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2 / The Timbre of Sincerity: Mahalia Jackson’s Gospel Sound and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Thanks to Ralph Ellison’s writings on music, eloquent style, and selfmythology designed to promote this view, literary critics have often seen Ellison’s writing, like Zora Neale Hurston’s, as an expansive lyrical answer to Richard Wright’s hardboiled naturalism.1 I hope the previous chapter has shown that dichotomy to be misleading, if not false. A more appropriate distinction between Wright and Ellison is that, whereas Wright often anticipates a readership that will misread his use of black music—and thus needs to leave the States and even the medium of fiction to bring his engagement with Bessie Smith’s blues to fruition—Ellison anticipates a readership that will corroborate his complex vision. This faith in the writer’s powers of inventive persuasion helps explain why Ellison represents black women’s sacred songs in a more celebratory , less anxious manner than does Wright. Like Wright’s account of Smith’s blues, Ellison’s account of women’s sacred music illuminates his own literary style. Ellison’s nonfiction music writings mainly concern the male blues and jazz artists who were his heroes—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington , Charlie Christian, Jimmy Rushing. As is well known, Ellison figures these artists as custodians of the unrealized promise of pluralistic democracy. Yet this chapter aims to correct the critical bias that Ellison’s own bias produces, of reading his work only through his writings on secular male musicians.2 Instead, I use Ellison’s essay on gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to theorize Ellison’s creation of a complex yet nonduplicitous narrative voice in his classic black bildungsroman, Invisible the timbre of sincerity / 67 Man (1952). When we read Ellison’s novel for the “timbre of sincerity” he ascribes to Jackson, we can see that Ellison’s faith in fiction matches his faith in black music, and not only on the grounds that both art forms offer templates for social pluralism but more specifically because they both represent this expressive potential: that the black writer and the singer might drop the ironic mask often associated with “crossing over” toward a white audience—or, in Ellison’s case, “integrating” the (white) American literary tradition—and instead centralize a sincere black expressive ambivalence. By linking Ellison’s and Jackson’s work through the concept of sincere ambivalence, I offer a more sincere vision of Ellison’s modernist novel than is common, and a more complex vision of Jackson’s music. Highlighting both artists’ non-duplicitous double vocality, moreover, allows us to theorize forms of audience-performer relations that do not privilege the white gaze. Given Ellison’s brilliant writings on jazz, it is no surprise that the organizers of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival invited him, along with Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, to appear on a panel discussion of “Jazz and American Life.” What is more surprising is that Ellison’s literary beat that year was not jazz but gospel music. His trip to Newport would produce his only article on a female (sacred) singer, “As the Spirit Moves Mahalia” (1958). On the Newport stage that summer, Jackson performed “Come Sunday” with the Duke Ellington Orchestra and, later, a solo set of gospel songs. (This was the second year the jazz festival had featured gospel music, billing it as the music at “the roots of jazz.”) Apart from her festival performances, Jackson also sang at Newport’s Mount Zion AME Church that weekend, on Sunday morning. In the midst of this busy schedule, she additionally made time to attend Ellison’s panel. This, according to one reporter, was Jackson’s response to the panel discussion: “There’s been too much analyzing here and not enough heart.”3 Granted, the reporter’s citation of this remark enforces the troubling binary by which female artists feel things while their male counterparts think about them.4 Ellison’s article on Jackson constructs a version of this binary as well: while his appreciation of Jackson’s art verges on reverence, he does not consider Jackson his peer in the expression of ambivalence. I see this as a mistake. Against these artists’ mutual misrecognition—whereby Jackson frames Ellison as lacking heart and Ellison frames Jackson as lacking complexity —I show that affective ambivalence is a critical effect of both Ellison’s and Jackson’s intellectual labor. Hence, I take Jackson’s exchange with the cultural critics at Newport, skeptical though it is, as an...

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