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“Working Both Sides of the Fence” African American Quartets Enter the Realm of Popular Culture joyce marie jackson introduction W hether the urbanizing South will remain southern is a question that now occupies the minds of countless scholars and journalists. Clearly, we see a region in the process of redefining its own image and character as it is buffeted by the forces of migration, immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Elements of an older, more traditional culture remain, even though they are being increasingly overtaken by a host of competing influences. The result is a dynamic process of sociocultural change and transformation, the exact nature of which is still imperfectly understood. The New South, by its diversity alone, challenges that simpler South. But as southerners adapt to the new urban worlds growing up in their midst, they will probably discover that in their diversity of culture, interest, and power, they still have ample room for southern traditions as well. Southern musical culture is an excellent example of this. The South is the birthplace of American music forms including spirituals, blues, jazz, country and western, and rock and roll, as well as genres that originated from an amalgam of styles, such as Cajun and zydeco music, which are indigenous to Louisiana. Credit must be given to the confluence of people and cultures in the South for providing the creative impetus. It is difficult to imagine another region that has had more national and international influence musically . Indeed, music may be the region’s most obvious and most important cultural export. African Americans have been instrumental in the creation of the majority of the musical genres that first emerged from the South. Even today, we can still hear the traditional strains of the spiritual as it was heard during the antebellum period in the Baptist Easter Rock ritual of Winnsboro, Louisiana. We can hear 154 “working both sides of the fence” 155 these sounds emanating from elderly black women sitting on their front stoops in New Orleans or flowing from storefront churches similar to the one in which Mahalia Jackson in her early years listened to the music that subsequently influenced her style. Black musicians are performing the country blues today with the same raw originality and conviction that they possessed during the era of Reconstruction and the early twentieth century. We can here these sounds in Tougaloo, Mississippi, on the back porch of a black man who lost his job and his woman and decided to “pick a few” on his guitar to vent his frustrations. We can also hear the country blues at a Saturday night dance and fish fry at any of the local juke joints in the Black Belt of Alabama. Yes, in many locales of the South these identical sounds can still be heard in their original context. You just have to know who to talk to and where to go. Although we can still hear most of this music in its original form or a close facsimile, much of it has been redefined at different times and to varying degrees because of the changing aspects of southern culture. Producing music is a creative process that is reinterpreted over time to correspond to the natural process of adjusting to new conditions and environmental factors; in essence, music is a dynamic element of culture. In describing the changing nature of culture, Lawrence W. Levine contends: “Culture is not a fixed condition but a process: the product of interaction between the past and present. Its toughness and resiliency are determined not by a culture’s ability to withstand change, which indeed may be a sign of stagnation not life, but by its ability to react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation” (1977, 5). The music that is created and redefined results from interaction between the original tradition and the new environmental situations, cultural diversity, and musical influences that musicians encounter in their lives. In addition, redefinition is also brought about by radio broadcasting, commercial recordings, and concert tours. The present essay discusses how and why, for more than one hundred years, African American gospel quartet singers creatively redefined themselves and their music to selectively adjust to a cadre of new conditions in their lives. the case for african american quartets The African American quartet tradition is a distinctly twentieth-century musical and cultural phenomenon; however, it is clearly rooted in the traditional music of the post...

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