Category: Race

  • “Crazy” Blues?

    In the book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, Adam Gussow devotes an entire chapter to Mamie Smith’s 1920 blues hit “Crazy Blues.” The song is believed to be the first blues recording ever released, and was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994. Gussow’s main concern, however, is not…

  • Tracing the Sources

    [Content warning: racist language and imagery.] In the 1940s, the American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, also a folklorist and musicologist, published a collection of American children’s folksongs she had compiled. One of the numbers in this volume of 43 songs is “Such a Getting Upstairs.” This singer asserts that it is a “going-up-to-bed-song” from Indiana.…

  • Authenticity (part I)

    The protagonist of Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, a young white recording engineer named Seth, describes days spent listening to music with his college friend, Carter Wallace: We worshipped music like [Lee “Scratch”] Perry’s but we knew we didn’t own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling…

  • Rebirth of a Nation

    [Content warning for disturbing, racist, and violent film imagery.] As we’ve discussed, the way that music and image interact can change, enhance, or even contradict the meaning of both the music and of the image. We are all familiar with the ability of image to define, revise, and re-write not only past history, but even…

  • Race, Class, Art, and Consumption

    Trigger/content warnings: N-word in original source. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d’une négresse 1800, Musée du Louvre. New Zealand singer Lorde’s 2013 hit “Royals” appeared to be a critique of conspicuous consumption: My friends and I – we’ve cracked the code. We count our dollars on the train to the party. And everyone who knows us knows that we’re fine…

  • Can A White Girl Sing Selena?

    April 16 is a state holiday in Texas: Selena Day. Who was Selena? Selena was, is, and, were I to guess, will remain for eternity the most beloved female of all time in the Latino community. (Second place is the Virgin Mary, if you’re looking for context.) . . . She looked like (a more attractive…

  • Identity and Transformation

    Detail from Synecdoche by Byron Kim, a series of oil paintings that are “portraits” of racial identity. As we all know, Rachel Dolezal was by no means the first white American to take on aspects of African-Americanness in her persona — calling Elvis, is anybody home?. . . But blackness has always been an integral part of…

  • Sun Ra, Intergalactic Afrofuturist

    Sun Ra (born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914) was not only a jazz pioneer. He was also a pioneer of all kinds of avant-garde sounds. In the 1950s, when record companies released 45-rpm discs in the hopes of selling them as hit singles, Ra used the 45-rpm technology to record his musical experiments.…

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • Going Home

    The second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony no. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”). What is the instrument that plays the poignant solo? It was thought that Dvorak took this melody from an African-American spiritual that his student and assistant, the composer Harry T. Burleigh, sang for him.  (For more on Harry T. Burleigh…