Deep River

Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought

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by Paul Allen Anderson

Duke University Press

Due/Published May 2001, 360 pages, paper

ISBN 0822325918

Anderson focuses on the role of African American folk music in the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic and political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity. He examines how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation in the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Tracing the roots of the period's muscical debates to the American and European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W. E. B. DuBois's influential writings at the turn of the century about folk culture and its bearing upon racial progress and national identity, he details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist cosmopolitanism in the works of DuBois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to revisiting music's place in the culture wars of the 1920s, Anderson provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary musicology.

Series: New Americanists

"While many scholars have attempted histories of the early years of jazz--and even more have examined Du Bois's appeals to the musical in his social and cultural criticism--few have attempted the kind of sustained examination of the critical debates about black music that Anderson does. Deep River places these long-standing debates in a crucial new context."--Aldon L. Nielsen, author of Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism