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The Genre-Defying Essence of Black Song
by Caroline Helton and Stephen Berrey (on behalf of the Singing Justice Collective)
In the summer of 1969, hundreds of thousands people gathered in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem for a series of concerts known as the Harlem Cultural Festival. Conceived by community activist Tony Lawrence, the event featured a wide variety of Black and Latina/o performers, including luminaries of pop, gospel, jazz, rock, R&B, and soul music such as Stevie Wonder, The 5th Dimension, B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Mongo Santamaria, and Nina Simone. However, unlike another music festival held that same summer about 100 miles to the north–Woodstock–the Harlem Cultural Festival was mostly lost to history until Amir “Questlove” Thompson found footage of the event and made the documentary film, Summer of Soul (2020).
Recovering the history of the Harlem Cultural Festival offers important lessons for understanding the long, troubled relationship between Black musical creation and the music industry and its gatekeepers by shedding light on historical silences and exclusionary practices. It was also unique among the many musical festivals staged in the 1960s, in that it became a forum for centering Black experiences and traditions. The Harlem Cultural Festival was a community event: it was created for the surrounding neighborhoods and staged in their park with an audience composed of young and old, groups of friends, and families. In what was a tumultuous summer nationally and locally — the war in Vietnam, continuing arrests and violence targeting civil rights and Black Power activists, and a crisis of poverty in Harlem — the Black community came together in common cause. The park became a space for politics, resistance, collective action, communion, and Black joy. And all those things flowed across the boundaries of musical genres.
In 2020, with an interest in the history and legacy of Black musical creators and performers, we formed the Singing Justice Collective. Our collective included scholars and performers, faculty and graduate students. Supported by grants from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, we dedicated our efforts to understanding the fundamental contributions of African Americans to all genres of American music through a capacious musical lens we call “Black Song.” As a collective, we sought to give Black Song its proper place as the foundation of American music and as a product of the Black experience. When we spoke to diverse concert audiences, college students, and focus groups about what makes a song a “Black Song,” the conversations quickly moved beyond the basics of being written by a Black songwriter or performed by a Black artist. From these conversations and our research, we have come to realize that Black Song carries a vital importance that is too broad to contain in a genre label.
Black Song provides spiritual refuge, an outlet for the entire spectrum of human emotion, the expression of Black liberation through music, and a connection to the past, present, and future. Most broadly, Black Song refers to the musical expressions of truths — personal or communal, of the moment or drawn from the past — born of the Black American experience rooted in survival and resistance against slavery, segregation, white supremacist ideology, and all forms of oppression. Black Song springs from a specific historical and social context, shaping nearly every aspect, making it a music of love, sorrow, protest, intellect, joy, celebration, and frustration. Black Song defies historical gatekeeping that attempted to deny African Americans their basic humanity. Consequently, Black Song is a space for community building, individuality, celebrating freedom, and communicating messages hidden from some, while living under the constraints of a society that discriminates against Blackness.
Black Song transcends musical frameworks such as genre and canon, partly because Black artists have learned to excel in many creative spaces outside the standard categories controlled by white supremacy. As doors of opportunity close and open, Black artists have found possibility. For example, until the twentieth century, most institutions of formal music instruction denied entry to nearly all Black musicians. Black music teachers responded by teaching their pupils in a wide range of musical traditions. The biographies of many influential Black American musicians and teachers, such as Major N. Clark Smith, Lena McLin, and Ron Carter, describe them traversing seamlessly across diverse musical styles that you might not think are closely related.
Our current experience of musical genres may lead us to conclude that these categories have always existed in some “authentic” state of unique purity of heritage. For example, country music is commonly understood to be created by white artists, for white audiences. This perception is misleading and can be traced back to the emergence of the recording industry. In the 1920s, industry officials imagined that the music played by white, working-class Southerners was one genre (eventually labeled “country”) and that the music played by Black Southerners was another (“race records” and then “rhythm and blues”). Those divisions constricted and constrained musical distribution and compensation in ways that disadvantaged Black musicians and ignored their contributions.
Additionally, the notion of two naturally distinct and separate musical worlds, one Black and one white, is false, even as segregation and Jim Crow laws were a big part of the lived realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicians. Despite an imbalance of power, the music of Black Southerners and white Southerners developed like a braided stream, with many channels merging and diverging from one another. In the South, white and Black Americans lived in close proximity and interacted frequently, leading to their music and culture overlapping and significantly influencing each other. Black musicians had been performing music that sounded ‘country’ long before the first recording executive took notice of vernacular music in the rural South. They have been integral to these musical traditions, from the Bohee Brothers and DeFord Bailey to Linda Martell and Mickey Guyton, not to mention Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Tina Turner. As country music writer Alice Randall notes in her memoir, “Black country is a big tent with many entry points.” The big tent directly challenges the narrowing work of exclusion that genres perform.
Other Black artists met with various barriers stemming from the conflict of race and the expectations of musical genres. Marian Anderson was the highest-paid concert artist of her time. Still, she was prevented from performing operatic roles in her vocal prime because opera houses in the U.S. would only hire white singers. She would become the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, but only at the end of her career. Nina Simone trained at a very high level for a career as a classical concert pianist. Still, because she was denied a scholarship to study at a highly ranked conservatory, she began playing piano at jazz clubs to make ends meet. From there, her career flourished in a genre that the music industry and the larger society considered more “acceptable” for a Black pianist. Simone’s experience mirrors the beginnings of jazz at the turn of the twentieth century. Jim Crow norms prevented classically trained Black musicians like Simone from pursuing concert careers, so they used their virtuosity to create their own genre of music.
The problem of genre is that it misrepresents the fluidity of how people create, practice, perform, and hear music. Historically, it has worked to exclude and contain Black musicians, exploiting an artificial separation of cultures. That the Harlem Cultural Festival was virtually lost to history for 50 years was less an accident than it was the product of a long history of excluding and forgetting Black contributions to music. If we were to remember that festival and center it as we have Woodstock, we would be forced to rethink the function of genres, assessing the music and the musical stylings based on other, more meaningful criteria. These criteria could include the way the music on the Harlem stage embodied Black history and Black experiences, and the ways in which this multifaceted music reflected the joy, sorrow, anger, liberation, and resiliency of the Black community that assembled at that park.
Caroline Helton is a pedagogue, performer, and researcher who is the co-author of Singing Down the Barriers: A Guide to Centering African American Song for Concert Performers (2023). She is a Clinical Associate Professor of Music and teaches Voice in the Department of Musical Theatre at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
Stephen A. Berrey is the author of The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi (2015) and has served as a co-PI on the grant from the UM Humanities Collaboratory that supported the research by the Singing Justice Collective. He is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of American Culture and History at the University of Michigan.
The Singing Justice Collective embraces divergent experiences of race, ethnicity, class background, gender, academic rank, scholarly discipline, and religion while encompassing generational and geographical variance. They have drawn on that diversity and experience to research and write a book that centers Black composers, musicians, and performers in U.S. history and culture. The book, Black Song: A Manifesto for Music and Justice, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.
Members of the Singing Justice Collective:
- Naomi André, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in Music, University of North Carolina
- Stephen A. Berrey, Associate Professor of American Culture and History, University of Michigan
- Tyrese Byrd, Doctoral candidate in Music (Voice), University of Michigan
- Mark Clague, Executive Director, U-M Arts Initiative, Professor of Musicology, University of Michigan
- Christie Finn, Managing Director, the Hampsong Foundation
- Thomas Hampson, Distinguished Visiting Artist in Voice, University of Michigan
- Caroline Helton, Associate Professor of Music (Musical Theatre), University of Michigan
- Cody Jones, Doctoral candidate in Musicology, University of Michigan
- Traci L. Lombré, Doctoral candidate in American Culture, University of Michigan
- Louise Toppin, Professor of Music (Voice), University of Michigan
- Samatha Williams, M.A. in Music (Voice), University of Michigan
