Genre in Black Music.pdf

Questions of Genre in Black Popular MusicAuthor(s): David BrackettReviewed work(s):Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Spring - Fall, 2005), pp. 73-92Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30039286 .Accessed: 12/10/2012 13:43

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QUESTIONS OF GENRE IN BLACK POPULAR MUSIC DAVID BRACKETT

In the movie The Jerk (1979), Steve Martin plays Navin Johnson, a white man raised by an African-American family in rural Mississippi. The opening credits have barely concluded when it becomes clear that the development of Navin's personality is causing some consternation among his adoptive parents and siblings. He cannot dance, he experi- ences difficulty clapping in time to the rustic shout-type tune that his family plays on the front porch, and he prefers tuna fish sandwiches on white bread (with extra mayonnaise) and shrink-wrapped Twinkies to soul food. Navin finds his deliverance, however, in a fortuitous exposure to a broadcast of 1970s-era easy listening music-suddenly, he can clap on the backbeat to the neo-Herb Alpert strains emanating from the radio, recognizing through this involuntary response that, somewhere, others of his own kind must exist.

My summary of the opening of The Jerk may seem remote from the title of this article. But the movie's first few scenes present topoi that condense many beliefs and assumptions central to understanding the links between identity and musical genres. The film revels in the absurdity of rigid essentialist stereotypes even as it points to widely shared associations between musical categories and racial demographics. Nature tri- umphs over culture, and mimesis (how nature and culture become "second nature") lurks outside the frame. Who, after all, associates African Americans with Herb Alpert?1

1. This is not intended as a condescending swipe at Herb Alpert. After all, according to Pierre Bourdieu's "heteronomous principle of hierarchization" (i.e., economic success),

DAVID BRACKETT is Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Theory (Academic Affairs) at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. His previous publications include Intrepreting Popular Music (University of California Press, 2000; originally published in 1995) and The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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If a generalized connection can be established in The Jerk between racial identity and musical "kind" writ large, then a second anecdote illustrates the ambiguity involved with categorization in practice. On a recent trip to the local HMV megastore, I attempted to find a recording by the Drifters, a group that began in the 1950s with Clyde McPhatter's gospel- derived lead tenor featured against the background of the group's gospel-quartet influenced "doo-wop" vocals. By the late 1950s, the group (with Ben E. King now singing lead) had become a star attraction of the new "uptown," pop-rhythm and blues emerging from the Brill Building in central Manhattan. After I searched in vain for the "oldies section," which I assumed would house the Drifters' recordings, a friendly store clerk directed me to the "R&B" section, and I left with a copy of the Drifters' Greatest Hits. I felt a bit perplexed: the Drifters' first recordings certainly were categorized as "rhythm and blues" in the mid-1950s, and as both "rhythm and blues" and "popular" (i.e., as "crossover recordings") during their Brill Building heyday from 1959 to 1964. But they have little in common with contemporary R&B, which is what I expect to find in the R&B section of the contemporary record store.

Compared with the straightforward, commonsensical relationships observed in The Jerk, my visit to the HMV megastore presented a more tangled web of connections. The logic of this particular HMV's spatial arrangement of categories is not difficult to detect, even if it is rife with interesting and revealing contradictions. Genres associated with the African diaspora-rap, reggae, R&B of all eras, disco-are grouped into one corner of the store along with not necessarily black but still dance- centered genres such as house, techno, drum 'n' bass, and other forms of electronic dance music. Consumers interested in the inconsistencies of this system need only look under "J" in the R&B section, where they will find the Jackson 5, the Jacksons, and Jermaine and Janet Jackson, but not Michael-he's in the Pop/Rock section in the middle of the floor along with his confreres Prince and Jimi Hendrix. (I might add that the floor containing the various genres of popular music is in the basement of the store-Classical and Jazz are "on top.")

Both the opening minutes of The Jerk and my trip to HMV present notions of genre and identity that result either in laughter or confusion depending on how well these notions match the generic codes that we

Alpert's work is unquestionably of great value (Bourdieu 1993, 38). As an illustration of this, Joel Whitbum (2001) ranks Herb Alpert (with or without the Tijuana Brass) as the twenty- sixth most popular album artist during the period 1955-2001. For more on mimesis as "second nature," see Taussig (1993).

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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music

have internalized. The symbolic function of genre serves us well until we encounter a situation that reveals the fragile line between common sense and nonsense.

The Jerk proposes a natural connection between race and taste, between a preference for pigs' feet and an ease in finding musical beats. In contrast to the connections proposed by The Jerk, the organization of HMV highlights the arbitrary relationship between recordings and categories, although race once again plays a role in designating the place of a particular type of music. Both of these cases exemplify how the notion of genre speaks to transitory divisions in the musical field that correspond in dis- continuous and complex ways to a temporally defined social space. The relationship between divisions in the musical field and social identities is most obvious in the large categories for popular music (initially labeled "race," "hillbilly," and "popular") that have been used by the U.S. music industry since the 1920s. Of these categories, "race music"-subsequently relabeled "rhythm and blues," "soul," "black," and most recently, "R&B"-has persistently been linked with African Americans. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this linkage has been straightforward or consistent: non-African Americans have recorded music that has been classified in this category; non-African Americans have certainly purchased, consumed, and listened to music classified in this category; African Americans have recorded, purchased, consumed, and listened to music that does not belong in this category; and, as my Drifters' anecdote suggests, the range of musical styles included within this category has varied considerably both synchronically and diachronically.

Yet it would also be a mistake to think of these categories as solely arbitrary machinations of the music industry or as mere "social construc- tions." The large musical categories of the U.S. popular music industry that have played variations over the basic terms of popular, race, and hillbilly since the 1920s are part of a larger field of musical production in which musical genres participate in the circulation of social connotations that pass between musicians, fans, critics, music-industry magnates and employees. That these connotations, these "meanings," are accepted as "real" speaks to the phantasmatic nature of identity, that ever-shifting sense of self that finds confirmation and reinforcement in quotidian social practices and in a range of discursive formations, both institutional and shadowy.

Even as individuals use genres to articulate the here-and-now of individual and collective identities, the variety of genre labels gestures toward an ephemerality that exceeds the spatial stolidity indicated when- ever a particular structural arrangement is named. For example, the music industry categories of "popular," "R&B," and "country" each

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encompass genre labels that emerge in other media and contexts, all of which are in a perpetual state of transformation. Thus R&B, the music- industry category, might consist of R&B, hip-hop, neo-soul, and quiet storm as propagated in radio formats, nightclubs, certain record stores, or in the everyday discourse of fans. By the same token, the larger umbrella category of popular music functions as part of an even larger field of Western music containing jazz, classical music, world music, and so on (see Brackett 2002, 69; 2003).

Because of the fleeting quality of genre arrangements and levels at any particular point in time, a given musical text may belong to more than one genre simultaneously, either due to shifting perceptions of the context under consideration or because the text presents a synthesis that exceeds contemporary comprehension of generic boundaries. To be sure, close inspection of any text inevitably raises doubts as to genre identity; but it is also impossible to imagine a genreless text.2 Similarly, the more closely one describes a genre in terms of its stylistic components, the fewer the examples that actually seem to fit (see also Negus 1999, 29; Toynbee 2000, 105). And although the range of sonic possibilities for any given genre is quite large at a particular moment, it is not infinite: simply because the boundaries of genre are permeable and fluctuating does not mean that they are not patrolled; simply because a musical text may not "belong" to a genre with any stability does not mean that it does not "participate" in one. To take a recent example, "Hey Ya" (2003) by Outkast might be understood as "hip-hop," "rap," maybe even a type of "alternative rock," or perhaps "alternative" or "progressive hip-hop," but it could not be considered "country music" by any stretch of the imagination.3

Whatever sense of boundary exists before slippage ensues relies on the affinity of musical genres for what Bakhtin (1986, 60-102) described as "speech genres," verbal "enunciations," and the resulting quality of "addressivity." As Bakhtin (95) explains, "The style of the utterance depend[s] on those to whom the utterance is addressed, [and] how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressees." Furthermore, "Each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own

2. I am here paraphrasing Derrida (1980, 61) when he hypothesizes that "a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such partici- pation never amounts to belonging." For studies of specific instances in which the same song was reclassified due to performance style and context, see Hamm (1995, 370-380). Grenier (1990) discusses how the meaning of a recording changes when it appears in different radio formats.

3. This is not to say that "Hey Ya" could not be performed or recorded in such a way as to turn it into a country song; again, see Hamm (1995, 370-380).

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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music 77

typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre." (95). In addition to marking the intersubjectivity of speech genres, enunciations refer to particular moments and specific spaces, emphasize embed- dedness in a discursive web, and imply a distinct cultural position (see Bhabha 1994, 36; de Certeau 1984, 33).

To continue the parallel, musical utterances form and are subsequently reformed within (or between or even among) genres, already anticipating how these utterances will be heard. Successful interactions with mediators (e.g., record company employees, music critics, etc.) situated within institutions that function at the interstices of power and public culture often depend on generic intelligibility (at least until a certain level of success has been achieved), but these gatekeepers are also not independent from the social circulation of generic meaning (see Frith 1996, 88-89).

One can anticipate a few common criticisms of genre studies. Some could easily fault the notion of genre as a static concept that strips a work of its individuality. The spectral protests of musicians hover before me, complaining that an emphasis on genre, and hence (to some extent) on structure, robs them of agency. On the other hand, when the temporality of genre becomes the focus, the notion may come to seem meaningless because it then paradoxically appears to be too unstable: no listing of semantic or stylistic content can account for all texts that might be brand- ed by a particular label, and the same labels refer to different cultural arti- facts at different moments. Moreover, when one posits a momentary relationship between a musical field of genres and different positions in social space, one is confronted with the instability of social identities, which, like genres, are subject to constant redefinition and which also become meaningful within a field of relationships at a particular moment.4

A swerve into etymology will show that the term genre, imported from French into English, refers in French both to categories for artworks and to what approaches an originary experience of category: that of gender, the classification of humans into females and males, a division that, it might be argued, engenders all human impulses to categorize and classify.5 If the term genre evokes stasis and spatiality, as do terms such as arrangement and field, then to describe a text as "participating" in, rather than "belonging" to, a genre emphasizes temporality. Derrida comments on the impossibility of defining genre on the basis of traits and on the

4. For more on the relationship between positions within a cultural field of production and a social space, see Bourdieu (1993, 29-73). Bourdieu counterposes the "space of artistic position-takings" (the cultural field of production) with the "space of artistic positions" (the position of artists in social space).

5. For more extensive punning on "genre," see Derrida (1980, 57).

simultaneous impossibility of ignoring genre: "[The mark of belonging] belongs without belonging, and the 'without' (or the suffix '-less') which relates belonging to nonbelonging appears only in the timeless time of the blink of an eye" (Derrida 1980, 61). The instability of genre, then, resembles nothing so much as the situation of meaning in language in general.

If the instability of genre is not particularly remarkable, then the quality of "addressivity," derived from Bakhtin, claims a bit more attention. One often reads that genres connect cultural producers and texts with audiences (for one of the most eloquent presentations of this argument, see Frith [1996, 75-95]). This quality provides one way of understanding how people in the United States (and much of the rest of the world) can speak of "black popular music" with some sense that they know what they are talking about despite apparent inconsistencies in terms of musical style, musicians, and producers and how it is that qualities of race, place, gender, sexuality, and so on may become associated with an assem- blage of musical texts.

"Addressivity" notwithstanding, and despite many studies of production and consumption, popular-music scholars have rarely employed genre theory as a way of understanding black music.6 One of the few essays to address the use of the term black music by popular-music scholars is written by Philip Taggs (1989), "Open Letter: 'Black Music,'Afro- American Music,' and 'European Music.'" As indicated by its title, Tagg presents his essay in the form of an open letter. It is not, in the words of the author, "a 'scholarly' article quoting, misquoting or otherwise attempting to attack or out-argue anyone else" (Tagg 1989, 285). Rather, "the letter is intended as a polemical problematisation of terms like 'black music,' 'white music,' 'Afro-American music' or 'European music'" and "to provide some ideas for a constructive debate on music, race, and ide- ology" (285). Somewhat surprising, in light of the importance of the subject, Tagg's essay, while frequently cited, has not, to my knowledge, in the fifteen-odd years since its publication received a direct, sustained response nor has there been a particularly constructive debate within popular music studies around the issues that Tagg raises.

This lacuna is especially striking given that, since 1989, the study of particular "scenes" and social groups (i.e., specific articulations of identity) has become one of the major growth areas of popular music studies,7

6. For exceptions, see Toynbee (2000, 115-22) and Negus (1999, 83-102); for a systematic theory of genre developed by a popular music scholar, see Fabbri (1982).

7. Two influential examples of the move toward "scene studies" are Cohen (1991) and Straw (1991).

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and it may well be that since the publication of Tagg's letter, broad statements about black music of the sort to which he took exception have tapered off. I would not be surprised if this tapering off resulted from the force of Tagg's presentation, a thorough dissection of essentialism in discussions of black music and in the use of racial terminology itself. Tagg notes the inconsistency of style traits in the music described as black music, the heterogeneity of practitioners and audience, and the presence of black-identified traits in "European" music-in fact, his critique of the concept of "Afro-American music" might well resemble a critique of the tendency to classify musical texts into music genres in general. The relentless rationality of Tagg's arguments makes them difficult to ignore.

Several possible responses to Tagg suggest themselves, although none provide the type of empirical data that would refute his points on their own terms. One could mention a historical discourse emerging in the United States and emanating to the rest of the world positing a critical difference between African-American music and other music produced in the United States. This discourse bears important similarities to the discourse that insists on the idea of racial difference itself, an idea emerging in almost-perfect synchrony in the nineteenth century in a profusion of colonial texts. While in no sense natural, inevitable, or logical, the "peculiar institution" of slavery and the equally peculiar legal/social practice of Jim Crow are but two particularly infamous and visible instances of routinized racial difference that permeate U.S. social history and that are performed anew as living traces in individual memories.8 The centrality of this particular axis of difference can be difficult to understand for people from elsewhere in the world. African-American legal scholar Patricia Williams (2004, 10) recounts an exchange that she had with a Parisian friend who was upset over what seemed to the friend to be the American obsession with racial categories, an obsession seen most overtly in personal ads. Williams adds that labels such as "single black female," "lonely Asian male," and "self-described hunk or hunkette who is tall, blond and emphatically Caucausian" characterized "the personals columns of any given newspaper or magazine," which are "perhaps the most openly and unashamedly segregated sites in the United States." Yet while the particular enactment of difference in the United States may not find precise duplication elsewhere, why should we expect performances of difference (which may occur along axes of gender, sexuality, class, reli- gion, language, etc., as well as race) to remain the same from place to place and time to time?

8. For attempts to theorize this historical discourse, see Brackett (2000) and Radano (1996). For source readings illustrating the formation of this discourse, see Southern (1971) and Epstein (1977).

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Examining the idea of black music as a genre as it occurs in large popular music categories forms another avenue of response to Tagg's argument. Especially important are the ideas that genres are not static assem- blages of empirically verifiable musical characteristics, that they bring with them social connotations about race, gender, and so on, and that they are understandable only in relation to other genres at particular moments in time. While in some respects less accessible, the same contradictions (some might say shortcomings) of generic understanding highlighted by Tagg hold true for classical music: one need only look at Chopin's Nocturne in G minor, op. 15, no. 3, for an example of a piece with almost no musical characteristics associated with the genre within which its title places it.9 I am not suggesting that scholars should avoid analyzing internal stylistic characteristics that create difference within the musical field. Rather, the preceding discussion suggests that such internal differentiations will be most convincing when limited to particular sociohistorical instances. Of course, one reason the contradictions of genre are more apparent in black popular music is precisely because the label highlights its associations with social identity so much more than the label "Nocturne" does. But then this is true to some extent of other popular music genres as well. For example, the assumed audience of country music is clear, especially in its original guise as "hillbilly" music.

In addition to referring to black popular music as part of a long-range historical discourse and as part of an ever-changing genre system in a general sense, we may attain a greater degree of specificity by looking at the uses of this label in one particular "frozen" moment. In the following example, the relationship between recordings that "cross over" genre boundaries articulates those very same transitory and translucent boundaries. "Crossover" recordings illuminate the instability of musical categories even as they reinforce and rely on them. Comparisons between music industry genre assignations (keeping in mind that the "music industry" is not separate from the rest of society) and the sound of specific recordings often highlight sociocultural factors in classification precisely because of the lack of an airtight relationship.10 Examining two different recordings of the same song made around the same time provides an occasion for proceeding with the assumption that these categorical labels must mean something if so many people seem to think they do,

9. Jeffrey Kallberg (1996) has done just this in his excellent analysis. 10. For a more in-depth examination of a different moment that describes a similar dis-

junction, see Brackett 2002.

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even if the categories appear inconsistent from the standpoint of empirical, musicological data.11

"By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (hereafter "Phoenix") was written by Jimmy Webb (1967), part of a new breed of songwriters who emerged during the 1960s (including, most notably, Burt Bacharach). Webb retained the basic aesthetic of Tin Pan Alley (especially the use of sophis- ticated harmonic-melodic relationships and orchestral backing) while updating this traditional notion of craft with formal fluctuations, occa- sional modal-tinged harmonies, and contemporary lyric themes suitable for a new brand of swinging consumer.12 As such, recordings of Webb's songs by artists such as Glen Campbell (including "Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston"), the 5th Dimension ("Up, Up, and Away"), and Richard Harris ("MacArthur Park") demonstrated the continued viability of the "easy listening" or "middle-of-the-road" (MOR) genre within the popular mainstream during the late 1960s. Yet, in a manner recalling Tin Pan Alley songs of the "golden era," Webb's songs proved adaptable in a variety of genres, as illustrated later in the discussion of Isaac Hayes' soul version of "Phoenix."

Glen Campbell's recording of "Phoenix," released late in 1967, poses interesting challenges in terms of genre analysis. As might be expected, it participates in the pop-MOR genre without belonging to it. It features orchestral backing and relatively complex functional harmony, but compared with the other songs of Webb's already mentioned, it is relatively simple in formal terms, consisting of one sixteen-bar section that goes around three times. Its sense of late 1960s contemporaneity is provided by a dotted-quarter-eighth-note bass pattern, an integral part of produc- ing a "rock ballad" feel, and by lyrics containing a degree of romantic realism-pessimism-bittersweetness that would have been distinctly out of place prior to the mid-1960s. A brief two-bar mixolydian modal vamp appears at the end of the song but fades out before it sounds three times, as the song clocks in at two minutes, and forty-three seconds, a conven- tional duration for a pop recording of the era. Campbell sings the melody very close to how it appears in the sheet music, adding subtle expressive ornamentation during verses two and three but largely allowing the orchestration and the lyrics' narrative to carry the drama of the recording.

In terms of Billboard chart representation, Campbell's "Phoenix" was a moderate pop hit, reaching number twenty-six on the "Hot 100" pop chart, while the album of the same name reached number fifteen on the

11. A more general study of how cover versions highlight the connections between genre and identity may be found in Griffiths (2002).

12. The selection of songs for studies such as this one can be virtually arbitrary. This song was chosen because I initially presented this discussion at a conference held in Phoenix.

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album chart and won the "Best Album of the Year" Grammy award for 1968, reflecting the prestige granted MOR-pop by the music-industry establishment at this time. The broad acceptability of Campbell's music and persona is also evidenced by his primetime variety network television show, which aired from 1968 through 1972.

If the identity of Campbell's "Phoenix" as a MOR ballad is relatively clear, the same cannot be said of its simultaneous designation as a country song. On the one hand, the recording fared much better on Billboard's country chart than on the pop chart, reaching number two, yet the sonic signifiers of country on "Phoenix" and Campbell's other hits (which also tended to rank higher on the country charts) are subtle at best. Line Grenier (1990) has made a persuasive case for the generic ambiguity of ballads in the rock era, a property that enables the codes of these recordings to be seamlessly rearticulated in varying radio formats. In other words, Campbell's recording of "Phoenix" created a "ballad" that could retain the country audience without country markers strong enough so as to disturb mainstream pop listeners. Members of the listening audience searching for elements of late 1960s country style would have recognized that Campbell's voice has a slight southern twang and that the song's persona moves steadily towards Oklahoma, which comes to represent a southern safe haven, perhaps even "home." Two other Campbell-Webb collaborations, "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman," perform a similar fusion, adding another countryism in the form of a tremeloed, "Bonanza- esque" guitar. 13

The almost-tangential relationship of these songs to country music stereotypes has been typical of country-pop ballads going back to the late 1950s, most notably in the ballad recordings of Jim Reeves. In one of the many interesting paradoxes (and tautologies) of genre, perhaps the clear- est evidence why Campbell's recording of "Phoenix" would be considered a country-pop ballad is because it bears some resemblance to previous country-pop ballads. Another factor in assignations of genre is the role of the performer's image as understood by the music industry and consuming public at that time: in other words, if Glen Campbell is per- ceived as a country musician, then he must make country recordings.

Released in the summer of 1969, Isaac Hayes' recording of "Phoenix" crosses over from a completely different direction. Hayes' recording of

13. Richard Peterson (1997, 137-55) has noted the coexistence of "hard-core" and "soft- shell" country subgenres since the 1930s, an internal division that indicates how country's hybridity depends on the maintenance of opposing forces within itself. While Campbell's work falls clearly into Peterson's soft-shell category, Peterson's subgeneric dichotomy demonstrates that one need not necessarily resort to the intrageneric ballad argument to explain why Campbell-Webb's "Phoenix" can be understood as country.

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Webb's song (as written) lasts roughly the same duration as Campbell's (slightly under three minutes) but is framed on the album version (although not the single) by an eight-and-a-half-minute introduction and a seven-minute concluding vamp. The album that includes "Phoenix," Hot Buttered Soul, presaged a new blend of jazz and soul, in some respects anticipating the R&B subgenre with "Quiet Storm." On "Phoenix" and on "Walk on By" (the first song on the album, written in 1964 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David), Hayes approaches these 1960s updates of Tin Pan Alley song craft as a jazz singer (or some pre-rock and roll pop singers) would, ornamenting and embellishing phrases, never singing an entire phrase "straight." The soul-gospel influence is prominent in the many melismas and interjected moans and hums. In contrast to Campbell's version, Hayes' vocal performance infuses the song with a dramatic arc, as his vocal grows gradually more intense and elaborate over the course of the song's three verses. This is most dramatically illustrated by the different treatment of the third line of each verse, which forms the melodic climax of the song. Hayes places the beginning of each of the three lines where this shift occurs progressively higher in his voice (the recording is in E-flat major):

Verse 1: (eb) "she'll laugh when she reaches the part" Verse 2: (fi) "she'll hear the phone keep right on ringing" Verse 3: (g) "then she'll cry just to think I would really leave her"

Whereas Hayes' rendition of these lines features an ascent in scale degree from one to three during the course of the song, Campbell's recording hovers around scale degree six in the parallel passages of all three verses. Thus, even in the first verse, Hayes' treatment of this phrase represents a significant variation on both Campbell's recording and the printed sheet music (to which Campbell's recording adheres more closely than does Hayes').

Examples 1 and 2 add detail to these observations. The third line, because it forms the climax of the melodic line, provides a good vehicle for comparing the singers' treatment of the line during the course of their recordings, as well as for comparing the recordings to each other. Campbell's recorded performance varies this line from verse to verse, shifting the phrasing, sometimes by delaying a phrase for a beat or two (compare Ex. lb with la and Ic) and, at other times, by micro-rhythmic inflections. The conversational character of his voice and the limited range of these lines (restricted to a major third, scale degrees 4-6) projects well the proselike character of Webb's lyrics. This perhaps helps explain why certain events that may look remarkable in notation (e.g., the "reversed" accents on the words "I'm leavin'" in Ex. la, which also

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Example 1. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." A comparison of the third phrase (mm. 9-12) in verses 1-3 of Glenn Campbell's recording (transcription by David Brackett) a.

FMaj7 BlMaj7 C7 Am7

She'll laugh when she reach the part that says I'm leav-in'

b.

FMaj7 BlMaj7 C7 Am7

But she'll just hear that phone 3 keep on ring - in'

c.

FMaj7 BIMaj7 C7 Am7

And she'll cry__ just to think__ I'd real-ly leave her

appear to create an accented nonharmonic tone with the d over an A minor chord), sound smooth and flowing on the recording. The tran- scriptions also represent the subtle but increasing intensity that Campbell injects into his delivery of this line in successive verses of the song, particularly evident in the melismas present in the second measure of Examples lb and Ic.

As already suggested by the discussion of the climactic points in his recording, Hayes varies the line considerably more than Cambell does, sharing only the emphasis on scale degrees 6 and 5 in the first two measures of the line (shown in Exx. 2a and 2b; these pitches are emphasized in the first three measures of Ex. 2c). This variation is evident not only in the high note that begins these lines in Hayes' recording but in the complex internal subdivisions of the beat, in the immense expansion of the melodic range of the line (all three versions of the line taken together span a perfect twelfth), and in the lengthening of the line to three-and-a- half measures from two-and-a-half. Compared with Campbell's conversational vocal quality, Hayes' voice is more like an instrument, repeating syllables and words ("Oh" and "ringin"' in Ex. 2b; "I" and "ea," from


Example 2. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." A comparison of the third phrase (mm. 9-12) in verses 1-3 of Isaac Hayes's recording (transcription by David Brackett) a.

ElMaj7 AbMaj7 B7

b.

C.

She'll laugh when she reach the part

Gm7 Cm7

that says I'm leav - in' yes she will

EbLMaj7 AlMaj7 B7

Woah_ she'll hear_ Oh_ Oh the phone_ keep

Gm7 Cm7 / I~-----3-- -- :

right on ring-in' and ring-in' and ring-in' and ring-in' woah and ring-in'

E Maj7 ALMaj7 Bj7

Woah__ then she'll cry (i)

Gm7

just to think

Cm7

I would real-ly lea__ ea-ea ve her

"leave," in Ex. 2c) to enable him to embellish the vocal line. This instru- mental vocal character reaches an apex in the almost-vertiginous polyrhythm of "ringin' and ringin' and ringin"' in Example 2b and the over-the-barline internal triplets of "le-ea-ea-ve her" in Example 2c.

These features strongly suggest the soul genre circa 1969 (much more

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strongly, I might add, than Campbell's versions suggest country, even in its "soft-shell" guise, circa 1967), and the long introduction and concluding vamp that frames Webb's song in Hayes' version make the connection with soul music even more explicit. The entirety of the lengthy introduction takes place over a single, jazzy, dominant 11-13 harmony, sustained on a Hammond organ, with a bass playing the same dotted figure found on Campbell's recording, and with the drummer steadily playing quarter notes on a ride cymbal. Over this, Hayes "preaches" a sermon on the "power of love" that outlines a prequel to the narrative presented in the song. Hayes states that the song is "written by one of the great young songwriters of today" and that it is a "deep tune" and has a "deep meaning." This section of the song reinforces the sense that Hayes is participating in the soul genre, as he declares that he is going to do the song "my own way" and "bring it on down to soulsville." The addition of contemporary black slang ("she was bad," "she was outasite") demonstrates how intersubjective awareness of the audience-"addressivity"-is in play on both musical and verbal levels. Hayes refers to a recent soul recording in the introduction when he compares the narrative of his prequel to the story found in Tyrone Davis's hit from earlier in 1969, "Can I Change My Mind." This process recalls the sort of "troping" discussed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey (1988), a practice that is decisive (according to one of Gates's better-known formulations) in creating a sense of an African-American literary tradition. Hayes stretches the concluding vamp, heard for a few seconds on Campbell's recording, to a length almost equal to the introduction, and provides an opportuni- ty for extensive vocal extemporizing, another musical practice that evokes gospel and soul music.

As in the classification of Campbell's recording, the importance of pre- conceptions and social perceptions of identity plays a role in genre assig- nation in Hayes' version of "Phoenix": Hayes' personal and vocal identity as an African American cannot be discounted when one tries to understand the placement of his recording in the soul music category. Another factor is Hayes' previous association-as a songwriter, pianist, and producer-with Stax Records, a recording company specializing in soul music, a factor that parallels Campbell's previous associations with country music (as well as with pop music as a studio musician).14 The representation of the mainstream popularity of these two recordings was remarkably alike, with neither of them being a big hit using Billboard's methods of measurement. Campbell, however, had far more mainstream success in other arenas, as witnessed by his television show and Grammy

14. Campbell even toured with the Beach Boys during the initial period when primary songwriter Brian Wilson ceased to perform live with the band.

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awards. Yet, it was by virtue of similar processes of crossing over to the mainstream, albeit from different directions, that the generic identity of the two recordings was confirmed. 15

The way I am establishing the viability of the term black popular music may well seem absurd to those for whom such elaborate and circuitous argumentation about black popular music and African-American identity merely addresses an obvious fact of life. Many subtle and important statements about black music over the years have explored conceptual continuities in African-American music rather than consistency of empirically based style traits.16 These studies reveal how a linkage between social identity and a practice of music making (as in "black music") need not depend on the reproduction of negative stereotypes but may function as a positive marker, a chiastic turn, not unlike the "sly civility" ("the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand") noted by certain postcolonial critics.17 The centrality of music in specifically political struggles by African Americans undermines the idea that black music can only result from naive beliefs in cultural inferiority and purism.

In two recent scholarly landmarks on African-American music, Samuel Floyd Jr. (1995) and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (2003), use the concept of "cultural memory" as a discursive tactic that forms an implicit riposte to dis- missals of the idea of black music. One of the principal ways in which cultural memory becomes audible and visible is through the practice of storytelling, an ineluctably temporal practice that disturbs the fixity of spatial practices by blurring the line between scholarly discourse and fiction. Storytelling as a mode of discourse, relying as it invariably does on memories, forms an opposing pole to scientific discourse. The truth of storytelling depends on external verifications of truth that are clearly contingent. Scientific discourse, on the other hand, with its abundant systems of external verification, no longer has to clarify its relationship to the conditions that authorize its claims to truth. Michel de Certeau (1984, 87) describes a powerful property of memory and storytelling in what he terms the "'art' of memory," an art that "'authorizes' (makes possible) a

15. Mainstream often remains an unexamined term in discussions of genre and value in popular music. For a recent attempt to shed light on this "straw" genre, see Toynbee (2002).

16. A selection (by no means exhaustive) of representative work includes Baraka (1967), Wilson (1974), Maultsby (1990), Floyd (1995), Neal (1999), and Ramsey (2003).

17. The term sly civility comes from Homi Bhabha's (1994, 93-101) essay of the same name, a complex meditation on the "the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand" that results ultimately in paranoia on the part of the colonizer (99). For a postcolonial study of the "Black Atlantic" that explores how a similar dynamic connects African- American tactical responses to power with that of the black diaspora, see Gilroy (1993).

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reversal, a change in order or place, a transition into something different, a 'metaphor' of practice or of discourse."18

Floyd (1995, 8) explicitly uses the concept of cultural memory to con- front objectivist biases that suppress forms of knowledge that would allow subaltern discourses to surface, acknowledging what he calls the "nonfactual and nonreferential motivations, actions and beliefs that members of a culture seem, without direct knowledge or deliberate train- ing, to 'know.'" Floyd's discussion of how cultural know-how becomes second nature recalls the work of other social theorists who have tried to account for the seemingly objective nature of subjective and intersubjective experience. I am thinking here primarily of Pierre Bourdieu's (1977, 1990) notion of the "habitus"-an ensemble of principles that generate and organize practices and representations-or of Charles Taylor's (2002) work on "social imaginaries."19

Guthrie Ramsey (2003) elaborates, riffs, and tropes on Floyd's com- pelling discussion of cultural memory. In this way, he situates himself in a lineage of African-American writers discussing African-American music in a manner analogous to the troping of African-American fiction writers and musicians who generate an intertextual sense of tradition. Ramsey emphasizes, even more than Floyd, the concept of cultural memory and the practice of storytelling, including narratives of the formation of his own musical identity, as well as a substantial ethnography of his extended family. With this shift in the grounds of what might constitute scholarly discourse, Ramsey boldly presents an enunciating practice that challenges orthodox epistemology in a fashion that matches the challenge of African-American music as an object of study within the discipline of musicology. The use of storytelling and cultural memory emphasizes the time of black music at the expense of trying to locate it in its proper place; it scores what de Certeau (1984, 79) calls a coup: "a detour by way of a past... or by way of a quotation . . . made in order to take advantage of an occasion and to modify an equilibrium by taking it by surprise. Its discourse is characterized more by a way of exercising itself than by the thing it indicates" (emphasis in the original). Far from being presented as static, "pure" form, the existence of which can only be thrown into doubt by inconsistent style traits, black music in this context, is revealed as hybrid at the root, resisting closure as a concept in the vigorous enunciating practices that perform its identity in ever-new guises.

Some will undoubtedly raise the question whether this use of cultural

18. The role of memory in African-American literary practices is explored in a series of essays collected in Fabre and O'Meally (1994).

19. For an essay that develops a theoretical framework for understanding different ways in which music might figure in the constitution of social imaginaries, see Born (2000).

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memory to write about African-American music excludes scholars who are not African American and who therefore cannot lay claim to that particular form of cultural memory. Yet identification in the intersubjective realm of the social is predicated on recognizing and identifying with an "other." Thus, my identity as a white person growing up in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s depended (and depends) on my sense of other people being "nonwhite," and on arguably inhabiting a social imaginary conterminous or overlapping with others who identified themselves differently. When cultural memory is invoked as a way of understanding the enunciating practice of black music, it reminds us of the contingent nature of identity and how our identity, whatever we perceive it to be, becomes meaningful in relation to other identities as they are performed in the same social space.

To understand how the everyday knowledge embodied in genre labels can have such communicative power despite their ultimate irrationality is to begin to understand the sort of almost subliminal logic performed by the various genres associated with African-American popular music. Beyond the banal level of keeping the wheels of music commerce turning, genres function as ephemeral utterances that provide a clue to the role played by music in the intersubjective social imagination. As such, genres may act as mediators somewhat in the manner of myth and totemism in the studies of Levi-Strauss (1966); that is, genres indicate a tacit and contingent collective agreement about the "proper" place for different types of music and the social groups most associated with them.

To insist on the role of popular music in facilitating the performance of cultural difference may strike some as obeisance to political and/or theoretical correctness. Rather than debunk genre labels for their internal inconsistencies, I have tried to inquire as to their social functions, as to why these labels seem so important despite their rather transparent mal- leability. I am not sure that this quality of genre need be viewed as a defect; indeed, it would be difficult to find any completely consistent use of language or of symbolic communication in general. More to the point, in the specific case of "black popular music," we are not talking simply about another term or label but about a form of symbolic communication imbricated in a lengthy history of power struggles.

It may seem as if I am trying to reconcile two incommensurable approaches. An emphasis on genre as a way of approaching the practice of black music stresses institutional structures and spatial arrangements, whereas an emphasis on cultural memory foregrounds the deferred temporality of enunciation. Yet if we can accept the idea that cultural memories represent more than the consciousness of the individual who articu-

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lates them, thereby encompassing a cultural group or a community, then I would argue that genres consist of individual musical utterances enunciating the here-and-now in musical terms. Embedded as we are in con- stantly reconfigured social imaginaries, then the point may be that if the personal is political, then the individual can certainly be institutional.

DISCOGRAPHY

5th Dimension. Up, up, and away. Soul City 756 (1967). Campbell, Glen. By the time I get to Phoenix. Capitol 2015 (1967). ---. Galveston. Capitol 2428 (1969). ---. Wichita lineman. Capitol 2302 (1968). Davis, Tyrone. Can I change my mind. Dakar 602 (1968). Drifters. The very best of the Drifters. Rhino R2 71211 (1993). Harris, Richard. MacArthur Park. Dunhill 4134 (1968). Hayes, Isaac. By the time I get to Phoenix. Hot buttered soul. Enterprise 1001 (1969). -. Walk on by. Hot buttered soul. Enterprise 1001 (1969). Outkast. Hey ya. Speakerboxxx/The love below. Arista 82876-50133-2 (2003).

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Issue Table of ContentsBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Spring - Fall, 2005), pp. 1-233Volume InformationFront MatterEditor's Note [pp. 1-1]Representing America, Instructing Europe: The Hampton Choir Tours Europe [pp. 3-42]This House, This Music: Exploring the Interdependent Interpretive Relationship between the Contemporary Black Church and Contemporary Gospel Music [pp. 43-72]Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music [pp. 73-92]The Disappearing Dance: Maxixe's Imperial Erasure [pp. 93-117]Current Research Twelve Years after the William Grant Still Centennial [pp. 119-154]Reflexive Ethnography: An Ethnomusicologist's Experience as a Jazz Musician in Zimbabwe [pp. 155-165]The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices [pp. 167-222]Back Matter

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