Authentic Imitation: Modernist Anthologies and the Pedagogy of Folk Culture

In the introductions to his companion anthologies The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925-26), James Weldon Johnson succinctly outlines the two central justifications for his project. One is the active role of the spirituals in the development of a self-conscious black American art: "This reawakening of the Negro to the value and beauty of the Spirituals was the beginning of an entirely new phase of race consciousness. It marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze upon his own cultural resources" (1:49). The other is directed at white Americans, who, he says, have been "awakened" by the spirituals "to the truth that the Negro is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature" (2:19). The two audiences share a common ignorance, until recently, of the black American cultural heritage—in Johnson's figure of speech, they have been asleep to it, and the valuation of this heritage can begin as soon as their eyes and ears are opened. In other words, aesthetic education merely involves showing his readers what has been there all along; white Americans will then recognize the full humanity of black Americans by acknowledging them as fully capable of creating culture, while black Americans can start putting these "cultural resources" to use.

Johnson's hopes were common among anthologists of black folk music in the 1920s and '30s, who, as mediators between folk singers and an urban readership, also confronted a number of pressing questions as to how, exactly, this "awakening" would occur. Was cultural recognition simply a matter of repeated exposure, or did certain authentic performance conditions have to be met in order for unfamiliar readers or listeners to fully and accurately appreciate the material? And once black Americans recognized the cultural resources at their disposal, how could they integrate and/or sublimate them into new art forms? The folk song anthology occupies a special position in this debate because contemporary intellectual and social theorists saw both of its defining terms—folk song and anthology—as particularly efficacious forms of conveying cultural and social meaning. While these decades saw a rise in academic and popular interest in the American folk more generally, folk anthologies served as a privileged and representative point of access to folk culture, particularly because of the belief that performing folk songs oneself could relay experience quickly and deeply, in a way that merely hearing or reading them could not.¹ Anthologies like Johnson's that enabled readers to sing along with folk music would immediately evoke pride in their cultural heritage for black readers, while heightening feelings of cross-cultural identification for white readers. This empathy would then, in turn, lead to greater social and political equality.²

The major conceptual hurdle for these anthologists was that such performance practice was fundamentally imitative, a quality that had been vilified in the aesthetic realm from two directions. Imitation was an integral part of racist accusations that black American culture produced nothing but poor takeoffs on white forms, and, more generally, that people of African descent were an inherently imitative race. Proponents of black folk music therefore had to defend it from these charges while promoting a more salutary kind of imitation, one that would lead to understanding rather than mockery. To compound this problem, high modernist writers and critics such as Pound and Eliot had inveighed against imitation as the recourse of second-rate hacks who could recognize genius when they saw it, but not produce it themselves.³ The anthology's democratic impulse to open up new aesthetic possibilities for all its readers was fundamentally opposed to Eliot's assertion that a cultural heritage should be "obtain[ed] by great labour," rather than easily reproduced in one's own living room. Folk song anthologists had to reclaim imitation as a serious and potentially productive force, both aesthetically and politically, for their work to have value as more than displays of quaint curiosities.

The political goal of such...