The Music of the Migration

Transcription

1 The Music of the Migration The landscape of American music was transformed as black musicians and audiences moved north with the Migration. The vocal traditions and instruments of the South, including the banjo, fiddle, and guitar, integrated into new genres like gospel and jazzy urban blues, as well as classical orchestral music. Traditional African-American spirituals songs that originated with slaves were arranged and performed by trained musicians, opera singers, and theater stars, adding new layers of meaning to older ones. Blues singers who had established the style on the Southern circuit appeared on radio programs and toured Northern theaters. The stories of hardship and celebration of freedom that were the mainstays of blues lyrics resonated with migrant experience: The blues were created on the pavements of the city, in saw mills, in lumber camps, wrote Richard Wright, in short, wherever the migrant Negro, fresh from the soil, wrestled with an alien reality. Recording companies recognized the new economic and cultural power of black audiences built by the Migration: in the 1920s they began producing race records, aimed specifically at an African-American market, recording black performers in a variety of new genres, including blues, jazz, and gospel. Such recordings placed black music outside traditional minstrel shows: black stars sang to a black audience about their own lives, without stereotypical dialect or comedy. With race records and the growth of radio broadcasting, black singers gained white audiences as well, and artists such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday became crossover stars, releasing hits that sold millions of copies. The playlist here offers a selection of musical works that suggests how music of the South served as a creative touchstone for works performed and recorded in the North in the 1930s and early 1940s. In each the memories and rhythms of the South can be heard, though they are often ingeniously reinvented. Many serve as Migration narratives in themselves.

2 Painting North and South Beginning in 1935, Lawrence depicted scenes set in his Harlem neighborhood. Using inexpensive materials tempera on brown paper and simplified forms, he represented the ordinary rituals of urban life. Sixteen of Lawrence s Harlem scenes, including several on view here, were shown at the Harlem YMCA in 1937 in the artist s first solo exhibition. Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, wrote his teacher Charles Alston in response to the show, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists. The exhibition made Lawrence eligible for employment as a professional artist in the Works Project Administration (WPA), a New Deal federal agency designed to put people to work during the Great Depression. He was hired in the easel division in April 1938; for the next eighteen months, he was required to present two paintings every six weeks in exchange for $95.44 in wages. The WPA offices in downtown Manhattan, where Lawrence went to pick up his paycheck, proved to be an important gathering place. There the young artist met many others from across New York City also enrolled in the WPA. We d meet each other, he recalled, and talk and talk and talk. At the time Lawrence painted the Migration Series, he had never been to the South. Immediately after finishing the project in summer 1941, he resolved to see it for himself: he travelled with Gwendolyn Knight, his new wife, to the South for the first time to create paintings concerning the urban life of the Southern Negro. Among them were stark images of racial segregation that Lawrence s dealer, Edith Halpert, excluded from her gallery presentations of the artist s work.

3 The Writers of the Migration This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled. Richard Wright, in his memoir Black Boy (1945) The Migration was a rare subject in fine-art painting when Lawrence began research in preparation for his landmark series in However, black writers working in the North had explored the experience of the Migration in a variety of innovative literary forms over the two preceding decades. These works were part of a flourishing of African-American culture born in many ways of the Migration itself that has been called the Harlem Renaissance, though its bards often lived in other urban centers. A wealth of poems, short stories, and novels gave voice to the fears and aspirations of the migrant, the trials of the journey northward, and the particular double consciousness of the Southern-born black living in the urban North. Others sought to capture something of the sound of speech, the character of tales, and the cadence of sermons remembered as relics of things still treasured from a place left behind, and as a way of defining black culture itself. What the colored poet in the United States needs to do, wrote James Weldon Johnson in the introduction to God s Trombones (1927), a volume of poetry inspired by the words of the black preachers of his Southern youth, is... to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without. Lawrence became acquainted with many of the writers who gathered at the studio run by the artists Charles Alston and Henry Mike Bannarn at 306 West 141st Street, including William Attaway, Countee Cullen, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. The informal association was called the 306 group. Alston later recalled, We d meet and have just bull sessions, knockdown, drag out. Some of them were pretty rough.... I don t think any of us realized the value of these things but there was a tremendous exchange of ideas.

4 The Artist as Activist At about the time that Jacob Lawrence began work on the Migration Series, musicians took the political stage in a set of bold acts. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission to let the celebrated African-American contralto Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. The Marian Anderson Citizens Committee led by black labor organizer Philip Randolph and others picketed and planned a mass protest. The furor attracted the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who resigned from the DAR, writing in a public letter, You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed. With the First Lady s support, Anderson performed instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of 75,000 and millions more at home listening on the radio. That same year in New York, Billie Holiday debuted Strange Fruit as her signature song at the close of her regular sets at Café Society New York s selfproclaimed interracial night club. While lynching is not mentioned explicitly in the lyrics of Holiday s set piece, the metaphor in lines like Southern trees bear a strange fruit was clear. When Holiday s label refused to record the song, fearing the retribution of Southern distributers, she persisted, negotiating a one-time release to record it with Commodore in The disk went on to sell over a million copies and played an influential role in inaugurating the genre of civil rights protest songs. Lawrence was certainly well aware of these models of the power of culture to cast a spotlight on issues of racial injustice before a broad audience. Marian Anderson, with pianist Kosti Vehanen at the Lincoln Memorial, April 9, 1939 Excerpt from Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes s introduction to the concert; America. Written in 1831 by Samuel Francis Smith; Gospel Train. Music arranged by Henry Thacker Burleigh. Film footage courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive s Hearst Metrotone Collection Billie Holiday performing Strange Fruit for the Granada television program Chelsea at Nine in London, 1959 This is the only known footage of Holiday performing the song, in 1959 twenty years after its debut. The song s lyrics, by Abel Meeropol, were published as a poem in Film footage courtesy ITN Source

5 The Artist as Historian Having no Negro history makes the Negro people feel inferior to the rest of the world.... I didn t do it just as a historical thing, but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today. Jacob Lawrence, 1940 Before Jacob Lawrence began to paint the Migration Series, he went to the library. The 135th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) had been an important gathering place and resource for black writers, artists, and scholars since the 1920s. It also served as a cultural center in a broader sense, hosting exhibitions of work by African-American artists and adult education classes. The core of the holdings in the library s famous Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints was the collection built by the bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, which had been acquired by the library in 1926, of rare books and materials related to the lives of people of African descent. Such an extensive research protocol was unusual for a painter. Lawrence spent months at the library taking notes from books, journals, and documents. He chose both the subjects of his pictures and their captions from these sources. However, printed matter shaped more than his approach to the subject. Lawrence s use of captions echoes the picture-plus-text formula of images in print of illustrations, political cartoons, and photo-stories. And Lawrence s images in their pared-down forms and flat planes of unmixed color have some of the look and the graphic impact of prints. Lawrence s interest in history, and African-American history in particular, was nurtured at the library. In the workshops and artists groups with which he was associated, heady debates about approaches to writing and giving image to African-American history were common. Lawrence always insisted that his choice of historical subjects reflected the interests of his community people would speak of these things on the street. Librarians, teachers, speakers at both the 135th Street branch library and the nearby YMCA, as well as street-corner orators, he recalled, all played key roles in his education in black history.