How a White Supremacist Became Famous for His Black Music: John Powell and Rhapsodie nègre (1918)

On May 12, 1922, American composer John Powell received a death threat from the Ku Klux Klan. He had dissolved the organization’s Richmond, Virginia, branch. Like many elite white men, Powell thought the Klan’s tactics were too violent and its handling of money deceptive.¹ He created the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America (ASCOA) to take the place of the KKK and tried to attract the KKK’s entire membership with the promise to preserve “the supremacy of the white race in the United States of America, without racial prejudice or hatred.”² The ASCOA enacted its racism not through vigilante violence but through legislation. Powell worked with Earnest Sevier Cox, author of White America (1922), to draft the Racial Integrity Act, which required Virginia citizens to register their race according to the “one-drop” rule. It passed in 1924. Powell then hired Walter Plecker, the registrar of the newly formed Bureau of Vital Statistics, to harass African Americans trying to pass as white. Plecker sent letters threatening to take legal action, dissolve marriages, and expel children from school. Famous eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920), praised Plecker for “smoking out the colored gentlemen in the white woodpile.”³

Powell was not always a politically active white supremacist, and in 1918, just four years prior to creating the ASCOA, he launched an international career touring what would become his most famous work: Rhapsodie nègre, a piece based on ragtime, early jazz, and spirituals. To be sure, white composers of black music in this era were never patron saints of black freedom, but nor were they radical activists working doggedly to maintain segregation.⁴ The Rhapsodie was not his first composition that drew on approximations of what he perceived to be black music, but it marked an interesting and significant shift in his compositional approach. As a concert pianist, Powell had already established an international reputation with the piano works Sonata Virginiaesque (1906), which featured depictions of southern plantation life, “Negro Elegy” in In the South (1906), and “Banjo-Picker” in At the Fair (1907). In the wake of what Beth Levy calls “the Dvořák debates,” Powell sought to create a concert music distinct from Europe by relying on music native to the United States.⁵

Rhapsodie nègre signaled a dramatic departure from Powell’s bucolic, Lost Cause depictions of black culture and his tonal and formal conservatism. Written only one year after the first commercial recording using the word “jazz,” the single-movement programmatic work negotiated the music industry’s transition between ragtime and early jazz and fore-shadowed the symphonic jazz vogue. It was also his most experimental composition; he adopted the language of primitivist modernism to depict black people as premodern savages. Finding “the music of oppressed people fascinating,” Powell composed the piece to represent the “primitive” and “childlike” qualities of “the Negro.”⁶ In the work’s extensive program notes, he detailed how its five themes represented what he believed to be the animalistic urges of black people. Every theme begins as a clear statement but then fragments into a chaotic soundscape to portray the commonly held belief among white Americans that black Americans were culturally regressive.

Five years after completing the Rhapsodie (and one year after erecting the ASCOA), Powell publicly rejected the “Negro school” of composition and began studying and writing music based on Anglo-Saxon folk culture exclusively.⁷ His political campaign was cultural. To preserve “the supremacy of the white race” he believed he must also preserve white culture and challenge the legitimacy of black culture. He worked tirelessly until his death in 1963 doing so. In a 1923 essay entitled “Music and the Nation,” Powell asserted that black folk songs—namely, the spirituals (which he had used in his past compositions)—were really the “compositions of white men” that had been stolen from nineteenth-century white Protestant camp meetings.⁸ The part of black music that is “purely African” is “meagre and monotonous,” he...