Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  All of this is to say, early rhythm & blues registers as a reclamation of the classic blues aesthetic and the evolution of the anti-racist ethos African Americans’ unapologetically embraced during the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, Black Women’s Club Movement, and New Negro Movement turn of the twentieth century years. Whatever high hopes African Americans held concerning desegregation and integration during World War II soon soured in the years immediately following the fall of Nazi fascism in 1945. Early rhythm & blues expressed the frustrations and ongoing aspirations of a people who had been repeatedly denied and brutally betrayed by their government and fellow citizens. Crying seemed an inadequate response to the double-dealing African Americans had been consistently dealt after 350 years of enslavement and, at the time, close to 100 years of post-enslavement American apartheid. Instead of the sonic cry that was one of the distinguishing characteristics of classic blues, as jump blues evolved into early rhythm & blues the music eventually came to express a collective sonic scream or, quite literally, an unmitigated shout. However, as was discussed in detail in the preceding chapter, early rhythm & blues did not have a monopoly on the “shout” aesthetic during the Civil Rights Movement era. Obviously, gospel, with its characteristic “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty” sound and its tendency to “push [. . .] the vocal register to the extreme” indelibly influenced the “shout” aesthetic of early rhythm & blues. Being one of, if not the primary point of departure for rock & roll, rhythm & blues bequeathed the “shout” aesthetic and the tendency to “push [. . .] the vocal register to the extreme” to rock & roll, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

  Even the early rhythm & blues instrumentalists seemed to “shout” and make their instruments mirror the human voice, saying with blue notes, coded cultural sounds, and pulsating polyrhythms all the things they felt they could not say with their mouths. Early rhythm & blues’ musical shouting is inextricable from the spiritual shouting that takes place in African American churches each and every Sunday morning, and both kinds of shouting are nothing if not cathartic releases, momentarily freeing the shouter from the inferiority complexes, racism, poverty, and other ills that have plagued African America since its inception. Hence, what has been long referred to as “the honking saxophonist” might actually be better explained by turning not simply to musicology but also to sociology and, even more, to the socio-musicology of early rhythm & blues saxophonists’ segregated social world.

  Along with the shouting and screaming so typical of early rhythm & blues singing, equally telling, Baraka contended, are the “uncommonly weird sounds that were made to come out of the instruments. The screaming saxophone is the most characteristic” (172). He importantly continued, “during the heyday of rhythm & blues, blues-oriented instrumentalists, usually saxophone players, would vie to see who could screech, or moan, or shout the loudest and longest on their instruments.” In explaining the shouting and screaming in early rhythm & blues Baraka, perhaps, partially explained much about every major form of black popular music that rose in the aftermath of the classic rhythm & blues era between 1945 and 1965:

  The point, it seemed, was to spend oneself with as much attention as possible, and also to make the instruments sound as unmusical, or as non-Western, as possible. It was almost as if the blues people were reacting against the softness and “legitimacy” that had crept into black instrumental music with the advent of swing. In a way, this is what happened, and for this reason, rhythm & blues sat as completely outside of the mainstream as earlier blues forms, though without that mainstream this form of music might have been impossible. Rhythm & blues also became more of an anathema to the Negro middle-class, perhaps, than the earlier blues forms, which by now they might have forgotten, because it was contemporary and existed as a legitimate expression of a great many Negroes and as a gaudy reminder of the real origins of Negro music. (172, emphasis in original)[22]

  It would seem that early rhythm & blues’ connections to the Civil Rights Movement could not be more pronounced. For example, notice how early rhythm & blues, to a certain extent, represented working-class and poor black peoples’ interface with and integration into modern industry and technology (e.g., amplifying the saxophone and electrifying the lead, rhythm, and bass guitars). Where early rhythm & blues was one of the first forms of music to regularly utilize electric instruments, the Civil Rights Movement was one of the first black popular movements to skillfully and consistently utilize telecommunications, especially radio and television, to bring awareness of African Americans’ ongoing search for social justice and democracy.

  Paralleling early rhythm & blues saxophonists’ screaming, screeching, and honking, as discussed in the previous chapter, gospel and freedom songs’ characteristic “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty” sound, and gospel and freedom singers’ tendency to “push [. . .] the vocal register to the extreme” were more or less the musical equivalent of the eloquent oratory of Martin Luther King, the raspy radical rhetoric of Malcolm X, and the heavy, visceral vibrato of Fannie Lou Hamer. More specifically, I would like to suggest that just as Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and Septima Clark’s speeches and sermons helped to inspire a long over-due deconstruction and reconstruction of American citizenship and democracy, early rhythm & blues, and the early rhythm & blues honking saxophonists in specific, represented a kind of sonic deconstruction and aural reconstruction of black popular music, simultaneously updating and adapting it to the post-war world of black America in particular, and the United States in general. It is easy to comprehend how the early rhythm & blues honking saxophone sound eventually evolved into the screaming electric guitar sound that became the hallmark of early rock & roll.

  Obviously Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, did not intend the instrument to be played the way the early rhythm & blues honkers, such as Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Earl Bostic, Red Prysock, Big Jay Neely, Frank “Floorshow” Culley, Willis Jackson, and Jimmy Forrest, did. Just as, we can be certain, George Beauchamp and Paul Barth, the inventors of the electric guitar, never intended their invention to be used the way black guitarists have over the years. Whether we turn to the early gospel, blues, and jazz pioneers and popularizers of the electric guitar, such as Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, and Memphis Minnie, or later black guitar gods, such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, Elmore James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Rogers, Hubert Sumlin, Earl Hooker and, of course, Jimi Hendrix, post-war black popular music hinges on African Americans innovative interface with (post)modern technology. Indeed, the point I wish to emphasize here is that one of the major motifs of the Civil Rights Movement and its rhythm & blues soundtrack has much to do with African Americans incredibly intense and rapidly evolving relationship with technology, both musical and industrial technology, during the post-war period.

  If, via early rhythm & blues, it was “almost as if the blues people were reacting against the softness and ‘legitimacy’ that had crept into black instrumental music with the advent of swing.” Then, in a similar fashion, it could be observed that early rhythm & blues registers as mid-twentieth century blues people’s rejection of, and resistance to the “softness and ‘legitimacy’” that had increasingly whitewashed and watered-down black popular music, from classic blues to classic jazz, with the infamous emergence of “sweet” music. In other words, early rhythm & blues saxophonists’ honks were more than mere “honks” or hoots. Likewise, early rhythm & blues singers’ shouts were more than mere “shouts” or whoops. These sounds came from an anguish-filled existential place deep within the souls of these artists and the racially segregated, colored section-quarantined “blues people” they lived among, suffered with, and passionately performed for.

  Many may find it ironic that rhythm & blues grew out of a musical style, jump blues, that was initially known for its preoccupation wit
h jive, novelty dances, comedy routines, and “country cuisine,” but rhythm & blues’ remarkable evolution only appears ironic or erratic if it is divorced from the long history of black popular music and black popular culture. Black popular culture, and especially black popular music, has always expressed aspects of African American social and political thought. Mirroring classic gospel, and to a certain extent freedom songs, early rhythm & blues reflected a distinct form of African American protest, musical protest, which is obviously a form of aesthetic protest that was handed down from the spirituals and the Abolitionist Movement.

  What needs to be understood here is that unlike most forms of political protest, aesthetic protest is very rarely a direct call to action, and this is where there is considerable overlap between gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll as forms of musical protest during the Civil Rights Movement. Even so, critical aesthetic representation of socio-political problems, political aesthetics, and social realism in the context of African American artistic traditions must be comprehended as constituting extremely powerful socio-political ideas and acts. Most musicologists might interpret instances of protest in early rhythm & blues as mere “complaint,” but by the very fact that the alleged “complaint” is publicly articulated to such an eloquent extent that even black popular music’s most ahistorical, apolitical, and often incredibly uninformed interpreters understand it to be “complaint” illustrates that musical protest, indeed, is a form of contestation of oppressive and exploitive conditions even when it does not directly translate into concrete political organization and public demonstration. This is part of the distinct power of black popular music, if not black popular culture in general. Indirectly responding to black popular music critics’ de-politicization of black song and helping to drive my point home about early rhythm & blues as protest even though it may not have translated into “protest” in the conventional Civil Rights Movement-sense of the word, in Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), Lawrence Levine offered remarkable insight:

  To state that black song constituted a form of black protest and resistance does not mean that it necessarily led to or even called for any tangible and specific actions, but rather that it served as a mechanism by which Negroes could be relatively candid in a society that rarely accorded them that privilege, could communicate this candor to others whom they would in no other way be able to reach, and, in the face of the sanctions of the white majority, could assert their own individuality, aspirations, and sense of being. Certainly, if nothing else, black song makes it difficult to believe that Negroes internalized their situation so completely, accepted the values of the larger society so totally, or manifested so pervasive an apathy as we have been led to believe. . . . The African tradition of being able to verbalize publicly in song what could not be said to a person’s face, not only lived on among Afro-Americans throughout slavery but continued to be a central feature of black expressive culture in freedom. (239–240, 247)

  It is Levine’s last sentence that directly connects with jump blues and early rhythm & blues shouters’ songs. When he reminds us that the “African tradition of being able to verbalize publicly in song what could not be said to a person’s face, not only lived on among Afro-Americans throughout slavery but continued to be a central feature of black expressive culture in freedom,” he hints at how generation after jostling generation of African American musicians have, literally, utilized music as a medium to constructively critique their enslavers, oppressors, and abusers, both within and without African American communities. From Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” to Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Forty Acres and A Mule” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” much like the music emerging from the black sacred song tradition during the Civil Rights Movement, in the black secular song tradition of the Civil Rights Movement African Americans were able to sing what they could not unambiguously say “in the face of the sanctions of the white majority” (i.e., violent anti-black racism, Jim Crow, Black Codes, segregation, and other aspects of American apartheid more generally speaking).

  It is also important for us to keep in mind that the contention that “black song constituted a form of black protest and resistance does not mean that it necessarily led to or even called for any tangible and specific actions.” As with gospel and freedom songs, classic rhythm & blues’ “protest and resistance” may not have nicely and neatly paralleled the “protest and resistance” emerging from the dominant African American socio-political movement of its epoch (i.e., the Civil Rights Movement). But, make no mistake about it, classic rhythm & blues folk, which is to say, classic rhythm & blues people, as Levine noted, indeed did protest and resist by way of black popular music and black popular culture, among other social, political, and aesthetic avenues.

  Classic Rhythm & Blues: The Secular Soundtrack of the Colored Section and American Apartheid

  As jump blues began to wane a new form of black popular music took center stage: vocal harmony groups, street corner groups, barbershop quartets or, more simply, doo-wop groups. Inspired by the stripped down trio sound and smooth singing of Nat King Cole, Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, and Charles Brown, the doo-wop concept actually reached all the way back to pre-World War II vocal groups, such as the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, the Delta Rhythm Boys, and the Charioteers. The first two groups, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, had roots in the barbershop quartet, jazz, and pop traditions, frequently performing with the big bands of Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, and Lucky Millinder. The latter two groups, the Delta Rhythm Boys and the Charioteers, began their careers as jubilee quartets, primarily singing spirituals, folk songs, and pop songs. Four core features characterized pre-World War II vocal group singing, which consisted of a lead vocalist and supporting background singers: first, alternating lead vocals; second, closely harmonized choruses; third, imitation of instrumental tonality; and fourth, extreme contrasts in vocal range and timbre. It would be the post-war singers’ innovative imitation of the sound of musical instruments that would provide their version of vocal harmony group singing with its catchy name: doo-wop.[23]

  Here it is important to emphasize the two dominant streams running through the African American vocal harmony group tradition prior to the emergence of the post-war vocal harmony group tradition (i.e., the doo-wop tradition). Obviously the spirituals and African American folk songs provided many of the pre-war vocal harmony groups with their point of departure, while pop, love, and novelty songs offered others their core repertoire. Hence, the same thread of the sacred and the secular, spirituality and sexuality found in 1960s and 1970s rhythm & blues, as well as 1980s-onward rap and neo-soul, can be traced back to post-war black popular music’s roots in 1940s and 1950s rhythm & blues. In fact, as I discussed in detail in The Hip Hop Movement, contemporary discussions concerning “commercial rap” vs. “conscious rap” are particularly indebted to early rhythm & blues’ gospel-sound vs. pop-sound divide.

  Taking its name from the incredibly close harmonies and creative scat singing of the background vocalists, “doo-wop” was a common phrase that 1950s vocal harmony groups used in their efforts to imitate musical instruments. Like rap music, doo-wop emerged from the lives and struggles of African American ghetto youth and, as a consequence, it reflected all of the limitations and idiosyncrasies of African American youth life and culture in the immediate post-war period. Although many have made fun of 1950s black ghetto youth singing “nonsense syllables,” when these so-called “nonsense syllables” are placed within the wider context of post-war African American history, culture, and struggle, especially the Civil Rights Movement, alternative meanings and messages can be gleaned from doo-wop. As a matter of fact, I would be one of the first to admit that in a strict musicological sense phrases such as “doo-wop-wop, doo-wop-wop,” “be-bop, be-bop, be-bop,” “dang-dang-diggy-dang,” and “shooby-dooby-doo” are nonsensical. However, in a socio-musicolo
gical sense, when dropped within the absurd world of post-war America, with its continued commitment to segregation, denial of decent African American education, and routine violation of African American civil rights, the nonsense phrases of doo-wop seem to mirror, if not mimic, the high-sounding but hollow words of 1950s U.S. government and society as a whole with respect to civil rights and social justice. With doo-wop, African American ghetto youth were, yet again, “implicitly singing what they could not explicitly say.”[24]

  Even doo-wop’s most cynical critics have conceded that it has roots in the hallowed harmonies and emotive phrasing of the spirituals and gospel, especially gospel quartets such as the Golden Gate Quartet, Soul Stirrers, Deep River Boys, Fairfield Four, Harmonizing Four, Swan Silvertones, Pilgrim Travelers, and Dixie Hummingbirds. However, frequently these same critics fail to recognize that just as the spirituals and gospel contained double-meanings and masked messages, as discussed at length in the previous chapter, so too did doo-wop. Doo-wop’s double entendres and masked messages, whether perceived as romantic or comedic, provided African American ghetto youth in the 1950s with one of the only avenues open to them at the time to express their worldviews and distinct values.