Using his research into the American Federation of Musicians, the author shows how those trained in jazz and classical music responded negatively to the emergence of jump blues and rock-and-roll music in the late 1940s. Interracial solidarity within the union was made possible in part by the creation of a particular class distinction based on taste, formed through musical training and performance. Though it has been customary for followers of W. E. B. Du Bois such as David Roediger, who describes the ‘dialectic of race and class’, to emphasise the critical factor of race in US class formation, this article suggests the need for a more nuanced position. In his study, the author shows how class solidarity can be made possible through racial distinction, while in other cases interracial solidarity is constructed around class distinction. To expand our analyses of how class mediates racial formations means examining cultural, discursive and ideological dimensions of class as well as the structural aspects.
See Du BoisW.E. B.Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York, The Free Press, 1998 [1935]).
2.
RoedigerDavid R.The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, Verso, 1991), p. 7.
3.
Ibid., p. 11.
4.
Ibid., p. 10.
5.
HartmanAndrew, ‘The rise and fall of whiteness studies’, Race & Class (Vol. 46, no. 2, 2004), pp. 22–38, and HaleGrace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, Pantheon, 1998).
6.
Hartman, op. cit., pp. 26 and 22.
7.
In the late 1940s the music that became known as rock-and-roll was referred to by industry insiders as ‘rhythm and blues’ or ‘jump blues’. The structure of rock-and-roll in the 1950s was essentially the same as the jump blues from the 1940s. I discuss this in more detail in my book, Tell Tchaikovsky the News: rock’n’roll, the labor question and the musicians’ union 1942-1968 (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014). In this essay, I used the phrases jump blues, R&B and rock-and roll-interchangeably, as signifiers for the same object.
8.
See HallStuart, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, in HoustonA.BakerJr. eds, Black British Cultural Studies: a reader (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), and ‘Race, the floating signifier’, a documentary about Hall. The transcript for the documentary can be found on the website for the Media Education Foundation, here: http://www.mediaed.org/assests/products/407/transcript_407.pdf.
9.
Hall, op. cit.
10.
See LeonardNeil, Jazz and the White Americans (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962). A key figure in the cultural appropriation of jazz music was Paul Whiteman, whose work involved pressing jazz music into a symphonic form. Whiteman, who became known as the ‘king of jazz’, was one of the first among the well-known white band leaders to gain his fame from appropriating black musical forms. Whiteman himself was very public about giving credit to the black musicians who created jazz music, but the political economy of the music industry situated band leaders like Whiteman in places that gave them, rather than black musicians and band-leaders, much of the cultural and economic spoils of the industry.
11.
See KraftJames P., From Stage to Studio: musicians and the sound revolution (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Roberts, Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit.
12.
‘Work stoppages caused by labor-management disputes’, Monthly Labor Review (May1946), p. 720.
13.
For a more detailed analysis of the social and cultural context of the 1940s that gave rise to jump blues and rock-and-roll, see LipsitzGeorge, Rainbow and Midnight (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1994). See also Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit. In the words of Lipsitz, ‘what the wildcat strike provided in political life, rock-and-roll music realized in culture’, p. 330.
14.
I provide a more detailed history of this phenomenon in, Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit.
15.
DoutyH. M., ‘Review of basic American labor conditions’, in WarneColston E., ed., Yearbook of American Labor (New York, 1945), pp. 1–11.
16.
Ibid., pp. 48–9.
17.
‘Money and real weekly earnings during defense, war and reconversion periods’, Monthly Labor Review (Vol. 64, 1947), pp. 987–9.
18.
See SpiveyDonald, Union and the Black Musician: the narrative of William Everett Samuels and Chicago Local 208 (Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1984), p. 37.
19.
For more on the politics of bebop musicians, see Scott DeVeaux’s book, Birth of Bebop (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1999).
20.
Esquire (June1957), p. 55.
21.
Ibid., p. 141.
22.
See HorkheimerMaxAdornoTheodor, ‘The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: philosophical fragments, translated by JephcottEdmund (Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 2007).
23.
Taylor’s words appear in the article, ‘Musicians argue the value of rock-and-roll’, in Downbeat magazine (30May1956), p. 12.
24.
Downbeat (23March1955), p. 1.
25.
‘Musicians argue value of rock-and-roll’, op. cit. p. 12.
26.
Esquire, op. cit., p. 143. There are many more examples of union musicians speaking out against rock-and-roll music, but there is not the space to cover that here. I have a more extensive analysis of the phenomenon in my book, Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit.
27.
For more on the middle-class fear of rock-and-roll, see HillTrent, ‘The enemy within: censorship in rock music in the 1950s’, in DeCurtisAnthony, ed., Present Tense: rock & roll and culture (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1992).
28.
Hearings before the Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, United States Senate, Eighty-Fifth Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to an Amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 (Washington, 1958).
29.
Allegro: Official Newspaper of Local 802, AFM (October1955), p. 1.
30.
Gillespie’s quote appears in DeVeaux, Birth of Bebop, op. cit., p. 343.
31.
Ibid. p. 347.
32.
Quinichette’s quote appears in John Chilton’s book, Let the Good Times Roll: the story of Louis Jordan and his music (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 144.
33.
There is not the space here to discuss in more detail the complexity of the case of Jordan and the other jump blues musicians. A good case can be made in their defence, and I do make that case in my book, Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit. I also discuss the problems involved in the process of bifurcating music into hierarchical categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In short, there are good reasons to defend popular music as a form of working-class resistance, something I also argue in my book.
34.
Let the Good Times Roll, op. cit., p. 144.
35.
Trenier’s quote appears in Nick Toshces’ book, The Unsung Heroes of Rock’n’Roll (New York, DaCapo Press, 1999).
36.
Mingus’ quote appears in Eric Porter’s book, What is This Thing Called Jazz? African American musicians as artists, critics and activists (Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2002), pp. 106–7.
37.
To be more precise, Mingus was considered a creator of ‘hard bop’, but for the purposes of this paper, I’m using the term bebop for all the figures who were active in creating a class distinction among different forms of music at that time.
38.
What is This Thing Called Jazz?, op. cit., p. 108.
39.
For an extended discussion of this aspect, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY, Cornel University Press, 1986).
40.
Some infamous cases where musicians were denied membership to the AFM because they failed to adequately read sheet music included the Beach Boys. See Roberts, Tell Tchaikovsky the News, op. cit.
41.
Douglass’ quote can be found in Central Avenue Sounds, edited by Bryant. (Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1998), p. 248.
42.
Central Avenue Sounds, op. cit., pp. 154–9.
43.
Buddy Collete with Steven Isoardi, Jazz Generations: a life in American music and society (New York, Continuum, 2000), p. 114.
44.
See LottEric, Love and Theft: Black Face minstrelsy and the American working class (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).
