Kenny Dorham and the Experience of Race During Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era

• In Event: Orienting to Others

Abstract

This paper focuses on one aspect of a larger biographical study of the great African-American trumpeter and composer, Kenny Dorham (1924-1972). In east Texas in the 1930s, Dorham’s family sharecropped on several white-owned farms and eventually moved to a segregated section of Austin. After a brief stint in the Army, Dorham embarked on a music career just as modern jazz was taking shape. He worked with all of the pioneers of that music, including Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Dorham contributed through performance and composition to many valuable and critically-acclaimed jazz recordings of the 1950s and 1960s. Despite his vast artistic achievements, however, Dorham was obliged repeatedly to find work outside of music in order to support his family. Kidney disease ended his life at 48.
Dorham lived a rich, diverse and complex life, but all along he had to contend with the social, political and economic pressures driven by the dynamics of American racism. His early appreciation for nature in the “big Southwest” and the rural life of farming and ranching (he also worked as a cowboy) shaped his approach to playing the trumpet and composing music. Yet sharecropping itself was an exploitative institution that imposed numerous hardships. Earlier generations of his family endured the legacy of slavery in different ways: those born before the Civil War had actually been enslaved before moving to Texas, and one branch of the family owned land and voted during Reconstruction, only to lose that land to a questionable legal ruling in 1935.
This paper documents Dorham’s remarkable ability to transcend the limitations of the Jim Crow South through his art while being dogged throughout his life by the insidious mutations of that racialized social order.

Author

• Robert Michael Pallitto, Seton Hall University