HARRIETTE HEMMASI:
Good afternoon.
I'm Harriette Hemmasi,
University librarian at Brown,
and I want to extend a warm
welcome to each of you.
We would be much warmer
if we were outside.
Many of you know
this set of programs,
which included an exhibition,
a recital, and a symposium
were all intended to happen on
one day, when it was not warm.
It was very snowy, and
the university was closed.
We were very pleased
to have the opportunity
to have heard John
play his recital,
and to have observed the
exhibition which is still
on display in the
John Hay Library.
I believe we'll have a reception
in the Hay after this program.
So I hope you'll just walk
right across the street with us
and enjoy seeing the
exhibition and also having
some refreshments.
I want to begin by extending
a word of appreciation
to Professor Tony Bogues.
Tony is the Asa Messer
professor of humanities
and critical theory.
He is also the director of Brown
Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice.
And Tony has organized
this afternoon's symposium.
And in just a few minutes, he'll
give an overview of the topics
and also an introduction
to the speakers.
But first, I want to share
with you a bit of background--
I'll be brief-- about this
program and the accompanying
exhibit that we hope
you'll see in the Hay.
More than two years ago, I
received an email message
and then a phone
call from Tom Tisch,
who was chancellor at the time.
And Tom had forwarded me a
proposal of sorts, from John.
And that proposal outlined,
really, a fabulous possibility
for Brown and for many other
institutions of cultural memory
and history, and other higher
ed institutions as well.
And John's proposal
was that there
would be an exhibition
of some materials
that he owned, including perhaps
some of Brown's materials.
A recital that he would perform.
And as it later
turned out, we invited
some of the Brown students
to join in that performance
and that happened
several weeks ago.
And he was also interested in
having a symposium of sorts,
to talk about the reason
that this music is important
and that this cultural
heritage is so important.
It turned out that
John came to campus,
I think on one of
his many visits
to his parents,
which is wonderful
that they live in
Providence, and John
could visit frequently.
And during one of the first
visits that I met John,
we included several
faculty members.
One from the music
department, at that time
it was Butch Rovan,
now Dana Gooley,
who is the chair of
the music department.
Tony Bogues was part
of the discussion.
Christopher Geisler, who's
director of the John Hay
Library and Special Collections
was part of the discussion.
And we began to plan out
what this program might be.
Almost two years later, it's
been a great opportunity
to see the evolution
of that program,
and to hear the many
comments and contributions
of each person, and today to
be culminated in the symposium.
As I was thinking back
over this two year period,
and what I personally have drawn
from the planning process, as
well as the wonderful
exhibition and John's playing,
and then anticipation
of today's symposium.
I thought that this
whole set of programs
is about tracing memory, tracing
authorship, audience agency,
and also meaning.
This tracing is derived from
both printed and unprinted text
or scores.
I think, probably much of
the music that you play,
at least originally, was
probably not written down.
Is that correct, John?
JOHN DAVIS: Most of it
was actually written down
because these were
classical musicians,
and they made money via
selling these scores.
HARRIETTE HEMMASI: But perhaps
the tradition from which
they [INAUDIBLE]
JOHN DAVIS: Yeah.
And they were transcribed
after their composition
because some of these
people were blind, actually.
HARRIETTE HEMMASI: So that
led me to one other tracing,
and that is of the seen and
unseen object or condition,
in which this music
might have been played.
As well as the heard and unheard
performers and audiences,
because certainly audiences had
a big impact on the response,
and perhaps even the
initiative of performers.
And I think, John, you might
say that is still true.
I recall that you were
standing and talking
and the kind of
response that you must
have felt from the audience.
We were all very engaged
with not only what
you were playing, but also
what you were telling us,
and also the visuals that
were on the big screen.
So it's with these
thoughts, and thoughts
that will occur to you as
this afternoon progresses,
that I welcome Professor Tony
Bogues, who will introduce
this afternoon's program.
Thank you.
TONY BOGUES: Thank
you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm really very glad that we
are finally able to do this.
It's one of these events that
if everything could happen,
anything could happen,
it would happen.
And when we finally thought
we all had it together,
I got a note yesterday
saying one of our panelists
who stuck with us all this time.
In fact, was the very first
person I asked to do this.
Eric [? Lott ?] who's a
professor at [? Cooney, ?]
wrote to say he was
not feeling well,
and he was going to try to
come, but he was not so sure.
And then this
morning, I got a note
to say he was not going
to be able to come.
But at that stage,
we have to press on.
So I want to apologize for
Professor Lott, who is not
well and not able to make it.
If I'm allowed to frame
for a few moments,
this particular symposium, I
would like to begin this way.
There are two young,
relatively young,
African-American musicians,
critics, and cinematographers.
Their names are Arthur Jafa,
who is this the cinematographer
for Daughters of the Dust,
and now a noted filmmaker.
And Greg Tate, who is perhaps
one of the finest music
critics on black music that
we have in this country.
And they have been talking
to each other as friends
for some time in New York
City, and as colleagues working
within a certain tradition.
And trying to think
about the meaning,
and what Greg sometimes called
the power of black music.
There's a recent article,
which they both published,
in which they talk about one
of the power of black music,
they say, is a certain
kind of alienation.
And that it is out
of that alienation
that the music develops
a certain power.
And I would argue that there
is within black expressive
culture, generally,
in the United
States, a certain kind
of power that comes
from that kind of Alienation.
Historically we should
recall that there was
a historian who wasn't here.
He was down the road in another
university, John [INAUDIBLE]
who made a set of collections
of slave narratives,
of 19th century
slave narratives.
And in doing that, opened
a certain door for us
to think about African-Amercan
expressive culture writ large.
It is a certain kind
of distinctiveness.
And when he says
distinctiveness,
and I use the word
distinctiveness,
we're not talking about
any kind of essentialism.
Rather, one is trying to think
about how expressive forms
and in this case,
musical expressive forms,
grew up, are adapted, re-work
themselves, and then become
something else.
Become something new.
In the period of, I
would argue, period
of American racial
slavery, the kind of music
that emerged out of the
African-American experience,
or the experience
of slavery, was
the music I think one can say
characterized by something
called, remembering a song.
That is a song around
questions of memory, what it
is that we may have forgotten.
What it is we may have lost.
What is it that we may find
ourselves in this place
that some people consider
to be a land of exile.
If you remember one of
the spirituals of Exodus.
And the essentiality
of the Bible.
To what Du Bois
would call The Sorrow
Songs of the African-American.
[INAUDIBLE] of
trying to remember,
of translating what I
would sometimes call,
memory into sonic sound.
And in translating
memory into sonic sound,
creating a certain kind
of distinctive music, what
the boys call scores
of black folks,
they gift to American
civilization.
Then of course, we
have in that period
right before the end of
slavery and the Civil War,
we have the songs really
being, and the music really
being sorrow songs.
Hymns.
With the major work,
actually, being a man
called John [INAUDIBLE]
who produced
the hymn book of the
African Methodist Church.
In the secular domain, if
you could call it that,
you had a whole host of
people who were writing songs,
and who were making music.
And John Davis talks about a
man called James Monroe Trotter,
who was an African-American who
was seen as one of the major
music critics around--
what we would call
music critics today--
and music historian.
Musicologists, some
of us would call it.
There's a whole set
of issues around him
because he was a man who wanted
to put African-American music
on what he called a
scientific footing,
and wrote in that
kind of language,
while there were
people who say, no.
That when you do
that, what you do
is you miss the richness and the
complexity of the music itself.
The point I'm making
here, and the point
I think John makes, and
the exhibition makes,
is that there's a
very long history
of black music in this country.
When those of us who
are my generation, gray
hairs and so on, we'll think
about soul, rhythm and blues,
music coming out of
Chicago, music coming out
of Philadelphia.
And then we'd also
think about the music
that comes out of New York later
on in the 90s, that is hip-hop.
But I think that once you begin
to understand that there's
a set of conditions, that
music has a long history,
then one question
that emerges has
got to be what are
the conditions that
produce this music.
In other words, that there's
a whole set of argument
about not just the
music as a certain form
of expressive culture.
But in what kind of
conditions would produce
this kind of distinctive music.
And then you can't
therefore think
about African-American
music and its long history
without not thinking
about the ways in which it
has been produced, the
conditions that have actually
produced it.
And it is those conditions.
I think that some critics
and some writers would argue,
that gives the music a
certain distinctiveness.
And in fact, some people
I know periodize the music
according to the actual
conditions themselves.
Some of us would
say, you can't have
that kind of heavy
over-determination,
but that is a relationship
between the actual music
and the conditions
for its production.
And I would then want to say
that, in thinking about this
and thinking about
some of the work
that John does on
the exhibition,
that you can't escape
this business now.
Not just of the music,
but of minstrelsy.
And the way I would suggest
we might want to think of it,
and I'm sorry that
Eric is not here,
as he has written
extensively on this,
is really to borrow
a term from Eric.
Which is, to think about
minstrelsy as a kind
of racial unconscious.
A racial unconscious of
American society, and what
does it mean to have
that racial unconscious.
And what I think he
means is not that you
are unconscious of race,
but is that in fact
you don't mention it as you
minstrelsy grows, emerges
and as we see it
So I think if you put
all those things--
combine all those
things, you get a kind
of combustible tinderbox.
And that is all to the good,
because music is in fact
perhaps one of the
most profound, sonic,
and emotional experiences that
we can have as human beings.
But I think that part of that
tinderbox, combustible thing,
tinderbox, if you
want to call it that,
is that it always takes
us back to the conditions
for its production.
Because it is human beings
who make these things.
And the question
that I always ask
myself is, what is in
the conditions that makes
a human being does A, B, or C?
And how can we think
about those conditions,
and how do those
conditions relate
and shape what it
is that people do.
So I think that those
are some of the issues
as I read them, both in the
catalog and in the exhibition.
And that some of the
speakers might try or will
address in some shape or form.
So let me introduce
the speakers.
First will be John Davis.
John Davis is a
pianist, curator,
I think I can say with
some pride, Brown alum.
Was not in the bag of
[INAUDIBLE] but clear to me
that one has to say that when
one is on Brown's campus.
Whose work is associated with
many concerts in United States
and abroad.
Essentially, around three
critical acclaimed recordings,
or begins with three
critical acclaimed recordings
on the Newport classic.
John Davies plays like Tom,
and this particular figure
I'm sure he will speak about
is a really critical figure.
We was hoping to get
Daphne Brooks here,
but she who has
written extensively,
but she wasn't able to come.
A Top 10 seller in
the classical music
and Tower Records and Amazon.
He also has done Marshall Field
[INAUDIBLE] John Davis Plays
Blind [INAUDIBLE] 2008.
I repeat, number one
seller on the [INAUDIBLE]
chart on Amazon.com.
And Halley's Comet--
Around the Piano with Mark
Twain and John Davis, 2010.
A CD of Twain's
related compositions,
which according to
the New York Times
was played powerfully,
and with a rich palette.
The core, I think,
of Davis' work
is really his own
personal archive
of rare 19th and early 20th
century printed [INAUDIBLE]
that is the source of so many
of his ideas and materials
that have filtered into
his concerts, recordings,
and various literary
contributions.
Including things
in American Lives
and the African American
National Biography
and [INAUDIBLE] all published
by Oxford University Press.
He has been interviewed on the
right stations, so to speak.
NPR, ABC and PBS.
And then did a program-long
[INAUDIBLE] interview
on ABC's Nightline Closeup.
He has also been profiled
in many newspapers,
including the New York Times,
and New York [INAUDIBLE]
independent [INAUDIBLE]
and Scientific American.
That last one, I
kind of wondered why.
Remember Trotter's attempt
to make the music scientific.
So he can probably
talk about that a bit.
Dr. Brandy Monk-Payton is
currently a Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Leslie Center
for Humanities at the Dartmouth
College.
She's associated there with the
Department of Film and Media
Studies at Dartmouth.
She obtained a PhD in
modern culture and media
at Brown, where she was a Ford
Foundation Dissertation Fellow.
And so this is a
Brown panel, and a lot
of Brown alum, and
Brown [INAUDIBLE]
At Brown, she was
a Graduate Fellow
of the Center for the Study
of Race and Ethnicity,
and her own work is on questions
of race and representation,
and has been published
in a couple of journals.
Black Scholar, Reconstruction
Studies and Contemporary
Culture, and [INAUDIBLE]
She's currently working
on a book project called
Dark Optics: Blackness,
Exposure and Celebrity and Media
Culture.
And in fall, a couple
months from now, 2017,
she will be an
assistant professor
of communication and media
studies at Fordham University.
We are very proud of her,
and I am proud of her
since I sat in her dissertation.
So each of these persons will
speak for about 25, 30 minutes.
And then the floor will
be open to Q&A. Thank you
all very much for coming,
and let's begin with John.
JOHN DAVIS: Thanks so much,
Tony, and thank you and welcome
everyone, and thanks for coming.
Bamboula!
Black Music Before the Blues
comes at a particularly fraught
moment in American history.
With the Black Lives Matter
movement still simmering
after Barack Obama's
two terms in office,
and the most racially
charged presidential campaign
in recent memory.
This exhibition is a survey
of the African-American roots
of popular music and show
business in the United States.
On display are
printed artifacts of
the shared African
and European-based
musical tradition established
in colonial America.
A cultural synthesis that
continues to shape our nation's
identity.
These first flowerings of the
transoceanic dynamic triggered
by the African slave trade--
often referred to as
the Black Atlantic--
played a foundational role in
the development of jazz, rhythm
and blues, and rock
and roll, and initiate
a set of structural parameters
and comedic archetypes that
have become hallmarks of
the American performing
arts and theater, film,
radio and television.
The scholarly framework
from Bamboula!
Black Music Before
the Blues can be
traced to the cross-cultural
forces at work
in the material being
shown in the exhibition,
as well as through the evolution
of my own identity, one shared
consciously or not,
by many Americans.
My lifelong interest in
African-American music
and culture was kindled when
I was just 10 years of age,
literally just up the street
from where we are currently
meeting.
One day, my older brother Ned--
he's the less cute
one on the right--
now medieval Chinese historian,
but still a blues man
to the core, brought
home this record album,
still in my collection
today entitled,
More Real Folk Blues by
the late but still great
Mississippi bluesman
Sonny Boy Williamson.
The moment Help Me, the
album's opening cut,
first spewed forth from our
tiny Radio Shack speakers,
we were hooked.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Right away, the
band's opening vamp
laid down by Robert Jr.
Lockwood and Luther Tucker
on guitars, Lafayette Leake
on the Hammond B3 organ,
bassist Willie Dixon
and Fred Below on drums,
cut to the bone.
To us, it evoked a
world we could only
imagine from our vantage point
in New England, one of which
hypnotically wheezing
and clattering
trains passed through the
vast cotton plantations
of the Mississippi Delta.
And cut through the center of
the region's sleepy, racially
segregated towns, the tracks
separating white neighborhoods
from black.
Over this funky,
instrumental background,
Sonny Boy's harmonica
would one moment
dole out locomotive-inspired
staccato accents,
geared toward bolstering his
band's relentlessly rhythmic
underpinning and the next, a
hefty, heart-wrenching vibrato
as wide as a Mississippi
cotton field.
The entrance, 12 bars later,
Williams' opening line,
"You've got to
help me," revealed
the Sonny Boy's
harmonica style, one
of the most expressive in
recorded blues history,
had been designed to mimic
closely his rough edge,
chameleon-like voice.
Sonny Boy's evocative lyrics,
laced with double entendres,
expressed not just his
individual loneliness, but also
the aching solitude felt by
all African-Americans left
homeless and rootless by
slavery and its aftermath.
Ned and I were utterly
defenseless in the face
of this beautifully
recorded performance of one
of American music's
deepest singers
and instrumentalists,
backed by one
of the most commanding outfits
in rock and roll history.
Were it up to them primarily
on the likes of Beethoven
and Bartok, we
realized we had wrongly
assumed this kind
of earthy directness
and multi-tiered complexity
was only possible
in classical music.
Sonny Boy's expression
of isolation
also fed directly into
our burgeoning worldview,
coming of age amidst the
turbulent, race-conscious late
1960s.
Nightly, we were confronted
with television images
of the ongoing civil rights
struggle beamed into our living
room on the evening news.
Add to this the influence on us
of our chosen bedtime reading.
The incendiary black
arts movement writings
of Leroy Jones and Eldridge
Cleaver, so popular
at the time.
From that moment,
my brother and I
vowed to learn all we
could about blues culture,
immersing ourselves in
slave songs, spirituals,
gospel music, soul music,
funk music and, of course,
country and urban blues.
All the while continuing to
study and play classical music.
And that first
exposure to the blues
came full circle
almost 30 years later,
when that same brother
of mine made a pilgrimage
to Sonny Boy's overgrown, and
until recently, unmarked grave
at this abandoned church
in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
A humble, but not altogether
unprecedented end to a towering
figure in American music.
At Brown, I majored in
history in Russian language.
My true concentration,
however, could
be more accurately
described as leisure,
as my main interest
during college
was to enjoy the personal
freedoms that Brown
had to offer.
I did manage to eke
out a couple of hours
of piano practice per
day in preparation
for my weekly lessons in Boston,
but the piano during my years
here was mostly a
solitary endeavor,
of which most of my
friends and professors
were utterly unaware.
Even my Russian history
thesis advisor, Tom Gleason,
rightfully miffed by
my continued failure
to submit a first draft
of my honors thesis, said
after attending a concerto
performance I gave
with the Brown
orchestra, well at least
you haven't been completely
wasting your time.
The only other musical constant
in my life during college
were my regular visits
to sleazy, and sometimes
menacing bars and
nightclubs downtown.
Providence in the late 70s had
a flourishing local blues scene
and with a built in audience
for this kind of music,
was also a major stop for
many of the legendary figures
on the national blues circuit.
During this period, I recall
seeing the Louisiana blues
pianist, Roosevelt Sykes,
and Professor Longhair.
The Kansas City blues shouter
Big Joe Turner and the Chicago
bluesman Walter Shakey Horton.
Son Seals, Muddy Waters,
and Willie Dixon.
One night I ventured down
to the Met Cafe, at the time
a ramshackle blues
box under route 195,
only to find the female
Chicago belter Koko Taylor
and her band in the middle
of an impromptu set.
Right here on the
Brown campus, I
saw the harmonica player James
Cotton at Meehan Auditorium.
The Texas bluesman Albert
Collins at Alumni Hall,
and the Chicago bluesman Jimmy
Rogers at the Grad Center Bar.
All of these musicians
are now dead.
After graduation, I
moved to New York City
and somehow managed to
get accepted to Julliard.
The only breaks there from
class of my 12 hour day
practice regimen
were the performances
I regularly attended at night.
When not at Carnegie
Hall or Lincoln Center,
I was scouring all the
city's jazz and blues clubs.
As a place to hear top flight
jazz, New York of course
is unparalleled.
I would never call it a
great blues town, however.
Nevertheless, during those
early years in New York,
virtually every major
blues and soul performer
eventually made it to either
Manhattan or Brooklyn.
Suffice it to say,
I saw them all.
The first years after
graduation from Juilliard
were spent trying to
gather experience and find
my voice in the professional
world of classical music.
After a great deal
of self-reflection,
what eventually
became apparent was
that the piano and classical
music had become only one
of a number of interests
that had come to define
who I was as a person.
Increasingly, I
could not imagine
spending the rest of
my life just playing
the fantastic 18th, 19th,
and early 20th century
largely European-based
music that up to then
had constituted the meat
of the piano repertoire
and had been performed and
recorded so convincingly
for generations.
As an American
musician coming of age
in the late 20th and
early 21st century,
I suspected there was
something else that
could be done with the piano
that had yet to be done,
that may be more charge,
more relevant to the world
in which I now
lived, and that best
reflected who I was becoming
as both an artist and person.
Staring me in the face was my
childhood and young adulthood
steeped in
African-American culture.
Through playing, listening,
and reading, completely
outside the confines
of academia,
I had amassed a store of
knowledge of black music
literature and folklore
that, in many ways,
rivaled all that I had
learned in classical music.
Over time in fact, I'd come to
record this lifelong obsession
as more than just an avocation.
Legitimately and
not, it now felt
like an alternative
area of expertise
and a parallel spiritual home.
Although I'm not
black, and always have
had the luxury of being white
in a white dominated society,
African-American
music and culture
become central to my
life and identity.
The question then
became, how was
I to combine these dual
interests into a performing
career.
Might there exist an
unexplored, keyboard repertoire
simultaneously drawing from
these seemingly disparate
fields that was
awaiting excavation
would be of musical
and cultural interest
to both me and the
listening public?
Was there a continuum of 19th
century pianist composers
who were either
African-American,
or if not influenced by
early black culture, who
were the forgotten musical
ancestors of people like Sonny
Boy Williamson and the
performers of ragtime
blues, soul, gospel,
funk and rock and roll
that have been so formative
in my musical development.
Indeed there were, as
subsequent fruit bearing visits
to various archives
soon bore out.
Residing just a subway stop
away from my Brooklyn apartment
at the New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts
at Lincoln Center,
was a leading archive
related to Louis Moreau
Gottschalk of New Orleans,
the first pianist
from the new world
to achieve international
renown, and widely
regarded as the first
person to compose
concert music influenced by
African-American culture.
In the same library,
I came face to face
with the first
piece of sheet music
I encountered by Thomas Wiggins,
the Georgia slave pianist,
more popularly
known as Blind Tom,
and about whom I had
read in Eileen Southern's
landmark survey, The
Music of Black Americans.
In her discussion of Wiggins,
Southern also mentioned another
sightless black pianist,
this one from Missouri,
named John William
"Blind" Boone,
who had modeled his early
career on Blind Tom's.
A subsequent trip to the Library
of Congress in Washington DC
uncovered a trove of surviving
works by both Wiggins
and Boone.
Looking over these
scores, I was struck
by how developed this
music appeared on the page.
In stark contrast to so much
other salon music of the era
that had been dumbed down
for the amateur pianist.
The technical demands as well
as the range of expression
indicated in the printed music
of both musicians suggested
that these were works of
loftier aspiration, intended
to be played by high level
amateurs and professionals.
More importantly, these
pieces were a window
into a corner of
American culture
that, for a host of reasons,
had been unfairly relegated
to the musical junk heap.
Right there and
then, I knew I had
the makings of at least two
recordings and related concerts
for years to come.
Through these woefully
unacknowledged figures,
I could expose the
listening public
to a remote corner of the
classical repertoire influenced
by black culture.
Furthermore, the
piano for me could now
become something more dynamic.
No longer an end in itself,
but a jumping-off point
to discuss ongoing issues
in an American society
still grappling with
its segregated past.
With the help of my father,
a retired Brown professor
of medicine now in the
rare book business,
I began to look for
19th century printed
musical African Americana.
These books, pieces
of sheet music,
and other ephemera encompassing
African-American folk concert
and theater music, would become
the primary source material
for my ongoing research as well
as supplementary visual imagery
for my recordings,
writings, and concerts.
This quest sent me on
countless road trips
to remote corners of
the United States,
during which I met
antiquarian book and ephemera
dealers, librarians,
local amateur historians,
and private collectors.
Conduits to the arcane
knowledge and artifacts
central to my research.
One of them in fact, Larry
Zimmermann, a mathematician
and sheet music
expert who has amassed
one of the most
comprehensive archives
of early American sheet
music in private hands,
has been a trusted curatorial
consultant for the exhibition
here at Brown.
My ongoing
relationship with Larry
and so many other mostly
self-taught authorities
who operate on the
margins of academia,
has been one of the great
joys of my professional life.
The printed material
I've collected
has now become the basis for
the exhibition, Bamboula!
Black Music Before the Blues.
The artifacts on
display are presented
as the byproduct of a distinctly
African-American culture, apart
from the African culture
from which they sprung.
And as the printed record of
the shared African and European
based musical
tradition established
in colonial America.
The African rhythms call
and response patterns
in the instrumental and
vocal techniques imported
by the enslaved, when
combined with European bass
harmonies, performing
styles, and secular
and religious institutions
encountered in the new world,
had enormous influence
on the development
of much American popular music
we take for granted today.
And a number of structural
and comedic tropes
we associate with American
theater film, radio,
and television,
can also be traced
to that pariah of the
American performing arts
and the beginning of show
business in the United States.
White and black minstrelsy.
Numerous studies provide
the scholarly framework
for the cross-cultural forces
informing the musical artifacts
on display in the exhibition.
One such inquiry was conducted
by the eminent literary
scholar, Shelley Fisher Fishkin.
In her book, Was
Huck Black?, Fishkin
outlines the evolution
of the main character
in Mark Twain's seminal novel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain himself
acknowledged that Huck
had been modeled on his
childhood friend, Tom
Blankenship, a white son of
a local drunkard in Twain's
hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.
Utterly astonishing, however,
is Fishkin's addendum
to Twain's claim.
While Blankenship may have been
the template for what Fishkin
calls, quote, "Huck's
place in society,"
the model for Huck Finn's
voice, she goes on,
was a black child that Twain
encountered and subsequently
wrote about in an
article in the New York
Times called Sociable Jimmy.
Via a parsing of Huck's language
and the vocabulary and syntax
used by Jimmy, as
filtered through Twain,
Fishkin methodically
shows in her book
that Huck's character was
of dual racial origin.
Fishkin also
suggests that, quote,
"It may have been yet
another black speaker who
awakened Twain to
the power of satire
as a tool of social criticism."
This other black speaker,
Fishkin theorizes,
must have been Jerry,
an enslaved acquaintance
of Twain's, whose oratory
imbued with quote,
"the African-American
folk tradition
of signifying satire,"
Twain regularly listened
to for hours on end
during his childhood.
Through Jerry,
Fishkin speculates,
Twain gained an appreciation of
the African-American trickster
tale that lies at the core of
his most famous book, one that
would have us, quote, "revise
our understanding of the nature
of the mainstream American
literary tradition.
The voice we have come to
accept is the vernacular voice
in American literature,
the voice with which Twain
captured our national
imagination in Huckleberry
Finn, and then
empowered Hemingway,
Faulkner, and countless other
writers in the 20th century,
is in large measure, a
voice that is black."
"Understanding African-American
traditions," Fishkin concludes,
"is essential if one wants to
understand mainstream American
literary history.
And understanding
mainstream literary history
is important if one
wants to understand
African-American writing
in the 20th century.
We can no longer deny the
mixed literary bloodlines
on both sides."
Laurence Levine, in his
landmark book, Black Culture
and Black Consciousness,
makes much the same point
about black culture in
the mid 19th century.
"Perhaps at no other
point in United States
history," he
writes, "is the term
Afro-American a more
accurate cultural designation
than when it is applied
to black Americans
in the mid 19th century.
The essence of their
thought, their world view,
their culture owed
much to Africa.
But it was not purely African.
It was indelibly influenced
by the more than 200 years
of contact with whites
on American soil.
But it was not the product
of an abject surrender
of all previous
cultural standards
in favor of embracing
those of the white master.
This syncretic blend
of the old and the new
of the African and
the Euro-American
resulted in a style
which, in its totality,
was uniquely the
slaves own, and defined
their expressive culture
and their worldview
at the time of emancipation."
For Levine, that 19th century
American black culture,
including music, was
a distinct culture
apart from African culture.
A synthesis of folkways imported
by slaves from their homeland,
and responses to cultural
forces encountered by them
in the new world.
Levine's take was
updated 16 years later
by the Afro-British philosopher
historian, Paul Gilroy.
In his 1993
path-breaking treatise,
The Black Atlantic, Modernity
and Double-Consciousness,
Gilroy attempts to refute
what the author calls,
quote, "the continuing
lure of ethnic absolutisms
and cultural criticism produced
both by blacks and by whites,"
through the study of, quote,
"the stereophonic, bilingual,
or bifocal cultural forms
originated by, but no longer
the exclusive property
of blacks dispersed
within the structures
of feeling, producing,
communicating, and remembering
that I have heuristically
called the Black
Atlantic World."
For Gilroy, what makes
black music black,
in the Atlantic World, is not
entirely a matter of race,
but also the product of
numerous other cultural forces
triggered by the
African slave trade.
The transoceanic contact with
mostly European-based cultures
during the Middle Passage
and in the New World,
initiate a process of
musical transformation
that continues to
the present day.
Bamboula!
Black Music Before the
Blues speaks directly
to this cross-cultural dynamic.
The printed musical
artifacts on display
give voice to the many
African-American musicians
of the pre-recording era
who, mostly lost to history,
managed through
talent and sheer grit
to assimilate into and express
themselves artistically
in a hostile, foreign land.
It also attests to
the undeniable impact
that African-American folk,
concert, and theater music
has had on the musical output
and identities of Americans
like me, of European descent.
"The history of the
Black Atlantic,"
writes Gilroy,
"continually crisscrossed
by the movements
of black people.
Not only as commodities, but
engaged in various struggles
towards emancipation,
autonomy, and citizenship,
provides a means to re-examine
the problems of nationality,
location, identity,
and historical memory.
And yields a course of
lessons as to the instability
and mutability of identities
which are always unfinished.
Always being remade."
Thank you, and thank
you all for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON:
Hello everyone.
So good afternoon.
I'm honored to participate
in this event that celebrates
the unique contributions
of African-Americans
to the development of
arts and entertainment
in the United States,
really forming
the roots of popular culture.
And I want to thank
Tony Bogues for inviting
me to speak today with John.
And also, thank you to
Jennifer Braga at the library,
and Maiyah Rivers at the
Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice for figuring out
the logistics of this panel post
snowstorm.
John, I just want
to say you have
amassed such amazing
archival treasures.
I'm looking forward
to seeing them,
and it's exciting to have the
exhibit presented at the John
Hay.
So much of my current
academic research
revolves around the
questions, what, if anything,
does race and racial slavery
have to do with stardom?
In particular, how
can we understand
the terms and conditions of
African-American stardom?
The past, present, and future of
the terrain of black celebrity,
which is, I think, an
interesting specter
of the exhibit, this
idea of celebrity.
Answering these questions
provides another contour
to the study of the aesthetics
and politics of blackness,
including the fantasies
associated with representation,
and attachment to
racial iconicity
that are simultaneously--
can seem incredibly liberating
but also potentially incredibly
pernicious.
The star can be considered
a spectacular articulation
of liberal humanism in
which the individual is
the proprietor of his own
person and capacities.
Thus the claim to
possessive individualism
seems always already a
problem for the existence
of African-American stardom due
to the legacy of enslavement.
As Saidiya Hartman states--
and I'm quoting her--
"The transubstantiation
of the captive
into the volitional subject,
chattel into proprietor,
and the circumscribed
body of blackness
into the disembodied
and abstract universal
seems improbable
if not impossible."
In the afterlife of
slavery under neoliberalism
and late capitalism,
the paradoxical quality
of such a conversion process can
be epitomized by hip hop artist
Kanye West, quote, "Something
strange is happening."
So I serendipitously
stumbled across the story
of Thomas Wiggins while doing
my dissertation research
on race and contemporary fame.
In the midst of examining West,
various athletes and comedians,
as well as assorted social
media personalities,
I was drawn back to
conceptualizations
of public persona in
entertainment culture
in the 19th and
early 20th century--
a time in which black American
performers expressed themselves
and garnered reputations
through music and dance
on the plantation and beyond.
For example-- and she is also
featured in the exhibit--
with her moniker,
the Black Swan,
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield
gained success as a singer
and even traveled to
Europe for shows labeled
as a celebrity in the press.
So she's going to Europe
with Harriet Beecher Stowe,
apparently.
So born into slavery on
May 25, 1849, Thomas--
the child of Mingo
and Charity Wiggins--
was without sight and
believed to have no labor
potential for slave owner and
Confederate General James Neil
Bethune due to his
medical disability.
However, it was quickly
realized that Thomas had
an uncanny fondness for sounds.
His musical prowess
caught the attention
of Bethune, who proceeded to
cultivate Wiggins as a concert
attraction.
Popularly referred
to as Blind Tom,
he made his stage debut in
1857 in Columbus, Georgia
at the age of eight, and soon
began touring the country.
Under the staunch
anti-abolitionist management,
the piano prodigy proved to
be a lucrative investment
with his improvisatory
compositions
based on his audiences.
Tom became the first
African-American
to play for the president,
then James Buchanan,
at the White House.
And later in life was even
promoted in a playbill
as, quote, "The last
slave set free by order
of the Supreme Court of the
United States" until his death
in 1908.
As one account of the
virtuosos asserted, quote,
"Tom has been seen probably by
more people than any one living
being.
Those who have observed
him most closely
and attempted to investigate
him most fully pronounce him
a living miracle,
unparalleled, incomprehensible,
such as has not
been seen before,
and probably will never
be seen again," end quote.
In this account, Tom emerges
as a visual curiosity
through the account
spectatorial focus
on a kind of scopic fascination.
Wiggins as a human
phonograph, in addition to
other enslaved black folk such
as Millie and Christine McCoy
who I have right
here, conjoined twins
who P T Barnum
coined the Carolina
twins and the
Two-headed Nightingale,
were thus marketed
as freak shows
and intensely scrutinized
during their public appearances,
a sort of often a kind of
violent sort of scrutiny.
Historian Leo
[? Brouty ?] succinctly
states that visibility is fame.
So what I want to
share today are
preliminary notes on the status
of African-American fame,
and the business
of show in relation
to the notion of publicity.
I'm especially
interested in the logics
of public exposure associated
with a black celebrity.
What I call dark optics is
informed by Frantz Fanon's
understanding of the black image
as an overdetermined category
of inquiry in which exposure
is configured as crisis.
In his 1952 book on
colonialism and racism,
Black Skin, White Masks, the
famous dictic, "Look, a Negro,"
cited by him in
the fifth chapter,
references a moment in which the
Martiniquan born Fanon becomes
an object of fixation for a
young white child, a fixation
that fixes him with an
epidermal racial schema.
Such a scene
reflects a threshold
of visibility and visuality
that is racialized,
indicating the
melodramatic appearance
of blackness and
the scopic field
when encountering
the white gaze.
The idea of dark optics aims to
think through such an encounter
as a form of public
relations in order
to make larger claims
about black [INAUDIBLE]
in communicative culture.
Optics popularly refers
to the perception
of public appearance.
By utilizing Fanon's
engagement with and critique
of racial representation,
I develop dark optics
as a theorization of PR.
In this way, I work through
communications discourse
by taking seriously Fred Moten's
provocation that blackness,
quote, "can tend and
has tended toward
the experimental
achievement and tradition
of an advanced transgressive
publicity," end quote.
And I should note that for
him, publicity in this respect
and in other work is really
about a kind of fugitivity
that's associated with music,
sound, and speech acts.
And so, for me,
I'm really trying
to think about the optic
as tethered to the sonic,
and vice versa.
Publicity involves a set of
dynamic relations to the self,
to others, and to media
technology broadly conceived.
Publicity can also be
understood as a right--
the right of every human being
to control the commercial use
of his or her identity.
In her discussion of the legal
concept of property and person,
film scholar Jane
Gaines provocatively
argues that, quote, "The legal
premise that licensed the slave
trade and plantation
economics is
identical to the doctrine
that guarantees new fortunes
and celebrity imagery."
Taking this rather sort of
crude equation seriously,
I want to explore
its implications
for black celebrity
imagery especially
in the current historical moment
in which what we might call
property in personality
underscores the right
to publicity or self-promotion.
How did these new fortunes
that are presupposed
by the peculiar
institution of slavery
manifest in black
entertainment fame?
Here I bring to bear the
slave as property in person
onto racial difference
and celebrity culture.
In this way a tension
between self-possession
and dispossession emerges
in African-American stardom,
instantiated through
practices of publicity.
And so it's again,
kind of thinking
about this question of
alienation that I think
is really important.
So one thing I'm intrigued by
and why I sort of went down
this rabbit hole of sort of
going into the work of Thomas
Wiggins and whatnot,
is that I was
interested in
trying to understand
how could Tom intervene in
such mechanisms of promotion.
Right?
So as the exhibit
states, the branding
of Wiggins as Blind
Tom was designed
to elicit audience sympathy
as part of the publicity
campaign for the young pianist.
And so these kind of productions
of this elaborate publicity
campaign by his
handlers really incites
a level of public captivation
that functions as captivity.
And if you think about
what entertainment means,
it means sort of to captivate,
to sort of hold among
and to hold interest.
So I emphasize the performant
of thrust of personality--
racialized personality-- that
produces a captivating body,
a gravitational
pull for audiences.
Right?
The ability to hold attention
within celebrity culture is
predicated on a robust
publicity machine that keeps one
in the public eye as
an object of interest .
So what makes some famous
individuals so magnetic?
Certainly charisma, as
both an innate disposition
and societal construction,
contributes to mass appeal.
Joseph Roach
provides a genealogy
of fame and
personality-driven mass
attraction as the It Effect.
Roach suggests
that quote, "There
is a kind of freakishness
to having It,
and despite the allure, a
potential for a monstrosity
which haunts the meaning
of It as the proper neuter
pronoun of the third
person singular
used to refer to
things without life,
of animals when sex is not
specified, and sometimes
infants," end quote.
But absent from his
analysis of what It connotes
is a sadness of race
and racial difference.
Non-human personhood undergirds
black entertainment fame
in a trajectory from
enslavement to stardom
in which the black subject
comes to possess It.
In other words, the
captivation of the captive.
So in Q&A we can
talk about, perhaps,
Thomas Wiggins and the
way in which the sort of--
his autonomy and it was
always being contested
in terms of very particular
kinds of managerial sort
of processes, whether
it be thinking
through his ownership,
who owned him when,
and who was sort of
vying to manage him.
And so hopefully, we'll
talk about that more
and that kind of complexity.
But I think that
Daphne Brooks gives us
a good kind of
account of thinking
about the ways in which Wiggins
and others sort of exemplify
or have these moments where they
have sort of lines of flight,
where they can kind
of imagine what
she calls the poetics of
the sonic slave narrative.
The soundscape of
enslaved men, it's
multi-century dimensions and
how that sort of exemplify
through Thomas's performances.
So black performers such
as Bert Williams and others
capitalized on minstrelsy as
the most popular entertainment
genre in American culture and
further advanced their acting,
singing, and dancing careers.
The emergence of
mass media forms
and the development of
screen culture, film,
and later television orients
blackness differently
in the public eye.
And so I really want
to sort of think
about the way in which-- what
difference does the screen make
and sort of the advent
of consumer culture
when we're talking about
issues of black music
and particularly in
terms of performance
and ultimately stardom.
For example, in his seminal
study of Paul Robeson's fame,
Richard Dyer accounts for how
African-American cinematic
stardom became
permissible in Hollywood
during the first half
of the 20th century.
Utilizing Robeson's circulation
and entertainment culture,
Dyer accounts for the discursive
conditions of possibility
by which Robeson was
allowed to cross over
in his appeal to both
black and white audiences
who produce disparate
readings of his screen image.
Additionally, Miriam Petty's
work on early black star
performers who stole the show
in cinema through enactments
of strategic expressions that
allowed them to retain autonomy
both on and off screen.
Also consider someone like
Lena Horne who was considered
the NAACP crisis cover girl,
who signed to a studio contract
but whose scenes
were actually omitted
in some southern
cinemas due to issues
concerning race relations.
So how do we
understand the screen
and the advent of
commodity culture
in relation to black fame?
So I first read Amiri
Baraka's Blues People
with Tony Bogues,
who kept telling me
it was the prototypical
cultural studies text.
And I just wanted to
read a couple of quotes
from the last couple
of pages where he says,
quote, "Negro music is
always radical in the context
of formal American culture."
And then he ends
on the last page
by saying that "The American
Negro is being asked
to defend the American
system as energetically
as the American white man.
There is no doubt
the middle class
Negro is helping
and will continue
to help in that defense."
So in a 2013 Saturday
Night Live NBC appearance,
hip hop artist Kanye
West performed his track
"New Slaves," which included a
screen behind him that rapidly
projected a succession of
images resembling vintage price
tags from half price
to not for sale.
The song describes
the intoxication
of consumer culture
for African-Americans,
commenting on how the desire for
material wealth amongst blacks
manifests itself as
a form of slavery.
As Tommy J Curry suggests,
the record, quote
"introduced a
pessimistic terminology
to capture the paradoxical
condition whereby
black freedom from
enslaved men only
resulted in the
capturing of black people
psychically in the neoliberal
entanglements of poverty,
servitude, and corporatism."
At the same time,
the hip hop song
ruminates on West's own fame and
his antagonistic ties to the US
entertainment enterprise.
He critiques
corporations in the rap,
attesting that such business
entities cannot control him,
and lyrically threatens
to relocate his family out
of the country due to the
encroachment on his privacy
by the mechanisms of
star surveillance.
West performs "New Slaves"
in virtual stillness,
not moving from his
position on stage.
And visually, the play between
foreground and background
allow the rappers
to be enveloped
by darkness at the same time
that he occupies the spotlight.
The SNL musical act
conveys a message
about the brands of
commodification offered up
by new slavery as
well as stardom.
The screen image
prompts audiences
to question what is
and is not for sale.
The overall performance
allows for a consideration
of who has the capacity to own
and profit from the black star
image.
No other African-American
entertainer in recent memory
circulates in media
culture like West,
a veritable public
relations nightmare.
Named one of Time magazine's
most influential people
in the world in 2015,
the icon grabs attention
and makes headlines
with his infamous antics
and larger than life persona.
West navigates stardom
through performative errantry
across visual and
sonic registers.
His complex relationship
to celebrity
reveals the
threshold of exposure
for African-American
entertainers
within current media culture.
He does not just
diverge from the script
in his mediated
relations to the public
but rather demonstrates
a calculated nonsense
that simultaneously attracts
and repels audiences.
Frequently deviating from the
proper standards of stardom,
his errantry is epitomized
by his aesthetic choices.
Daphne Brook's conceptualized
that Afro alienation act
as a performance tactic
of black entertainers
in which expressivity is
a radical operation that
calls attention to
historical racial oppression.
The performance
in his eligibility
or spectacular opacity
becomes a method
of disorienting and
re-orienting blackness
in the field of vision.
West's dissonant star
image across screen culture
exemplifies such a strange mode
of visibility and visuality
that also operates on
the level of the sonic.
Once describing his
work as sonic paintings,
West emphasizes the centrality
of visuality to his music
and relies on the
experience of synesthesia,
a melding of the senses--
in this case seeing sound--
for his artistic practice.
Sometimes electronically
manipulated to their limits,
his vocals extend
beyond legibility.
Such jarring linguistic
indeterminancy
produces disruptive utterances
that complicate common sense
through excessive equivocation.
So West is a figure that
I analyze in my first book
project-- so promo here--
Dark Optics, Blackness Exposure
and Celebrity in Media Culture.
On December 13th
of this past year,
West was photographed in
the lobby of Trump Hotel
with President Donald Trump, who
has even likened himself to P T
Barnum in a past interview.
In the midst of the flashing
lights and clicking cameras,
West only makes one remark--
quote, "I just wanted to
take a picture," end quote.
So I'm really interested
in this moment in terms
of this kind of
photo opportunity
and what I'm sort
of understanding
as a kind of crisis
of screen personality
that's manifested through these
kind of promotional mechanisms.
Public image has been central
to African-American identity
and experience in US
culture and society.
From Frederick Douglass's status
as most photographed person
in the 19th century to
the ubiquitous display
and influence of Beyonce Knowles
in current popular media,
the cultivation of public
image in all arenas of life
became a way for black
Americans to see themselves
in a symbolic world order.
Yet as Bell Hooks
has also noted,
we experience our collective
crisis as African-Americans
within the realm of the image.
The book is an
intervention into the study
of race and representation.
It engages with crises
in representation
and the structuring
of publicity when
confronted with
racial difference
by focusing on the
contemporary mass
mediated black
celebrity subjects.
I argue that understandings
of public image
and public exposure
are complicated
by blackness in the
headlines, and particularly
by the dark optics of publicity.
If celebrity largely
centers on the idea
of being known in its
logics of exposure,
I argue that this poses a crisis
of ontology and epistemology
for the black subject.
The book takes up this
problematic paradigm
of revelation and concealment,
analyzing famous individuals,
popular performances,
and memorable moments
in the early 21st century US
television and digital media
culture in order to demonstrate
the multiple ways in which
blackness comes to be fashioned
and managed or mismanaged
in the limelight.
Thomas Wiggins perplexed
audiences in his alterity
on stage.
Returning to this early material
history of black celebrity
may be useful in the hopes
that we can find resonances
with the current
multimediated environment
with, as West states,
our now inside of the TV.
Thank you.
TONY BOGUES: OK.
Thank you very much,
John and Brandy.
We have about 20 minutes or
so for Q&A. So show of hands
please?
Question and answer, Q&A.
AUDIENCE: I'd like to
make an observation of how
John is brilliant.
And I want to make sure that
you are going to publish it.
JOHN DAVIS: Oh.
No one's asked me, but
I'm always open to it.
TONY BOGUES: OK.
Yes?
Yes, please.
Go ahead.
Can you just say who you
are, if you don't mind.
RAY RICKMAN: Ray
Rickman, citizen.
So I went to--
so [? Ciseretta ?] Jones fought
the establishment, integrated,
she's the reason that
movie houses, blacks
got to sit in the balcony.
Before her, black people
could not come in.
So she's an exception to your--
I'm sorry, as she--
whatever they'd offer her,
she'd ask for double.
So she's the first black
woman to ever do that.
She's the Aretha
Franklin of her day.
And as you know, that's
six months from here.
So she's an exception to
everything you're saying?
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON: Yeah.
I think there's a
way in which I'm
trying to understand sort of
the terrain of black celebrity
as a concept.
And so trying to think through
the ways in which we even
come to understand what
it means to be known
in terms of racial subjects.
Right?
So I think that there are
definitely these figures
that we can point to
that integrate and do it
successfully, and
don't necessarily
have a sort of moment of crisis.
But I then wonder how
we're understanding their--
how we're understanding
sort of racial difference
in that moment.
Right?
Whether or not
figures like Beyonce,
for example, that are
invested in a particular kind
of capitalism, you
know, if that is somehow
different from just the idea of
what black stardom actually is.
So I think that-- and
there are other figures.
I think that there's a
really interesting kind
of idea being presented
by some figures where--
there's one episode where
Chris Rock talks about how one
is famous versus black famous.
So there are all
these different kinds
of categories that we
can think about in terms
of how one's racial
identity is operating
in these different moments,
in terms of crossover appeal
and whatnot.
RAY RICKMAN: So is there--
JOHN DAVIS: Can I respond
to what you originally said?
RAY RICKMAN: Yes.
JOHN DAVIS: Yes maybe
[? Ciseretta ?] Jones
was able to sort of exert some
influence in her own career,
but don't forget that the
reason she joined Black Patti's
Troubadours was
she was completely
left out of the opera world.
And she never was able to get an
engagement at any opera company
anywhere in the world.
And so was left to
actually join a kind
of quasi-minstrel
black vaudeville
troupe as the headliner which
did become hugely successful.
But her real dream was to be in
a legitimate opera production
either in Europe or
the United States
from which she was
completely basically exiled.
RAY RICKMAN: Tony,
I wanted to ask--
TONY BOGUES: Yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead, Ray.
RAY RICKMAN: So she's a
civil rights figure, really.
And in every era,
there's only so far
you can go because you
can only go so far.
People have strange
views about civil rights.
You know, 16 year olds
shouldn't be able to vote.
And I know they will
be able to vote.
So we're very strange
and [INAUDIBLE] people.
But I think there's a date.
It may be Berry Gordy.
Seriously, who doesn't
get his credit.
But, you know, you
have Ray Charles
and everybody going back.
They're only black.
And you can't set--
white people--
you can't even buy a
record from Ray Charles
in most stores in America,
including Providence.
So is there a date to
what you're talking about?
That at some date white
people quit stealing black
people's music with impunity and
Berry Gordy [INAUDIBLE] legal--
he beats the hell
out of everybody.
And then black
folks are different?
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON: Yeah.
No, I mean, that's an
interesting question.
I mean, in terms of a
date, I'm not quite sure.
I mean, I do--
I'm also thinking about
Prince and his catalog,
the way in which that
has been mobilized
or not after his death.
But I think that part of
this, for me, comes back
to issues of media technology
and sort of the ways in which
with the emergence of
sort of digital media,
the way in which we encounter
race has fundamentally shifted.
And so not only race but,
you know, other things.
So I think that there's
an interesting sort
of post-civil rights
era terrain that we
haven't quite yet figured
out, if that makes sense.
RAY RICKMAN: OK.
JOHN DAVIS: One reference to--
now that you've
brought up Berry Gordy,
I would argue that one
reason this music became
so popular across the
board was basically he,
rightly or wrongly, he
streamlined soul music
in a way that was much less
sort of church-oriented
and much more designed to
appeal to a larger audience.
So if you listen
to Motown songs,
there's much less of this sort
of church style of singing
and also the
instrumental backdrop.
And that was one of
his brilliant touches
in terms of
commercialism, whatever
you think of aesthetically of
that music versus the music
that was being put out
by Atlantic Records,
and also some of the so-called
race records in the South.
But he was very
smart that way to be
able to make this appealing
to a wider audience.
Also one of you brought
up the issue of whites--
the history of whites
stealing from blacks.
I think, as a musician, that's
a kind of a murky terrain.
I mean there's no
doubt that this
was going on all through
recorded history,
that white producers were
co-opting black songs
and having them remade
by white people.
But I mean the history of
actually borrowing music,
and this is a central thing in
at least in Western culture,
is a tried and
true tradition that
began way back in the Baroque
period and even before
with people like Basso.
Musicians themselves
actually don't always
look at it as a
kind of stealing,
but this kind of co-opting
of other music they hear
is just part and parcel
of being a musician.
The degree that it was being
done by record companies
was outrageous obviously,
and the lack of payment,
and all this kind of stuff.
And this even goes on today.
And personally I've also been
the victim of this myself
with my own recordings.
So I feel this very strongly
that people need to be given
credit.
They need to be paid for this.
And that was not being done.
But the actual act of sort of
taking somebody else's song
or covering it, assuming
you get permission for this
and you pay them for this,
to me is not in itself
a horrible thing.
It's a tried and true
tradition that also goes on
to the present day.
TONY BOGUES: Yes,
please, at the back.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you both for your
wonderful presentation.
This question is
moreso for Brandy.
I was really interested
in this relationship
between the optic and the sonic
that you're talking about.
And you mention
Daphne Brooks' idea
of soundscapes of enslavement.
And I think also you can add
in folks like Tina [INAUDIBLE]
and now she's really looking
at photographs from the archive
through the lens of the sonic.
And so I was wondering
how might sound
to be a useful kind of
methodological approach
when kind of rethinking
blackness in the archive,
or moments of resistance.
So like from the photograph
of Thomas Wiggins, what
a moment of resistance
might we read
from that to the last
photograph that you
showed with Donald
Trump and Kanye West.
So just really thinking about
like the sonic and the optic.
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON: Yeah, no.
Thanks for that question.
I mean it's something that I've
been trying to sort of navigate
because I am very
interested in-- particularly
in terms of understanding
sort of public relations
as a communicative practice.
When you think about sound, you
think about speech acts mostly.
You think about sort of
particularly kinds of press
releases or sorts of moment--
I think about sort
of Janet Jackson
sort of videotaped apology for
that Super Bowl performance.
So it's a question
that I definitely
want to sort of delve into.
I think those images are
so-- are so striking in terms
of the stance of
the [INAUDIBLE] I'm
wondering if there's
something about their body
in these photos that can
speak in some respects
and sort of have that kind
of sonic materiality to them
that perhaps exceeds a kind of
[INAUDIBLE] sort of reading,
if that makes sense.
Yeah.
TONY BOGUES: Yeah?
HARRIETTE HEMMASI:
Tony, I wonder
if we would go back to a quote
that you had that minstrels
are like a racial unconscious--
if you could speak to
that a little bit more.
TONY BOGUES: Yeah.
I would actually like
to, if you don't mind,
speak to it in reference to some
of the discussions, not so much
about minstrels
if you don't mind,
but into discussions around
cultural appropriation and also
Motown.
To say that it might be useful
to think about not stealing
but a certain form of
cultural appropriation
which actually takes place,
that there is talking now
as a black musician myself,
that there is an exchange which
all musicians, writers, various
people actually engage in.
But there is also
a moment in which,
given the racial organization
of American society,
that there's a way in which
that a lot of that music
is not recognized and seen
as quote, unquote "music,"
but is seen as noise
or something else.
And that what happens is the
process of mainstreaming,
not what Berry Gordy does, which
we can talk about in a minute,
but the actual process
of mainstreaming
is a form of cultural
appropriation
that then allows us to have a--
the mainstream to have a certain
kind of ease with the music
without the racial
understanding.
So there is a racial quote,
unquote "unconsciousness"
of that.
So a figure like Presley becomes
critical, rock and roll becomes
seen in the mainstream
as a white American music
without an understanding of
its roots in black culture.
So that there is a way in which
we might want to just think
about this racial
unconsciousness which as I said
is [INAUDIBLE] here is
really not unconscious.
It is just that
it is not upfront,
but it is actually the
frame in which we operate.
But it goes by, it passes us by
because we take it for granted.
And in relationship
to Berry to and stuff,
I would just want to say
that we might want to--
the way in which
strings were used--
violence, you know, [INAUDIBLE]
and all of those folks
who was in this kind of
music, that there in the South
there was also
something called Stax.
Those of us who
knows a man called
Isaac Hayes would want to know
where does Hayes come from.
And there is that--
in Memphis, Tennessee
the music which comes out
of the South in which
the strings are there
in which a certain
kind of church
is transformed into soul.
Because I would think that--
I actually think that Berry
doesn't transform church
at all.
Is that church-- is
that the actual roots
of the African-American
church then
gets reorganized itself in
a certain kind of secular
singing.
But secularism and secular
singing was always--
and secular music--
was always part
of the African-American
tradition.
And that there's no--
[INAUDIBLE] Aretha
but understanding
the profound effect
you know of being
in the black church
[INAUDIBLE] a major staple
and her song "I Would
Take You There,"
without understanding
the deep roots
in the African-American church.
So that is-- what I'm
trying to suggest is
that there is no great rupture.
All right?
There is a different form that
emerges that people play with,
there's a certain
kind of elasticity
around the sonic that occurs
within the black tradition.
But there is-- but that
elasticity has its roots I
would argue, you know, certain--
what was called [INAUDIBLE].
And within those certain
songs, the actual institution,
if you wish, of the black church
is where all of this is taken.
So one of the things I would
love to hear Brandy talk about
later on is the way in which you
cannot go to a gospel concert
and the performance of
that gospel concert is not
fundamentally different
from Beyonce in many ways.
The dress is
different and so on,
but there's a way in which the
apparatus of the actual concert
itself draws from a
certain kind of way of--
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON:
Worship, yeah.
TONY BOGUES: --entertainment
is now organized.
So that's how I would
answer your question.
JOHN DAVIS: In
fact, if you take--
one of my favorite soul
singers is the guy named
O V Wright for High Records.
And he has a song called
"Eight Men and Four Women,
That's the Jury Of Love."
And in the middle
of it is a section
where he starts talking.
And it's basically mimicking the
cadence of an African-American
preacher at a--
and so there's no overt
reference to this.
But if you've heard
any of these things,
you go like, oh, that's directly
from a church service, really.
And yet there's no reference
to Jesus or anything.
It's all in the context
of love and what
the secularizing of
African-American music.
AUDIENCE: So I [INAUDIBLE]
about stealing [INAUDIBLE]
or that it wasn't stealing.
And then I appreciate
Professor Bogues's comment
on cultural appropriation,
but having done a lot of work
in music, in undergrad
there's this conversation
about speaking to each other.
The music spoke to each other.
And that's not what happened
through the power dynamics when
power-- when race--
when non-black
people use the music.
So in the blues, it was I'm
going to take this one chord
and then play with
it and argue with it
and have a conversation with it.
And that's not what happened.
So it really was--
I would say a theft
and I appreciate that--
JOHN DAVIS: Entire
songs, you're saying.
AUDIENCE: I'm
saying entire songs.
I'm saying entire verses.
And so it seems like a
co-opting of the idea
and a white washing when you
say it, of telling the story,
when the fact is that
it was literally music
was being stolen.
And it wasn't
about giving money.
It was literally the
erasure of an entire genre
given to a group that was not
the person that created it.
And it's important
to acknowledge
who created this kind of
work and the history from it.
So there isn't a European
history in any of the Europe
that I know that traces back
to the lineage of the kind
of music that was stolen
and then re-appropriated
to the white population.
And so that's my
response to that.
And then I have a question
about bringing together the work
that you all do.
When we're thinking about
like looking through music
and looking through the sonic,
if there wasn't an optic image,
if we're looking at dark
optics, would there still
be the same kind of
narrative, right?
So if we could hear the
conversation between Trump
and Kanye, if we didn't
know their voices,
if they weren't racialized, if
their voices weren't racialized
and we didn't know who they
were, would the conversation
or would the music or the
way that we interpret them
be different?
And there's been some
experimental work
done at Yale about it.
But just like-- it doesn't
have strong theory.
So just what-- do
you think there's
a theoretical intervention
that can happen when we look--
when we take out the optics
and only think about the sonic
and that is not racialized.
Is there a certain way
that certain people like--
TONY BOGUES: Before you all
answer-- can I-- it's 3:30.
Can we take one more question
so that we [INAUDIBLE]
if there's one more person that
has a burning-- anything they
want to ask?
OK.
John.
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON: Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good question.
I think a lot of this is sort of
emerging from this idea of sort
of just with potentially
evacuate the kind of optic
you know--
that I think is historicized
through sort of Obama
and sort of a post-racial
moment, right?
I don't know if we
can do that anymore.
Like I actually
don't know if we can
separate the two in that way.
I mean, I'm very invested
in sort of the audio visual,
so that would be might like
preliminary answer to you.
But I think that there
is a way in which
the myth of the post-racial
has now been sort of erred out
to the extent that to just
sort of think about these two
icons irrespective of it right?
Like, I don't know
how that would work.
But I'll think about it.
TONY BOGUES: John?
JOHN DAVIS: I was just of
curious how it's different--
the celebrity, if you're
sort of a current celebrity
versus white versus black,
how the situation might
be different if you're
white versus black
and how it shows up for a
black person comes differently,
the kind of societal
enslavement or something
that come from celebrity.
BRANDY MONK-PAYTON: Yeah, and
I mean for me, like, that comes
in these kind of
moments interestingly
in terms of cultural
appropriation,
where you kind of have these
moments on social media
where you have particular
contemporary celebrities who
are calling each
other out like based
on various issues
of appropriation,
whether that be kind of
Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj,
or other kinds of sort of feuds,
and that becomes another kind
of mechanism by which to sort
of think through the ethics
and politics of blackness.
TONY BOGUES: OK can we
just give our panelists
a round of applause please?
