The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967 by Amy Absher (review)

Historians have examined twentieth-century African American music from many angles, from the social and cultural to the artistic and commercial. In The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967, Amy Absher takes a somewhat different approach. In addition to offering social and cultural perspectives, she also examines Chicago's African American music community from the labor viewpoint.

Absher crafts an academically rigorous but eminently readable book about how African American musicians strived to make a living from their art in one of the most segregated cities in America—Chicago—where an invisible but palpable color line determined where you lived, where you shopped, where you took your leisure and, in the case of popular and classical musicians, where you worked. Arguing that "musician radicalism was not born in the 1960s," Absher illustrates how Chicago's African American music community battled against segregation as early as the 1920s, when the only opportunities available for them were in Chicago's South Side club trade.

Many of the city's first generation of jazz and blues musicians migrated from the South during the prewar period to escape Jim Crow laws, constant threats of racially motivated violence, and crushing poverty. What they found in Chicago were less explicit but equally insidious forms of discrimination. On top of that, the newcomers faced arrogance from some Old Settlers, blacks who were born in Chicago or moved there prior to the Great Migration. The Old Settlers viewed the migrants' vernacular music as embarrassing reminders of vaudeville parodies of black folk music. For them, the best avenue for upward mobility was assimilation, not separation, and the musical soundtrack to assimilation was Western European classical music. Nevertheless, racism impacted old and new settlers alike, so Local 208 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) was created to counteract the discriminatory actions of the city's white Local 10. The assimilationist Old Settlers became 208's first and longstanding leaders.

The true merit of Absher's book is its illustration of how the very actions designed to protect African American musicians from segregation sometimes worked against their ability to make a living wage; other times, the hand they were dealt by the majority turned into a winning hand. An example of the latter was when Local 208 members were denied opportunities to perform in the silk stocking nightclubs of the downtown area and relegated to the South Side. Before the Great Depression, the South Side had the most jumping nightlife for black and white patrons, and offered the most promising paydays for black musicians. Of the former, wages and benefits were not nearly as beneficial for Local 208 members as for their Local 10 brethren.

Absher explains how, ultimately, the AFM ground game to secure greater exposure for black artists was no match for independently-owned record businesses, jukebox operators, and radio disc jockeys. The new vehicles for disseminating music disregarded color lines and opened up new opportunities for African American musicians, even if the musicians did not profit at the same financial level as did the record companies, jukebox operators, and radio stations.

The book concludes with a page-turning narrative about how Local 208, long the defender of African American musicians, became such a liability by the 1960s that its younger members fought to reintegrate into Local 10. The internecine battle between Local 208 leaders and their members brought to a head the decades-long struggle for control of one's own artistic destiny, as well as the notion of what it meant to be race conscious.

Although Absher discusses the challenges that black classical artists faced, her lens is focused on jazz, swing, blues, and rhythm and blues musicians. She barely mentions sacred artists, likely because for most of the time period she examines, the primary audience for sacred music was in the African American church and off the...