Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance Presentation
Introduction
 The 1920s were a complex and interesting time in American
cultural history. A number of different appellations have
characterized the age, among them the “Jazz Age” and, at least
for the latter half of the decade, the Harlem Renaissance.
 There were a number of tributaries for the changes in mores
and thought that characterized the decade, among them
differing reactions to the aftermath of what was then called
“The Great War,” growing anti-immigrant sentiment in different
parts of America, increasing black migration from the South to
the urban industrial centers of the north, and of course, the
passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919 beginning the era of
Prohibition.
 It is in the midst of these and other cultural and societal
changes that we must locate the Harlem Renaissance. We should
also be mindful, as musicologist Sam Floyd points out, of the
differences between the Harlem Renaissance and its European
predecessor. He writes, “[u]nlike the European Renaissance,
which took place in western Europe from the fourteenth through
sixteenth centuries and was largely fueled by the rediscovery
of the Greek cultural legacy, the Negro Renaissance had no
large body of written texts.…But African Americans were
inspired by a growing awareness of the African civilizations
that had flourished along the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates
rivers. They longed to restore African culture to a position
of respect, and they used what they knew of African and
African-American folk art and literature of times past and
current in an attempt to create new cultural forms. It is in
this sense that the period was called a renaissance” (Floyd
1995:106).
 It is also important to remember that this rebirth or
flowering of African creativity in the arts had not previously
taken place in Harlem. In her excellent and exhaustive book
Terrible Honesty (1995), Ann Douglas points out that, at the
turn of the century, Harlem had been an immigrant neighborhood
composed of British, German, Irish and Jewish residents. She
details how housing speculation and shrewd real estate deals
transformed the neighborhood in less than twenty years to an
almost purely black enclave. Accounts from the white press in
1911 referred to the influx of African Americans as a “Negro
invasion” that “must be valiantly fought.” Alluding to the
Middle Ages in another way, fleeing white residents also spoke
of their fear of a “black plague.”
Aims of the Harlem Renaissance
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One could say that Renaissance officially began with the
publication of Alain Locke’s The New Negro in 1925. In that
collection, various contributors undertook to explain the
“riches of the black heritage” (Douglas 1995:332). The New
Negro’s notion of his heritage, from the standpoint of many of
the essayists, included black and white traditions. Indeed,
one scholar writes that the “New Negro wanted not distance
from white America but more power and recognition within it”
(Douglas 1995:304).
Part of the rationale, as black leaders like James Weldon
Johnson saw it, was that African Americans were an essential
part of the American fabric: unlike hyphenated immigrants who
had been “added to America,” African Americans had been here
from the beginning. W.E.B. DuBois, similarly, felt that
African Americans were the first, “the ur-American[s], and
might be the last. His message became the credo of the New
Negro in the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance was founded on
DuBois’s assertion that African Americans possessed a rich and
significant culture of their own, on that predated, and in
part determined, that of white America and entitled its
participants to full rights in American society” (Douglas
1995:308–9).
In particular, Booker T. Washington’s policy of humility and
accommodation was seen as a failure (312–3). Whereas
Washington had emphasized “fighting the battle” in the South,
these new individuals were committed to fighting it in the
cities, guided by James Weldon Johnson’s statement that “A
people that has produced great art and literature has never
been looked upon as distinctly inferior” (quoted from Douglas,
313). Seeking varied forms of support for African American
novelists, poets, visual artists and musicians, the architects
of the Renaissance hoped to challenge demeaning stereotypes of
African Americans.
Why? There seemed to be few viable political alternatives.
Some attempts had been made, by DuBois for example, to
encourage black voters to support Democratic candidates,
thereby assuring that no party could assume African American
support in elections. Such tactics were not very successful,
however, for New York was still dominated by machine politics
and patronage that had no room for African Americans without
economic power.
In a sense, then, the Harlem Renaissance was a test case,
another tactic for achieving equality when political means
didn’t seem viable.
A number of important figures emerged from this “test case,”
including writers Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Nella Larsen and Claude McKay and visual artists like
Aaron Douglas.
Music in the Harlem Renaissance I: Art Music
 But what about music? Where was its place in this flowering of
African American creativity?
 Musical production was expected to follow the same general
patterns that literary and artistic work were. Sam Floyd
explains, “Musically, the idea was to produce extended forms
such as symphonies and operas from the raw materials of
spirituals, ragtime, blues and other folk genres. The
movement’s first successful effort in the transformation of
folk music into ‘high art’ was [R. Nathaniel] Dett’s [1882–
1943]…The Chariot Jubilee (1921). [William Grant] Still’s
Afro-American Symphony (1930) was the movement’s crowning
achievement” (Floyd 1995:107).
 The music of jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Fletcher
Henderson or that of classic blues singers like Bessie Smith
were seen as “folk forms” that needed to be transformed along
the same lines as European composers like Mussorgsky and
Bartók had transformed folk melodies before they could
“elevate” the race. Indeed, much of the work of composer
George Gershwin fits this bill, particularly works like his
1924 piano sonata, Rhapsody in Blue, and Porgy and Bess.
 David Levering Lewis (1989) notes that “Afro-American music
had always been a source of embarrassment to the Afro-American
elite. The group continued to be more than a little annoyed by
the singing of spirituals long after James Weldon Johnson and
Alain Locke had proclaimed them America’s most precious,
beautiful, and original musical expression” (173).
 In contrast, they, and many white compatriots, were quite
supportive of achievements in the European concert realm.
Roland Hayes began to receive great praise for his work
following his Town Hall concert in December of 1923. And when
Jules Bledsoe did a concert of music by Purcell, Handel, Bach
and Brahms in April of 1924, things started to change. In
fact, Hayes’s performance of spirituals was accepted partially
because of the acclaim he received from the white press. As
Lewis sarcastically writes, “Now that Roland Hayes had taken
spirituals to the concert hall, cultured Afro-Americans were
suddenly as pleased as Southern planters to hear them again”
(163).
 While there is much to criticize in narrow vision of older
Harlem Renaissance leaders, they encouraged the development of
the careers of outstanding musicians in the “classical” vein,
performers who drew upon an extensive, but scarcely documented
tradition of African American performance and composition
using European models.
 Two of the most famous interpreters of spirituals were Paul
Robeson and Marian Anderson, both of whom would become
important figures in American society. Though both of these
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recordings date from the 1930s, they present a glimpse of the
basic concert hall rendering of spirituals in the Harlem
Renaissance: the solo voice accompanied by piano. Outside the
concert hall, spirituals were more likely to be performed
communally, in the context of worship, with emphasis on
rhythmic and melodic improvisation rather than arrangement and
execution. We’ll first hear Anderson performing an arrangement
of “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired” followed by Robeson performing
“Go Down, Moses.” Note how different these versions sound from
a more down-home, gospel-style performance of these tunes.
Those two examples represent one way in which “folk” materials
were made respectable.
William Grant Still’s Afro American Symphony, composed in
1930, represents an even more ambitious attempt. The twelvebar blues progression, by then a familiar harmonic form, was
not at all associated with concert music. Still, however,
inventively wedded the form and harmonic progression
associated with the blues with the “first movement” form for
the symphony. We’ll first hear a simplified example of a
twelve-bar blues from a demonstration cassette for a popular
jazz textbook. Afterwards, we’ll hear its realization in a
performance by Howlin’ Wolf in the 1960s. Lastly, we’ll hear
Still’s adaptation in his symphony.
Music in the Harlem Renaissance II: Vernacular Music
 There were, of course, criticisms of this approach toward
music-making. These criticisms strongly voiced by musicians
and writers who celebrated vernacular musics. Poet Langston
Hughes, in this recording from the late 1950s, recites one of
his poems that addresses the “refining” of folk forms. He,
along with Zora Neale Hurston, sought to embrace African
American “folk” forms, to see them as valid in their own
right.
 And, in his famous 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain,” Hughes pointedly criticized the viewpoint of his
elders:
 “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of
Bessie Smith singing blues penetrate the closed ears of the
colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps
understand. Let Paul Robeson singing ‘Water Boy,’ and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer
holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas
drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books
and papers and catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger
artists who create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are
pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We
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know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the
tom-tom laughs” (Ogren 1989:132).
Likewise, both Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington recorded
tunes that signified on what the Renaissance leaders thought
about their music, the former recording “Dicty Blues” in 1923
and the latter “Dicty Glide” in 1927 (108). In describing his
title for the composition, Ellington noted that the dance
called the dicty glide required “a lofty carriage” (see Tucker
1993:88). Note how this tune in a sense communicates through
its low dynamics and muted sonorities “gentility,” “sweetness”
and “refinement.”
If those musics weren’t part of the program, they surely
formed part of the backdrop and provided ambiance for it.
Along with nascent jazz and blues, the stride piano work of
musicians like Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Willie “the
Lion” Smith were captivating audiences.
Floyd goes on to argue that as the decade progressed, jazz
became the most acceptable of the vernacular genres,
particularly via the work of bands led by Ellington and
Henderson. In brief descriptions of their work, he shows how
they too took folk forms and materials and employed them in
larger band settings, with expanded harmonic and timbral
resources. Particularly praised are songs like Henderson’s
1926 “The Stampede” with its riffs and call and response
figures and Ellington’s 1927 “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” with
its vocalized trumpet and trombone work, its contrasting
sections, and its references to New Orleans style collective
improvisation.
References
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its
History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the
Meaning of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Tucker, Mark, ed. The Duke Ellington Reader. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.