Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry Reviewed (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of Popular Music

Even though Negro spirituals are one of the most popular black sacred music genres, they have not been extensively considered as a commoditized cultural product or as a founding popular music of the U.S. Filling this gap, Sandra Jean Graham's Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry examines the role of white-controlled Negro spirituals and jubilee performance in the establishment of the U.S. entertainment industry. She asserts that the entertainment industry was drawn from frequently exploited black labor: "built on black culture, black ingenuity, black bodies… it was embraced by black audiences who valued seeing their own community members onstage and knew how to look beyond the endlessly recycled stereotypes for subversive and affirming messages" (xv). By providing a nineteenth-century account of commoditized black sacred music performance and linking it to the concomitant development of the troubling blackface minstrelsy industry, Graham establishes the basis for interpreting the popularity and continuing impact of black sacred music genres today. In his poetry, African American composer James Weldon Johnson referred to the enslaved African creators of Negro folk musics as "black and unknown bards." These unknown black bards crafted Negro spirituals in community, within the pernicious chattel slave society that underpinned U.S. colonialism. The folk music tradition then provided "raw" product that was culturally mined by mostly white men who could copyright music long before African American composers could. By the end of the Civil War, there was a surge in live performances evoking a mythic, romantic plantation past. These concerts, minstrel shows, musical plays, circuses, and variety shows offered black performers employment and were the means through which U.S. and international audiences were exposed to black social life. While black audiences were anxious about and ashamed of portrayals of a slave past, white audiences were insatiable when it came to devouring what Graham calls "black musical behavior" in live shows. Unfortunately, those performances transmitted misrepresentations of black people's spirituality, work ethic, sexuality, and character-mischaracterizations with which black people contend to this day.