Thesis (M.M.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 352-362) and index.

Excerpt: African Americans have lived in Southwest Virginia since the early eighteenth century, and their traditions—their verbal folklore, customary folklife, and material culture—have long influenced cultural life in Southwest Virginia. African American music has been particularly impactful in the region, yet many people today are unaware of the extent of that influence.

My dissertation is a foray into blues music's intricate web of racial taxonomies, an aspect that has been neglected by most existing studies of the genre. In particular, I am interested in significant changes that took place in the 1960s under which blues was reconfigured from "black" to "white" in its production and reception while simultaneously retaining a notion of authenticity that remained deeply connected with constructions of "blackness." In the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement and the burgeoning counterculture, audiences for blues music became increasingly "white" and European. In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music's class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present. Individual chapters focus on key figures, events and institutions that exemplify blues music's racial politics and transnational movements of the 1960s.

This thesis explores the relationship between black gospel music and the African American freedom struggle of the post-WWII era. More specifically, it addresses the paradoxical suggestion that black gospel artists themselves were typically escapist, apathetic, and politically uninvolved—like the black church and black masses in general—despite the “classical” Southern movement music being largely gospel-based. This thesis argues that gospel was in fact a critical component of the civil rights movement. In ways open and veiled, black gospel music always spoke to the issue of freedom. Topics include: grassroots gospel communities; African American sacred song and coded resistance; black church culture and social action; freedom songs and local movements; socially conscious or activist gospel figures; gospel records with civil rights themes.

The Azusa Street Revival was a movement started in 1906 by a small group of black individuals at a prayer meeting in Los Angeles, California. The revival is largely considered the beginning of the Pentecostal movement. This paper investigates the relationship between the worship practices of the Azusa Street Revival and the musical and religious traditions of the West and Central African peoples who were the ancestors of some of the most prominent and influential participants in the movement. These practices, which include spirit possession, physical movement and rhythm, musical collaboration, and indeterminate times of worship, seemingly made their way from Africa into the daily lives of African American slaves, where they were adopted by participants at the American camp meetings of the early nineteenth century. From there, these West and Central African musical traditions became instituted in the holiness movement, the precursor to the Azusa Street Revival.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Why is it that "Steal Away" is better known than "Jesus on the Waterside?" This question can only be answered by examining the history of how Spirituals were brought to the attention of audiences beyond the plantation. Negro Spirituals began as a folk music tradition and were later developed into concert music for performance. Along the way, this genre was described, notated, catalogued, studied, and arranged by individuals from various ideological perspectives, which led to the following questions and debates: 1. Can African Americans produce beautiful music? 2. Why do African Americans sing? 3. Are African Americans content to await freedom in Heaven? 4. Are the Spirituals original compositions or imitations of European music? 5. Are the Spirituals a source of dignity or shame? 6. What can contemporary society learn from the message of the Spirituals? 7. How should the Spirituals be performed? The debates that most directly affected the canon of Spirituals are the final three questions, which originated among African Americans after emancipation and were especially influential at freedmen schools in the South, where the tradition of singing Spirituals as concert music was established.

<p>This dissertation focuses on a variety of African-American musical expressions of the later twentieth century, situating them along a continuum of musical modernism that constitute various modes of survival technology, inextricably connected to the cultures from which they arise. My application of the term <i>survival</i><i>technologies </i>denotes two primary aspects: musical “technologies” in the sense that the term is commonly understood to refer to the construction of musical instruments and recording instruments both old and new, but also “technologies” in the sense of the term employed by Murray and Dinerstein: as modes of knowledge and strategies of resistance. My use of <i>survival technologies</i>as the conceptual underpinning that unifies my research entails bringing these two aspects together, and the two senses of the term converge especially when African-American musicians use musical instruments and tools in new, unexpected ways, as frequently happens throughout the history of African-American music in the twentieth century. I analyze how African-American musicians’ use of electric guitars, amplification, synthesizers, analog sequencers, studio effects, turntables, samplers, drum machines, and digital audio workstations constitute a uniquely African-American mode of musical knowledge and practice that is improvisational, heuristic, non-linear, and constantly aware of the past while simultaneously re-imagining the future. I link this analysis to works by twentieth-century literary authors and theorists in order to examine how African-American musicians’ <i>modus operandi</i>, varied and distinct as they are, are nonetheless consistent not only across divergent musical styles and eras, but also function inseparably from other arts and broader cultural contexts.</p><p>Throughout this project, written words interact with musical recordings. I strive to “hear” written texts (literature and literary criticism) and to “read” sound texts (recordings), highlighting the resonances between “literary texts” and “sound texts.” The Chicago blues style of Muddy Waters interacts with Richard Wright’s literary documentary of life on Chicago’s South Side, <i>12 Million Black Voices,</i>to highlight how old rural black vernacular “folk” expressions could serve as the basis of a new urban African-American modernism. Likewise, the electronic experiments of Herbie Hancock, which innovatively combined European modes of music creation and African diasporic musical concepts, interacts with Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s <i>The Signifying Monkey </i>to highlight how African-American modernism entails Signifyin(g) on European precedents as well as precedents in African-American art. Additionally, the historically informed jazz of Wynton Marsalis interacts with T. S. Eliot’s ideas of tradition in order to highlight how artistic conceptions of the past inform African-American modernist expressions today, such as jazz and sampled electronic music. Finally, Detroit techno music interacts with the musical and cultural criticism of Theodor Adorno to highlight how African-American modernism uses survival technologies to construct visions of the future that resist what Adorno called the “culture industry.”</p>

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