“Swingin’ Theory: The Blues Idiom as Vox Populi”

The articulations of the cultural and class chasm between well colonized Afri- U.S. peoples and those Afri-U.S. peoples at the margins of mainstream U.S. culture, functioned and still function as an ongoing debate between disparate worldviews and divergent perceptions of and relationships to mainstream U.S. hegemony. I am using the term, ‘Afri- U.S.,’ to identify that group of Diasporic Africans who are the direct descendants of those original Africans enslaved in the United States. Opposed to the popular use of African American, Afri-U.S. avoids the reduction of the Americas—North/South/Central America and the Caribbean—to the United States. As well, Afri-U.S. recognizes the historic African population in the U.S. as one of many populations of Africans in the Western hemisphere, the larger group more accurately signified by the term African American. Conceptualizing Afri-U.S. peoples as a colonized group, relies on boiling the process of colonization down to its basic elements. These are the processes which transform one group of peoples into pieces of the larger apparatus that serves the social, political, cultural, economic and racial needs of the colonizing body. The starting point of this transformation begins with the period of Reconstruction (1865-77) after the U.S. Civil War. Through philanthropic organizations and government intervention (The Freedman’s Bureau) factions within mainstream U.S. culture systematically sought to acculturate emancipated Africans into the dominant systems of thought and behaviour. Religious organizations and schools were established in the post Civil War South for the sole purpose of altering the social-cultural orientation of newly freed Afri-U.S. peoples. These were attempts facilitate the movement and participation of Afri-U.S. peoples into the expanding industrial-economic order of the United States. The results of this experiment were the growing complexities of Afri-U.S. identity along lines of class and culture.

The questions of the identity and the identifications of Afri-U.S. peoples range across discussions of education, labour discipline, sexual mores and forms of aesthetic and cultural expression. Sections of the Black “under” classes maintained an ongoing public forum concerning the circumstances of their own lives and the larger world around them. These sites of mass popular expression work over, against and in relation to the colonial culture of indoctrinated elites. These elites (colonized middle class) can be defined as those, who at this historical moment have attained privileged status as a result of contact with the mainstream and their ability to negotiate said mainstream as opposed to being defined as a bourgeoisie. Being defined as bourgeoisie means that they belong to an economic class which manifests itself through its command of capital and the political will to establish national spaces where they are fully empowered to construct a social-political apparatus reflective of its will and benefit. Despite the rise and growth of the Afri-U.S. middle class in the realms of politics and economics, the fundamental precept of bourgeois life, remains the control and command of the means of production facilitating the overt and covert domination of a given society. Presently the Afri-U.S. middle class does not control, command or dominate the U.S. mainstream and does not meet the classical Marxist definitions of a bourgeoisie.¹

Riffing off of W.E.B. DuBois concept of “double consciousness,”² the degree of social-cultural consciousness of colonized elites, manifests itself as “liminal identification,”³ a state in which colonized elites retain a marginal identification with their original cultures despite colonial indoctrination. At the same time “liminal identification” is the state in which colonized elites adhere to a marginal identification with the precepts of the colonizer’s culture despite their affinity with their original cultures. Having a simultaneous identification with cultures in tension with each other, leaves the liminally identified colonized elite without a true sense of belonging in either social cultural sphere. This state leaves the elite at the margins of both cultures. Within the context of the U.S., the colonized elite is liminal to colonial culture due to the strictures of mainstream racial culture perception. Within the context of Afri-U.S. culture, the elite is liminal due to his/her articulation and performance of the dominant culture’s mores, which exist as antithetical to Afri-U.S. social-cultural patterns. As analyzed by DuBois, this state finds articulation in his concept of “double consciousness” and its expression as the “two warring souls” of Afri-U.S. identity.

DuBois’ “two warring souls,” are indicators of the colonized elite’s distance from his/her original culture (Negro/African derived) and their institutionally supported/coerced gravitation toward hegemonic values and perceptions. Afri- U.S. mass popular consciousness follows a pattern of quasi-autonomous self-consciousness that is self-constructive and seemingly apathetic toward mainstream criticisms and judgements. By quasi-autonomous, I mean the narrow social-cultural spaces where Afri-U.S. peoples are able to creatively express themselves outside of the boundaries of U.S. hegemony. These are best imagined as those moments and spaces where the white gaze is not present and there are Black people existing without having to conform or respond to white expectations (ex. Afri-U.S. churches, juke joints, social clubs). Other writers have described this sense of self- awareness.⁴ Within the context of mass popular consciousness, Albert Murray’s, idea of the “blues idiom,” will suffice as an expression of this self consciousness within the sphere of musical expression. What concretely is at stake is the question of what does the dancehall enthusiast or juke joint regular find in mass popular music that provides as much meaning and identity in their lives as Sunday morning church members find in sacred music. These lines of delineation between the Afri-U.S. middle class and working/under class, function through the question of institutionally formed consciousness—the influence of schools, churches and state institutions upon mass popular consciousness—and the degree of investment and non-investment in hegemonic social-cultural and political mores. These lines can be seen as we consider examples of mass popular political participation (the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the cooperation of Depression era rural farmers with the Communist Party USA). Measure these against the colonized elite’s historic struggle to integrate within U.S. society and prove themselves worthy of U.S. citizenship (the explicit goals of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the integrationist agenda of the modern Civil Rights movement). The examples of mass popular choices reveal members of the mass populace that acknowledged the problematic nature of their relationship to the U.S. mainstream and were willing to engage radical and revolutionary solutions. These must be understood in comparison to the efforts of middle class influenced movements and organizations that sought to affirm or recognize Black identity and life in to the fabric of mainstream U.S. life. In regards to the divergent streams of consciousness among Afri-U.S. social-cultural classes, the discussion of mass popular consciousness will be examined through the medium of what I term, “Classic Jazz/Blues.”

The relations between the modes of desire expressed through the “blues idiom” and “liminal identification” are more complicated than a dichotomy of “Black vs. White” culture or a disjunctive framework of “authentic” Black culture (mass popular expression) vs. “inauthentic” Black culture (elite liminal expression). [The overlap of cultural experiences among Afri-U.S. elites has its reflection in the member of the mass populace whose investment in colonial mores is acquired outside of formal colonial institutions. Cultural/class consciousness is not absolutely determined, as members of the elite have historically allied themselves to mass popular cultural and political movements and like wise members of the mass populace historically aspire to the levels of cultural and social privilege enjoyed by elites. The cultural-class lines between the Afri-U.S. masses and elites are often porous. African literature—continental and diasporic—give clear examples of the push among mass popular characters to adapt and attain status within the colonial framework. Barbadian and Guinean writers George Lamming and Camara Laye, provide vivid examples of this cultural intersection in their autobiographical novels, In the Castle of My Skin (1983) and The Dark Child (1969).

Colonial ideology though concentrated in its institutions, manifests itself in various aspects of life in the colony in lesser or greater degrees thus making itself accessible to all sections of the populace. In this brief conversation, we will specifically examine an area of Afri- U.S. life, thought and expression outside the direct mechanisms of U. S. ideological control (i.e., formal educational institutions). Therefore the question is not, “who and what is ‘keepin’ it real,’ rather, it is an inquiry into the various sites of Afri-U.S. culture (elite and mass popular) as working through the filters of race, class, culture and identity. This is the short truth of this piece.

The long-term vision of this work is to present mass popular expressions as theoretically viable articulations that move within the worlds of determination beyond prescribed structures (i.e. seek meanings and have validity beyond those prescribed by dominant structures). Within the sphere of intellectual history and Africana philosophy/thought, noted individuals take precedence and are privileged over and against the mass of people. Clearly, it is a question of the accessibility of surviving records/documents and historic figures of note within their epochs. But because of this emphasis on noted figures, mass popular voices are disadvantaged in that the intellectual historian and philosopher privileges certain forms over others as being credible vehicles of analysis. The means and manners by which mass populations assert themselves are taken merely as cultural artifacts, low art, or spectacle. It is left for the historian, cultural critic, sociologist and the anthropologist to explore these avenues. This marginalization of the critical possibilities of Africana mass popular consciousness stinks of class prerogative and is an indicator of the limited scope of what philosophy as applied to Africana experience can unearth. In this piece, I hope to encourage a rethinking of what is, “theory,” who is a “theorist,” and what are the forms that theory can assume. I argue along with philosopher/activist Antonio Gramsci, that we are all, “intellectuals,” and in the case of Africana theorists, we have only just begun to understand the manner in which continental and diasporic Africans have presented their thoughts, beliefs and ideas to the world.

In the remainder of the essay, I examine Jazz/Blues music as an avenue of social aesthetic expression among the Afri-U.S. mass populace. I treat Jazz/Blues music as an exemplar of “eye level philosophy,” by which I mean, Jazz and Blues serve as Afri-U.S. cultural and aesthetic responses of the Afri-U.S. mass populace to the conditions of life and labour under U.S. internal colonialism. Within these responses we will uncover an attempt to articulate a deeper understanding on the part of Afri-U.S. mass popular culture of their lives and the creation of self determined meanings resistant to racial cultural stereotypes. Critic of culture, novelist and essayist, Albert Murray, in his writings on Jazz/Blues⁵ discusses a very specific aesthetic approach by listeners and artists in the two musical genres. In his analysis of the Blues, Murray charges that most commentators have completely missed the point and circumstance of the music:

Murray argues that the life of Afri-U.S. peoples in general but in particular the lives of what LeRoi Jones called “Blues People,”⁷ were not the lives of dispirited, pathologized victims of mainstream opinion. Instead, as exhibited by their musical expression, the majority of Afri-U.S. peoples enjoyed highly original and spirited inner and social lives. Circumscribed by but not fully determined by U.S. internal colonialism, sectors of the Afri-U.S. populace operated out of a will to face the adversity of their situations with a self determined and conscious effort to live lives beyond the pale. This effort to maintain a high degree of autonomy and expression within the confines of mainstream hegemony and do so with panache, style and grace, Murray calls the “blues idiom.” We will use this idea of the “blues idiom” to delineate and ground the social, cultural and political articulations of sectors of the Afri-U.S. populace as they are diverge from the Afri- U.S. elite and its investment in U.S. bourgeois culture.

The “blues idiom” manifests itself as Afri-U.S. peoples denied/refused access to formal education and its subsequent privilege, formulate social-cultural views based on their experiences outside direct hegemonic control but within hegemonic subordination. Under this umbrella must be included those Afri-U.S. peoples who despite their access to colonial privilege rejected the norms and references of Euro-American bourgeois culture and acknowledged a fluid stream of valid tradition and relevant expression within mass popular Afri- U.S. culture.⁸

Like their elite counterparts, the Black underclass remained inside and outside American civilization. Nevertheless, life beyond ideological mechanisms such as educational institutions differed in exposure to colonial influence. Other forms of ideological influence remained. Despite its history as the heart of the traditional Afri-U.S. community and a constant source of resistance to white supremacy in its various forms⁹ , the church as documented by Albert J. Raboteau and Lawrence Levine could function as both a mechanism of ideological control and as a site of popular resistance. States Lawrence Levine, “the church continued to represent the conservative, moral and institutional religious center of the Black community . . . [there was a] perceived association between doctrines of the church and the canons and policies of white society.”¹⁰ As the Black church was the single institution completely controlled by the Afri- U.S. community but in many instances influenced by hegemonic values,¹¹ its role in the tradition of Afri-U.S. social-cultural resistance is ambiguous. The “blues idiom” survived on those patches of ground where the lives of Black folk were predominately determined by Black folk and thus were perfect venues for Afri-U.S. commentary formed with minimal colonial influence. States Leonard Feather, “Jazz was the product of a specific social environment in which a group of people, the American Negroes, largely shut off from the white world, developed cultural patterns of their own.”¹² Expanding on these patterns, “Blues represents subversive attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs within an emergent African-American culture . . . blues culture represented an emergent alternative, replete with its own philosophical and religious base.”¹³

Opposing the colonial formulae mouthed by the Afri-U.S. elite, we have what Sylvia Wynter, in a discussion of C. L. R. James’ classic work, Beyond A Boundary, describes as differing, “modes of desire” in which there is a clear articulation and expression of a specific mass popular social-aesthetic sensibility. There is revealed, “a separation, a gap . . . between the mode of popular desire, i. e., what the masses wanted to ‘live’ by and what the ‘ruling elements’ wanted them to live by. In other words, what is at issue here in [sic] a struggle between two modes of desire - that of the bourgeoisie and that of the popular forces.”¹⁴ Wynter continues her discussion in regard to James’ critique of the role of Cricket in the social-political lives of West Indians but her words are apt in their relevance to Afri-U.S. modes of desire as expressed through a social-cultural aesthetic and identity.

In his essay, “Storiella Americana As She Is Swyung: or, The Blues as Representative Anecdote,” Albert Murray describes the historical and social context that gave birth to the personality and talent of Edward Kennedy Ellington (a.k.a Duke Ellington, fig. 1 -- duke_4). Murray detailing the racial and political climate of turn of the century Washington, D. C. reveals an Afri-U.S. culture that determines to carry out its desire for social stability and progress in the midst of racial suppression. In true Washingtonian fashion (Booker T. Washington) the community of Duke Ellington’s childhood was relatively self reliant and filled with “Representative Negroes” who did not waste too much time commiserating over the fickle nature of racial oppression. Murray and Ellington himself in his autobiography¹⁵ describe a neat and tidy world of upwardly mobile colonial elites. Murray makes the point of Ellington being the product of a “Negro” culture that existed beyond uninformed caricatures of Black emotional life. Ellington’s formative world was not a constant refrain of “what did I do/to be so black and blue.” His world was a “Negro” culture that existed beyond the stereotyped images of “Negroes” as primitive, artless folk¹⁶ of the rural South. It is through the direct cultural-aesthetic descendants of this same folk culture that Duke Ellington received his education in the vehicle of the “blues idiom” (jazz piano) that was the medium for his extraordinary expansions and experiments within it (fig. 2: Sitting at the Piano -- duke_2). Despite the community of elites that nurtured Ellington, the vehicle of his expression came from the culture that lay beyond his life in the bosom of the Talented Tenth.

Despite his attendance and graduation from Howard University (fig. 3: Howard University), Duke’s career training came about in the pool halls and taverns of Black Washington, D. C. Along with Ellington in these “joints” was a cross section of a growing middle class. “Guys from all walks of life seem to converge there: school kids over and under sixteen; college students and graduates, some starting out in law and medicine and science...lots of Pullman porters and dining car waiters.”¹⁷ Though Duke learned something of the world outside Washington from these fellow “slummers,” it was from the pool hall regulars that Ellington learned the fundamentals that would establish him as arguably one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century (fig. 4: YMCA). States Murray, “When he really began to focus his ambitions on the piano and music, there was a whole galaxy of virtuosi and theorists not only at Holliday’s [pool hall] but all over town, and they were always willing to repeat and explain things.”¹⁸ The tensions of Ellington’s position as an up and coming member of the vanguard by day and jazz pianist by metaphoric and literal night, is never versed by Murray or Ellington but the social/ cultural/ ideological(?) tensions were there.

Novelist, essayist and (quiet as it’s kept) musician, Ralph Ellison, expresses this tension initially in terms of musical desire:

This may be the reminiscence of a school boy desire to play a jazz as hot as that of Oran “Hot Lips” Paige, trumpet hero to enthusiasts of the late 20’s and early 30’s Kansas City “sound” and member of Walter Page’s Blue Devils (fig. 5 & 6: Covers of Album -- duke_3 & duke_5). Yet as the page turns, Ellison describes a place, within a cultural framework, for jazz and it’s social- aesthetic, the blues idiom. Jazz/Blues, within its context and venue, offered a statement over and against the hegemonic bourgeois pressures described earlier. It is a statement in which a relatively unadulterated, popular (collective) voice spoke from within the Afri-U.S. community. Ellison writes in the essay, “The Golden Age, Time Past”, “And in the beginning it was in the Negro dance hall and night club that jazz was most completely a part of a total cultural expression; and in which it was freest and most satisfying, both for the musicians and for those in whose lives it played a major role.”²⁰ Jazz, as an outgrowth/manifestation of mass popular consciousness (racial, class and cultural), establishes a logic and tradition,²¹ through which we are able to view the structures and sensibilities of a society within a society (fig. 7: Whitelaw Hotel).

This society within a society and its divergent social-aesthetic stance, served as a line in the sand for the class divisions within African- America. In eulogizing jazz guitar legend, Charlie Christian, Ellison wrote in, “The Charlie Christian Story” of Christian’s background and its relationship to his life and death as a jazz musician. “He spent much of his life in a slum in which all the forms of disintegration attending the urbanization of rural Negroes ran riot . . . It was also alive and exciting, and I enjoyed visiting there, for the people both lived and sang the blues” (ibid, 232). Christian’s life and choice of profession reveal the fractures in Afri-U.S. social-cultural life, as his embrace of the blues idiom was a clear statement to and about the Negro middle class. I quote Ellison.

In this embrace of jazz/ the blues idiom/ Afri- U.S. folk expression, there was the rejection of the bourgeois based colonial elite- refracted tenets of life, liberty and happiness as articulated through colonial ideology, its institutions and its native agents. Writes Ellison in, “Remembering Jimmy”, “Jazz and the blues did not fit into the scheme of things as spelled out by our [Black managed] two main institutions, the church and the school, but they gave expression to attitudes which found no place in these and helped to give our lives some semblance of wholeness . . . jazz and the public dance was a third institution in our lives” (ibid. 237). The blues idiom and its accompanying vehicles, jazz/blues music, was an alternative voice, a grass roots organ which was based upon the social-political and economic positions of its primary audience. Its indigenous form of cultural-aesthetic expression embodied a resistant mode of desire.

The jazz musician, blues music and the folk tradition from which they sprang as pro- active (native?) phenomena, for the colonized elite, were discrepancies in the panorama of their bourgeois dreams. In the speech of the blues musician explaining his/her craft and the virtuosity of the music itself, creatively systematic phrasing overturned beliefs about the degraded and pathological Negro upon which mainstream racial cultural superiority and colonial elite missionary agendas rested. From a Blues perspective, one would have facetiously to ask, what could a Harvard Ph.D. in music (or anything else) tell “unlettered” Count Basie, he who knew the ABC’s of vamping and was the Alpha and Omega of Swing? Indeed, beyond elite and hegemonic constructions, mass popular Afri-U.S. peoples led lives, thought thoughts and spoke words that satisfied their own needs.

The growth of jazz in the former half of the twentieth century, its celebration by U.S. and European music critics, and most depressing for adherents to the tenets of U.S. internal colonialism, its lure for both Black and white privileged youths²² disrupted belief in the passive folk ways of an easily manipulated working/under class (fig. 8: Lincoln Center). For those in the Black middle class invested in colonial ideology, that son or daughter who chose to be a jazz/blues musician was a backward step in the upward climb to mainstream bourgeois acceptance.²³ An embrace of any folk expression that had not been sanitized for mainstream consumption (ex. The Fisk Jubilee Singers and their “Spirituals”) disrupted attempts to prove the ability of the Negro to embrace “civilization” and “progress.”²⁴ The Black middle class failed to appreciate the refined aesthetic, soothing qualities and civilizing effects of the flatted fifth upon the minds of the savage bourgeoisie.

Without conscious intent, approval or encouragement from an outside agitator, mass popular Afri-U.S. life issued a challenge to the custodians of “culture, civilization and race.” Spiritual and political kin to Sylvia Wynter’s Matthew Bondmans²⁵ (the wretched of the earth) who, “had to live in an alternative cosmology, an underground culture which they reconstituted for themselves,”²⁶ the “Blues people” clearly played and danced a resistant note, one dependant on bourgeois domination (in its circumscription by white supremacy, colonialism and cultural imperialism in their various aspects) yet simultaneously one that was free/autonomous in that it chose to (re)define style, culture and aesthetics beyond the categories of bourgeois domination. In short, jazz and the blues idiom was a defining of Afri-U.S. life, by Afri-U.S. peoples in their likeness and on their terms. The blues idiom spoke in a counter discursive voice, perhaps in the most telling way, in that there were no necessary extended criticisms of the agents of colonial ideology or white supremacy, instead the “blues people” simply chose to live their lives in ways that most satisfied them, beholden only to themselves. As Billie Holiday sang in, “Getting Some Fun Out of Life.”

References

Feather, Leonard. The Book of Jazz From Then to Now. New York: Bonanza Press, 1965

Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963

Laye, Camara. The Dark Child. Trans. James Kirkup and Ernest Jones. New York: Farras, Strous and Girouz, 1969

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977

---------------. The Blue Devils of Nada. New York: Vintage International, 1997

Paris, Peter J. The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995

Paul, Oliver. Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary. New York: De Capo Press, 1984

Wynter, Sylvia. “In Quest of Mathew Bondman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey.” C. L. R. James: His life and Work. Paul Buhle, ed. London: Allison & Busby Limited, 1986


	. I define liminal identification as the interstitial consciousness manifested within colonized elites, in which their marginality to both colonized and colonizer culture, causes a hybrid and ambiguous relation with both extremes of the colonial circumstance.


	. Though in general usage the terms Jazz/Blues are used to discern two connected but distinctive forms of music, Murray uses the them interchangeably because they are forms sharing the same roots in slave culture as serving the same purposes. Jazz and Blues serve as Afri-U.S. cultural and aesthetic responses of the Afri- U.S. mass populace to the conditions of life and labour under U.S. internal colonialism and the determination of a cultural and existential space for its independent identity formation.


	Blues People. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963. Due to the class/cultural stratification of the Afri-U.S. populace, for this examination Blues people are best defined as those Afri-Americans whose lives were/are? Heavily invested in Afri-U.S. slave culture which gradually became Black mass popular culture.


	The use of Christian myth and signifiers by the enslaved to conceal subversive activity; Christian doctrine as the basis for resistance movements among abolitionists (e.g. David Walker, Maria Stewart) and revolutionaries (e.g. Nat Turner and John Brown) and the church as the social center for the social and economic expansion of the Afri-U.S. community post Reconstruction, all point to the churches role as a bulwark of anti colonial resistance.


	As to the relationship between A) folk culture and B) slave culture/ mass popular Black culture, Murray states, “Over the years there has been a tendency to confuse the Blues with folk expression, but where the hell did all those writers get the idea that folk, which is to say peasant or provincial, art (or artlessness), is adequate to the complexities of black experience in contemporary America?” 4.


	ibid, “For although since the twenties many jazzmen have had conservatory training and were well grounded in formal theory and technique, when we approach jazz we are entering quite a different sphere of training. Here it is more meaningful to speak, not of courses of study, of grades and degrees, but of apprenticeship, ordeals, initiation ceremonies, of rebirth”, 206.


	Jones, “The Negro created a music that offered such a profound reflection of America that it could attract white Americans to want to play it or listen to it for exactly that reason. The white jazz musician was even a new ‘class’ of white American,” 149.


	Two anecdotes from the life of blues Singer Jimmy Rushing, exemplify the tensions surrounding some aspects of the Black middle class ideology and life as a jazz musician. “Jimmy Rushing’s uncle, Wesley Manning...was a pianist who lived in close contact with the Rushing family but in their perpetual disapproval...he was the “Professor” of a sporting house. ‘They were afraid he would influence me...and he did!’ said Jimmy.” “His [Jimmy Rushing] first employment came...from his father, for whom he played piano in Rushing’s Cafe. Jimmy’s repertoire was strictly circumscribed for he received the inevitable ‘whopping’ if he began to play the blues.” Both anecdotes reveal the rejection on the part of members the Afri-U. S. middle class to jazz/blues. Oliver, Paul. Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary. New York: De Capo Press, 1984, 147.


	. James, ibid. Matthew Bondman was that cricket player from C. L. R. James’ childhood that in his work, became representative for James of the anti-colonial tensions and resistant demeanor that demarcated the class divisions within colonial cricket competition and ideology. “He was generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent and his voice was loud...Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace and style...Matthew’s career did not last long” (3-4).

Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2001)

ISSN: 1525-447X

“Swingin’ Theory: The Blues Idiom as Vox Populi”

References


	See Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963) for a discussion of the colonized elites lack of social, political and economic impotence.


	. For example, Manning Marable in, “Religion and Black Protest Thought in African-American History,” describes it in the context of the Afri-U.S. church as, “Darkwater.”


	Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1976, 45.


	The Book of Jazz From Then to Now. New York: Bonanza Press, 1965, 16.


	“In Quest of Matthew Bondman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey”. C. L. R. James: His Life and His Work. Paul Buhle, ed. London: Allison & Busby Limited, 1986, 131.


	“Living With Music”. Shadow and Act. New York: Signet Books, 1966, 190.


	I argue that this attitude persists, as Hip - Hop/Rap has replaced Jazz as the dominant musical expression of Afri-U.S. mass popular youth culture.


	. Giants of Jazz: Billie Holliday with Lester Young. CD 53006.


	Levine, 237.


	Levine, 237.


	Music Is My Mistress. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1973.


	ibid, 88.