On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  That “thousand years” is not hyperbole. In fact, thirteen hundred years ago the seeds of jazz that would eventually flourish in New Orleans were being planted in Spain under the marching feet of African invaders. In 711 CE, Moorish general Tariq ibn-Ziyad conquered Spain with seven thousand African soldiers and began an occupation that would last seven hundred years. Thanks to these invaders from Africa, Spain received a kick start toward the Age of Enlightenment that the rest of Europe did not. These Muslim occupiers brought with them an advanced concept of civilization that included everything from education to government to science. Hundreds of years before Paris had paved streets or London had streetlamps, Córdoba, with a population of 1 million, had both. The city had hundreds of public baths during a time when Christian Europe decried cleanliness as sinful. While the rest of Europe had no public libraries, Moorish Spain had over seventy. Education was made available to most Spanish citizens, while Christian Europe was almost entirely illiterate. Along with all this scientific and artistic advancement, African music merged with European music, the hybrid of which Spanish explorers would spread to the New World. When these Spanish invaders occupied North and South America, they brought their African-influenced music with them. And when slaves from Africa were unceremoniously dragged onto American soil (having arrived a year before the Pilgrims), they brought little with them except their memories and their music, which gave them some comfort and connection to their heritage. Ironically, these two violent events—the brutal conquering of Spain and the cruel slave trade in America—would help parent jazz, one of the most joyous musical forms ever.

  The Rise of the Black Musician: From Minstrel to Maestro

  The official end of slavery in 1863 may have brought freedom, but it did not bring much economic opportunity. In the South, the political and social backlash against emancipation resulted in many laws designed to promote racial discrimination that kept blacks from getting well-paying jobs or even voting. As a result, only menial jobs at menial pay were open to blacks, with the exception of the new holy trinity of opportunity: teacher, preacher, or musician. Even during slavery, whites accepted blacks as musicians, but only in what were considered low-class venues such as dances or minstrel shows. A black pianist might be seen in a church or a brothel, but never in a proper concert hall.

  The minstrel show, which featured white performers smearing burnt cork on their faces and presenting insulting caricatures of African-American life, was wildly popular in post–Civil War America and continued in spirit right up through the 1950s. Although performers in blackface date back to the 1790s, Thomas “Daddy” Rice is credited with popularizing the tradition in the 1820s when he took to the stage in blackface to perform “Jump Jim Crow,” a song he’d heard an old black man sing, supposedly about himself. The sheet music was published in 1823 and sold well throughout the country. “Jim Crow” then became not only a stock character in subsequent minstrel shows, but also the term used for the racially discriminatory laws and customs meant to repress people of color.

  The start of the more formal minstrel show was the result of desperation rather than commitment to racist social commentary. In the 1840s, four out-of-work white actors, anxious for employment, saw a popular act called the Tyrolese Minstrel Family, who were touring the United States singing European folk songs. In a parody of the show, the actors created Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, a revue that featured the four of them in blackface performing songs, dances, and comic skits. As the Virginia Minstrels’ popularity grew, so did that of some of the songs they introduced, such as “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Blue Tail Fly.” Author Lee Davis, in Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the Great Broadway Revue, describes the appeal of the Virginia Minstrels:

  Most of all, there was exuberance and excitement. The minstrels, in their wide-eyed, large-lipped, ragged-costumed absurdity, rolled onto the stage in a thundercloud of energy which hardly ever dissipated. They insulted each other, they baited each other, they made mincemeat of the language, they took the audience into their fun, and, in one night, they added a new form of show business in America—in fact, the world.

  Hoping to cash in on this popular new act, other all-white companies quickly formed and began touring both the United States and Europe, even during the Civil War. In fact, the minstrel song “Dixie” was adopted as the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. Even after the abolition of slavery the popularity of the minstrel show continued to grow, not just in the South, but in the North as well. By the end of the Civil War, New York City alone had twenty full-time resident minstrel companies. It seemed that white America refused to accept any image of African-Americans that wasn’t the familiar—and nonthreatening—version of the slow child that needed stern parenting. And even when black musicians refuted this image by demonstrating remarkable skills, those skills were ignored until a white performer made it more palatable.

  Because the minstrel show claimed to be an accurate, though exaggerated, portrayal of black culture and values, it helped solidify the way blacks would be viewed by most white Americans for many years to come. The typical minstrel show featured several standard grotesque characters, among them Jim Crow, the carefree slave; Bruder Tambo, who played the tambourine; Bruder Bones, who played rib bones or spoons; and Zip Coon, who was a freed slave putting on high-class airs. Usually, the show was divided into three acts. The first act was the Minstrel Line, in which the actors would sit in a semicircle and perform songs, dances, and jokes. The second act was the Olio, in which songs or variety acts were performed by the actors without blackface makeup so the audience could be assured they really were white. The final part of the Olio was a comic speech given by one of the standard blackface characters (e.g., Jim Crow or Zip Coon), in which contemporary politics and personages were satirized. This last format was the start of what would later be called stand-up comedy. Act 3 was the presentation of a one-act musical that lampooned a well-known novel, play, or political or social issue. This act usually presented the characters of slow-witted doofus Jim Crow and “uppity” social striver Zip Coon.

  After the Civil War, blacks began to join some of the minstrel shows. Some even formed their own all-black minstrel companies, which toured both the United States and Great Britain. Ironically, these black performers still had to wear blackface makeup to make their skin darker to fit in with the audience’s expectations. They were now in the strange position of being black men imitating white men imitating a twisted version of black culture. And although the format required that they degrade their own people, the minstrel show gave African-Americans their first opportunity to perform on a professional stage.

  The next barrier to be broken was that of gender. For a long time, minstrel shows had been all-male. Then in 1890, The Creole Show featured several women in the cast. The show became so successful that women became common in minstrel shows, thereby launching the acceptance of black women performers that would later reach its greatest success in the many popular female blues and jazz singers. Their break came just in time, for the minstrel show would quickly lose popularity, nearly disappearing after the 1920s, as jazz began to rise.

  Dismissing the minstrel shows as merely another ugly episode in American racial history would be easy, but that would ignore their significant contribution. They provided the first stage for black actors. They originated stand-up comedy that leads directly to Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Chris Rock. Black women performers got their start in minstrel shows, presaging Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday. Even though renowned abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass condemned minstrelsy for its overt racism, he also grudgingly acknowledged some benefit: “It is something to be gained when the colored man in any form can appear before white audiences.”

  By being the first to commission songs for their acts, minstrelsy promoted the widespread growth of popular music in the nineteenth century. White composer Stephen Foster’s hit songs—“Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” �
��O Susanna,” and “Old Folks at Home”—were written for and became famous because of the minstrel shows. James Bland, America’s first black composer of popular songs, wrote “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” for the minstrel shows. Both Bland and Foster, two of the most famous chroniclers of Southern life, were raised in the North. Even if the songs weren’t anywhere close to authentic depictions of African-American lives or sentiments, they did create a white audience receptive to what they thought was black music. This made it easier for the more authentic music such as ragtime, the blues, and jazz to later reach such popularity.

  Minstrelsy reached its height, and its most famous (though erroneous) connection with jazz, through the talents of Al Jolson (1886–1950), the son of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. Jolson’s popularity was extraordinary, even by today’s standards. His Broadway career lasted nearly thirty years (1911–40); he recorded the equivalent of twenty-three number one hit records, the fourth-highest total between 1890 and 1954; and he starred in several popular, though not especially good, films. His most popular movie was The Jazz Singer (1927), credited with being the first commercially successful “talkie” (a movie that included sound with the images). The title was more a tribute to the popularity of jazz than the actual music Jolson performed. In the film, Jolson sang minstrel classics like “Mammy” while wearing blackface. Although Jolson has become something of a poster boy for the evils of minstrelsy, Jolson himself was a friend to many black performers during a time when it could have hurt his career. Once he heard that the noted black songwriting team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle had been turned away from a restaurant. The following night he provided both of them with not only dinner, but a private performance.

  Even as the minstrel shows were dying out, the two stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon continued in popularity. The radio show Amos ’n’ Andy debuted in 1928, featuring the same basic Jim Crow and Zip Coon characters. And as in the minstrel shows, two white actors portrayed the two main black characters. The show became the longest-running radio show in history. When the show was brought to television in 1951, black actors played the parts. The TV show lasted only two years, in part due to rising protest from the black community. However, not all members of the black community condemned the show. The Pittsburgh Courier, a highly influential black newspaper that led the outrage against the movie Gone With the Wind for its use of black stereotypes, printed an article defending the show. Despite this contentious history, Amos ’n’ Andy was the first TV show with an all-black cast, a landmark that wouldn’t be equaled for another twenty years.

  Blackface itself continued to appear in popular movies. In Babes on Broadway (1941), Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney perform a musical number in blackface. And the beloved Christmas movie Holiday Inn (1942) features Bing Crosby in blackface, making the movie not so beloved by African-Americans. Blackface entertainment was satirized in Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000), in which a black television executive introduces blackface minstrelsy to contemporary TV audiences, only to be shocked by its success.

  The apparent lesson of the wide success of minstrelsy is that if Americans couldn’t see blacks in their traditional subservient roles, they wouldn’t see them at all. It was this myopic vision and entrenched attitude—as well as the images of Jim Crow and Zip Coon burned into the white collective retina—that the Harlem Renaissance fought so hard to dispel by parading before white America the boundless talents of black writers, intellectuals, actors, athletes, and artists. And leading the parade right down Main Street, USA, and into the homes of white America were the black musicians. They created the white audience that would be receptive to all other talented African-Americans who followed.

  The Piano Plays a New Tune for African-Americans

  That magnificent parade might never have traveled out of Harlem if it wasn’t for one unexpected vehicle: the piano. For African-Americans, the piano was more than a musical instrument; it became a speedy getaway car to escape the black stereotypes that blocked them from opportunity—artistic, educational, and economic.

  Like that giant meteor that supposedly was responsible for wiping out all dinosaurs, the piano hit post–Civil War African-Americans with an impact that would destroy and bury the popular image among white Americans of the dumb and lazy Negro, too slow-witted and undisciplined to learn the complex piano. To white America, African-Americans could only handle the most primitive of instruments, such as the drums or banjo. True, few blacks at the time played the piano, but that was because during slavery they had little access to pianos. However, after emancipation, many African-American families bought small organs or harmoniums (pianos were too expensive) as a means both to proudly display their independence by owning what had before been denied them, and to promote cultural assimilation for their children. Raising children who could play the piano not only dispelled the derogatory myths, but also boosted the children’s chances for rising up out of their class, even within the black community. And the cost for this opportunity was only fifty cents down and fifty cents a week for the rest of their lives. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington recounts a dinner visit with one such hopeful family in their Alabama cabin: “When I sat down to the table for a meal with the four members of the family, I noticed that, while there were five of us at the table, there was but one fork for the five of us to use…. In the opposite corner of that same cabin was an organ for which the people told me they were paying sixty dollars in monthly installments. One fork, and a sixty-dollar organ!” Fingers could substitute for forks, but the organ was the hope for the future.

  At this same time, a new musical phenomenon was sending feet everywhere into wild spasms of dancing: ragtime. Whether the popularity of the piano spawned the popularity of ragtime, or the other way around, both benefited from the relationship. Those who wanted to learn to play the newest ragtime piece could do so on the standard piano, while those who liked the sound but found the compositions too challenging could just crank up the player piano. The spread of these two instruments throughout the United States helped create a market and made ragtime in great demand. And it was ragtime that would launch the nationwide, and even international, popularity of the black musician.

  The Ragtime Rage

  When the Paul Newman–Robert Redford movie The Sting was released in 1973, the world rediscovered a musical form that had once dominated American society: ragtime. Scott Joplin’s songs, particularly “The Entertainer,” were prominently featured on the film’s sound track, which became a huge hit. Suddenly ragtime was heard on major radio stations, on TV, and in other movies. As popular as ragtime was in the early 1970s, that was nothing compared to the enormity of its popularity in the early twentieth century. So great was its fame that in 1900, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” (named after the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri, where he sometimes played) became the first sheet music to sell more than a million copies—at a time when there were only 76 million people in the entire United States.

  Art critic Russell Lynes once said, “Ragtime was a fanfare for the twentieth century,” meaning that ragtime’s lively beat and celebratory attitude made it the perfect music to herald the arrival of a century filled with hope that we would right the wrongs of the last century and prove ourselves more worthy this time around. People felt more empowered in this “modern era,” demanding more rights—rights for minorities, rights for women, rights for labor. And through it all, energetic ragtime music wafted from homes, bars, and brothels like an encouraging friend. This optimistic energy and independent attitude spilled over into jazz. Ragtime’s influence on jazz was so great that the terms jazz and ragtime were sometimes used interchangeably, even by the musicians who played them.

  Ragtime’s independent attitude partially came as a result of musicians not being trained in traditional musical theory. While a number of black pianists were formally trained in the classic European approach to the piano (Scott Joplin among them), most were self-taught and could not read mu
sic. For many of the early ragtime pianists, as well as those who played blues and jazz, this lack of traditional training made them less rigid in their musical tastes and more willing to experiment with different sounds and techniques. While European-inspired music emphasized counterpoint and harmonies, the ragtime musicians were working on “ragging” popular songs that employed the European techniques. Ragging meant to alter the rhythm to make it syncopated, which involved shifting the accent to the weak beat of the bar. This ragging technique did not appear out of nowhere, but was a major part of West African music, which slaves brought with them to their new homes. The origin of the term ragtime isn’t definitively known. Some historians claim it was the result of the ragged rhythm described above, which even ragtime musicians such as Scott Joplin halfheartedly accepted (“It suggests something like that”). Yet others believe it came from the nineteenth-century African-American tradition of handkerchief-flaunting. By the end of the nineteenth century, the terms rag and dance were interchangeably used because it was as much about the way the music made your body want to move as any specific structure of playing.

  Eventually, ragtime became more formalized, typically structured around a four-theme form and a sixteen-bar melody. In the novel The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson offers a less technical explanation of ragtime by re-creating his personal experience of watching ragtime pianists in Harlem: