Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music

13 Styles and Rituals: Wanting to be Part of That Music

Chapter 13 STYLES AND RITUALS: WANTING TO BE PART OF THAT MUSIC The eruption of rock'n'roll into popular music in the mid1950s took most white people by surprise; it seemed as if this extraordinary raucous but exciting music had suddenly come from nowhere to displace the familiar strains to which they had been accustomed as a background for social events and for decorous dancing. That it was in fact a product of the long evolution which I have been describing in this book, and that it had strong links with other contemporary styles of Afro-American musicking was not at that time clear to many people, and indeed it is still largely obscured by an imposed taxomony which tends to conceal its true origins. In this chapter I intend to show the strength of those links by tracing the main lines of its development both backwards into its past and forward to the present forms of popular music. One of the major difficulties in discussing the great fourdimensional jigsaw puzzle that is Afro-American music, and in showing how the various elements articulate one with another, lies in the necessity of using the literary medium, which is obstinately sequential, to represent a process in which so many interlinked things have been going on at the same time. Performers and listeners alike have resisted the pigeonholing that both entrepreneurs, trying to make money out of the musicians' activities, and scholars, trying to make a tidy and manageable order out of what is essentially an untidy and unmanageable activity, have tried to impose on them. The record industry, which 370 Music of the Common Tongue has of course been intimately involved with the development of all kinds of western musicking since at least the turn of the century, has always been keen to pigeonhole its artists and its publics; built as it is on music as a commodity for sale, it finds that this practice makes for greater ease of packaging and marketing, as well as making it possible to direct sales efforts towards specific markets and from time to time to produce the illusion of having something new to sell. There can be no doubt that this packaging of artists for a particular market has had its effect on the history of western music in this century, not excepting classical music, and has played a large part in the erection of what are often quite artificial categories in Afro-American music. In real life, however, musicians have always been willing to work in as wide a variety of styles and milieux as their skills will permit (the two musicians described by Titon in Chapter 7 are by no means exceptional), while on the other hand audiences have on the whole not cared to confine their listening to one musical style only; this need not surprise us since identity is a complex, dynamic and many-layered affair. The categories that are commonly used are at best convenient approximations, at worst commercial and even political fictions, and trying to establish the boundaries between them is like trying to put fences between the colours of the rainbow. That is not to say that giving names to styles of AfroAmerican music, or any other music for that matter, has no basis in reality. Styles do crystallize and become dominant, and musicians as they play, listeners as they listen and dancers as they dance, do group themselves together, bound by common values and identities; such groups frequently adopt names for the purpose of selfidentification . The fact that the power to name is also the power to define is of great importance in musicking, concerned as it crucially is with identity, and we need to look very carefully always at how a name is given, who gives it, and whose power of definition it reflects. The need becomes more pressing when the musicking under discussion is concerned with the self-definition of large Styles and Rituals 371 numbers of people, as is that modern popular AfroAmerican music known as rock, or pop. The most notable instance in this century of selfdefinition on a mass scale through music occurred in the mid-1950s, with the coming of rock'n'roll, perhaps the most profound and enduring reshaping of a dominant musical style to have taken place since the Renaissance. An astonishing feature of that reshaping, in an age of mass communications (that is, one...