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Abstract: This issue of American Music begins with a symposium on Guthrie Ramsey’s book, Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present (2022), which encapsulates his longtime participation in the ongoing institutionalization of Black music research. Since the publication of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), Ramsey’s work has had a significant impact on the study of African American music. For this symposium, we extended invitations to scholars with diverse backgrounds and interests to contribute short essays that reflect on, engage with, and build upon the ideas, stance, and vision expressed in Who Hears Here' The contributors include former students, colleagues, and collaborators, as well as others ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: All of the “what” that Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., shows that he knows in Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present is of enormous value.1 His essays move seamlessly through discussions of a wide range of music and musicians, cultural sites and sensibilities, genres and generations, and authors and art forms. This virtuosity, however, may obscure at first glance what I consider to be the equally important achievement that emanates from the “how” that he knows and the ways he deploys that way of working. The ideas, evidence, and arguments in this book make extraordinary contributions to scholarship and civic life by prodding scholars and cultural critics to conduct our work in a manner that is contributive rather ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “What I want,” writes Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, “is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being, where there is no argument to be made, where there is no speaking to or against an audience because we are all the audience there is. . . .”1 In Who Hears Here', Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., invites us into a world where Black music is “of being,” devoid of defenses, justifications, or validations for its existence. Black creativity and intellectuality simply are, and Ramsey historicizes, theorizes, and “storifies” their various manifestations majestically.Who Hears Here' is a collection of Black world-making essays that read as a road map for a musicological life lived beyond ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present, by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., both synthesizes and attests to a decades-long intellectual project that has set the foundation for a long overdue epistemic shift in music studies today. If through our stories and citational practices we announce our intellectual histories,1 then Ramsey’s query—“Who hears here'”—is both a challenge and a call for scholars to engage Black music studies from richly complex racial positionalities and to acknowledge the political concerns that motivate our research. Ramsey models the measured frankness of an expert historian, the analytical acumen of a seasoned cultural critic, and the sensitivity of an active musician emplaced within ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Guthrie Ramsey opens Who Hears Here' with the declaration: “I believe that writing (and any act of creating) is about ‘self-fashioning.’ While it certainly encompasses other things, the establishment of ‘Self’ in writing is always present—even if it is done under the category of ‘objective scholarship.’”1 These words resonated with and reminded me of another pronouncement made over three decades ago by Sander Gilman who, informed by psychoanalysis, proposed that all writing is somehow autobiographical, even at its most academic. Gilman was referencing mainly unconscious traces; in contrast, for Ramsey, it is the conscious insertions that are important. Over the years, I have found myself both drawn to and resistant ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., published the titular essay of his Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present in 2001, the same year I began graduate school in musicology.1 I still remember the day a student from my entering cohort excitedly shared a copy, knowing that I was interested in the relationship between race and music. This act of collegiality, however, came with a warning, and as I began reading, the reason for my classmate’s caution became clear. Not only did Ramsey critique the work of one of our professors, but he also voiced an uncomfortable truth: although the preceding decade had witnessed a flourishing of writing about Black music, there had not been a corresponding growth in the number of Black ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I met the musicological titan, Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr., at my very first American Musicological Society conference in 2007 at Quebec City. Ramsey sat on Charles Atkins’s presidential plenary panel on the topic of race and ethnicity, one of many convenings on the topic since then. Although I hadn’t fully settled on being a professional musicologist at the time (I was still in my MA program at Catholic University), when I heard Ramsey speak, I felt a familiarity, a likeness that I did not experience as the norm at this mostly white academic music conference. (Ramsey was also my most direct link to trailblazing Black music scholars Eileen Southern and Samuel Floyd, Jr., whose work I had encountered during my MA ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The fourteen essays compiled to form Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present trace the writings and intellectual contributions of Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., over the past three decades. In this way, the essays track the flows of a musicological career that has consistently and unrelentingly worked toward building the academic foundations for a robust field of Black music studies. Beginning with his efforts to understand and illuminate the historiography of Black music, from his earliest publications Ramsey drew our attention to the ways that historiography and its discursive tactics have worked to shape far more than scholarship alone. In his characteristically understated way, Ramsey documents the many ways ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reading Guthrie Ramsey’s Who Hears Here', a wave of memories pulled me back to the spring semester of 2005, my first year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor David García led an ethnomusicology seminar on music of the African diaspora, and I was one of four students. Our reading list covered a lot of terrain, from classics by J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Paul Berliner, and Samuel Floyd to recent material by Ronald Radano, Robin Moore, and García himself. It just so happened that Ramsey’s Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003) had been sitting on the music library’s new bookshelf, as if it anticipated that we would all pick it up at some point in the term.At the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I remember being in graduate school and taking Portia Maultsby’s Theorizing Black Music seminar. That course was rich with epiphanies for a budding ethnomusicologist. Two such epiphanies stand out as particularly relevant both to my consideration of Guthrie Ramsey’s latest book, Who Hears Here' On Black Music, Pasts & Present, and to my own research on music at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).The first epiphany was when I realized that there are so many ways in which to discuss Black music; so many eras, so many genres one could explore. Two of the ways that struck me especially—so much so that they became a part of my own ethics when conducting my research—are these: writing about Black music ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In my early life, I never aspired to write about music. Initially, my work in music grew out of an intense curiosity about what the voice could do. Following a traditional educational pathway, I trained at a music conservatory based on the old European model—essentially a trade school, where craft was taught by instructors considered masters in their areas. Instruction was meant to be received uncritically. As a person of color, a number of unarticulated questions arose in relation to my body performing the traditional repertoire. I eventually learned that I could engage these questions to some extent using a scholarly framework. However, in academic practice, I also found the drive toward logical conclusions ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In hip-hop jargon, the term “bars” refers to the sum of a rap performer’s artistic endowments. If their rhymes hit hard and remix your thoughts, if the stress and release of their rhythms organize something inside your body, and if the timbral quality of their voice makes you hear metaphors, then that rapper’s “got bars.” What rap artists do over beats, the best scholars try to accomplish in essay form.In her recent publication In Search of a Beautiful Freedom, writer and humanitarian Farah Jasmine Griffin explains the importance of essays to American historiography, particularly among Black feminist literary critics. She writes that the essay provides a forum to “explore ideas, posit theoretical interventions ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This study documents the full range of musical activity that took place in a Southern Appalachian community during a period of rapid cultural transformation.1 While scholars of Appalachian music have typically pursued inquiry into a bounded tradition—social dancing,2 for example, or fiddling3—we have instead attempted to document the entire musical life of a rural town (Dahlonega) and the small county (Lumpkin) in which it is situated. This approach allows us to shed light on musical practices that have received limited attention, due either to their peripherality or to the perception that they are “commercial” or “inauthentic.” While our findings are limited to the community under consideration and cannot be ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! is one of the most beloved and enduring works of American musical theater. It looms large over the history of the genre for its trailblazing integration of song, dance, and narrative. At the time of its premiere in 1943, when the nation was at war with a foreign enemy, Oklahoma!, in the words of Raymond Knapp, “provid[ed] America with a strongly embodied sense of a central national myth.”1 Over the past decade, however, a spate of revivals has reimagined Oklahoma! through the lens of contemporary politics, bringing new perspectives to the musical’s symbolic forging of national identity. These reinterpretations of Oklahoma! emerged from a political context marked ... Read More PubDate: 2024-06-03T00:00:00-05:00
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