Disciplinary Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, and Charles Keil's Urban Blues Matt Sakakeeny If it is the task of the historian to question the dead, who then will question the living? For unless someone questions the living ... then the historian, when he comes to accomplish his work, may ask his questions in vain, for there would be no voice from the past to help him find the answers. -Gilbert Chase (1958) Charles Keil was in his midtwenties when he published his first book, Urban Blues (1966a), based on his master's thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In many ways, it was the summation of his experiences and encounters up to that point: a childhood in rural Connecticut where his grandfather raised pigs; a love of jazz that began with drum lessons from his uncle (an example of what colleague Steven Feld described as "white male bonding through black music" [Keil and Feld 1994:2]); undergrad­ uate schooling at Yale that included travel to the West Indies and Nigeria; 1960s countercultural activism intensified by a relationship with Malcolm X; a tumultuous graduate school experience under the tutelage of Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, and Marshall Sahlins in anthropology, Leonard Meyer in musicology, and Alan Merriam in ethnomusicology; and finally fieldwork in the theaters, nightclubs, radio stations, recording studios, and tour buses connected to the bustling blues scene in Chicago. l The appearance of Urban Blues was not revolutionary because it came from the hand of a humanist prodigy, but because Keil approached a mod­ ern, urban African American musical style with such rigor. In the current disciplinary climate of critical musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and Black Studies, it is difficult to grasp that Urban Blues was not only one of the first scholarly texts based on fieldwork in urban Afro-America, but was also one of the first ethnographic monographs dedicated to an American popular music form, and was the first to eschew transcription and detailed musical-structural analysis in favor of a sociocultural approach.2 By making urban blues his object of inquiry, Keil confronted the erasure of African Americans as anthropological subjects. By researching musicians like B. B. King and Ray Charles in Chicago, Keil went against established disciplinary practices that valued "primitive" folk culture in remote areas over commercial forms in urban centers. By calling these musicians "culture heroes" from the urban ghetto, Keil positioned his work in opposition to the Current Musicology, Nos. 79 & 80 (2005) © 2005 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 143 144 Current Musicology dominant "culture of poverty" theories that pathologized African Americans. Finally, by interpreting musical meaning in the daily life of musicians and audiences and relating practices within these musical networks to broader political movements, Keil was breaking ground in the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology, which in the 1960s continued to treat music as an autonomous object to be analyzed with formal theoretical models. At the broadest level, this essay is an attempt to situate Urban Blues within a genealogy of anthropological and ethnomusicological studies of African American popular culture, as well as the specific social and political context of the civil rights era. Keil's monograph appeared at the beginning of a major paradigmatic shift in recognizing African American expressive practices, popular culture, and urban ethnography as appropriate forums for research. However, in subsequent assessments of black music research, Urban Blues has been mostly disregarded. I will conclude by linking this exclusion to a historical pattern of institutional "forgetting:' whereby dis­ ciplinary expansions are undervalued because of their inability to conform to accepted narratives. Before surveying the discursive matrix from which Urban Blues emerged in 1966, consider the implications of the brilliantly economical title of Keil's book: "urban" (a modern, heterogeneous, fragmentary ethnographic site); "blues" (a distinctly African American musical form and cultural trope); "urban blues" (a popular, contemporary African American expressive prac­ tice). Keil was able to condense the progressive and interventionist nature of his project into two simple words that suggested multiple possibilities of signification and interpretation. Early Anthropological and Sociological Study of African Americans In 1978, anthropologists John Szwed and Roger Abrahams published an annotated bibliography of research on African Americans, which they assembled in response to the lingering myth that African Americans did not have a culture of their own: Afro-American cultures exist, cultures which are neither entirely African nor European in origin, but which contain elements of both, plus the inevitable developments attendant on enslavement, the plantation expe­ rience, Native American contact, poverty and racism, as well as the vigor and creativity of human beings. (Szwed and Abrahams 1978:ix) Decades later, the argument that ''Afro-American cultures exist" seems im­ possibly unnecessary. In recognizing, however, that Szwed and Abrahams Matt Sakakeeny found it necessary to justify the discussion of race in cultural terms a full decade after the height of the civil rights movement, we are made aware of the themes that dominated academic discourse before and after Urban Blues. A brief consideration of these themes will allow for a greater understand­ ing of the process through which African Americans gradually emerged as appropriate anthropological subjects. Beginning this historical trajectory with Franz Boas is fitting not only be­ cause he is the "father" of American anthropology, but also because his views in this area are prismatic for the field in general during the early twentieth century. Boas led an effective anthropological assault on the American racial worldview, authoring dozens of publications that theorized racial difference in terms of culture, not biology (e.g., Boas 1911; Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997 :518). A founding member of the NAACP and frequent supporter and colleague of W. E. B. DuBois, Boas defended African Americans against racial determinism, and yet he systematically avoided black culture in his ethnographic research.3 For Boas, the primary mission of anthropology was to reconstruct the past of isolated societies. As Melville Herskovits, Boas's student at Columbia University, later surmised, "the comparative study of culture ... has in the past attempted to base its hypotheses on data from the nonhistoric peoples-those nonliterate folk termed 'primitive' -who are relatively but little disturbed by European influence" (Herskovits 1941:9). African Americans as a group did not conform to any of these criteria, and Boas and most of his contemporaries believed that processes of expropria­ tion, enslavement, and enforced inequality had stripped them of their past. "The tearing away from the African soil and the consequent complete loss of the old standards oflife;' wrote Boas, "are sufficient to explain the inferiority of the status of the race" (Boas [1938] 1968:240, cited in Szwed 1972:156). As Szwed discussed in his article "An American Anthropological Dilemma: The Politics of Afro-American Culture" (1972), this mode of thought domi­ nated "New World Negro" studies for the first half of the twentieth century, including the work of the "strict" Boasian Ruth Benedict, who concluded in 1940 that "the Negro race has proud cultural achievements, but for very good reasons they were not spread before our eyes in America" (Benedict 1940:87, cited in Szwed 1972:158).4 Theories of "deculturation;' or "cultural loss;' were partially informed by quantitative studies in sociology, where the study of race and ethnicity in urban areas was more prevalent than in anthropology. The center for sociological investigation before World War II was the University of Chicago, where Robert E. Park and his student E. Franklin Frazier laid the groundwork for what became the "culture of poverty" school.s With few exceptions, these theorists assumed the pathological nature of African Americans and immi- 145 146 Current Musicology grant groups to be self evident and linked "aberrant" behavior to economic impoverishment (Omi and Winant 1986).6 Many sociological depictions of ghetto life-rationalizations of "the Negro problem" conducted from a safe distance-were not based on ethnography but derived from quantitative statistical data collected through surveys with a discernable a priori agenda (Cerroni -Long 1987:445-46). The Chicago school was subsequently dubbed "the pejorative tradition" by anthropologist Charles Valentine in his Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter Proposals (1968:20-24). Valentine was part of a new wave of scholars-including Keil, Sidney Mintz, Roger Abrahams, and John Szwed-who were attempting to iden­ tify African American cultural contributions while undoing biological and cultural associations between race and pathology. In his article "Race and the Embodiment of Culture" (1975), Szwed lamented the shortsightedness of his predecessors in the "cultural loss" and "culture of poverty" camps: Early scientific anti-racists in the United States addressed the folk equation of race and culture by specifying and delimiting the concept of race ... they attempted to dispel the negative Euro-American readings and valuings of culturally different behavior of Afro-Americans by denying the existence of the behavior itself. This meant that they were forced to treat black dia- 1ects, music, dance, interpersonal style and the like as non-existent just at the point where these phenomena were beginning to flood the country through the mass media, when they were in fact becoming the basis of an American vernacular culture. (Szwed 1975:28) A circular dialogue about race and culture was occurring in the social sciences: sociologists and others piled up quantitative data to bolster their thesis that discrimination and structural inequalities had produced a "culture of poverty:' while the anthropologists, unable to locate African American culturalisms within a history of white domination, saw only a "poverty of culture:' In anthropology, it was Herskovits who first articulated a progres­ sive anti-racist argument that African American culture was reducible to neither a culture of poverty nor a culture of loss, subservient to the norms of dominant culture. Though he never questioned the fundamental Boasian construct of cultural anthropology, which insisted on detaching biological concepts from cultural concepts, Herskovits set out to destroy impressions of African Americans as a disorganized people with attenuated cultural re­ sources by demonstrating the historical depth and continuing force of their African heritage. His model of acculturation-detailed in his monumental The Myth of the Negro Past (1941; see also Herskovits 1937)-theorized culture as a dynamic process of combination and recombination, which he viewed through an ethno-historicallens based on empirical fieldwork in Africa and the Black Atlantic. Matt Sakakeeny Herskovits's groundbreaking and radical work was widely misinterpreted and ultimately dismissed by his contemporaries. Anthropologist Gunnar Myrdal took issue with Herskovits's retentionist claims by reiterating the liberal anti-racist axiom that Afro-America was "a distorted development, or a pathological condition of the general American culture" (Myrdal 1944:928-29). Along-lasting debate between Herskovits andE. Franklin Fra­ zier was aired in public throughout the 1940s (Whitten and Szwed 1970:28), but Herskovits's findings of cultural continuities between Africa and the New World were unable to sway Frazier and others from the conviction that "the most conspicuous thing about the Negro is his lack of culture" (Frazier 1934:194, emphasis added). As a result of this critical backlash, many of the main themes of The Myth of the Negro Past were neglected until the height of the civil rights era in the 1960s, establishing a precedent of institutional "forgetting" in African American cultural research. According to Szwed and Abrahams, the lack of cohesive and sustained dialogue within the small as­ semblage of scholars "permitted the same arguments and rationalizations to be explored by each [generation 1 of investigators" (Szwed and Abrahams 1978:xi). I will explore this pattern further in my conclusion, but I will first offer a limited overview of research on African American music prior to Urban Blues. Early Studies in African American Music Many early researchers of black culture in Africa and the Black Atlantic were drawn to aesthetic expression, and as Herskovits noted in his discussion of the arts, no cultural form was given more attention than music: "It has long been held that the principal contribution of the Negro to the culture of the Americas, and most particularly the culture of the United States, lies in the expression of his musical gift" (1941 :261). The first landmark study of Af­ rican American music was Slave Songs of the United States (Allen, Ware, and Garrison 1867), a collection of religious songs transcribed and annotated by educator William Francis Allen and two of his colleagues. The associa­ tion between black music and sacred singing defined most works until the mid-twentieth century. In his thorough analysis of music in The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits criticized Slave Songs of the United States and its followers for perpetuating the idea that "the songs of the Negroes represented a welling forth of the anguish experienced under slavery" and thus had no identifiable relationship to Africa (1941:262). The pioneering comparative musicolo­ gist Erich M. von Hornbostel's paper ''American Negro Songs" (1926) was faulted by Herskovits for its conclusion that "the outstanding aspects of 147 148 Current Musicology the Negro spirituals are European:' a position echoed in the "white origin theories" of Newman White (1928) and George Pullen Jackson (1944). Herskovits attempted to strike a balance, proposing that we "speak of 'Af­ rican' music in about the same degree as ... 'European' music" (1941:267). He also took issue with music researchers who did not substantiate their claims with ethnographic data. H. E. Krehbiel's Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (1914) suffered from its reliance on "what he could glean from travelers' accounts and other nonmusical works" (1941:267). Herskovits pleaded for more meticulous fieldwork on the full breadth of African American music. The scarcity of rigorous study was noted years later by Norman Whitten and John Szwed in their volume Afro-American Anthropology: These commentators ... were far from being ethnographers. They were ministers, abolitionists, educators, military officers, and members of the Freedmen's Bureau, all intent on making the Negro appear a pitiable creature in the hands of white slave owners ... in effect, they created a new stereotype: that of the humble, God-fearing, simple folk. (Whitten and Szwed 1970:31) A legacy of neglect and misapprehension stemmed from this foundational research on African American culture, but there were notable exceptions. John Lomax and his son Alan were among the first to study African American secular music seriously, along with anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston (one of Boas's students at Columbia University), who figured music as part of a larger African American cultural framework in Mules and Men (Hurston 1935). The Lomaxes made extensive recordings of black music throughout the South in the 1930s for the Library of Congress and published transcriptions of the songs of blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, or "Leadbelly" (Lomax and Lomax 1936). This project began Alan Lomax's sixty-year career as a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and documentarian of a strikingly broad range of traditional musics from around the world. Throughout the twentieth century, a devoted group of ethnomusicolo­ gists, enthusiasts, and record company entrepreneurs tracked down blues musicians in the rural South, speculating on the African and European roots of the idiom and positioning it as a "taproot" for virtually all other African American expressive cultural practices. The valorization of the "country blues" reached its apex in the 1960s folk revival, when several elderly per­ formers, particularly from the Mississippi Delta region, were resurrected as bearers of an authentic folk tradition. Ethnomusicologist Christopher Waterman questioned the racial politics of the revivalists and the ideology underpinning their "folklorization" of the blues, pointing out that the urban Matt Sakakeeny folk revival "centered on icons of rural American, Caribbean, or African negritude not threatening to white leftists" (c. Waterman 2000: 189; see also Keil1985; Wald 2004). In broader terms, cultural studies theorist Nestor Garda Canclini has suggested that particular genres are reified as "praised residue" and folkloric practices are positioned in opposition to modern­ izing practices: "In deciding that the specific character of popular culture resides in its faithfulness to the rural past, [researchers 1 are blinded to the changes that were refining it in the industrial and urban societies" (Garda Canclini 1995:148-49). The country blues embodied everything the liberal white researcher was looking for: a rural, acoustic ("primitive") music that was linked to an imag­ ined Africa by its vocal stylings and sparse arrangements. Accepted logics of folk authenticity were verified by plaintive wailing and shouting, effects of both the torturous legacy of enslavement and sacred rituals designed to "catch the spirit." Modern styles, such as urban blues and rhythm & blues, were seen as commercialized, contaminated mongrelizations of "authentic" folk music. And worse, these urban black styles were too close to rock en' roll, too influential on Elvis Presley and a generation of white rockers who changed the face of popular music in the US and Europe, too identifiable with exactly the type of "mainstream" popular music that musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists had built their work in opposition to. In the minds of many of the salvage-oriented ethnographers, urban blacks and their electrified and electrifying music exemplified the pervasive forces of modernization that Alan Lomax feared would bring about a "cultural greyout," or the homogenization of distinct forms (Lomax 1968:4).7 Urban Ethnography and Popular Culture The social sciences grew dramatically after World War II, and in parallel with the growth of the civil rights movement there developed a sizable body of ethnographic literature on black culture in the United States. With the exception of Roger Abrahams's study of black speech in Philadelphia, Deep Down in the Jungle (1964), however, there was little fieldwork being done in urban areas. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz detailed the multifaceted problems facing the anthropologist in 1970: Urban North American neighborhoods lack homogeneity of the sort typi­ cal of rural proletarian communities; they lack the physical isolation and boundedness often characteristic of rural communities ... anthropology has its own preoccupation with purity, and this is the purity of primitiv­ ity. 149 150 Current Musicology The marked sociological significance of "race;' though by no means fully understood in such cases, is nonetheless real, creating additional complex­ ity for both fieldworker and social analyst ... informants are members of an oppressed minority, while the ethnographer-like it or not-is a member of the oppressing majority ... most of us ... have been far readier to study Afro-American cultures elsewhere than to study Afro-American culture in our own area. (Mintz 1970:12-14) As Mintz indicated, the difficulty of retrofitting ethnographic methodolo­ gies that had been designed for work in isolated, relatively homogeneous cultures to include larger, more variegated urban groups was compounded by complex negotiations surrounding race, ethnicity, and class. Research in North American cities was traditionally left to sociologists, criminologists, economists, and political scientists. Even at the height of the civil rights era in 1967, when the American Anthropological Association conference organized the symposium "Negroes in the New World;' Charles Valentine noted "nearly all of these papers deal exclusively with Negro communities that are exotic and/or marginal in one sense or another. Conspicuously omitted from systematic attention here are the masses of urban and largely northern Negroes ... " (quoted in Whitten and Szwed 1970:49). Popular culture studies faced many of the same problems. Academicians were largely unequipped or unwilling to engage with mass-mediated culture, especially in music, where commodified entertainment was anathema to both musicology and ethnomusicology. In general, musicologists entrenched themselves in Western art music of the past, while ethnomusicologists studied the traditional music of "primitive" peoples, who were inscribed as: 1) physically removed from modernity in space; 2) culturally distant in practice; and 3) developmentally distant in time. Traditional yet modern, rooted in oral and aural transmission but often written out in musical notation, labeled "popular" but comparable in many ways to "folk" music of non-Western subjects, urban African American music was too exotic for musicologists and not exotic enough for ethnomusicologists. Jazz is a useful entry point for considering the dearth of popular music scholarship in this period. Currently invoked as ''America's classical music" (Taylor 1986), jazz was all but ignored in the academy until the establishment of popular music studies in the 1980s, with important exceptions including Marshall Stearns's The Story of Jazz (1956). At the time, Stearns was the lone scholar of jazz in an English department (where many jazz scholars make their home today), but he was not completely alone in the academy: a hand­ ful of other scholars made early contributions, including Alan Merriam and Richard Waterman, both ethnomusicologists who studied with Herskovits and played jazz. 8 Merriam, known more for his disciplinary writings on the field of ethnomusicology than for playing jazz clarinet, contributed three im- Matt Sakakeeny portant studies on jazz, but they were mostly bibliographical and sociological in nature (Merriam and Benford 1954; Merriam and Mack 1960; Merriam and Gamer 1968). When it came time for his major fieldwork projects, he abandoned jazz for studies in Native American music and the music of Zaire. Waterman played jazz bass and dedicated much of his research to African American music, but his overall body of work is small and contains little ethnography of jazz (R. Waterman 1948; 1952; 1963). By the time Charles Keil began his graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, there was not a single ethno­ graphic monograph on jazz or any other urban black music in the United States. In 1966, this omission would be rectified by the appearance of Ur­ ban Blues. Chicago was a center of the urban blues scene where popular practitioners such as B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Ray Charles performed extensively. Keil's monograph situated these popular performers and their audiences within the current social climate and the practice of daily life in 1960s urban black America. Movements in African American Ethnography Keil's insistence that urban African American entertainers were appro­ priate subjects for thorough ethnographic and musicological study separates Urban Blues from its predecessors inside and outside of ethnomusicology. Keil writes, "the field of Afro-Western music offers an ideal laboratory for the study of diffusion, acculturation, syncretism, and the emergence, ac­ ceptance, rejection of styles through time-all matters of importance to anthropology both theoretical and applied" (1966a:31). In the academic climate of the time, this was equivalent to tipping anthropology on its head and attacking institutional perceptions of acceptable subject matter, which had sedimented into the binary oppositions previously mentioned in this essay and reproduced in table 1. In each case, Keil chose the second member of the pair when status quo dictated the first as the proper focus for ethnography. Urban Blues deals primarily with style, symbols, and meaning in elec­ tric blues music and masculine roles in urban, working -class black culture. The introduction was a sociopolitical manifesto in which Keil argued that racial and ethnic struggles in the United States were principally concerned with cultural difference and the recognition of plural identities: "Can a shared gene pool riot? No ... Nor can races conflict; but cultures can" (Keil 1966a:3). To support his thesis and locate music's position within the civil rights movement, Keil followed his mentor Clifford Geertz in using "thick description" to unravel complex webs of symbols (Geertz 1964; 1972), in- 151 152 Current Musicology Table 1: Urban Blues was part of a representational shift in ethnography in the 1960s. Criteria for inscribing Ethnographic subjects as typi- Ethnographic subjects as subjects cally represented in the 1960s represented in Urban Blues development: primitive modern group make-up: cohesive, monolithic diverse, heterogeneous locale: rural urban ethnographer's remote nearby relationship to locale: musical classification: folk popular musical dissemination: oral tradition commercial distribution terpreting the meaning of a backstage interview with B. B. King, a Bobby Blue Bland performance, an episode of a talk radio program dedicated to the "soul" concept, a recording session at the fabled Chess Records studios, and the roles of blues stars, preachers and hustlers. Working without the benefit of a substantial body of empirical literature, Keil accumulated his own data and drew theory from sociology, psychol­ ogy, philosophy, linguistics, media studies, literature, music criticism, and radical/pacifist/anarchic propaganda, as well as musicology and anthro­ pology. In situating his own work among that of others, a pattern is detectable whereby Keil acknowledges an epistemological debt while finding his own voice through polemical acts of writing and research. This is particularly evident in the relationships with his advisors at Chicago, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider in anthropology and Leonard Meyer in musicology. Keil retrofitted Meyer's theories of syntax, style, and meaning-applied to classical music in Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) and subsequent works-to serve his own agenda. Style and meaning were two focal points of Urban Blues, but in his article "Motion and Feeling Through Music" (1966b), Keil criticized Meyer's syntactic analysis of music as an autonomous object, an approach that Keil believed did not fully explain musical meaning in performance situations. In a later exchange with colleague Steven Feld in their book Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (1994), Keil remembered his rejoinder to Meyer as a pivotal moment in the shaping of a new analytical framework: [Meyer 1 provoked not so much a dialogue as a kind of angry reaction ... I was deeply angry about this version of what music was about because it didn't explain John Coltrane at all . .. the stuff that was dull syntactically was absolutely the greatest processually ... (Keil and Feld 1994:11-12)9 Matt Sakakeeny Keil also had confrontational but productive relationships with his teachers in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago. Geertz and Schneider were pioneers of symbolic anthropology, interpreting symbols as vehicles of culture, with an emphasis on "culture" rather than "society" or "personality;' and on symbolic structures rather than on patterns of behavior (for example, see Ortner 1984:129). Keil revealed his debt to his mentors in the introduction to his second major work, Tiv Song (1979), in which he described searching for the "visions of cultural systems floating symbolically above the events of everyday life" (1979:6).10 In Urban Blues, Geertz's "thick description" method was applied to an urban African American context in Keil's interpretation of the "soul" as an "unspeakable essence;' which "both guides and is embodied in any contemporary blues ritual" (l966a:164)Y Not surprisingly, Keil had his share of disagreements with his advisors in anthropology and even lost his fellowship after submitting a Marxist paper about fieldwork-as-praxis that was dismissed as insufficiently rigor­ ous (Christgau 1996). Keilleft Chicago for a year to study ethnomusicology at Indiana University with Alan Merriam, who he praised in Urban Blues for being "consistently concerned with the relationship between music and culture" (1966a:204). But Merriam, too, would disappoint Keil for devoting too much space in his monographs to formal, structural analysis of music­ as-object, instead of probing how social structures and musical structures were intimately related. At odds at one level or another with many of his colleagues and teachers, Keil felt most closely aligned with popular critics such as Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, and particularly LeRoi Jones. Keil called Jones-the playwright, poet, music critic, and author of Blues People (1 963)-"the Allen Ginsberg of Black Nationalism" (Keil1966a:39). With Blues People, Jones (who soon after took the Muslim name Imamu Amiri Baraka) made a monumental contribution to African American studies, crafting a narrative of musical development from enslavement to the civil rights era and the free jazz move­ ment. Both Keil and Baraka were motivated and informed by struggles for racial equality; both were countercultural rebels with a mandate to inscribe the previously uninscribed; both centered expressive culture as the master trope for social and political change; and both operated under the principle that the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge had the potential to in­ spire action and bring about change. (Unfortunately, both also constructed a male-centered thesis that largely eradicated the role of women from cul­ tural production and discourse, a problem I will address in my conclusion). Beyond these similarities, the relationship between the work of Keil, a white social scientist, and Baraka, an African American culture critic, may be de­ scribed as complementary. Published while Keil was doing fieldwork, Blues 153 154 Current Musicology People is a comprehensive history of black music in the United States and an expansive consideration of all classes of African American social order. Urban Blues is a synchronic case study, using a specific musical practice (ur­ ban blues) of a particular group (urban working class African, Americans) in a single location (the South Side of Chicago) as a prism to investigate the nation's social and political climate. In the postscript to the second edition of Urban Blues ([1966] 1991), Keil praised Baraka for celebrating "blues as a core metaphor in process, the center of a worldview that incorporates jazz, literature, aesthetics, philosophy, criticism, and political strategy;' and referred to Blues People as "probably the one blues book to have if you're having only one" ([ 1966] 1991:236). Keil, however, faulted Baraka for drawing boundaries between Negro music as representative of Negro America and white music as representative of "mainline" (white) America. Keil saw American music as a conversation across racial lines, a dialogue marked by appropriation and imbalance, but a dialogue nonetheless. He observed, "it is simply incontestable that year by year, American popular music has come to sound more and more like African popular music" (l966a:45). In this way Keil aligned himself with two African American literary icons: Albert Murray, who argued that African Americans were "omni Americans," an inextricable part of "mainstream" US culture (Murray 1970), and Ralph Ellison, who, in his review of Blues People, asserted that American music was essentially American Negro mu­ sic (Ellison 1964:247-58). Ellison's review relentlessly criticized Baraka's understanding of authenticity as inflexibly linked to class and color, and launched a contested dialogue that ran in public for years. When asked after Ellison's death in 1994 ifhe had any "poignant memories" of the esteemed author, Baraka responded with a single sentence: "Ralph and I were always on opposite sides of the fence-from the time that I was a young man and he criticized Blues People as being overly concerned with social relations in society rather than music" (Baraka, et al. 1994:37). Just as Keil could not fully embrace Blues People, he also found fault with Ellison's critique of Blues People, and positioned himself somewhere in between the two authors. Keil saw Ellison as representative of the black bourgeoisie, speaking for himself and not "the man in the street." He elaborated: "The secular values Ellison has in mind are freedom, justice, and equality rather than wine, women, and song" (l966a:10, 11). Though this statement unambiguously essentializes gender roles (men as seekers of free­ dom and justice, women as purveyors of pleasure), it somewhat paradoxically relates Keil's progressive understanding of the tension-filled dialectics that define black-white relations: "most urban Negroes have both goals-white acceptance and Negro identity-dimly in view"(l966a:12). Or, to rephrase Matt Sakakeeny using Keil's problematic analogy, his version of black urban identity included freedom, justice, and equality and wine, women, and song. The competing discourses about class division, representation, and the cohesiveness of African Americans as a group has only become more heated in the ensuing years; the constructed nature of blackness as a fixed category has been the subject of piercing interrogations by Cornel West and Stuart Hall, among others (e.g., West 1990; Hall 1988). Seen as a continuation of the debates between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the stratification of African American society, the triangular conversation be­ tween Ellison, Baraka, and Keil offers an interesting window into this debate at a particularly turbulent historical moment. What complicates this conversation is the issue of subjectivity and repre­ sentation. Keil's whiteness bestowed him with privilege within the academy at a time when the authority of the white male subject position was rarely questioned. In the decades that have followed, however, the hierarchical relationship between those in this position and the various "Others" they study has been problematized. In her canonical article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Spivak traced how researchers become masters and au­ thorities of subaltern peoples through the process of inscription, and are thus "complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self's shadow" (Spivak 1988:280). The specific case of white male researchers representing African American music was discussed by ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt (2000) in her review of Keil and Feld's Music Grooves (1994). Gaunt was particularly attuned to the authors' racial and gendered reflexivity in a dia­ logue about "growing up white in a world of black music" (Keil and Feld 1994:2) and how their interpretations obscure the historical exclusion of other possible views: I am deeply concerned that one of the hooks of Music Grooves-white male bonding through black music-insidiously becomes the hook that draws readers attention away from critiquing the unconscious complicity of whites, limiting the participation of African American and African women and men in vanguard musical scholarship and discourse within the so-called ivory tower. (Gaunt 2000:180) There is no question that Keil and Feld avoided addressing the lack of par­ ticipation of black scholars in discourse about black music in their dialogue in Music Grooves. In Urban Blues, written nearly thirty years earlier, Keil occasionally takes an essentialist stance in his representation of African Americans as a group (a topic I will address in my conclusion), but he is also outspoken-bordering on confessional-about his subject position as a liberal white male. Urban Blues was the first ethnomusicological monograph 155 156 Current Musicology written in the first person, a stance which is made clear in the first sentence of the preface: "Much of who I am comes out in this book;' writes Keil. "White liberals, black militants, and others of varying pigmentation and persuasion hear in the blues essentially what they want to hear ... I claim no exemption from this pattern" (1966a:vii). Keil writes with authority in Urban Blues, but the voices of urban blues musicians are not silenced. The musicians are speaking subjects whose conversations are quoted and whose lyrics are analyzed; they are named subjects who populate the book as fully modern individuals; they are socially-constituted subjects and Keil is candid and unapologetic about his role in constituting them. Keil's identification as a white radical was not a defensive position but a constructive one from which he conceived of music as inseparable from political and social practice. Urban Blues and Civil Rights Keil's ultimate goal was to abolish racial designations altogether: "I use the term 'Negro' in connection with a way oflife, a culture, and in no other sense" (1966a:4). He added in retrospect, "It was not that I wanted to be black. My motive was simply to playa clear and strong part in righting the wrongs of American racism by celebrating black alternatives to the 'great white way'" ([1966] 1991:226). The civil rights movement served as much more than a backdrop to Urban Blues, it was decisive in its making. Keil was the first white author to contribute an essay to Muhammad Speaks, the Black Muslim publication. Urban Blues is dedicated to Malcolm X, and the relationship between the ambitious white graduate student and the revolutionary black leader evidences how Keil's progressive racial politics stimulated his ethno­ graphy of urban black expression. As an undergraduate student, Keil sought out Malcolm X and brought him to Yale and later to Chicago: Going down to the Temple Restaurant and being escorted in by Brother Joseph, the bodyguard, to sit with Malcolm for an hour, hour and a half, two hours at a clip to just talk with him. Those were the dialogues that sure as hell shaped my life at the same time Coltrane's music was getting my whole head to think differently. (Keil and Feld 1994:14) The civil rights movement, and particularly Malcolm X's militant leadership, impelled Keil to consider African American entertainment as appropriate for anthropological study. Keil went further in distancing himself from white liberal colleagues who sought to ease racial tensions in the distant South while remaining oblivious to the inequalities in their own backyard: Matt Sakakeeny The idealistic undergraduate students who flock to a folk-blues concert at the University of Chicago are not particularly interested in slum con­ ditions, but can be overheard at intermission discussing last summer's crusade in Mississippi or a forthcoming church reconstruction project somewhere in the Deep South. It is so much easier to reminisce with old bluesmen, collect rare records, and write histories than it is properly to assess a career-conscious singer, analyze an on-going blues scene, and at­ tempt to understand the blues as a Chicago Negro in 1966 understands them. (l966a:38) Keil leapt across ideological and institutional boundaries that could no longer be perceived as anything but racist, and questioned whether it was a less formidable task for "well-meaning" researchers to traverse the Mason­ Dixon line than venture outside the confines of the university campus in the predominantly black South Side of Chicago. More controversially, he questioned the motivations and goals of the black assimilationist leaders that white liberals most admired: There is a fantasy, a dream, an ideal, a plan current today which is based on the notion that the Negro problem can be solved by making the Negro white, by assimilating and integrating him in the same manner that every other immigrant has been assimilated and swallowed up in monolithic America ... an end to segregation is one thing; achieving a lasting sense of one's humanity as a black man or a white man living in America is another and more difficult problem. (l966a:196-97) In the process of consecrating Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the conflicting ideas of the assimilationists and the separatists have become blurred over time. But in a few paragraphs written from the front lines, Keil showed the division with prescient clarity and connected it to hypocritical patterns within the intellectual left. In a prismatic episode mentioned without awareness of its eventual historical potency, Keil described passing the time before his interview with B. B. King by watching Martin Luther King Jr. give a speech on television: Now as I waited for B. B. to come off stage I began to draw comparisons in my mind between the two Kings-the preacher and the bluesman-both leaders in their respective fields, both eloquent spokesmen for their people, both from the Deep South ... The preacher used two phrases over and over again as he improvised the conclusion of his address, "Let freedom ring ... I have a dream" ... gradually mov[ingJ the audience to an emotional peak ... B. B. King rarely fails to give his listeners much the same kind of emotional lift ... more than a singer or guitarist-he is a personality, a spokesman, a culture hero perhaps ... with Martin Luther King, the com­ plaints are general, political, and phrased in terms of a call to action; B. B. 157 158 Current Musicology King's concerns are specific, deeply personal, and have little or nothing to do with social protest. (l966a:96, 98) Keil was similarly able to find commonalities between the adamantly radical Black nationalists and the typically more moderate audiences in the "soul" movement: Both Muslim and soul movements are attempting to achieve the same end-self-respect ... The soul brothers seem to be saying: "let us fight for our rights ... because we value our cultural identity and wish to be able to develop it and express it without fearing punishment from the white majority" ... To say, "B. B. King is my main man," is to say, "I take pride in who I am." (l966a:189) Keil drew parallels on issues of ideology and representation between the overtly political movement and the intentionally apolitical entertainers. His ability to make these connections between politics and popular culture is still remarkable today, in an age when research on embodied meaning and coded messages in contemporary forms like hip-hop is commonplace. Fieldwork in Urban Blues The ethnographic settings described in Urban Blues are richly diverse and the methodologies innovative (it must not be forgotten that the book was based on a master's thesis). Whether socializing with musicians backstage at the Regal Theatre, or attending a Bobby Bland show at the Ashland Au­ ditorium in Chicago with "perhaps two white faces in the crowd;' Keil was approaching new sites in novel ways (1966a:96, 11S). In one of the earliest ethnographies of a commercial recording session, Keil gleefully surmised that "one afternoon at a recording session can often reveal more about a current style than all the books, interviews, and performance observations put together" (l966a:SS-93). In another episode, he turned the Interna­ tional Blues Festival at the Ashland Auditorium into an ethnographic site, interviewing ninety-seven audience members and collecting quantitative data about the reception of urban blues (1966a: 155). Urban Blues was Keil's debut as an ethnographer and author, begin­ ning a career that would take him to Africa, middle America, Macedonia, and elsewhere. It was also the end of a process of occupational searching that started in his undergraduate years: "I began thinking of myself as a fieldworker during a two-week study cruise in the West Indies, in the spring of 1960, and a summer work-study experience in Nigeria that same year" (Keil and Feld 1994:32). In the postscript to Urban Blues, Keil described these trips as instigating a process of "blackening" himself, which "probably Matt Sakakeeny culminated in the writing of Urban Blues and that ended in Nigeria, 1966, where a massacre of Igbo citizens ... punctured my beliefs that the black ways were better and more beautiful than white, that Africa is essentially superior to Europe morally and aesthetically" ( [1966] 1991 :225). This return trip to Nigeria for dissertation fieldwork coincided with the Biafran Civil War that became the basis for Keil's second book, Tiv Song. Keil refused to publish Tiv Song until 1979, unwilling to make public any ethnographic data that could be used to support the ethnic cleansing of Igbos. In the introduction to Tiv Song, Keil described his conundrum as the product of "a triple ambivalence or sense of contradiction that is built into the profession of anthropology:" I don't like the imperialist way of the world, the ever-tightening exploi­ tive grip of our greedy economy on the rest of humanity, but I enjoy the specialist's benefits from this system each day ... I don't like anthropology's role in this systematic oppression, but here I am making my second report on the poor and the powerful. (1979:4) In his reflexive and revelatory admission about the ethnographer's mediating role in issues relating to public policy, Keil was yet again prophetic: policy concerns and the place of the ethnographer have become central to ethnomusicology and anthropology since the shift towards globalization studies in the 1980s. Reaction to Urban Blues Researchers from across disciplines and outside the academy took note of Urban Blues on its publication in 1966. The New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlantic Monthly gave glowing reviews. Africanist Robert Farris Thompson wrote of his friend, "he makes us mistrust some of our deepest assumptions about a basic 'culture of poverty'" (Thompson 1967:259) and musicologist Gilbert Chase favorably compared Keil to Herskovits in his article ''Afro-American Anthropology and Black Music" (1971). However, negative reactions were inevitable considering Keil's unwilling­ ness to limit his treatment to musical analysis. Musicologist Ernest Borneman was "let down by a work which promises to tell us something about music and then tells us, at best, something about the behavior of musicians and their audiences:" What I want to learn from it, if I spend my money to buy a book on this subject, is something about the musical structure of urban blues; and this precisely is what the book does not give me. There are no musical examples 159 160 Current Musicology at all; no musicological analysis is provided beyond the standard informa­ tion about the chord structure of the twelve-bar blues. If the author can as much as read music, he does not reveal that knowledge. (Borneman 1970:169-70) It was not in the arena of formal musicological study where the most heated debates on Urban Blues occurred. More substantive grumblings came from those who had taken up the mantle of E. Franklin Frazier and Gunnar Myrdal, as Keil noted in his 1991 postscript: "The best debate growing imme­ diately out of Urban Blues was between sociologists Bennett Berger (1967), reviewing the book critically for its lack of class analysis, and Robert Blauner, defending it in his essay 'Black Culture: Myth or Reality' (1970)" (Keil [1966] 1991 :236). Berger, writing from the "poverty of culture" school, believed that the path out of poverty for Mrican Americans was through the adoption of white norms, and faulted Urban Blues for not equating racial uplift with assimilation. Blauner situated these comments within a broader pattern of academic treatment of African American subjects: "The positive assertion of Negro culture has been confined to nationalist and political circles ... it has not been defended through analysis and evidence in the academic field" (1970:349). Blauner further inflamed Berger and other scholars by suggest­ ing that their pursuits amounted to a form of neo-racism: Superficially, this argument seems to say that blacks are as American as whites and therefore, their cultural orientations reflect their social class position ... this position is historically tied to past patterns of negating or appropriating the cultural possessions and productions of black people. (1970:364) By 1970, Keil's Urban Blues was integral to a scholarly awakening of the distinctive and positive characteristics of African American culture. The civil rights movement provided the impetus for Keil and others to take up black cultural practices with seriousness and rigor. In conclusion, I will pursue whether Keil's work has remained relevant in the decades following the movement. Situating Urban Blues Much has changed in the years since Urban Blues was published. Keil was prescient in choosing his topics: urban ethnography, popular culture, and Afro-America have all become widely accepted areas of study. The mere ap­ pearance of an ethnographic case study focusing on urban African American cultural practices in the United States would no longer constitute a sub stan - tial disciplinary disruption. Yet it is worth surveying recent activity within Matt Sakakeeny various disciplines and questioning why there remain comparatively few monographs alongside Urban Blues and why Keil's work is rarely referenced in contemporary black music research. Research on African American culture has become established within the academy and professional opportunities for black scholars have increased. An interdisciplinary movement has loosely gathered under the banner of Black Studies, and music is often upheld as the preeminent trope of black expressive culture (e.g., Gilroy 1993). The parallel emergence of gender studies has created an important space for dialog about women, race, and music, particularly the exclusion of women from the study of African American music (e.g., Davis 1998; Tucker 2000; Griffin 2001). These recent shifts offer a pertinent, if indirect, critique of Urban Blues, which focused exclusively on male performance and offered an analysis of masculine "hustler" and "preacher" roles that essentialize black male identity (Keil 1966a:143-163). Keil's undertheorizing of gender roles led him to make sweeping assumptions that border on the paternalistic: "The traveling life and its attendant woman troubles (or role conflicts, it you prefer) provide of course the source material for the most typical blues lyrics and, more important, enable the singer to deliver those lyrics night after night with absolute conviction" (1966a: 181). This statement not only undermines Keil's objective of demonstrating the diversity of black culture, it also circumscribes black performance according to ethnocentric notions of authenticity, as if urban blues singers were incapable of projecting emotions that didn't spring forth from immediate experience. Work in cultural studies-and particularly in gender studies and Black Studies-has sought to offset the essentialist understandings that often underlie our most basic assumptions about identity. However, there is a recognizable disconnect between disciplines, evidenced in the scarcity of ethnographic work on African American culture outside of anthropol­ ogy. Gender studies and Black Studies often privilege critical theory and historical excavation at the expense of the more empirical and experiential method of ethnographic fieldwork. A committed and sustained dialogue between the established and emergent disciplines could only benefit both (Harrison 1995:47). Within anthropology, the discourse on race diminished after flourish­ ing in the 1960s and early 1970s. In a comprehensive review article, Paye Harrison blamed this silence on the "progressive" act of debunking racial determinism: the new understandings of race as a social rather than a bio­ logical construct led to the abandonment of race as a scientific category (Harrison 1995; see also Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997:520-21). Studies of racial groups were decentered by studies of ethnic groups until the late 161 162 Current Musicology 1980s, when a revitalization of race-centered analysis emphasized the con­ struction of "racial formations" and the "racialization" of ethnic groups (e.g., Omi and Winant 1986). In much of the recent anthropological writing on race and Afro-America, however, there has been a general failure to pursue a discursive engagement with music despite the efforts in cultural studies and historiography to valorize black music. In historical musicology and ethnomusicology, a major paradigmatic shift in the early 1980s recognized popular culture as a suitable object of inquiry, and thus greatly altered both disciplines. The ethnographic and sociocultural study of music making and reception in ethnomusicology has thoroughly overtaken formal musical analysis as the principal means of understanding musical meaning. Yet, as Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohl­ man point out in their introduction to Music and the Racial Imagination (2000), those in musicology and ethnomusicology have failed to theorize race as an important dimension to musical study (2000: 1_5).12 The polemical reassessment of the place of race in music studies achieves critical mass in Radano's Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (2003). Positioning Urban Blues within Radano's valuation will provide an appropriate conclusion to my own reappraisal of Keil's work. In his opening chapter, Radano covers the landscape of black musical study with exhausting comprehensiveness, and Urban Blues could be clas­ sified within at least two of the epistemological strains he outlines. Radano conceivably envisions Keil as an "emancipatory scholar" who sought to free black music from what he calls the narratives of exclusion and/or contain­ ment in the academy (2003:30-32). Several researchers of gospel and other African American genres have "opted for an assertive, affirmative scholastics that celebrates perceived racial unities" (2003:32). According to Radano, these Afrocentric interpretations are "merely inverting the assumptions of European superiority and disavowing the historical and cultural complexities of Africa in the name of a hegemonic black America" (2003:33). Yet, Urban Blues resists categorization as an Afrocentric project in several ways: 1) in its focus on a thoroughly urban, modern, assimilated music as opposed to more "rooted" genres such as gospel or rural blues; 2) in its emplacement of the music within a highly politicized American social movement; and 3) in its recognition of the multiplicity of black identities, or the "unstable ideological formation" of blackness that Radano finds missing in much Afrocentric scholarship (2003:36). Keil's work might also be included within Radano's epistemo­ logical genealogy of scholars who attempted to identify an African past within the cultural practices of an African American present, such as Herskovits, Merriam, Waterman, Abrahams, Szwed, etc. (Radano 2003:9; Matt Sakakeeny 33-36). While Radano acknowledges the necessity of "claiming 'pastness'" in order to refute claims of cultural deficiency or erasure, he faults the re­ tentionists for reducing the "complexity of lived experience to a static and oversimplified phenomenology of blackness" (2003: 1 0) and for disregarding histories of rupture and displacement in the search for continuities. 13 This scholastic reconstruction leans towards presentism: a thorough consider­ ation of the particular historical moments and research conducted within those moments would acknowledge the battle faced by past researchers in dismantling the institutional and societal barriers supported by racists and anti-racists alike. The interventions of these scholars forced the recognition of racial practices that had been systematically disregarded, and contempo­ rary claims of oversimplification or the inherent essentialism of these efforts must be seen in this light. The development and ideational change that has taken place between Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past and Lying Up a Nation reflects the shifting tides of racial ideologies within and beyond the academy over several tumultuous decades. Determining precisely where Urban Blues fits within Radano's schema necessarily involves speculation, as Keil's work is not referenced in the text (secondary themes of Urban Blues are cited in two footnotes). Can this omission be explained by the difficulty in positioning Urban Blues as rep­ resentative of a larger body of work because of its defiance of disciplinary boundaries and its challenge to established methodological and theoretical constructs? Or was Radano unable to polemically deconstruct Urban Blues with the same force that he tackled "emancipatory" and "retentionist" works because of Keil's rigorous fieldwork, theoretical engagement, and prescient argument? Radano's decision not to include Urban Blues in his extensive disciplinary review is unfortunately indicative of a larger pattern. Though Keil's book has never gone out of print and remains popular among blues audiences, it has not secured a prominent place in the academy. Once the civil rights movement began to fade from public consciousness in the early 1970s, Ur­ ban Blues ceased to be identified as a transformative agent in the study of music, African American culture, and urban ethnography. Why, for example, were Bruno Nettl's 1978 edited volume Eight Urban Musical Cultures and Adelaida's Reyes-Schramm's "Ethnic Music, the Urban Area, and Ethnomu­ sicology" from the following year considered pioneering works upon their appearance, more than a decade after the publication of Urban Blues? Why do these works continue to be cited as foundational contributions to urban studies of music to the exclusion of Urban Blues? Urban Blues is simply not representative of a larger body of literature and has not spawned any identifiable descendants in ethnomusicology or 163 164 Current Musicology anthropology. As of this writing, it remains one of a handful of ethnographic monographs of an urban black music in the United States, a body of re­ search inversely proportional to the privileged position of African American popular music in the marketplace.14 Regardless of the fact that Keil was at the forefront of a disciplinary movement, spurred by a widespread political movement, the work he produced fits uneasily into subsequent paradigmatic taxonomies, disciplinary genealogies, and epistemological narratives. In 1978, John Szwed and Roger Abrahams lamented the institutional pattern of under-recognizing previous scholarship, which they saw as espe­ cially pervasive in the research of African American culture. Decades later, there is little evidence that the abundance of scholarship on racial practices, both inside and outside the field of Black Studies, has altered this pattern of forgetting. This essay is intended as one corrective, with the aim of recogniz­ ing Keil's vision and reserving a space for Urban Blues in a more inclusive, less regimented disciplinary framework. Notes Thanks to Aaron Fox and John Szwed for their comments on this essay. 1. Keil's biography taken from Keil and Feld (1994:2,9,15,32) and Christgau (1996). 2. A note on two choices of terminology: 1) ethnomusicology/anthropology: the terms occasionally appear interchangeably as I am focusing on ethnographic accounts of Mrican American music by both anthropologists and ethnomusicolgists at a time when ethnography was not as central to ethnomusicological projects as it is today. 2) African American/black! Negro/negro: I use the terms ''African American" and "black:' except when referring to previous writings which used "Negro" or "negro," hence the appearance of loaded phrases such as "New World Negro." 3. Though Boas did no ethnographic research on African Americans, he frequently spoke out against racial injustice against blacks. In 1906, Boas was invited by W. E. B. DuBois to give the commencement address at Atlanta University, where he spoke out against discrimina­ tion. See Hyatt (1990:85-88). 4. Much of John Szwed's early work in African American anthropology has been collected in Szwed (2005). 5. Frazier was one of the few black social scientists employed by a white academic institution in the mid-twentieth century. For a discussion of the forces that limited black participation in anthropology, see Drake (1978). 6. The phrase "culture of poverty" was later coined by sociologist Oscar Lewis in his book about families in a Mexico City barrio (Lewis 1961). 7. Lomax maintained a contradictory relationship with contemporary black music, simul­ taneously fearing the transformation of "traditional" musics and celebrating the vitality of jazz and urban blues. 8. Stearns was a professor at Hunter College and founded the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in 1966. Other early academic jazz writings include: Borneman (1944); Slotkin (1946); M. Berger (1947); and Cameron (1954). Matt Sakakeeny 9. Feld said of Keil's article: "Here's Chuck, way out there, twenty years before critical cul­ tural studies, saying that analysis and criticism do have something to do with each other and that, contrary to the ethnomusicologists and cultural relativists who don't want to evaluate anything, there is a way to talk about what's a good groove completely apart from Meyer's deferred gratification. It's an article that could have been as seminal twenty or twenty-five years later" (Keil and Feld 1994:158-59). 10. It is possible that Schneider encouraged Keil to pursue ethnographic research in the United States, as he was working on a major study of American kinship as a symbolic system at the time. See Schneider ([1968]1980). 11. Tellingly, there was no empirical data of urban blues practices to extend Geertz's find­ ings, so Keil convinced the host of a local talk show on Chicago's largest black radio station, WVON, to devote a call-in program to the theme of "What is soul, how do you define it, who has it?" (1966a:166-170). 12. The critique of the absence of racial discourse in musicological study is also explored in Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000). 13. Radano aligns himself here with the important intervention of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, who argued in 1976 that because slaves did not share a unified African past or a unified experience once in America, "the Africans in any New World colony in fact became a com­ munity and began to share a culture only insofar as, and as fast as, they themselves created them" (Mintz and Price [1976]1992:14). 14. Though ethnography of urban black musical performance in the United States has in­ creased, I am only aware of a handful of published monographs: Berliner (1994); Monson (1996); Mahon (2004); Schloss (2004); and the ethnographically-informed texts, Ramsey (2003); and Rose (1994). References Abrahams, Roger D. 1964. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates. Allen, William E, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy M. Garrison. 1867. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, et al. 1994. 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