Black Music, Black Poetry

Blues and Jazz's Impact on African American Versification

Gordon E. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138270565
• eBook ISBN: 9781317173915
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Black Music, Black Poetry offers readers a fuller appreciation of the diversity of approaches to reading black American poetry. It does so by linking a diverse body of poetry to musical genres that range from the spirituals to contemporary jazz. The poetry of familiar figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and less well-known poets like Harryette Mullen or the lyricist to Pharaoh Sanders, Amos Leon Thomas, is scrutinized in relation to a musical tradition contemporaneous with the lifetime of each poet. Black music is considered the strongest representation of black American communal consciousness; and black poetry, by drawing upon such a musical legacy, lays claim to a powerful and enduring black aesthetic. The contributors to this volume take on issues of black cultural authenticity, of musical imitation, and of poetic performance as displayed in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Amiri Baraka, Michael Harper, Nathaniel Mackey, Jayne Cortez, Harryette Mullen, and Amos Leon Thomas. Taken together, these essays offer a rich examination of the breath of black poetry and the ties it has to the rhythms and forms of black music and the influence of black music on black poetic practice.

PART I
Authenticity in Black Music and Poetry

Chapter 1
“Original Rags”: African American Secular Music and the Cultural Legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Poetry

Ray Sapirstein

Of the few African American cultural figures celebrated at the turn of the twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) ranked at the top, equaling the celebrity of educator Booker T. Washington, ragtime composer Scott Joplin, vaudeville comic and singer Bert Williams, and boxing champion Jack Johnson. Although he was recognized in his time as a writer of poetry and fiction, the extent and depth of Dunbar’s work remained obscure until relatively recently. More willing than their immediate predecessors to engage dialect literature as a genre, contemporary critics continue to recover and reexamine the nuanced and ambiguous intricacies of Dunbar’s contributions to literary and cultural history.¹

Remarkably prolific despite a 13-year career cut short by death at age 33 in 1906, Dunbar published works in many literary genres: ten books of poetry, four collections of short stories, four novels, innumerable journalistic essays, periodical contributions, dramatic works, and lyrics for the popular musical stage. He wrote poetry alternately in African American dialect and in standard literary English, the former a racialized phonetic vernacular that twentieth-century critics would subsequently deem crude and the latter a somewhat self-conscious, highbrow literary diction. Because of his use of dated forms and his frequently cited disavowal of popular demand for his dialect poetry, scholars since the 1920s have underestimated his stature as a cultural figure. The African American public, however, has long remembered the centrality of Dunbar’s poetry, keeping his words alive by reading and reciting them across generations, maintaining them as touchstones of racial and cultural validation. Over the years and during his lifetime as well, a great deal of Dunbar’s lyrics have been put to music, performed, and recorded (Martin and Primeau 2002: xxiv).

Rather than recalling the parodic conventions of minstrelsy, as might seem the case on first reading given contemporary audiences’ reflexive sensitivity to phonetic spellings of black language, Dunbar’s dialect poems suggest the sensibility of a twentieth-century author in the mainstream and forefront of artistic thought at the turn of the century, a decade prior to the Armory show, two decades before the end of World War I, and a generation before the promotion of the black vernacular in the fine arts during the Harlem Renaissance. Dunbar’s poetic oeuvre embraced novel technologies, such as the photo-text form, in which six books of his dialect poetry were released from 1899 to 1906, evoking the cinematic and phonographic technologies that were popularizing and defining African American diction and identity to an international audience. Despite his close friend James Weldon Johnson’s later rhetorical disavowal of Dunbar’s verse as having but two registers, those of “humor and pathos,” Dunbar’s work not only provided a prescient artistic example legitimating African American vernacular forms to African American artists, but helped define African American forms and performances as expressions appropriate to modern life, demonstrably influencing the later writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance (Johnson 1922: xl).² Also an Ohioan, Langston Hughes cited Dunbar as a forerunner, and their linkages are well documented. Zora Hurston, too, although not a poet, seemed to contend with Dunbar’s work of a generation prior, critically citing his “We Wear the Mask” apocryphally as an exercise in self-pity.³ While she likely would have disavowed a connection to Dunbar on the basis of this single poem, her commitment to the study of African American folklore and literary appropriation of vernacular idioms were very much in a similar vein artistically. Despite Dunbar’s seeming marginalization by his modernist successors, Dunbar’s work actually epitomizes the earliest modernist expression, finding inspiration and appropriating formal aspects of African American rural vernacular culture, primarily in its musical forms.

Published in the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century, Dunbar’s poems in black dialect are contemporaneous and especially allied, in both their topic and formal organization, to ragtime and cakewalking, associated African American vernacular forms widely accepted by mass audiences and legitimated by middle and upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic. The popularity of Dunbar’s dialect poetry is also emblematic of its time, demonstrating the crucial contribution of African American vernacular culture in the 1880s following the publication of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881). Like the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ popularization of African American sacred music and the first transcriptions of African American spirituals collected and published by Thomas Fenner at the Hampton Institute, a school with which Dunbar was intimately associated, Dunbar’s poetry legitimated African American expression, making secular black musical, literary, and dance forms acceptable in polite society, a critical passage in the impact black expression would make in mass media in the twentieth century. While Dunbar derived much of his diction and cadence from vernacular black musical forms, black music, in turn, owes Dunbar a debt for making its entrée into mainstream popular culture possible, even as it remained culturally transgressive. Reclaiming the African American voice from the comic appropriations of minstrel shows that dominated the popular entertainment of the nineteenth century and thus the perception of African American culture among nonblack audiences, Dunbar’s work was among the first to mine the black vernacular and to be championed and legitimated among middle-class audiences internationally. Dunbar’s earnest and pioneering first articulations of the legitimacy of black vernacular expression was likely a formative factor influencing his friend W.E.B. Du Bois to include fragments of the Fenner transcriptions of black spirituals as epigrams in each chapter of his monumental Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903 (Sundquist 1993: 310).

In addition to his promotion of the black sacred tradition, Dunbar most auspiciously cited popular black secular music in his poetic rhetoric. Like the European artists and intellectuals who pioneered artistic Modernism, Dunbar’s lyric poetry responded to the nascent popularity of African American vernacular forms, music, and dance, appropriating its oppositional stance and formal construction.⁴ Both were translations made from a common original, yet Dunbar’s work was made with significantly greater contact with the lived experience and folk traditions of African American culture. However, as a lifelong resident of Dayton, Ohio, with periods of residence in Washington, DC, and New York City, Dunbar had limited first-hand exposure to Southern rural culture, although both his parents and much of his immediate community migrated northward to Ohio from Kentucky to free themselves from slavery. Except for a few exploratory journeys southward, Dunbar spent the entirety of his professional life in the urban North.

Despite contemporary aversion to the racism and white supremacy associated with the use of African American dialect at the turn of the century, Dunbar doggedly asserted the artistic legitimacy of the African American vernacular, which he most forcefully illustrated with the example of black music. With this he demonstrated a relativistic appreciation for African American language, asserting its legitimacy as an alternate expressive platform to that of “standard” English. In the article entitled “Negro Music” published in the Chicago Record in 1893 and echoing Dvořák’s much more quoted assessment of the same year, Dunbar related the following after hearing music performed at the exhibit of live Dahomeans at the Chicago World’s Fair, citing the “blue notes” it had in common with African American spirituals. Of the spirituals, he noted their uplifting quality as “rays of hope … reaching up to the sublime,” further observing, “It is only the Negro who can sing these songs with effect.” The article concludes:

It is said … and generally conceded to be true, that the Negro is ashamed of his music. If it be so … it is a shame to be rebuked and one he must overcome. … They are his by inheritance … and to him who laughs and says they are only fit to be played on the banjo, let them say that the banjo makes quite as sweet music as the bagpipe. … If the American Negro consults his best interest, he will seize upon these songs, preserve them and make them distinctively his own. … Let him out with false pride and come into the heritage which is his own. (Martin and Primeau 2002: 161)

Although several writers have cited Dunbar’s chafing at the demand for his dialect poetry, which he seemed to deride with a musical simile as “jingles in a broken tongue,” his evident displeasure resulted from audience demand for his dialect poems to the exclusion of his work in standard literary grammar.⁵ Dunbar was secure with the legitimacy of vernacular expression and its ability to communicate deeper and nuanced themes; he may have merely chafed because white audiences were interested in them for shallow reasons, rather than appreciating their “myriad subtleties,” the substance underlying the fawning he established in his landmark poem “We Wear the Mask.”⁶

It is by comparison to music that Dunbar legitimates African American vernacular forms, including its diction. Dunbar specified the musical nature of his works explicitly to readers with many collection titles—Majors and Minors (1895), Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1904), and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905)—and he sometimes emphasized the point with the repeated refrains of song, explicitly incorporating black vernacular music to deepen the substance of his art. A great many of Dunbar’s poems invoke song, comparing it to the poets’ art, as in the case of his most famous line, from the poem “Sympathy,” later cited by Maya Angelou: “I know why the caged bird sings.” He likens himself to a singing captive bird, whose plea is sent “upward to heaven” (Braxton 1993: 102), an image inspired by a long stint as the operator of an elevator cage in a downtown Dayton, Ohio, office building following his auspicious graduation from high school. A great many of his pieces refer to music in their titles: as “songs” (Braxton 1993: 4, 13, 19, 20, 26, 59, 76, 92, 104, 142, 143, 150, 178, 210, 222, 229, 235, 236, 248, 270, 271, 282, 310, 337), “odes” (Braxton 1993: 22), and “lyrics” (Braxton 1993: 288), but many additionally specify musical and dance forms: several “Lullabyes” (Braxton 1993: 144, 244, 245, 327), “A Madrigal” (Braxton 1993: 287), “A Virginia Reel” (Braxton 1993: 326), “The Dance” (Braxton 1993: 170), “A Frolic” (Braxton 1993: 200), “A Spiritual” (Braxton 1993: 194), three “Hymns” (Braxton 1993: 98, 133, 66), three “Ballads” (Braxton 1993: 204, 48, 58), two “Dirges” (Braxton 1993: 199, 66), “A Roundeau” (Braxton 1993: 340), a “Christmas Carol” (Braxton 1993: 278), and “The Valse” (Braxton 1993: 175). The little-cited poem “Whistling Sam” (Braxton 1993: 156–8) actually quotes both gospel and martial songs, as supposedly whistled by a black Civil War veteran, including “Deep River,” “The Girl I Left Behind,” and “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which rendered fragments from the songs in standard musical notation within the text of the poem, much as his friend Du Bois did four years later in the chapter headings of Souls of Black Folk.⁷ Several of Dunbar’s poems were set to music during his lifetime, as was much of his work for the musical theater and the “Tuskegee Song,” the school’s anthem (Braxton 1993: 332).

Other songs invoke musical instruments, especially the banjo, symbolically invoking the plantation tradition. One example is “A Banjo Song,” whose lines echo, “Oh de music o’ de banjo, / Quick and deblish, solemn, slow, / is de greates’ joy and solace / Dat a weary slave kin know” (Braxton 1993: 20). “Christmas” opens with “Step wid de banjo an’ glide wid de fiddle / Dis ain’t no time fu’ to pottah an’ piddle” (Braxton 1993: 269). “The Old Cabin” contextualizes joyous memories of life during slavery by first recounting vividly, “An’ my mind fuhgets de whuppins / Draps de feah o’block an’ lash / An’ flies straight to somep’n’ joyful / In a secon’s lightnin’ flash” before proceeding to the more predictable “An’ hit wan’t no time, twell, bless you / You could hyeah de banjo’s soun.’ / You could see de dahkies dancin’ / Pigeon wing an’ heel an’ toe— / joyous times, I tell you people, / Roun’ dat same ol’cabin do’” (Braxton 1993: 260). Throughout Dunbar’s oeuvre, music represents a refuge and respite from the indignities of forced menial labor.

Of Dunbar’s predecessors in celebrating the legitimacy of African American vernacular culture, the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner seems the most significant precedent to specifically celebrate the legitimacy of African American secular music. Tanner’s monumental painting The Banjo Lesson depicts a young boy learning to play while seated tenderly on his grandfather’s lap, in a domestic interior suffused with sanctifying light. Tanner painted the image in 1893 to establish and legitimize the banjo and the African American folk tradition despite popular caricature, in a manner that honored African American vernacular culture and the mechanics of the passage of tradition from generation to generation. As many critics have noted of the painting, Tanner indicates that banjo playing is not an inborn talent but legitimate musicianship, a taught and practiced skill, an element of a larger cultural heritage to be regarded with pride and reverence. In the image, Tanner sought to dispel the popular association of the banjo with the shuffling and fawning of the minstrel tradition, replacing it with an African American pride in ownership of a powerful cultural tradition as envisioned from within the community itself, and rendered it as self-expression within a private domestic space, rather than as a performance calculated to court spectators.

Tanner used the figure of intergenerational teaching and the passage of tradition as a device to circumvent popular derogatory images. Tanner “changed the joke and slipped the yoke,” in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, emptying the sign of its derogatory or irreverent meaning as a means of altering its connotation.⁸ Tanner’s image masterfully demonstrates that white supremacists applied racist discourses to actual features of African American life, using them as vessels to carry a spurious cargo of black inferiority, spun as a rudimentary, intuitive musicality. The image was purchased by a trustee of Hampton Institute and installed centrally in the school’s library in 1894. Dunbar would have seen it on his visit to the school in 1902, and prior to that he would likely have seen the image reproduced in the popular press and in Hampton’s promotional materials, which he would have seen on several occasions in his appearances at fundraising events for the school (Frissell letterbook, January 10, 1898, HUA).

Several of Dunbar’s poems contend with the banjo’s iconic status, like dialect, as a symbol of black vernacular traditions. Among Dunbar’s most popular and salient early poems, “The Deserted Plantation” is a conventional and sentimental reminiscence of slavery, yet articulated by an African American voice commemorating the African American community rather than eulogizing the feudal order of slavery and the benevolence of white masters:...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction Lyrical Aesthetics in African American Poetry
• Part I Authenticity in Black Music and Poetry
• Part II Jazz Its Spiritual Lyricism
• Part III Lyricism and the Sonic Aesthetic
• Part IV Transformational Lyricism
• References
• Index