Voice on Record: The New Negro Movement’s Recording Imaginary

• In Event: Black Modernism's Roving Ear: Folklore and Popular Music in the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

Abstract

The 1920s’ “vogue in things negro,” including African American music and writing, marks a pivotal chapter in Black America’s long history of commodification, appropriation, and expropriation. This presentation traces a formative transition of the Harlem Renaissance in its literary encounter with jazz and blues culture, arguing that its aesthetics were shaped not only by the music’s iconic personalities, gestural repertoire and vibrant expressive forms but also by its means of production, the technical recording apparatus itself. I use the term “New Negro recording imaginary” expansively, to describe a complex literary soundscape, composed of musical poetics and various practices of sonic transcription, preservation, and contextualization. It is an imaginary that both reflects and animates creative tensions between technologies of representation, including writing, audio recording and live performance, and it works to mutually define--and blur--commercial markets for popular music and folk song. Following Lisa Gitelman’s observation that “new inscriptions signal new subjectivities,” I argue that these technologies’ capacities to migrate sound within different spaces and be heard in new ways helped shape the representation of the New Negro as a distinctly modern identity (11).

Paeans to race records we do not find. In fact, much of the commentary characterizes race records as a troubling form of commercial culture: canned sound traveling the airwaves, diluting black folk song. Many writers of the Harlem Renaissance were motivated in their own artistic work to preserve the folk music they felt was rapidly being lost (Lamothe, 38-9). To do so, they often harnessed the very recording technologies they believed were hastening folk music’s demise (Hamilton 13). Technology would provide the record of folk music’s “before” and “after.” In the fear of folk music’s dying with the incursion of audio recording, we might perceive something more fundamental, the threat of actual death figured in the separation between body and voice. The recorded voice eerily emanates beyond the mortal body. These instances of phonography’s temporal and spatial disjuncture resonated with the precarity of black life in the moment of Jim Crow: the imminent violence and terror of the South spurred African American migration, as people left home in search of “freer spaces” (Griffin 18). In its dislocation and disorientation, migration feels like a kind of death facilitated, in part, by technology.  At the same, that technology circulates blues voices who sound “the possibility of a new life elsewhere” (McGinley 38).

Such sonic technologies were never merely the vehicle. I argue that a recording imaginary animates the writing of the period, in its method and aesthetics. Across various recording practices--technological, writerly and performative--we see black artists intervening in the culture industry’s appropriation of black music, translating the music in their art to stake a claim of ownership, safeguard its preservation and stage its transmission. Turning to letters, poems, and essays by Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes, and Sterling Brown, I explore the ways that these writers engaged with popular music and its processes of recording, its possibilities of preservation, representation and collectivity but also displacement and alienation.

Author

• Sonnet Retman, University of Washington-Seattle Campus