From "Airshafts, loudspeakers, and the hip hop sample: contexts and
African American musical aesthetics" by Andrew Bartlett, African American Review, Winter, 1994.
The expropriation of work rhythms as a method for taking possession of one's physical labor is situated at an aesthetic/economic crossroads that long antedates the recording of work songs. In Singing the Master: The Evolution of African American Culture in the Plantation South, Roger D. Abrahams explores how "constantly . . . within each other's gaze" (37) slaves (unwillingly) and the white-planter class participated in the evolution of not only African American culture but American popular culture in general. Abrahams focuses attention on an end-of-harvest celebration at which slaves were called upon to shuck enormous amounts of corn: Corn . . . was not a demanding crop, since it might be cut away at any time and left in the field. The corn needing shucking would accumulate until all the other crops had been harvested. . . . Thus, the communal shucking of the corn was not crisis work, but rather the final act in the harvesting of the grain which provided the basic food resource for slaves and domestic animals. (74-75) That the institution of corn shucking, from the "white" side of the gaze, was a "display event" (23) can be explained by the fact that corn shucking was not "crisis work" and that, as Abrahams further notes, Southern planters tended to cling "to many of the more aristocratic features which had characterized the Cavalier perspective in England" (65), particularly "ever more theatrical opportunities by which their public postures of power might better be appreciated" (40). Briefly, an overseer or master elected two "captains" who picked "teams" which raced against each other to finish shucking their assigned pile of the corn harvest first. With the recognition of "the most powerful voice" came the selection of a leader from the slave community "to stand on top of the corn pile and lead the singing" (325). Abrahams points out more generally about "slave life" and singing that few observers . . . failed to notice the importance of call-and-response singing. All [accounts] focus on the sense of power produced by the overlapping of the leader's voice with the voices of the chorus as they engaged with each other antiphonally. (91; italics added) It is the centrality of "overlapping" that echoes throughout the African American musical tradition. From the vocalized overlap to the individualized instrumental meandering of much jazz, a constant is Thompsonian (as in Robert Farris Thompson) "apart playing," in which "a central performer interacts in counterpoint or some other contrasting mode with the rest of the performing group."(2) Of equal importance in the work/play matrix Abrahams discusses is the overlap of English quasi-aristocratic display and the actional engagement of the display opportunity, which slave singers found well(enough)-suited for their own performances. The corn-shucking event - complete with the festivities which followed the shucking labor - is an oft-ignored aesthetic event which, Abrahams notes, has received scant attention from historians. Doubtless this is because it represents such an apparent capitulation to the image of the happy slave purveyed by the planter-apologists for slavery. (21) But Abrahams locates the corn-shucking event as a pivotal occasion for white onlookers to learn "slave style." The "slave" qualification here is vital, as recognition of an African style would counteract the white dominant practice of inculcating the slave into the person at every turn. From this onlooker learning comes the institutionalization of the white "vernacular artist," who appears variously throughout the nineteenth century, "on the minstrel stage, the lecturer's platform, or the written page" (145). Vernacular artistry, for white performers, was a function of "an ardent effort to bring to the stage studied imitations of slave styles of singing and dancing and celebrating" (133). What we find here is the central presence of imitation in an emergent Anglo-American popular culture. While the corn-shucking event sits at the economic and aesthetic crossroads, every opportunity afforded slaves at that crossroads is transformatively worked into a multi-level aesthetic performance which whites tried to duplicate exactly, even to the point of using specific "tales of random encounters" to give their nineteenth-century stage acts authenticity. Regarding blackface entertainment and white minstrelsy, Abrahams notes that the authenticity of the material itself became an important feature of presentation for these singers and dancers wearing blackface. . . . By the end of the nineteenth century such authenticating stories had become almost conventional, so often had the theme been embellished upon by the most successful writers of the time: Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, Mark Twain, and George Washington Cable. (142)(3) While Anglo-American popular culture became saturated with the problematics of authenticity and the establishment of a standard for "vernacular artistry," singularity again was fetishized. That is, a one-to-one, unmediated knowledge of slave life offered "an abundance of stylized ways of acting, singing, and dancing" (142) in American popular culture. White minstrelsy in blackface did not rest once the performance was authenticated; instead, it reinforced a singular expression of what Joel Williamson describes as an organic society in which African Americans were considered and treated as innately incapable of operating beyond a social sphere of servitude and, ironically, the aping of the master class. In opposition to this is the multiplicity of performatively engaged, metaphorically enacted texts worked into the slaves' performances during corn-shucking events (and elsewhere). When we read William Cullen Bryant's reminiscence of a post-corn-shucking celebration in which the "commander," called on to speak after dinner, confesses "his incapacity for public speaking," and in turn asks "a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead," we see a non-musical but nonetheless performative actionality that draws on numerous discourses. Toby, Bryant writes, came forward, demanded a piece of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in his day. He spoke of "de majority of Sous Carolina," "de interests of de state," "de honor of ole Ba'nwell district," and these phrases he connected by various expletives and sounds of which we could make nothing. (qtd. in Abrahams 225)
From the "piece of paper" Toby "demanded," to his "political"
discourse, Bryant can see nothing coherent, perhaps because of the "various expletives," etc. In any case, Toby appears not to have tried exact replication of any specific stump speech; rather, he used the tone and the pose and the props. In other words, this metaphoric enactment makes Thomas Porcello's map of the digital sampler's functions, "the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative[,] and the extractive" (69), begin to look like an ahistorical overview of African American aesthetics rather than a comment on postmodern technology. I would add to Porcello's analysis the constant element of simultaneity. Distinguishing between mimesis and the actional uses of that process - that is, manipulation and extraction of one's stylized signature - is difficult, if not impossible. Following the corn-shucking competition, slaves and guests - those who worked and those who watched, respectively - were treated by the plantation master to a large feast at which the captain of the winning team would make a speech, and following the feast the slaves, again, would become the spectacle. With the setting up of a platform dance floor, the entertainment began. Wood below the slaves' feet kept up the "multimetrical effects" (93) that were, Abrahams suggests, a pervasive presence throughout the dancing and music making, from "patting" to the ring shout. While paring (clapping) "created a field of rhythm in which each performer respond[ed] to a basic beat," it did so in an asymmetrically harmonious fashion: "By doubling or tripling the time, breaking each beat into doublets or triplets, a performer produced a rolling effect that played against the master pulse without necessitating an actual change in the basic meter" (95). Abrahams further locates the "apart playing" of the dances which white planters watched from the distance of the owner's gaze. With the dancer's hips as the "center of gravity," there was division and cohesion, paradoxically engaged at once: "Thus the flexibility and fluidity of black dancing arises from the division of the body at the pelvis, with the upper body playing against the lower much as individual dancers or singers playfully oppose themselves to the rest of the performing community" (98-99). This bodily intertextuality, under the gaze of the planter class, presented a much more communally fluid aesthetic, contrary to "European social dancing," in which "the body is maintained as a single unit of behavior" (98).(4) The overlapping is multi-directional, with the body functioning similarly to the grouped voices. -- Sandwichman
