James Weldon Johnson and the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Musician

In all the critical attention paid to James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, surprisingly little has been directed toward the crucial role of music in the narrator’s experience and identity. While music scholars have cited the novel’s passages on the origins and significance of ragtime, literary critics seem relatively uninterested in the narrator’s principal means of supporting himself, which is also, arguably, his principal means of crossing racial boundaries.¹ Comfortable and capable in both European and African American music, the narrator’s musical performances function, more than once, as agents in his “passing” as either “white” or “black”; indeed, his convincing performance of Frédéric Chopin ultimately convinces a “lily white” woman to marry him, while his masterful performances of ragtime make audible a blackness invisible to the eye.² But the narrator challenges the “color line” even more dramatically in his repeated efforts to produce music that revises both “black” and “white” musical traditions by sounding an intimate relationship between the two—by performing European music in a style learned from his mother, by “ragging the classics,” and finally by composing (or preparing to compose) African American symphonies. Because it occupies the invisible medium of sound, this “hybrid” musicality promises to distract both the narrator and his audiences from the visual markers of the “color line” and to invite them into an aural experience of racial mixture and ambiguity, of “colors” that are not so clearly mapped onto stable racial identities.

Typically overlooked by recent critics who read this novel as a powerful exposure of the social constructedness of “race,” the narrator’s musical practices not only challenge the notion of an absolute boundary between white and black but also reveal the limits of this “hybrid” musicality within his social world.³ Like “passing,” music that crosses the color line depends on a perceivable (in this case, audible) “line” between black and white in the very process of defying its authority. Indeed, the novel arguably grounds its otherwise slippery approach to “race” in the audible blackness of certain African American musical practices that ultimately cannot be imitated or reproduced: the ragtime performed by the “natural” player at the “Club,” the “call and response” songs performed by “Singing Johnson” and the Southern black congregation, and the Southern melodies sung by the narrator’s mother. Johnson presents the value and difference of this music in no uncertain terms. Unlike European music that is fixed on a page, learned by imitation, and performed for paying audiences, African American music, as this novel represents it, involves an entirely different set of rituals and values, as well as different sounds. Spontaneous and improvisatory, involving its audience in call and response, and expressively tied to body and memory, black music occupies a unique position in Johnson’s text. The narrator’s repeated attempts to bridge these differences—either to unfix European texts by “ragging” them or to transfer the spirit of black music to the notated page—inevitably fail, even as they promise to unsettle American racial ideology. Cast by his European “training” as an inauthentic imitator of or mute audience for black music, and by his white audiences as either imitation white or exotic “other,” the narrator repeatedly becomes caught in an inflexible racial binary. From his “ex-colored” and alienated position at the end of the novel, he can only gesture as a silent writer toward a realm of African American sound that, safe from the commodifying, imitating, and fetishizing ears of white America, has been returned to an imagined, if now inaudible, authenticity.

Rather than simply revisit the ongoing debate about The Autobiography’s constructions of “race,” I would like instead to focus on how this text reflects and engages the racial politics of early-twentieth-century American music. The ex-colored man’s various innovations (he claims to be the first to “rag the classics,” the first to conceive of classical music based on African American themes) in fact echo the collective innovations...