The Daily - ‘1619,’ Episode 3: The Birth of American Music

Episode Date: September 7, 2019

Today on “The Daily,” we present Episode 3 of “1619,” a New York Times audio series hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones. You can find more information about it at nytimes.com/1619podcast.Black music, forged in captivity, became the sound of complete artistic freedom. It also became the sound of America. Guest: Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for The New York Times.This episode contains explicit language.Background reading: “The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism,” Wesley Morris writes.The “1619” audio series is part of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Read more from the project here.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. Today on The Daily. From The New York Times Magazine, I'm Nicole Hannah-Jones. This is 1619. This week, Wesley Morris on the birth of American music. So, last fall, I am at my friend's house. We are making dinner. I'm chopping vegetables. And I asked my friend Brett, who was cooking with me, can you put on some music? And he said, what do you want to listen to? And I said, have you ever heard of Yacht Rock? And he said, what? I said, Yacht Rock, have you ever heard of this? And he goes, no, I have not. So he finds the Yacht Rock station in Pandora,

which I don't know why or how he's still a Pandora guy. With all due respect to Pandora, he is one. And he finds the Yacht Rock station. At some point, Bright has to go run an errand. I think I might have sent him on one. I don't remember. But he's gone, so I'm alone. Just me with the vegetables and Yod Rock.

It gives me plenty of time to really think about the songs I'm hearing. really think about the songs I'm hearing. We're talking about music made between the years of, I don't know, I would say like 1975 to about 1983. Things like How long has this been going on?

Ace's How Long. Summer breeze makes me feel Aces How Long Seals and Croft doing Summer Breeze I'm hearing things like Steal Away by Robbie Dupree Steal Away And Robbie Dupree. And the Doobie Brothers' What a Fool Believes. It is like our soft, raucous period in American popular music. The joke of Yacht Rock is that whoever invented it and whoever's making a playlist out of these songs is basically saying that they're inconsequential

and that what's in them doesn't matter. But what I know I'm hearing is something bigger and deeper than that. But what I know I'm hearing is something bigger and deeper than that. Every song has something about it that is similar to the other songs. I'm hearing things like Rosanna by Toto. Which seems perfectly banal. has a really good beat, sort of builds to its chorus. But then at the end,

I'm hearing the great doo-wop harmonies of the 50s and 60s. There is something jazz-like in the syncopated music of something like Steely Dan. You can hear in somebody like Michael McDonald. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. That is like a gospel breakdown. What I am hearing in all of these songs is basically blackness. And the song in which I am hearing it the deepest and strongest and most powerfully, at least to me, standing in that kitchen, chopping those vegetables, was when Kenny Loggins' This Is It comes up. It's got a kind of loosely disco-like rhythm to it.

There's a lot of percussion sort of going back and forth and around sure Kenny Loggins is basically Sing whispering the verses of the song Doing this very light Coup And then in the pre-chorus Kenny Loggins disappears and who shows up? Michael McDonald You think that maybe it's over Michael McDonald giving Kenny Loggins

plenty of time to gather himself. When he sings the word miracle, he doesn't sing miracle. He goes, miracle. Like he is

scraping the bottom of a pan to get all of the good bits off of it before you pour the gravy in. This isn't where you are. This isn't. Your back's to the corner. Scraping the pan is the blackest thing you can do as a singer. And here's Kenny Loggins as this white artist doing it.

The waiting is over. is about to run. And then the gravy comes. This is it. Make no mistake where you are. This is it. He is like at the top of the church at this point. He has like elevated himself to the rafters. There's like no more.

He is like at the roof trying to clear a way to get to heaven, but there's just church roof in the way. He says if no one can tell what the future's like You're back to the corner He's not the greatest singer, but there's a kind of gumption and nerve to the singing of this song.

The waiting is over But there's a kind of gumption and nerve to the singing of this song. It cannot be denied. A tip of the hat to him. I just had to stand there and I just, I actually cracked up. I had, I just put down the knife and I cracked up. And it felt so pleasurable. And then I started thinking about all these other singers I love. I'm thinking about Amy

Whitehouse. I'm thinking about Annie Lennox. I'm thinking about George Michael. I'll carry on before this river Think about George Michael Before you throw my heart back on the floor I think about Chris Stapleton

You should spend my nights out in the ballroom Who practices a kind of muscly blues that gets written off his country because he's a big white guy in a hat It was the only love I've known And one of the many phases in which David Bowie really wanted to make R&B and soul music. This is the sound not just of Black America, but the sound of America. It is deeply American, just of Black America, but the sound of America. It is deeply American, almost especially when it's sung by British people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Amy Winehouse. And it fills me with

pride. Like, I know that there is something irresistible and ultimately inevitable about Black music being a part of American popular music. But it also reminds me that there's a history to this, a very painful history. And in the most perversely ironic way, it's this historical pain that is responsible for this music. Some of the oldest recordings we have of Black American music are from the 1930s. And they're songs that would have been sung

by Americans born into slavery. There's this one called Old Ship of Zion. You can hear in it these four men. Their voices are moving in and out of each other. And it's beautiful. And it's also sad. and it's beautiful, and it's also sad. You can feel that in your bones.

And then there would be music that was completely the opposite, like Old Coon Dog, for instance. You can hear a playfulness in this song. And you've got this banjo, this great African instrument that becomes the bedrock of American music in so many ways. And that thing is dancing. And then... You have someone like Billy McRae. And, oh, my God.

You can hear in his singing what we would now call something like the live-long day. Years and years of hard work and unimaginable sorrow. You can also hear in all of this music this undeniable sound of hope. All of these melodies and cadences and emotions are things that would have been passed down generation after generation. It's what you would have heard on a plantation.

It's what you would have heard walking by a plantation. It's what you would have heard passing a black person doing his job, entertaining himself doing the drudgery of work, the way a guy named Thomas Dartmouth Rice did sometime around the 1830s. As the story goes, T.D. Rice, a white man, this anonymous nobody actor trying to make ends meet, one day he's touring with a troupe in Cincinnati, or maybe it was Pittsburgh.

We don't really know. But the myth basically goes, T.D. Race happened upon an old black man cleaning a horse in a stable. The man was doing his job on property owned by a white man named Crow. Crow, are you crow? He heard the tune this old black man named Crow. He heard the tune this old black man was singing.

He saw the way this man moved his body as he was cleaning this horse. Now, we don't know what tune this old man would have been singing. Whatever Rice hears coming out of this man's mouth is captivating to him. And what he sees is an opportunity. Because showbiz in the 1830s looked like this. Italian operas. British plays. Entertainment imported from Europe. All the people performing this stuff would have been white.

The audiences would have been white. After all, it's 1830. Slavery is in full effect. And when it came to entertainment, there was nothing new. Nothing truly American. And so when T.D. Rice hears this black man singing this song and moving his body in this particular way, ding, a light bulb goes off. And he takes that light bulb and runs all the way to the theater.

He figures out a way to melt down some cork, lets it cool, presumably takes a rag or maybe even his hand if it's cool enough. And then he paints his face black. He goes out on stage, but instead of doing his regular act, he's got this horse groomer's tune, except now he's given the tune lyrics. Come listen all you gals and boys, I'm just from Tuckahoe. I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow. Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

And the lyrics give the horse groomer a name. And the name is Jim Crow. So the crowd goes crazy. They go so bananas, the man gets 20 encores. This is the first time a paying audience is basically electrified by a white man with a black face. This is the night that Jim Crow was allegedly introduced to America, this mascot of American racism. And this is what America really wanted, which was its own original art form, that is not an Italian opera, and isn't some British guy coming over and despising all over them. And here is Thomas Dartmouth Rice giving it to them. This is the most successful American play in Broadway history, says 60 Minutes.

Rolling Stone gives it five stars, calling it a landmark production of an American classic. To Kill a Mockingbird is All Rise, one of the greatest plays in history, raves NPR. The New York Post says it will change how you see the world. This is what great theater is for. All Rise for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a new play by Aaron Sorkin.

This is a phenomenon, says New York Magazine. On Broadway at the Schubert Theater. Get tickets at telecharge.com. There was an old nigger, they called him Uncle Ned. He is dead long ago, long ago. Oh boy. I mean, you know how it goes. This sensational thing happens and then everybody wants to get on the bandwagon and do their own.

So you have other minstrel acts who come along and try to do what Thomas Dartmouth Rice is doing, a song and a dance and a black face on their white skin. Oh, hang up the fiddle and the bow. And then from these solo acts, you have basically bands forming. And the bands have all the instruments that you would have in a band that you'd recognize now. There is a banjo and a fiddle and some tambourines and percussion in the form of bones, which would come from a pig sometimes. That is the formation of what will become the minstrel troupe.

And the place that minstrelsy took hold was in the North. Places like Philadelphia and New York and Boston, where you'd have these theaters dedicated to minstrel acts, where minstrel acts would just move into a theater and do their act night after night after night after night after night. And a lot of these performers had never been

meaningfully South to have a meaningful relationship with Black people. And so, they just made stuff up based on what they thought Black people were like. I want you to know that I'm a ragged foot right. Hold black and living like you people ask why. They were able to draw on things that were coming to America from other parts of Europe, like the polka.

Come all you colored people now and gather round me close And listen to what is going to sing And so you had, over the course of the formation of this culture, an inherent mixing. You had some amazing mix of an imagined blackness, real, actual Irish melodies, and Polish music with what we would now call gospel, but spiritual harmonies, interlaced together with this African banjo.

High road, Hockman Road, Lugansk, Riviera, Ohio. High road, Hockman Road, Lufthansa, River City, Ohio. High Road, Huffman Road. Basically welding into a fusion that becomes the thing that everybody wants to try to do. The whole thing just sweeps the nation. And for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit. Can we say that? Oh, very much so. I think so.

And so, for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit. High road, open road South River, Ohio High road, open road This is America's primary form of entertainment.

People are going crazy for blackface minstrels. You have little boys going to bed and dreaming about how they can become part of this minstrel show. Some of those people having these dreams go on to become people like Stephen Foster. Stephen Foster, the man widely credited as being the father of American music. Some of his songs, some of his most famous songs, songs you know, songs you love, songs you still sing, songs your children, if you have them, they still sing. Some of those songs were written for blackface performers.

You can't come, ladies, sing this song. Do not, do not. They still sing. Some of those songs were written for blackface performers. And if you listen to something like Camptown Races, you can hear in it all of its minstrel properties. The song, of course, is written in so-called Negro dialect. I mean, instead of saying going, you're saying guine. Wine to run all night, wine to run all day. Like instead of saying O-F for of, you get a lot of D-E for duh. You blind horse sticking in a big mud hole. Doodah, doodah.

This is a white person imagining how a black person would sing this song. And that was a Gold Rush era hit. This is the I Want to Hold Your Hand of 1851. Somebody better love me. Part of the problem that we still live with now is that it was so much the heart and soul of American culture that it wasn't that it became not racist. It just was a thing that you did. If you wanted to be an entertainer,

at any point after 1830, you in all likelihood were at least going to try to be a blackface minstrel, even if you were black. After the Civil War ends and there's an opportunity for black people to perform, they have to do what the nation wants. And what the nation wants at that point is blackface. And now, giving you noise in tempo, F.B. Miller and Scatman Corrella. So black people blacked up and performed as black people who weren't actually black.

and performed as Black people who weren't actually Black. You the laziest man I ever did see. What's wrong with you right now? What's wrong with you? I'm tired. By the time you have Black people painting their faces Black to perform as Black people, the only question you can really ask at this point is, what the hell is going on?

Why is this happening? What was so captivating about seeing black people represented this way? Why would a white audience have clamored for it so much? I think one of the things that it offered was an opportunity to feel good about a thing that actually felt really bad at the time. People were really torn about whether to continue with slavery or whether to abolish it. The Minstrel Show didn't really give you an answer, but it provided a platform by which you could either escape from actually having to think about that question that really was tearing the nation apart, or depending on which show you would wind up seeing, it fully engaged you in the lightest possible way about enslaved people and how you didn't really have to feel so bad for them because they like being enslaved.

You got to laugh at a thing that you actually felt so anguished about. You get to watch these black people who are really a source of national agony outside the theater become fools inside the theater. national agony outside the theater become fools inside the theater. And in sitting in that theater, watching these white men in blackface make fools of black people, a white audience could feel cultured. They could feel civilized. They could feel superior to the people they were watching be made fun of. And in a crazy way, watching them dehumanize would really have been an opportunity for a white audience to feel so much better about their own humanity. By the time you get to the 20th century, minstrelsy is still with us. It is the basis upon which American movies are built.

This country's first movie blockbuster. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Full of white men, villainously in blackface. I am privileged to say a few words to you. And America's first

talking motion picture. In this most modern and novel manner. The jazz singer. And America's first talking motion picture. The jazz singer. About a Jewish man who feels most himself not as a Jewish man, struggling with his Jewish identity and pleasing his cantor father. No, no! No, no! Mammy, I'm coming!

Oh, God, I hope I'm not late! It's when he blacks his face up and performs Mammy as a Negro. I'd walk a million miles, a one-a-yup miles, on my Mammy. Some of America's favorite stars did numbers in blackface. I come from south, from the deep, deep south. Judy Garland performed in blackface. Just die with blight and the pappy reads Esquire with delight While my Alabama mammy plays bridge all night

Way down south in Dixie, swing me low Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire both performed in blackface. White Christmas has a whole number. The most famous number in White Christmas involves a blackface tune. But at the same time, there's the beginnings of a recording industry. And you had black artists who had access to recording studios. Out of these recordings, you have people like Muddy Waters. Well, now, let me tell you, people. Lord, I don't think I do.

I just can't stand. I don't leave her where she do. She gonna miss me. Inventing and perfecting blues rhythm, blues ideas, blues expression. The expression of... Oh, you gonna miss me. Child, what a baby. is blues expression the expression of of a fully human black self in American popular art. She wouldn't let me in. Told me to go raise money.

I've got too many friends. You're gonna miss me. He had a kind of confidence that most people would never have heard coming from a Black person before. All right, son! And this is just the beginning. You have the advent of a place like Blue Note Records, where lots of amazing jazz was created and then released into the world.

People like Sidney Bechet, and then You have Black musicians thinking about how to move not only music forward, but American culture forward. Thinking about how these instruments can do other things besides make what we think of as Western European classical music. can do other things besides make what we think of as Western European classical music. Taking music to a place that nobody had ever tried to previously take it. People who just kept pushing it forward and beyond. And then, you have the development of the single most important movement Black people have ever had artistically.

And that is the advent of Motown Records. Motown is the most powerful, mass-produced expression of Black glamour, of Black self-confidence, of Black self-reliance. The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. It's project was to get Black producers, Black musicians, Black singers to take quote white, quote Western musical ideas of orchestration,

strings and horns. quote white, quote western, musical ideas of orchestration. Strings and horns. And straightforward harmonies. And you marry them to a black weekend. Where on Saturday night you're at a juke joint, having a good time with rhythm and blues music, guitar and drum and bass. Now that I've been there Sax, basically.

Watch me now! Work, work, work it out, baby Work, work, work it out And then you go home slightly hungover. And you wake up and you go to church on Sunday morning. Listen, baby. Ain't no mountain high, ain't no valley low, ain't no river wide. Where there's a whole other musical experience involving hand claps and different harmonic arrangements and call and response.

A lot of feeling, a lot of oomph, a lot of gratitude. You have the combination of these three different areas of musical expression happening at the same time in just about every single Motown record. Whether it's the Four Tops doing Reach Out, I'll Be There. Or Martha and the Vandellas doing Heat Wave. On something like Heat Wave, you can hear hands slapping the tambourine like it actually is Sunday morning. Then when everything is firing, girl, it starts to flame, burning in my heart, turning all upon, no matter how I try, my love, I can't hide, sugar pie, honey, what sugar pie?

It's just the most exciting, romantic sound you're ever going to hear. And at the center of it is what can only be described as a refulgent, tasteful blackness. Here you have in Motown a force that is actively combating these ideas of black people as being inherently inferior. Motown is the antidote to American minstrelsy. And this is what I was thinking about Any kind of fool could see There was something And this is what I was thinking about standing there in that kitchen chopping those vegetables.

It's the thing that made me laugh was just how all that history is just very silently coursing through this music. It might not even be aware that it's even there. It's so thoroughly atomized into American culture. It's going to show up in ways that even people making the art can't quite put their finger on. What you're hearing in Black music

that's so appealing to so many people of all races across time is possibility, struggle. It is strife, it is humor, it is sex, it is confidence. And that's ironic because this is the sound of a people who for decades and centuries have been denied freedom. And yet what you respond to in Black music is the ultimate expression of a belief in that freedom. The belief that the struggle is worth it, that the pain begets joy, and that that joy you're experiencing is not only contagious, it's necessary and urgent and irresistible. Black music is American music. Because as Americans, we say we believe in freedom.

And that's what we tell the world. And the power of Black music is that it's the ultimate expression of that belief in American freedom. Every Saturday. We're also releasing 1619 as a standalone series with new episodes published on Fridays. You can subscribe to the series by searching for 1619 wherever you listen. That's it for The Daily. See you on Monday. To kill a mockingbird has not played to a single empty seat, reports 60 Minutes. It's the most successful American play in Broadway history.

Rolling Stone gives it five stars, calling it unmissable and unforgettable. All rise for the miracle that is Mockingbird on Broadway. It's a New York Times Critics' Pick. Jesse Green calls it a mockingbird for our moment. Beautiful, elegiac, satisfying, even exhilarating. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. A new play by Aaron Sorkin. A New York Times Critics Pick. Tickets at telecharge.com.