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  • Literary Ethnomusicology and the Soundscape of Jean Toomer’s Cane
  • Daniel Barlow (bio)

Montage renders inoperative any simple opposition of totality to singularity. It makes you linger in the cut between them, a generative space that fills and erases itself. That space is, is the site of, ensemble: the improvisation of singularity and totality and through their opposition. For now that space will manifest itself somewhere between the first lines of tragedy and the last lines of elegy.

—Fred Moten (89)

Canefield vespers, trees caroling slavery, and pines shouting to Jesus; songs like flames, whispering pines, and whinnying trees; flesh-notes, throbbing walls, gasping echoes, and singing streets; lullaby chants, land-heaving songs, and broken melodies; soul sounds, “Deep River,” and a promise-song, sung by a young narrator with a strange quiver in his voice: these are elements of the soundscape in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), a work reconsidered here as literary ethnomusicology.

In 1933, folklorists John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax traveled through Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to collect folk songs with a Dictaphone sound recorder and later a portable disc recording machine. In 1941, in Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads, the Lomaxes would contrast the advantages of sound recording technology with the disadvantages of fieldwork writing:

The needle writes on the disc with tireless accuracy the subtle inflections, the melodies, the pauses that comprise the emotional meaning of speech, spoken and sung. In this way folklore can truly be recorded. A piece of folklore is a living, growing, and changing thing, and a folk song printed, words and tune, only symbolizes in a very static fashion a myriad-voiced reality of individual songs. The collector with pen and notebook can capture only the outline of one song, while the recorder, having created an atmosphere of easy sociability, confines the living song, without distortion and in its fluid entirety, on a disc.

(xxvi, emphasis added)

Twelve years prior to that initial Lomax project, in 1921, Toomer had accepted a position as substitute principal at the all-black Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. He went South by train to Sparta, Georgia, to escape his “caught [End Page 192] and trapped” position as a struggling writer (Toomer qtd. in Kerman and Eldridge 75). Unlike the Lomaxes, Toomer brought with him no Dictaphone, but after experiencing African American spiritual music firsthand, he was driven to record metaphorically the folk songs of Southern black Americans. Toomer said later that this sojourn in Georgia was the first time he had ever heard African American folk songs and spirituals. He found them “rich and sad and joyous and beautiful,” but he “learned that the Negroes of the town objected to them. They called [the songs] ‘shouting.’ [...] So, [he] realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. [...] Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end” (“Autobiographical” 142).

Most are familiar with this moment in Toomer’s biography—his concern for the spirituals and his thinking of Cane as a swan song, as well as the fact that he converted his aural experiences into scribal text and combined that musical text with several previously written works to comprise Cane. These developments have been accounted for in the work of critics such as Paul Allen Anderson (65–73), Houston A. Baker, Jr. (11–44, 100–10), Barbara E. Bowen, and Karen Jackson Ford, who have emphasized some of Cane’s musical aspects. Baker’s work is especially attentive to the centrality of song and sound in Cane: “The implicit goal of the agonized consciousness that informs Toomer’s book [...] is to capture the sound of a racial soul and convert it into an expressive product equivalent in beauty and force to Afro-American folk songs, or ecstatic religious performances” (101, emphasis added). Beyond the mere observation of Cane’s musical presence and folkloric conservationism, though, Baker argues for its numinousness—its spiritual outreach: “‘To trance,’ as an active behavior, is to make contact with the numinous element of the universe, and in Cane that element is coded as the history of the Afro-American soul in its tortuous striving to convert a possessed...

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