Ryan Speedo Green, a thirty-year old African-American Bass-Baritone who stars at the Metropolitan Opera, was born in a poor home in southeastern Virginia and spent several months of his childhood in prison. Thomas Chatterton Williams, an African American writer who lives in Paris recounts Green's story in a book review in last Sunday's Times. According to Williams, Green appeared at a fundraiser in Manhattan and after singing one song was asked for an encore. "Oh, you should do 'Ol' Man River,' " an "¬elderly black pianist" suggested, referring, according to Williams, "to a humiliating number about the unceasing misery of being black. It is a song white audiences have lapped up -- and ¬demanded of black vocalists -- since it was first staged on Broadway in 1927. Green both knows it by heart and detests it; he is black, but he is also a student of Verdi and Mahler." Here he was, Williams continues, "in a room packed with well-meaning people who did not see him, who perhaps were incapable of seeing him, who possibly refused to see him, and who were eager to have him inhabit an object of pity, to hear him be that pitiable object with every note that rose from behind his ribs and from within his throat, to gather around the big brawny black man and listen to him lament his oppressed and thwarted and minuscule life."
There is certainly some truth to Williams' account. To ask a Black singer to sing "Ol Man River" stereotypes him, of course. Furthermore, the original lyrics of the song written by Jerome Kern and Rodger Hammerstein for the 1927 musical Showboat, with a mildly anti-racist plot that includes the theme of miscegenation, were at times racist. Whenever the song was sung, for example by the great Black Communist Paul Robeson, or by Frank Sinatra in his leftwing, Popular Front days, it was rewritten, so much so that it became the target of a 1962 parody by Stan Freberg, an early satire aimed at political correctness. (The parody starts with first word, "old," being criticized as offensive to our elderly listeners.).
Nevertheless, if Williams knows this history, it does not concern him. Rather, he is bent on portraying Green as both a hero and a victim. This portrayal exemplifies the neo-liberal racial ethos that pervades the Obama era. To see why, consider three aspects of Williams's description of the song.
1)POSITIVE THINKING: Williams characterizes the song as "a humiliating number about the unceasing misery of being black." If he sings it Green will become a "pitiable object," a big brawny black man lamenting "his oppressed and thwarted and minuscule life." Williams seems unaware that the roots of the song lay in the Blues-- shown especially in its unusual pentatonic rhythm-- and that African-Americans invented the Blues form soon after the ending of slavery. The Blues were above all a music of lament, but not of self-pity. Rather, as Ralph Ellison wrote, they were based on "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism." Williams' rejection of a music that emphasizes Black suffering-- and transcendence-- is characteristic of the neo-liberal era in which everyone is responsible for one's own success, and only success counts.
2)MANUAL VS. MENTAL LABOR "Ol Man River" is sung by a stevedore on the showboat, whose labor-- "tote that barge; lift that bale"-- is what enables the wealthy classes' gambling and empty showboating. Williams ascribes the song's enormous popularity to white Americans' desire to see Blacks humiliate themselves, but in fact the song became popular during the New Deal/Popular Front era, a period in which physical labor was valorized, and in which "Black ad White, Unite and Fight" was a well-known labor slogan. The person most identified with the song is Robeson, the great Black singer and Communist, persecuted by a McCarthy-ist American government. Robeson not only made the song famous, he was also a great Shakespearean, which brings us to the third point:
3)ELITE VS. MASS CULTURE. Williams is insulted on behalf of Green because Green is being asked to sing a song from musical comedy, whereas Green is familiar with "Verdi and Mahler." Verdi and Mahler are signs of cultural capital, symbols that Green has "made it," according to Williams. Once again, the Blues, with their lower-class (proletarian) and, even more, their folk meaning, give us a clue to a different interpretation. The Blues were one of the world's most important examples of a folk art that had successfully made the transition to urban, industrial society, an achievement that lies behind the world supremacy of American popular music. Broadway Musical Comedy, like jazz, ragtime, soul and rock and roll were all steps in this process. Indeed, Verdi and Mahler are exemplary of composers who use folk and popular (mass) themes in their great music just as Dvorak, Gershwin and Bartok drew on African-American music. Once again, Williams exemplifies the cultural thinking of the neo-liberal elites, who look down on a degraded mass culture as a sign of their superiority.
To be sure, the story of the Blues is complicated. Richard Wright, in a preface to the first history of the Blues, Blues Fell This Morning, challenged the "passivity, almost masochistic in quality, and seemingly allied to sex in origin, that appears as part of the meaning of the blues. Could this emotional stance," Wright asked, "have been derived from a protracted inability to act, of a fear of acting?" Fanon, too, saw the need to move beyond the blues. In The Wretched of the Earth he rejected what he called the "despairing, broken down nostalgia of an old Negro," trapped between whiskey and racial hatred in favor of the new intellectual jazz of bebop, supposedly infused with contempt for "square" culture. In 1964 Amira Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) had his buttoned-down, uptight "Negro" in The Dutchman explode, claiming that "Ofays" say "I love Bessie Smith and don't even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, 'Kiss my ass, kiss my black, unruly ass.'" None of this, however, changes the fact that Williams presents the song-- and Green-- in an ahistorical way that eliminates both the tragic elements in African-American history and the centrality of African-American culture, especially music, to American history as a whole.