In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Research in African Literatures 34.3 (2003) 168-170



[Access article in PDF]
Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought, by Paul Allen Anderson. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 335 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2591-8 paper.

Although the Harlem Renaissance has been well documented especially for its literary and social importance, not many works have focused on its musical heritage. James Weldon Johnson's classic, Black Manhattan (1930), chronicled black musical theater, and David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981) offered a cultural history including entertainment. However, Anderson's study, whose title derives from a "Negro spiritual," is more theoretically situated. It explores the "critical turns in Renaissance debates about the folk music inheritance, black nationalism and the cosmopolitanism of the New Negro" through "intellectual portraits" (3). [End Page 168]

Rather than support a particular position regarding folk authenticity, Anderson presents the various positions, beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois's defense of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Certain critics thought the choir should conform to a black folk music "primitivism" as opposed to the Western classical model, but for Du Bois, "Art is not natural and is not supposed to be natural" (qtd. 14). Du Bois leaned more toward black "folk romanticism" and "Victorian cultural idealism," quite different from the 1960s black nationalism of Amiri Baraka, which accepted avant-garde free jazz. Alain Locke theorized differences between "African art expressions" and those of the "Aframerican," the former, "rigid, controlled, disciplined," the latter, "free, exuberant, emotional" (qtd. 107). This conservative argument for "African American nationalism" minimizes Diaspora inheritances and is similar to that of such present-day critics as Stanley Crouch. Certain of Locke's viewpoints led poet Sterling Brown to conclude that Locke did not understand blues or jazz but "intellectually he knew their importance'" (qtd. 165).

Concerning the creative writers, Anderson suggests that Jean Toomer's idea of blending peasant rhythms and "the rhythm of machines" (qtd. 59) led to syncopated jazz elements in Cane (1923), but clearly Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston placed more emphasis in their works on black musical forms and were closer to the heartbeat of black music. Hurston rejected Du Bois's concept of the spirituals as mere "sorrow songs," and Hughes's short story "The Blues I'm Playing" mocked white patronage and valorized jazz and blues rather than European classical music. Undoubtedly, Hughes was the preeminent Harlem Renaissance blues and jazz poet.

The border between black folk music styles and that of European classical music is also evident among black concert stage performers. Roland Hayes, who "followed the contours of Du Bosian cosmopolitanism quite closely," sang spirituals and European classical music (62), as did Paul Robeson, but Robeson claimed that he had "no desire to interpret the vocal genius of half a dozen cultures which are really alien cultures to me" (qtd. 97). Acquiring a European classical repertoire or grafting its style to spirituals was objectionable to Carl Van Vechten, the white New York patron, who befriended Hughes and others.

Venturing somewhat beyond the usual boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Anderson contends that thirties white jazz critics such as John Hammond, who favored Holiday's unique vocal "grain" and Count Basie's swing, and Roger Pryor Dodge, who preferred a New Orleans style, promoted jazz authenticity rather than the classicism of Paul Whiteman. Most important, Anderson considers Duke Ellington, the most prolific African American composer and orchestra leader of the twentieth century, whose Black, Brown and Beige (1943) went beyond the proscriptions of folk authenticity and short-form jazz. Anderson also manages to include such contemporary critics as Samuel Floyd, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Paul Gilroy, and Nathaniel Mackey.

Ultimately, Deep River addresses contemporary jazz canonization and neoclassicism, the problem of a unilinear jazz historiography and the [End Page 169] views of Ellington enthusiasts Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray, whose "claims to inheritance" resemble Du Bois's use of the "sorrow songs" (268), a position that Anderson considers limiting. Although Deep River is somewhat of a top-down view of black musical culture in that...

pdf

Share