Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) provides an intriguing anticipation to one of the most important chapters in the history of African American music, the inscription of the slave songs. At key moments in The Narrative, Douglass foregrounds the generative power of writing to the point where text appears to overwhelm the originary presence of vernacular orality.1

As James Olney observes, the pen serves here as a marker of slavery's psychic and bodily effects. It measures the vast chasm between Douglass's literate present and a sound-filled, preliterate past.2 Most directly relevant to the interpretation of African American music, however, are Douglass's famous references to the character of slave singing. At the close of chapter two, he employs writing to alter the very way in which Americans hear slave sound. Through the power of a masterful literary style, Douglass challenges the minstrel theme of the happy "Sambo" and makes palpable and nearly audible the anguished resonances of slave singing. In this instance, Douglass uses text to amplify and to erase. Turning up the volume of slavery's horrors, he inscribes another, more oppositional view that prefigures W. E. B. Du Bois's image of the "sorrow songs."

It is particularly revealing that in Douglass's depictions of slave life textual signification works at cross purposes. In The Narrative, writing is at once a mark of civilization and a symbol of civilization's violence, a birthright that mutes the resonances of the slave body. By harnessing the power of script to redraw black song, Douglass seems to bring to life an unheard sonic world. In the process of recovering slave sounds, however, Douglass also reinvents them to fit the common sense of nineteenth-century Northern, literate culture. Gaining access to script, he gives a new hearing to that which is "neither [seen] nor heard," as slave singing becomes "a tale of woe which [at the time] was ... altogether beyond my feeble comprehension" (N, p. 37).

These instances of textual crossing and contradiction are directly relevant to American musical and cultural studies because they mirror similar patterns in slave-song accounts from the 1830s onward. In diaries, journals, and public recollections, writers depicted the experience of the slave sound world as a peculiarly audible sensation whose special properties tested the outer limits of the Western imagination. During the Civil War, these reports began to include musical transcriptions prepared by Union officers, educators, people of the clergy, and other travellers to the South. When remarking on the practice of transcription, these writers frequently noted the difficulty of capturing in Western notation the nuances of slave singing. Still, they continued in their efforts, seeking to preserve for an increasingly text-bound culture the songful "'heart religion'" of black orality.3 The surviving transcriptions ultimately amounted to little more than discursive fictions that offered a partial sampling of African American musical practices at a profound moment of cultural change. Indeed, even the word partial exaggerates the success of these texts, which radically transformed the very conception of a slave music formerly "within the circle." What the various notations did provide was a documentary record of another's past; black singing assumed the form of a discernible difference that occupied the very height of the Northern white musical imagination. A racialized, sound-filled difference became the key reference point for white writers, whose essays and transcriptions offered ever newer ways of gesturing to a realm out of bounds.

Douglass's portrayals of writing and the interpretations they engender thus pose a serious challenge to the modern conception of black music as a transhistorical essence. Against this background, "black music" as such appears to be less a formal continuity grounded in the vernacular than a series of socially constituted expressive practices emerging from the complex discursive matrices of post-Civil War public culture. The rhetorical formations of African American musical expressions did not solidify into a single "black perspective" but rather assumed a variety of projections consistent with American imaginations of race. As a group, these discourses worked to discipline and constrain, inscribing white racialisms onto the textualized body of black song. Yet by conceptualizing difference as a realm beyond white access, so did they supply a reinvented slave music with formidable, "spiritual" power. Figured as transcendent and otherworldly, black musical difference became the key to the recovery of a forgotten past, to the re-membering of a realm of American sound, constituted by, while existing beyond and even prior to, the containments of writing.

1. Discussions of the formative power of writing are common to literature of African American studies. See, for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Literary Theory and the Black Tradition," Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York, 1987), pp. 3-58 and "Editor's Introduction: Writing `Race' and the Difference It Makes," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Gates (Chicago, 1986), pp. 1-20. In the latter essay, Gates suggests that writing became in the literate, rational West "the visible sign of reason" (p. 8). See also Hortense J. Spillers, "Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 25-61, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Scene ... Not Heard," in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York, 1993).

2. James Olney develops this reading of the passage in "'I Was Born': Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature," in The Slave's Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Gates (New York, 1985), pp. 148-75.

3. William E. Barton, D.D., "Recent Negro Melodies," New England Magazine 19 (Feb. 1899): 707-19; rpt. in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin, Tex., 1967), p. 326.

Versions of this essay were delivered to the conferene on Frederick Douglass, music, and cultural studies at the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania, April 1993, and to the Anthropology of Music Workshop, University of Chicago, April 1994. For their readings, I thank Roger Abrahams, Regina Bendix, Lorna McDaniel, and Larry Scanlon. I am also grateful to Houston A. Baker, Jr., Herman Beavers, Phillip V. Bohlman, Jeanne Boydston, Dena Epstein, and Kenny Goldstein for sources, suggestions, and expertise.