Civil Rights Music Page 7
On the other hand, there is another tainted tendency in civil rights studies, this one most often put into play by humanities and cultural studies scholars. Namely, the tendency to limit the scope and scholarly attention of their studies almost exclusively to literary or artistic movements and, consequently, discursively downplay the ways in which the politics or actual protest practices of the Civil Rights Movement directly impacted and influenced virtually all African American artists between 1945 and 1965, whether they were openly associated with the Civil Rights Movement or not. Please, beloved reader, think seriously about it for a moment. It is not as though American apartheid only targeted African Americans who were openly associated with the Civil Rights Movement. No, absolutely not. Such an interpretation is completely historically inaccurate and utterly intellectually disingenuous. American apartheid assaulted all African Americans, as well as their kith and kin from other countries, whether they were moderates, militants, or “silent members” of the movement or not. That is, quite simply and quite sadly, the way the irrationality and blanket-style anti-black racism of American apartheid worked between 1945 and 1965.[9]
In most humanities and cultural studies scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement when black cultural expression is placed within historical and cultural contexts, typically it is the historical and cultural contexts of “art worlds” or “avant-garde movements.” However, the broader social, political, and economic connections necessary in order to really and truly comprehend the art of, and the art created during, the Civil Rights Movement era is, at best, either barely brought up or, at worst, never even broached. Breaking with both of the tendencies discussed above, Civil Rights Music acknowledges that sociologists and political scientists over the years have produced one kind of civil rights studies that most often ignores and ultimately erases the art of, and the art created during, the Civil Rights Movement era, where humanities and cultural studies scholars over the years have produced work that has, more or less, ignored and ultimately erased the politics and social justice agenda of the Civil Rights Movement.
A third tendency in civil rights studies revolves around scholarship that emphasizes the cultural work of the Civil Rights Movement, and its music and musicians to be more specific. Similar to the scholars who focus on the “art worlds” or “avant-garde movements” of the broader movement, in this third tendency the academic takes on the role of the descriptive categorizer and cultural organizer of the Civil Rights Movement, giving selected singers and songs social and political functions and, as a result, putting into practice a form of what C. Wright Mills (1959, 55–59) termed “abstracted empiricism.” Needless to say, here the point is not to discursively dismiss any form of civil rights studies as much as it is to challenge scholarship that privileges the political over the cultural instead of understanding the political and the cultural to be inextricable in the black popular movement tradition, as they are in African American life-worlds and life-struggles more generally speaking.
There are countless scholars of the Civil Rights Movement who have offered enormous insight to my effort here, and I should openly emphasize that my work seeks to build up and not tear down civil rights studies. It is in this sense that I do not necessarily fault other Civil Rights Movement scholars for neglecting the cultural, and more specifically the musical, innovations and expressions that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. I am only interested in emphasizing that the musical and extra-musical elements of music during the Civil Rights Movement should not be discursively divorced from the broader political praxes and conceptions of social change during the movement and, indeed, discursively divorced from other aspects of African American social life. In other words, civil rights music—as with civil rights art more generally—should not be relegated to some musicological or sociological subfield, but should be included in the most wholistic and interdisciplinary manner imaginable in the overarching historical, cultural, sociological, political, legal, educational, economic, and religious studies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Civil Rights Music seeks to find a middle ground between history, theory, politics, economics, sociology and musicology. Rather than superimposing “abstracted empiricism” onto the Civil Rights Movement, here I would like to extract and critically explore the extra-musical aspects of the music of the Civil Rights Movement while grounding those extra-musical aspects in the history, culture, politics, and economics of the movement. In fact, instead of advancing a grand sociological theory of the Civil Rights Movement, here my main focus will be on the ways in which Civil Rights Movement history, culture, and overarching struggle are uniquely captured in, and conveyed through the major forms of black popular music between 1945 to 1965. By re-examining the music of the Civil Rights Movement as “cognitive praxis,” as cultural action and, in turn, utilizing the said “praxis” and “action” as a point of departure to develop an alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement, I aim to avoid “abstracted empiricism.” Admittedly, the work here is “theory-laden,” but it is also “history-laden,” and specifically “music history-laden,” and primarily preoccupied with answering the overarching research questions: Did the art of, and the art created during, the Civil Rights Movement era capture and convey aspects and events of the movement unlike any other expression or artifact of the movement? And, more specifically, did the black popular music of, or, rather, the black popular music created during, the Civil Rights Movement capture and convey aspects and events of the movement unlike any other expression or artifact of the movement? Can art and cultural expression, and music more specifically, truly be transformative with respect to politics and social change?
Above I argued that the Civil Rights Movement was an important source of knowledge production, and that it is, in large measure, through the creation and dissemination of social movement-inspired knowledge that major social, political, and cultural transformation takes place in African America, if not in America more generally. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, women and gender studies, queer studies, and environmental studies, not to mention the myriad “traditional” disciplines, have all inherited, even if often unwittingly, a great deal from the epistemology, which is to say, from the knowledge and praxis production, of the Civil Rights Movement. Here, the black popular music of the movement is considered a key part of the knowledge production, political practice, and cultural action of the Civil Rights Movement. On the one hand, civil rights music, as a matter of fact, actually challenged dominant—most often incredibly Eurocentric and bourgeois—categories of “good music,” and even “good black music,” as will be seen in our discussion of the “rock & roll controversy” in chapter 5. From gospel through to rock & roll, black popular music between 1945 and 1965 called into question lily-white, albeit thoroughly whitewashed, categories of artistic merit by highlighting and problematizing the taken-for-granted frameworks for aesthetic evaluation and judgment. Between 1945 and 1965, the black popular music of the Civil Rights Movement simultaneously did this on a discursive as well as performative level, especially by inventing and incessantly experimenting with new, post-war black aesthetic principles and creating new, post-war black communal rituals and styles.
On the other hand, although often overlooked, the Civil Rights Movement innovatively utilized the media of artistic expression to communicate with the wider world and, by doing so, frequently decolonized, repoliticized, and mobilized popular culture and entertainment. In terms of African American music, literature, and art, the Civil Rights Movement in many instances provided a significant source of renewal and rejuvenation by injecting new “movement meanings” into, and reconstituting established aesthetic forms and genres. In more general terms, through its impact on popular culture, mores, views and values, the Civil Rights Movement ultimately lead to a deconstruction and reconstruction of the processes of African American identity formation, African American cultural transformation and,
perhaps most important considering the present discussion, African American popular movement emergence and sustenance.
The Civil Rights Movement: A Creative Combination of Black Political Culture and Black Popular Culture
Although there is much nostalgia surrounding the Civil Rights Movement today, we should note that not every aspect of it and its popular culture were progressive or even morally commendable. As a matter of fact, during the Civil Rights Movement longstanding African American traditions were mobilized by movement leaders, intellectuals, artists, and rank and filers in the interest of a wide range of social visions and political agendas, some of which were obviously sexist, heterosexist, Eurocentric, and very often bourgeois, even though the African American masses of the era were, as they remain up to the present moment, primarily working-class and underclass. When engaged objectively, we must concede that the Civil Rights Movement harbored evident regressive, if not outright reactionary, elements. It was not the often-squeaky clean and ethically irreproachable movement it is often portrayed as today.[10]
However, whether deemed progressive or regressive, it is virtually impossible to deny that the Civil Rights Movement actually reconstituted African American cultural resources in the immediate post-war period. This reconstitution of African American cultural resources during the movement ultimately translated into myriad creative works of artistic experimentation and critical, extraordinarily reflective works of evaluation. Through its songs, theater, literature and art, over fifty years after its end the Civil Rights Movement has retained a presence in our collective cultural memory and social imagination in the absence of many of the particular social and political conditions that initially brought it into being. With this in mind, it is easy to see why I argue that even if only through the memory of its political praxes, cultural contributions, and innovative evaluative criteria, the Civil Rights Movement has a living legacy in the twenty-first century. But, its legacy is often shrouded in mystery and misinterpretation because most of its cultural contributions were subsumed under more urgent social and political matters.[11]
The popular culture, including the popular music, of the Civil Rights Movement has rarely been examined in a serious and systematic way, either by academics, activists, or general observers. In fact, many movement members have great difficulty distinguishing the political from the cultural in the Civil Rights Movement. And, partly as a consequence of this dichotomy, the Civil Rights Movement is typically discussed and interpreted in purely political terms: organizations, issues, ideologies, campaigns, marches, demonstrations, strategies and tactics. The dominant interpretive and discursive frameworks usually paint a picture of the Civil Rights Movement’s famous political figures, and how these extraordinary individuals channeled the human, material, and organizational resources of the era into the overarching political struggle. What is of greatest interest is the effectiveness with which the Civil Rights Movement was able to achieve many, if not most, of its political goals. However, where most civil rights scholars have long overlooked it, here I am most interested in the deeper and longer-lasting impact that the Civil Rights Movement had on cultural transformation, and specifically cultural expression through the black popular music of the movement. While “movement cultures” have been taken more seriously in recent years, yet and still there has been little or no real attempt to come to terms with the ways in which the black popular culture and black popular music of the Civil Rights Movement often arose out of, and often in turn influenced the internal culture and external cultural work of the movement.[12]
Here, much of my analysis will go against the grain of more or less poststructuralist and postmodernist interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement that read it almost exclusively in textual terms, whether via actual literary products or the dialogical practices that can be read into social and political interactions of the era. In this discursive framework, the U.S. society of the Civil Rights Movement era is treated, for the most part, as a web of discourses, and the main emphasis is placed on the construction of meaning and identity through various forms of written articulation. Most often decontextualized and disembodied, the text in this discursive framework, whether it be a book, or a “social text,” or even a “cultural text,” is typically comprehended as a thing in and of itself. Admittedly, this often makes for fascinating analyses of particular political practices and cultural expressions, and has actually led to the production of an entirely new epistemological and methodological arsenal for extracting the essence out of an exemplary document or artifact. However, all too often when this framework is applied to African American movements the deeper structures of distinctly black theories and black praxes of social, political, and cultural change are left in the lurch.
The poststructuralist and postmodernist textual interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement dilutes the central importance of history, and especially the role of collective action, political praxis, and social movements in reconstructing the contexts in which all texts are created and recreated. All of this is nonchalantly negated, and the ways in which history, culture, politics, and economics impact the interpretation of all texts is essentially bracketed out. In essence, in order to exclusively focus on the specificity of texts, the generality of contexts is discursively dismissed. Obviously, I do not want to revive the “structuralist” theories that the poststructuralists and postmodernists have challenged. However, I would assert that there are very serious limitations in attempts such as these to read society and social movements in textual terms.
While there are innumerable works by historians of art, music, and literature on the cultural activities and cultural expressions of political movements, for the most part sociologists and musicologists have curiously left the cultural activities and cultural expressions of political movements, especially African American political movements, woefully under-analyzed. Frequently, the historians of art, music, and literature produce accounts of the cultural activities and cultural expressions of political movements that fall squarely in the idioms of cultural or literary history, where almost invariably aesthetic work takes precedence over social and political work. Although there have been biographies and scholarship about selected artists of the Civil Rights Movement, for the most part, this work has not significantly contributed to our understanding of the overarching movement because of the understandably narrow, autobiocentric nature of the focus of most of these studies.
For my purposes here, when taken collectively these studies open up a rich field for critical interdisciplinary analysis. On the one hand, these studies point to the crucial importance of political commitment in black cultural expression and artistic production during the Civil Rights Movement. As is now well known, many of the leading artists, writers, and musicians of the Civil Rights Movement era were involved, at arguably the most formative phase of their lives, in the movement. Although I would be the first to admit that this does not mean that the monumental artistic achievements of, for example: Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Lorraine Hansberry, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Love Coates, Sammy Davis, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, Nat King Cole, Odetta, Richie Havens, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Nina Simone, and Ray Charles, among many others, can be reduced to their political commitments to the Civil Rights Movement. However, it does seem to suggest that without having taken an active role in the Civil Rights Movement they probably would have produced distinctly different work. Additionally, it is important to observe that in most instances movement involvement was a defining moment and, more or less, remained, however furtively, central to their artistry even after the Civil Rights Movement came to a close.
These artists’ activism was objectified in their art and, as a consequence, the movement came to be embodied in them. When the Civil Rights Movement ended the ideals and ethos of the movement lived on in their iconic art. In many instances, their “movement art” helped to inspire post-Civil Rights Movement popular movements (albeit not me
rely black popular movements) by serving to keep the Civil Rights Movement and its distinct aesthetic alive in the American social imagination and collective cultural memory long after 1965.
On the other hand, studies focused on the relationship between civil rights aesthetics and civil rights politics provided me with ideal examples and sources of inspiration for my conception of music as a form of, and force for cultural transformation during the Civil Rights Movement. What I previously proclaimed as the distinctive soundtracks of African American social movements and “movement musicians” can now be comprehended, with the intellectual assistance of this scholarship, as a kind of cultural production and cultural praxis that harbors deep historical, political, sociological, legal, educational, economic, and religious implications for the critical study of the Civil Rights Movement. Here the Civil Rights Movement is seen as a breeding ground for qualitatively new kinds of politicized and ritualized thought and practices, as well as for artistic, literary and, most especially, musical innovation and experimentation.
Bearing all of this in mind, I openly acknowledge how profoundly my work here has been influenced by a number of important studies that have focused on how the artist-activists of the Civil Rights Movement politicized and mobilized the black popular music of the movement in the interest of the movement’s social and political goals. I would be remiss if I did not make special mention of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1965” (1975), Jonathan Kamin’s “Rhythm & Blues in White America: Rock and Roll as Acculturation and Perceptual Learning” (1975), Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser’s Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures (1989), Kerran Sanger’s “When the Spirit Says Sing!”: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement (1995), Laura Helper’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On: An Ethnography of Race Relations and Crossover Audiences for Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll in 1950s Memphis” (1996), Anne McCanless’s “Uniting Voices in Song: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement” (1997), Brian Ward’s Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm & Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (1998), Brian Ward’s Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (2004), Ruth Feldstein’s How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (2013), Bob Darden’s Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (2014), and Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2014). These studies, along with the myriad others to be discussed in the subsequent chapters, not only enriched my conception of music as a form of, and force for cultural transformation during the Civil Rights Movement, but they also deftly demonstrate that civil rights music had a significant impact on subsequent popular music and popular culture both nationally and internationally.