Degenerate Music

"Degenerate Music - a detailed statement by State Secretary Dr. Hans Severus Ziegler, general manager of the German National Theater in Weimar.

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The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfDK, or Fighting League for German Culture) was founded in 1929 by Alfred Rosenberg, with the aim of promoting German culture while fighting the cultural threat of liberalism. Ironically, this organisation – best known for disrupting concerts and music classes, insulting and threatening artists, and distributing inflammatory and anti-Semitic pamphlets – was originally aimed at the nation’s elite. Hitler and other early Nazi leaders were searching for a way beyond mob-style violence, and decided to create a cultural organisation as a way to court the intelligentsia.

During the first years of its existence, the relatively small and regionally-organised KfdK attracted many intellectuals and, increasingly, musicians. With its conservative agenda of fighting ‘degenerative Jewish and Negro’ influences, it spent much energy promoting the ‘cleansing’ of museums, university faculties, and concert programmes of unwanted artists. In general, the KfdK appealed to radical nationalists and anti-Semites, to those who felt betrayed by defeat in World War I and by the Treaty of Versailles, and to those who felt outraged by the leftist, modernising and ‘cosmopolitan’ tendencies of the Weimar Republic.

The KfdK was initially not very aggressive, relying instead on lectures, intimidation and propaganda. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it became increasingly violent, with the support of the Stormabteilung (SA, Storm Troopers, or brown shirts) changing both its techniques and its membership pool. The KfdK had its own orchestra, which was selected to perform a special concert for Hitler’s birthday. It also acquired control over the important music journal Die Musik, which gave it an official outlet for racist and nationalist opinions on music.

(http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/kampfbund-fr-deutsch/)

Centre Section of the triptych Grosstadt, 1927-8, by Otto Dix (1891-1969). It is an evocation of the Gershwin (1898-1937) period - the Jazz Age. This age and the kind of music (Jazz) were condemned by the Nazis as decadent and racially degenerate

Indeed, the Nazis were so fearful of African and African-American culture (particularly jazz) that in 1930 a law was passed that was titled "Against Negro Culture." In other words, the Nazis were clearly aware of the potential for popular cultural forms to taint what they considered to be genuine Aryan culture—whether this taint was a result of marriage or of music. As a consequence, the Germans often conflated stereotypes of African-American musical performers with those of Jews and Africans into some of their most heinous propaganda pieces.

Two of the most infamous and well-known Nazi propaganda artworks were posters which advertised cultural events. In a poster advertising an exhibition of entartete musik (degenerate music), for example, the viewer is confronted with a dark-skinned man in a top hat with a large gold earring in his ear.

This distorted caricature of an African homosexual male in black face playing a saxophone has a Star of David clearly emblazoned on his lapel. To the National Socialists, the most polluting elements of modern culture were represented by this single individual. They were suggesting that anyone who listened to jazz (or enjoyed other forms of art that they judged to be degenerate) could be transformed into such a barbarous figure.

Nazi propaganda poster titled "LIBERATORS" that epitomizes many perennially-recurring themes of anti-Americanism, by the Dutch SS-Storm magazine that then belonged to a radical SS wing of the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (1944)

Toward the end of the war, the Nazis circulated posters in a somewhat desperate attempt to get their "white European brothers" to join their cause. In one infamous poster, the designer depicted a multi-armed monster clutching two white American women. Attached to his muscle-bound body are iconic references to the Ku Klux Klan, Judaism (the Star of David), boxing gloves, jazz dancing, and a lynching noose. At his middle is a sign that reads in English "Jitterbug—the Triumph of Civilization." This poster was directed at white European men, and it urged them to protect their wives and their culture against a coming invasion of primitive, inferior American men. As occurred in the poster that warned against jazz, this image conflated stereotypes of the Jew with that of the African in an attempt to frighten white (Aryan) Europe and America into joining their cause. The exaggerated racist stereotypes served to strengthen and amplify widely accepted attitudes regarding racial and ethnic superiority. With these images, the National Socialists were offering their justifications as to why certain groups should be feared and thus eliminated.

(http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/art-propaganda)

Mississippi Cotton Picker: Charlie Pride

Charlie Pride

One of 11 siblings born into a poor, Mississippi-based sharecropping family, Charley Pride was raised on a cotton farm, where he was forced to work for most of his childhood. At an early age he developed a passion for country music, purchasing his first guitar at the age of 14 and teaching himself to play by listening to radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry. After turning seventeen he enrolled in a baseball training camp, eventually joining the American Negro League and playing for teams in Detroit, Memphis and Birmingham.

Two years in the army interrupted his baseball ambitions, but after his discharge in 1958 he resumed his involvement with semi-professional leagues, supporting himself during the day through various manual labor jobs. His hopes of moving into the major leauges were ultimately blocked by the racist attitudes pervasive at the time, and by 1962, after being denied a tryout for the New York Mets, he left the sport behind in favor of his music.

Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi, on March 18, 1938. (population 489, from the 2010 US census)

Throughout his involvement in baseball, Pride had continued to develop his musical skills, performing on the bus between games for his teammates and occasionally joining different bands onstage. At the urging of country performers Red Sovine and Red Foley, he traveled to Nashville in 1963 and, despite initial disinterest from the locals, secured a management contract with Jack Johnson.

"I'm not a black man singing white man music, I am an American singing American music. I worked out those problem years ago, and everybody else will have to work their way out of it too."

A year later a demo was cut with producer Jack Clement, and the two songs -- The Snakes Crawl At Night and Atlantic Coastal Line -- attracted the attention of RCA Nashville chief Chet Atkins, who quickly signed the singer to a recording contract. Snakes was chosen as the first single in 1966, making a strong showing in the charts, as did its two follow-up releases later in the year, Before I Met You and Just Between You And Me. Due to concern about a backlash against a black country singer, Pride's skin color was kept concealed at the beginning of his career -- and live performances did result in some awkward moments when audiences saw him for the first time. In time the subject of his race became irrelevant, and Pride established himself as one of the leading country acts of his time, topping the country charts 36 times between 1969 and 1984.

In 1986 Pride discontinued his long association with RCA, which was now directing most of its resources towards young, up-and-coming performers. A deal was signed with the Opryland label 16th Avenue, with whom he released several reasonably successful records before the label ceased to exist. An arrangement was subsequently made with Honest Entertainment in the 1990s, but by this time Pride's recording career was largely over. Pride continued to be active as a performer, however, as well as pursuing numerous business interests, amongst which are the Charley Pride Theater in Missouri, majority holdings in the First Texas Bank, his publishing company The Pride Group, and a variety of real estate and broadcasting properties. An autobiography was published in 1994 (source: http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000023952/)

Charlie Pride: Cotton Fields


Charlie Pride: Mississippi cotton pickin' Delta town w/Lyrics

In Trinidad, Carnival’s Commercial Has Critics

The New York Times reports: "Carnival’s Louder Commercial Beat Adds Dissonance," by John Eligon, 9 March 2011:

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — To some people here, Dean Ackin, 38, with his boyish face, is an inspiration of entrepreneurship, a bearer of this country’s evolving culture. To others, he is a threat to this nation’s most beloved social and cultural treasure: Carnival.

Mr. Ackin runs one of the country’s most popular Carnival bands, the groups of people who don costumes and masquerade — or play Mas, as locals call it — in the raucous annual two-day street parade. The roughly 5,000 spots available in Mr. Ackin’s band, Tribe, sell out every year almost as fast as they go on sale. Demand has been so high since he started Tribe in 2005 that Mr. Ackin just started a second band.

But some say Mr. Ackin and others like him, who have in recent years spun profitable, year-round businesses out of organizing these bands, threaten the existence of Carnival as Trinidadians know it.

By shunning the conservative, traditional costumes for cheaper, skimpier outfits that are sometimes produced outside of Trinidad, these new bands, critics say, are distorting their forebears’ creation and sending work elsewhere at a time when the government and others are trying to turn Trinidadian-style Carnival into a more profitable and exportable industry.

“We call it two-piece and fries, the bikini and the bras,” said Stephen Derek, a traditional costume maker, referring to the skimpy costumes that have become a staple of the new bands. “The costume comes like a fast food. To them, the bottom line is profit. It has nothing to do about country or culture anymore.”

The entrepreneurial bandleaders counter that they are part of a natural evolution, merely offering what people want.

“If you really look at those people who play Mas with the younger bands, or if you talk to a visitor abroad and say: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of Trinidad Carnival? What band would you play with?’ they would call Tribe or they would call one of the younger bands,” Mr. Ackin said. “That says we are reaching out further than the traditional bands. We are reaching out to the international market.”

With few exceptions, the 1.3 million people living on these twin West Indian islands believe that they do Carnival better than anyone in the world. But the generational clash has raised questions over how today’s Carnival is shaping the country.

Is the reliance on mass-produced bikinis — a far cry from the elaborate, hand-crafted costumes Trinidadians had grown accustomed to — stifling the creative works that have been the hallmark of traditional Carnival, which the government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been pressing to revive since she took office last year?

Or does it reflect the country’s new energy, representative of a push beyond Trinidad’s reputation for complacency in developing revenue streams beyond oil production?

Carnival festivities here begin in earnest right after Christmas, but the signature parade was held on Monday and Tuesday, right before Ash Wednesday, adhering to the Catholic tradition of one final period of revelry before the start of Lent.

The tradition here started with the island’s 19th-century slave masters, and was carried on by the African slaves after they were freed in 1834. To make the custom their own, former slaves took to burning sugar cane, to symbolize their freedom from the plantations here, and in later years residents began wearing costumes that both portrayed folkloric characters from Africa and mimicked their colonizers.

Now the event attracts about 40,000 visitors to Trinidad annually, nearly half of them from the United States. In parades held throughout the country, as many as 300,000 people march around trucks blasting Soca music, according to government estimates. Estimates of the economic windfall from Carnival vary widely, from just over $27 million to hundreds of millions.

What distinguishes Carnival here is an emphasis on getting people — even tourists — to purchase a costume from a band for as little as $200 and march. Several bands like Tribe have taken it a step further, charging $400 to $1,000 for a whirlwind experience that includes an open bar for both days, meals, security and shuttle service.

Mr. Ackin said that Tribe, which has around 5,000 masqueraders each year, usually has a waiting list 2,000 people long. Several celebrities have also marched with Tribe, including the actor Idris Elba an the billionaire Richard Branson.

His new band, Bliss, had just over 2,000 masqueraders this year and a long waiting list as well, he said. Over all, the market to pay hundreds of dollars to join a band, even in a tight economy, seems to be growing.

Mr. Ackin, who has emerged as a quasi-celebrity here, spent years working in a bank and running a women’s fashion boutique. But he and his wife, Monique, a co-bandleader, got into the Carnival business by creating a band in 2000 for J’Ouvert, the early-morning parade that kicks off Carnival. His company now organizes five parties around Carnival time here. It also organizes parties at Carnivals in Miami, Washington and London.

The transformation of Carnival bands into businesses has disrupted the social order in which bands used to consist of friends getting together to hang out, make costumes, and eat and drink together, traditionalists said.

“The designers or the bandleaders of those other bands call themselves designers and artists, but I think that is fraud,” said Brian MacFarlane, whose band won large band of the year in each of the previous four years. “If you really, truly are a designer and artist, you’d be holding true to the art form and the culture.”

Indeed, Trinidad’s Carnival has started to resemble that of “Brazil in a lot of ways,” said Winston Peters, the minister of arts and multiculturalism, “where you just have decorated bikinis and stuff with a headpiece. I can’t be against that because that’s what people want. At the same time, we don’t want the traditional Mas of our country to die.”

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the bikini costumes is that many bands import some of them from China. Mr. Peters has proposed putting a 2,000 percent tax on imported costumes.

Mr. Ackin said that Tribe and Bliss imported about 20 percent of their costume pieces, a necessity to meet their demand and get high-quality production unavailable in Trinidad.

People on both sides of the argument seem to agree that Trinidad needs to better harness the skills of people in the Carnival business — from the artisans who make the costumes to the people who manage the bands — and the country’s resources to create an exportable industry.

The government is considering increasing the prize money for the bands with the best costumes, and it has started a band with which anyone can march in a homemade costume. Those efforts come after the creation of a Mas Academy that teaches and certifies people in Carnival trades.

Derrick Lewis, who, along with his brother Dane, started a wildly popular band, Island People, in 2005, said it was important to find ways to marry the traditional Carnival with the new.

“I think popular culture will become culture,” said Mr. Lewis, 52. “The same that happened with hip-hop. I’ve seen Kanye West performing with full orchestral violins and stuff like that. I think we need to encourage the fusion of the traditional and the contemporary.” (source: The New York Times, Vijai Singh contributed reporting.)

Cotton Picker B.B. King from Indianola, Mississippi.

From the USA Today: INDIANOLA, Miss. — B.B. King's fingers were lightning fast, too smooth to be described as machinelike.

His peers, even the most accomplished ones, would watch in amazement. How does he do that? He had no explanation. His fingers, he told them, were simply an extension of his soul.

King, a teenager then, knew he was good. He could pick more than 400 pounds of cotton a day. His personal best was 480.

"I had a cousin, Birkett Davis. Me and him could pick a bale of cotton a day. That was 900 pounds back then," King says. "And, man, we were proud of that. I still am."

King's fingers eventually moved from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the neck of a Gibson electric guitar, affectionately nicknamed Lucille. He has played his signature blues in 90 countries. In 1987, he earned a lifetime achievement Grammy and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Just shy of 83 (his birthday is Tuesday), he's still making music. He plays about 100 shows a year and released a new album of blues standards, One Kind Favor, in August.

Listen to what the blues master has to say about the $15-million museum bearing his name that's slated to open Saturday in the small Mississippi Delta town where he sweated for a few cents a day picking cotton nearly eight decades ago.(LA Times)

Little is missing from B.B. King's wish list these days.

"Well, maybe a beautiful woman to hold in my arms," he says with a smile. "I love women."

Twice divorced and the father of 15 children, he has battled diabetes in recent years, but his health appears good. King looks slimmer than he has in years, though he has trouble maneuvering stairs or standing for long periods of time.

"Honestly, I feel great," he says, sipping a Diet Coke shortly after the unveiling ceremonies for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which opened Saturday here in his hometown of Indianola after five years in the planning.

"I sure don't feel 82 — or 83. Whatever I am."

"When you're running track, they pass you -- I don't know what you call it . . . -- the baton. I just picked up the baton and kept running with it. But guys like Robert Johnson, Jimmy Rogers, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and I could name you many, many more -- they are the ones that were the base," King said last week during a stop in L.A. "They could have picked any one of them to name the museum after." (LA Times)

He's still hungry for knowledge. "My brain is like a sponge. I'm interested in anything out there. I want to learn. Because to be honest, I always feel sort of second-best when I am around people who went to school, who got an education."

Sitting on the stage of a small auditorium where visitors can watch a short documentary about his life before touring the museum, King is in a reflective mood.

He's thinking of his mother, Nora Ella King, who died when he was 9.

"I would pay whatever it would take for a picture of her," says King, a white handkerchief in his left hand alternately dabbing away sweat and tears. "I don't even have a good picture of her in my mind.

Elvis Presley and BB King

"A lot of people back then thought if you let somebody take a picture of you, you were giving them your soul," King explains. "Plus, taking pictures was complicated and expensive. We were country folks who didn't have a lot of money."

And away he went, on a precious ramble down memory lane, about growing up as a hand on a plantation where they ate whole pigs, ears and all. Where they drank crystal-clear water from an artesian well. Where they had no electricity and nothing but work awaiting them at sunrise. Where worries seemed few.

He earned 75 cents a day chopping cotton, 35 cents per hundred pounds picking it.

Map: Indianola, Mississippi

"But don't get me wrong, that was a lot of money in those days," King says. "I loved my work and I loved my life."

Saturday was always his favorite day. He was off work by noon and headed to town as quickly as he could put on a fresh shirt.

King became interested in the guitar at age 6 while watching the Rev. Archie Fair pick and sing at the Sanctified Church of God in Christ in Indianola. King bought his first when he was 12, a red Stella acoustic. It cost $15, about his monthly salary.

"I worked for the Catledge family, and Mr. Catledge agreed to buy it for me, and he would take out half of it one month, and then half the next," King says.

He even wanted to be a preacher.

"But when I would go into Indianola and play there on the corner of Church and Second Street every Saturday, I got different reactions," King recalls. "When I played gospel, people would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I was going to be good one day. But when somebody asked me to play a blues song, they would also give me a tip.

"Sometimes I made more money on Saturday than I made all week driving a tractor."

"I don't live in my home state now, but I bought some land down there and I was going to build me a house on it," he said softly. "After my demise I wanted this to be open as a museum . . . But they said, 'Why wait till you die? We do it now, you could see it!' I like that idea." (LA Times)

He moved to Memphis in 1946 to pursue a music career. The blues were taking hold of him.

At some point in the past 62 years, that turned around. King got hold of the blues and redefined the genre.

In 2003, Rolling Stone named King the third-best guitar player in history, behind only Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman.

"Like a fool I let 'em come to my house and I said, 'Anything you want, you get it.' And they took damn near everything except the house -- and me," he said, still chuckling. "But I'm glad to do it, because I love to share everything I've had, trying to learn to play blues and trying to do what I've done." (LA Times)

"No question, B.B. King is the most influential blues player of all time," says blues historian Scott Barretta, host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Highway 61 radio show. "The way he bent the strings, his phrasing, his technique" changed the blues.

"B.B. grew up around traditional Delta blues, but he wasn't totally defined by it. He also loved big bands like Count Basie and the Kansas City swing sound. He took all that and created his unique sound. And just about anybody who plays blues or rock has been influenced by it." (source: USA Today)

PBS American Roots Episode 3: Chapter 2: B.B. King

Cuban Rumba's African Slave Roots

This had its origin with the African Negro slaves imported into Cuba, whose dances emphasized the movements of the body rather than the feet. The tune was considered less important than the complex cross rhythms, being provided by a percussion of pots, spoons, bottles, etc. (Raffe, 1964, 431).

It evolved in Havanna in the 19th century by combination with the Contradanza (Sadie, 1980, 5/86). The name 'Rumba' possibly derives from the term 'rumboso orquestra' which was used for a dance band in 1807 (Sadie, 1980, 5/88), although in Spanish, the word 'rumbo' means 'route', 'rumba' means 'heap pile', and 'rhum' is of course an intoxicating liquor popular in the Caribbean (Smith, 1971, 502), any of which might have been used descriptively when the dance was being formed. The name has also been claimed to be derived from the Spanish word for 'Carousel' (Morris, 1969, 1134).

The rural form of the Rumba in Cuba was described as a pantomime of barnyard animals, and was an exhibition rather than a participation dance (Ellfeldt, 1974, 59). The maintenance of steady level shoulders while dancing was possibly derived from the way the slaves moved while carrying heavy burdens (Rust, 1969, 105). The step called the 'Cucaracha' was stomping on cockroaches. The 'Spot Turn' was walking around the rim of a cartwheel (Rust, 1969, 105). The popular Rumba tune 'La Paloma' was known in Cuba in 1866 (Sadie, 1980, 10/530).

The Rumba was introduced into the U.S.A. in the 1930's as a composite of this rural Rumba with the Guaracha, the Son, and the Cuban Bolero (unrelated to the Spanish Bolero) (Ellfeldt, 1974, 59). It was particularly popularised in 1935 by George Raft, who played the part of a suave dancer who wins the heart of an heiress through dance, in the movie 'Rumba', although the male dancing was done mainly by Frank Veloz.

The British dance teacher Pierre Margolie visited Havanna in 1947 and decided that the Rumba was danced with the break step on beat 2 of the bar, rather than on beat 1 as in the American Rumba. This is not entirely true, as the 'beat' of the music is traditionally determined by the rhythm of the Claves (two sticks being hit together). The Claves are hit on half-beats numbers 1,4,7 in the first bar of a two-bar phrase, and half-beats 3,5 of the second bar. Counting full beats, these correspond to beat 1, the half beat before 3, and beat 4 of the first bar, and beats 2 and 3 of the second bar. Ideally one might dance 5 steps over the two bars to match the Clave beats. But instead it was decided to dance only on one of the bars of the Clave sequence. The American Rumba is danced on the first bar Clave beat. Pierre decided to use the second bar, stepping on beats 2 and 3, and he added an extra step on beat 4 for no obvious reason. He brought this back to Britain, together with many steps he learned from Pepe Rivera in Havanna. These steps together with dancing the break on beat 2 rather than beat 1, after many years of heated debate in the 1940's and 1950's, became part of the standard International Cuban Rumba. (Lavelle, 1975, 1).

With only a transfer of weight from one foot to the other on beat 1 of each bar, and the absence of an actual step on this beat, the dance has developed a very sensual character. Beat 1 is a strong beat of the music, but all that moves on that beat are the hips, so the music emphasises the dancing of the hips. This together with the slow tempo of the music (116 beats/minute) makes the dance very romantic. Steps are actually taken on beats 2, 3, and 4. Weight tranfer and turns are performed on the intervening half beats. Again, as in the Samba, the weight is kept forward, with forward steps taken toe-flat, and with minimal movement of the upper torso throughout. (source: History of Latin American Dancing)

Fundamentals of Rumba

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

From Black Banjo Gathering this article "About the Banjo," written by Tony Thomas discusses the banjo and American folk music. Tony Tomas writes: The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s. Originally the banjos were made out of gourds and skins. The strings numbered between three and nine, with four- and five-string banjos being popular. A distinguishing feature was one or more short drone strings sounded with the thumb.

Banjo playing became an object of popular white culture in the US and later in Britain as a result of the Blackface Minstrel shows that became a popular form of entertainment in the 1830s and 1840s. Minstrels from the South who had actually learned real African-American music like Joel Sweeney popularized the banjo by introducing the clawhammer or frailing style that Blacks had brought from Africa. Commercial banjo makers later claimed that Sweeney invented the banjo in order to cover up its African origin. Sweeney did work with luthiers and drum makers to help perfect drum head banjos, the most common type, and is thought to have popularized the five-string banjo as opposed to the four-string banjo. Banjo playing became widely popular among working class and poor people both urban and rural. While African Americans continued their tradition with the instrument, whites also became fans, makers and manufacturers of the banjo.

Banjos began to be built by fine instrument makers, factory scaled manufacturers, as well as working people and farmers who worked with home-made materials. Gradually, the sturdier drum head style of banjo began to replace the gourd banjos.

Banjo playing expanded in the late 19th Century when classic banjo playing finger-picking styles made the banjo a popular instrument among the upper classes and social elites of the US and Britain. While efforts were made to distance the banjo from its African origins and its continued popularity as the instrument of the poor and the Black, nevertheless the outstanding player of period was Horace Weston, an African-American who excelled at the classic, minstrel, and traditional African-American banjo styles.

In the last 30 years of the 19th Century, manufacturers added frets to banjos to make them easier to play for beginners; these became a standard part for most manufactured banjos while people continued to make their own fretless and gourd banjos. In the same years banjo-based instruments aimed at taking the place of various orchestra instruments such as the banjo cello, banjo-bass, mandolin banjo, and banjo mandolin flourished as banjo orchestras became popular particularly among college students.

The twentieth century saw the emergence of steel strings on the banjos. This meant banjos could be played with a plectrum or pick. This led to the plectrum banjo and the more popular tenor banjo, which were both four-string banjos with the fifth drone string removed. These instruments proved popular for pop, dance, tango, and Jazz bands until they started to be replaced by the guitar in the late 1920s and 1930s.

While five-string banjo playing retained a support among African-Americans and whites in the Piedmont and Appalachian South, five string banjo playing declined until the explosion of Bluegrass in the post war years, powered by Earl Scruggs’ dynamic style of finger picking, Bluegrass led to the repopularization of the banjo among Southern whites. The “Folk Revival” that began in the late 1950s popularized the banjo among college youth. A crucial part of that folk revival was the struggle by some young folk players to learn and reproduce traditional Southern white and Black banjo styles played before Bluegrass. This led to a revival among some players of old-time clawhammer and finger picking styles.

The once ignored music of traditional African-American five-string banjoists from Piedmont areas of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia began to be heard again in the collection and performance of banjoists like Dink Roberts, John Snipes, and Odell Thompson. The publication of Dr. Cece Conway’s African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions linked these players to the African origins of the banjo as well as to the African origins of clawhammer and other traditional banjo styles among white old-time players. The issue by Dr. Conway and Scott Odell of Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina & Virginia, a CD of these Black banjoists’ music, brought the original Black voice of the five-string banjo back to the banjo world. These events helped encourage a layer of African-Americans to take up the banjo and continue and expand the traditions of their elders.

Today Black banjoists are exploring the original Black traditions of clawhammer and finger style five-string banjo, as well as reviving the traditions of Horace Weston in classic banjo, and continuing the great music of the great Black tenor, plectrum, and six-string banjoists of the 20th Century.

For more history of the banjo, please visit www.dhyatt.com/history.html, by George Gibson.

The Historical Context of "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

From CNN, Professor Rudolph P. Byrd responds to an unenlightened article posted by Timothy Askew discussing James Weldon Johnson's masterpiece, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Professor Byrd's article "Song reflects racial pride, never intended as anthem," on 30 July 2010:

In a recent article on CNN.com, Timothy Askew, author of "Cultural Hegemony and African American Patriotism: An Analysis of the Song 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' " makes certain claims regarding James Weldon Johnson's hymn that are not only historically inaccurate, but also are potentially harmful to Johnson's legacy as a pioneering figure in the modern civil rights movement.

"Askew decided the song was intentionally written with no specific reference to any race or ethnicity," the article stated. Nothing could be further from the truth.

James Weldon Johnson

The agnostic Johnson carefully reconstructs the genesis and context for the composition of his hymn in his autobiography "Along This Way." There he writes: "A group of young men decided to hold on February 12 [1900] a celebration of Lincoln's birthday. I was put down for an address, which I began preparing; but I wanted something else also."

Along with his address, Johnson initially was interested in writing a commemorative poem in honor of Abraham Lincoln but abandoned that idea for lack of time, and instead composed with his younger brother J. Rosamond Johnson "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing."

"Lift Every Voice and Sing Sheet Music"

As Johnson composed his loving tribute to his race and nation, he wept: "I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so." On the occasion of its debut, the hymn was sung by 500 African-American children, many of whom were students at Stanton School, Johnson's alma mater and where, at the time, he was principal.

The context then for the composition of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" was an early Black History Month celebration organized by the black leadership of Jacksonville, Florida, decades before this tradition was institutionalized by the African-American historian and Harvard Ph.D Carter G. Woodson.

Musical Composer J. Rosamond Johnson, (James Weldon Johnson's Younger Brother)

Not only does Askew mistakenly claim that Johnson composed his hymn without any "specific reference to any race or ethnicity," but he applies this erroneous, ahistorical and decontexualized reading to the lyrics themselves.

"Some people argue lines like 'We have come, treading our path through the blood of the/slaughtered,' signify a tie to slavery and the black power struggle. But in all essence," asserts Askew, "there is no specific reference to black people in this song."

While there is no specific reference to African-Americans in the hymn, the genesis and context make it impossible to ignore the centrality of the history of African-Americans and their heroic movement from slavery to freedom in a democratic republic that for centuries countenanced the contradiction of slavery, and later, segregation, to the hymn's inspiration and composition.

Without this context, which Askew surely must know, such a phrase as "the blood of the/slaughtered" cannot be fully understood. In his commentary on the hymn, Johnson observed that "the American Negro was, historically and spiritually, immanent. ..."

Timothy Askew

By ignoring the context and Johnson's own commentary, Askew is able to advance his wrongheaded interpretation of this hymn, which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People adopted as its official song in 1920.

Askew is correct in stating that "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" "lends itself to any people who have struggled." Of course, this is true of all great works of art that emerge from the specific experience of a people and that rise to the level of universalism. Johnson understood and appreciated this dimension of the hymn.

"Recently I spoke for the summer labor school at Bryn Mawr College," he wrote in his autobiography, "and was surprised to hear it ["Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"] fervently sung by the white students there and to see it in their mimeographed folio of songs."

As this story reveals, Johnson's hymn is not only part of the rich cultural background of African-Americans, but it is also part of the cultural background of all Americans.

In his eagerness to enter the debate regarding whether or not "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" should be sung as the black national anthem, Askew fails to offer an important clarification, which is that Johnson always regarded the song he composed with his younger brother Rosamond as a hymn, not an anthem. The Johnson brothers understood that there was only one national anthem: Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner."

While "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" was widely sung, even during Johnson's lifetime, as the "Negro National Anthem" he never encouraged this practice, but recognized it for what it was -- the spontaneous response of African-Americans who found in this hymn a source of racial pride.

And the fact that many African-Americans continue to sing this hymn as an expression of racial pride today represents a desire to remain connected to the history of slavery and the struggle for freedom while also affirming their national identity as Americans.

Let us be clear, Johnson was not a racial separatist. In his role as executive secretary of the NAACP, he was at the head of a national interracial coalition committed to the full realization of the promise of American democracy.

James Weldon Johnson

Askew's failure to provide this clarification leaves Johnson vulnerable to the charge of racial separatism, a stance that he steadfastly rejected throughout his life. This is a disservice to Johnson's legacy as both race man and patriot, not to mention to the truth.

There is the text and the context. A knowledge of the complex interplay between both is needed to appreciate the origins and continuing significance of Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." As reported in the earlier article, Askew fails to meet this widely accepted standard in scholarship, and in the process performs a certain violence upon a hymn cherished by many as well as Johnson's legacy.

Professor Rudolph P. Byrd

Rudolph P. Byrd is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and the founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University.