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How Music Means
Laying Bare the Social Roots of Music

Seated at a glossy-black grand piano on stage at the Philadelphia Clef Club, Guthrie Ramsey leans over the keys and hunches his shoulders around the high notes he plays in the opening movement of a jazz piece. Ramsey, an assistant professor of music at Penn, is performing with the jazz ensemble J-Mood, which is made up of members from the campus community. The mellow and slightly melancholy tune he taps out is soon joined by vocalist Audrey Smith Bey, an administrative assistant at Penn. Their smooth, down-hill rolling stream of jazz notes later converges with the sudden, irregularly timed rhymes and alliterated jolts of rap vocalist Aaron Jones, C'99. The audience appreciates the unexpected pleasures of the musical experiment.

"I do more scholarship these days than performing," laments Ramsey. "A scholar's life is very demanding, but I'm fighting my way back because performing is important to me--at one point in my life it meant everything."

Guthrie Ramsey photoA young scholar, Ramsey is an historical musicologist who's just completed his first year as a Penn faculty member. He specializes in African American music and is currently putting the finishing touches on his first book, Race Music: Post-World War II Black Musical Style from Bebop to Hip-Hop, which is excerpted here. The music that pulses in his blood is the inheritance from a family that regularly played and danced and sang at almost every gathering. His father, a self-schooled pianist, taught him his first chords. One of his elderly aunts tells the story of having grown up during the depression in the "black belt" of Chicago's Southside. They were so poor the only furniture they had were crates--and a piano. In the book, he writes in warm tones of how the music that pervaded his childhood shaped his scholarly perspectives.

On designated weekends, the brothers and sisters of Ramsey's father, along with their children, would crowd into the Ramsey home. A steady musical tumult of jump blues, rhythm and blues, soul, and jazz charged gatherings with an air of celebration that required family members to turn up the volume of conversation a couple notches. Although jazz was particularly loved by his father's immediate family, "suave jazz aficionados, Motown-minded teenagers, blues stompers, and weekend gospel rockers partied cheek to jowl to these various styles," he writes. The three Ramsey sisters greeted every relative with a "Hey, baaaaa-by!" and a kiss on the mouth; the more reserved brothers became comfortable by increments as the music--and the drinking--picked up. Once the recorded music got to cooking, someone would rush to the kitchen for a set of spoons. All four brothers could play, but Ramsey's father, Guthrie, Sr., was the acknowledged "spoon virtuoso."

text calloutIn the Ramsey household, the word "party" was a verb--and not a passive one. "And then the show would begin," exults Ramsey in his book. "Heeeey now! Hand-clapping, foot-patting, finger-snapping, neck-popping, shoulder-shrugging, hip-rolling, pah-tee-iin! . . . . A kitchen full of food and drink, rise-n-fly bid whist, poker, loud music, jivin' and signifyin', laughing, and dancing completed the agenda. Whenever this scene and its beloved cast of familiar characters shuttled through our front door, my chest would fill with a breath-gripping anticipation. We knew we were going to have a ball."

Besides his family, the music of neighborhood churches and participation in their choirs played an important part in Ramsey's musical formation. "My first musical memory is of Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago," he recalls. "I think I was about four years old. I remember Arbry, the pianist, and how his volcanic baritone voice sounded, and some of the names of the tunes he played. I remember the emotional intensity, and it has just stayed with me." After Arbry's "gale-force rendition" of various hymns that took the swaying and amen-saying congregation to the mountain top, the Ramseys went home to "the jams" of Daddy-O-Daylie's Sunday afternoon jazz party and other jazz, blues, and soul musical programs on the hi-fi.

As he became more skilled at the piano, Ramsey's devotion to performing turned his youth into a "never-ending rehearsal." He developed a keen interest in modern jazz, attending all-night jam sessions in Southside Chicago clubs, where he was not old enough to be admitted, and playing frequent gigs on the "chitterlin' circuit." At his first gig, the band's drummer had an argument with his girlfriend, who drove off in a huff with the drums in the back seat. "Welcome to the jazz life," he writes of the experience.

As a scholar, Ramsey uses a multidisciplinary approach that fuses musical analysis, anthropology, history, literary criticism, cultural studies, and social science to explore a number of musical genres. "I essentially try to answer the questions, Why are these people listening to this music at this time? What are some of the ways this music generated meaing for those audiences?"

Much of the research that has been done on African American music has tended to stress its origin in west and central African societies, he explains. The slave trade brought masses of black people to the New World, and scholars have traced how this African legacy has informed American styles of music. Ramsey explores the "ethnographic truth of musical meaning" by investigating, mainly through oral histories, what the music that emerged after World War II meant to ordinary listeners rather than to critics and scholars. "One of the things I've learned," he notes, "is that what researchers call an 'Africanism,' audience members think of as a Southernism."

One of the "grand narratives" of twentieth-century African American cultural history is the migration of blacks from the deep South in search of better jobs in the urban centers of the North. The maternal side of Ramsey's family migrated to Chicago in the late 40s, and his father's family was part of an earlier migration that came north during the First World War. "A lot of the music I heard growing up and a lot of the musical culture in which I was socialized was a negotiation between these settled urban people, who had been in the city for a long time, and these newly arrived migrants." In fact, musical taste was one of the markers of how deeply an individual had been socialized into big city life. Being a jazz aficionado, for instance, was a sign of one's urbanized sophistication. But a lot of musicians who came up from the South brought their own musical styles, and the music that evolved was a negotiation between northern and southern sensibilities.

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One tune Ramsey dissects is It's Just the Blues, which was recorded in 1946. The singer mixes a "blues scream"--traditional southern declamations like "Yeeowh!" and "Hey, now!"--with a contemporary-sounding, "very controlled, push-in-the-back-of-the-throat croon." There is also an electric guitar jazz solo, which would have sounded very modern to listeners, together with a rhythm guitar that strummed along, sounding backwards looking, Ramsey points out.

With this and other musical analyses, Ramsey then looks at what his "informants" are telling him about trying to make it in their new urban terrain. They talk about their old ways of doing things in the South--the food, music, clothes, jobs--all in the context of how they're trying to adjust to this new situation. The oral history interviews help Ramsey understand what he calls the "intergenerational process of ethnicity" or how African American identity gets passed along from generation to generation, and what role music played. Music is one of the "sites" where that process gets worked out, he asserts. "No one experiences music objectively, outside one's history, outside a particular experience."

It's Just the Blues was recorded in Chicago by Mercury Records. "They were targeting a particular kind of person with these tunes," he says, "and I bounce that off the experiences of these migrants, and I come up with this idea that there are code fusions in this music. The music itself is trying to negotiate the divides. A lot of this music was performed by black people for black people, and this music was a very important social practice and was doing some important cultural work for these black citizens. They moved to this music; they danced to this music; they partied to this music; they made love to this music; they sophisticated themselves to this music."

African American identity is not some essence that was carried across the Atlantic on slave ships and passed down to succeeding generations, Ramsey argues. It's not some homogeneous selfhood captured in the music, but a variegated and ceaselessly shifting social creation. "Meaning doesn't reside in the music; meaning is a social negotiation that occurs among members of the audience," he says. In Race Music, Ramsey calls this "blackness as practice or blackness as a dynamic process of cultural and ideological shape shifting."

The "informants" he interrogated for his research were mostly members of his family. The oral history interviews started with a 101 year-old great aunt and worked down to the present generation of Ramseys. The idea of using his own family as a source of "data" for a research project, derived from an effort to work out a "theoretical" position based on his "empirical" experiences. In graduate school, the study of black music is circumscribed by boundaries that separate "popular" music from "art." Jazz, for instance, is construed as music for concert hall listening and appreciation, but not for dancing. The conventions of musicology as an academic discipline ignore important features of jazz's social history--not to mention Ramsey's experience. That experience, he writes, provided a "healthy skepticism" that helped shape his graduate training. "My personal experiences bore witness . . . that boundaries, territories, and categories tell only part of the story of 'meaning.'"

As he was finishing up his dissertation, his father died. Ramsey returned to the family and the Chicago social setting that had nurtured his love of the black musical styles that are his specialty. After a formal funeral, and a staid and unsatisfying restaurant gathering, the family met a few days later for a "home cooked" celebration to help them heal. "The food and drink were good and plentiful," Ramsey recalls, "and the music was just right--a little jazz, a little rhythm and blues, a little funk, a little soul--played at a volume that caused you to raise your voice above conversation tone in order to be heard."

He describes the scene in his book. As the music, the food and drink, the conversation and laughter reached a familiar combustible pitch, the family chose up partners and stepped out onto a makeshift dance floor. "As the evening progressed, the young and not so young, aunts with nephews, brothers with sisters, cousins with cousins . . . danced, played cards, 'stomped the blues,' and stomped our grief away with the blues. Auntie Ethel would refer to such events as 'good times like the Ramseys do like,' even if the reasons for gathering were not always happy ones. And although the spoons my father would have played laid still on the table, we finished the job and partied for him. This was also jazz's 'home': among the blues people whose social, emotional, and cultural well being depended on its power."


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