Customer Reviews

Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895 (American Made Music)

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One of the problems with historical research is that we often get lost in summaries and highlights - and lose a sense of context, what it was really like to live in a distant time and space. This excellently done reference book is all about "being there" - it literally reprints music-related news stories from the black press of the period 1889-1895, along with some connecting narrative. The authors have long studied this era and give us a vivid view of the black music scene in the period when syncopated music was just emerging into the mainstream, shortly to morph into ragtime and then jazz. Many of the names will be unfamiliar (though I did sight such diverse figures as W.C. Handy and Antonin Dvorak), but any student of roots music will find this fascinating reading, not only for the "big" events, but for the little ones. There are even a few of the earliest black recording artists here (commercial recording began around 1890). There are fascinating illustrations, and extensive notation. Altogether a handsomely done book, as well as an important piece of scholarship on African-American music and history.

This book presents a deep survey of African American professional and commercial entertainment from the late 1880s until the turn of the century. In doing this, the authors document an aspect of music that is often neglected. Yet, we cannot discuss this volume alone. When I speak of this book, all the same words apply to _Ragged but Right_, by the same authors which continues the story to the first twenty years of the 20th Century.

What these books document is the explosion of African American musical creativity that changed the entire popular musical world, once slavery was overthrown and African American creativity broke free. Every conceivable instrument from the banjo-newly reconstituted by European American manufacturers-- to the Oboe was taken up in the stream of instrumentalmusic expressed first in string bands, brass bands, dance orchestras, minstrel bands, circus bands, string quartets, ragtime bands, classical ensembles, and ultimately jazz bands and blues bands. Seroff and Abbot are wise to include the rise of Black religious music, if only in a formalized, Europeanized, and essentially entertainment rather than worship oriented form, as a central part of the world-wide impact of Black music.

We have an explosion of Black music on the stage, in the streets, in all kinds of touring companies, minstrels, play acting, dancing, and in comedy that begins in the 1880s. We have the explosion of Black dances, some rooted in Africa, that begin to create dance crazes for the entire society as the 19th century runs into the 20th. Best of all this book captures the performers and the producers and the entrepeneurs involved in this business as well as the Black critics.

The authors put the words of their sources, the African American entertainment paper the Indianapolis Freeman, first and foremost, ahead of their own voices. Most of the information comes directly from the Freeman and from other Black newspapers like the New York Age, and for general entertainment papers like the New York Clipper out of which a charming and informative obituary for Horace Weston, the great African American banjoist whose playing was hailed on both sides of the Atlantics from the 1860s until his death in 1889. Most words and information come from the voices of contemporary Black people, not modern analysts, and there is a wealth of photographs, playbills, and other memorabilia of this great age of Black entertainment.

Ragtime, Blues, Jazz, Spirituals, developed as truly world-wide musics based on African American music. Abbot and Seroff show that these Black performers were not just hitting all the stops in the USA, but circling the globe, headlining in Europe, China, Australasia, and bring the music back to Africa itself. This is one of the central cultural events in human history and Abbot and Seroff document this entirely.

Even without some of the superb cross referencing and indexing by song in this book, a knowledgeable student of old time country music, Black traditional music, and the Blues, will discover how many verses and how many songs you are already familiar with are the product of interaction between Black commercial song-writer songs and Black professional entertainment and these folk musics.

Of vital importance in this volume, Out of Sight, is the story of Ragtime and its progress. In discussions of American music and African American music Ragtime is overly indentified with the transcribed and composed piano music of geniuses like Scott Joplin. Yet, Ragtime was a broad musical movement that began in the Kansas/Missouri area in the 1880s based on the rhythms produced by Black rural string band dancing taken into city dance halls and taken up by the growing groups of African American pianists and band leaders as well as by string bands. As a broad music underlying much popular and folk music, Ragtime was a central thread in American music from the 1880s until the 1920s, although into the 1930s and 1940s, music that was really ragtime was being offered as either the Blues or Jazz.

Indeed, we need the understanding of Ragtime, its roots and extent as offered here to understand such musicians as Jimmie Rodgers, Gus Cannon, Charlie Poole, WC Handy, and James Reesce Europe, as disparate as their musics seem, were part of the large musical movement of Ragtime. This is one of many things offered here, not in ambitious and incautious analysis, but presented by the extent of primary source information in this book and Out of Site.

Finally, these books suffer a similar fate to other books that pioneer their field. We have the impulse to demand of them what a library of a variety of books on this history and music should do. The authors have done their job. Now others need to do their jobs involving such issues as theinteraction between Black commercial music and various forms of folk music, with political and economicdevelopments of the time, and with the changes in racial consciousness and images of AfricanAmericans within and without the Black nationality.

We can wrongly aim to criticize these books for not doing all of this and more, when it is the necessity of someone finally doing this work and highlightingall that this uncovers that makes the need for so much more suddenly apparent, but this is not the fault of theauthors. Instead, they call others into action to do this work!

This book and Ragged But Right are quite expensive, even at the remaindered prices offered here on Amazon. Wherever you are, even if you can afford one of your own, implore your local library to get one!