On Ownership and Value: Response

I would like to try to put one of Radano's points in a different, perhaps older, context. He writes of the increasing references to African-American music in the 1840s and talks about the discourse of folk authenticity that was used to describe it. In my view at least, the 1840s and 1850s were a key time in the development of slave culture. Examining the written record for these years, one finds fewer references among whites to barbarism or the strangeness of African-American sounds. There seems an almost palpable sense that, finally, after a century and a half of living cheek by jowl a growing number of whites are beginning to appreciate black culture. Not only did you have whites as spectators on plantations at corn shuckings (and they are really a post-1830 development, as Roger Abrahams has shown), funerals and the like, but whites in cities such as Richmond in the 1850s actively sought out opportunities to come in contact with black culture. They observed slaves singing as they worked in the tobacco factories and, most importantly, they filled the amen benches in churches and watched and listened to blacks pray and, particularly, sing. These people were the forebears of the whites who would listen to blues and jazz in the twentieth century and this too is the line out of which John and Alan Lomax came.

There is another group of whites that do not get talked about much that I find fascinating. I am particularly drawn to moments when white observers, mostly writers of some sort, despite an intense and very unpleasant racism that was a commonplace of the time, are forced, no matter how reluctantly, to concede that there was "something" to black life. More often than not these occasions centered on some aspect of African-American expressive culture, most commonly music and/or dance and most commonly what moved them was a highly syncretic performance of some sort or other.

On an evening in late June 1840 in New York City, the residents of Park Place

were waked up, such as were asleep, by a strain of most exquisite harmony, in which the bugle predominated. "The last rose of summer" was the air, and most beautifully was it played. It was followed by "Away with melancholy," with the variations, executed by the bugle solo, such as seldom have been heard in that quiet neighborhood. The moon was just rising over the turrets and trees to the east, and many of the windows in the street were thrown open, with fair eyes peeping forth upon the night scene. From Broadway a considerable crowd was attracted to the spot where the Serenaders stood. This spot was opposite some trees opposite No. 10 Park Place. After several other strains, executed with the same exquisite beauty, the Serenaders slowly withdrew towards the College grounds below, and soon disappeared in the shades of night.

(New York Herald 1840)

The Serenaders were in fact Francis Johnson and seven or eight members of his band, all black. Johnson, from Philadelphia, was one of the most important and popular black musicians of the nineteenth century. Twenty years earlier one commentator had noted that he had "a remarkable taste in distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song, into a reel, jig, or country dance." The word "distort" here can bear some weight. What Johnson and his black band did was to bring to bear on European standards some of the rhythmic complexities familiar to them from their African heritage. It seems likely that Johnson and his musicians could not only match the skills of white players but also managed to infuse their performance with something distinctive taken from the black dancing cellars of northern cities. The brief story ended: "Johnson is quite a composer himself, and closed his serenade with one of his own brilliant compositions" (quoted in White 2002, 141).

What makes this remarkable story all the more remarkable is that it was published in James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, a paper whose unremitting nastiness toward African Americans was almost palpable. In the two calendar years of...