Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  Indeed, most doo-wop songs centered on love, but we should bear in mind that African Americans composing and beautifully singing love songs in a racially segregated post-war world, where less than a century prior it was basically forbidden for African Americans to have families and against the law for African Americans to enter into matrimony, was indeed political, if not decidedly defiant. This may also explain why rhythm & blues, soul, and neo-soul are primarily perceived as love-centered musics. In other words, black love in a white dominated world is always already political and an act of undaunted defiance, because by loving each other African Americans not only acknowledge the humanity and beauty of their special loved ones, but they also defy the centuries of “civilized” and “scientific” discourse that has habitually dehumanized them and told them that they are not really and truly part of the human species—and not really and truly American citizens.

  The 1950s were the peak years for youthful a cappella group harmony sounds. The new music poured out of city parks and school gyms, and it could also be heard on street corners and the stoops of overcrowded low-income apartment buildings in the inner-cities. Similar to rapping today, back then singing was a diversion from the hard lives and harsh conditions most African American youth faced in the ghetto. Although the African American middle-class made small but steady progress in the 1950s, the African American masses, who were primarily poor and working-class folk, experienced very little change in their day to day lives. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why these youths viewed a hit record and a successful career as a singer as a viable way to get out of the ghetto.

  Boldly building on the models and innovations of the pioneering inter-war vocal groups, throngs of African American teenagers (initially known as “street corner” groups) developed post-war harmony styles that directly corresponded with their musical tastes, cultural sensibilities, social values, political views, and lives as poor and working-class youth. Tellingly, the songs they sang were, however juvenile to their critics (and parents), sonic expressions of their aspirations and frustrations, their dreams and nightmares. More than any previous group of African American youths, the doo-woppers of the 1950s were able to draw from two parallel but distinct African American singing traditions.

  The first tradition, as alluded to above, grew out of the spirituals and gospel, and always seemed to privilege more of a soulful “church sound” regardless of the thematic content of the song. The second tradition, which was also made mention of above, grew out of the blues and its more secular and sensual sounding offspring, such as jazz and jump blues. The more church-sounding music appealed to the masses of African Americans, who had been raised on the gospel vocal aesthetic, where—when it could be whitened and lightened and made to crossover—the more secular and sensual-sounding music appealed to whites, who eventually began to accept a vanilla version of black popular music within the white popular music marketplace.

  Doo-wop was not the first form of black popular music to “crossover” to white audiences, both the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots crossed the color-line in the 1930s and 1940s. However, it was the first form of black popular music to spawn widespread white youth imitation of black popular music, especially as it evolved into rock & roll. In keeping with the sonic segregation of the music industry in mid-twentieth century America, which obviously mirrored the social segregation of mid-twentieth century America, there were gospel-sounding doo-wop songs for blacks and usually a separate set of often-placid pop-sounding doo-wop songs for whites. A distinction between the more rhythm & blues-based doo-wop and the more or less white pop-sounding doo-wop—and black popular music in general—began to be embraced by fans and critics. For instance, in their classic essay, “The Doo-Wah Sound: Black Pop Groups of the 1950s” (1975), music critics Mike Redmond and Marv Goldberg offered an insightful analysis of the distinct differences between 1950s pop and rhythm & blues, essentially characterizing pop as:

  the group singing the entire song in unison, or group members singing the chorus or phrase lines behind the lead. Or, in a variation, the group members singing a smooth, almost subdued blend of harmony without distinctive tenor to bass parts. In this format, the group provides a showcase for the lead and remains unobtrusively in the background. The material is presented in a cool—almost detached manner, and the subject matter is usually non-controversial in nature avoiding such topics as drinking, crime and associated societal problems, and overt sexuality. (22–23)

  When Redmond and Goldberg wrote about 1950s pop artists avoiding singing about certain illicit or impolite topics, it is important for us to go back to Levine’s emphasis on the extra-musical meanings inherent in black song “in the face of the sanctions of the white majority.” As was witnessed with gospel and freedom singers, black pop, jump blues, and rhythm & blues artists during the Civil Rights Movement were in many ways lyrically muzzled and muted and, therefore, put into play myriad forms of musical protest that non-verbally or, rather, non-lyrically conveyed dissent and, however subtly, a commitment to civil rights and social justice. Clearly the pop music of the twenty-first century, including commercial or pop rap, echoes and continues to embrace much of the pop music formula of the 1950s, with the one important exception being that instead of “avoiding such topics as drinking, crime and associated societal problems, and overt sexuality,” everything except social problems regularly turns up in contemporary pop music, especially sexuality. In other words, even though it has evolved a great deal over the last sixty years to include topics such as drug use, drinking, crime, and sexuality, the raising of serious social and political problems, at least in terms of contemporary black popular music, has been left to conscious, political, message, underground and alternative rappers, neo-soul singers, or spoken-word artists—all of whom, in one way or another, seem to, however incongruously, correspond with Redmond and Goldberg’s definition of 1950s rhythm & blues. They insightful explained:

  the R&B style employs a prominent, often intricate, background harmony pattern with distinguishable tenor and bass parts. The material is presented with an emotionally-charged reading reflecting the influence of gospel and blues music. The lyrical content of R&B songs is usually more representative of black cultural patterns of the period. Generally there are more variations in presentation and a greater tendency toward experimentation in R&B music—as opposed to the more stylized pop form. (23–24)

  The first thing we might observe is that classic rhythm & blues, in contrast to much of the contemporary music put out under the “rhythm & blues” moniker, had “more variations in presentation and a greater tendency toward experimentation.” Obviously when one listens to, and really hears Atlantic, Chess, King, Motown, and Stax rhythm & blues from the 1950s and 1960s, what one is really listening to are the sounds of experimentation: the infectious sounds of Ray Charles synthesizing gospel, jazz, jump blues, and country & western; Etta James melding barrelhouse blues, jazz, and pop; James Brown masterminding his distinct mix of gospel, blues, jazz, and jump blues; Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, the Four Tops, Mary Wells, and Marvin Gaye smoothing out the rough edges of early rhythm & blues; and Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, and Rufus Thomas fusing the grit of gospel, the bad luck tales of the blues, the jive of jump blues, and the earthiness of early rhythm & blues. In the aftermath of the “sweet soul” and disco of the 1970s, with the shift toward the digitization of black popular music in the 1980s rhythm & blues, almost as a rule, suffered from over-production. Its polished and super-slick sound frequently watered the music down (not to mention the messages in the music), making it sound more like mainstream pop, which was going through its own version of the post-disco digital revolution as well.

  In The Hip Hop Movement, I argued that it was left to rap and neo-soul to present contemporary black popular music “with an emotionally-charged reading reflecting the influence of gospel and blues music,
” as well as the gutsy gospel aesthetic of classic rhythm & blues. Not only do rap and neo-soul represent a recommitment to the experimentalism that marked the best rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, funk, and disco, their respective lyrical content has been consistently “more representative of black cultural patterns of the [contemporary] period.” As I often remind my roughly 18 to 25 year-old undergraduate students, to really understand rap and neo-soul, and the wider Hip Hop Movement they sonically represent, it is important to comprehend classic gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll as “representative of black cultural patterns of the period” in African American history, culture, and struggle between 1945 and 1965. Which is also to say, during the immediate post-war years and the Civil Rights Movement era.

  The entangled racial and commercial agendas of the recording and radio industries, as well as “mature,” middle-class, and mainstream white America’s response to the precipitous widespread popularity of African American and African American-derived musics, greatly influenced the evolution of rhythm & blues between 1954 and 1965. Along with that, there were concomitant currents internal to the African American community that were also equally influential on rhythm & blues’ evolution between 1954 and 1965. Undoubtedly, the evolution of African American male vocal harmony group singing during the 1950s demonstrated that significant social, cultural, and demographic changes had converged to create unprecedented African American acceptance of a lighter and sweeter style of rhythm & blues (à la Nat King Cole, Charles Brown, Billy Eckstine, and the Four Toppers/Five Red Caps) that was more ballad-focused than previous forms of early rhythm & blues. Consequently, long before the recording industry took up a similar strategy in its efforts to reach the wallets of a wider white audience, African Americans’ musical tastes favored a softer, slower, ballad-based form of rhythm & blues. In fact, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, these lighter and sweeter lyrical and musical stylings had periodically enabled a couple of the more sentimental sounding African American harmonizers—classic groups such as the Orioles (“It’s Too Soon to Know”), the Ravens (“Count Every Star”), the Five Keys (“The Glory of Love”), the Vocaleers (“Be True”), and the Harp-Tones (“Sunday Kind of Love”)—to cross the color-line and integrate the white pop charts.

  By the middle of the 1950s the same sentimental and relatively safe-sounding characteristics that put African American harmony groups on the pop charts in the late 1940s and early 1950s had paved the way for the wholesale crossover of several sets of upstarts who spearheaded a wave of sonic desegregation and sonic integration that has continued to this day. Groups such as the Moonglows, Spaniels, Penguins, Charms, Chords, and Crows all had major hits on the pop charts that, for all intents and purposes, put forward idealized and newfangled versions of male-female relationships that challenged the core characteristics of the African American male blues aesthetic, which revolved around sometimes subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, expressions of hyper-masculinity and outright misogyny. These changes in African American musical tastes were indicative of broader changes throughout African America in particular, and the U.S. more generally.

  After World War II small crowds of well-meaning and mostly liberal white sociologists and cultural anthropologists marched into African America (especially black ghettoes). When they came out and carefully reviewed their “scientific” findings they concluded that African Americans had created their own unique culture with identifiable value systems, codes of conduct, and standards of excellence. As a result of their distinct historical experiences and ongoing racial segregation in U.S. society, the urban African American masses incrementally evolved their own worldview, created their own cultural institutions, and put forward their own popular art forms geared toward expressing and legitimating their views and values. Among the myriad institutions that synthesized and publicized the post-war urban African American experience, few were more effective and effusive than rhythm & blues and its accompanying ethos and aesthetic.

  Much like the gospel artists and freedom singer-songwriters treated in the last chapter, there is no denying the profound impact that mainstream and middle-class white America had on the daily existence, material conditions and, ironically, the growing cultural consciousness of urban black America during the immediate post-war era. Similar to other African American performers and artists—indeed, like most African Americans in general at the time—the exponents of rhythm & blues in the 1950s existed in a racially, culturally, psychologically, religiously, and musically segregated world. They existed and operated at the crossroads of a series of intersecting traditions, mostly African American but many European American as well; mainly Southern, unsophisticated, and rural, but also increasingly Northern, Mid-Western, Western, and undeniably urbane.

  As touched on in chapter 2, African Americans’ efforts to come to terms with their creolized culture and hybridized heritage was exemplified in their social, political, cultural, and religious expressions, and also reflected in their popular culture and, most especially, in their popular music. It was black popular music in the 1950s that increasingly came to sound like a vocalized version of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness” which, as will be recalled from the prior chapter, he famously identified as the core characteristic of the African American experience. In his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903b), Du Bois declared:

  After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (3–4)

  Classic rhythm & blues, being the mid-twentieth century culmination of black popular music up to that point, sonically and succinctly captures and conveys “double-consciousness.” It represents the psychological, cultural, and musical aftermath of centuries of enslavement, racial colonization, social segregation, and American apartheid. It is what being emancipated and recurringly re-enslaved sounds like. It is the sound of African Americans expressing that “peculiar sensation,” that “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

  Classic rhythm & blues excruciatingly encompasses African Americans’ feelings of perpetual “two-ness” and dividedness, their quests to see themselves as they actually are, not as others would like for them to be. Classic rhythm & blues, then, is fundamentally about truth, about black folk speaking their special truths to each other and to the world at large. Part of African Americans’ distinct truth undeniably involves the struggle to come to terms with their “American[ness]” and their “Negro[ness]” (i.e., their “Africanness”), their “two souls, two thoughts,” their “two unreconciled strivings,” their “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” How else can we explain Ray Charles’ innovative Atlantic Records years, where he synthesized th
e pleading, frenzy-filled and shouting sounds of gospel with the often calm cry and musical melancholia of the blues? Or Etta James’ jocular gospel, blues and jazz mix during her Chess Records years, where she seemed to combine the styles of countless black pop divas before her and unambiguously provide a sonic palette for seemingly each of the pop divas who would follow after her, from Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin to Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera?

  Classic rhythm & blues is a musical and cultural manifestation of African Americans’ “dogged strength.” It represents the evolution of the deep double entendres of the spirituals and the blues, gospel and freedom songs, and—as with all other forms of black popular music—it makes the music mean one thing to those who have not lived the music and wholly another to those who have. Living the music and having an authentic relationship—or, rather, “keeping it real”—with the culture and community, or the experiences, individuals, and institutions that one is singing or rapping about represents both the leitmotif and sine qua non of black popular music and black popular culture. In other words, both the artist and the audience have got to feel the existential realness of the lyrics and music. If the lyrics and music do not conjure up and sonically capture the African American experience in a highly original and thoroughly individual way they do not register as “real,” or “authentic,” or—dare I say—“soulful.”

  It is the mystical and almost magical category of “soul” that has determined the fate more than a few would-be iconic African American artists. In African America, as in Africa, an artist must do more than represent and express themselves. They must also represent their community and culture. They must speak the special truth of their community and culture to the wider world. No matter how technically proficient one may be on their chosen instrument. No matter how much facility one has to sing high or low, or rap fast or slow, without “soul”—that je ne sais quoi of both continental and diasporan African ethos and aesthetics—there would be nothing truly distinct or, more to the point, “African” about African American music.[25]