Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post quotes portions of a pdf of a 2002 Sociological journal paper written by William G. Roy. This paper is entitled "Aesthetic Identity, Race, and American Folk Music".
The content of this post is presented for folkloric, historical, and socio-cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to William G. Roy for his research and writing. Thanks also to those who published this sociological paper online.
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JOURNAL EXCERPT
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Comm/Courses/roy.pdf
Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 2002 (°C 2002)
Aesthetic Identity, Race, and American Folk Music
William G. Roy
This article uses the concept of aesthetic identity to
interrogate the relationship among musical genres, social movements and racial
identity. American folk music has at some times subverted and other times
reinforced the categorical boundaries between blacks and whites in
twentieth-century United States. Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment
of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres
represent “our” or “their” art, music, and literature. Genre boundaries then
become social boundaries. Folk music inverts the usual relationship of genre and social boundaries. Folk music is always the culture of some “other,”
either racial, regional, class, or national. Before it was called folk music,
American vernacular music was much more racially integrated than the society
around it, creolized across a spectrum from predominantly European to
predominantly African influenced, but with most exhibiting both. Before the era
of commercial recording, black and white musicians sang the same music, learned
techniques and songs from each other, and shared a social world of performance.
The concept of folk music was created by academic elites, but remained
unfamiliar to most people until the organized left took it on as a cultural
project in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Both academic elites and political activists constructed the
genre as an alternative to the racialized genres that the commercial recording
industry had dubbed “race records” and “hillbilly music.” American communists
and their allies were especially self-conscious about using folk music as an
instrument of racial solidarity in a particularly racially polarized era.
Submerged by McCarthyism until the 1960s, folk music was revived as a racially
unified genre, but quickly became whitened. My explanation for why the folk
revival was so white revolves around three factors: the continuing legacy of
commercial racial categories, the failure of the New Left to control music
through a cultural infrastructure as effectively as had the old left, and the cultural momentum of an understanding of folk
page 460
music of the “other” at a time when blacks were trying to enter a system
that white middle-class youth were rejecting.
The sociology of culture is premised on the notion that boundaries between aesthetic
genres correspond to social boundaries between groups. One of the major mechanisms
by which such correspondence operates is that groups claim genres as their own
and tie their group identities to the aesthetic standards of “their” genre.
Folk music presents a special problem for the relationship of social and cultural
boundaries because while folk music has been a prime instrument for solidifying
social boundaries between groups, no one claims to be “folk.” Those who use
folk music to solidify boundaries are using music not their own. In the American
setting, one of the social boundaries shaped by folk music has been racial.
This article will explore how aesthetic identities of race have
interacted with the construction of American folk music over time, reviewing
how the racial identity of folk music has shifted between black and white poles
in response to the changing social context of musical production and the
interaction of musical institutions. American folk music has gone through three
distinct phases of racial identity. The concept of folk music was invented
within a European nationalizing project and applied in this country to white
Anglo-Saxon Americanism. It was then transformed into a left wing political
project in the 1930s as “the people’s music,” taking an explicitly bi-racial
cast. Finally, the folk revival of the sixties, despite its close association
with the Civil Rights movement, reverted to its Anglo-Saxon identity. It is
especially challenging because the discursive definition of folk music has
substantially departed from what the “folk” themselves were singing.
[…]
GROUPS, GENRES, AND RACE
The underlying assumption of this analysis is the principle
that cultural objects and cultural forms reflect and constitute boundaries
between social groups
page 461
(Griswold 1987; DiMaggio 1987).2 One of the basic principles of the sociology of
culture is homology, the notion that the boundaries between cultural forms align
with the boundaries between groups. Different audiences have preferences for
different artistic and musical genres, and conversely those genres often help constitute
boundaries between groups. High and low art are perhaps the clearest example.
Not only is classical music preferred more by upper-class audiences, but the
consumption of such culture signals upper-class status, creating a social
boundary between upper- and lower-class groups (Bourdieu 1984). Just as David
Halle’s pathbreaking work has torpedoed the simpleminded association of
high-status culture to abstract art, I want to enrich our analysis of racial
boundaries and musical genres. Cultural genres create boundaries between
racial, gender, age, national, sexual orientation, and other groups. Bourdieu,
for example, has emphasized that cultural capital is not only a quality that
individuals use for personal advacement but also a means by which groups use
cultural distinctions a d knowledge to advance collectively by erecting
invidious social boundaries. Thus, groups adopt an aesthetic identity, the
appropriation of a cultural boundary to solidify a group boundary. They adopt
an aesthetic standard to define an invidious distinction that marks us vs.
them. Just as the aesthetic standard of formalism, for example, creates an
invidious distinction between those with the cultural capital to appreciate
high art and music, other standards demarcate the boundaries of ethnicity,
race, gender, and sexual orientation. Identification with a group becomes
measured by adherence to particular aesthetic standards.
I want to emphasize that aesthetic identity does not mean
that every member of a group embraces the aesthetic standards attributed to the
group. To suggest that would be a not very subtle form of stereotyping. Not all
whites like country and western any more than all blacks enjoy soul music. But
people recognize that they are members of groups that are associated with
particular genres. Individual blacks may not savor jazz, but they often take
pride in it. Individual Finns may honor Sibelius even if they never listen to
him, because they identify with Finlandia.
The development of aesthetic identities is a social
construction more than a matter of individual tastes. Moreover, the
construction of genres often involves the erection of boundaries between
groups. Black music and white music were pitted against each other. Youth culture
is pitted against the older generation. Nationalist music blossoms in time of war.
That is not to say that every genre arises in a conflict between concrete
groups.
Composers seek greatness by transcending existing canons to
found new genres—classical over baroque, romantic over classical, impressionist
over romantic, etc. We can imagine a continuum with the putatively pure
artistic boundary on one end and the equally unattainable group-based genres on
the other. Genres may be
page 462
placed along this continuum, or may move along it as groups
become more and less identified with particular genres as “their” music.
Folk music, however, complicates the connection between group identity and
group culture. As the music of “a people” or “a folk” it conforms to the principle
of homology. But, in fact, folk music is typically the appropriation by one
group, usually a dominant group, of someone else’s music, fortifying social boundaries
by breaching the principle of homology. No one calls themselves “the folk.”
“The folk” are always some “other.” So the question becomes: Who creates the
genre of folk music, for what purpose, and who embraces it as “our” music? Whose aesthetic identity is defined by folk
music and what social boundaries are constituted?
WHO CONSTRUCTS AN AESTHETIC IDENTITY FOR FOLK MUSIC?
The commonsense answer is that folk music was there before
it was called folk music, and belonged to some traditional group as “their”
music. In this perspective, folk music is nothing but the name that outsiders
give to vernacular music that “the folk” have been making all along. However,
this simple answer is historically misleading. Concrete, identifiable groups
constructed, negotiated, clashed with, and reconstructed folk music on the
basis of claims about and on behalf of particular social constituencies.
For the first generation of folklorists, folk music was the
music of a national people. The notion of “folk music” was first articulated by
nationalist intellectuals creating an imagined community whose collective
genius fostered the literature, poetry, lore and music that gave voice to a
distinctive people. The English, like other Europeans, discovered an allegedly
ancient national culture of the people least touched by modernity, the rural
poor. By the turn of the twentieth century, English scholars despaired that the
English peasantry had been corrupted by modernization and declared that the purest form of Anglo-Saxon folk music was to be found in
the unsullied hollows and hills of the American Appalachians. Cecil Sharp, an
Englishman who towered over the first generation of American folklorists, explicitly
declared that the greatness of the American folk tradition was racial. He believed
that racial inheritance determined a culture’s value: The mountaineers’ “language,
wisdom, manners, and the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial
attributes which have been gradually handed down generation by generation” (Filene
2000, p. 25).
However, the folklorist’s portrait of the rural poor not
only misrepresented their musical tastes, but helped racialize American
vernacular music in general. The music that ordinary people were singing,
especially in the South, included much more than the Anglo-Saxon ballads the
folklorists had identified as “folk.”
While many Southerners did sing old ballads, the larger
corpus of vernacular music was a creolized synthesis of European and African
influences. By privileging the
[page 463]
European influences within the category of “folk,” the music that represented
“the people” was confined to “white” music.…
[…]
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper was presented at the UCLA LeRoy Nieman Center
Conference on New Cultural Frontiers, May 2001, and the Annual Conference
of the American Sociological Association, August 2001 in Anaheim,
California."
-snip-
Pancocojams Editor's Note: This pdf consists of 10 pages: 459-469; including references.
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