Rhetorical Crossover

The Black Presence in White Culture

Cedric D. Burrows

• Editorial: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780822987611
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Lingüística

Winner, 2021 NCTE David H. Russell Award In music, crossover means that a song has moved beyond its original genre and audience into the general social consciousness. Rhetorical Crossover uses the same concept to theorize how the black rhetorical presence has moved in mainstream spaces in an era where African Americans were becoming more visible in white culture. Cedric Burrows argues that when black rhetoric moves into the dominant culture, white audiences appear welcoming to African Americans as long as they present an acceptable form of blackness for white tastes. The predominant culture has always constructed coded narratives on how the black rhetorical presence should appear and behave when in majority spaces. In response, African Americans developed their own narratives that revise and reinvent mainstream narratives while also reaffirming their humanity. Using an interdisciplinary model built from music, education, film, and social movement studies, Rhetorical Crossover details the dueling narratives about African Americans that percolate throughout the United States.

CHAPTER 1

“HEY, MAN, YOU’RE TAKING MY HERITAGE”

RHETORICAL CROSSOVER, R&B, AND DINAH WASHINGTON

Once, when we were working on one of those love songs and Sam [Cooke] got to the height of it . . . he sings, “And if you ax me, I will,” and I said, “Hold it. It’s ‘asked.’” Sam says, “What’d I say?” “Ax,” I tell him. So we did another take and got to the same spot, and “ax” appeared again. We did it a third time, and I guess I was getting a little annoyed. And Sam looked at me and laughed and said, “Hey, man, you’re taking my heritage.”

Luigi Creatore, producer

The phenomenon of modern rhetorical crossover develops toward the end of the nadir of race relations. While Rayford Logan determines the end of the nadir as 1910, I argue that the nadir ends after World War II. At this time, segregation and other forms of discrimination were still legal, racially targeted violence continued, and racial stereotypes still dominated popular media. However, the era also witnessed a series of Supreme Court decisions that slowly began chipping away at segregation, the integration of institutions such as the armed forces and major league baseball, and the growing awareness of African Americans as valuable consumers. Coupled with the development of media targeted to African Americans and a series of “Negro firsts,” the era illustrated the potential of African Americans entering into the mainstream and for the mainstream to create a concept of integration that would shape American society well into the twenty-first century.¹

One medium that illustrated the potential of modern rhetorical crossover and integration was postwar African American popular music. As African Americans migrated to urban areas in the United States, they created genres that sustained them in urban segregated America. One musical form was rhythm and blues. This chapter uses the historical development of R&B music to create a theoretical framework for understanding rhetorical crossover. In discussing the stages of rhetorical crossover, I use the career of the Queen of the Blues, Dinah Washington. Also, by highlighting how R&B music moved from African American to white spaces and how those moves influenced the marketing of R&B for African American and white audiences, I present a historical pattern of rhetorical crossover in American culture and discuss this pattern’s influence on the mainstream view of the Black rhetorical presence when it enters white society.

Stage 1: Learn the rhetorical features and cultural literacies of the African American community. These features allow the subject to develop a rapport with the African American community, which understands the language of the rhetorical features used by the subject.

In the first stage of rhetorical crossover, the I is replaced by we, and the communicative practices are shaped by the community to reaffirm it. The subject learns about African American rhetorical patterns in spaces where those discursive practices are highly valued (e.g., the church, school, family, friends, barber or beauty shops, etc.). As the person achieves recognition or awards for their work, their accomplishment is seen as a reflection of the community. As a result, the subject is viewed as the voice that expresses the community’s everyday existence and helps the community interpret its world in a style it readily understands.

Dinah Washington’s early career illustrates how she became the voice of African Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly those who migrated from the South to the North during the second phase of the Great Migration and those who moved from rural communities to urban environments. Born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1924, Washington and her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, during the first wave of the Great Migration and settled into the African American neighborhood of Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side. Tutored by her mother, Washington played piano and became the piano player for the Sallie Martin Colored Ladies Quartet,² which was named after the singer who would help usher in the Golden Age of Gospel.³

She was singing at a club when she caught the attention of Lionel Hampton, who later claimed to have renamed her Dinah Washington.⁴ Washington became one of the featured singers of Hampton’s band and together they recorded several traditional twelve-bar blues, most notably “Evil Gal Blues,” “Salty Papa Blues,” and “Blow-Top Blues.” Buoyed by the success of those recordings, Washington left Hampton’s band and eventually landed a record deal with Mercury Records, the label where she would stay for fifteen years and achieve her greatest success. During Washington’s early tenure at Mercury, her recordings were labeled purple to signal that they were relegated to Mercury’s race division, which meant that Washington’s records were primarily marketed and sold to African American audiences.⁵

This categorization of Washington’s recordings and lack of crossover promotion reflected attitudes toward African American music during the first half of the twentieth century. When Mamie Smith’s version of “Crazy Blues” sold more than seventy-five thousand copies on the OKeh Records label within its first month of release, record companies began recording blues music and selling it in their race records divisions.⁶ During World War II the rationing of shellac, the product that made 78s possible, made the production of records expensive, which led major record labels to abandon the race market in favor of white pop singers.⁷ The restrictions on shellac were lifted after World War II, and the successful release of Cecil Gant’s “I Wonder” on the independent Gilt-Edge label proved a demand for Black recorded music in American ghettoes. As a result, independent record companies flourished and met the needs of African Americans who were mainly barred from performing or going to white theaters and nightclubs. Owned and operated by African Americans or white immigrants who lived or owned businesses in Black neighborhoods, record labels such as Atlantic, Chess, Savoy, King, and Modern would become major developers in postwar African American music.⁸

These recordings by African Americans led the trade magazine Billboard to start tabulating the most popular singles in Black urban areas. Billboard ranked Washington’s first singles under the moniker “Harlem Hit Parade,” which referred to the best-selling songs sold in the largest enclave of African Americans in the country. Later, the title changed to “Race Records,” an overt reference to Black music that also reflected the era’s designation of race to anything pertaining to African Americans (e.g., “race man,” “credit to the race”). As the 1940s progressed, Billboard writer—and later Atlantic record owner and producer—Jerry Wexler changed the name to “Rhythm and Blues” because the term “race records” was deemed racially offensive.⁹

While the title could still be viewed as a euphemism for Black music, rhythm and blues also intonated a genre of music mirroring the postwar changes in African American popular music. Eileen Southern notes that R&B music was an ensemble genre that involved a solo or vocal unit that traded call and response; a rhythm unit that could include an electric guitar, string bass, piano, or drums; and a supplementary unit that often featured saxophones or other wind instruments.¹⁰ And, according to Arnold Shaw, R&B highlighted the rhythm section of swing bands mixed with the singing of gospel music along with a blues sensibility that came with living in segregated America.¹¹

R&B was also “liberated” music, meaning that it was music that originated from Black sources, sang by Black artists, and marketed to Black audiences.¹² As long as the music stayed in the Black ghetto, where the likelihood of crossing over was slim or nonexistent, R&B was largely ignored by white audiences. This containment of the music allowed musicians to record their music how they wanted and led singers to sing any material they wanted without fear of white judgment. As jazz critic Ralph Gleason observed, “the Mills Brothers like the Ink Spots were really black men singing white songs . . . but Louis Jordan sang black and sang proud.”¹³

Identifying with the African American community is an important stage of rhetorical crossover because it provides freedom from the white gaze and enables the development of new genres with their own discourse conventions such as indirection and social commentary, which helped Washington when she first began recording.¹⁴ Grounded in gospel music and influenced by the secular sounds emanating from Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, Washington developed a sound characterized by a near-perfect enunciation of lyrics with a tart vocal sound that made her voice distinguishable in a genre saturated by blues shouters and “sepia Sinatras.”

Also, the blues that Washington sang were adult oriented and contained double entendre that was appreciated by her Black audience but off-limits to white ones. While most of Washington’s blues echoed the common refrains of lost love or no good men, songs such as “Blow-Top Blues” discussed the effects of getting high from marijuana or, as in “Long John Blues” (with Washington singing how the dentist told her to “open wide” so he can “fill my whole inside”) or “Big Long Slidin’ Thing” (which had Washington longing for her “trombone-playing man”), presented strong sexual overtones. Such topics were fine within the social milieu of the working-class African American community but were out of bounds for white singers like Bing Crosby, Perry Como, or Doris Day.

Along with singing about aspects of Black life, R&B music also used indirection to capture the hopes of frustrations of the Black ghetto at the dawning of the civil rights movement. Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” made a definitive statement about Black manhood; Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry” captured the joys of celebrating the end of a work week but also functioned as a commentary on police encounters in Black communities; and Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love” served as a plea for brotherhood between Blacks and whites. While some songs had more overt leanings toward political commentary, most used indirection as commentary on the social situation of Black Americans. As a 1954 photo editorial in an Ebony magazine stated about R&B, “each song is a graphic case history telling of tomorrow’s lesson learned from experiences of last night. They tell it more vividly than the annual report of the NAACP, more realistically than the records in the vital statistics bureau, or on the police blotter. . . . If others wish to know [African Americans’] full life story, they might do well to listen to his song.”¹⁵

Washington’s songs also served as social commentary about Black life with her reinvention of popular songs. While also recording blues, Washington became Mercury’s cover girl by reinventing songs made popular by white singers for Black audiences.¹⁶ From 1949 to 1954, Washington recorded several covers of songs that became highly successful on the R&B charts. Singing with the blues ethos mixed with a gospel flair, Washington covered tunes that ranged from standard pop (“It Isn’t Fair,” “Wheel of Fortune,” “Harbor Lights”) to country and western tunes (“Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Don’t Hurt Anymore”). Whereas the original versions focused on the complexities of love, the covers sung in Washington’s style made lyrics about freeing one’s “doubtful mind” and “melt your cold, cold heart” or hoping “the wheel of fortune” would smile on a person take on another meaning for a generation that was about to mobilize for social change in the next decade.

A standout in Washington’s covers includes her rendition of Hank Snow’s “I Don’t Hurt Anymore.” Snow’s country and western version is a waltz detailing how he is healing from a broken love, making peace with the breakup, and realizing that the pain is not as severe as it used to be. Like Aretha Franklin would do with Otis Redding’s “Respect” thirteen years later, Washington revised “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” into a defiant affirmation that she is glad that her pain is over and that it will never return. Changing the first line “It don’t hurt anymore” to “I don’t hurt anymore,” Washington makes a definitive statement by owning her freedom, especially in the opening of the song, where she holds “I” for several seconds without musical accompaniment, pauses, defiantly states “don’t hurt,” pauses, and then sings “anymore” as the band responds to her declaration. Washington and the musicians play call and response with each other throughout the song until it climaxes with Washington belting out the final statement, “And it’s wonderful now that I don’t hurt anymore.”

While critics note that the song may have mirrored Washington’s tumultuous love life (depending on which report you believe, she was married seven or eight times), “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” parallels the attitudes of African Americans in postwar America. Released months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that deemed public school segregation unconstitutional and one year before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Washington’s rendition of “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” functioned as a call for a community preparing to participate in one the largest social movements in American history. In her music, Washington served as a voice for her community, echoing the sentiments of early blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, singers who used their music as a record of the history of black Americans. These singers reaffirmed preacher and gospel songwriter William Herbert Brewster’s assertion that singing was one way to get messages out that would have been otherwise dangerous to say.¹⁷ They also contribute to Maulana Karenga’s assertion that the rhetorical practices of African-derived cultures is one of community and meant to “being good into the world.”¹⁸

Washington’s music and message in this stage of rhetorical crossover would endear her to a loyal African American fan base in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly women and the working class. In his autobiography, Malcolm X recounted seeing Washington perform at the Savoy Ballroom as a teenager in New York City: “When she did her ‘Salty Papa Blues,’ those people just about tore the Savoy roof off.”¹⁹ Before he was head of Motown Records, Berry Gordy recalled seeing the chanteuse perform at Detroit’s Flame Show Bar and captivate her audiences in a style that her base appreciated: “If you wanted hot chili, chitlins, and greens, Dinah Washington could serve it up in great style. Now Dinah could sing the blues and everything else, talkin’ bout men like dawgs. She’d walk that bar and the Flame, ‘tellin’ it like it is,’ working it from end to end—both the bar and her behind.”²⁰

Along with earning the title “Queen of the Blues,” Washington earned the title “Queen of the Jukeboxes” for most records played, beating out more established names like Ella Fitzgerald.²¹ In its cover story on the Queen of the Jukeboxes, Jet magazine—a weekly periodical aimed at working-class African Americans—stated that one manager dubbed Washington as “the poor man’s Lena Horne,” attributing Washington’s success to a unique combination: “The way she sings a song is her secret. Church folks hear her records and get the idea she’s singing a gospel song. The jitterbugs go for her because she put a terrific beat in what she does. The ‘juice-heads’ and ‘winos’ swear she’s singing directly to them. How can anybody beat a combination like that?”²² That description summed Washington’s recording success as a reliable record seller, but also the ingredients of R&B—taking the melisma and melodramatic flourishes of gospel music, adding a beat that emphasizes bass and horn instruments, and presenting secular lyrics that speak to the everyday listener. Or, as Arnold Shaw penned, R&B “embodied the fervor of gospel music, the throbbing vigor of boogie woogie, the jump beat of swing, and the gutsiness and sexuality of life in the black ghetto.”²³

The description of Washington as a “poor man’s Lena Horne” reflected not only Washington’s position within the Black community but also how some within the community viewed her looks. Although Horne’s scenes in movies were often cut in southern cities that balked of Blacks shown alongside whites, Horne’s light skin, svelte figure, and easy-listening delivery made her more acceptable to rhetorically cross over and perform in areas that were off-limits to darker-skinned artists like Washington. During this period, the Black rhetorical presence of Black female singers who crossed over into white society fit the profile of Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, light-skinned African American singers who sang pleasantly but did not emote Black culture. If the singer was dark-skinned like Pearl Bailey or Joyce Bryant, they relied on being sexless, down-to-earth humorous characters or eroticized singers who played up fantasies about Black female sexuality.

Washington, however, could not fit neatly into these categories. While she sang about sex and love, her rapport with an audience required a shared cultural knowledge, and according to her contemporaries, she was often viewed as unattractive.²⁴ And while Horne, Dandridge, and Bryant wore slinky or tightfitting gowns onstage, Washington often wore tailored suits and was seen as overweight. In its article about Washington at the beginning of her popularity, Ebony magazine described Washington as a “buxom,” “lusty-voiced young woman” who was “plump,” “good-natured,” and resembled Bessie Smith in both delivery and appearance.²⁵ While Horne could perform “Stormy Weather” and Dandridge could sing the Great American Songbook in swanky supper clubs, Washington’s blues, ballads, and jive-talking worked for an audience that was nurtured and produced in the same environment as Washington. And while Washington sold out performances on that network of Black clubs known as the chitlin circuit and was successful with her singles—which were considered successful at twenty-five thousand or more copies sold—Washington, and her audience, evolved as the 1950s progressed.²⁶ Cementing her relationship with her Black audience in this first stage of rhetorical crossover, therefore, dictated that Washington would carry her base with her as she began to be exposed to a wider audience.

The first stage of rhetorical crossover reveals the exigencies that led to the creation of rhet...