Top Ten Underground Walks

A site maintained by National Geographic on the Top Ten Underground Walks in the World, the list is enlightening concerning the importance of what goes on underground and as such good background for your reading of Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground."

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/top-10/cave-tunnel-walks/

Some of these underground locations are naturally occuring but some of the most interesting to me are manmade.  One of them is the "Cu Chi Tunnels" which provided access to an underground village composed of kitchen, dormitory, meetings rooms and hospital for the Viet Cong during the Vietnamese War (1954-1975) first with France and then with the United States.  The network of tunnels stretched over a length of 125 miles. Berlin has an underground radiation proof bunker built in 1971 to withstand nuclear attack for 14 days.  One of the most famous is the Paris Sewers, apparently a wonder of human ingenuity.  Also the Catacombs in Rome which go back to the early years of Christianity. There's the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt.  The Great Pyramid is apparently 30 times the size of the Empire State Building.

The Man Who Lived Underground

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100720-london-sewer-fat-clog-flushers-weird-news-pictures/#/sewer-fat-cleaning-leicester-square_23690_600x450.jpg

Sewers and underground cities have become a topic of great fascination to me stimulated by my reading of Richard Wright's story.  I find it helps to have a more precise sense of what the world he was creating might have looked like since Wright was so given to realistic, precise detail and description.  He was greatly influenced by the great Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy among them, and this fondness for detail may have come about through reading this prior work.

In any case, on to the interesting links that one will find in relation to issues of sewers and the underground, some of the best stuff is from National Geographic, which has done many shows on the topic.  The following link is to a story about a wall of fat having formed in the London underground.  A lot of people don't know what a danger it is to throw fat down the sink drain or the sewers but apparently it accumulates and blocks up everything.  I guess it does the same thing to the pipes that it does to our bodies.

  Sewers are extremely crucial to modern life and to concentrations of human population such as one will see in a city.  Without an effective sewer (which New York didn't have until less than a hundred years ago), the result of concentration of populations in one place and the accumulation of their untreated waste and disease on a massive scale.  Indeed some of the places in the world where particularly childhood disease remains at plague level it is because of the lack of adequate sanitation arrangements such as modern sewers.  Whether Wright intended it deliberately, the choice of the sewers as this young man's adventure has the impact of maximizing how important of everything that happens to him.

Below find a link to a story about the problem of cholera in London in the 19th century when untreated sewage was still getting into the drinking water supply of the city.  Can you imagine people not being willing to believe that combining waste and drinking water would cause death and disease but people continued to deny it even after it was known because the needed corrections would be expensive and time consuming.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0614_040614_tvcholera_2.html

Josephine Baker, The Siren of the Tropics (France 1927)

French Theatrical Poster from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. also visible at http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2156229568

  Last week, we watched in class the first half of a silent film called "La Sirene de Tropique" starring Josephine Baker (1927). We will finish watching it this Tuesday. It is possible to watch it free online at : http://www.ovguide.com/movies_tv/la_sirene_des_tropiques.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0135652/

For those of you having trouble following the action or anything else about the film, since it was a "silent" film please see this description provided by IMDb (The Internet Movie Database).  

Although it would appear that the first part of the film was made in the "French Antilles" or the West Indies, in fact it seems as though it might have been entirely filmed in Paris on a sound stage. The West Indian cast looked genuine enough though. I am attaching here as well a quite wonderful paper I found on line concerning Baker's role in juxtaposition with the male star Pierre Batcheff who was apparently quite well known as an actor.  I send you these materials as support for the fact that silent film was indeed quite important worldwide up through 1927, also the time of the Harlem Renaissance.  It will be difficult for you to grasp anything about the issues for the participants of the Harlem Renaissance if you are unable to recognize any of the significant constituent elements of their world, i.e. this important silent film starring Josephine Baker which apparently premiered at the Lafayettle Theatre in Harlem in 1929 to much fanfare.  

As some of you may know, Josephine Baker was an important black female performer (actress, singer, dancer) born in East St. Louis who moved to New York and travelled to Paris in "La Revue Negre" in the early 1920s.  Baker remained in France for the rest of her life and became a major star there, making a number of films, and widely considered in Europe one of the most beautiful and talented women of her time.  Her career as an international star of stage and film would have been impossible to launch in the U.S. because of racial and sexual prohibitions that were strictly enforced in the U.S. film industry and in the theatre, which was largely racially segregated as well.  

(Segregated doesn't mean that black stars didn't exist.  They did.  Indeed, sometimes it seems as though segregation actually allowed more participation than integration ever has. The first result of integration in the 1960s was that black stars and black institutions faded.  Neither Harlem nor any other black community has subsequently re-established its ascendancy since integration.)

For the most part, black women who were cast on stage and in film in the United States during the 20s and the 30s were restricted to narrowly defined and smaller roles (I have written about and screened every single occasion which while important to black audiences was never commensurate with the lavish attention that white female stars were receiving). They were rarely if ever featured in leading roles in American films (although there was a somewhat prolific but entirely separate race film industry which I have studied as well).  

So far as the stage, black women were largely restricted to black cast shows, often musicals. Nonetheless the freedom of black performers in live performances in clubs and on stage was always greater than on film, and as the concentration of the film industry in Hollywood was more extensively institutionalized, black participation on screen was ever more diminished.  Whereas, during much of the silent period the film industry was much more decentralized with major pockets of production in a variety of locations throughout the United States, Hollywood almost immediately became the capital of color and sound film and took on right away many of the characteristics of the Southern United States in that it was extremely racially segregated from the outset, reflecting the pressures and the censorship of its central industry of feature film and its concern for its Jim Crow audiences in the South. 

This arrangement also encouraged white performers to borrow what they could from black performers in live venues all over the country and refurbish what they had gathered for their own appearances in film.  It was often done and during the sound period it made Hollywood a profoundly rich and entertaining place in which racial representations were scarcely limited to those few presentations of African Americans in leading roles on the big screen.  

 When Baker decided to emigrate to Europe, she opened up for herself a range of possibilities.  These possibilities were much more promising, albeit not unlimited in France either, as our viewing of La Sirene indicates.

One of the reasons I chose to show you this film, and to introduce you to Josephine Baker in this section of our course is because we've been reading the work of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, both really important figures in the Harlem Renaissance as writers.  Baker's career in the U.S., in France and touring through Europe overlaps in time with theirs.  No doubt in a different world, Hughes and Hurston would have written for and collaborated with Baker.  As it was both Hughes (who travelled to Europe as a young man) and Hurston probably were both aware of Baker's work but rarely got to witness it since she only performed in the United States on two occasions after she went to live in France.  Although she was active in the French Resistance and supportive of the Allied Forces during WWII, she was effectively blacklisted in the United States in the 1950s because of her liberal and progressive political associations.

More images of Josephine Baker in the course of her illustratious stage and film career in Europe.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackheritage/2149959458/in/set-72157603860664259/

Slavery Links

One of the most fascinating topics in America and in the world today: Slavery.

http://slavery.yale.edu/
Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal

-http://www.yale.edu/glc/index.htm

Gilda Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition

http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/bib/

The Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving

Images of Native Americans--http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/nativeamericans/index2.html

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record--http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia--http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/index.html

 Brown University Library Center for Digital Initiatives: AFro-American Sheet Music, 1820-1920--http://dl.lib.brown.edu/sheetmusic/afam/

Relevant Texts History of African American Literature

-->

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION with two audio cds of folk culture. 

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail-contents.aspx?ID=10626

The Declaration of Independence, 1776

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html

David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Article, 1829 (NA 227-238)

http://www.archive.org/stream/walkersappealwit16516gut/16516.txt http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html (text and related materials)

Freedom Riders 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

Director/Producer Stanley Nelson

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html (full text

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jacobs/hjhome.htm (related materials)

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom(1855) http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouMybo.html

and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(1881-1892) http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglasslife/douglass.html

(NA Excerpts, 385-387 and 452-483)

Ida B. Wells Barnett, “A Red Record,” 1895 (NA 675-686)

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14977

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery Excerpt, 1901, (NA 570-602)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/washington/toc.html

WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk,1903 (NA 686-689, 692-766)

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubSoul.html

Ann Petry, from The Street Excerpt 1946 (NA 1496-1516)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Excerpt 1952 (NA 1548-1570)

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (NA 1696-1699, 1713-1727)

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1959 (NA 1768-1830)

Martin Luther King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1964 (NA 1895-1908)

El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, From The Autobiography of Malcolm X 1964

In (NA 1859-1876)

Ntozake Shange, Excerpts. In NA 2553-2559.

The Birth of a Nation 1914

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1914) is rightly notorious for its strident view of African American participation in Reconstruction. It is also a uniquely important and unforgetttable film in many ways. Viewing these films about it might be beyond the range of undergraduate interests but certainly more advanced students will find this helpful in understanding the mindset of the Jim Crow era as well as the emerging popular culture of America.


A year or two ago I attended a symposium on THE BIRTH OF A NATION at The New School where I was privileged to share the podium with the American historian of the Civil War in Popular Culture David Blight.  Not only that, the entire procedings together with beautifully edited selections of the entire length with the original music of The Birth of a Nation are available on Youtube for all to see: His talk, My talk.

I must say, I like my talk better.


Birth and Rebirth of a Nation Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqUDxzv3bE
Birth of a Nation Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_YN6INiZ_Y&feature=related

Blues People Began Again Thursday, Aug 26th, Assigned Readings

 As of the Fall semester of 2010 at the City College of New York, I will be teaching once again my course Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century, as a special section of World Humanities under the course number WH 10302.  The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:30 p.m.  We will begin in a new way with the discussion of our individual visits to the exhibition For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights at The International Center of Photography located at 43rd Street and 6th Avenue.  We will also be reading the book by Maurice Berger, which accompanies the exhibition, in the course of the semester in combination with our other readings in the Norton Anthology and African American Music: An Introduction.  

From there, we will progress to our chronological reading of African American literature in the 20th century, beginning with chapters from WEB Du Bois's 1903 masterpiece TRHE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  You are invited to supplement the reading of SOULS with visual materials from Du Bois's "Negro Exhibition" at the Paris Exposition of 1900, about which a great deal has been written and said.  


Du Bois's NEGRO EXHIBITION was compiled by him and others  to document the progress of African Americans since their enslavement had officially ended in the United States in the mid-1860s.  He travelled steerage to Paris to install it at the Paris Exposition of 1900, one of the most celebrated of the world's fairs of the period.    


World's Fairs in general were particularly instructive when considering the status of race and African American in the United States and elsewhere.  Especially when the fair was actually located in the United States (as was the case of the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1896 in Atlanta at which Booker T. Washington delivered his celebrated address), African American artists and various kinds of status reports and exhibitions on African Americans were included. 


On this blog, I have made available a variety of related materials, as well, as a very excellent presentation of Du Bois's exhibition at the Paris fair compiled by Eugene Provenzo, who is also the author of THE ANNOTATED SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  While the book doesn't have high quality photographs, the website is superb and includes superior supporting documentation related to the exhibition.  


REQUIRED READINGS:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/course-readings-section-i.html

   THE NEGRO EXHIBITION COMPILED BY WEB DU BOIS as introduced by me:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/negro-exhibition-complied-by-web-du.html

   AS COMPILED BY EUGENE PROVENZO:

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm

  COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION OF 1893 IN CHICAGO:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/03/columbian-exposition_16.html

The Slave Ship Clotilda--The Last To Arrive Before The War

I added this material to the Blues People blog concerning The Slave Ship Clotilda, the last slave ship to carry new slaves successfully to the United States, for a number of reasons. First, I had always heard that there were very late arrivals to slavery from continental Africa well after the importation of slaves was illegal in the United States but this book made available to me the precise documentation of one case.

I first became aware of this case through the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, who had interviewed one of the elderly survivors of this group in the 1930s and who had written a book, which was never published, about him.  Much of what Hurston has written or said remains unsubstantiated and unpursued in a scholarly way, perhaps because Hurston never completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology and therefore much of her "research" is taken lightly by the people who generally determine the importance of such things. That she often lied about things having to do with her personal life doesn't help the matter. Nonetheless, in this particular case this particular alleged survivor of the slave ship Clotilda was very real indeed, as you can see in part from this photograph of him. Also from reading Sylvaine Diouf's recent and fascinating study of this case, DREAMS OF AFRICA IN ALABAMA: THE SLAVE SHIP CLOTILDA AND THE STORY OF THE LAST AFRICANS BROUGHT TO AMERICA. 

I envision currently this curriculum to include, however minimally, the vast mostly unchartered field of slavery studies in the continental United States. In addition to the various cases of groups of Africans who continued to arrive as slaves in the United States after the importation of slaves from Africa was rendered illegal, there is the fascinating case of the many legally emancipated African Americans who continued to be held in forced servitude well after slavery was rendered illegal in the United States as a consequence of the Civil War (1860-1965), and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th ammendments.See, for instance, Douglas A. Blackmon's SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: THE RE-ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK AMERICANS FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR II, Doubleday 2008.

There is a very interesting researcher/activist in the South right now, who I will subsequently devote a post to, who has begun to investigate some of the extreme economic under-development of African American populations in the South as a consequence of these pockets of continued isolation and enslavement, particularly in the outback of such states as Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. These were places where the Confederacy's failure to win the Civil War landed hard and where the acceptance of the liberty of African Americans never really took root because of all manner of local challenges (some of them, interestingly, both technological and geographical) until the re-enactment of the Civil War in the guise of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Moreover, if slavery is defined as forced unpaid labor and not by ethnicity and/or forced immigration, this would be a vast field of study indeed revealing many interesting chapters in the history of Native, Asian, and Latin populations. Since we still like to think of ourselves as the home of the free and the land of the brave, we have an obligation to take a continued interest in such matters. It is our plan to live up to that obligation.

Cudjoe Lewis, Former Slave and Surivor of the Slave Ship Clotilda

    In 2007, Oxford University Press published a book called DREAMS OF AFRICA IN ALABAMA: THE SLAVE SHIP CLOTILDA AND THE STORY OF THE LAST AFRICANS BROUGHT TO AMERICA written by Slviane A. Diouf.  
    The book describes the story of 110 young men, women and children from the Bight of Benin in West Africa brought illegally via the vessel Clotilda to Mobile, Alabama as slaves in 1860 (less than a year before the outbreak of the Civil War and 52 years since the abolition of the international slave trade in the United States). 
The writer of this book Diouf points out the sad realization that we know little of this particular group today, although their story had been reported in many places, including by Zora Neale Hurston who wrote a book about the last of the survivors (Cudjoe Lewis) /  Yet the manuscript survives intact in the Alain Locke Papers kept at Yale University although it has never been published.  
    Many important authorities have denied or disregarded the existence of this group of slaves, from President James Buchanan to WEB Du Bois in his Ph.D. dissertation (1895) published as THE SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE, as well as a variety of major subsequent studies of the slave trade.  And we would probably still know nothing about them if not for the extraordinary circumstance that despite five years of enslavement in the United States, they managed to remain together as a group, form a settlement called African Town in Alabama and continue to speak a common African language and preserve their legacy to pass it down to their children.  
     According to Diouf, they ran their settlement according to traditions they had brought with them from Africa under the leadership of someone who had formerly been of noble birth in Dahomey, named Gumpa.  Most of them had been sold as prisoners of war by the Dahomeyan Army.  
    The survivors in Alabama remained together long enough to give interviews to whomever would listen in the hopes of making contact with those who had remained behind but they were never able to get back to Africa.  
    A long interview with Cudjo Lewis and his wife Abile was published in HARPER'S WEEKLY in 1887.  They were written about again in 1903 in a long article in HARPER'S MONTHLY.  Booker T. Washington paid them a visit in 1909 and Emma Langdon Roche published a book about them in 1914. 
     In the summer of 1928, Zora Neale Hurston spent two months interviewing Cudjoe Lewis, the last of the original group, for her book.  Her last draft entitled BARRACOON was completed in 1931 but it never found a publisher.  
Cudjoe was the last of the group to survive and died in 1935.  Diouf's book includes a fascinating collection of photos and documents, all serving to substantiate that slavery was both real and compelling to its descendants well into the 20th century.   

My Uncle Cardoza in France During WWI

This post relates to an interesting subject relevant to our investigation of African American culture in the 20th century, which is the participation of African Americans in particular in WWI--a topic that has largely existed under an extraordinary cloud of obfuscation manufactured largely by the dismal scent that Jim Crow lent to every activity and contribution of African Americans in the 20th century.

The story of their role in WWI is one of the most fascinating chapters, which I wanted to delve into more deeply during my sabbatical but never got to. It moves me deeply partly because of the magnificent portrayals of black soldiers of WWI, in particular in Ralph Ellison's classic INVISIBLE MAN, immediately comes to mind.

Their experience of segregation in the military, the whiff of freedom and triumph they enjoyed in Paris and then their tragic return to the Red Summer of 1919 and the lynching ropes and fires of the South is a story that will forever intrique, especially since I was raised in a time in which women rarely got to engage in military service of any kind.

The case of WWI, in which many men of African descent participated from all over the world, is really a topic of great international dimension and interest, which might provide some necessary background to matters that come much more clearly into focus in the historiography and journalism on African American participation in WWII. There wasn't too much time between the two wars, but WWII was so much more extensively and graphically documented in every detail, benefiting as it did by the extraordinary international developments in photography and war journalism. Indeed, such developments may have contributed to the ultimate desegregation of the U.S. military by President Harry Truman after World War II, a step which now seems inevitable in historical hindsight.

I don't know if you have had a chance to notice but a lot of wonderful documentaries and feature films have begun to emerge on this war, propelled along in part by the release of a great deal of color film monopolized by the military in a variety of countries (the U.S. and Japan both come to mind--I will be showing some of both collections in class) but then not widely released to the public for various reasons, some of them having to do with propaganda and all sorts of war related fears. Part of it is that only now via dvd, internet and computer technology have we got the means to really widely distribute and appreciate this material I think although I don't hear people saying much about it.

Many people seem too consumed by the wars of the present to notice this glorious scholarship and documentation of the equally crazy wars of the past but I think it would be most helpful to all of us if we could take another longer look. Certainly, much of it is deeply relevant to the subject matter of this course. African American military participation has always been central to all discussions of African American Civil Rights and Cultural Progress. There's actually a wonderful book about this, which we won't be reading in this course but which you might find interesting. It is by John A. Williams and it is called CAPTAIN BLACKMAN (1972 republished in 2000). Not my favorite title but certainly one of my favorite books. And a book that anyone who has ever been in the military, or knows anyone in the military, should certainly read.


http://michelewallace.zenfolio.com/img/s8/v10/p848698751-11.jpg


 Some more pictures of black soldiers in WWI from my family archive.

http://michelewallace.zenfolio.com/blacksoldierswwi

Afro American Music Site at Carnegie Hall

http://www.carnegiehall.org/honor/history/index.aspx
This site provides excellent organizational resources for the analysis of the development of African American music.  It is authored by Portia K. Maultsby, who has also published a very useful book,  African American Music: An Introduction edited by Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby and published by Routledge in 2006.

The book is plainly built upon the research of an entire field in these three or four decades since scholars have been systematically attempting to find words to describe the African American oral tradition.  In this case, the focus is on music largely to the exclusion of spoken forms of oral tradition.  But on its own turf, it comes the closest to providing what I, myself, was trying to construct for my own use in the Blues People Curriculum.

Doing this course again at the Ph.D. level or at the graduate level, I would use this book as the starting point for the literature and the images that make up the Blues Tradition.  Also in a more advanced context, I would emphasize music more because music is so dominant and has such great explanatory power  in African American culture.

On both the website and in the book there is a chart which provides a genealogy of African American music composed of three major categories--African American sacred traditions, African American secular traditions and African American Secular Traditions Instrumental.

The book contains chapters on the various relevant fields by the appropriate experts, among them Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dena J. Epstein, David Evans, Thomas I. Riis, Lawrence Levine and Mark Anthony Neal.

African American Literature: 30s through 60s--Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960

This photo graced the album Black Brown and Beige: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson released by Columbia Records in 1958.  These are two of the most elegant and most interesting people that the African American Blues tradition ever produced, two of the most famous and successful and unscathed by the racism and Jim Crow that were the scourge of the nation at the time.  I don't know as much as I would like to know about how they managed it but there's no question that they were birds of a feather (Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox) and they made a fine couple in this picture, which I have no idea who took it except that it was taken at the time they made the album together and there were other photos, which are included in the reissue package designed and compiled by the brilliant Phil Schaap although the print is so small I despair of ever finding the information I am looking for.  


We will be hearing from both of them in the Blues People Curriculum on various occasions.  Both are heard from via the audio recordings including in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.  I fear not nearly enough but these are more musical questions. 

This is the same Mahalia Jackson we meet on the pages and in the magnificent albeit rarely seen photos of JAZZ LIFE: A JOURNEY ACROSS AMERICA IN 1960 described below, the same America.  People go to her house in Chicago and she cooks for them, probably something she learned to cook growing up in New Orleans.  

I found this photo on line and used it here, wanting the album but feeling as though it was an expense that I could spare myself.  Finally, I broke down and bought it (turned out to be very inexpensive) as much to learn more about the photograph and the historic collaboration as to hear the music.

 I already had had the experience of being disappointed by the fact that the wonderful performance of Mahalia Jackson at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, in which she is accompanied by Duke Ellington, is not really captured in all its musical richness either on the film make by Bert Stern, JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY, or on the Newport Jazz Festival recording released of it.  It seems it was rather common to re-stage performances for the albums that were released as Newport Jazz Festival performances.  Moreover, black artists were so subject to being corrupted.  Their sound, their look, and everything else about them.  You never knew and you still don't know what part is this and what part was something somebody just slapped on them on their way out of the door.

In fact, I am thinking of poor Louis at that very same festival singing his trademark "Sleepytime Down South" with that ragtag gang of All Stars he was hanging out with then. Not that I didn't cherish every bit of it but I could see the strain he was under.  I've gotten so I can feel every bit of the strain he was under because I at a age and at a point where I am feeling that strain myself.

 For all I know, the recordings that were released were actually made at the festivals, although maybe at some other point in performance.  All they had to sell was lps, which had very limited recording space.  Also, I don't know much about what remained on the cutting room floor although this version includes many unreleased cuts so there is a vault of some kind somewhere.  Whats in it I don't know.

Nor would there have been much point in miking every instrument back then since they didn't have the technical capacity to use all the tracks anyway yet.  Perhaps all the sound is kept somewhere for future generations but I don't suppose I will ever find out what it sounded like to hear the Duke Ellington band backing Mahalia Jackson in the open air of Newport, Rhode Island, or even to be at a Newport Jazz Festival.

   In my view, a recording made under studio conditions, even if it was Duke Ellington and his orchestra and Mahalia Jackson, could never touch a live performance.  The best I've ever seen for this period were made abroad.  For instance, Duke Ellington in Amsterdam in 1958 is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.  But what makes it so sweet is the way it looks (released as part of the Jazz Icon series on DVD), and my total inability to have imagined at the time (in the 50s or the 60s) that such a thing as such exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely elegant black men could ever exist on film.  I already knew it could never be made in America and lord knows I never had a clue taking classes at NYU in their Ph.D. program that film could ever result in anything so exquisite.

   It's interesting that George Wein didn't allow more film to be made at Newport, although if it had ever gotten out in technicolor the racial experiment that was going on there, it would not have been allowed to continue I should think. In the 50s, sliding right into 1960 with room to spare, the Newport Jazz Festival provided a utopian alternative racial space, one of the few in which blacks and whites of the highest caliber freely intermingled and associated with one another, thanks to the brilliant interventions of George and Joyce Wein, one of our most celebrated interracial couples.  It was still illegal in some states for blacks and whites to marry, and certainly there were still lots of white Americans who thought it should be illegal for whites and blacks to party together like that.  Yet George and Joyce were not only married but making history with some of the most brilliant performers in America in the brilliant summer sunlight.

  Anyhow I gather that somehow Duke Ellington (who was in my estimation one of the greatest purveyors of American folk culture/popular culture ever born) is just for brainy folk so I don't know how many of my acolytes in World Humanities Blues People will be able to catch on.  Words can't say. 

    But the whole point of this was to mention this wonderful supersize, heavily illustrated book of photographs by William Claxton and Interpretative Text by Joachim E. Berendt, which is entitled Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960, Taschen 2005.  It is composed of the pictures and information collected by Claxton and Berendt as they travelled across the United States seeking out the rich variety of African American musical culture taking place in the year of 1960.

Initially, the book was only published abroad, not in english, and was not well known but the book I have has German, French and English, and was signed by Claxton and sold to me for $200 by a high-end photography shop that had recently opened near me.  

The young man who waited on me kindly explained how Claxton's distribution worked.  As it turned out the shop was another outlet for the main shop in another location, which also functioned as a photographic gallery.  The book was, in essence, a collection of copyrighted photographs which you might use to make a selection of one or more prints that you might like to buy from Claxton, frame and put on your wall.  There was actually a market for such a thing, people buying individual prints of photographs for thousands of dollars that they could not obtain in any other way directly from the photographer or his representatives.  The runs were limited in number in order to ensure the increasing value of each print, just as would be the case with lithographs or other kinds of artistic prints.  

The book itself is reissued a number of times in limited printings with each printing going up in price, if demand continues to rise, or down if the demand falls off.  Also, Taschen, which is one of the publishers who participate in these arrangements, would simply stop making more copies at some point in order to facilitate the collectability and value of the original editions.  So the book, itself-- if carefully maintained without damage and so forth--could also end up being worth a fortune in some rare instances.  

Both Claxton and Berendt were white (Claxton recently died) while a considerable number of the photographic subjects of the book are African American.  The photographs are, in many cases, absolutely exquisite and more importantly not the same pictures you see all the time.  Indeed, I bought the book after leafing through it because I knew that it contained a documentation of the year of 1960 in the United States, including the relationship between whites and blacks, such as it would be impossible to find elsewhere.  

Moreover, this is clearly a more racially integrated version of the cultural milieu of 1960 than those of us who teach African American Studies are in the habit of employing.  I am eager to see how his musical inventory would match up with the one I have been able to reconstruct from archival sources.  

But I cannot legally reproduce a single one of these pictures, which is ironic.  I've got some juicy bits of 1960s history in my hot little hands.  I can tote it to class and let my students look at it--although I will certainly have to take a cab and just their breathing on it is likely to diminish its collectability (by which I mean its financial value).

There isn't even an image of a person on the cover, just lettering and the book, itself, is 600 pages.  

Bert Williams, A Natural Born Gambler (1916)

Bert Williams was one of our early Blues People.  Of the highest caliber.  Blackface and all!  In a proper chronology of Blues People, Bert Williams and George Walker, and their musical play In Dahomey, which derived from their experience of the Dahomey Village at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, would provide one of the crucial starting points of the Modern African American Century.

I have also included here a running copy of the only surviving film of a Bert William's performance in A Natural Born Gambler (1916), which I picked up from former student Chris's blog.  It works well although many of the other wonderful links have degraded to pictures.  Still wonderful commentary.

The film is from the Biograph Company, apparently produced written and starred in by Bert Williams. A man for the ages.  A black man in blackface par excellence. There is no equal.  I saw many of them as a child at the Apollo Theatre in the 50s and I am still laughing.

August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone

. . . a mythmaker who sees his basically naturalistic panorama plays as stages in an allegorical history of black America, Michael Feingold (1987)

There is a production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, which I just saw tonight.  I sat in the second row right under the stage, soaking up the mystical, allegorical palette of the set design and the way in which the characters are molded from Wilson's rhythmical, repetitive text.  I found it somewhat more comprehensible than I found it the first time I saw it on Broadway twenty or more years ago.  Not sure how well students in the class may be able to read it but it certainly relates very directly to a blues reading of African American history and the migration from the South to the North.

The play is entirely set at a boarding house in Pittsburgh run by a seemingly middle aged couple, both warm and nurturing people.  Part of the household is Bynum, an elderly man who also works roots and exercises at various times a power to move people around that goes beyond the visible and the concrete.  His powers, he says, are specifically to bind people together, to help people to find the one with whom they should be bound and then bind them.  Also in the household is a very young man who plays the guitar, a frisky kind of troublesome fellow just up from the South and given to womanizing.

Two women come to the house and each takes up with the young man in turn.  Meanwhile, Harold Loomis, a mysterious dark stranger arrives at the house with his daughter in tow.  He is looking for his wife whom he hasn't seen in 11 years.  As it turns out, he was kidnapped by Joe Turner and endured the horrors of forced labor and exploitation.  Loomis is presented as a man who wears the scars of his enslavement on his sleeve and who is holding onto the pain but in a manner meant to symbolize, I should think, the incorporation of a slave mentality for some black men in a manner making them particularly subject to violence against others and themselves.  

The coercive nature of his service is clearly meant to serve as a metaphor for the forced enslavement and transportation of the slave trade and of Jim Crow peonage.  In any case, I don't want to say too much more about this for fear of entirely ruining the pleasure of seeing the play for the first time, except to say that Wilson's text has aged well in my opinion.  Also that it continues to fascinate me that black authors regardless of the aesthetic tradition they practice all seem to embrace so much of the same resonant vocabulary having to do with drowning, water, dead rotting or floating bodies, bones, backbreaking physical labor--all of them drenched with the rhythms and preoccupations of the blues and African influenced religious practices.  In particular, watching this play I was struck by how much of it seemed to resonate with some the visual vocabulary of so many African American visual artists generally. 

The music was done by Taj Mahal, somebody who is a vigilant student of the blues and its roots in African music, which comes through the score although very little musical performance is incorporated into the show.  

I have invited those students who might be interested in my World Humanities version of Blues People to go to see the play and write about it as an assignment that could substitute for the mid-term, or provide extra credit.  Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone is set in the early teens, and all his plays are all devoted to portraying the history of the folk.

Also, the entire text of August Wilson's Joe Turner is included in the Norton Anthology.

In addition, Joe Turner is the subject of a number of blues tunes, having much to do with Wilson's choice of him as a subject for his play no doubt.  The ones I have in my musical collection, and which I play all the time they are so beautiful and mysterious are by Big Bill Broonzy, Ed Young and Hobart Smith, and Miles and Bob Pratcher, all of them coming from Alan Lomax's Blues Songbook Collection, a 2-cd set with a medley of classics from Lomax's copious collection of "folk" performance mostly in the rural South from the 20s through the 60s.  

According to these songs, Joe Turner is a mythological figure something like John Henry, except that in Turner's case he comes to your house when you are in need, without work and food, and then he makes sure you get what you need.  How this works in August Wilson's play is somewhat different.  Joe Turner seems to be a figure who occupies the symbolic position of the enslaver, the enforcer, the white kidnapper of black men.  

The play begins with this beautiful and poetic description, as a preamble to the action:

It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911.  The sun falls out of heaven like a stone.  The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress.  Barges loaded with coal and iron ore trudge up the river to the mill towns that dot the Monongahela and return with fresh, hard, gleaming steel.  The city flexes its muscles.  Men throw countless bridges across the rivers, lay roads and carve tunnels through the hills sprouting with houses.

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city.  Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrived dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.  They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with the dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves in a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth.

Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and illuminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy. (August Wilson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone)