On Ownership and Value

A key issue that continues to inform discussions of black musical value is the concept of authenticity. Authenticity is not, of course, an idea that is peculiar to music. We look for authenticity in a number of places and in a variety of forms. Journalists debate the authenticity of political candidates; on public television, antiques experts size up the authenticity of a special object, and home contractors restore old houses to their original, authentic form. But it is in music, and specifically in black music, that many of us find our greatest cultural truths. For well over a hundred years, black music has been held up as a symbol of the grandeur and distinctiveness of the nation, bringing into discernible sonic form all that which unites and divides us. In the performances of Bird, Mahalia, Aretha, and JB—artists so familiar that we refer to them by their first names and nicknames—we often seem to hear a certain coalescence of the multitude. Authenticity and truth appear as a sonic resolution of our unities and differences.

Yet acknowledging the rhetoric that has traditionally accompanied black music is not the same thing as understanding its powers of affect. And it is curious to note how little thought we have given to the matter. Why is black music regarded as fundamentally authentic? Why do we so often assume black music to be inherently superior to nonblack forms? Why do youth audiences in particular gravitate to black music for what they hold to be the key to life's secrets? And why have they done so at least since the rise of twentieth-century popular culture? Conventional wisdom tells us that black musical value grows out of the musical forms themselves. Great black music is great because it displays essential qualities that speak the truth of the black experience. We can readily put this argument aside, however, since it is ultimately based on what we like: those qualities deemed great are the same as the ones we find most appealing. More sophisticated arguments steer away from such claims and attribute authenticity to cultural factors, typically those arising from the experience of resisting the oppressive forces of white supremacy. While there is certainly relevance to this argument, it also runs into trouble, above all by relying on stereotypical views of black poverty and oppression in order to explain creativity. The historical sites of black racial struggle—the plantation, the Delta, the urban streets—become the domains of authenticity. According to this view, the truest African Americans are those who have lived the most oppressed, and therefore, most authentic lives. It is this struggle that supposedly enables them to produce "real" black music.

Even this brief summary of a couple of the popular debates surrounding black music suggests how difficult explaining authenticity really is. We may recognize black music's remarkable social contributions, but we find it challenging to specify that power and appeal. We may celebrate black music's primacy in the United States and abroad, but we can reach no consensus on how it got that way. Contemplating the nature of black musical authenticity may ultimately seem to be the stuff of philosophy and aesthetics, but, in the end, I think it is best addressed through historical analysis. For it is only through historical analysis that we can attempt to look past present-day matters of likes and dislikes and uncover the social processes that brought the idea of black musical authenticity into being.

Undertaking such a project begins by setting aside the tedious debates about true blackness—about what is musically real or not real—and focusing instead on black music as a participant in the construction of race. When we do so, we begin to see that black music's authenticity does not derive from the music itself, nor is it inherent to African-American culture, even if many African Americans have made black music a fundamental part of their lives. Rather, authenticity is part and parcel of black music's constitution within American racial ideologies. As a matter of course, black music in the United States would not sound the...