The Music In African American Fiction

This is the first comprehensive historical analysis of how black music and musicians have been represented in the fiction of African American writers. It also examines how music and musicians in fiction have exemplified the sensibilities of African Americans and provided paradigms for an African American literary tradition. The fictional representation of African American music by black authors is traced from the nineteenth century (William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Pauline E. Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar) through the early twentieth century and the Harlem Renaissance (James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston) to the 1940s and 50s (Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison) and the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement (Margaret Walker, William Melvin Kelley, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas). In the century between Brown and Baraka, the representation of music in black fiction went through a dramatic metamorphosis. Music occupied a representative role in African American culture from which writers drew ideas and inspiration. The music provided a way out of a limited situation by offering a viable option to the strictures of racism. Individuals who overcome these limitations then become role models in the struggle toward equality. African American musical forms-for both artist and audience-also offerd a way of looking at the world, survival, and resistance. The black musician became a ritual leader. This study delineates how black writers have captured the spirit of the music that played such a pivotal role in African American culture. (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1993; revised with new preface and index)

Originally published in 1995, The Music of African American Fiction is a historical analysis of the tradition of representing music in African American fiction. The book examines the impact of evolving musical styles and innovative musicians on black culture as is manifested in the literature. The analysis begins with the slave narratives and the emergence of the first black fiction of the antebellum years and moves through the Reconstruction. This is followed by analyses of definitive fictional representations of African American music from the turn-of-the-century through Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and World War II eras through the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement. The representation of black music shapes a lineage that extends from the initial chronicles written in response to sub-human bondage to the declarations of an autonomous "black aesthetic" and dramatically influences the evolution of an African American literary tradition.

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women’s studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.

The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970-2005 is a sequel to The Music in African-American Fiction, which traced the representation of music in fiction from its mid-nineteenth-century roots in slave narratives through the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The Songs Became the Stories continues the historical, critical and musicological analyses of the first book through an examination of many of the major figures in African-American fiction over the past thirty-five years, including Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Walker, Albert Murray and John Edgar Wideman. The volume also includes an extensive annotated discography and excerpts from first-hand interviews with major African-American musical artists.

Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In twentieth-century African American fiction, music has been elevated to the level of religion primarily because of its power as a medium of freedom. This collection explores literary invocations of music.