On Rhetoric and Black Music
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- $94.99
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- $94.99
Publisher Description
This groundbreaking analysis examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Author, musician, and scholar Earl H. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music. Through rhetorical studies, archival research, and musical analysis, Brooks establishes the "sonic lexicon of Black music," defined by a distinct constellation of sonic and auditory features that bridge cultural, linguistic, and political spheres with music. Genres of Black music such as blues and jazz are discursive fields, where swinging, improvisation, call-and-response, blue notes, and other musical idioms serve as rhetorical tools to articulate the feelings, emotions, and states of mind that have shaped African American cultural and political development. Examining the resounding artistry of iconic musicians such as Scott Joplin, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Mahalia Jackson, this work offers an alternative register in which these musicians and composers are heard as public intellectuals, consciously invested in crafting rhetorical projects they knew would influence the public sphere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brooks, an assistant English professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, debuts with a rigorous analysis of how Black musicians shaped Black political and social discourse in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ranging from the ragtime of the late 19th century to the gospel music of the 1960s civil rights movement, Brooks dissects how Duke Ellington "articulated Black identity and history" during the Harlem Renaissance by exploring "themes of racial uplift" through new tonal registers; how John Coltrane and other "free jazz" pioneers used "growls, screams, hollers, and other unorthodox sounds" to reject Western rhythms during the Black Nationalist movement of the '60s and '70s; and how gospel singer Mahalia Jackson married blues music with Black gospel tradition for a sound that symbolized, and was used to fuel, the political activism of Black churches in the '50s and '60s. (Jackson's refusal to play for racially segregated crowds also paved the way for some of the first integrated gospel concerts across the country, Brooks notes.) Lucidly anchoring his analysis in sonic studies—the study of how sound is produced and consumed—and sociohistorical context, Brooks reveals how music served to broaden boundaries of "what can be said—and to whom" and helped to spread changing ideas of Black identity, liberation, and protest. It's a fascinating look at the complicated relationship between art, culture, and social change.
