Again, the tradition is "masked" as a Mardi Gras parade which is both acceptable to the dominant society and within the means of the Black community. Again, Tootie offers an interesting insight. He maintains that his first ten years of masking Indian was, "for myself. The rest of the time, those other forty years were for the people. After you do it for so many years and you get involved and you get to be the people's person, you have a lot of feeling for the people. They make you do a lot of things. Right now, when I'm making a suit, I be saying, 'Boy, wait until the people see this.' That's what I sew for."22 The third element is ritual. The formation of societies with secret codes, a specific hierarchy, plus regulations and obligations to be met serve as major focus of socialization by organizing and teaching young men how to be responsible members of their community. "If you're serious about it--I hear guys masking for a year or so and then missing. No excuses if you're serious. I've had all kinds of problems: separated, divorced, buying a house, spending money to repair it, no work--the type of work I do, construction work, sometimes you finish your job the man don't have no where to send you. You might be off a couple of weeks, maybe two or three months, sometimes long enough to draw unemployment. I faced all of that kind of stuff but made a suit, a new suit. Like Jackie Robinson, I started in '47. He didn't play ball for fifty years but I masked all that time except for one year."23 Thus, we understand the depth of Tootie's announcement to his mother that he was going to start masking Indian. "Now, when I first said I wanted to mask as Indian, even though I was a married man, my momma said, 'What do you want to mask as Indian for, are you crazy?' I said, 'I want to mask as Indian. I'm a man, and I'm going to mask as Indian.'"24 The fundamental framework of a Mardi Gras Indian gang is a functional hierarchy. Montana spells out the positions: "You've got first chief, which is Big Chief; First Queen; you've got Second Chief and Second Queen; Third Chief and Third Queen. First, Second, and Third chiefs are supposed to have a queen with them. That's just tradition. I found them doing that. Your fourth chief is not called fourth chief, he's the Trail Chief. From there on it's just Indians, no title. You also have your Spy Boy, your Flag Boy and your Wild Man. Your Spy Boy is way out front, three blocks in front the chief. The Flag Boy is one block in front so he can see the Spy Boy up ahead and he can wave his flag to let the chief know what is going on. Today, they don't do like they used to. Today you're not going to see any Spy Boy with a pair of binoculars around his neck and a small crown so he can run. Today a Spy Boy looks like a chief and somebody carrying a big old stick. It's been years since I seen a proper flag. Today everybody has a chief stick. The Wild Man wearing the horns in there to keep the crowd open and to keep it clear. He's between the Flag Boy and the Chief."25 Between the nearly year-long sewing seasons and the Indian practices prior to Mardi Gras, the Mardi Gras Indian gangs compose a social organization which encompasses the most creative and most dedicated aspects of individual endeavor. Thus, to be an Indian is to make a social commitment and social statement, to dedicate one's resources, energy, and creativity to masking, procession, and ritual. Though not often discussed, these are key elements in the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, elements which account for the stability of a social formation that has outlasted other traditions that have died out over the years. Mardi Gras Indians are more than beautiful. Tootie Montana is more than a Big Chief. The Mardi Gras Indians in general and Tootie Montana in particular are the pinnacle of artistic achievement in a country where excellent, community-based art activity is all but defunct.   NOTES: Guide to ARC, LIGHT, A Series of Multi-Image Shows About Afro-Americans, Other Ethnic Groups, and Race Relations History. The Amistad Research Center, 37, 1983. Leonard V. Huber, New Orleans A Pictorial History. New York: Crown, 1971, 11. Michael Smith, "New Orleans' Hidden Carnival." Cultural Vistas. New Orleans: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Autumn 1990, 20. Ibid. Maurice M. Martinez Jr., "Two Islands: The Black Indians of Haiti and New Orleans." Arts Quarterly. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, July/August/September, 1979, 7. Barbara Bridges, "Black Indian Mardi Gras in New Orleans," in John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim, Caribbean Festival Arts. St. Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum 1988. 163. Ute Stebich, Haitian Art. New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1978, 132. Michael Smith, op. cit., 20. Allison Montana, unpublished interview, 23 April 1997. Allison Montana, unpublished interview, 30 July 1987. Allison Montana, unpublished interview, 15 July 1987. Allison Montana, unpublished interview, 23 April 1997. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Chernoff, John Miller. "The Drums of Dagbon." Repercussions, A Celebration of African-American Music. London: Century Publishing, 1985, 101. Montana, Allison. Unpublished interview. 23 April 1997. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

Tootie Montana passes away in June 2005.

>via: http://www.louisianafolklife.org/lt/Virtual_Books/Hes_Prettiest/hes_the_prett...

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

I MET MYSELF

 

 

I met myself coming around the corner one day, and I almost didn’t recognize me.

 

We so seldom see ourselves as we actually are. Even in a mirror we often see what we hope to be or what we fear we are, exaggerating both flaws and beauty. But when we see ourselves in the faces of others, then we really see.

 

Would you know yourself if you saw yourself the way others see you?

 

Of course, when we are young—or at least when I was first moving beyond my teen years—it never occurred to me that the past had anything deep to do with me personally. My father was from the country. I was from the city. I didn’t really see how his life was shaping my life. One African proverb says you can’t truly judge the man until the man has reared a child. So when can you truly judge the child?

 

Somehow, in the way most of us in America have been acculturated, I thought of myself as distinct from my parents. I did not consciously know their ideas about life except by inference in terms of what they encouraged and/or discouraged in me, and therefore I was blissfully unaware that much of my own ideas were shaped and influenced, if not outright determined, by the ideas my parents held.

 

When my mother was battling Hodgkin’s disease, she would have her three sons take turns driving her across the city to the hospital that was located in the next parish to the west of New Orleans. During these long drives for chemotherapy treatment she would talk to each of us, not about anything in particular, but many years later I realized she was consciously spending her last days conversing with her sons.

 

I’ll never forget how well she knew us, how after hurricane Betsy hit my mother had written a long letter to her youngest sister, my aunt Narvalee who was by then living out in California, a single mother with one child, my first cousin Frieda. My mother was a college graduate and a third grade school teacher. I knew she could write, but she opened her letter saying if she could write like Paul in the bible or like me, Lil Val. Wow, my mother admires me as a writer.

 

That was in 1965 three years before I joined the Free Southern Theatre and became a professional writer. By 1973 she was dead. If she saw me now, would she still admire me; would I remind her of the young man she loved; or would I be so strangely changed that she would know who I was but not know the me who came to be over the intervening years between now and when she last saw me back in the early seventies? I wish I could see me the way she would see me if she looked at me today, she who knew me before I knew me.

 

Have you ever had a long talk with someone who knew you well but had not seen you in over ten years? Say, you’re having a quick drink with Gilbert after seeing him at Walgreen’s; he was purchasing a prescription for diabetes medication and you were getting a refill of blood pressure medicine. Gilbert was your best friend from elementary school with whom you used to share lunch. You and Gilbert had even planned and literally started to run away together just for the romanticized adventure of two adolescents exploring the world away from the dictates of parents.

 

Or maybe you are hugging Eric and laughing with your arm still around his shoulder and he is playfully punching you in the chest the way y’all used to do while playing sandlot football games on the crisp autumns of weekends decades ago, and Eric would laugh at something you said and retort, “boy, you still talking all that shit.”

 

Or maybe it was Woodrow you encountered.  He was coming out of Picadilly’s, and you were going in planning to meet your wife for dinner. Woodrow was someone you used to laugh with pulling pranks in high school and now, even though he walks with a cane and has only half a head of hair, Woodrow gains your admiration as he tells you about the business venture he’s started. His enthusiasm is contagious as he describes all the wonderful skills and information he’s learning. His eyes are animated as he leans into you, one hand familiarly resting on your right shoulder as he describes the joys of getting into a whole new area and keeping up with thirty-year-old guys who are not even half his age.

 

Or you see Sandra in some office hallway, she who could outrun a cheetah back in eighth grade. She is still slim and vivacious. She greets you not only with a girlish giggle and bubbly “hello” but waves a well-manicured hand at you while balancing a cup of steaming coffee in her other hand; she’s married and has a beautiful diamond ring that literally shoots off a flashing rainbow of refracted lights as she waves good-bye. Seeing her brisk walk and the swing of her lithe hips makes you self-conscious about all the weight you’ve gained.

 

I temporarily quieten some of my concerns about who really knows me by insisting people who have not seen me in years can not really know me. The two questions—who knows me and do I know me the way other people know me—take turns as the focus of my mind.  Then I wonder how much of me today is the old me that friends knew decades ago.

 

The old folks say it’s easy to change your mind but hard to change your ways. Is the way I am today more or less the way I was way back when, and if so where did that constant part of me come from? Was I born the way I am, or are all of us shaped by our interactions with and responses to our nurturing environment?  Over a life time do we remain essentially the same or is it possible to fundamentally transform ourselves?

 

The things we think about can surprise us. Where did that come from, we ask ourselves while looking around to see if anybody saw us thinking these crazy ideas.

 

I remember riding a subway in Manhattan. I hallucinated for a minute and thought I saw my mother and father at a train stop, standing close to each other. My old man handsome, with a dimpled smile and a seriousness dripping from his eyes, his dark head held high; my short mother looking up, her eyes shining. He had one hand lightly on her waist, and she was leaning into him, two hands caressing his chest. I had never seen my mother touching my father like that, never thought of them as head-over-heels infatuated with each other. But there they were.

 

Suddenly I started wondering about what momma and daddy were thinking and feeling, how it was to be young and black in the late forties. How did fighting in two wars affect him: once in the pacific and later in Korea?  Before she died, my mother’s younger sister told me why we used to alternate going by the Robinson’s on Mardi Gras one year and the Robinson’s coming by us the next. Frank Robinson and my father were best friends, and daddy asked Mr. Robinson to look out for mama while daddy was in the war. I wonder now how it was to be a pregnant woman with two small children and her man returning to war after surviving World War II.

 

I can’t believe how dumb I was to ignore them. How could I be so uninterested in the roots of myself. Even though in my early manhood years I served in Korea on a missile base located on a remote mountaintop, I never really discussed Korea with my father. Like most youth, I was too self absorbed to want to learn anything about my origins or any of me that wasn’t actually embodied in my physical person.

 

When I was still in elementary school I gave a Frederick Douglass speech and won a prize in a church contest, and later in junior high school, playing Crispus Attucks, I jumped out of a closet—well, actually from behind a curtain—hoisting a sword fashioned from a coat hangar, proclaiming “I’m a proud black man who is willing to fight and die for my freedom.”

 

I liked that kind of black history but ignored my father’s fight to be hired as a laboratory technician at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He wrote letters all the way to Washington. DC, kept arguing his rights and finally a directive came down to hire him. They did, but they wouldn’t promote him even though he was the best lab tech they had, so good that he was the one training the college interns, some of whom were hired after his training and even promoted because they had a degree while he languished in lower grade positions because he had no sheepskin. I never heard him complain about mistreatment—was I deaf or did he just silently suffer, nobly carrying on despite slights heaped on him?

 

Now that I’m old as history, now that my teenage years are on page five hundred-and-something in the American history book, the textbook someone had thrown on the floor, in the corner of our classroom; now that what I went through does not seem relevant to what teenagers today are going through; now I want to know my father’s history, I want to embrace my mother’s hardships.

 

There they were again and again, at each train stop. That must have been me my mother was carrying in two arms, gently bouncing up and down. I had on a funny, green knit hat swallowing my big head. I am the elder of their three sons.  Should I get off and at least walk close to them, hear what they are saying to each other?  Look, my mother is talking to me.  What was she saying? Before I can muster the courage to stand up and go eavesdrop on my parents, the train pulls off. I am strangely more anxious about how I bungled the chance to get to know my parents when they were standing at the last stop than I am curious about what I will see at the next stop.

 

But the next stop is my stop. I get up and wait at the door as the train jerks to a stop. The door abruptly opens.  People pour in and out of the train simultaneously. As I push through the throng, I look up and down the platform. They are not there. My parents are gone, or more likely, never were here. I feel alone, making my way in the world.

 

I promise I will never forget my parents as young lovers. I was so fortunate that they were my fate—Inola and Big Val. My mother, a school teacher who never forced me to do homework and who did not even try to dissuade me from taking an F in high school one trimester because I didn’t want to do an assignment a teacher forced on me. My father forcing us to grow food in the city and pick up all the trash on our block to keep it clean but who never once tried to discourage us from picking up the gun in the sixties—that was my brother on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a shotgun during the take over at Cornell University. Big Val and Inola always encouraged us to fight, and they never made us conform to anything.

 

It is obvious to me now, but I have not always recognized this truth: I can not fully know myself if I don’t intimately know my past, intimately know the forces that shaped and influenced me, the people who gave birth to me, and especially the culture and era within which I lived. My head was spinning as my mental fingers tapped the codes of past experiences into the calculator of my consciousness. I was literally engrossed in my own world.

 

So there I was coming around the corner thinking all these thoughts, totally unaware that I was about to really peep who I was; suddenly I see someone I grew up with. That person looks old as they hug me, greet me, and playfully say, heyyyy man, long time no see. They enfold me in a long, warm embrace, holding the me they remember. I am struggling to remember their name.

 

In that moment I see both their obvious joy and also see how much they have changed, how they have aged. I wonder what they are doing, what is their life like, what part of the city they live in, what kind of work they do, all the personal profile sort of information. That’s when I had this weird desire; I wanted to be able to fully embrace myself and know myself the way this old friend thinks they know me, and I was really curious to know myself from the perspective that my parents knew me.

 

I wanted to know all of me, and that’s the moment when I had a news flash: now that your life is almost over, who are you really?

 

Am I only who I think I am or am I really the complex summation of all that I have also been in relation to others and in response to the world within which I have lived.

 

As I walked to my car I had a funny thought: my mind is not me. My mind may in fact be the biggest impediment to me getting to know me. Maybe my mind is the least reliable map of who I have been, a distorting lens when it comes to recognizing the self.

 

All personal intentions aside, all individual desires sublimated, all intellectual self-reflections and second guesses ignored, is it possible for any of us to truly know ourselves without the help and input of others who know us? Is it possible to move beyond letting our minds judge who we are? Would it be too overwhelming to consider letting the world we live in judge who we are? Can we shed the shackles of our own mind and be both free and fortunate to see ourselves the way others see us? And if that portrait was actually presented to us, would we recognize ourselves? 

 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

The Breeze And I

 

Last Thursday I drove out of town to Lulling, Louisiana, only thirty or so miles upriver from New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi River. I was there to see a neurologist, Dr. Hightower, who was an associate of my brother Keith. Keith is a cardiologist and arranged the visit because he suspected I might be exhibiting symptoms of the onset of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness for which there is no known cure. Additionally, Parkinson’s is idiopathic, there are no known causes of the illness. The best modern science can do is a drug regimen that will offset some of the effects.

 

In the early seventies I never thought about health issues when we were traveling back and forth all over Mississippi, often racing each other cross the length and breadth of an extremely hostile terrain for young black firebrands such as those of us in The Free Southern Theatre. I remember we were speeding from West Point, Mississippi headed over to Cleveland, Mississippi. Their infamous highway patrol caught me.

 

“Boy, you know where the courthouse in Oxford is, don’t you?”

 

“No sir, I don’t.”

 

“Well, you best go find it and pay this here ticket.”

 

I found it.

 

The court clerk was an old, white man straight out of In The Heat Of The Night. He pulled down a big, weathered ledger book. I remember his hand was trembling and the book shook as he lowered it to the counter top. At that time, I saw absolutely no commonality between me and that wrinkled, old presumed racist. Today I realize he probably had Parkinson’s.

 

I know now what I didn’t know then: all of we humans have more in common than are apparent when we judge each other by easy to discern differences such as gender, race, ethnicity or social behavior. I wonder was the old man’s tremors ever diagnosed or was he doing what I had done, simply accepting the inevitably of the shakes and coping with it as best he could.

 

How long would I have gone without professional attention had not my physician brother spotted something and had he not been able to track down a neurologist to check me out. We’re over five years after Katrina and medical care in New Orleans is still very much a spotty proposition, particularly for specialties and for mental health. I mention the latter because so many of us are suffering various stages and/or severities of depression. Our vary states of dementia, from mildly retarded to full out, bona fide crazy, often inhibit us seeking help for preventable and/or curable illnesses.

 

Worst than the paucity of health care in post-Katrina New Orleans was my general antipathy toward hospitals and medication, and it’s not just me. I recall Keith was hospitalized once with a fever and the physicians couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He had an infected appendix but the protrusion had lodged behind a rib bone or something and was not detected by normal x-rays. They wanted to do exploratory surgery. Keith nixed that. I think they finally found it when they did a CAT-scan x-ray or something like that and with a proper diagnosis, the doctors were able to operate before Keith’s appendix burst.

 

Also influencing my attitude was the way my father died of a mysterious illness. Friday evening he was talking. Friday night he slipped into a coma. Sunday morning he expired. Keith said when he arrived from out of town early Sunday morning there was not one doctor present who could tell him anything definitive about what was happening with daddy.

 

My father was not into taking medications. I’m like him. I don’t even take aspirins, but even if I was to seek treatment, without Keith’s expertise and assistance I probably would still be waiting for an initial screening. When obtaining health care is difficult, many of us just shuffle along, self medicating ourselves with over the counter pain killers. Worse, we generally ignore early signs of trouble and don’t seek treatment until we have some kind of major incident or incapacitation. And don’t even bring up the question of health insurance—if you’re poor and don’t have good health insurance, you can’t afford to get sick. It’s depressing.

 

Lucky for me my wife had Blue Cross insurance from her previous job as an X-ray technician at Veteran’s Hospital and my physician brother had excellent contacts, so I was able to receive first class health care shortly after a potential problem was spotted. My relatively stable mental state is due in part to the social safety net surrounding me.

 

It was a warm, late fall day in December and I was driving out to see a doctor. The temperature was inching up towards the high sixties, too warm to be considered a proper late autumn by New Yorkers but just the way we like fall and winter in the Crescent City. The drive over went well. I had music I’d burned to CD and when I got really close to the destination, I called for the final directions. I had just passed the non-descript gate and had to double back half a block.

 

Keith had seen a tremor in my right hand. Of course I had noticed it before but at sixty-three, I just passed it off as one of the many physical breakdowns that occur with getting old. I paid it no mind because the malady was infrequent and not serious enough to prevent me from using my hand.

 

From somewhere in my stored memory cells an image came to mind: a cut kite, fluttering downward. We used to have the kite patrol, a bunch of us adolescents on our bikes chasing after kites that broke away or were intentionally let loose. We would tear off, racing to see who would be the first to find the errant kite.

 

Back in the late fifties flying kites was a big thing in New Orleans. Most of us made kites. And even a lot of the adults would join in the fun. Miss Vivian who lived across the street from us and who sold chickens that she raised in her back yard would cross the street to the empty lot that was next door to our house to join the fun.

 

Sometimes we would make spending money by helping Miss Vivian slaughter young chickens but I didn’t have much stomach for it, so after two or three times I just stopped going. I hope my hand never goes spastic like those headless chickens whose wings beat against our pants as we held them still after Miss Vivian had sliced off their heads.

 

We had cut down most of the trees in the lot and that’s where we played baseball and football instead of in the street like we did when we played two-handed touch with the big boys. Lionel could throw the ball with some degree of accuracy damn near the full length of the block, three quarters of the block easy. But the street was no good for kite flying because car antennas and kite strings didn’t go well together, so when it was kite season, we generally stuck to the empty lot.

 

A white man whom I never saw or met owned the empty lot between our house and the corner house and refused to sell it to my father. Eventually, my father bought the corner house, which was on the other side of the lot between the two properties. My daddy’s father stayed by himself in the corner property until Betsy, when my grandfather drowned after retreating into a closet as the water rushed in.

 

My brothers had tried to go get him but they said the water came up too fast, and wires and trees were knocked down and all kinds of stuff was flying through the air. I believe Keith almost got hit, or was blown over, or something, and my father called Keith and Kenneth to come back. My family spent that night in the attic of our brick house before somebody in a boat carried them down to the roof of Hardin Elementary School in the next block from our house, the same school where my mother taught third grade. At that point my father must have deduced that his father was lost to the storm.

 

I was in the army in Texas when the hurricane hit. Kenneth says my daddy didn’t talk about his father drowning. They didn’t find the body until the following week, after the water had subsided and they were able to get into the house. Maybe it was even two weeks later. I know now that daddy was deeply affected—how do I know?

 

To quote my brother Kenneth’s favorite explanation for a lot of the behavior of we three brothers, “it must be genetic.” Over twenty years later I’m still deeply affected by daddy’s death even though on the surface I seem to have made peace with my father’s departure. I can talk about his transition without wincing or crying aloud. Such stoicism is typical of we Ferdinands, we take our blows and move on without lingering over the pain.

 

I don’t much remember my grandfather. I recall visiting him before he moved in after our family purchased the corner property. I have a deep but extremely fuzzy recollection of how my father would go check on his father when the old man stayed in some musty, two-room apartment. I believe it was somewhere in the upper ninth ward but I don’t accurately recall. My grandfather liked those old, big, square soda crackers—much thicker and more puffy than the thin saltine crackers like the ones we ate with cheese.

 

After grandpa relocated on the corner, my brothers and I would take turns crossing the lot to bring dinner plates to him in the evenings. He didn’t talk much. I don’t think we ever had an extended conversation beyond “here’s your dinner. You need anything else?”

 

I don’t have any image of my mother ever going over there, nor even my daddy spending any significant amount of time talking with his father on the porch or anything. I didn’t have words for it but it seemed to me my grandfather wanted to be alone, wanted to live hermit-like. I don’t even remember a radio over there. My father loved listening to the radio but wasn’t crazy about television. We used to watch the Gillette Friday Night boxing matches but that’s about all I remember my father regularly watching on television. I’m beginning to think solitude runs in my bloodline.

 

My grandfather was a big, red-bone man. Didn’t look much like my father. My daddy’s mama had died when he was very young, maybe five or six. From the one picture we found of her, years later, she was a dark-skinned woman—we couldn’t really make out her features on the blurry photo. Daddy undoubtedly took after her in appearance. I don’t think my daddy remembered his mother. In fact, my daddy didn’t even know exactly when he was born. The courthouse out in Napoleonville, or was it Donaldsonville, had burned down and the records were lost and none of the family knew for sure. So much history gets lost in the wind.

 

Even when the wind is blowing real hard, a kite doesn’t fall like a plane with engine failure, or even a balloon that springs a serious leak. The kite just sort of slowly flutters downward until caught in the branches of a tree or on a power line, occasionally on the roof of a house, seldom settling on the ground.

 

There were a lot of trees all over the Lower Ninth Ward when I was growing up in the fifties. It was sort of like living in the country. Indeed, we had a real farm with cows, horses, pigs and stuff in the next block before the city bought the two block stretch and built a school in the late fifties or early sixties. I never got to go to Harden Elementary because I was too old by the time it opened. It’s funny the bits of unconnected things you remember when you plummet your past.

 

I never made a box kite. I had wanted to, like the kites I saw in a book, or even construct one of those Chinese dragon kites, but I got so wrapped up in building fighter kites with razor blades embedded in the frames. We would crash the kites into each other trying to see who would have the last kite flying. In fact, now that I think about it, chasing down kites that had been knocked out of the sky was how the kite patrol started.

 

A red kite descending against a blue sky towards a not too distant green tree line. That’s what I think every time I remember my hand trembling until I dropped my fingers down to the desk top or atop my knee. It seems Keith’s suspicions were on target. Dr. Hightower—what a name, I wondered during the drive over whether he would be a black man. Leslie Hightower. I was willing to bet he was a brother. I was right. Anyway, after the check up, I listened with equanimity, even cracking a joke or two as Dr. Hightower delivered his preliminary diagnosis. I indeed was exhibiting symptoms of the onset of Parkinson’s Disease.

 

It’s days later I can’t resist the urge: from time to time I hold my hand out to see if it’s shaking. So far, every time I’ve checked it’s been relatively still, but I take note whenever I feel a brief tremor and it reminds me of catching a falling kite whose string has been cut.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

22 december 2010

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

It didn't jes grew:

the social and aesthetic significance

of African American music.

 

 

Our music is our Mother Tongue, our meta-language that we use for the fullest expression of self. In the preface to Paul Garon's seminal text on surrealism and Black music, Blues & the Poetic Spirit, Franklin Rosemont notes that

 

. . . American black music originated in the culture of the slaves who were systematically deprived of the more "refined" instruments of human expression. Slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write, and they had no opportunity for plastic expression. Even their musical efforts were severely circumscribed; slaveholders who feared the use of drums and other instruments as means of communication between slave assemblies, and hence as tools of insurrection, banned such instruments from the plantations. Thus the spoken word, the chant, and dancing were the only vehicles of creative expression left to the slaves. The sublimative energies that in different conditions would doubtless have gone into writing, painting, sculpture, etc. were necessarily concentrated in the naked word and the naked gesture - in the field hollers, work-songs, and their accompanying rhythmic movements - in which gestated the embryo that would eventually emerge as the blues. Black music developed out of, and later side by side with, this vigorous oral poetry combined with dancing, both nourished in the tropical tempest of black magic and the overwhelming desire for freedom. The extreme repressive context of its origins, and its consequent subsumption into itself of the whole gamut of creative impulses, together give the blues its unique intensity and distinctive poetic resonance

As a living and fertile body of creative expression blues and jazz retain today their boundless integrity and provocative flare. Their role in shaping the modern sensibility is already large and shows every sign of expanding. It should be emphasized, since so many critics pretend not to notice it, that all authentic blues and jazz share a poetically subversive core, an explosive essence of irreconcilable revolt against the shameful limits of an unlivable destiny. Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few timid skeptics, this revolt cannot be "assimilated" into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The dark truth of Afro-American music remains unquestionably oppositional. Its implacable Luciferian pride - that is, its aggressive and uncompromising assertion of the omnipotence of desire and the imagination in the face of all resistances - forever provides a stumbling-block for those who would like to exploit it as a mere commercial diversion, a mere form of "entertainment," a mere ruse to keep the cash register ringing. Born in passionate revolt against the unlivable, blues and jazz demand nothing less than a new life. (7-8)

 

Within the above stated context, this paper will address language as both a basic means of communication and as a tool for artistic expression; the foundational aesthetics of African American music, which I refer to as GBM (Great Black Music); and the state and significance of the four major genres of GBM in the contemporary setting - Gospel, or religious music; Blues; Jazz; and Black Pop or R&B, which includes everything from Jump Blues, Doo-Wop, Soul, and Funk to New Jack Swing and, arguably, Rap (as an extension of R&B).

 

This essay is an attempt not simply to explain what GBM is and how it functions within the Black community, but to contextualize both the total significance of and worldview implicit in GBM.

 

The term Great Black Music is not a racial term, even though it contains a racial element. When African Americans refer to someone as Black, we generally mean a lot more than race; after all, we are a mixture of races. So the biological is the least important of the three elements of Blackness. Culture and consciousness are the critical elements. Culture roots the individual in a group, a community of people who share behavior, attitudes, ethos, and ideals. Consciousness is critical because an individual can be biologically Black and Black-acculturated by rearing, but still serve as a representative of some other culture. Just because a Black person does something does not make that act or creation representative of Black culture.

 

I Heard That

 

Let us start with who African Americans are, how we as a people became ourselves. And let us recognize an obvious but often overlooked reality: Standard American English (SAE) is not the native language of African Americans, even though a kreolization of SAE is the language we grow up with and use on a day-to-day basis. We use English because it was forced on us by a dominant culture. Unlike other immigrants who came to the United States, African Americans (and, in a similar way, but not to so great an extent, Native Americans) were denied the opportunity to use on a day-to-day basis, and thus retain, their native languages.

 

Some would argue that, while the above may be historically true, in contemporary settings SAE is our native language. I argue that a "native tongue" is not imposed, but rather developed. Moreover, those of us who are not formally educated in SAE beyond the rudiments of grammar tend to speak an Africanized form of SAE.

 

Formally speaking, SAE is literally a foreign language, inexact and inadequate to express fully the human-rainbow totality of our essence as a people. The lexicon and grammar of SAE can not communicate the essentials of our experiences precisely - in part because SAE was the language devised by those who actively conspired to forcibly deny our humanity and ensure our continued subjugation.

 

Our national identity as a people was forged in the kiln and on the anvil of the greatest holocaust in human history: the colonization of the Western hemisphere (especially the genocide of Native Americans and the chattel enslavement of Africans). The English language specifically ignores, obfuscates, misrepresents, or negates this reality. There are literally no SAE words to describe adequately the social and psychological history of our people. Indeed, SAE is overwhelmingly anti-"Black." Just as all languages propose a worldview and value system, SAE (like all other colonial languages) presupposes the domination of people of color by Europeans and the hierarchical subservience of all things African to anything European.

 

But although we were denied expression of our native languages, being the creative people we are, we not only developed our own approach to the master's tongue, but we went one better: We created a nonverbal language which expressed our worldly concerns, as well as our spiritual aspirations. This language we created is "the music."

 

More than any other form of communication, "the music" expresses, at the deepest levels, the realities of our existence. The most profound and serious moral lessons are generally articulated by the speaker shifting into the "talk-singing" style of orature that is an extension of GBM. All of our ways of expressing our concerns, what is on our minds and what is happening, appear in the music long before they are codified in literature, dance, film, or the visual/plastic arts. On a personal level, we find ourselves using song lyrics as encoded metaphors to express the epiphanous moments of our lives, especially as the moments concern our interpersonal relationships. We will literally break out in song and nobody - not even that person walking past you on the street as you moan, "First you love me / then you snub me" - finds this unusual. We understand because the music is our mother tongue, even those of us who otherwise eschew any use of the vernacular.

 

At the same time that I celebrate "the music" as our "mother tongue," like most people of color, I recognize that African Americans from birth grow up speaking a second language, a variation of SAE, the trade language of our times. Those who argue that we are now simply American citizens and not colonial subjects transformed by nearly a half-millennium of colonization are very precisely and ahistorically attempting to redefine our reality and deny the circumstances and legacies of chattel slavery.

 

The Mother Tongue and the Other Tongue

 

I start with the language issue because I believe that a full appreciation of our music is incomplete if the appreciation does not identify GBM as our "mother tongue," the language we use for the fullest expression of ourselves. Put simply, "the music" is where our soul is. With other people you might have to view paintings and architecture, or learn to "read" their literature. With our people, in order to fully appreciate us, one must immerse oneself in our music.

 

Africans in the diaspora are probably the only modern people whose soul is expressed almost solely through our music. On the African continent, sculpture (and specific crafts ranging from textiles to ceramics), dance, and sociological ritual systems represent defining expressions in addition to music. But in the diaspora, where our people were uniformly denied the opportunities of concrete expression and mass assembly, all our soul was poured into the ephemerality of music.

 

Indeed, it is possible to know and understand African Americans by studying our music and its history without ever reading a novel or viewing a piece of art - especially since the most successful of all our other art forms owe some measure of their inspiration, if not their articulation, to the influence of GBM on the artist.

 

Not only is GBM our most identifiable and most developed cultural expression, but, within the context of world achievements, GBM is far in advance of the other art forms. In fact, while we have barely penetrated world consciousness in terms of other forms, we dominate world consciousness in terms of music. Not even in the area of dance (which is so closely aligned to music) have we made a comparable world impression. This is no accident, but a specific reflection of the high development of music within African American culture and the dwarfing of all other forms of artistic expression.(1)

 

This reality is partly due to the constrictions of enslavement and colonialism. Music, sound could be created at anytime, under any conditions with only the most primary of instruments - i.e., the voice (lyrics/melody) and the body (beats/rhythm). Chained naked to a tree or a rock, our ancestors could still make music. Plus, because of their own opinions about music, our captors had little idea that music could be expressive language and hence a tool of resistance, and even rebellion. (The colonialists of America did understand enough of the power of our music that in the ante-bellum era they universally feared and legally prohibited our use of the drum outside of well-monitored special occasions. Thus, within GBM, rhythm, although sometimes sublimated, becomes one of the major cultural battlegrounds.)

 

Every era of our music has an identifiable rhythm. This is even the case with the religious music. So on the one hand the drum is repressed by the dominant society, and on the other hand the drum is recreated by proponents of GBM who understand (sometimes intuitively, sometimes consciously) that rhythm is the battleground.

 

Heads up: Why do I claim GBM as the "mother tongue" and "SAE" as a second language, with what was once called "Black English" as a third category somewhere between the two? GBM was developed as a language of communication and cultural affirmation among ourselves and specifically for ourselves. "Black English" was our means of day-to-day communication among ourselves about mundane and ordinary matters. Our use of SAE existed strictly for the purpose of communicating with our captors or as an indication that we had successfully adopted the ways of our captors and hence were not like "most Blacks" - indeed, were almost "White."

 

From a linguistic standpoint, to become "White" is to strip oneself of any "foreign" languages that might be one's birthright and also to strip oneself of foreign accents. Linguistically, to be White means to speak SAE flawlessly. Even when it appropriates Eurocentric musical instruments or modes of music making, GBM never aspires to be White. Listen to the music, especially unmediated by dominant-society audiences, recording companies, or aspirations, and you'll hear what I'm saying.

 

As Geneva Smitherman perceptively notes,

 

African slaves in America initially developed a pidgin, a language of transaction, that was used in communication between themselves and whites. Over the years, the pidgin gradually became widespread among slaves and evolved into a creole. Developed without benefit of any formal instruction (not even a language lab!), this lingo involved the substitution of English for West African words, but within the same basic structure and idiom that characterized West African language patterns. . . . The formation of this Black American English Pidgin demonstrates, then, simply what any learner of a new language does. They attempt to fit the words and sounds of the new language into the basic idiomatic mold and structure of their native tongue. . . .

The slave's application of his or her intuitive knowledge of West African rules to English helped bridge the communications gap between slave and master. However, the slaves also had the problem of communicating with each other. It was the practice of slavers to mix up Africans from different tribes, so in any slave community there would be various tribal languages such as Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa. Even though these African language systems shared general structural commonalties, still they differed in vocabulary. Thus the same English-African language mixture that was used between slave and master had also to be used between slave and slave. All this notwithstanding, it is only logical to assume that the newly arrived Africans were, for a time at least, bilingual, having command of both their native African tongue and the English pidgin as well. However, there was no opportunity to speak and thus reinforce their native language, and as new generation of slaves were born in the New World, the native African speech was heard and used less and less, and the English pidgin and creole varieties more and more. (5-8)

 

Understand that we are talking about a process of generations, of centuries, not simply a decade or two. Also understand that many African languages were tonal - when West Africans talk, it's almost like singing. Finally, understand that music was integral to most social activities in West Africa. These things allow one to appreciate that the dynamics of the development of language apply very specifically to the development of GBM, especially after the Civil War when African Americans had some measure of freedom to engage in self-defined cultural expression. It is only common sense that the musical cultural expression of newly emancipated African Americans would be very different from, if not outright at odds with, the music of our historic captors, even though the music would also be adaptive of instruments and modalities of musical articulation (especially "melodies") of the dominant society. Additionally, we should keep in mind that a significant number of the newly emancipated creators of GBM were either first- or second-generation American-born and thus would have had a high degree of African cultural retention, especially in terms of music.

 

In this context, it is apparent that there was no pressure or inclination for early Gospel, Blues, Jazz, or R&B to uphold standard English vocabularies or musical modalities. Indeed, Jazz in particular and the other three genres in general self-consciously differentiate themselves from SAE, and from the dominant modes of American and European music-making, through the use of an indigenous vocabulary, a culturally specific syntax, and a desire to break past the formal structures of the existing language.

 

This is not just a case of being "ignorant" or "emotional." It is a conscious choice to create an alternative language of communication, a language which is expressive and affirming of the colonized rather than expressive and affirming of the colonizer.

 

It may seem a bit "inaccurate" and "off-putting" that I keep using terms colonized and colonizer, especially since, after 1865, African Americans have legally and culturally been citizens of the United States. But there are many of us who want to retain our culture of resistance and alternative rather than be about submission and assimilation. For us, the re remains a raw element in our cultural expression precisely to remind us who we are, and to affirm that we do not ever want to forget or give up the fight against our condition of forced submission to alien conquerors.

 

This is why in many of our native vocabularies, when speaking of Whites in general, the vocabulary is one of opposition - e.g., the "ofay" (pig Latin for 'foe') of bebop and the "honky" of the Black Power Movement. This historic oppositional stance often seems to be in direct contrast to the higher morality of calls for mutual respect and racial harmony. But calls for harmony which do not address reparations and rectification of massive historical inequities are, at best, "idealistic" and more often than not downright "duplicitous," because such calls refuse to take into full consideration African American historical and contemporary political and economic realities.

 

This attitude of cultural warfare is indelibly encoded in the mother tongue of GBM and in "Black English." Conversely, opposition to this philosophical position is encoded in SAE. This is the fundamental cultural dichotomy: GBM, the mother tongue, through its intrinsic oppositional stance, is first and foremost a culturally specific affirmation of the humanity of African Americans, the same people whose humanity SAE attempts to negate.

 

The Philosophical Attributes of GBM

 

In this affirmation/negation dichotomy is precisely where the philosophical attributes of GBM are located. At root GBM is always loud, raw, bluesy, and iconoclastic; it is a break with the status quo yet an extension of tradition; it is democratic in execution yet solicitous of the unique contribution of the individual; and it is celebratory of the present and adaptive to current conditions hence the emphasis on compositional and articulational improvisation (i.e., the music is composed as it is created, and articulated as improvisation based on the realities of the moment rather than as a written score). At root GBM is a music which is both naive in its emphasis on emotive prowess and modern in its advocacy of participants' equality.

 

Loud. Dynamic is not inexact, but loud carries a connotation of disruptive of the status quo. If we thus read loud to mean 'disruptive,' then clearly in musical terms rootsy GBM is quite loud. Part of it springs from the desire to create overtones and feedback, and a desire to actually "feel" the vibrations of the music: low-frequency drums and bass instruments, falsetto horns and voice - all setting in motion vibrations which literally "rock the house" and encourage shouted response. This extremely dynamic element of feedback (as in call-and-response both from the audience and from the instruments themselves) and of physical movement is manifest whenever "the music gets good."

 

Unlike classical European music which one contemplates in silence and stillness or in highly structured dance movements, GBM demands response and movement. While silence can be part of loudness, most of the techniques associated with GBM, particularly at the roots level, emphasize an articulation that is physical and rhythmic, regardless of the instrument used.

 

Moreover, this "loudness" tends to disrupt calm expression and require accommodation of accidents of the moment. In fact, by being loud, the music actually (and consciously) causes unplanned responses so that those responses can be subsumed into the resultantly transformed totality. In a sense, the music does not fully become itself until it literally vibrates its environment and its audience causing both to participate in the music making.

 

Everything from "tearing the roof off the sucker" to "burning down the house," "smoking" and "cooking" or "wreaking maximum effect" - all connote physical transformation of the structure or environment where the music is made and not just the emotional transformation of the audience that is present when the music is being made. While it is possible to effect this desired transformation while playing softly, in general there will even be a loudness to the silence that is played the silence becomes not an absence of sound, but rather a powerful damming of sound that physically and momentarily hold s the noise at bay.

 

Raw. As in the case of soft and loud, raw as a quality operates with refined in a both/and dialectic rather than an either/or duality. Rawness is achieved at the moment of creation, not after a period of reflection. Even music that starts off refined will strive to achieve a point where the response is spontaneous and unpremeditated. Philosophically, this is a "come as you are" approach that emphasizes honest involvement with the music making. The acceptance of rawness also means that no one is excluded because of social considerations. Raw accepts one at whatever level one exists. Raw also emphasizes "honesty" over "correctness," sincere response rather than intellectualized observation.

 

Raw is always uncivilized, unmediated by social convention. Again, listen to the music at the root level and you will immediately hear what I am talking about. There is almost an urgency of the now time, which reflects when we want to be free: now, not later. Rawness openly reveals what has been socially repressed/oppressed/exploited - at least with urgency, and often seemingly with fury or anger.

 

Bluesy. The Blues is an attitude of transcendence through acceptance, but not submission. We can accept reality without submitting to it: In fact, we sing Blues songs to transform that which we accept - namely our reality. Conversely we can submit to a reality and not transform it, which is what I call singing "straight" and "proper" with nary a bluesy inflection. In the lyrics of traditional Blues songs, there is generally a stated desire to rise above the situation at hand, to transform the situation (with violence if necessary), or at the very least a looking forward to better times.

 

In traditional Gospel, the bluesy sound focuses on deliverance and transformation in the other world. In traditional Blues, the focus is deliverance and transformation in this world. Both offer a spiritual response to a negative social situation, supposing that if one can not overcome physically, then psychologically (or "spiritually") one can transcend the limitations of reality.

 

From a musicological standpoint, a bluesy sound exists outside of the specific tones associated with Western musical scales. There is an inexactness to the bluesy sound: a quavering between set nodes; a sliding toward or away from the desired note; a use of noise elements and objects to alter the sound (e.g., rubber, metal, and glass mutes; bottlenecks, knives, the hand or other body parts covering the bell or sounding boards of the instruments, etc.); unorthodox playing techniques; exaggerated vibrato and various other devices that produce a "dirty" tone.

 

This "dirty" or bluesy tone approximates the social reality, which is one of chaos and struggle rather than order and stability. The articulation and attempted resolution of the chaos, of course, involves a transitory, give-and-take process, because in reality we are still dominated and thus, regardless of successes and victories, on a social, political, and economic level we are still very much in a period of chaos.

 

Even those of us who are consciously attempting to assimilate are in a state of chaos, because integration is won at the expense of repressing our "native" identity and is also always threatened by the inability (and/or unwillingness) of the majority of our people to assimilate fully. We are faced with the chaos of the self as a collective identity which revels in resistance and sometimes wallows in submission, or the chaos of the self as an individual identity, an "emancipated" but not "liberated" individual self which achieves a measure of freedom by literally severing its identity from the group which gave that self life. This is the chaos which is articulated in GBM as a loud, raw, and bluesy sound.

 

In "the blues aesthetic," the opening essay in my book What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self, I offer a "condensed and simplified codification of the blues aesthetic" which further explains the philosophical ingredients of the bluesy sound:

 

1. stylization of process - i.e., whatever blues people did, it was done with a style and emphasized the collective tastes and simultaneously demonstrated the individual variation on the collective statement. this practice, of course, is based on call/response motifs but might more accurately be identified as theme/variation. if you know the history of the music, the use of theme/variation marked the movement from agrarian (communal) forms to urban (collective) forms. the communal form required the audience. in the collective form, the artists became their own audience, and the audience moved from communal participant to observer of the collective, from proactive participant to quasi-passive observer, from ritual to entertainment. . . .

 

2. the deliberate use of exaggeration to call attention to key qualities, with wit being one of the most salient projections of exaggeration. . . . (ever wonder why some people miss a joke that is really obvious? if you don't know the reality, you can't appreciate the joke, precisely because the joke is a comment on the reality.)

 

3. brutal honesty clothed in metaphorical grace, which includes at its core a profound recognition of the economic inequality and political racism of america. at the same time, this honesty is clothed in a profound appreciation of the fact that every strength got a weakness and that it is better to recognize (and sometimes even ridicule) rather than cover up weaknesses.

 

4. acceptance of the contradictory nature of life - life is both sweet and sour. while generally you got a pot of the latter, almost everybody is guaranteed at least a spoonful of the former. here one must be careful not to confuse dualism with dialectics. life is not about good vs. evil, but about good and evil eaten off the same plate.

 

5. an optimistic faith in the ultimate triumph of justice in the form of karma. what is wrong will be righted. what is last will be first. balance will be brought back into the world. this faith was often co-opted by christianity, but is essential even in the most downtrodden of the blues songs.

 

6. celebration of the sensual and erotic elements of life, as in "shake it but don't break it!" (12-14)

 

Iconoclastic. GBM naturally must destroy the tyranny of dominant cultural forms in order to express its true self, because the African is not European, and the African American is not White. Every social construct and/or mythological icon of the dominant culture is based on upholding the supremacy of "White" and/or Eurocentric ideals, or at least on accepting the "goodness" and "desirability" of these ideals. Thus, at every turn, in every genre, in every era, innovative GBM is seen/heard as antithetical to the musical status quo.

 

Iconoclasm is an organic development wherein GBM reflects the aspirations of an oppressed and exploited people. What is surprising is that the breaking of conventional structures always happens and always comes in unexpected forms. GBM iconoclasm is literally a guerrilla attack on the dominant and dominating system. Though we know the guerrillas are out there and expect that they will strike, invariably we are surprised when they do.

 

We should not be surprised by this inexorable law of cultural conflict. When the status quo restricts, then the articulation and affirmation of cultural expressions by those who are suppressed necessarily must take the form of demolishing the social constructs of external control.

 

A Rooted Departure. Here we have a contradiction which expresses itself as a dialectic, a revolutionary form of ancestor worship. GBM is always forward looking and seldom seeks to preserve or replicate the past or status quo, yet at the same time, the point of departure tends to be an extension of GBM musical traditions. From Jazz flowing out of Ragtime, to Rap sampling Funk & Rock music, a creative boldness of GBM is the way in which every new development finds some way to incorporate a previous era. Perhaps this is possible because the tradition, the previous era was, at the time of its birth, revolutionary.

 

Like genetic traits, the root expression can manifest itself after skipping generations. GBM stresses a connection to tradition even as it transcends tradition; it offers a musical manifestation of the African philosophical principle of accommodation and adaptation. I call it embracement because it creates something new while celebrating something old.

 

Embracement signifies a philosophical open-endedness which completed structure (e.g., musical compositions in which all the notes are written out, and even the inflections are directed by the composer) precludes. Embracement posits that nothing is ever finished. Each performance brings the opportunity for a fundamental development (or, conversely, a fundamental failure) to occur. This risk taking, this element of chance is intrinsic to GBM, which proposes the past as a dynamic entity: Tradition is constantly growing and being enriched.

 

Now Is the Time. We can't perform in the past because it's gone, and we can't perform in the future because it's not yet here, so we must perform in the present. When we perform, the question becomes whether we are trying to replicate something that existed in the past or trying to be profoundly contemporary and create a day / a music that never before existed and will never again exist in precisely the same way. In this context, principles of expression rather than specifics of expression become the measuring rod of success. Over and over, one will hear GBM musicians saying that they have no desire to play like they used to play, even though they might want to replicate a certain feeling they attained at some point in the past.

 

GBM, while respectful of its roots, always seeks to march forward, and in marching forward to use everything that exists as part of its arsenal of instruments and elements of music making. Literally, nothing is exempt from absorption into GBM. GBM remains identifiably itself because it adapts rather than adopts all influences. It has the capacity to deconstruct, recontextualize, and supersede the "foreign" and even "antagonistic" origins of some modes of expression which it adapts into the music.

 

In a profound sense, GBM does not seek to go back to Africa, but to go forward into Africa. GBM represents a transformed Africa, a sophisticated Africa, an Africa which as a result of colonialism is no longer innocent or any longer exclusively continental. In this context, there is a definite push forward to develop into something, that something being a cultural accretion, a hybrid which contains the best of everything that exists whether indigenous or foreign, originally innocuous or originally harmful.

 

Participatory Democracy. The emphasis on the individual differentiates GBM from traditional African musics. The phrase participatory democracy was popularized by SNCC workers in the Civil Rights Movement, and CBM's emphasis on participatory democracy (i.e., communal music making which encourages each individual to contribute creatively) is New World.

 

Some would say democracy in general is an American contribution. However, the fact is that America was made into a real democracy by African American struggles for civil and human rights. Left on its own, America would probably never have transformed itself into a true democracy. Thus to identify democracy in music as an American concept is misleading, unless by "American" one explicitly means a kreole society which is self-consciously accepting and respectful of its various ethnicities.

 

Participatory democracy encourages, even demands, open-ended contributions from all present (be they musicians or "audience members"). Participatory democracy is qualitatively different from what is generally meant by "democracy" in the American context, since each day offers a new interpretation and also new players to add to the mix. This allows for constant growth and development commensurate with the conditions of the time and the talents of the participants. These are the basic philosophical principles of GBM, which has afforded African Americans a way to elevate both the collective and the individual at the same time, in an open-ended embracement, without diminishing either.

 

A caveat: The above elucidated principles have been deduced from a consideration of the body of the music. I do not believe that any significant number of African American musicians create their music with these principles in the foreground of their intentions. I do not believe that any significant number of African American musicians are even conscious of these principles, or, if presented to them, that many artists would agree that these are principles governing the music they create. But the intentions and/or consciousness of the artists is not the measure of the relevance of the philosophy.

 

I believe that there are two ways to approach philosophy: One is to start from axioms and beliefs and try to make reality conform; the other is to create based on one's own being and social makeup and then deduce principles evidenced by what has been created. Ideologues go the axiom route, artists go the creation route. In this light, I believe a good critic should be an artist who starts by investigating what is.

 

If we understand nothing else, when we study Afrocentric art we must understand that everything must change. Even principles will change if the principles are drawn from the reality which we use our art to reshape. Indeed, to the degree that we are successful in changing our reality, those changes will inform and influence our philosophy. So, just as GBM has no respect for form, but loves process, our critiques are not about establishing absolute laws but about identifying a process that will guide us in interpreting and changing the world - the world that we are born into as well as the world that our art helps create.

 

I don't have the power to predict the future, but as a critic, I do have an obligation to understand and analyze the present and the past. Thus, this essay is meant to be open-ended and imperfect: open-ended because it is not an end in itself, and imperfect because I am ignorant of so much.

 

The Four Major Genres of GBM

 

"Why am I treated so bad?" is both a question and a statement, an existential question that has been historically phrased as "What did I do to be so Black and blue?" This questioning of causality is based on our belief in karma's truth: What goes around, comes around; what you send out is what you get back. Our belief in karma's forces causes us to wonder "What fundamental wrong did we as a people do to deserve slavery?"

 

"Why am I treated so bad?" is a bold statement of fact that sums up our position in this society. Except for Native Americans on reservations, we currently hold down the top spot of nearly every major negative index of social well-being by an identifiable sub-category of U.S.A. society.

 

The Blues aesthetic answer to our existential question is "Why not?" - life is like that, full of mysteries. We didn't earn or cause our hard luck. We didn't cause our own enslavement, even though we certainly must effect our own liberation. Christianity, however, supplies a significantly different answer: original sin - all mankind is born in sin and hence both guilty and in need of salvation.

 

When we were enslaved as a people, we were not yet Christians. We had our own belief systems. But in the crucible of chattel slavery, we were denied the opportunity to practice our religious rituals and retain our languages. To the degree that anything beyond subservience was taught us, we were taught Christianity, and as scholar/historian Vincent Harding accurately asserts in his important book There Is A River, although we were involuntarily conscripted into Christianity, we shaped Christianity to meet our needs and, in so doing, became the authentic U.S.A. practitioners of Christianity as a theology of liberation.

 

From a psychological perspective, our cleaving to Christianity is in part because it both answers the question of guilt and offers the gift of salvation, but there is also a material reason.

 

Except for the unique setting of Congo Square in New Orleans, Christian worship services offered the only opportunity during slavery for the expression of Afrocentric, organized, social rituals among our people. These services included the singing of hymns in a manner completely different from that in the orthodox Christian liturgy. Initially, our services were conducted under the vigilant eye of the slave master, and our hymn singing was expressly imitative of the music which we were taught, even though we always adapted and never simply adopted the teachings and modalities of worship. In Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music, musicologist Christopher Small posits that what

 

. . . enabled the Africans and their descendants in those same circumstances not only to survive as an ethnic and cultural group, not only to retain a proud identify within the societies of North and South America and the Caribbean, but to create a culture which, through its music and dance, has gone out across the world, was not Christianity (the Indians were Christianized too) but the African ability to adapt and to tolerate contradiction, and, above all, the African assurance that the supreme value lies in the preservation of the community[;] without a community for support the individual is helpless, while with it he or she is invincible. (86)

 

I believe that Small is correct. Moreover, African philosophy has an aesthetic aspect which manifests itself in music, both the modes of making music as well as the meaning of music for the individual and for the community. And when we consider both the African philosophical framework which stresses adaptability and the evolved African American use of music as mother tongue, we can begin to understand why our music speaks to the world.

 

Consider the African essential: Given that humanity began in Africa, then to one degree or another, all humans have a common ancestry; we are all Africans. And whether we accept or deny this primal truth, Afro-centric music remains the most universally admired of all musics.

 

The conceit that music in general is a universal language is false. Chinese music, for example, has limited universal appeal. European classical music has broad appeal, but only in direct proportion to the dominance of European people worldwide. So how is it that African American music speaks to people worldwide when African Americans have no social dominance over anyone anywhere on the planet?

 

First of all, GBM retains not only the African pulse of life, a rhythmic sensibility/spirituality (the "drum connection") which all peoples relate to, but also, and more importantly, GBM retains the African principle of inclusion and adaptability. Essentially this means that there is room for everyone to be included on their own terms and that everyone can adapt the music to their own purposes.

 

Second, GBM expressly advocates freedom and democracy, individual expressiveness and collective participation. To a much higher degree than other musical forms which are often regimented and insist on the authentic reproduction of stylistic rules and modes, GBM stresses the authenticity of the musician and the audience as opposed to the authenticity of the musical form itself. Thus the artist is not only given the freedom to improvise, but the artist is encouraged to improvise (make a unique contribution). Until the music meets the needs of both the artist and the audience the music is not successful, no matter how faithful the performance might be to a specific musical form.

 

These two principles are unparalleled in any other musics of the world. Moreover, no other music had to carry as much aesthetic and social weight as did GBM. During slavery, Christian religious music was the only organized form of collective self-expression which both met our human needs and was acceptable to the dominant society. This is why religious music was the first genre of GBM to develop.

 

Gospel: Amazing Grace

 

In ante-bellum America the development of churches and the concomitant development of unique forms of musical worship by African Americans took place exclusively in the North. Reverend Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.) Church in Philadelphia in 1797, and in 1801 Rev. Allen compiled and produced a hymnal which contained original musical compositions as well as variations of traditional Christian praise songs. This music was closer to what became generically known as "Negro Spirituals" than to what we consider "Gospel"' music today.

 

In the South, where the overwhelming majority of our people were, the development of independent churches was not tolerated, and the compilation of hymnals was mostly by word of mouth. In the early 1800s a wave of religious revivalism swept across the South which was largely Protestant and independent of centralized church authority. In many cases, African Americans were included in the services, although segregated either in special sections of the camp meetings or at separate camp meetings. The accepted participation of enslaved Africans in American religious revival-ism is another factor in the rise of religious musical expression as the first form of GBM.

 

Up to the Civil War, there was a constant, albeit ever decreasing, influx of Africans into the overall Southern population. In the South, African modalities of cultural expression remained strong and obvious, while in the North, African cultural expressions remained strong but sublimated. Not until the post-WWI Great Migration, would religious expressions common to the South become the majority expressions of our people in the North.

 

The African religious modes of worship included trance and spirit possession, dance, communal chants and semi-sung oratory ("talk-singing"), improvised musical passages, and community sharing of hardships. Practices such as prayer services and the telling of one's determination gave each individual the opportunity to "speak" her or his piece as well as the opportunity to seek her or his peace in the Holy Spirit. While some African American Christians deny the relevance of such cultural practices and consider them either quaint or reprehensible expressions of illiterate people, these cultural expressions are philosophical projections of an African sensibility rather than a reflection of ignorance of European culture.

 

There is also a strong class bias to the sublimation of African aesthetical practices among our people. "Better off Negroes" do not go for whooping, hollering, shouting, and getting happy. In deference to acceptance of and by the Eurocentric mainstream, middle-class African Americans tend to sublimate their African aesthetics and appropriate Eurocentric modes of expression.

 

Prior to Emancipation, there was no overt mass development of an African American cultural presence distinct from mainstream Euro-American culture, precisely because a truly self-determined and fully expressive African cultural presence was politically unacceptable and constantly repressed at its every articulation. This began one of the major characteristics of African American culture: the masking of African elements within Euro-acceptable forms. For example, Afrocentric "processions" became Eurocentric "parades" (often with a martial character).

 

Generally, masking was not necessary for music because music neither created nor resulted in any concrete manifestation. To quote jazz artist Eric Dolphy, "After you play it, it's gone into the air." By contrast, the plastic arts (such as painting and sculpture), the literary arts, and other art forms (except dance) all have a concrete manifestation which called attention to itself.

 

Excepting those elements which were locked into a museum or warehouse as confiscated treasure, the European colonizer burned and destroyed every vestige of African culture. In America anything that "looked" African had to go, but Afrocentric culture existed and was constantly recreated in a "masked" form. Often such masked elements passed into the general body of American culture, and their African antecedents and essences went unrecognized. This is why most African Americans who are Christian do not realize that they have retained African liturgy.

 

Masking was often so successful that second- and third-generation African Americans could not decode the mask and thus began to identify the masked expression as non-African. In other words, we became unable to recognize our own contributions to the general culture because the contributions had been masked in order to escape repression, and the success of the masking made them unrecognizable as "African" even to succeeding generations of African diaspora people. This transformation and/or absorption (whether voluntary or by appropriation) into the dominant culture is one of the major dynamics of African American culture.

 

We often misunderstand the transformation of Africans into Americans and assert that it is solely a result of Eurocentric dominance. Our reality includes the intentional masking of African elements by African Americans in order to preserve those elements. The American reality also includes the masking of African elements by Whites in order to appropriate and/or commercialize the culture. This masked preservation/appropriation/commercialization dynamic is especially true of GBM, from the minstrel tradition, to Dixieland jazz, down to Madonna and Michael Jackson.

 

A key to understanding the complexity of masking and the propagation of African American culture is an appreciation of the constant transformation that the culture manifests as both a survival technique and as a result of interaction with external forces. In short, another defining aspect of African American culture is its fluidity.

 

So-called "Black culture" as a self-conscious and overt expression of our people did not exist until after the Civil War. The period of Reconstruction marks the actual formation of our four musical genres although, as I have acknowledged above, religious musical expressions predated emancipation.

 

The music that is considered classic "Negro Spirituals" was codified into a cultural force in the late 1800s when the spirituals were "spruced up" and presented as concert music in 1871 by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Here begins the common practice of dating the development of African American music by its presentation to the Eurocentric mainstream and its acceptance by "Whites." Here also is the nexus of cultural production and cultural authenticity - i.e., until Afrocentric cultures are produced for (or more importantly by) Whites the culture goes unrecognized by the mainstream unless "money" can be made from controlling the sale of the cultural "product."

 

The commerce associated with the Black church, including the publishing and recording of Gospel music, has remained largely controlled by African Americans. Thus, it is no surprise that the history of modern Gospel music starts, in part, with musician/entrepreneur Thomas Dorsey and with Dorsey's immediate predecessor, the Rev. Charles A. Tindley, who composed and published what some critics consider the first modern Gospel songs. Tindley, who was at the height of his achievements as a composer between 1901 and 1906, marks the beginning of known individual composers of African American religious music. But whether you date the development of Gospel from the turn of the century with Rev. Tindley, or from the "Roaring '20s" with Thomas Dorsey, it was not until the 1920s that the music we know as "Gospel" was broadly practiced on a national level. The two best known exponents of this "new" music were vocalist Mahalia Jackson and composer Thomas Dorsey. It is instructive to note that initially Jackson, Dorsey, and others who practiced this new Gospel form were rejected and, in fact, prohibited from performing in some churches because they were accused of "jazzing up" religious music or of bringing "the Blues" (i.e., the "devil's music") into the church.

 

Mahalia Jackson was from New Orleans, the cradle of Jazz, and she subsequently went on to become recognized as the greatest Gospel singer of all time. Before becoming a devout Christian, and widely celebrated as the preeminent composer of modern Gospel music, Thomas Dorsey had been a Blues musician and performer who accompanied Ma Rainey and many other early Blues singers. Whether consciously or not, these artists were espousing the holistic African approach to culture which recognizes no inviolable separation of church and state.

 

In the 1990s, the "contemporary" Gospel movement, as exemplified by artists such as Bebe and Cece Winans, The Sounds of Blackness choir, and literally thousands of others, represent a continuance of the Jackson/Dorsey rejuvenation of Gospel to "include" the significant and essentially Afrocentric musical developments of the day into the religious music canon. Those who reject these artists today because they are making worldly music and calling it Gospel are of the same temperament as those who rejected such attempts in the '20s and '30s.

 

In the overall scheme of contemporary Gospel music, perhaps the single most significant development is the insertion of the drum. The drum, considered the "most savage and pagan" of all instruments, was indelibly associated with our African origins. The drum had always been excluded, indeed condemned, in Christian music making. That the drum today is found in the choir stands and on the stages of almost every Gospel concert is an amazing development that indicates not only the strength of African retentions but also the inevitability of Afro-centric cultural expressions surfacing among the masses of African Americans, even those who had consciously rejected the drum in previous times.

 

The drum, then, is a reaffirmation of Africanness rather than a contradiction of Christianity. But Gospel music does face a major contradiction - its movement toward commercialization. For African Americans, this contradiction, which can be encapsulated as the contradiction between performance and ritual in contemporary Gospel music, first appeared during slavery in Congo Square. Located on the then-outskirts of the city of New Orleans in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, Congo Square was a field on which enslaved Africans were allowed to dance and make music on weekends, and notably use instruments of their own creation and sing in African languages. Here is where the codification of African American culture first began, and here also is where the dichotomy between ritual and entertainment was crystallized.

 

For the gathered Africans this was ritual, a chance to establish community and articulate self-expression in keeping with an Afrocentric sensibility, but here also is where Euro-Americans came to observe and be entertained by Afrocentric music making. For the enslaved African and the native-born African American, dancing and singing in Congo Square were vital rituals, whereas for European and Euro-American observers, this was exotic entertainment (as well as unavoidably "erotic entertainment" - unavoidable because of the nature of race relations, the prevalence of miscegenation, and the French - initiated social system of placage, "octoroon balls," and other interracial arrangements between white males and women of color).

 

Congo Square existed from the 1700s up to the Civil War. But to this day there continues to be a Eurocentric audience for Afrocentric music, and this audience tends today, as it did then, to be a paying audience.

 

Gospel has retained much of its African character precisely because it is ritual rather than commercial. Indeed, except for a handful of professional recording artists, most Gospel artists seldom had to tailor their performance to commercial considerations. Moreover, the network of independent churches provided both a stage and a conservatory for the development of artists apart from the vicissitudes of popular trends. This is not to say that there are no trends in Gospel music. Certainly Gospel is subject to fads and the mass adoption of certain styles in a given era, but the adoption or rejection of commercial influences is not a life-and-death issue for Gospel artists.

 

The primary audience for Gospel music is an audience of "believers" who partake in the music making with the expectation of being moved to religious ecstasy. Through their collection offerings the Gospel audience (i.e., the church) supports the vocalists, choirs, instrumentalists, and musical directors. This audience validates the worth of the artist, not a recording executive, not the status on the commercial charts, not television (or radio) popularity, although all of these certainly play a role in contemporary Gospel music.

 

Completely apart from Eurocentric cultural concerns and apart from the pressure to sell to the mainstream, the church as a collective entity remains both a training ground for talent and a support center/validator of that talent as it develops. Additionally, each church has its own stars - Gospel artists who are revered within their own community. Currently, no other form of GBM has an African American base of support. Even Rap has a buying audience with a significantly large percentage of non-African Americans.

 

While there is no current danger that commercial concerns will dominate Gospel, there certainly is a danger that commercial concerns will become influential. Concerts can not replace the intimacy and authenticity of the church which functions year round, but commercialization unchecked can begin to erode the authority of the church as a cultural entity. On the other hand, the reaffirmation of Afro-centricity within the contemporary African American church means that there is a counterweight to any derogating effects of commercialism. Thus, a commercial group such as The Sounds of Blackness, produces a Gospel-based album which is overtly commercial but which is also suffused with overt Afrocentric concepts and musical styles.

 

The direction that the African American church goes will determine to a significant degree what direction the mass audience for GBM goes.

 

Blues: Laughing to Keep from Crying

 

Contrary to popular belief, the Blues is not slave music, even though slave-era work songs, field hollers, chants, and the like were some of the basic ingredients of the Blues. In fact, the archetypal image of the wandering Blues musician, roaming from town to town with his guitar, is de facto testimony that Blues musicians, as we know and mythicize them, could not have existed prior to Emancipation because our people did not enjoy freedom of movement during slavery.

 

The initial form of itinerant Blues music that became known as Country Blues is best exemplified by Mississippi's Robert Johnson. Johnson, who was born in 1911, was not the first to record nor was he the originator or even popularizer of the Blues or various Blues vocal and instrumental techniques; however, he was easily the most developed and forceful Blues musician of his era to record.

 

An accomplished guitarist and composer, as well as a mesmerizing vocalist, Johnson, who recorded only 29 songs during two different sessions in 1936-37, set standards for acoustic Country Blues performance which stand today. Literally thousands of performers, including many of the most popular and best known rock recording artists, have extensively "borrowed" Johnson's melodies, riffs, and even whole songs, often without crediting Johnson.(2)

 

A second form of Blues is known as the Classic Blues, the only modem genre of music which was led by women. In a country dominated by patriarchal values and male leadership (should we more accurately say "over-seership"?), Classic Blues is remarkable. Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace, and the incomparable "Empress" of the Blues, Bessie Smith, were more than simple fronts for turn-of-the-century Blues Svengalies. These women often led their own bands, chose their own repertoire, wrote or co-wrote their own songs, and certainly composed or chose their own lyrics. Moreover, those who were truly successful, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, actually ran their own production companies.

 

Never again have women performed leadership roles in the music industry, especially not African American women. The entertainment industry intentionally curtailed the trend of highly vocal, independent women - most of whom, it must be noted, were not svelte sex symbols comparable in either features or figure to White women, but robust, dark-skinned, African-featured women who thought of and carried themselves as the equals of any man. America fears the drum and psychologically fears the bearer of the first drum, the feminine heartbeat that we hear in the womb.

 

Without going too far out on a psychological limb, what is immediately clear is that the disappearance of big, Black women from the music industry had nothing to do with the tastes of or rejection by the African American record-buying and ticket-purchasing audience. I postulate that this disappearance had more to do with the inability of White males to deal with assertive (some would say "domineering") women. Outward resemblances notwithstanding, Bessie Smith was clearly nobody's Aunt Jemima.

 

Aesthetically, the music these women sang was closer to an amalgam of popular music infused with Blues elements than Country Blues per se. Indeed, it was only through a recording fluke that the Classic Blues first came to the attention of the general American public. When Russian-born immigrant Sophie Tucker was unable to make a recording date because of contractual conflicts, vaudeville and Blues musician Percy Bradford convinced Okeh, a small record label at that time, to allow one of his featured singers, Mamie Smith, to record. Eventually, they produced "Crazy Blues." The record was released in August of 1920, selling over 75,000 copies in the first month and over one million within a year. Soon the then-fledgling record industry was literally rushing to record every Blues-singing Smith woman they could find, thus beginning the industry trend of churning out clone after clone of what is perceived now as a "hit formula."

 

The third category of the Blues is the Urban Blues - the up-South, big-city variation of the Country Blues. Most of the founding fathers of Urban Blues were Mississippi-born transplants such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, and literally hundreds of others.

 

These artists laid the foundation for modern pop music. As John Lee Hooker sings, "The blues had a baby / and they called it rock and roll." Except for the wholesale raiding of Robert Johnson's repertoire, there has been no larger cross-cultural appropriation than the coveting of Urban Blues songs by White pop artists - especially the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, two groups that, unlike their American predecessors and peers, actively acknowledged that they got their music from African American Blues artists.

 

Although White American artists such as Elvis Presley became rich copying "Hound Dog" from Big Mama Thornton and recording the songs of Otis Blackwell (an African American composer who would send Presley tapes so that he could learn to sing the songs), these artists did little to acknowledge and celebrate the sources of their riches.

 

In the 1990s, other than a handful of legendary figures, and a larger number of relatively unknown elderly practitioners, Whites dominate Blues - or, more correctly, they dominate the "representation" (as opposed to recreation) of the Blues. One central fact needs to be kept in mind: Other than the three schools of the Blues (Country, Classic, and Urban), there have been no real developments of the Blues as a form, although there have been significant transformations and off-shoots.

 

For example, the Kansas City Jump Jazz Shuffle (especially composer/arranger Jesse Stone and vocalist Joe Turner), mixed with the swampy syncopations of Southern Louisiana (especially producer, composer, and band-leader Dave Bartholomew and pianist/vocalist Fats Domino) produced the music we know as "Rock and Roll." Rock and Roll became really popular as an American artform when "Rockabilly" (White, Southern, Black-influenced country music) artists adopted the form. Key in this "masking" process was Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, which recorded artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. It was Sam Phillips who is credited with the prophetic statement, "If I could find a White man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." Phillips found that man, Elvis Presley.

 

When Elvis burst on the popular music scene, the initial controversy was not about his singing but about his style of dancing - i.e., swinging his hips like a "coon." That's the point of the Elvis cameo in the Academy Award-winning movie Forest Gump, which glorifies America's innocence in the '50s.

 

This next statement is guaranteed to be controversial, but before you rush to get me a straitjacket, hear me out.

 

The Blues is dead!

 

One of the most vexing and seemingly contradictory aspects of GBM is that the majority of Blues fans, and arguably the majority of Blues musicians (no argument if you only count people 35 and under), are White. Why don't Black people listen to and play the Blues today?

 

There are all kinds of theories, but there is one simple fact: GBM is functional. Unlike Western culture, which is obsessed with eternal life, African culture accepts the inevitability of death and rebirth through generational transformation. Thus, when something dies, we grieve and then move on, carrying the spirit of the deceased within us as we create anew.

 

The Blues is no longer functional mainly because the conditions which created and sustained the Blues have changed. But the fact that the Blues, in the classic sense of a specific genre of music, is dead does not mean that we are not blue or that we don't have blues. It just means things ain't what they used to be.

 

Coming out of Reconstruction, we African Americans literally found ourselves emancipated but unliberated. The Union government reneged on its promise, and the South aristocracy let loose a viscous wave of repression designed to drive us back onto the plantation, only this time as wage slaves (a state akin to being serfs). Our serfdom was defined as "sharecropping," a system designed to keep us behind: behind the plow, behind the eight ball, always in debt, and never in control of our daily lives and destiny.

 

Many of us left the South. Literally walked out. In wise reaction to the Union's sellout, we decided to head west and thus added to the post-Civil War opening of the "Wild West" frontier - by some estimates, one out of every three cowboys was an African American. This story is fertile ground for further research, but my point is to focus on those who stayed South, especially in the Deep South areas where Jim Crow was most virulent. As Nina Simone presciently sang, "Everybody knows about Alabama, but Mississippi, Goddam."

 

In The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues, author Giles Oakley paints this despairing portrait of the Mississippi delta, the area most critics consider the oven within which the Blues was first baked:

 

By the 1890's there was a greater concentration of black people in Mississippi than in any other part of the country. In some areas blacks outnumbered whites by as many as two or three to one. This was especially true of the so-called Mississippi Delta . . . the local term loosely applied to that part of the State flanked on the West by the Mississippi River, roughly from Memphis to Vicksburg, and on the East by the Yazoo River. It is a flat plain, for centuries washed over by uncontrolled river floods accumulating some of the richest earth in the South. The land had been leveled and planted by slaves, who constituted a majority of the population as early as the 1840's. Levees were banked up to control the river flow and the area became more and more densely populated after the Civil War. As railroads and roads were developed, larger and larger numbers of poor and illiterate blacks were attracted to the area, drawn by promises of higher pay made by labour agents working for the white planters. Virtually limited to sharecropping and working on the new plantations owned by the whites, raising cotton to the exclusion of everything else, life in the Mississippi Delta was the essence of the black's segregated social isolation. The dominance of the white minority was absolute economically, educationally, politically and socially. Mississippi had a reputation for racism and bigotry from the earliest days of Emancipation; its record of lynching, reaching a bloody peak in the early days of the Jim Crow laws, was appalling. (46, 48)

 

Only by understanding the social context of post-Reconstruction Mississippi can we appreciate the origins of the Country Blues and the roots of the Urban Blues. Anybody who thinks African Americans are nostalgic about Jim Crow era America has to be ignorant or crazy, or both. In fact, we voted with our feet (first in terms of the Great Migration and then with Civil Rights demonstrations) to get out of the Jim Crow era, an era which was the crucible for the production of the Blues.

 

The Blues is dead because the soil that produces the Blues either lies fallow or has been covered with concrete. However, the Blues sensibility, the impulse to rise above by declaiming just how tough times are, the laughing to keep from crying, the celebration of the transformatory power of violence - all of that is found in the Blues music of the '90s, which is, of course, Rap.

 

We as a people have never been hung up on perpetuating the American status quo. Our goal has always been to either flee Babylon or burn it down, to leave it or change it. In the case of the Blues, as a specific reflection of Jim Crow America, we did both - we left the Blues as a specific genre of music and we transformed the Blues into other popular forms of music. In fact, what is Rhythm and Blues but post-WWII Blues, and what is Rap but a literal recitation of the Blues over "phat rhythms"?

 

What we must distinguish is the difference between process and product, between focusing on a sensibility which informs the creative process and the forms which are the result of a specific creation. The Blues as a historic genre is dead. The Blues as a sensibility is very much alive. The Blues is dead. Long live the Blues!

 

Jazz: I Got The Heebee Jeebies

 

Of all the forms of GBM, Jazz is both the most misunderstood and the most powerful as an influential social and musical phenomenon. The origin of the word Jazz as applied to the music is shrouded in myth and anonymity. It is known that "jazz" had a connotation of sexual activity. How or why this term was used to describe the music, however, is not known.

 

One of the most common and inaccurate myths about Jazz is that it was born in the brothels of Storyville in turn-of-the century New Orleans. The truth is that Jazz was born in the streets and parks o f the New Orleans African American community. Initially, Jazz was primarily an outdoor music performed at social occasions such as wedding receptions, funerals, parties, births, parades, and picnics.

 

The man credited with being the founding father of Jazz is trumpeter Charles "Buddy" Bolden, who merged the popular music of the era (especially Ragtime) with the Blues. (Note that many of the early Jazz musicians also recorded as accompanists to Classic Blues performers - e.g., Louis Armstrong backing Bessie Smith.) This merger was a brilliant stroke of African genius. Once again, the African aesthetic of inclusion and infusion worked to produce a synthesis, Jazz, that was greater than the sum of its parts.

 

Another misunderstood aspect of Jazz is that it is exclusively or mainly a solo improviser's art. While there is no doubt that improvisation is a major hallmark of Jazz, improvisation is not unique to Jazz, and Jazz has a major history of composition dating back to its beginnings. Indeed, the "other" founding father of Jazz is Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, a contemporary of Buddy Bolden's, who was the first major Jazz composer and arranger.

 

In the context of world musical culture, Jazz is the only serious alternative to classical music as a major musical art form. Although, in relation to European classical music, Jazz is relatively young, Jazz (along with the other three genres of GBM) has exerted more dominance on world perceptions and practices of music than any other musical form. Moreover, in the later half of the 20th century, GBM has superseded classical music in informing, influencing, and, in some cases, dominating world musical tastes and practices. This is especially true if one focuses on the recording and documentation of music, and on the creations and comments of musicians. And given that the last five hundred years have been an era of European world dominance, this is an especially striking development. Part of the explanation is that Jazz specifically, and GBM in general, flew around the world on the back of the American eagle, often masked and presented as "American" music in white-face.

 

There is, of course, an element of truth to Jazz being the "Whitest" form of GBM. From its early days, Jazz has always had White practitioners. Moreover, the first major commercializer of jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), was an all-White group led by cornetist Nick La Rocca. In 1917 the ODJB opened at Reisenweber's Cafe in New York. In February of that same year, on Victor Records, they cut the first Jazz record and kicked off the national musical love affair that would later be dubbed the "Jazz Age." Although the reality is that no major Jazz musician copied either the band's style or LaRocca's style, the ODJB is sometimes cited as critical to the development of Jazz by those who are intent on citing the existence of non-African American practitioners as proof that Jazz was significantly developed by White musicians. Indeed, from 1917 on, there has been a continuous racial boosterism of specific Whites as the dominant forces in Jazz. ODJB was quickly followed by Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and so on. Of course, this industry-induced racialism did not necessarily reflect the personal attitudes and actions of those Whites who were lionized by the media. Just as the fact that Blacks singing opera doesn't negate the fact that classical opera is a European art-form, the existence of White practitioners in no way means that Jazz is not an African American artform.

 

Another misconception about Jazz is that it is essentially African rhythms, European harmonies, and American melodies. I think that's one-third correct - there is no doubt that Jazz utilizes American melodies (and, for that matter, any other melodies that Jazz musicians find attractive). The fact of the matter is that Jazz is born out of the American matrix and was kreole from the "get go." But this musical kreolism is not an equal mixture of racial elements; rather, it is an adaptation of various cultural elements via an Afrocentric sensibility.

 

Jazz rhythms use straight 4/4 time, which ca n not be said to be African; but how the 4/4 is used - i.e., "swinging" - is African American. Jazz is both a specific: creation of African Americans anti a general reflection of the Afrocentric perspective of its creators.

 

As for harmony, clearly the harmonic substructure of Jazz is the Blues, which is a "good, long ways" from standard European harmony. The basic harmony of Jazz maybe European, but what distinguishes Jazz is its Blues tonality.

 

Blues and Swing are the two major structural foci of Jazz. To the degree that one plays Jazz that neither swings nor employs a Blues tonality and/or sensibility, one is playing a form of Jazz that is not very "Jazz-like." The genius of the music is that it is possible to play authentic Jazz and at the same time be far removed from the central focus of the music. It is possible, for example, to play Jazz in a Eurocentric manner - i.e., to emphasize product and technique over process and emotive prowess.(3)

 

The central point to understand about Jazz, especially in the contemporary context, is that Jazz has a dual tradition that sometimes may seem to be contradictory. Buddy Bolden represents the Bluesy popular element and Jelly Roll Morton (who was fond of loudly declaiming that he invented Jazz) represents the compositional, formalized element. Wynton Marsalis is the Jelly Roll Morton of this era.

 

Those who dismiss Marsalis's "neoconservatism" make the mistake of focusing solely on one aspect of Jazz and ignoring the other. Wynton and Jelly not only share New Orleans as a birthplace, they have similar temperaments, and congruent emphasis on playing the music correctly. Moreover, as time goes on, Wynton Marsalis is focusing his energies on composing music. His major hero is Duke Ellington. The real deal is that Wynton Marsalis has a concrete/sequential personality and a high appreciation for technical and structural integrity. Because he has a bent toward repertory, toward "classical" study, he is attempting to preserve the best of previous eras.

 

The rub, of course, is that technically replicating the past is not the same thing as extending the tradition. Indeed, when Jelly Roll, Duke, Monk, and countless others were creating what we now consider classic music, they were challenging the then-status quo, shattering the old molds and creating completely new forms of music. They were also playing the truths of their contemporary life experiences and not trying to repeat what had been done by the generation before them.

 

The major problem with much of the Jazz in the '90s is that many young musicians are so intent on recreating old forms that they have nothing new to say. And a major part of their silence evolves from the fact that they are the products of an uneventful assimilation into the American status quo: Their music has no fire because there is no fire in their personal lives. And, as Bird said, what comes out of your horn is your life.

 

In the '20s, Jazz musicians traveled around the world and through the entertainment underbelly of America. They were the most internationalist-minded and, at the same time, nationally repressed of all artists - lionized abroad and denigrated at home. Many lacked formal education, but they had lives that necessarily included fighting for their rights as human beings and artists.

 

Today's young Jazz musicians have college degrees in music (often in Jazz Studies). When they tour, they have hotel rooms, limousines, recording contracts with riders calling for fresh fruit, juice, select wines, or liquors, specific sound equipment, and so forth. I am not advocating a return to hard times, but I am pointing out that the fire of Jazz must come from the musicians. If the musicians are enjoying (as they should) relatively comfortable careers, then the fire has to come from some place else in their lives.

 

Historically, poorly paid Jazz musicians have been the epitome of "starving artists." They persued their art despite economic injustices and inequities, not because they wanted to starve but because making money was not the main reason for creating Jazz. Jazz was their religion, rather than simply their career.

 

Jazz in the '90s has become a middle-class, respectable pursuit. So is it any wonder that much of today's Jazz does not relate to the lives of the working class, under- and miseducated, poor and de facto segregated urban masses of African Americans?

 

If Jazz has a future it will only be in the sphere of international (or what some people would call "multi-cultural") cooperation and collaboration to contest the aesthetic, political, and economic domination of post-colonial capitalism (regardless of the color of the capitalist). When will the people who create the music control the production, distribution, and consumption of the music? Traditionally, the Jazz musician has been at the forefront of asking this question, of fighting for self-determination and self-respect. It remains to be seen whether that continues to be the case.

 

Black Pop: Dance to the Music

 

My basic contention is that if our popular music is in sad shape - and in general Black popular music is abysmal - then we as a people are in sad shape. What we are witnessing (and too often participating in and collaborating with) is the total commercialization of our music. Thus, R&B (whether Disco, Funk, or New Jack Swing) and Rap are both designed mainly not only to sell records but also to sell to an audience which, to a significantly large degree, is not Black. If this audience were the large majority of people in the world who are the descendants of the colonized, this would be a good development. However, the "auditors" of fame and fortune in America are largely White: White youth in revolt against their parents, a White music industry in capitalist profiteering of the sale of the music, and a White-controlled media which exists as an adjunct (and advocate) of the business sector.

 

The integration of African American artists into the mainstream of the entertainment media necessarily results in a dilution and/or prostitution of the music. Rather than present the history of Black Pop/R&B, I will focus on the latest development: Rap.

 

The Words and the Beat - That Is the Music. While some adults still argue about whether Rap is really music, Rap has become a major force in American popular music. Although Rap certainly does not sound like Eurocentric music, Rap is still music, albeit rhythm-based rather than melody- or harmony-based.

 

Initially, Rap artists were more concerned with having a good time within their neighborhoods and expressing themselves to their peers and friends than they were with making careers as recording artists. Because of Rap's language - which is not only considered vulgar but which is also difficult for adults, in general, as well as non-Blacks, specifically, to understand - few thought that Rap would ever have a big influence in the music business. Oh how wrong the majority was.

 

Today, Gospel artists are including "raps" in their recordings, as has almost every other category of artist. Even the Pillsbury Doughboy had a rapping TV commercial. What started as an "outlaw" movement is now a major part of the music industry, accounting for millions of dollars in sales.

 

Regardless of what one thinks about the language of Rap, the reality is that Rap, in its non-commercial (i.e., "hardcore") form, speaks directly to and for African American youth. These youth, especially those in the working class and underclass segments of society, are alienated, marginalized, mis-or uneducated, abused, and socialized into a life of crime and/or dependency.

 

Most adults today have no idea how hard it is to be an African American teenager in an urban setting. In fact, many adults will never understand, because much of the more dangerous and damaging social and psychological pressures felt by youth of this generation did not exist in preceding generations.

 

In addition to being the language of our youth, Rap also represents the power and influence of self-assertive expressions whose origins are within the continuum of African American culture, a power and influence that is now worldwide in effect.

 

Just as the Country Blues of the rural Deep South and the Urban Blues of Chicago and other metropoles of the Great Migration were matrices for and continually inform and influence the majority of American pop music, and just as Jazz from the streets and parks of turn-of-the-century New Orleans has had a worldwide impact on all 20th-century music which views itself as more than entertainment, Rap, which came from the bantustans and townships of modern America, has had a major and worldwide influence on the youth culture and pop music.

 

Moreover, just as the influence of Blues and Jazz was both unprecedented and unpredicted, the influence of Rap is preceded and predicted only by the continuous presence of African American culture as the predominant force in 20th-century music worldwide. In other words, when Rap is seen as part of the same cultural continuum which produced the Blues and Jazz (and the Spirituals and Gospel as well, even though the influence of our religious music on world music has not been so profoundly far-reaching), then the importance of Rap is better appreciated.

 

It's a Money Thang. Driven by both the need and the greed for profits, the recording industry - the same industry which commercializes Blues and Jazz - is now pushing Rap for two reasons: There is money in it, and there is a large talent pool.

 

The existence of this talent pool (i.e., surplus creative labor) is critical to Rap's profitability as a commodity. Literally thousands of would-be rappers daily submit demo tapes to record companies in the hope of making "mad cash." This talent pool nurtures and grooms itself, and in many cases delivers "demo" tapes that are virtually finished products. There is no necessity for the recording companies to make a major investment in grooming or buying studio time to record these potential million-selling artists. In fact, record companies spend fewer dollars per artist on Rap groups than on any other genre of popular music. When you further consider that much of Rap's promotion is word of mouth (and promotion eats up a lot of money), you begin to understand that Rap both increases income and reduces overhead at the same time. A major Rap hit does wonders for a company's bottom line.

 

While it is easy to see how Rap has affected the recording industry, this industry also affects Rap through commercialization and stylistic fragmentation. Once the major record labels became involved in Rap, much of Rap as a genre was unavoidably driven by the goal of making hit records on a national level; appealing to one's neighborhood circle was no longer broad enough. And the commercialization of Rap necessarily affected the stylistic direction of Rap. For example, Hammer, who is the best-selling Rap artist of all time, may be considered a joke as a hardcore rapper, but he is a master entertainer and an astute entrepreneur who understands what it takes to be commercially successful.

 

Fragmentation is also inevitable as major companies compete against each other for airplay and retail sales. Where once the neighborhood audience decided who was good and who was bad, now major Rap artists are validated by a much larger audience. To put it bluntly, White teenagers now have as much, if not a greater, influence in determining who the best-selling Rap artists will be as do Black youth. The resultant commercial commodification of Rap aimed at White audiences is one of the major reasons that Rap is undergoing severe changes stylistically.

 

The commodification of Rap (which includes clothing, concerts, paraphernalia, and the like, in addition to records as product) is concurrent with the emphasis on youth in today's American mainstream culture. The record companies benefit because they seldom have to deal with mature and experienced artists. They can concentrate on pushing hungry and upcoming young artists, many of whom will literally do anything to get a record contract, anything - listen to the music for an hour, watch Rap videos for an hour - anything!

 

Rap's Contributions. The negatives notwithstanding, Rap as a genre has brought two major innovations into pop music: First, Rap reintroduced the Afrocentric oral tradition as an art-form, and Rap demonstrated a profound advancement in the use of computer technology in the service of art. Rap's use of electronic instruments and recording equipment is an advancement whose far-reaching significance is akin to the African American appropriation and elevation of the saxophone at the beginning of this century.

 

The verbal wordplay of Rap is a major advance on the general state of lyrics in pop music. Whereas most pop lyrics are content to use end rhymes, commonplace metaphors, and similes as their main literary devices, rappers have significantly upped the ante through the employment of a sophisticated approach to word play. It is not uncommon to hear rappers use rhymes within as well as at the ends of lines; the metaphors and similes range from satirical to surreal; and the use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and other forms of word wizardry is, in the mouth of a master rapper, astounding.

 

But Rap is more than just technique. Rap has also reintroduced the relevance of "saying something" - i.e., political or social commentary. This is especially important during a period when Black pop had become little more than hip elevator music and commercials for consumerism run amok.

 

In terms of using computer-aided technology to create pop music, rappers are pioneers and originators. Just as few people think of the fact that African Americans created the trap drum set, many people are unaware of the technological innovations created by Rap artists. Sampling - using selected passages of existing music mixed with other elements to form a new composition - is Rap's best known but, by no means only, innovation. The use of environmental sounds and noise elements as part of the music bed is another example. But perhaps the major achievement is the turning of computer and electronic instruments into drums. It is an incredible development, the use of computerized electronic instruments to create polyrhythms - and not just simple backbeats, but complex cross-rhythms of "found" (sampled) and "created" (programmed) sounds, creatively patched together like an aural quilt of musical scraps turned into a magic carpet of head-bopping motion. While Charles Murray et al. argue about the ability of inner-city Blacks to intelligently compete in the information age, Rap DJs and producers have taken the computers and created the first truly postmodern music of the 20th century. As an aesthetic, Rap is both a throwback to basic voice and body percussion and a look into the future when music becomes simultaneously more natural (in that it draws on every available sound in the environment) and completely synthetic (in that it can be created without using "musicians" per se). Rap is both the creation of music without traditional musicians and a major redefining and expanding of our perception of what a musician is and does.

 

Although the technical achievements are awesome, perhaps the most significant effect of Rap has been to create more space for musical artists in every genre to make overt political statements and social commentary in their music. The political immaturity of "Gangsta" Rap notwithstanding, Rap has reintroduced the concept of the artist as social critic at a time when popular entertainment threatened to inundate us with romantics, clowns, and minstrels.

 

Philosophically, the major deficiency of Rap artists is buying into the mainstream assertion that "racism" is the only problem stopping African Americans from enjoying the good life. Unless and until rappers confront the need to oppose commercialism and other divisive "isms," such as patriarchal sexism, the music will never achieve its full potential and will always end up debasing itself for the dollar.

 

If You Had a Choice of Colors, Which One Would You Choose?

 

Whites now seriously compete with African Americans both as producers and as artists in all genres of GBM. This was not always the reality, except in Jazz. Although White domination of the genre has not yet happened in Gospel or Rap, they've got our Blues, have placed a firm downpayment on Jazz, and are making significant inroads into R&B.

 

Some critics argue that White artistic domination will never happen with Gospel and Rap because both forms are "too Black." But for a long time that was the same argument about both Blues and Jazz. In fact, not long ago there were serious statements that one could tell if Jazz musicians were White or Black simply by listening to them. Obviously, that is no longer the case. Not only do some Whites sound Black, but a number of Blacks sound White - assuming that one even entertains a discussion of sound being synonymous with biology.

 

On the other hand, from a cultural and conscious perspective, "sounding White" is simply accepting the status quo and attempting to conform technically to a standard that has been established as the paragon of sound. "Sounding Black" is making an individual statement within the broad social context, utilizing the basic principles and traditions of GBM. Thus, any person, White or Black, can sound White or Black depending on the individual's culture and consciousness.

 

We need warriors who understand that, in the American context, "sounding" - i.e., making music - can not uphold the status quo and at the same time free African Americans. You can't sound Black and act White. Any and all music worthy of the designation GBM must oppose the status quo both in how it sounds and how it is produced, distributed, and consummed by its audience.

 

Throughout the history of GBM, artists have struggled to create their own record companies, to secure their publishing rights, to control venues and how the music is presented, and to form collectives and associations to effect these objectives. To the degree that young musicians ignore issues such as these, their music will be, or will quickly become, largely irrelevant to the lives of the majority of African Americans. The challenge facing GBM, and facing both Rap and Jazz in particular, is how to regain the independence they had when the artists and the music existed either on the periphery of or totally outside of the music industry mainstream.

 

There are many other challenges - e.g., no major African American-owned publications which seriously focus on and critique GBM; the declining significance and existence of Black-owned radio stations; the almost total lack of community-based, Black-owned music venues; the lack of GBM festivals, conferences, and special events which are controlled, organized, and curated by African Americans.

 

Today we have more African American musicians who are millionaires than ever before. At the same time we have less control, less ownership, and less independence than at any time in the history of GBM. What we face is the neocolonialism of individual musicians who, in exchange for big salaries, do nothing to confront some of the very real problems and deficiencies GBM faces. What we face is the near total control not only of the production and distribution, but also of the discourse about and documentation of GBM by forces that are de facto siding with the status quo in the continued exploitation of GBM.

 

A truly sober look at our current condition will show that ain't nothing shaking but the leaves on the tree / and they wouldn't be shaking if it wasn't for the breeze.

 

In the final analysis it's all about context and control - what we do in and with our own space and time. Everything is informed by its time of creation, existence, and demise; what was happening when it was going on.

 

Which brings us back to where we began. The music is not a "Topsy"-like creation that jes grew. Our music is our mother tongue. Our music is a language used not only to express ourselves, but also to assert ourselves in world affairs. Additionally GBM serves as a unifying force in our external conflict with our colonizers and as a unifying force in encouraging us to struggle against the internalization of oppressive concepts as well as struggle against our own weaknesses.

 

As our present state of emancipation without liberation makes clear, the ultimate struggle is the struggle around internal conflicts. Internalized oppression and our own human weaknesses must be fought against and rooted out, or else they will lead us to colonize, oppress, and exploit each other, as well as other human beings. Unless we fight the principled fight, politically and economically, we will become just like the racists we claim we hate.

 

The social and aesthetic significance of African American music is neither abstract nor biological. The social and aesthetic significance of GBM is very precisely its warrior stance in the face of the status quo and its healing force for the victims of colonialization. Ultimately, the best of our music helps us resist colonization and reconstruct ourselves whole and healthy.

 

That is why GBM is such a joyful noise.

 

Notes

 

1. I do not mean to imply that none of our other artistic achievements are significant, or that we can not or have not found a "voice" in media other than music, but the fact is that GBM is the only area where we, as Africans in the diaspora, have been able to make a powerful addition to world culture.

 

2. The irony of charges against Rap artists using sampling is lost on many who do not realize the overwhelming degree of White "sampling" of GBM that has been going on since minstrel days.

 

3. Lest anyone deduce that I am engaging in that tired duality of opposing thinking and feeling, we must always remember that it is not possible to create consciously without thinking, even though it is possible to think without feeling (or, perhaps more accurately, to consider thinking a form of feeling).

 

Works Cited

 

Oakley, Giles. The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues. New York: Taplinger, 1976.

 

Rosemont, Franklin. "Preface." Blues & the Poetic Spirit. By Paul Garon. New York: Da Capo P, 1973.

 

Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. New York: Riverrun P, 1987.

 

Smitherman, Geveva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton, 1977.

 

ya Salaam, Kalamu. What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self. Chicago: Third World P, 1994.

 

Kalamu ya Salaam was guest editor for "The Music" special issue of African American Review. His most recent book is What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994).

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

LET’S HAVE SOME FUN

 

Hey, everybody, let’s have some fun.

You only live but once, and when you’re dead, you’re done.

 

Pleasure is essential to life. Indeed, the desire for pleasure is the fundamental hunger of life. Even at the basic survival level, we prefer down home cooking that gives us pleasure to food that solely give us nutrients. The first law of human nature is survival. The second law is find a way to enjoy surviving!

 

Pleasure is essential because life is hard. Moreover, for those who live a life of toil rather than leisure, pleasure is not just a salve soothing over hard times, pleasure is also a necessary encouragement to optimistically face the future. Or, as the blues bards sing: I believe / the sun gonna shine / in my backdoor someday. We face the future because we believe there will be some pleasure to be gained by holding on, otherwise, why stay alive?

 

Plato never trusted music precisely because music foregrounded emotion and backgrounded cognition. Christian ministers condemn Black popular music as the “devil’s music” pointing out that such music inflames pagan passions. In a sense, they are partially right. Music does communicate at a visceral level, connects through sensations, feelings. Popular music = emotional expressiveness.

 

Pop’s first commandment is “feel it.” Feeling always precedes thinking—before you can think about the world, you must “feel” the world, or, as we commonly say in New Orleans, “ I feel to believe.”

 

The second commandment is “sing,” express yourself lyrically. Singing represents your reactions to the world presented with emotional ardor. When we sing we are not only making music, we are also expressing our conscious and unconscious thoughts. All popular music expresses a worldview, a reaction to and feelings the world we live in.

 

Thirdly, R&B has a strong beat, it is dance music. The emphasis on dance is also significant. The birth of R&B happened precisely at the same time that jazz ceased being dance music. Initially, R&B was nothing more than a branch of post-World War II jazz that emphasized lyrics (often humorous and/or bawdy) and a strong dance beat. A founding figure of R&B was saxophonist / vocalist / bandleader Louis Jordan. Jordan’s music was sometimes known as “jump jazz,” a term which made the dance connection obvious.

 

Emotionally-based, lyricism with a strong dance beat is the triumvirate of essential ingredients in all popular American music, however, just as Black aesthetics have affected American culture, Euro-centric aesthetics have also affected Black culture.

 

One of the most significant “American” shifts in the Black music aesthetic is the separation of secular and spiritual forms of music, a separation which is reinforced by the exclusive association of dance with secular music. Thus, although Black religious music (spirituals and gospel) clearly qualify as embodying the concepts of feeling and lyricism, spirituals are not dance music, and ditto for gospel (a music form which developed in the 1920s epitomized by the work of composer/pianist Thomas Dorsey and vocalist Mahalia Jackson). The recent attempts of Kirk “Stomp” Franklin and others within contemporary gospel notwithstanding, churches do not allow dancing.

 

This is a European splitting of the celebration of the body from the celebration of the soul. Moreover, because all Black dance celebrates the erotic, and because Christianity posits the body as sinful (as in “original sin”) there is a further demarcation and separation. African aesthetic does not consider the body sinful, nor does our aesthetic consider the erotic lewd. Thus on the one hand dance and popular music is considered beyond the pale for good Christians, and at the same time within the Black community there is a constant cross-genre traffic.

 

Ray Charles was the most important creator of the fusion of gospel into R&B (which was jazz and blues-based). The “Right Reverend” Ray Charles infused into popular music not just the expressiveness of gospel, he also used specific gospel techniques. For all practical purposes, if Louis Jordan, the founding father of R&B, was the “John the Baptist,” then Ray Charles was the “Jesus” of Soul music and had thousands of disciples, both male and female, following in his wailing footsteps.

 

At the same time that gospel was used to develop the “soul sound” of R&B, Black religious music was, and is, constantly re-energized by injections of Black secular musical forms. Gospel as we know it initially was spirituals “jazzed up.” In the twenties when Dorsey and Jackson first introduced this music they were accused of bringing he devil into the church and were actually forbidden to sing “gospel” in some churches because the church elders insisted that what they were really singing was the “devil’s music.” Mahalia Jackson’s retort is classic: Well that’s the way we sing it in the south.

 

Today, what is significant is the reintroduction of the drum into sacred musical liturgy. If any one factor represents both dance and Afrocentricity, it is the drum. That the drum is not only accepted, but is increasingly a mainstay of religious music, signifies a move toward the merging of secular and sacred music into an aesthetic (holistic) oneness that is a hallmark of the African way of life.

 

In a very important and Afrocentic sense, music that does not merge both body and soul, feeling and thought, is not complete. Music that is truly a people’s music (i.e. truly “popular”) ought to contain and celebrate both body and soul/feeling and thought as part of a continuum rather than dualistically separate one aspect from the other. In the infusions of soul into R&B and of the drum into gospel, what we are witnessing, whether we realize it or not, is the push and pull of African aesthetics toward wholeness.

 

The sound of Blackness is the aesthetic of psychological freedom. Black music is a music of freedom—the freedom to acknowledge one’s self, body and soul; to say that I exist and I matter, and all of me matters, my physical and emotional as well as my mental and spiritual aspects.

 

To prioritize pleasure, a pleasure that we can produce and reproduce without “buying” something, is extremely important to maintaining mental health. To understand self-production as an activity that each of us can engage, rather than an artifact we own or purchase is key to why we persist in singing and dancing to the music. We do so because ultimately we can not exist without recreating our sense of self, our awareness of our own beauty and goodness.

 

In our communities, aesthetic (a sense of beauty and goodness) awareness is generally an unconscious awareness, nevertheless, such self awareness is absolutely necessary to life, for we can not go on if we do not believe that there is some good, some beauty within us. That screaming and hollering that the singers do, those songs that move us so, all of that informs us that within each of our lives there has been some good, some beauty, even if only momentary and fleeting, even if we are crying and moaning because that good thing is now gone, even if we believe the exquisite moment shall never return, we are still emboldened by the fact that we can stand and proudly proclaim, “I have had my fun / if I don’t get well no more.”

 

Finally, fun is subversive, especially when one is the object of oppression and exploitation. For when the sufferers find a way to have fun, we not only momentarily transcend our suffering, we affirm that there is a part of us, an enjoyment within us which we share with our fellow sufferers that is beyond the reach of the overseer, the master, the banker, our creditors, the boss, the hoss, and any damn other person or thing intent on making our lives miserable.

 

The subversive factor is the ultimate meaning of R&B, and is also the source of why the music is always damned by psychological gatekeepers, i.e. ministers, politicians, educators & status quo intellectuals. When social pundits argue that R&B, or rap, or any other contemporary popular music is a morally corrupting force, or that those forms “are not music,” that our music needs to be censored if not actually prohibited, then what they are saying is that we have no right to decide what to do with our own bodies for good or for ill.

 

The blues asserts that “I’m three times seven / and that makes 21 / ain’t nobody’s bizness / what I do.” The power of popular music is that it affirms our existence centered in a pleasurable self-determined celebration. When we holler, “let the good times roll / laissez les bon temps roullez,” we are actually uttering a war cry against psychological oppression. And when we produce our own popular music and dance outside of the purview of the status quo, then we are (re)creating the/our “living self.”

 

There is more, of course, just as surely as Sunday morning follows Saturday night, but that more is for another time. Right now, I just wanted to share with you the “psychological significance” and “aesthetically-African origins” of popular American music; in other words, I just wanted to tell you why it is so important for us to have some fun!

 

--Kalamu ya Salaam