Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  Rhythm & Blues and the Civil Rights Movement

  Introduction: The Rhythms & The Blues

  of the Civil Rights Movement

  While mainstream American history, culture, politics, and economics have undoubtedly impacted the African American popular music tradition, black ghetto youth historically have been, and remain, its primary producers and practitioners. Their songs served as mouthpieces for the Civil Rights Movement, just as their songs remain central to the soundtracks of the Hip Hop Movement. As we shift our focus from the African American sacred song tradition to the African American secular song tradition, from black church music to black popular music during the Civil Rights Movement, it is important to bear in mind that the primary producers and practitioners of the gospel-derived freedom songs discussed in the previous chapter were working-class and underclass black youth. Moreover, at its inception many of the pioneers and popularizers of gospel were, relatively speaking, young, working-poor church folk. For instance, the widely acclaimed “father of gospel music,” Thomas Dorsey, began his career performing and recording as a scuffling blues musician named “Georgia Tom” (he also performed and recorded as “Barrelhouse Tom” and “Texas Tommy”), but by the mid-1920s was recording early gospel along with his blues songs. Born in Villa Rica, Georgia, in 1899, in the mid-1920s Dorsey was a young, working but poor musician whose gospel music was long-reviled before it was eventually revered during the Civil Rights Movement. As Michael Harris observed in The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (1992), it was Dorsey’s “earlier experience with the revitalization of downhome blues that provided him with the assurance that that style was an appropriate form of music for [black] churches” (127).[1]

  Much like its musical offspring, rhythm & blues and rock & roll, gospel creatively combined elements of both the African American sacred song tradition and the African American secular song tradition, both black church music and black popular music, and it is this sonic synthesis that was incredibly controversial at the emergence of gospel music in the 1920s. Most “old-time religion” or “old school” church folk in the 1920s and 1930s thought that gospel—what Dorsey called “gospel blues”—was nothing more than misguided young folks’ foolishness. But, Harris contended:

  Dorsey could well remember that the strength of the resurgence of the older style of blues was a surprise to almost everyone in the business. Recordings by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey exceeded all sales expectations. Because of the success of their records, Smith and Rainey now performed in the theaters and clubs that had been the exclusive domains of vaudeville blues artists who were considered the higher-class singers. Dorsey knew, therefore, that downhome secular blues was a powerful medium even outside the rent parties, wine rooms, and honky-tonks in which it was usually performed. To Dorsey these traditional contexts for the older blues were comparable to the storefront for the older style religion. As he had worked his way out of them and ultimately had been able to carry the music with him, he could now expect to remain in old-time churches and convince them of the virtues of the older music—no matter how formidable the challenge. (127)

  Part of Dorsey’s genius lies in his extraordinary ability to perceive that black popular music, in this instance “downhome secular blues,” was in fact, “a powerful medium even outside the rent parties, wine rooms, and honky-tonks in which it was usually performed.” If the spirituals could be sung in secular settings, as they were during and immediately after African American enslavement, Dorsey fervently believed that certain elements of the blues and jazz could be blended with the spirituals and adapted to create a new, more modern, twentieth century version of the spirituals that could be sung in the modern black church. Mixing black sacred song with black secular song, Dorsey blurred the lines between the sacred and the secular in ways that obviously resonated with the large majority of African Americans when we consider that gospel music is currently universally regarded as the central soundtrack of black church life and culture, and the fact that every major form of black popular music that has risen after the introduction of gospel has in some way been influenced by it—including rhythm & blues and rock & roll during the Civil Rights Movement, and soul and funk during the Black Power Movement. It would be virtually impossible to overlook the working-class and underclass roots of the blues. It stands to reason, then, if early gospel directly and unambiguously mixed the spirituals and the blues, both musics with undeniable working-class and underclass roots, then gospel, especially during its formative phase through to its peak period (circa 1925 to 1965), can be interpreted as an expression of working-class and underclass black folks’ preoccupation with heavenly salvation and earthly liberation.

  Where gospel could be said to be an expression of primarily working-class and underclass black folk, rhythm & blues (as with rock & roll at its inception), can be said to be an expression of primarily working-class and underclass young black folk. Again, it should be emphasized that a young Thomas Dorsey pioneered gospel music, and he selected a young, working-poor Mahalia Jackson to popularize his songs and the gospel sound. In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Jackson moved from New Orleans to Chicago, and in 1928 met Dorsey. Although Dorsey, according to Horace Boyer (1995), “was legitimately concerned with what she would do to his songs,” as the teenage Jackson “was not always inclined to follow the Baptist style of singing, especially when she was caught up in the spirit,” by the 1930s “the two became a team for fourteen years” (87). Just as ragtime was pioneered and popularized by a young Scott Joplin, and jazz by a young Louis Armstrong and a young Duke Ellington, gospel music was pioneered by a young Thomas Dorsey and popularized by a young Mahalia Jackson. As emphasized in the previous chapter, the extra-musical aspects of African American music are often just as important as, if not even more important than, the purely musical elements.

  Whether we turn to the Abolitionist Movement or the New Negro Movement, the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power Movement, the black popular music emerging out of the movement under consideration most often provides a mouthpiece for, and map of the movement. Musical texts often double as historical, cultural, social, and political texts that chronicle and, however codedly, critique many of the most pressing problems of the movement and its epoch. Which is to say, as discussed in the previous chapter, there is more than merely a casual relationship between black popular music and black politics, black aesthetics, and black ethics. At the heart of the connection between black popular music and black politics lies working-class and underclass black youth, who pioneered and popularized every form of post-enslavement black popular music, from the blues and ragtime to jazz and gospel. Consequently, the history, culture, and struggles of working-class and underclass black folk, especially black ghetto youth, should be at the heart of any serious analysis of black popular music and black popular movements. As a matter of fact, much of what historically has been, and currently continues to be called “black popular culture” is nothing more than black ghetto youth culture or, at the least, some derivation of it.[2]

  Ironically, along with being the primary producers and practitioners of black popular culture, black ghetto youth have consistently served as the foot soldiers and very often the shock troops for the mostly middle-aged and middle-class leadership of post-enslavement black social and political movements: from the Black Women’s Club Movement and the New Negro Movement through to the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. For instance, with regard to the Civil Rights Movement, who can deny the pivotal role black ghetto youth played in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Voter Registration Movement, the Sit-In Movement, the Freedom Riders Movement, the Albany Movement, the March on Washington, or the Selma to Montgomery Marches? The point that I am making here has to do with the fact that black ghetto youth are often rendered invisible when and where we come to African American political thought and social movements. But, these same youths are usually rendered hyper-visible when and where we come to black popul
ar culture, especially what is perceived to be the vices and vulgarities of black popular music.[3]

  Needless to say, black popular music conveys more than vices and vulgarities. If one listens to it from a perspective that is sensitive to the lives and struggles of black ghetto youth, then—and, perhaps, only then—a whole new world, a whole new archive ripe for critical analysis is opened up. Often black ghetto youths’ music, aesthetics, and politics are engaged, validated or invalidated utilizing either Eurocentric or black bourgeois criteria. This tendency reeks of the kind of dubious double-standard that working-class and poor black folk have long resented when and where their music, aesthetics, and politics have been examined by bourgeois and petit bourgeois scholars and critics. By grounding my analysis in the lives and struggles of working-class and poor African American youth; by sincerely and sensitively attempting to understand the ways in which they have historically used music as a prime medium through which to express their views and values (à la “implicitly singing what they cannot explicitly say”); and by (re)situating their sonic reflections and expressions within the wider contexts of African American political thought and popular social movements, and African American history, culture, and struggle more generally, here I will explore classic rhythm & blues as one of the major black popular music conduits for black ghetto youths’ contributions to, and critiques of the Civil Rights Movement.

  Ultimately I am undertaking this analysis to discover how the young unsung singing soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement put the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic into play in secular song, specifically rhythm & blues. Therefore, this chapter is not in any way offered as a definitive or even a comprehensive history of classic rhythm & blues in relationship to the Civil Rights Movement, nor was it ever intended to serve such a purpose. Let me be real clear here at the outset: the main thrust or thesis of this chapter, and indeed this book, is that unsung singing members of the Civil Rights Movement utilized politics and music, rhetoric and aesthetics to combat racial segregation and ultimately topple mid-twentieth century American apartheid. The Civil Rights Movement was inspired and led by more than middle-aged and middle-class black church folk, and I hope that this book will go far to demonstrate that although their leadership and contributions may not mirror each and every contribution that emerged from middle-aged and middle-class, church-going black America, more than fifty years after the movement we can finally acknowledge and honor the unique leadership and contributions of the rank and file unsung singing foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement.

  We have all inherited much from previous generations of African American youths—especially black ghetto youths’ musics, aesthetics, and politics—than readily admitted or otherwise understood. Part of the reluctance to acknowledge connections between past and present black ghetto youth (including rap music and the Hip Hop Movement) has more to do with either the ignorance or amnesia surrounding working-class and poor African American youths’ contributions to African American and mainstream American history, culture, and politics, especially the Civil Rights Movement. Racially oppressed and economically exploited groups have very few avenues open to them to dissent and express their opposition, even in a democratic society such as that of the United States. The situation is even more bleak when and where we come to black ghetto youth, whether we are considering their life-worlds and life-struggles in the twentieth or twenty-first century.

  After all, the ghetto is supposedly a place where violence, vulgarity, poverty, illiteracy, promiscuity, and larceny reign supreme. In other words, to take this lame line of logic to its extreme, nothing of value can be found in or come out of the ghetto. Therefore, the contributions to African American and mainstream American history, culture, and politics that actually originated in, and emerged from the ghetto are either attributed to the black bourgeoisie or treated as free-floating postmodern signifiers whose architects and origins are unknown. As I discussed in critical detail in The Hip Hop Movement, this simultaneous invisibility and anonymity with respect to black ghetto youths’ contributions to African American and mainstream American history, culture, and politics has been sadly handed down to the Hip Hop Generation.[4]

  Working-class and poor African American youths’ lives are situated at the intersections of both black popular music and black popular movements because, on the one hand, they are the primary producers of black popular music and, on the other hand, they are frequently the primary preoccupation of black popular movements. On this last point, it might be helpful to, however briefly, consider the fact that each and every major post-enslavement African American social and political movement has been, more or less, black youth-centered—if not black ghetto youth-centered. Think about the Black Women’s Club Movement’s work with working-class and poor under-age and unwed mothers, as well as their pre-schools and kindergartens for impoverished children. Think about the New Negro Movement’s emphasis on employment and higher education opportunities for underprivileged African American youth, especially the black youth of the South, at the turn of the twentieth century. Think about how the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which desegregated public schools in the United States, and how the long and arduous battle to implement that decision helped to spark the Civil Rights Movement. Although often uncommented on, a major motif that runs throughout each of these movements and their political activities decidedly revolves around the lives and struggles of African American youth, especially working-class and poor African American youth.

  Indeed, the lives and struggles of African American youth have been consistently at the center of black popular movements. Furthermore, their contributions to black popular movements have always been multidimensional—meaning, more than merely musical, artistic, or juvenile, but also political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual. Yet and still, the black popular music produced during the peak years of any post-enslavement black popular movement invariably seems to capture and convey the good and bad, the aspirations and frustrations, the thought and behavior of the black ghetto youth of the historical moment under consideration in ways that few other forms, aesthetic or otherwise, can.

  In short, working-class and poor African American youth’s music, aesthetics, and politics at any given moment in African American history seems to serve as a crude kind of social, political, and cultural barometer, allowing us to measure the atmospheric pressure in black America. However, the foregoing should not be taken as a fast and firm uncritical embrace of subaltern theory as much as it should be understood to be a historical and cultural reality. Let’s face it: there are more working-class and poor people in African America than any other class or group of people. Hence, my assertion that black politics and black popular culture are most often predicated on working-class and poor black folk’s lives and struggles should not shock anyone.[5]

  However, what may shock and awe many of my readers is the contention that black ghetto youth in particular have consistently contributed, not only to black popular culture, but also to black political culture and black social movements. As I argued in Hip Hop’s Amnesia and The Hip Hop Movement, black ghetto youths’ politics may not look like or sound like the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Power Movement’s politics but, no mistake should be made about it, working-class and poverty-stricken African Americans have consistently contributed to African American political thought and social movements. Again, one of the best gauges of the distinct worldview, politics, and culture of black ghetto youth historically has been, and remains, black popular culture, especially black popular music.

  In fact, black popular music has consistently served as the bridge between black political culture and black popular culture: black political culture being traditionally thought of as the domain of the black bourgeoisie, and black popular culture being traditionally thought of as the domain of working-class and underclass black folk. From my point of view, gospel, rhythm &
blues, and rock & roll during the Civil Rights Movement years, however unheralded, built on and carried over a pre-existing relationship between black popular culture and black political culture, which may go far to explain why each of the aforementioned incorporated elements of the spirituals, blues, ragtime, and jazz into their distinct expressions of the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic. To put it another way, almost inexplicably the music of black ghetto youth and many of the mores of the black bourgeoisie have traveled along parallel paths, seeming to cyclically coalesce in every major post-enslavement black popular movement, from the Black Women’s Club Movement through to the Black Power Movement.[6]

  In many ways the major forms of civil rights music—that is to say, gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll—resemble the various antecedent genres of black popular music that, from the Civil War through to the period immediately preceding the Civil Rights Movement, served as sonic expressions of the politics and aesthetics, the frustrations and aspirations of African America. For example, who can deny the ways in which Motown Records, undoubtedly the most successful rhythm & blues record company of the Civil Rights Movement, paradoxically appealed to working-class and middle-class black America, as well as black and white America in general, during one of the most turbulent, class-divided, and racially-charged eras in U.S. history? Similar to contemporary black popular music—obviously, the most popular expressions being rap and neo-soul—classical black popular music was given entry into spaces and places that black people, especially black ghetto youth, were unambiguously denied entry. This, too, is a part of the legacy left behind by the Civil Rights Movement, and black ghetto youth in particular continue to create music that is consumed and sometimes even seriously appreciated by middle-class black and suburban white America, even as middle-class black and suburban white America deny or, at the very least, vocally despise black ghetto youths’ ever-increasing impact on mainstream American culture, politics, and society.