Southern — The Music of Black Americans

Author: Eileen Southern
Title: The Music of Black Americans: A History
Year: 1971
Type: Academic book (W. W. Norton; second edition 1983, third edition 1997)

The Music of Black Americans: A History is a history by the musicologist Eileen Southern, published by W. W. Norton in 1971 and revised in 1983 and 1997. Southern declined to define Black music in advance and instead brought its folk, church, popular and concert strands together in one chronological history, from the first Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 to the present. Her preface names two readerships, general readers and college courses. Its evidence is archival: material from the Schomburg Collection in New York, from Philadelphia libraries and from sources outside music, along with interviews with living Black composers and performers and surveys she sent them, and it prints most of its folksongs complete. Most reviewers thought it met its aims, though the response was mixed: many missed footnotes, and some wanted more interpretation, the ethnomusicologist Charles Keil most sharply. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. later called its publication a watershed, and David Horn ranked it first among the books that won the subject a place in universities.

In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Southern was teaching at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, where the music faculty met to plan new courses on Black music in answer to student protests. Some colleagues, she recalled, doubted there was anything worth teaching, and at one point someone said that “there’s nothing to Black music”; she walked out, “very, very hurt.”¹ In the library she found only three books on the subject, all hard to obtain: James Monroe Trotter’s Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878), Maud Cuney Hare’s Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936) and Alain Locke’s The Negro and His Music (1936).^{1, 2} Harvard’s exhibit on her life says that she never taught the course and that her preparation for it grew into the book; David Horn wrote instead that the book began in a course she “developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College.”^{1, 3} Her training was in the music of the Renaissance. She took her doctorate at New York University under Gustave Reese in 1961, with a dissertation on the Buxheim Organ Book, and she had written her 1941 master’s thesis at the University of Chicago on “The Use of Negro Folksong in Symphonic Forms.”^{1, 4}

Little had been collected, and Southern assembled her evidence piece by piece, much of it from sources that were not about music. Her chief archives were the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature and the libraries of Philadelphia, and she added interviews with living Black composers and performers and surveys she sent them.¹ “I hope that as a black musicologist I can tell our story with a different slant than is found in the studies and histories written by whites,” she wrote to the composer T. J. Anderson in the fall of 1969.¹ For the book’s form she followed Reese, whose histories of medieval and Renaissance music were, in the exhibit’s words, “dense volumes, laden with data.” Her editor at Norton, David Hamilton, talked her out of slighting jazz, which she knew less well, and had her cover blues, folk music and the well-known performers as well as the composers. She later credited him with making it “a very comprehensive book instead of just a one-sided book.”¹

The first edition runs in four chronological parts, from 1619, the year the first captive Africans reached Virginia: “Song in a Strange Land, 1619–1775,” “Let My People Go, 1776–1866,” “Blow Ye the Trumpet, 1867–1919” and “Lift Every Voice, 1920–.” It ranges from West African music and the spirituals to ragtime, blues, gospel, jazz and opera, with minstrelsy and the music of the Black church along the way.¹ In the preface Southern wrote for two readerships, the general reader and the college classroom: the book was to be both “an introduction and guide” and “a much-needed textbook.”¹ Southern “hesitates to define or categorize black music,” Ione Vargus wrote of the preface, and offers instead “her approach of bringing together the strands of all types of music.”⁵ Southern wrote that “the majority of the folksongs used as musical examples are complete and, therefore, can—and should—be sung by the reader.”¹

Its playbills, sheet-music covers and photographs sat in a single folio in 1971, and later editions spread more of them through the text.¹ Alongside the first edition Southern issued a companion volume, Readings in Black American Music, which gathers 37 primary texts.¹ The paperback sold for $4.45 and the hardback for $10.00, and Southern valued the paperback because, she said, “blacks could afford it.” She told the music editor of the Amsterdam News in May 1971 that she had written the book “with my own people in mind.” She was frustrated: the paper had run no review, and the book had not reached the Black readers she hoped for.¹

Most reviewers, in the words of Harvard’s exhibit, “agreed she hit the mark,” though responses “were mixed.”¹ Publishers Weekly thought it “so gracefully written” that it “could have a wide general readership,” and the composer George Walker, one of the musicians it discusses, called it “a labor of love” in the Journal of Research in Music Education.⁵ Henry Kmen, in the Journal of Southern History, expected it to be “much more widely used as a reference book,” and Marian Tally Brown, in the Journal of Negro History, welcomed its factual approach for leaving conclusions to students and teachers.⁵ The musicologist Dominique-René de Lerma listed errors and omissions in Notes, but he took its publication by Norton as a sign that the subject might soon be “musicologically above ground.”⁵

Charles M. Weisenberg, in Library Journal, called its coverage “impressive” but found that its scope left many aspects “touched upon too lightly to satisfy the specialist.”⁵ Reviewers often missed footnotes, and the sharpest objections were to its method.¹ In Ethnomusicology in 1974, Keil called the book “all when, where, and who, very little how, and almost no why at all,” and since it had no footnotes, he wrote, “most of the basic research will have to be done all over again.”⁶ The exhibit finds the review condescending, since Keil called her “Ms.” where Brown wrote “Dr.,” and takes it as an example of “the disrespectful attitudes that Southern, as a Black woman, faced throughout her career.”¹ Ione Vargus, in the Black Scholar, expected that “young people will probably be disappointed” by how little it says about rhythm and blues and jazz musicians after 1950; The Supremes and The Temptations, she wrote, “are mentioned so incidentally that they are not listed in the index.”⁶ Byron Cantrell, in the Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, wanted “serious music as a separate section,” and James C. Downey, in the Anuario Interamericano de Investigación Musical, thought it gave white traditions too much room and called the result “a reconciliation, not a confrontation.”⁶ Kmen saw a difficulty Southern shared with every historian of the subject: “like everyone else who has tackled social music in America,” he wrote, she could not “really get the black and white clearly disentangled.”⁵

Southern revised the book twice. A second edition came out in 1983 with a new edition of the Readings. In the preface to the third, in 1997, she described a thorough revision with a new chapter, “Currents in Contemporary Arenas,” and counted “the treatment of black women musicians” among its “notable features.”¹

In 1973 Southern founded The Black Perspective in Music, which Harvard’s exhibit calls the “first long-running academic journal dedicated to Black music,” and in the NEH’s account she edited it until 1991; her husband, Joseph Southern, ran its business side.^{4, 7} She joined Harvard’s tenured faculty in January 1976, the first Black woman tenured in its Faculty of Arts and Sciences.⁴ In 2001 she received the National Humanities Medal.⁷

Samuel A. Floyd Jr., introducing a 1992 volume of essays in Southern’s honor, called the first edition “a watershed event” and “the first real musicological study of black music.”⁴ After her death in 2002, Horn wrote in Popular Music that the book was “the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music” and “hugely influential,” and he ranked it first among the books that won the subject a place in universities.³

Key contributions

• A history of Black music in the United States from 1619, built from primary sources.
• Folk, church, popular and concert music brought together in one chronology, with performers alongside composers.
• A book designed as a college textbook and a guide for general readers, with folksongs printed to be sung and a companion volume of primary sources.

See also

• Blues People — Amiri Baraka’s 1963 history of Black music as social history
• Classical Music in America — Joseph Horowitz’s 2005 history of classical music in the United States
• Dvořák’s Prophecy — Joseph Horowitz’s 2021 book on Dvořák and a Black American classical tradition
• Classical music — the concert tradition, which the book takes in alongside folk and popular music