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Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page a
Michael P. Roth
and Sukey Garcetti
have endowed this
imprint to honor the
memory of their parents,
Julia and Harry Roth,
whose deep love of music
they wish to share
with others.
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page b
Race Music
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page ii
Race Music
Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
© 2003 by
The Regents of the University of California
Ramsey, Guthrie P.
Race music : black cultures from bebop to hip-hop / Guthrie P.
Ramsey, Jr.
p. cm.—(Music of the African diaspora ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-520-90090-1
1. African Americans—Music—History and criticism. 2. Popular
music—Social aspects—United States. 3. African Americans in
popular culture. I. Title. II. Series.
ML3556 .R32 2003
781.64'089'96073—dc21 2002068455
The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-
free (tcf). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–
1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 8
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page v
To
Bernadette
Robert
Candace
Bridget
and to the memory of
Ethel Ramsey Batey
(1918–2002),
our matriarch and inspiration.
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page vi
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page vii
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Notes 219
Acknowledgments 259
Index 263
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page viii
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page ix
Illustrations
1. Dinah Washington 57
2. Louis Jordan 63
3. Cootie Williams 68
4. “Certificate of Honor” 91
5. The Ross daughters 92 –93
6. Dizzy Gillespie 99
7. “Blues-ing” upsouth in Chicago 148
8. Stomping the blues in the basement 149
9. “We Entertained” 150
10. James Brown 152
ix
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page x
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page xi
Preface
Following a recent meeting of the Jazz Study Group in New York City,
Muhal Richard Abrams, the radical musician, gentle soul, and “godfather”
of black music collectives, told me in a private, unforgettable conversation:
“You can go anywhere, but don’t never leave home.”
In many ways this book is about that idea and the way Abrams chose to
express it. This is not a comprehensive, strictly chronological study of
African American popular music. Rather, it is a meditation on the interpre-
tation and criticism of various aspects of its history. I attempt to forward a
poetics of this music that explains some of the circumstances and conse-
quences of its power and its relevance for specific historically situated lis-
teners. My poetics of “race music,” as I call it, speculates on how the inter-
play of the backgrounds of audiences, musicians, critics, and scholars might
inform the creation and reception of the music.
Some of the ideas represented here took shape while I was writing a dis-
sertation on 1940s jazz. Rather than continuing down that professional path
exclusively, I have expanded my work to also include various strains of
gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, and hip-hop. Throughout my life as a lis-
tener and musician I experienced these musics as closely linked to one
another: in my home growing up; on jukeboxes in assorted and sundry
establishments in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia; and in the various
musical organizations with which I have been associated. As an African
American musician raised in a primarily segregated working-class environ-
ment, whenever I was listening to or performing one style of race music, it
seemed that the others were never far away or totally out of earshot.
Chapter 1 takes Muhal’s advice quite literally: I go home. Beginning with
some of my earliest musical memories of the house party and church cul-
tures of my youth, the chapter then winds through multiple cultural spaces
xi
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page xii
xii / Preface
and the musical styles and genres that signified within them and distin-
guished each. Chapter 2 builds on the first by specifying and developing the
intellectual, theoretical, and methodological issues raised by the themes and
scenes detailed in the previous chapter.
In chapter 3 I explore the blues musings of three important figures in
mid-twentieth-century race music: Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, and
Cootie Williams. Chapter 4 goes home again, recounting the history and
southern memories of my family, shedding light on the historical ground-
ing of midcentury race music, the background of its audience, and the ten-
sions embedded in it. In chapter 5 I provide what is perhaps the core argu-
ment of this study: that the musical, socioeconomic, and political
developments in midcentury African American culture constituted an Afro-
modernism that not only indexed the moment but extended into future
decades. Chapter 6 accounts for some of the foundations, contentions, and
declamations of the Black Consciousness era by juxtaposing three sites of
cultural memory: migration narrative, historiography, and a recording by a
prominent musician.
Chapter 7 moves closer to the present, to what I call the Age of Hip-Hop.
Upon the foundation of the memories, histories, music, and modernisms
discussed earlier, I establish hip-hop’s signifying effect by focusing on musi-
cal practices in three important films: Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood,
and Love Jones. Finally, in chapter 8 I return to where I began this study: to
a discussion of the equally voracious muses of hip-hop and black gospel in
the contemporary scene.
While part of the story I tell here is directly tied to black Chicago, read-
ers should understand it as suggestive of other cities in the North that expe-
rienced similar migration patterns. I should also mention that the interviews
forming the ethnographic component of this study are more germane to
chapters 1 through 6 than they are to chapters 7 and 8. As I argue, however,
the notions of memory and history embedded in the earlier chapters form
the basis for understanding the creation and the generation of meaning in
African American popular music of the contemporary moment.
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page 1
In the summer of 1999, Stevie Wonder’s hit recording “I Wish” from two
decades earlier provided the rhythm track to a rap recording by the ubiqui-
tous entertainer Will “the Fresh Prince” Smith. The recording, a single from
the soundtrack of the film Wild, Wild West (based on a 1960s television
show), features Smith rapping and the soulful vocals of Sisqo, formerly the
lead singer of the hip-hop/R&B group Drew Hill. While the film Wild, Wild
West drew mixed reviews and proved only moderately successful, the sin-
gle itself was a smash hit, without doubt bolstering interest in the movie.
Smith’s gesture to revive “I Wish” in this setting speaks to more than the
tune’s enduring appeal. History and memory are embedded in the original
song—in both its musical and its lyrical qualities and in its connection to a
film about a television show from the past, which was, in turn, about a key
moment in America’s past.
Wonder’s “I Wish” first appeared in a special double-album project titled
Songs in the Key of Life (1976). Contemporaneous audiences, historians,
and critics have viewed Songs in the Key of Life as groundbreaking on a
number of levels. Recorded on the conservative and historically important
Motown label, Wonder’s project (and his other early- to mid-1970s work)
1
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page 2
2 / Chapter 1
has been heralded for helping to expand the company’s formal and formu-
laic approach to hit making. Moreover, Wonder’s explicitly expressed cul-
tural nationalism represented a thematic departure from his earlier body of
love songs. Along with Donny Hathaway, Gil Scott Heron, and Marvin
Gaye, among others, Wonder has been credited with introducing a political
element into 1970s black popular music that had not been seen before. What
is more, Wonder’s music “crossed over” into the pop market, won critical
acclaim and numerous Grammys during this period, and at the same time
earned him a “progressive” artistic reputation.1
For all of the reputed progressive orientation of Songs in the Key of Life,
it produced hit singles, among them “I Wish.” Wonder cast the musical lan-
guage of “I Wish” in a remarkably “nonprogressive” mold. Most of the
recording features a heavy funk backbeat under a nonlinear chord progres-
sion (E-flat minor to A-flat 7). Despite the repetitious quality of this har-
monic setup, “I Wish” propels itself forward on the foundation of a sym-
metrical, “straight eighths” walking bass pattern. The chords and bass
movement “take it back home,” sounding very much as though they were
straight out of a black Sanctified Church shout—the time in the worship
service reserved for ecstatic religious dancing and the visitation of the Holy
Ghost. Wonder’s ever-towering tenor vocals add another layer of gospel-
infused excitement to the performance. The theme of the song does not
convey political sentiments in the traditional sense. It expresses, rather, a
nostalgic (though not saccharine) reflection on a poor and presumably black
childhood: the “joy” of unanswered Christmas wish lists, boyhood pranks,
spending Sunday school money on candy, playing “doctor with that girl,”
and schooldays discipline.
Wonder’s new “political” profile, as evidenced by Songs in the Key of Life
(and his other projects from this period), was clearly of its historical
moment. He wanted his work to be relevant to his Black Power movement–
era audience, stating as early as 1973 that “we as a people are not interested
in ‘baby, baby’ songs any more.”2 Wonder wrote from his vantage point as
an adult composer, choosing the modes of history, memory, and his medita-
tions on the contemporary moment to make profound musical statements
that, despite their specificity, spoke to the hearts and musical sensibilities of
a very diverse audience base.
My brief discussion of this piece shows how it participated within a his-
torically specific, socially grounded dialogue between a film and a recording,
an artist and his audience, three decades, several musical genres, commercial
and political interests, “folk,” mass, and art discourses, sacred and secular
sensibilities, and history and memory. All of these dialogues (and undoubt-
Ramsey-D.qxd 1/29/03 3:00 PM Page 3
edly others that I have not mentioned) help audiences to generate and per-
ceive meaning in this music. This book is my attempt to identify and explore
some of the ways in which meaning is achieved in various styles of African
American music.
Boiled down to its essence, the central question addressed here is, How
does the music under consideration work as discourses and signifying prac-
tices at specific historical moments? I discuss several post–World War II
musical genres, including jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and their stylistic
progeny. As my title suggests, I call these musical styles race music. I have
grouped these various styles under this rubric because, while each is cer-
tainly distinct, possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and
formal qualities, they are yet grounded in similar techniques and conceptual
frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Most of
the genres were historically marketed and mass mediated in the culture
industry as “race records.”3
My use of the term race music intentionally seeks to recapture some of
the historical ethnocentric energy that circulated in these styles, even as
they appealed to many listeners throughout America and abroad. The con-
cept “race” is recognized in most academic circles as a “fiction” and social
construction and has become almost reviled in today’s cultural criticism. But
the word at one time represented a kind of positive self-identification
among African Americans. The black press routinely used “the Race,” for
example, as a generic term for African Americans during the first half of the
twentieth century. Furthermore, calling oneself or being referred to as a
race man or race woman became a way to display pride in being an African
American and in having efficacy in the affairs of one’s immediate commu-
nity. I use the word race in these senses, not to embrace a naive position of
racial essentialism, but as an attempt to convey the worldviews of cultural
actors from a specific historical moment.
I weave through a number of theoretical, methodological, and intellectual
concerns in this study: ethnographic perspectives, historicism, cultural
memory, practice theory, and self-reflexivity, among other tools that I use to
engage musical analysis, interpretation, and criticism. Taken together, they
cluster into three broad modes of investigation: history, memory, and the-
ory. Before elaborating on these various investigative modes, I want to pro-
ceed by recounting some of my own experiences with black music.
I have several reasons for including the following information in this
context. The musical autobiography sketched below brings into high relief
some of the theoretical and intellectual points that I will explore through-
out the book. As an African American scholar and musician, I believe there
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