Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on the role of African American folk music in Renaissance aesthetic and political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. This book elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation in the era of the Harlem Renaissance.
Trade Review“Paul Anderson’s
Deep River is the best, most convincing, and most richly textured work on black socio-musical criticism in print. In examining the views of twelve commentators on black music, ranging from W. E. B. DuBois and his ‘sorrow songs’ theory to Wynton Marsalis and his jazz neoclassicism, Anderson builds his interpretations and critiques on that of previous and current critics to develop a sophisticated examination and treatment of important ideas about social and cultural positioning of black music in America. I recommend this book to anyone interested in black music as a field of study or inquiry.”—Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., Columbia College
“While many scholars have attempted histories of the early years of jazz—and even more have examined Du Bois’s appeals to the musical in his social and cultural criticism—few have attempted the kind of sustained examination of the critical debates about black music that Anderson does.
Deep River places these long-standing debates in a crucial new context.”—Aldon L. Nielsen, author of
Black Chant: Languages of African American PostmodernismTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. “Unvoiced Longings”: Du Bois and the Sorrow Songs
2. Swan Songs and Art Songs: The Spirituals and the “New Negro” in the 1920s
3. “The Twilight of Aestheticism”: Locke on Cosmopolitanism and Musical Evolution
4. “Beneath the Seeming Informality”: Hughes, Hurston, and the Politics of Form
5. Saving Jazz From Its Friends: The Predicament of Jazz Criticism in the Swing Era
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
