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

  • Riots, Rituals, and Ceremonials:The Multifunctionality of Rhythm and Blues and Soul as Generational Music in David Henderson’s Early Poetry
  • Jean-Philippe Marcoux (bio)

The poets who converged to form the Umbra group at the beginning of the 1960s in New York City’s Lower East Side combined the activist spirit of groups like On Guard for Freedom and the Organization for Young Men with the artistic preoccupations of avant-garde praxes. Tom Dent claims that investing their writing with “[their] history and … folk experience” to articulate an “independent artistic vision” (qtd. in Thomas, “Need” 335), Umbra writers affirmed a form of cultural nationalism that correlated with the political struggles for social equality. In many ways, black music was the encyclopedic cultural memory that contained the “history and folk experience” Umbra members sought to refashion for political and aesthetic purposes. Music has historically represented the medium through which African Americans have not only upheld their humanity in the face of constant dehumanization and demonization but also expressed and performed their history. In that sense, music performed the dual role of experiential reservoir and archive of the black struggle in a racist world.

It is not surprising that in the 1960s, in the context of the reevaluation of black historical consciousness and black identity, Umbra writers sought to define a black aesthetic grounded in vernacular culture and cultural memory in a way that would reflect the “musical activism” (Porter 173) artists often heard in the music, more precisely in jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul, what Amiri Baraka called “The New Black Music.” On the one hand, Max Roach’s album We Insist! Freedom Now Suites (1960) and Charles Mingus’s works during the decade were considered “synoptic work[s] of black history” (Saul 93) that affirmed the need for blacks to reclaim their historical memory and their cultural consciousness, which, in turn, inspired “collective action for social change” (Ongiri 124).1 On the other hand, Umbra’s Archie Shepp released the militant Fire Music (1965), which echoed the contestation and militant spirit of black nationalists. The soul and rhythm and blues of James Brown’s “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) or The [End Page 27] Impressions’ “People Get Ready” (1965) spoke to and of the core values of pride and solidarity that black consciousness movements promoted in the streets. In essence, the music seemed to ventriloquize the political and cultural agendas of black nationalists by affirming black history and cultural memory; the music was perceived as a ritualized enactment of the black experience.

As part of a generation that sought to reaffirm and reinvest history and culture in their art, the Umbra poets found guidance in the words of encouragement from Langston Hughes, whose work theorizes how black music is both an analogue to and a rescripting of the black experience.2 More specifically, they drew inspiration from Hughes’s poem “Ask Your Mama” (1961), which represents one “synoptic work of black history” (Saul 93) that he scores using the vast repertoire of black vernacular music.3 According to Onwuchekwa Jemie, black music is, for Hughes, “a paradigm for the black experience” (Langston 12) and he “wanted to record and interpret the lives of the common black folk, their thoughts and habits and dreams, their struggle for political freedom and economic well-being.” To do so, Hughes turned to music as a recorder of black life (1). The Umbra poets responded in their work to the postulation of music as paradigmatic archive by actualizing the blues and jazz ethos underscoring Hughes’s poetry.

Concerned with Hughes’s influence and vernacular poetics, James Smethurst writes that “Following … the lead of Langston Hughes, a continuum of African American expressive culture, particularly music, also becomes an alternative history” for poets of the New Black Poetry (Black 82).4 In its constant dialogue between past and present and Africa / Black America, “Ask Your Mama” demonstrates the centrality of the black cultural memory for the survival and affirmation of Blackness through the idiomatic and ideological expressions of vernacular sound. Dent observes that Umbra poets used the model of Hughes’s “Ask Your Mama” to conceptualize “a kind of...

pdf

Share