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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Not long before the Harlem Renaissance, the figure of the “song collector” emerged as the paragon of folklore and ethnomusicological studies. Often coded white, male, middle-class and Northern, the song collector was a folklorist as that role was conceived at the turn of the century: one who aimed to document and preserve ways of life they believed to be receding into the flood tide of modernity, dissociating what Michael Rogin calls “a black past” from “a white present.” Contra these racist assumptions and colonialist practices, interventions by Daphne Lamothe and others have shown the ways that black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance operated as “native ethnographers,” deploying a “black modernist gaze” to disturb the mores of ethnographic seeing. Drawing upon the work of Lamothe, Daphne Brooks, Roshanak Kheshti and others, we explore a black modernist auditory practice that unsettles ethnographic listening. We do this by taking into account black popular music and performance located at the other end of the spectrum, music written, composed, directed, and acted by black artists on and off-Broadway as well as on film, overtly commercial forms of expression that grappled with a legacy that associated “folk” with minstrel performance. On these intersecting cultural stages, popular numbers were quickly appropriated and claimed by white artists for greater financial gain. As Tricia Rose observes, “once a black cultural practice takes a prominent place inside the commodity system, it is no longer considered a black practice.” Understanding “‘the folk’ to be an anxious product of commercial modernity—not an antidote to it,” we muddle the line between supposedly discrete types of authentic and inauthentic expression, creating space for new forms of songwriting and performance as well as new songwriters and performers to emerge from a long legacy of falsely racialized and gendered distinctions.

Our panel explores the dialogic of “folk” song collecting, popular music, and performance as it was claimed and enacted as an emergent practice of cultural preservation, assimilation and resistance by black artists throughout and beyond the Harlem Renaissance. A time when the majority of the white listening public denied the skill and labor of black musicians by assuming their musicianship to be inherent, black authors, composers, and performers were working through multiple (and not always immediately recognizable) genres and formats to carve a space of black creativity that flouted the norms of their Jim Crow present. Relocating the genre- and geography-bending songwriting career of Langston Hughes from the periphery to the center of his life’s project; sounding a “New Negro recording imaginary” in the work of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown; exploring the nexus of classical music and vernacular literature in New Negro Los Angeles; examining the insights afforded by migrant consciousness and its role in Bessie Smith’s black modernist “St. Louis Blues;” and considering Eusebia Cosme’s translations of blackness in her elaborate performances of Afro-Cuban folk poetry, our panel seeks to re-present the disciplines of folklore studies and popular music studies by centering the complex work of black artists of the period.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Lauren Sklaroff, University of South Carolina-Columbia

Individual Presentations

• Modernist Soundings of Classic Blues in Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues - Daphne Lamothe, Smith College

• Composing and Composition in Harlem Renaissance Los Angeles - Emily Lutenski, Saint Louis University

• Voice on Record: The New Negro Movement’s Recording Imaginary - Sonnet Retman, University of Washington-Seattle Campus

• The Little Songs That America Loves Are Just Called Songs: Langston Hughes’ Musical Career - Sophie Abramowitz, University of Virginia

• From Cuban Evening to Cuba Libre: Poetics, Embodiment, and the Translation of Black Folk Culture - Imani D Owens, University of Pittsburgh

Comment

• Lauren Sklaroff, University of South Carolina-Columbia