Faking It

Slave Songs

It was recently brought to my attention that Beacon Press has put up on their website 18 MP3 files identified as “sounds of slavery.” These are tracks recorded mostly by John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s which the authors of a book, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, have identified as characteristic of the sounds that the slaves made. (I assume Beacon is posting the MP3 files on their website so that they don’t have to go to the expense of creating a CD to insert into the paperback edition of the book.)

I enjoy listening to these tracks, but if anyone thinks that they represent the authentic sounds of slavery, I’d hope they’d think again. A number of slave narratives describe fiddle music, for example. Slaves held dances and performed for their masters’ dances. But there’s no dance or fiddle music here. (The book itself gives a more rounded picture of the sound-world of the slaves.) The Lomaxes were looking for the most authentic black music they could find, and if they heard any black fiddle music, it probably didn't strike them as black enough. In general, John Lomax preferred unaccompanied singing because it struck him as more African.

On a related note, it seems that only one old blues song makes direct reference to slavery: “Feather Bed” by Cannon’s Jug Stompers. It’s impossible to understand the words from simply listening to the song, but the first few lines seem to run, “I remember the time just before the war, colored man used to hunt about chips and straw. But now, bless God, old master’s dead--colored man plum fool about the feather bed.” (Thanks to Steve Calt for the transcription.)

I prefer another, less direct reference: Bessie Tucker’s “Mean Old Master Blues,” the song that to my mind best captures the slave experience.

- Yuval

Is the Quest for Authenticity Reactionary?

My poker buddy Mark Weinberg turned me onto this quote from New Republic cultural honcho Leon Wieseltier:

"Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.

"Authenticity is a reactionary ideal. And speaking strictly, it is an anti-ideal. It says: what has been is what must be. It is the idolatry of origins."

While I think Wieseltier is mostly right, he's wrong about a few things. First, provenance does inform substance. You cannot divorce substance from provenance, or else you end up with free-floating substance--an idea that has its attractions (remember the New Criticism?), but involves decontextualizing things from their origins. Second, authenticity is a conservative ideal, but not a reactionary one. The real reactionaries out there may pay lip service to authenticity, but their ideologies usually depend on deliberately manufactured untruths--or inauthenticities, to coin a word. Reactionaries are motivated by ideals, and, as Wieseltier rightly points out, authenticity is an anti-ideal.

I would modify Wieseltier's thought as follows:

Authenticity is only one of several standards by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics, and should not be the beginning and end of any such appraisal. It is at heart a conservative notion, one opposed to ideology, for it says: what has been, or what really is, is what should be. It is the idolatry of origins.

Any thoughts?

- Yuval

Back-to-School Authenticity Contest!

When I was in high school (1977-1981), being "authentic" was important if you wanted to be a rebel (or especially a punk) but it was hardly a requirement for success. I became senior class president when a friend of mine who called himself Rat Rondell formed a barbershop quartet (the Rondells) and wrote a song about me called "Groovy Yuvie" ("He's got the eyes, he's got the lips, he's got the . . . Groovy Yuvie, Groovy Yuvie"). After the performance I came out in a green satin "Beatles Forever!" jacket and actually took the microphone off the stand (which nobody else seemed to have thought of) in order to give my rousing speech ("No more car washes in the rain!"). Everybody could tell it was all an act, but I beat seven much more authentic candidates anyway.

I guess things have changed. Check out this story that the AP filed yesterday on authenticity in college admissions--and campuses. (Thanks to Bret Gladstone for pointing this one out.) High schoolers these days seem to be learning from Neil Young and Bob Dylan how to fake incompetence for authenticity's sake. And from Willie Dixon that the best piece is the one with the mistake in it (see Mark Rubin's comment on my faking-incompetence post here).

Right now my kids get awarded medals in school for attendance, honor roll, and--my favorite--citizenship (can illegal immigrant children get on the "citizenship" roll?). If things keep going this way, in ten years time kids in elementary school will be receiving medals for authenticity too. It's a great way to make everyone feel special, isn't it?

- Yuval

Tourism and Authenticity

When I took my family to Chiapas recently--as tourists, of course--I found myself looking for its authentic music. Yes, I’d just cowritten a whole book questioning the wisdom of such a quest, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was in a new place and I wanted to hear the age-old music of that place, unadulterated--not something devised for tourists or heavily influenced by today’s pop. What could be more natural than that?

Well, I only heard two kinds of Chiapanecan music.

The first was a marimba band. In Comitan, the town we stayed in, the municipal marimba band--which, if I remember correctly, consists of eight marimba players, four saxophonists, two trumpeters, a bassist, a drummer, two percussionists, a guitarist, and a singer--plays every Sunday and Thursday night in the town square. The music clearly owes something to Perez Prado and to cumbia, but the marimbas are a local thing--only in Chiapas and neighboring Oaxaca and Guatemala, as far as I know, is marimba music so prominent. It’s a tremendously vibrant tradition. Dozens of people were dancing, and the kids all take marimba lessons. In the CD stores were literally hundreds of marimba CDs by dozens of Chiapanecan bands with long names. I picked up a few, and a few old LPs too.

The second was a musician from a Mexican folkloric group who had painted his face and wore an outlandish costume with some Mayan and Aztec elements. He played a fife with a drum on the end, which he hit with a stick. His folkloric group was far from authentic--they clearly had some anachronistic elements, and there was a lot of theater in what they did. But his music sounded quite close to some of the music on a couple of terrific CDs of authentic Mayan music. One I bought in Chiapas, and documents a Mayan music festival in 2005, and the other one came from Smithsonian Folkways--it’s called Modern Maya--and was recorded in the early 1970s. Many of the songs on these CDs boast an inimitable rhythm--the beats are so uneven as to preclude accurate notation--and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the music is pre-Colombian in origin. Some of it sounds completely unlike any music I’ve ever heard.

The two traditions have nothing at all in common. This reflects the reality of Chiapas--the Mayans there speak primarily their own languages instead of Spanish, wear clothes that they fashion themselves, and stick doggedly to their own traditions. It might appear at first glance that this is all for the benefit of the tourists (who were surprisingly few, and even more surprisingly non-gringo), but my trips to Mayan villages confirmed the solidity of their traditions.

So does this mean I’m a complete hypocrite? Why do I get so much enjoyment from authentic Chiapanecan music? Why was I searching for it in the first place? Were my criteria for authenticity justified--or even justifiable? Was I fetishizing the Chiapanecans as exotic, or “other,” by looking for the unadulterated products of their cultures?

I’m not sure I’m ready to answer these questions yet. But I will say this--it’s in our nature, in our bones, to search for the authentic. We just can’t give it up. No matter how hard we try to get away from it, it will always come up.

And when we find authentic music, it will reward us if we let it. I’m posting below some authentic Chiapanecan music which I love, and which I hope you love too.

I should add one more thought first. I didn’t hear any truly inauthentic Chiapanecan music when I was there. But perhaps if I were to hear, for example, Chiapanecan rock or jazz or disco it would reward me just as much as this more authentic stuff. Maybe my touristic authenticity bent blinded me to some amazing Chiapanecan delights. The sad thing is that it’ll probably take another several thousand dollars for me to go back to Chiapas and find out.

First, three marimba bands, in chronological order:

Marimba Orquesta Reyna Frailescana de los Hnos. Garcia: Mi compadre
La Marimba Orquesta de los Hnos. Hernandez Villegas: La carcacha
Marimba Orquesta la Reyna Tuxtleca: Mesa que mas aplauda (el za za za)

Now, from Smithsonian Folkways’ Modern Maya: The Indian Music of Chiapas, Mexico:

Song of peace, Chalchiuitan
New year's prayer, Chalchiuitan
Good Friday service and Carneval, Tila

And from XV Festival Maya Zoque (2005), a Tseltal group called Bapus from San Juan Cancuc, performing a song they call simply San Juan.

- Yuval

Iggy on Authenticity

From an intensely interesting interview by Bret Gladstone that appeared in Pitchfork yesterday:

Pitchfork: People seem very concerned with what's "authentic," but nobody seems to know what that actually means.

Iggy Pop: Yeah, I know. When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial. These were highly artificial groups. The Sex Pistols, these guys took pains to tell people that it was all a con: "Don't listen to us."

Pitchfork: Dylan was a bit like that too . . .

Iggy Pop: Same deal.

- Yuval

Northern Attitude

I’ve been thinking about how various UK bands deal with their northern identity and how the media treats them. The Beatles made it trendy to have a northern accent - prior to that, northern accents were rare in UK popular music apart from the folksy approach of singers such as Gracie Fields and George Formby. From then on, it was far easier to be seen as a serious rock (or pop) act but to retain a strong northern identity.

In recent decades, northern accents and ‘attitude’ have often been perceived (or self-consciously deployed) as signifiers of something grittier and ‘more real’ within UK music (to some degree the same is true of the American Deep South, though it is not an exact parallel). There are too many examples (and possible counter-examples) to list the entire history, but here are a few.

The Fall, despite being intensely artistic and obscure in many respects, embody ‘northern attitude’ in other ways. Mark E. Smith is famously rude and difficult, has stayed close to his roots in Manchester, and likes to treat music as ‘just a job’ like any other. This dour approach embodies a deliberate proletarianism, as opposed to the perceived snobbery of the South-East and London. He is clearly wary of being seduced by the music business, and he has dealt more or less effectively with this by remaining as self-consciously Mancunian as possible. A more corruptible figure might have had greater financial success, but the respect in which he is held revolves largely around the feeling that he has remained uncorrupted, and his northern attitude is in this respect a badge of honour. 

Oasis strike me as having profited by displaying a rather cartoonish version of their northernness. During the Britpop period, the press hyped the rivalry between Oasis and Blur. Oasis portrayed themselves (and were accepted by the press) as a hard-working, basic rock band who were taking rock music back to its roots. By contrast Blur (the Londoners) were seen as arty and effete. The media focussed on Oasis’s aggressive posturing and blokey appeal, simultaneously valorising and patronising the band. The fact that Oasis went on to play some of the largest concerts ever in the UK at Knebworth and elsewhere is testament to the fact the public related to the band, perceiving in them something down-to-earth and real.

Today we have the Arctic Monkeys, from Sheffield, probably the best young band in the UK. The interesting thing about the Arctic Monkeys is that they hardly play up their northernness at all. They sing and speak in strong Sheffield accents, and were initially truculent about attending awards ceremonies, but there is little self-conscious mythologising of their northern roots (in sharp contrast to Oasis). In truth, they are simply a brilliant band that happen to come from Sheffield, but the North-South divide has come to be such a strong part of the mythology of UK music that it is almost impossible for the media to talk about the Arctic Monkeys without resorting to the old cliches of northern attitude.

- Hugh

Underneath the Harlem Moon

This post has very little to do with authenticity, I’m afraid. It’s more about race, irony, and the way a song’s meaning changes over time. In that sense, it resembles the exploration of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Nobody’s Dirty Business” and “Frankie” to which we devoted the second chapter of our book. It’s an attempt to take a particular song and look at how its meanings have changed over time.

The song is “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” Mack Gordon’s first hit, in 1932. Gordon was a Polish Jew, originally named Morris Gitler, who had come to the United States in 1908 at the age of four. Now he was 28, and having appeared in vaudeville, he decided to pen a minstrel number. His lyrics were pure racist malarkey:

            If you're crying for dear old Southland,
            Candy yams and lovin' Sams and 'Ginia hams and such,
            If you're sighin' for your dear old Southland,
            Sunny skies and mammy's pies you idolize so much,
            You don't have to cry so very hard:
            The South is in your own back yard.

            Creole babies walk along with rhythm in their thighs,
            Rhythm in their feet and in their lips and in their eyes.
            Where do high-browns find the kind of love that satisfies?
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

            There's no fields of cotton, pickin' cotton is taboo;
            They don't live in cabins like old folks used to do:
            Their cabin is a penthouse up on Lenox Avenue,
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

            They just live on dancing,
            They're never blue or forlorn.
            'Tain't no sin to laugh and grin,
            That's why darkies were born.
   
            They shout “Hallelujah!” ev'ry time they're feeling low,
            Ev'ry sheik is dressed up like a "jo ja" [Georgia] gigolo;
            You may call it madness but they call it "hi de ho,"
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

Joe Rines, a white Boston bandleader, popularized the song, and it became a huge hit, with at least eight different versions from different bands.

Thirty-eight years later, Randy Newman recorded a lovely version of the song on his second album, 12 Songs. It closed side one, preceding, on the other side, “Yellow Man,” which is equally racist malarkey, and a satirical version of “My Old Kentucky Home,” a Stephen Foster minstrel number. Newman’s point was unmistakable: he was singing racist and demeaning songs in order to perturb his listeners. It worked. Everyone who listened to “Underneath the Harlem Moon” got uncomfortable. As Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train, “Here [Newman] was, a struggling singer whose only possible audience would be urbane, liberal rock ’n’ roll fans, and he was unveiling . . . the charms of racism.” (Newman would go on to write many even richer evocations of American racism, among them “Sail Away,” “Rednecks,” and “Short People.”)

OK, so here’s a terribly racist song from the early 1930s, written and performed by whites, and demeaning blacks. There’s nothing so terribly new and shocking about that, is there? I could name dozens of other examples.

But what should we make of the fact that half of the people who performed “Underneath the Harlem Moon” in the 1930s were black?

The Washboard Rhythm Kings did it. So did Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra, with Katherine Handy (W. C. Handy’s daughter) on vocals. Ethel Waters performed it in the movies. The Brown Sisters did too. Even Billie Holiday wrote, in Lady Sings the Blues (page 65), that she used it to audition for a spot in a Philadelphia theater. It appears that black people liked this song.

The mind reels. How is this possible? Their performances of the song sound full of unfeigned enthusiasm and joy. Did they completely overlook the racism of its lyrics?

Let’s consider a few examples. First, Katherine Handy's version. It’s pretty straight, lyrically--she only makes a couple of minor changes, including “laugh and grin” to “guzzle down gin.” And she swings the melody pretty nicely.

Let’s take the Brown Sisters' version next. This trio never released any records, and they were clearly heavily influenced by the Boswell Sisters. This is, in fact, their only recorded performance, from the mid-1930s film Harlem Review. It’s a terrific version, but at the end they add: “Ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones!” Are they completely negating the racial aspect of the song by removing their skin? You tell me.

Lastly, let’s listen to Ethel Waters's version, from a fairly appalling 21-minute film called Rufus Jones for President (you can download the whole film) starring Sammy Davis, Jr. as a seven-year-old whose mother, played by Waters, dreams he gets elected president. First off, Waters changes the third person plural to the first person plural throughout. Then she changes “darkies” to “we schwartzes.” “You may call it madness” becomes “white folks call it madness.” And then she really goes to town, supplying brand new--and brilliant--lyrics for the last half of the song. It’s an incredible act of reclamation, changing racism to triumph. And it dates from 1933, only a year after the song’s debut.

Here are Ethel Waters’s additional lyrics:

            Once we wore bandannas, now we wear Parisian hats,
            Once we were barefoot now we wear shoes and spats,
            Once we were Republican but now we’re Democrats
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

            We don’t pick no cotton, pickin’ cotton is taboo.
            All we pick is numbers, and that includes you white folks too,
            ’Cause if we hit, we pay our rent on any avenue
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

We just thrive on dancin’;
Why be blue and forlorn?
We just laugh, grin, let the landlord in--
That’s why house rent parties were born!

            We also drink our gin, puff our reefers, when we’re feelin’ low,
            Then we’re ready to step out and take care of any so-and-so.
            Don’t stop for law or no traffic when we’re rarin’ to go,
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

Are we getting closer to answering our original question--how could black people like this song? The answer, I think, has four parts.

First, they didn’t necessarily like the song--perhaps they were singing it because it was so popular with the white audience. That might explain the Fletcher Henderson, Washboard Rhythm Kings, and Ethel Waters versions--all of them played for whites. It might explain Billie Holiday’s audition--she says she chose the song because it was “real popular.” But it doesn’t explain the Brown Sisters’ choice of that song--Harlem Review was strictly a race movie, made by blacks and shown to blacks.

Second, the song was a celebration of Harlem, however couched in racist metaphors and analogies; and blacks had good reason to celebrate Harlem, the locus of the Harlem Renaissance, in those days. This was something black entertainers could relate to.

Third, blacks were so inured to minstrel imagery by this point that it may have been like water rolling off their backs. Remember that many of the most popular minstrel troupes of the 1920s were black, not just blackface. Nowadays the song’s blatant racist imagery strikes everyone who comes across it as unspeakably awful. Ben Ratliff is horrified by it when he writes about Henderson’s version in his excellent guide to the 100 most important jazz records; Rolling Stone, reviewing 12 Songs, wrote of it that “every line contains some of the most blatant racial typing ever set down in song.” But back in 1932 it was simply par for the course.

Lastly, and most importantly, these artists weren’t just performing straight versions of the song, like the white folks were. They were jazzing it up, and in doing so, they were signifying. Ethel Waters did it best, but even Katherine Handy was doing it a little bit.

And that points out another, broader difference between how whites and blacks have approached racism in music. White folks use a distant kind of irony, and there’s no better example than Newman. They make white racism seductive, thereby problematizing it. Blacks, on the other hand, tend to keep things close to home, and there’s no better example than Ethel Waters. Their versions of white racism are often fierce and defiant.

I want to look briefly at a couple of more contemporary examples: CocoRosie’s “Jesus Loves Me” and damali ayo’s “White Noise” (ayo wrote the piece, based on the questions white folks asked her; it’s performed by Madeleine Sandford). Both are straightforward presentations of white racism.

Just like Newman, CocoRosie makes racism pretty--there’s no essential difference between this song and Newman’s version of “Underneath the Harlem Moon.” These songs make my skin crawl, but they’re meant to.

But I have to confess I find Ethel Waters’s version of "Harlem Moon" more effective than Randy Newman’s, and ayo’s piece more effective than CocoRosie’s. Both Waters and ayo reclaim racist words as their own, making them strangely triumphant in the process.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to Will Friedwald for the Ethel Waters track, Marcus Boon for the CocoRosie track, and damali ayo for her track.