I Read a Book: Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts and Present by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.

Looking into a Way of Talking About Music I Haven't Done All That Much

Music is my specialty, not musicology. But I do like to dabble in reading it now and then. And Guthrie Ramsey has long been my favorite musicologist. (Full disclosure: I’m not sure I could actually name any other musicologists.) I suppose in another life, I could have been an academic. I was always intrigued by the times I wandered onto campuses and met professors in the years after I was actually in college. But, as it turned out, I just dabbled now and then in reading stuff, and somehow stumbled onto Ramsey’s 2004 book Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop a few years after publication. I even became his Facebook friend (possibly before reading the book – it’s all a blur) and had a few interesting short musical discussions with him.

The new book is a collection of previously published essays on various topics in his field. I gather these essays are presented in chronological order – it’s interesting to note how his language moves from rigidly scholarly to much more vernacular as the book goes along.  The concluding chapter is an historical overview of African American music, starting from slavery and ending with hip hop. If I was the editor, I would have placed this smack dab in the front, as it offers enough background to let readers not already familiar with the gist of this history navigate the many historical styles and genres Ramsey drops in his other essays.

I was already more than a little informed about the ways African-American music has developed, particularly in the last century and a half. Still, seeing it all strung together in a short space was illuminating, and Ramsey dropped in several bits I hadn’t known before. Ramsey does an especially good job of mixing in the sacred with the secular developments in this history.

It’s also interesting that this entire chapter is made up of hundreds of thesis statements which could be developed into longer essays or even books. “The last years of the nineteenth century saw the rise of “public amusements,” an explosion of commercialized leisure that indexed America’s turn from Victorian sensibilities.” I’d read a book that starts with that sentence. Or “Since the codification of ragtime piano, pianists developed highly idiosyncratic approaches to solo and ensemble based improvisation that constituted key elements in the generic codes of various black popular musics.” Give me that book, please.

Oh, well, I’ve come to talk about the book we have, not the books we can imagine. And this one is pretty dang enjoyable if you’re the type who likes to find new ways to look at or talk about the history of music. The first essay, the most academic of the bunch, is called “Cosmopolitan or Provincial: Ideology in early Black Music Historiography, 1867-1940.” Historiography is a word I’m not sure I knew before, but it’s basically looking at the history of history, which, in the context of any African-American culture study, is well worth considering. Since most of the oldest writing about the history of this music, not to mention the people who made it, is steeped in various forms of racism, looking at the way the music has been described in the past helps inform our ways of thinking about it now. If only as a way of letting us think about what was gotten wrong mixed in with what was gotten right.

Ramsey rails against the concept of essentialism in several places in the book. It’s always important to remember that music is made by individuals, and while collectively, many of those individuals may share cultural traits, that doesn’t mean that the end product has to share all the same tropes. The second essay, “Who Hears Here?: Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade” is mainly concerned about the ways in which those who talk about music affect the way the music is perceived. It’s actually based on a work by Ann duCille called “Who Reads Here?” which does the same for the perception of writing by African-American women. Multiple times, Ramsey points out the ways in which writers of the past, and for that matter, of the present – Race Matters was, among other things, explicitly about the bias Ramsey’s own life experiences brought to music – can’t escape what they think they already know.

As the book goes on, it alternates between broad topical essays and narrow looks at particular artists. There’s an essay on Jason Moran that I think I may have read when it first came out, and one on the artist Jack Whitten who, I’m guessing, painted the artwork used on the front cover. I found the whole thing interesting in the extreme, and was disappointed when I got to the end and there was no more of this constantly inquisitive voice. Which once again reminds me – one of these days I have to read Ramsey’s book on Bud Powell.