Music of the Harlem Renaissance

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, 1899-1974: Band leader, composer, pianist, and perhaps one of the best-known and beloved figures of his time. Ellington was responsible for over one thousand compositions that surpassed the generic boundaries of blues, pop, and jazz. He is credited with having been instrumental in elevating jazz to an art form.

"Gladys Bentley [1907-1960] was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of American George L. Bentley and his wife, a Trinidadian, Mary Mote. She appeared at Harry Hansberry's "Clam House" on 133rd Street, one of New York City's most notorious gay speakeasies, in the 1920s, and headlined in the early thirties at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting outrageously with women in the audience" (1).

 Billie ("Lady Day") Holiday (1915-1959): Known for her unique vocal style, Billie Holiday's name is synonymous with jazz diva. Many of the songs on which she collaborated have evolved as jazz standards, including "Don't Explain," and "God Bless the Child." Her song "Strange Fruit" is a haunting protest to lynchings that were prominent in the American South during her reign.

Ethel Waters (1896-1977): Waters' career took her from Baltimore, to Chicago, to Atlanta, where she worked with Bessie Smith. Smith's objection to Waters' "competition" relegated the singer to performing "ballads and popular songs" (2). Later Waters moved to Harlem, where she built a following as a premiere blues singer at a club called Edmond's Cellar. Her best known and most beloved recordings include "Stormy Weather," "Heat Wave," and "His Eye is on the Sparrow." Waters was also an Academy Award-winning actress, starring in Member of the Wedding, a film based on the novel by Carson McCullers.

Bessie Smith (1894-1937): By the age of nine, Bessie Smith had lost both her mother and father, and one older brother, leaving an older sister, Viola, to raise the impoverished young family. While still a child, Bessie and another brother earned money by "busking" on the streets of Chattanooga: performing musical numbers as a team. Bessie would sing and dance while her sibling accompanied her on guitar. Smith began recording in 1923, and by the time she relocated to Philadelphia, she had earned a national following. Her record label dubbed her "Queen of the Blues."

Josephine Baker (1906-1975): Known otherwise as "Creole Goddess," and "Bronze Venus," Josephine Baker began her singing and dancing career at an early age. By 15 she performed her first St. Louis vaudeville show in 1924, and the next year performed as a chorus girl in Harlem. Baker later performed in Paris at the Theatre des Champs Elysees to overwhelming success.
Jacob M. Appel describes Baker's legacy in his online biography of the dancer, writing that "[o]n stage, Josephine Baker epitomized the flamboyant and risqué entertainment of the Jazz Age. Her overtly erotic danse sauvage, her exotic costumes of feathers and bananas, and her ability to replicate the rhythms of jazz through contortions of her body made the young African American dancer one of the most original and controversial performers of the 1920s. From her Parisian debut in 1925, Baker rocked middle-class sensibilities and helped usher in a new era in popular culture. In the words of newspaperwoman and cultural critic Janet Flanner, Baker's 'magnificent dark body, a new model to the French, proved for the first time that black was beautiful.' Off stage, Baker's decadent antics and uncanny ability to market herself helped to transform her into one of the first popular celebrities to build an international, mass appeal which cut across classes and cultures" (3).


A recording of Bessie Smith's "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out":

William Wells Brown: First African American Novelist

William Wells Brown was born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky in 1814. His mother, known only as "Elizabeth," was the slave of a prominent physician there named Dr. Young. Elizabeth had a total of seven children: Elizabeth, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Solomon, Milford, and William. Bought and sold several times before the age of twenty, William Wells Brown spent much of his young adulthood in St. Louis, where he was forced into work in the slave trade along the Missouri River. Finally in 1834, Brown escaped slavery and headed North. After gaining his freedom, Brown married Elizabeth Schooner and the couple had three children. Between 1834 and 1845, Brown relocated to Buffalo, New York where he served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He worked as a steam boatman on Lake Erie, where he would ferry escaped slaves to Canada (1).

By 1849, Brown traveled abroad to England, where he became a prominent speaker on the issue of Prohibition, and later, abolition. In keeping with the popular moral attitudes of the time, Brown often favored the tactic of moral suasion over violence to change the public's attitude. This approach for Brown was effective to denounce the U.S. definitions of democracy as they pertained to African Americans. He attended the International Peace Congress, bringing his three daughters with him. By 1854, he and his wife had separated, and later divorced: an event that drew some negative attention from critics. Nonetheless, despite his personal difficulties, Brown continued his abolitionist campaigning. He delivered over one thousand anti-slavery speeches and published the first travelogue--and the first novel--to have been published by an African American author. His own narrative of his life in slavery, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave was outsold by only one competitor, Frederick Douglass. A contemporary of Douglass's, the two shared a tense, even rancorous relationship throughout their respective careers (1).

Clotel, Brown's 1854 fictionalized account of the biracial daughter of Thomas Jefferson, is a significant work for a number of reasons. As mentioned above, it is considered the first novel to have been written by an African American. In Clotel, Brown introduces the 'tragic mulatta/mulatress': a woman who was "distinguished by her beauty, her idealism, her barely traceable African ancestry" who "proves herself an active and combative figure by the end of her story" (317). A marked consequence of the Tragic Mulatta's vexed social positioning is that her disappointments in life and in love drive her to suicide.

*From Documenting the American South (www.docsouth.com)

One may extrapolate that Brown, among others, engaged such a character to appeal to a broader range of readers that included the civic-minded and reformist society matrons of the North, as did such writers as Harriet Jacobs, to further the cause of abolitionism. The "Tragic Mulatta" exudes the characteristics of physical beauty that is designed to mirror her interior virtue, moral purity, and religious piety. Brown's employment of such a literary tactic, one concludes, is that this figure serves to underscore the multitude of ironies and hypocrisies of the slave trade. One notes this passage from "The Negro Sale" in which Clotel is waiting on the auction block to be sold, that the narrator observes, "There she stood, with a complexion as white as most of those who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers; her features as finely defined as any of her sex of pure Anglo-Saxon; her long black wavy hair done up in the neatest manner; her form tall and graceful, and her whole appearance indicating one superior to her position" (Brown 329). In such a passage, Brown emphasizes that the woman situated on the auction block is no different in manner, physical aspect, or demeanor, than the daughters of the slave-traders themselves; yet because of her tenuous ties to African slavery, she is reduced to human chattel.


The Tragic Mulatta

The term is associated with the system of concubinage--or 'placage'--in which mixed race women of color would be placed in common-law marriages with males of European descent. Some who were fortunate might be later freed by their male purchasers. Quadroon balls were prevalent across the lower South, but mostly in New Orleans, LA., where the planter aristocracy had thrived well enough to support this system of "placement" (1). The term placage was derived from the French term placer, or 'to place.' Though the system did not last long (only from approximately 1760s to 1803), the system did allow women of mixed parentage to maintain some measure of control over their destinies and economic freedom; however the race- and gender-based exploitation of this tradition were obvious.

In some cases, women involved in placage were able to acquire significant social standing within their respective societies. One such woman was the noted 'voodoo queen' of Louisiana, Marie Laveau.

Despite the occasional success of 'mulatto' and 'quadroon' women who parlayed their circumstances as placees into lucrative careers, the literature that appeared later in the century would lead one to believe that the system was a deleterious one. The figure of the "Tragic Mulatta" was, since Brown, and a recurring theme in African American literary tradition. She reappears in such work as Francis E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy; Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and in Nella Larsen's novellas Quicksand and Passing; and in Jean Toomer's Cane as an instrumental figure through which the author examines the nature of race and racial construct in the American imaginary. As with many literary tropes that assume the nature of convention, the "Tragic Mulatta" has evolved to convey some or all of the following traits:

-Exceptional beauty

-She suffers early separation from her mother and family

-She is sold to a gentleman, either through slave auction or ‘fancy girl’ ball

-She is abandoned by her purchaser shortly after she gives birth

-She is neither accepted fully by black or white society

-She passes for white for a time, but when her true parentage is revealed, she is disgraced

Other works in popular culture that feature the Tragic Mulatta:

“The Quadroons” (1842), a short story by Lydia Marie Child

“Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” (1843) also by Lydia Marie Child

The Marrow of Tradition a novel by Charles Chesnutt

Clotel: Or, the President’s Daughter, a novel by William Wells Brown

Iola Leroy (1892) a novel by Frances E.W. Harper

The House Behind the Cedars (1900) a novel by Charles Chesnutt

Passing (1929) a novel by Nella Larsen

Light in August (1932) a novel by William Faulkner

Imitation of Life (1933) a novel by Fannie Hurst

“Mulatto” a poem by Langston Hughes

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) a novel by Harper Lee

As we read the excerpted text from Clotel and then other, later works, think about how this figure comments on, critiques, or challenges the contemporary conceptualizations of race--and gender--in 19th century society.

Zora Neale Hurston: Genius of the South

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was perhaps one of the most prolific of the Harlem Renaissance writers, but she was also the most polarizing. To some of her contemporaries she was 'disconcerting'; to others, 'eccentric,' and even boastful and outrageous. As if a subtle critique, author Wallace Thurman cast her as  "Sweetie Mae Carr," an effete, egotistical would-be artiste in  Thurman's satiric novel, Infants of the Spring. To others, however, Hurston was a trail-blazer, an iconoclast, and later for Alice Walker, a 'spiritual mother.' 

No matter her reputation among Harlem Literati, she was one of the earliest African American female scholars to venture into post-Occupation Haiti to gather invaluable cultural material for her compilation, Tell My Horse. Later she would expose African American folklife to U.S. audiences in Mules and Men. Hurston was an intrepid and rigorous preserver and conveyer of Africana folklife and folk culture.

Born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-African American town, Hurston was the daughter of John and Lucy Hurston. Her parents and the folk of Eatonville made an indelible mark on the author. John Hurston, a preacher in the Sanctified Church and mayor of Eatonville, loomed large in her memory and became the basis for many of the male characters in her writing, principally of Hurston's semi-biographical novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine. Her mother, Lucy, was the first to tell Zora to "Jump at the sun...you may not reach it, but at least you'll get off the ground." Lucy Hurston's words and memory resonate throughout the pages of Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God."

Most notable in Hurston's novels and short stories like "Sweat," the townsfolk of Eatonville recur and assume shape as characters in themselves. "Porch talk," and "Mouth Almighty" become terms familiar to Hurston scholars to describe and dramatize the ways in which the community comments on individual lives and characters. Further, the townsfolk of Hurston's fictional renderings of her hometown explore the folk within an insular context in which blacks were free to be themselves and express their hearts, minds, loves and relationships liberally. Gates comments that "[i]n her view, the absence of whites not only kept Eatonville free of racism but also freed blacks to express themselves without reservation" (Gates 1019). This freedom revealed the true character of the folk, and Hurston's novels depicted the lives of these characters with honesty and compassion.

Always the iconoclast, Hurston's "How it Feels to be Colored Me" reveals the author's assertive--even brazen--character that some relished, and others deplored. The latter because of her apparent and unapologetic refusal to politicize her art. Even today, this essay resonates with some critics as complicit, even accommodationist. Even her ardent admirer Alice Walker was critical. In her compendium of Hurston's essays, Walker described the author of "Colored Me" as Hurston at her "most exasperating." Still, there are other readers of Hurston's work who see the author's effective resistance to racial discrimination. How shall we judge this essay? From a historicist view that observes Hurston within her social and historical context (of the Renaissance, as a southern transplant); or, from presentist perspective that views Hurston as a comparatively softer, less relevant voice of protest? Or must we view her art as having a protest role? Again we cannot help but find ourselves confronted with the potentially political role of art and the artist. 

Alice Walker discusses Hurston's portrayal of her people in Their Eyes Were Watching God: