Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era

3. Syncope Fever: James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice

· 109 ·· CHAPTER 3 · Syncope Fever James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is commonly read as a modernist novel of black alienation.1 It chronicles the life of a black ragtime piano player and composer during the so-called nadir of race relations in America who tries and fails to achieve legitimacy for classical music based on black folk songs. “Excolored man” is light-skinned enough to “pass,” and occasionally does. But over the course of the novel—and particularly when playing ragtime—he is exploited by whites as a kind of human phonograph, in ways he doesn’t seem quite to acknowledge. After witnessing a lynching, he abandons his quest to achieve cultural legitimacy for black folk music, and, at the novel’s end, admits that he has decided to live the rest of his life more comfortably as white. In a further twist, the novel itself also “passed” at the outset. Via a canny publishing strategy, Johnson initially circulated the fictional Autobiography as real, releasing it anonymously on its first publication in 1912.2 The first-person voice of the novel is thus highly unreliable, mirroring the generic instability of the book itself, which is called an autobiography but is really a fiction. In a further twist, Johnson, a critic, poet, songwriter, and black civil rights leader as well as a novelist, reused several passages from it in the 1920s and 1930s in his own voice, in prefaces to anthologies of poetry and music and in his essays promoting black cultural achievements . In his 1926 preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, for instance , Johnson had this to say about the purpose of anthologizing black literary and cultural achievements: “A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.”3 He goes on to include ragtime as one of the artistic products that might 110 SYNCOPE FEVER “measure” black achievement and change white America’s mind about black inferiority: Ragtime has not only influenced American music, it has influenced American life; indeed, it has saturated American life. It has become the popular medium for our national expression musically. And who can say that it does not express the blare and jangle and the surge, too, of our national spirit? Anyone who doubts that there is a peculiar heel-tickling, smileprovoking , joy-awakening, response-compelling charm in Ragtime needs only to hear a skillful performer play the genuine article, needs only to listen to its bizarre harmonies, its audacious resolutions often consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, its intricate rhythms in which the accents fall in the most unexpected places but in which the fundamental beat is never lost in order to be convinced. I believe it has its place as well as the music which draws from us sighs and tears.4 From this historical distance, Johnson’s argument for ragtime’s legitimacy might seem unremarkable. Yet it is both a groundbreaking statement about the value of black cultural achievement and a subtle and complex piece of rhetoric. In declaring both the national expressiveness and the black originality of ragtime, Johnson was ahead of his time. Well into the 1920s, the genre was dismissed by many blacks as a highly commercialized form, closely associated with minstrelsy, with a shameful history of appropriation by whites.5 Further, Johnson’s use of the word peculiar to qualify the “heel-tickling, smile-provoking, joy-awakening, response-compelling charm” of the music is a fascinating rhetorical move. “Peculiar” suggests the distinctiveness of the “genuine” African American ragtime performer andperformance,asifJohnsonwantedtodrawacontrastbetweenthe“real thing” and the derivative popular dances, Broadway shows, college songs, racist sheet music, player piano rolls, and phonograph recordings based on ragtime songs.6 But “peculiar” also implies the oddity or strangeness of this genuine article wherever it is heard—the difficulty of ever finding its “place” or of restoring it to the group of people to whom it truly belongs. Finally, of course, “peculiar” evokes the antebellum South’s “peculiar institution ” of slavery. By evoking ragtime’s “peculiar” charm, Johnson suggests SYNCOPE FEVER 111 that what is distinctive about the music is its ability to slip...