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ARTICLES JAZZ AND THE NEW NEGRO: HARLEMS INTELLECTUALS WRESTLE WITH THE ART OF THE AGE ALWYN WILLIAMS Nobody questions the popularity of jazz in Harlem during the twenties. Images of black men in tuxedos jamming behind dancers, performing for whites with martini glasses filled with prohibition gin, saturate the popular imagination. The most famous Harlem Club from the era became the subject of a movie, and its two most revered performers, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, are household names. Jazz histories spend ample time detailing the club scene, the rent parties, and the famous musicians who gravitated towards Harlem in the twenties from all corners of America. Harlem was the by-word for an edgy, fun time for wealthy whites, where elaborate floor shows with primitivist themes could be found at the big clubs, and blues, jazz and inter-racial mixing at smaller venues. Harlem was a wild place in the twenties, and jazz was its theme song. The response of the black artistic and intellectual elite to the culture of nightclubs and rent parties was varied. The concern of the black middleclass to improve its lot in American society through assimilation involved a denial of some of the folk roots of Afro-American music. Because blues and jazz were associated with lewd conduct and a shady milieu by much of middle-class America, it was necessary for black Americans to disown those musical forms association with them would only perpetuate the idea prevalent among whites that blacks were lascivious and primitive. One folk art worth celebrating was the spiritual, loaded with dignity and religious yearning, and, just as importantly, growing popular with white Americans and Europeans. W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke celebrated the spiritual as an honourable part of Afro-American cultural heritage, but were more hesitant in ascribing merit to the music found in speakeasies. Their hopes for black American musical achievement lay with the vocals of Roland Hayes, Jules Bledsoe, Paul Robeson and Marion Anderson, and the compositions of R. Nathaniel Dett; the sound of a black American astonishing white audiences in Carnegie Hall and Vienna with technically proficient performances of famous arias and passionate renderings of spirituals, was music to their ears. Younger black writers in the twenties did pay more attention to jazz with Langston Hughes being the most impressive example. But such voices were few, and the study of the writings and publications of the so-called New Negro during the twenties indicates that although an ambition existed to

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advance the Race through artistic achievement, jazz music was largely ignored an irony, if ever there was one, given the status of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong today, compared to that of the literary and musical figures championed by the likes of Du Bois and Locke. As one historian, particularly critical of the literary productions of the Harlem Renaissance, put it: It is very ironic that a generation that was searching for a new Negro and his distinctive cultural expression would have passed up on the only really creative thing that was going on.1 Traditionally it has been accepted that the Harlem, or the Negro Renaissance, was the inspiration of an elite among blacks, centered around the journals The Crisis and The Opportunity.2 Both were primarily political in substance, but they discussed the arts, with a major focus on literature, an occasional enthusiasm for black achievement in theatre, and rare concentration on painting, sculpture and music. When they covered music, they discussed black attainments in the European concert hall tradition, and the performance of the Spiritual. Concentrating on the writers and intellectuals of Harlem in the twenties, the most significant histories on this period have considered the Renaissance to be very much an affair of words. Nathan Hugginss Harlem Renaissance (1971) and David Levering Lewiss When Harlem was in Vogue (1994), focus on Du Bois, Johnson, Locke, Faucet, Toomer, Cullen, Hurston, Thurman, Hughes, while spending little time on Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson, Waller, Bechet. Both Huggins and Lewis note the importance of the jazz of the era, and criticise the Renaissance leaders for ignoring it; but their understanding of the Renaissance is chiefly literary, and they are both critical of its attainments. Some scholars have questioned the idea that the Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary event. In the 1990 volume he edited, Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, Samuel A. Floyd asked provocatively if it was the organisation of African-American musicians of the nineteen-teens which inspired the achievements of the literary set in the twenties. The National Association of Negro Musicians was formed in 1919, featuring the Group of Four: Ford Dabney, James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and William Christopher Handy. Their purpose was to stimulate progress, to discover and foster talent, to mold taste, to promote fellowship, and to advocate racial expression.3 Floyd argued that there was no parallel for this organisation in either literature or the other arts. Could it be that Charles Johnson and Alain Locke took the NANM as a general model for their later and much more loosely-knit literary movement? Was it the example of music that gave initial impetus to the Renaissances artistic philosophy?4 Jon Michael Spencer in The New Negroes and Their Music (1997) went one step further than Floyd. He not only considered music an important part of the Renaissance, but, following in the theoretical footsteps of literary critic

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Houston A. Baker, Jnr., argued that the Renaissance was an overwhelming success because of it. Challenging the conventional assumption that the Renaissance finished with the onset of the Depression, Spencer argued that it continued well into the thirties and forties. The fruit of the Renaissance was the work of R. Nathaniel Dett and William Grant Still, whose compositions vindicated the Race through their use of folk material in complex orchestrated forms.5 This paper, through the analysis of the key publications of the Harlem Renaissance, will demonstrate that music was a concern of the leading twenties intellectuals. Histories of the movement that do not account for the leaders interest in music do not do justice to it. Du Bois, Locke and James Weldon Johnson all, at some time, wrote about music, and considered it an important art-form for African Americans to succeed in even if the larger focus of the movement was on non-musical arts.6 The paper will also demonstrate that when these intellectuals considered music their attitudes varied. European concert music was the apogee of musical endeavour for W.E.B. DuBois and R. Nathaniel Dett. Racial vindication would be obtained through disciplined study of concert music, and the transformation of the Spiritual from a basic folk form to that of a key ingredient in concert hall composition. Jazz, the blues, and other forms of black secular music had little to offer the advancement of African Americans. However, greater ambiguity can be found in the writings of Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke. Both shared DuBois great hope for the Spiritual as evidence of black artistry in the present, and as the crucial ingredient in African American concert-style music for the future. But Charles Johnson, albeit briefly, saw the potential of jazz as a distinctive and important American art form, even if he gave it little encouragement in his position as editor of The Opportunity. Alain Locke, as editor of The New Negro, made a profound statement by juxtaposing an essay on jazz by J.A. Rogers with his own paper on the spirituals, if ignoring it for the rest of the twenties.7 The study of these different and gifted men of the twenties therefore provides an array of opinion on the importance and future of jazz music that has not always been recognised. Kathy Ogren, for example, has claimed that there was a loose consensus among Harlems intellectuals on the matter of jazz, but the only real agreement between these men in the field of music was over the beauty of the spiritual.8 Jazz divided black intellectuals as it divided white intellectuals, as it divided ordinary Americans. While some chose to ignore jazz, others preferred to damn it, and those that liked it tended to do so with reservation, hoping that it might be elevated into a higher, more respectable form of music as performed by the King of Jazz of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman, who had stunned New Yorks music establishment with the 1924 performance of George Gershwins Rhapsody

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in Blue. In 1916, Alain Locke gave a series of five lectures at Howard University where he argued that biological definitions of race were flawed, and that race should be understood as a construction of culture, in a constant state of change. While not a fixed biological entity, it did exist, and positive use could be made of this. A group with an awareness of racial commonality could use race to its own advantage. In his fifth lecture of the series, Locke advocated his idea of culture-citizenship. Claiming that every society had a dominant culture or civilisation type that was imitated by subordinate groups hoping to assimilate, he claimed that mere social imitation was useless, for the reason that it involves antagonisms and reactions on the part of the dominant group.9 What was needed was a counter-doctrine to social assimilation. This was race consciousness, or race pride. This was the social equivalent to self-respect in the individual moral life. In the United States the civilisation type was white America. When a subordinate group like the race of black Americans attempted to assimilate by imitating characteristics of the civilisation type of white America, they met hostility and rejection; the dominant culture resented attempts by the subordinate group to transcend their station. Hence, it was necessary for the subordinate group to affirm their difference, their race, by promoting its cause collectively. Lockes suggestion was that this could be achieved through cultural contribution: when the subordinate group created art that became part of a common, national culture, then that subordinate group could be said to have obtained culture-citizenship, thereby transcending subordinate status. This belief that cultural attainment by black Americans would win social and economic equality was held by other senior black figures. In 1922 James Weldon Johnson declared in an introduction to a volume of AfricanAmerican verse: A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognised and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all people is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.10 Few, if any, did more to promote black attainments in art than Johnson. He edited two books on Negro Spirituals and one on Negro poetry, as well

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writing his own poetry, fiction, history and propaganda for the NAACP. This concern evinced in Johnsons life to align artistic endeavour with politics was typical of the New Negro movement. The Crisis and The Opportunity , journals of the civil rights organisations the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League respectively, demonstrated their concern for black artistic achievement with the promotion of annual literary competitions from 1925. The editor of The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois, argued that all art was propaganda: Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.11 Du Bois extreme attitude regarding the relationship between art and politics was not entirely shared by Alain Locke,12 but adequately expressed the prevailing mood among the intelligentsia in Harlem in the early and middle part of the twenties. Post-war American might still be determined to deny the Negro social, political and economic equality, but art was another matter. It was the chink in the racists armour. Music worth listening to, novels worth reading, poetry worth reciting, would prove to white America that black Americans were not inferior beings that deserved second-class status. And the times seemed to suggest that black cultural achievement was being recognised. Shuffle Along had taken Broadway by storm in 1921, European artists were openly declaring their indebtedness to African traditional art, and Darius Milhaud and Anton Dvorak were praising African-American folk music. Paul Robeson was coming to prominence through the work of Eugene ONeil, and Roland Hayes was establishing himself as a first-rate tenor. And, of course, while they were unwilling or unable to recognise it, jazz, a music that could not exist without its AfricanAmerican elements, was making a definitive contribution the era. With a posse of intellectuals determined to advance the race through art, and the resources of two journals at their disposal, it is interesting to note the type of art that was encouraged. Charles Johnson, the editor of the Urban Leagues Opportunity , announced in his September editorial of 1924 the initiation of annual literary prizes to be first awarded in May the following year. He argued that these prizes would encourage into existence a market for Negro writing and introduce Negro writers into the world of letters. He also advocated a type of writing by Negroes which shakes itself free of

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deliberate propaganda and protest.13 Conscious that his rival at The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois, had received a sum of money from Joel Spingarn to hold a similar serious of awards, Johnson moved first, prompting The Crisis to announce its own prizes in the same month.14 Earlier in the year Johnson had organised the famous Civic Club meeting where young Afro-American literary talent met white publishers, critics and editors and his journal had critiqued the presentation of Afro-Americans in Anglo-Saxon literature.15 But the contents of The Opportunity in 1923 and 1924 indicate that literature was not the only art of interest to Johnson. In the very first edition, January 1923, amid social criticism and sociology, were reviews of AfroAmerican art exhibitions in New York and Boston. The June edition carried the story of a young black sculptor refused entry to the School of Fine Arts in Paris on grounds of her race, and the August edition carried a discussion of African art.16 The March and April editions of 1924 carried stories on the role of Negroes in the production of sculpture and their representation within it.17 This enthusiasm for visual art and literature was carried over into subsequent years. Poetry and short fiction were regularly represented thanks to the success of the magazines literary prizes, and visual art was accorded second place in the aesthetic hierarchy of Charles Johnson. Alain Locke claimed in one 1925 article that painting, of all the arts, was the one most bound by social ideas18 pertinent, perhaps, in a magazine concentrating on social problems. The point of these features and articles was to both encourage and celebrate African American success in the arts, and to demonstrate the need for even greater achievement. Poetry, prose, sculpture, painting and drama were the more intellectual arts, and, therefore, the ones that would most convincingly demonstrate the equality and dignity of African Americans. In a 1924 article on black dialect in American literature, the author praised the performances of Paul Robeson and Charles Gilpin in Eugene ONeils plays which ought to have proved for all time that it is possible to have a Negro character appear as something other than a grotesque jumping jack.19 It took two years before The Opportunity discussed anything musical. The May 1925 editorial argued that jazz most perfectly expressed the American essence and that it was the product of the unlikely Negro. The writer, Charles Johnson, concluded: What an immense, even if unconscious irony the Negroes have devised! They, who of all Americans are most limited in self-expression, least considered and most denied, have forged the key to the interpretation of the American spirit.20 This seems an extraordinary statement in the context of African-American writing in the nineteen twenties, and one that we will return to. It is extraordinary because not only

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did jazz receive little mention in the writing of Harlems intellectuals, but when it did it was often derogatory; the statement is also remarkable because, when they discussed music at all, Harlems intelligentsia preferred to praise either the return of the spirituals or the highlights of the concert hall. The remainder of Charles Johnsons time as editor of The Opportunity (he left in 1928) reflected the more conventional New Negro tastes. Arthur Schomburgs November 1926 piece on West Indian composers and musicians celebrated the achievements of black musicians in the European tradition. After praising the essential musical attributes of the Negro, Schomburg launched into a detailed discussion of West Indian and North American blacks who had adapted to the demands of the European musical tradition. European education was emphasised and Schomburg stressed the respect these musicians earned from whites, not only because of their musical gifts, but because of their decorum: Brandis won more sympathy on account of his friendship rather than his violin bow; by his pleasantness he was not as it were looked upon as a Negro... he dressed with immaculate neatness.21 The November 1925 edition was almost entirely dedicated to the discussion of the spirituals and the books recently written about them. Alain Locke praised the technical discussion of the spirituals, the appearance of articles about them in mainstream publications, and the concert recitals of these songs. For Locke, the introduction of the spirituals to the wider appreciation and understanding of the amateur was a dignified and urbane mission.22 This black middle-class concern for propriety and identification with highart was ultimately shared by Charles Johnson, whatever he might have said about jazz in 1925. On 22 March, 1928, The Opportunity held a broadcasting hour over radio station WABC, from Steinway Hall. Aaron Douglas read a paper on the Negro artist, three poets recited, and a lecture was given on African art. There was also a musical component: Mrs Ernestine Covington played Nocturne , E Sharp Major by Chopin and Humoresque by Rachmaninoff; and Mrs Lydon Caldwell sang Die Lotus Blume and Widmung by Schumann and Burleighs arrangements of Where Were You and Go Down Moses. The master of ceremonies was Charles S. Johnson, who had asked in an editorial three years earlier, whether blacks, in creating jazz, may have forged the key to the American spirit. The Crisis under W.E.B. Du Bois demonstrated no similar inconsistency. Jazz did not rate a mention in The Crisis in the 1920s, and the magazine tended to pay much less attention to the arts in general than The Opportunity. It published plenty of poetry and fiction among political and social features, but it rarely wandered into the realms of music and the

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visual arts. When it did, it tended to be even more dedicated to European tradition than its rival. Despite Du Boiss reputation as a champion of the spiritual, The Crisis consistently preferred to discuss black classical musicians such as George Polgren Bridgetower, a violinist and mulatto friend of Beethoven.23 DuBoiss discomfort with the jungle motif in literature and music and the art of Aaron Douglas, is reflected in the choice of painters discussed in The Crisis, like Juan de Paraja, a black slave of Velasquez, whose work The Calling of Matthew, hangs in the Prado.24 The concern was to demonstrate the presence of blacks in the creation of Europes high art, thereby encouraging race pride and the desire to emulate these achievements. Du Bois clearly articulated his attitude towards the sort of music black Americans should be concerned with in a 1921 editorial. We have good authority for stating that sixty-five percent of the phonograph records made for the Southern trade by a well-known company are sold to colored people he declared. Nevertheless, this company employs only one colored artist regularly and only occasionally a colored orchestra or quartet. All these musicians are confined strictly to a certain class of music and on no account are they allowed to attempt anything else, no matter what their gifts or ability. The certain class of music was blues, and a black girl (Mamie Smith) had signed a two year contract with this company because of her huge success. Du Bois made plain his dissatisfaction. Other companies were looking for more black blues singers but they made it particularly plain that no other need apply. Artists like Roland Hayes had been rejected by the phonograph companies; one of them had suggested he perform comic darky songs but nothing else. Concluding that the solution was a blackowned record company DuBois proudly announced: we are pleased to hear that such a company is now forming with adequate capital and skilled management of guaranteed integrity.25 The company was Black Swan Records and the integrity of the skilled management, no doubt, was ensured by the presence of Du Bois on the board of directors. However, his hopes for Black Swan Records were not realised. The larger black market was not in accord with his vision of a respectable black record company recording respectable black artists. Harry Pace, who founded the company in partnership with W.C Handy, told the National Negro Business League: it behooves some of us to undertake the job of elevating the musical taste of the race. We have issued 12 records, six of them standard high-class numbers, three of the popular type and three blues. We have had to give the people what they wanted in order to get them to buy what we wanted them to want.... our sales have naturally been larger for the last two types of records.26 Advertisements for the company read: Coloured people dont want classic music! So our dealers write us. Give

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em blues and jazz. Thats all we can sell. We believe the dealer is wrong. But unless we furnish him with what he has demand for, he will not handle our goods. If you the person reading this advertisement earnestly want to do something for Negro music, go to your record dealer and ask for the better class of records by colored artists. If there is a demand he will keep them.27 The company refused to record Bessie Smith on grounds that she was too coarse, failed, and in 1923 was sold to Paramount. The socialist organ, The Messenger, with a smaller readership than the two civil rights journals,28 promoted art energetically, with an emphasis on theatre. In its first edition, November 1917, drama critic Lovett FortWhiteman demanded the work of black playwrights be performed in Harlems theatres. White-owned theatres like the Lafayette should present plays that were in accord with the desires of the Harlem community. We, of the New Negro, demand that if the white man comes into our communities to make a living, he must not altogether be on the taking side.29 The Messengers irregular appearance over the next few years due to financial difficulties and political opposition (it was banned by the Postmaster General in 1919) is reflected in the limited content given to the arts over this time, but theatre still received attention with space also given to book reviews and poetry. Always an iconoclastic publication, T h e Messenger was not afraid to attack cultural stars such as Charles Gilpin and Bert Williams, figures who could usually expect favourable treatment from Harlem journals simply on account of their race. Whereas The Opportunity lauded Gilpins performances for demonstrating the dignity a black actor could bring to the stage, The Messenger pilloried him for choosing not to dine with other invited guests at the New York Drama Leagues annual banquet. Gilpin, concerned about embarrassing whites at the dinner with his presence, told the New York World that he intended to just drop in instead of dining, not wishing to force an association. In the mind of T h e Messenger, the clay eating crackers of the mob-ridden South must, upon hearing this, have burnt incense to the honor of this new Moses of the Negro preaching and practising the doctrine of Negro inferiority.... He should refuse to drop in on dinners, if he is not invited to remain as a guest, a man; and when he is invited to dinners of the Drama League or any other league, he ought to accept unqualifiedly.30 The Messengers quirky mixture of dialectical socialism and knee-jerk iconoclasm meant that it often positioned itself in opposition to the tastes and opinions of its better funded rivals. The revolutionary zeal of Asa Randolph was reflected in the magazines sub-title The Only Magazine of Scientific Radicalism in the World Published by Negroes, but in 1924 The Messenger was re-subtitled The Worlds Greatest Negro Monthly, signalling a toning down of the magazines more radical editorial line. None

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of the magazines other editors Chandler Owen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurmann were as doctrinaire as Randolph in their socialism (if they were socialists at all), so the content of the journal gradually became more mainstream, sometimes reading, in the words of David Levering Lewis, more like sleek, snobbish Vanity Fair than a protest periodical.31 In an attempt to keep pace with The Crisis and The Opportunity , The Messenger began to include fiction in 1924, also the year when artistic content reached a high for the magazine. Theatre remained the preferred art form, with regular notices, reviews and analyses of the Negro stage by critics Theophilus Lewis and Lovett Fort-Whiteman. This devotion to the theatre set the artistic content of The Messenger apart from the fiction/poetry focus of The Crisis and The Opportunity, but the concern that Afro-American success in the theatre should advance the race reflected the same concern with racial-vindication-through-art that motivated the literary competitions of the NAACP and Urban League.32 In the realm of music, however, The Messenger diverged in approach to its rivals. Like them it paid little attention to music, but when it did address it, The Messenger showed a more varied viewpoint on just what forms of music were worth discussing. Articles on respected New Negro musicians like Roland Hayes and Samuel Coleridge Taylor were juxtaposed with ones on jazz and blues. Musical coverage was scarce, but its diversity of interest illustrates the fact that there were perspectives among the black intelligentsia that differed from that of DuBois and Harry Pace. Whereas Black Swan records failed because of its unwillingness to accept the musical appetites of the larger black community its attempt to educate the market on what it should consume reflecting an intellectual and socio-economic position that rejected the blues and jazz as shameful and degenerate, other Harlem Renaissance thinkers found something in these musical forms worthy of investigation. It was apparent to anyone alive in the twenties that jazz music was a major cultural force, and as a result, some black intellectuals chose to engage with it rather than pretend it did not exist. The first time The Messenger applied its critical talents to music was when Asa Philip Randolph reviewed the art of Roland Hayes in January 1924 in an article that could just as easily have appeared in The Crisis or T h e Opportunity . Discussing the tenors performance in New York a month earlier Randolph emphasised the poise of the artist. Noting that the mixedrace audience applauded him until the final curtain fell, Randolph praised the singer for bearing these well-merited honors with a dignity and grace which was as compelling as his pure lyric voice was enrapturing, thrilling, gripping.33 Hayes was the perfect performer for the Renaissance

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intellectuals because he performed to universal acclaim in a highbrow cultural setting, thereby demonstrating that African-Americans could transcend their primitive folk arts.34 In the case of singing, according to Randolph, Negroes were thought by their friendly enemies to possess only natural voices, devoid of the qualities necessary to their lending themselves to rigorous technique, requisite in handling such a brilliantly classical program as Roland Hayes. Hence, thanks to the achievement of Hayes, another race myth was exploded. Yes, Negroes have natural vocal timbre; but it can be trained too.35 Could such racial vindication be achieved through the performances of blues singers like Bessie Smith or the New York jazz of Fletcher Henderson? Few black intellectuals in 1924 said yes, so The Messenger found a white man who did. A month after Randolphs celebration of Roland Hayes, W. Astor Morgan wrote that the blues were a distinct contribution to musical art. Real blues music has quality, dignity and beauty which carry a purpose. Morgan noted that the music had been reviled because it was black; he recognised that some detested it because it was bawdy; but he argued that crudity was to be expected in the creations of the uneducated and that its blackness had not prevented it from overpowering American song writers of all shades. Morgan warned those who think we shall always prize the music of Beethoven, Handel, Verdi and the like as the highest and best...wake up. Music, like other things, is progressive. But Morgan was not arguing blues for blues sake at least not in the sense that the blues he was praising should be celebrated as art in its highest, final stage: Morgan, like a number of white critics of the 20s who saw jazz as a source for higher composition, believed blues had a destiny: Blues music is yet undeveloped, but time will prove that it is more capable of great works, such as song classics, sonatas, operas and symphonies, than many other crude works. If three or four men, without thought or pause, improvise pleasingly upon such a theme, what could an educated composer do with it?36 The pages of The Messenger demonstrate the point that when black publications showed sympathy to jazz they portrayed it as a half-formed art waiting for a real genius to transform it into something truly great. A January 1925 review of Sammy Stewarts orchestra referred to jazz as queer and intriguing and praised Stewarts group for equalling Paul Whiteman in taking the rough edges off it;37 Wallace Thurman praised Gilbert Seldes for suggesting jazz was not music, but an American form of playing music (anything can be done with a form);38 and Clarence White

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wrote warmly of the book So This is Jazz by Henry O. Osgood. Emphasising Osgoods musical credentials (former conductor of the Munich Royal Opera and an editor of Musical Courier) readers were told that if they were open-minded they should be grateful for the publication of such a work which would wipe out prejudices against jazz.39 The New Negro, an augmented form of the Survey Graphic of March 1925, was meant to contain the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance.40 In the foreword, its editor Alain Locke claimed that ninety percent of literature on the Negro was about the Negro rather than of him, with the consequence being that it was the Negro problem rather than the Negro that was generally known. So the solution was the presentation of this collection where so far as he was culturally literate, the Negro would speak for himself.41 If The New Negro is the definitive text or Bible of the African-American cultural movement of the twenties,42 then it could be said to fairly encapsulate the values of this movement in relation to the hierarchy of the arts, the importance of music, and the place of jazz. The volume has two sections, one, The Negro Renaissance, concerned with the discussion of the arts produced by black Americans, including eight selections of fiction, a one-act play, an assortment of poems from ten poets, and essays on literature, music and the visual arts; the second section, The New Negro in the New World, contains a series of essays on the place of those with African ancestry in the Americas. The significant part of the first section is the poetry and fiction of the young writers of the Renaissance, many of whom were already known to readers of The Opportunity, The Crisis, and The Messenger. It is apparent that Locke considered these young artists the first fruit and the ones most importantly in need of exposure. The New Negro was dedicated to The Younger Generation and the fourth essay in the book, written by Locke, was called Negro Youth Speaks. Here Locke celebrated the fact that a galaxy of young poets had stopped speaking for the Negro now they spoke as Negroes.43 He named these poets as well as three short story writers, and four musicians Carl Diton, R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, and Roland Hayes as the youngest generation of our Afro-American culture.44 The musicians he named three composers and one tenor all worked in the realm of the conservatory trained, but their presence in Lockes assembly of AfroAmerican youth indicates the importance this Renaissance figure placed on music. In 1936, Locke published a volume on black music45 and in 1925 he hinted at a belief that achievements had been made in music that might provide a lead in literature. Noting the need to be racial purely for the sake of art, he advocated the creation of something technically distinctive from

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the racial substance. Urging writers to follow the lead of J.W. Johnson who, rather than writing dialect poetry per se, chose to transpose the dialect motive and carry it through in the idioms of imagery rather than the broken phonetics of speech, Locke stated that in music such transfusions of racial idioms with the modernistic styles of expression had already taken place.46 Just what music Locke was referring to here is not easy to say, but it wasnt until his 1936 work, The Negro and His Music, that he was to go on record praising jazz. The answer probably lies with the compositions of Burleigh, Dett, Still and Diton, who were engaged in bringing the sounds of black folk music, especially those of the spirituals, into the concert auditorium. Nonetheless, Locke was prepared to give the discussion of jazz space in this volume, with the essay Jazz at Home by journalist J.A. Rogers and the poems of Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Langston Hughes. The only other writing on music in The New Negro was a poem by Claude McKay and an essay by Locke himself on the spirituals. Juxtaposing an essay on the spirituals with poems and prose on jazz in a section on black music was dramatic for its time, and readers of The New Negro would have been aware of that. W.C Handys use of spirituals alongside jazz and blues a year earlier had earned the wrath of musically and socially conservative critic of The New York Age, Lucien White, who railed: any mixing of Negro spirituals and jazz approaches perilously near to sacrilege. It is a far-fetched imagination to connect the two, since the Spiritual is the product of a primitive soul untouched by civilisation and its demoralising influences, while the Blues is its antithesis in every aspect.47 The presence of jazz material in the seminal volume of the Harlem Renaissance indicates that its existence was not universally despised by the African-American elite, but when it was recognised as music of value, there were qualifications. J.A. Rogerss essay, Jazz at Home, is an example of this. Rogers was a journalist whose byline appeared in both The Messenger and The New York Amsterdam News, the biggest circulation black newspaper in New York. We have seen that The Messenger was prepared to discuss jazz and the blues with a condescending sympathy. The Amsterdam News, on the other hand, took a more hostile line. Unlike its rival, The Age, which tended to ignore jazz, only occasionally bothering to disparage it, The Amsterdam News recognised its existence and even wrote about some of its stars, but it provided ample space to jazzs critics in opinion pieces. An example was the work of an anonymous columnist known only as the Camera Man who wrote a piece speculating on the roots of jazz. The column began reasonably enough, discussing jazzs antecedents and development musically, but the last paragraph dramatically concluded:

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Jazz is a razz of aborted syncopation and instrumentation. It is probably here to stay, in order to appease the exotic period which recreation seems to demand nowadays. It is the chop-suey of the musical world but the world seems to want more and more of it, sad though that fact be; and it is a blessing that Schumann, Mozart and Mendelssohn are not present to hear it, for they would think, indeed, that they had lived in vain.48 The Amsterdam News was as hostile to jazz in its editorialising as The New York Times, and even followed The Times lead in the inclusion of one of its critics, Dr. E. Elliot Rawlins. Rawlins was convinced that jazz music had deleterious physical effects like most drugs, and excessive use was to be avoided. He appeared in the New York Times in 1922 and turned up in The Amsterdam News three years later arguing that jazz attacked the brain, overstimulating, confusing and finally paralysing its thinking and reasoning centre: Jazz is killing some people; some are going insane; others are losing their religion. The young girls and boys, who constantly take jazz every day and night, are becoming absolutely bad, and some criminals. Jazz.... should not be used by the very young, or in copious amounts by the old. Jazz, like any other drug, should be used only when needed, in a specific dose, and by those who know how it should be used. A little jazz is all right and proper; an overdose is harmful.49 Its from such a background that we must take Rogers essay, for along with Charles Johnsons remark about Negroes forging the key to the interpretation of the American spirit,50 it is strikingly out-of-step with most twenties African-American thought. Rogers began his essay identifying the universal appeal of jazz while claiming its strong black racial identity. While jazz was too fundamentally human to be typically racial, and too international to be characteristically national, it was one part American and three parts American Negro, originally the nobodys child of the levee and the city slum. Although a music that had swept the worlds capitals, jazz was really at home in its humble native soil wherever the modern unsophisticated Negro feels happy and sings and dances to his mood. The music was an epidemic that spread as swiftly as the measles, but somebody

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had to have it first: that was the Negro.51 Echoing Dr Elliot Rawlings suggestion that jazz was a drug, Rogers claimed the musics popularity was due to the release it provided from machine-ridden and convention-bound society. It was a balm for modern ennui, a revolt of the emotions against repression;52 jazz would remain a recreation for the industrious and a dissipator of energy for the frivolous, a tonic for the strong and a poison for the weak.53 Rogers reasoning was rusty at times one gets the impression he didnt plan the essay and consider the coherence of his arguments, rather he chose to write a series of impressions and opinions about jazz in general. For example, he told the reader that jazz had always existed in its elementals. By this, he meant that jazz was in the folk dances of the American Indians, the Scots, the Irish, Cossacks, Brazilians, Pacific Islanders and others. It was also in ragtime. But then, contradicting this suggestion that jazz is a universal quality of all folk music, Rogers tells us that its direct predecessor is ragtime, and that both are atavistically African: In its barbaric rhythm and exuberance there is something of the bamboula, a wild, abandoned dance of the West African and Haytian Negro.54 Even more confusingly he then wrote that jazz time was more complex than African music a statement that insults the polyrhythmic nature of African music given that Rogers had already described jazzs rhythm as monotonous.55 Rogers account of the origins of jazz is equally bizarre, although it is sufficient for our purposes here to note Rogers decision to accord jazz as much respect as the spirituals: [Jazz] is his [the Negros] spiritual picture on that lighter comedy side, just as the spirituals are the picture on the tragedy side. The two are poles apart, but the former is by no means to be despised and it is just as characteristically the product of the peculiar and unique experience of the Negro in this country.56 Like the white critics who supported jazz, Rogers believed that an elevated form of the music was to be most admired. He listed a number of white and black bands where none of the vulgarities and crudities of jazzs lowly origin were to be found and noted that the artistic development of jazz had been done initially by Negro artists, but that difficulties of financial backing led to the white orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Vincent Lopez taking the lead.57 Rogers concluded his essay by stating that jazz had come to stay, and that those were wise who, instead of protesting against it, tried to lift and divert it into nobler channels.58

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The hopes of the prominent intellectuals of the New Negro movement for black cultural success lay with poetry, prose, sculpture, painting, the spiritual and the musical discipline of the concert hall. These men clearly struggled with jazz and were divided in their opinions of it. If the great art of the era was the music created by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, then Du Bois, Locke, Johnson and Rogers appear foolish for promoting a race-based renaissance without their Michelangelo and da Vinci. But they shouldnt be judged too harshly. Locke, Rogers, and Johnson, and the muddled editors of the Messenger, recognised that jazz was hot, and they knew it was a black creation with potential. In its raw, bluesy form, with those coarse tones, loose morals and vibrant rhythms, jazz didnt seem compatible with the New Negro image of a dignified, sophisticated artist, proud of black ancestry and accepted by white America. But this was not an entirely negative view jazz simply needed polish and a smart suit to make it an accepted part of the movement.

ENDNOTES
1 2

N. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, Oxford University Press, New York, 1971, p. 11. For example David Levering Lewis: The Harlem Renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations.. D.L. Lewis ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Viking, New York, 1994, p. xv. 3 M.C. Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music, New York, Da Capo Press, 1974 [1936] p. 242, quoted in S.A. Floyd Jnr., ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwood, New York, Westport, Connecticut, London, 1990. 4 Ibid., p. 14. 5 J.M. Spencer, The New Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem Renaissance, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1997. 6 Consider the reflections of James Weldon Johnsons narrator in Autobiography of an ExColored Man: This generally accepted literary ideal of the American Negro constitutes what is really an obstacle in the way of the thoughtful and progressive element of the race. His character has been established as a happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking being, and the reading public has not yet been prevailed upon to take him seriously. His efforts to elevate himself socially are looked upon as a sort of absurd caricature of white civilization. A novel dealing with colored people who lived in respectable homes and amidst a fair degree of culture and who naturally acted just like white folks would be taken in a great comic opera sense. In this respect the Negro is much in the position of the great comedian who gives up the higher roles to play tragedy. No matter how well he may portray the deeper passions, the public is loath to give him up in his old character......... However, this very fact constitutes the opportunity of the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown, in depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles and the passions of those of their race who are striving to break the narrow limits of traditions. James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1995, [1912], p. 79.

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The recent publications of Spencer, New Negroes and Their Music and Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2001, have dated the Renaissance as lasting well into the early forties. Subsequently, when writing of the Renaissance, they have used as sources pro-jazz texts written in the nineteen thirties and forties, most notably Alain Lockes important The Negro and His Music, published in 1936. I dont consider Lockes work of the thirties relevant to an analysis of twenties Afro-American thought on jazz and culture. As I will show, the Locke of the twenties behaved much like most African American intellectuals of the era, evincing an ambiguous attitude towards jazz: he largely ignored it, celebrating other arts and other music (especially the Spiritual), while still demonstrating nervous curiosity. Perhaps the worst example of anachronistic writing on Lockes work in the thirties comes from Kathy Ogren, in her volume The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1989, where, despite the fact her book is about popular responses to jazz in twenties America, Lockes 1936 book is juxtaposed with the 1925 New Negro essay of J.A. Rogers as evidence of unified black thought on jazz, without any indication in her text that ten years separate the works. See Ogren, Jazz Revolution, pp. 24-5. 8 ,Ibid., p. 125. 9 A. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, Howard University Press, Washington, D.C., 1992. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. Ch. 5. Racial Progress and Race Adjustment. 10 J.W. Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1958 [1922], p. 9. 11 The Crisis, October 1926, p. 296. 12 See Alain Locke, Art or Propaganda? Harlem, 1 November 1928, p. 12. 13 An Opportunity for Negro Writers, Opportunity, 2, no. 21, September 1924, p. 258; see D.L. Lewiss suggestion that Johnson had no interest in art for arts sake, When Harlem Was In Vogue, p. 97. 14 The Amy Spingarn Literary Prizes, The Crisis, 28 September 1924, p. 199; see D.L. Lewis for the effect Johnsons awards declaration had on Dubois and Joel Spingarn. When Harlem Was in Vogue, p. 97. 15 The Opportunity. For commentary on the Civic Club Meeting see the May edition. For the article on black representation in Anglo-Saxon literature see June 1924, pp. 168-171. 16 Ibid., January 1923, p. 16; June 1923, p. 25; August 1923, p. 240. 17 Ibid., March 1924, pp. 81-2; April 1924, pp. 115-6. 18 Ibid., May 1925, pp. 155-6. 19 Ibid., November 1924, pp. 327-9. 20 Ibid., May 1925, pp. 132-3. 21 Ibid., November 1926, pp. 353-5, 363. 22 Ibid., November 1925, pp. 331-2. 23 The Crisis, Vol. 34, No. 4, June 1927, pp. 122 and 137. 24 Ibid., Vol. 34, No.1, July 1927, p. 153. 25 Ibid., Vol. 21, No. 4, February 1921, p. 152. 26 Minutes if the National Negro Business League, XXII, 1921, p. 66. 27 The Messenger, February 1923, p. 606 28 George S. Schuyler claimed The Messengers circulation was about 5,000 monthly compared to the figures of 11,000 copies per month for The Opportunity and 60,000 for The Crisis given by David Levering Lewis. George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative, Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1966, p. 135; Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, p. 199. 29 The Messenger, November 1917, p. 30. For the record, Gilpin eventually accepted the invitation. See James Weldon Johnsons discussion of the event in Black Manhattan, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930, pp. 184-5.

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30

Ibid., March 1921, pp. 203-4; for The Messengers critique of Bert Williams: March 1921, pp. 203-4. 31 Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, p. 109. 32 Although its commitment to the theatre ahead of the other arts was already apparent, The Messenger informed its readers at the end of a Theophilus Lewis notice in December 1923 that since the magazine was beginning to specialize in the theatrical field it would be glad to receive contributions from people in the trade. p. 924. The Messenger also ran pieces that would be considered appropriate for the arts pages of The Crisis. See, for example, J.A.Rogers Alexandre Dumas The Immortal, June, 1927, pp. 185-6 and Arthur A. Schomburg, Fragmentary Tribute to the Spanish Negro Painters of the School of Sevilla: Juan de Paraja, Sebastian Gomez, July, 1925, pp. 249-51. 33 The Messenger, January 1924, p. 21. 34 Paul Robeson was also receiving the popular and critical acclaim in the 1920s that delighted black intellectuals. See the following stories in The New York Times as examples: Hayes, Negro Tenor, Delights a Throng: Sings Old Songs of His People and German and French at His First Recital Here, 2 December. 1923, I, Part 2, 8:3; Tenor Sings Adieu: Huge Audience Calls Back Negro Artist for Encores, 6 February 1924, 16:1; Roland Hayes Warmly Welcomed on Return: Negro Tenor Sings Spirituals and Songs of Griffes With Electrifying Emotional Power, 20 November 1926, 21:2; Roland Hayes Sings to Vast Audience: Negro Tenor, Opening Fifth American Tour, Charms in a Varied Program Including Spirituals, 16 November 1928, 28:2; Vienna Likes Spirituals: Paul Robeson Gets Great Reception at First Concert There, 17 April 1929, 5:2; 1,000 Fail to Hear Robeson: Carnegie Hall Crowded Baritones Audience Demands Many Encores, 11 November 1929, 21:2; Roland Hayes, Tenor, Delights a Throng: Carnegie Hall Audience Hears Him in Meticulous Refinement of Style, 14 November 1929, 24:5 35 The Messenger, January 1924, p. 21. 36 Ibid., February 1924, p. 59. 37 Ibid., January 1925, pp. 44-5. 38 Ibid., July 1926, p. 216. 39 Ibid., January 1927, p. 26. 40 Alain Locke, Foreword, The New Negro, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997, [1925], p. xxvii. 41 Ibid., p. xxv. 42 Arnold Rampersads 1992 introduction to The New Negro, p. xi. 43 Alain Locke, Negro Youth Speaks, The New Negro, pp. 48-9. 44 Ibid., p. 49. 45 Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music, Washington, D.C., Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. 46 Ibid., 47 Lucien White, Decrying the Use of Spirituals as Companion Pieces to Blues and Jazz, The New York Age, 29 November 1924, p. 6. 48 The Amsterdam News, 13 October 1926, p. 11. 49 The Amsterdam News, 1 April 1925, p. 16; The New York Times, 12 February 1922, p. 1. 50 Ibid.,page 8; The Opportunity, May 1925, pp. 132-3. 51 J.A. Rogers, Jazz at Home, The New Negro, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992 [1925], p. 216. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., p. 223. 54 Ibid., p. 217. 55 Ibid., p. 218. 56 Ibid., p. 220. 57 Ibid., pp. 221-2. 58 Ibid., p. 224.