Civil Rights Music
Page 20
Just as the emergence of ragtime and jazz can be linked to larger patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and automation in the first quarter of the twentieth century, jump blues’ development can be traced to a series of transformations taking place in mid-twentieth century American music, culture, politics, economics, and society. As a consequence of the Great Depression (1929–1939) and the beginning of World War II in 1939, by the early 1940s the large big bands of the 1930s had to be downsized to small combos. African Americans in the 1940s, like most other Americans in the 1940s, continued to storm dance halls and watering holes on week nights and especially on weekends, and they expected the small combos to keep the music just as “hot” and “jumpin’” as the big bands of the previous decade. In short, they wanted their music lively, loud, and danceable. This caused many of the combos to place greater emphasis on honking saxophonists and fiery, flamboyant, and seemingly frenzy-filled vocalists who could be heard over the rambunctious rhythms and hollering horn riffs (e.g., Big Maybelle, Big Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Esquerita, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, LaVern Baker, Roy Brown, Varetta Dillard and, of course, Wynonie Harris). As a consequence of the honking saxophonists and shouting singers, early rhythm & blues musicians have been aptly characterized as “honkers and shouters.”
In his brilliant book, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm & Blues (1978), Arnold Shaw explained that “[a]n expressiveness as extreme as the honking-falling down syndrome” popular among early rhythm & blues saxophonists was “unquestionably a social as well as a musical phenomenon” (171). In essence, he understood it to be an “expression of a threefold separation: from the sound of Western music; from white popular song; and from the Negro middle-class to whom
R&B was anathema.” Ultimately, Shaw concluded, “the syndrome was a conscious or unconscious projection of the post-war segregation of black people, an abysmal expression of the separateness of the black ghettos.” In fact, he went further, the “post-war world was one that Negroes viewed with a mixture of disgust and frustration. Not only were they isolated from the mainstream of society, they not infrequently suffered white violence” (171).[17]
The violence that African Americans endured during and after World War II was both physical and psychological, and early rhythm & blues reflected the torture and daily turmoil they experienced. Jump blues and its rhythm & blues offspring represented that bubbling stream of African American music during the inter-war years that had been hailed as “city blues” and viewed as another step in the evolution of the urbanization of African American music. Jump blues and its early rhythm & blues offspring also, however uncomfortably, captured and conveyed a great deal about the mid-twentieth century America it emerged in and, more tellingly, the African Americans who invented it, performed it, and lovingly listened to and identified with it. Although most African American historians have generally agreed that the Civil Rights Movement essentially began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, it is extremely important to understand the 15 year period between 1939 and 1954—which is to say, from the beginning of World War II to the Brown decision—that undeniably laid the social, political, cultural, and musical foundation for what can be considered the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement between 1954 and 1965.
The Great Depression and World War II fundamentally changed the racial, cultural, social, and political consciousness of African Americans, just as they had irrevocably altered American society as a whole. A decade of economic depression further devastated an already impoverished and socially segregated people, coupled with the trials and tribulations of valiantly serving in a racially segregated military that was willing to fight for freedom abroad but not for freedom in the interests of African Americans at home, created a unique and perplexing historical moment. With America’s preparation to join World War II, between 1939 and 1940 the U.S. economy was finally lifted out of the depths of the Depression.
However, when the United States went back to business it rebuilt its military just as it was prior to the Great Depression. Which is to say, the U.S. military continued its longstanding policy of segregation and other Jim Crow practices of racial discrimination and exclusion. Teams of unemployed white workers streamed into shipyards, aircraft factories, and other sites of war production, while the throngs of destitute and jobless African Americans were left standing at factory entrances day after dismal day. When African Americans were finally hired, no matter which jobs their education or hard-won skills qualified them for, they were usually quarantined to the most demeaning custodial positions.[18]
For the most part, African Americans did not fare any better when they sought employment in government jobs and government-funded training programs. For instance, black applicants were regularly rejected for government-funded training programs because training them was thought to be pointless in light of their low prospects for finding skilled work. It was a callous catch-22 that eventually saw the United States Employment Service (USES) fill “whites-only” requests for defense industry workers. The U.S. military accepted African American men in their proportion to the population, about 11 percent at the time, but placed them in segregated units and assigned them to degrading service duties. More specifically, the Navy limited African American servicemen to menial positions, while the Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps outright refused to accept them altogether.
In light of post-Great Depression segregation, in the larger society and in the military, the Pittsburgh Courier called for a “Double V” campaign. Eventually adopted as a battle cry among African Americans in the early 1940s, “Double V” stood for victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Embracing the “Double V” mentality, during World War II African Americans’ simultaneous efforts to fight fascism and racism transformed the worldviews of soldiers and civilians alike, and led to the further development of African American civil rights efforts and organizations. A groundswell of protests removed the muzzle that had been on their mouths, and in the 1940s African Americans found the voices they had seemingly lost during the Depression years.[19]
A major catalyst for the change in African Americans’ collective consciousness, A. Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement called on African Americans to organize their protests and direct them at the national government. Indicating that he had ten thousand African Americans prepared to march on the nation’s capital, Randolph defiantly declared the movement’s motto: “We loyal Negro American citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country.” Throughout the spring and summer months of 1941, Randolph’s March on Washington Movement blossomed into the largest mass movement of African Americans since Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association during its New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance heyday in the 1920s.[20]
The 1940s March on Washington Movement demanded that President Roosevelt issue an order forbidding companies with government contracts from practicing racial discrimination. Randolph pushed for the complete elimination of race-based exclusion from defense training programs and also insisted that the USES provide work without regard to race. In short, Randolph wanted the president to abolish segregation in the armed forces.
The 1940s March on Washington Movement was a wide-ranging and wide-reaching movement, and its powerful appeal garnered the support of many African Americans who had never participated in social organization and political activism. Increasing the pressure on the president, Randolph let be known that as many as 50,000 African Americans had committed to march on Washington. Roosevelt, deeply concerned that the March on Washington would seriously undermine America’s efforts to appear democratic before the world and give fodder to the Nazi fascists the U.S. claimed to be the opposite of, initially offered a set of superficial changes to appease African Americans. The March on Washington Movement would have none of it and firmly stood its ground. Consequently, they raised the stakes by enlisting more than 100,000 African Americans to march on Washington.
By the close of June in 1941, Roosevelt raised the white flag, offered an olive branch, and had his aides draft Executive Order 8802, effectively prompting Randolph to call off the march.
Even if only on a superficial or symbolic level, Roosevelt’s order signaled an important change in African Americans’ relationship with the government and, likewise, the government’s relationship with African Americans. Perhaps the most meaningful lines of Executive Order 8802 read in part:
WHEREAS there is evidence that available and needed workers have been barred from employment in industries engaged in defense production solely because of considerations of race, creed, color, or national origin, to the detriment of workers’ morale and of national unity:
NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the statutes, and as a prerequisite to the successful conduct of our national defense production effort, I do hereby reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and I do hereby declare that it is the duty of employers and of labor organizations, in furtherance of said policy and of this order, to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin. (1)[21]
Although it was the first major blow to racial discrimination since Reconstruction, Executive Order 8802 was not the twentieth century’s Emancipation Proclamation. Consequently, African American excitement over the order quickly faded when many industries, particularly those in the South, evaded the order’s clear intent and almost exclusively engaged in token hiring. As they would repeatedly witness throughout the turbulent decades to come, in the 1940s African Americans learned a hard lesson that seems to have been passed down to the members of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement: the U.S. government’s high-sounding and hyperbole-filled articulations of anti-discrimination principles and the establishment of civil rights commissions and committees did not necessarily lead to the eradication of racial inequalities. Hence, words without deeds are as useless as fish without water.
Taken on its own terms or, better yet, placed within the context of African American history, culture, and struggle, black popular music—from the spirituals and the blues through to rap and neo-soul—can be seen as a form of sonic protest that is inextricable from the more conventional socio-political protest of black popular movements. As Shaw contended above, early rhythm & blues was “unquestionably a social as well as a musical phenomenon.” Therefore, it is important not to negate the interconnections between black popular music and black popular movements.
Without in any way downplaying the ways in which gospel, blues, folk, and jazz served as soundtracks for the Civil Rights Movement, it is important to comprehend how early rhythm & blues was undeniably the most popular and socially salient soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, even though most people have a tendency to deprecate and diminish its connections to, and significance for the movement. Part of the backlash against early rhythm & blues had to do with, not only its “heavy” rhythms and “hard-driving” backbeats, but also its raw expressiveness and “hard life” lyrical content that, in the most unprecedented manner imaginable, dealt openly with love, lust, loss, poverty, delinquency, partying, drinking, city life, and fast cars. Similar to the rock & roll, soul, and funk that built on the sonic breakthroughs and aural innovations of classic rhythm & blues, it is important to observe that long before rhythm & blues rocked and rolled onto the scene classic blues and classic jazz offered countless songs that brashly, and frequently with brutal honesty, dealt with love, lust, loss, poverty, delinquency, partying, drinking, city life, and fast cars. This should be held in mind as we continue to critically explore the relationship between early rhythm & blues and the Civil Rights Movement.
African American music, from the spirituals and the blues through to rap and neo-soul, seems to revolve around spirituality and sexuality, folk philosophy and new technology. To reiterate, black popular music often serves as a metaphor and medium of expression for black life, culture, and struggle. Consequently, the major issues and ills at any given moment in African America most often find their way into black popular music in particular, and black popular culture in general. At its core, black popular culture has always been a battlefield where a tug-of-war between black conservatives and black radicals, between black traditionalists and black modernists have consistently vied to have their respective views and values accepted as the dominant expression of the African American experience.
In many ways, the emergence of rhythm & blues in mid-twentieth century America is the musical and cultural culmination of African Americans’ experiences from enslavement through to the 1941 March on Washington Movement, and it is important to note that the March on Washington Movement actually continued to rally and call for nonviolent civil disobedience long after World War II ended in 1945. Emphasizing the dialectic of tradition and innovation that is at the heart of early rhythm & blues—and, truth be told, all major forms of black popular music—in his classic Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It (1963), Amiri Baraka insightfully asserted:
There was a kind of frenzy and extra-local vulgarity to rhythm & blues that had never been present in older blues forms. Suddenly it was as if a great deal of the Euro-American humanist façade Afro-American music had taken on had been washed away by the war. Rhythm & blues singers literally had to shout to be heard above the clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections. And somehow the louder the instrumental accompaniment and the more harshly screamed the singing, the more expressive the music was. Blues had always been a vocal music, and it must be said that the instrumental accompaniment for rhythm & blues singers was still very much in the vocal tradition, but now the human voice itself had to struggle, to scream, to be heard. (171–172)
Taking the music as a metaphor for the Civil Rights Movement and African Americans’ position in U.S. society between 1945 and 1965, it is difficult not to conclude that early rhythm & blues mirrored the movement and expressed African Americans’ thoughts and feelings about post-World War II segregation, racial discrimination, and ongoing economic exploitation. One of the reasons early rhythm & blues expressed “a kind of frenzy and extra-local vulgarity . . . that had never been present in older blues forms” is probably because at the beginning of the post-war period African Americans honestly believed that by helping to topple German fascism they would also be contributing to the eradication of American racism. Nothing could have been further from the truth, and U.S. history during this period reveals America’s reluctance and outright refusal to come to terms with the fact that it had been practicing its own form of fascism against African Americans for several centuries. What else is “fascism” if it is not in part, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, the “belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group,” and “a contempt for democracy” or, at the least, a contempt for extending democracy to all citizens without regard to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation? To put it another way, there is a sense in which early rhythm & blues can be seen as sonic protest against American apartheid and America’s “whites-only” democracy, which basically reduced the citizenry to white haves and non-white have-nots.
Listening to early rhythm & blues, “it was as if a great deal of the Euro-American humanist façade Afro-American music had taken on had been washed away by the war,” and the music increasingly reflected African Americans’ heightened cultural consciousness and new radical spirit (à la the 1940s March on Washington Movement). Almost as if directly responding to the whitewashing of jazz in the 1930s and early 1940s, especially under the guises of big band and “sweet” swing jazz, early rhythm & blues unrepentantly returned to its roots in the blues and advanced a new, amplified and electrified fo
rm of the blues. Seeming to perfectly mirror the industrialization and urbanization taking place in the larger society, mid-twentieth century blues—which is to say, first, jump blues and later rhythm & blues—emerged within a segregated world that was frequently lawless, loud, harsh, and often either erased or silenced authentic representations and interpretations of African American life and culture. Hence, Baraka observed, early rhythm & blues singers “literally had to shout to be heard above the clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections. And somehow the louder the instrumental accompaniment and the more harshly screamed the singing, the more expressive the music was.”
Early rhythm & blues was the music or, rather, the searing sounds of a people in search of their human, civil, and voting rights in the concrete jungles of segregated U.S. cities. The “clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections” could be said to metaphorically represent the impact of industrialization and the automation of factory work on African American life and culture. Moreover, the “screamed . . . singing” can be taken as a defiant affirmation of African Americans’ humanity and their dire need to be heard in the face of government-sanctioned segregation, Jim Crow laws, and myriad other forms of anti-black racism.
If, indeed, early rhythm & blues sounds harsh to our ears today, then we are only conceding how ingeniously it captured and conveyed African Americans’ struggle for human recognition and civil rights between 1945 and 1965. If the “clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections” sound slightly off-kilter and conflict with our understanding of what constitutes “good music” (even “good black music”), then perhaps that is because early rhythm & blues musicians created their music in the context of an increasingly urban and industrial segregated society, with all of the “clanging” and “churning” such a society entails. Early rhythm & blues represented something raw and real, something working-class and poor black people could feel and know that it was created by one of their own specifically with them in mind. Hence, “somehow the louder the instrumental accompaniment and the more harshly screamed the singing, the more expressive the music was.” Indeed, the African Americans who created early rhythm & blues and organized the Civil Rights Movement developed new music and new politics to express themselves—and, that is to say, to express themselves not as the larger society sanctioned and woefully wanted them to, but as they really were, in their full and indignant ugly beauty as Thelonious Monk put it on his classic album Underground in 1968.