Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition
Ben Sidran
Language: English
Pages: 314
ISBN: 0862415373
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Filenote: PDF retail from EBL. BookBaby have created it by taking their nice epub and converted to PDF + pagination rather than the typical beautiful PDF imprint
Publish Year note: First published October 1st 1970 by Da Capo
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Black Music—whether it be jazz, blues, r&b, gospel, or soul—has always expressed, consciously or not, its African "oral" heritage, reflecting the conditions of a minority culture in the midst of a white majority. Black Talk is one of those rare books since LeRoi Jones's Blues People to examine the social function of black music in the diaspora; it sounds the depths of experience and maps the history of a culture from the jazz age to the revolutionary outbursts of the 1960s.
Ben Sidran finds radical challenges to the Western, white literary tradition in such varied music as Buddy Bolden's loud and hoarse cornet style, the call and response between brass and reeds in a swing band, the emotionalism of gospel, the primitivism of Ornette Coleman, and the cool ethic of bebop.
"The musician is the document," says Sidran. "He is the information himself. The impact of stored information is transmitted not through records or archives, but through the human response to life."
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Manner of presentation. This accounts, in part, for the universality of Black music, for the acceptance of this music by peoples of all cultures and, especially, by people who are in some way oppressed. The institution of slavery precipitated the rise of Christianity in Black music and society for two major reasons. First, because the slave was absolutely dependent on the white man, he was psychologically impelled to absorb as much of the white culture as he could. He was forced, as Elkins.
Importance of the church structure to the lives of the slaves was menaced from within as well as from without. On the one hand, as the church became more established, it began to shape itself more fully in the image of white institutions and white value structures. The church began to provide social stations among Negroes that were based, ultimately, on the acceptance of these white values: the Negroes who most resembled whites, either in behavior, dress, or skin pigmentation, assumed the highest.
Square. Second, the infusion of Creole knowledge allowed the Black culture to address itself with more confidence to the monolithic Anglo-conformity of Western culture. It added information without which the Black culture could not gauge its true relationship to white culture, and in so doing, it galvanized the strength of the Black position. The desire for white legitimacy remained but became more covert, paralleling the Booker T. Washington theory that "progress " would come through.
White community. Since, as I have suggested, America had been moving toward "two societies" for decades, the importance of the "riot commission" report was not so much in its specific findings as in its recognition of an alteration in the articulated relationship between Black and white Americans. White society had always attributed such and such a character to Black culture in America. During slavery, the Negro had been considered "harmless," "childlike," and somehow "carefree," and this image.
That she has found corn, cucumbers, peas, and oats grow “quite definitely taller, stronger, and leafier when recorded folk songs were played to them.” She insisted that the increased growth of those subjected to music was between 15 and 20 percent more than those left in silence. (For more results of Dr. Weinberger's work, see Canadian Journal oj Botany, Vol. 46, September 1968, pp. 1151-61.) {xvii} Raymond Williams, op. cit., p. 40 {xviii} Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape, p. 90, cites an.