Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky

JAMES NAREMORE Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky ETWEEN 1927 and 1954, the major Hollywood studios produced 1 only six feature films that took place in an all-black milieu: Hallelujah ! (MGM, 1929), Hearts in Dixie (Fox, 1929), The Green Pastures (Warner Brothers, 1936), Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943), Stormy Weather (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944), and Carmen Jones (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1954).1 The period in question was the heyday of classic cinema, bounded at one end by the introduction of sound and at the other by a shift toward a decentered, "package unit" mode of production ;2 more importantly, 1954 was also the year when the Supreme Court ordered public schools desegregated, paving the way for a civil rights movement that would have a lasting effect on all the media. Until then, any studio film purporting to deal exclusively with black experience was truly exceptional and controversial. The six films just listed are therefore among the most unusual products ofAmerican show business. No proper history of the movies should ignore them, and they deserve far more critical analysis than they have received. ' Viewed from a late twentieth-century perspective, one of the most interesting of the "all Negro" productions was MGM's Cabin in the Sky, starring Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, Lena Home, and a host of well-known black performers. This film warrants special attention—not only because of its considerable entertainment value, but also because it appeared at a crucial juncture in the series, when African Americans were increasing their demands for better treatment from the movie Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright © 1 992 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 ? ooJames Naremore industry, when black musical performers were receiving a degree of celebrity they had not enjoyed before, and when the federal government was engaged in a semi-official drive to encourage more pictures with black casts. Although Cabin was manufactured in Hollywood's most conservative studio, it was designed to appeal to a variety of audiences , binding them together in the name of wartime solidarity; in certain ways, it can be described as a liberal or historically transitional work, and it tells us important things about the complex, sometimes troubled relations between ethnicity and modernity. Of course, in general terms, Cabin was no different from the other five studio-produced films about blacks. They were all products of a segrgated society; they were all written, produced, and directed by whites; and they were all musicals or melodramatic narratives that made extensive use of song and dance, thus reinforcing the white culture's perception of African Americans as a fun-loving, "rhythmic" people. As a group, the six films also depended upon a vivid binary opposition between city and country that structured both classic Hollywood and many aspects of the the culture at large.4 The social tensions and ideological contradictions expressed by this opposition were always crucial to any art or entertainment that involved blackness; notice, for example , how the country-city polarity functioned in early uses of "jazz," a term that had been appropriated by white songwriters from Tin Pan Alley and turned into an ambiguous, highly flexible signifier. Was jazz a primitive music, a people's music, or an entertainment music? AU three possibilities were suggested by critics, and the term seemed to oscillate between diametrically opposed meanings. On the one hand, jazz was associated with flappers, skyscrapers, and the entire panoply of twentieth-century modernity; on the other hand, because it originated with African Americans who migrated to the northern cities, it connoted agrarian or pre-capitalist social relations, and it could be linked to a pastoral myth. Thus Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat (1927) and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) —two celebrated "modern" stage musicals—were grounded in folkloric treatments ofblacks. EvenWarner Brothers's The Jazz Singer (1927) evoked both the city and the country. Throughout most of the film, jazz represents a force of modernization that disrupts a conservative Jewish household; but when the protagonist enters show business, he reasserts old-fashioned values by donning blackface and singing "Mammy. " The same contrasts can be observed everywhere in Cabin...