Still standing in the shadows

By the end of the 1920s, African-American music was at the centre of popular culture, not just in the United States but around the world. Jazz was a “viral” phenomenon, that spread with startling speed.

It grew as another virus declined. It’s often overlooked that lynching was considered a photographic sport in certain parts of the United States, with white faces gathered round contorted bodies. Lynching declined at the end of the 1920s, partly thanks to Mary Talbert’s Anti-Lynching Crusade and Jessie Daniel Ames’s Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

But America had found a new way of perpetrating violence against black bodies, in sport and, less obviously, in music, and by the time Joe Louis came along in the early 1930s the prize ring would become the legal arena for the conflict of black skin and white. For the moment, though, Louis Armstrong was the country’s most prominent African-American, having made, in 1928, the Hot Sevens recordings that remain perhaps the pinnacle of jazz art.

Snow never achieved Armstrong’s fame (though he admired her generously). She grew up in a musical family in Tennessee and could play saxophone, clarinet, banjo, accordion, guitar, violin, cello and double bass as well, but significantly she isn’t placed among the instrumentalists in the 1934 photograph.

Like JC Owens, known as Jesse, who was breaking high-school sprint records and preparing for greatness at the Berlin Olympiad, she would also encounter Adolf Hitler. Caught in Denmark at the start of the Second World War, Snow was interned by the Nazi occupiers as a representative of an inferior race. The experience scarred her physically and mentally, but Snow continued performing until her death in 1956 (one year after the revolutionary Charlie Parker breathed his last), when she came offstage at the Palace Theatre in New York and collapsed with a stroke.

The year Snow was born, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke out against lynching, but declined to make any reference to the practice when speaking in the South. The year she died, almost 100 Congressman signed the Southern Manifesto protesting against the desegregation of education.

Snow might have wondered how much had really changed.

White America, and then Europe, quickly learned to rely on black athletes for excellence. Both continents so thoroughly took to African-American music that when the Mobo Awards (dedicated to music of black origin) come to Glasgow for the first time on Wednesday , it is tempting to ask: is there any other kind?

There is, of course, but its musical blood is now thoroughly mixed. Jazz, like the Spanish flu which would kill 25 million people in a two year period, came out of America in 1918, a year after the first recordings. Early opponents of jazz made an unconscious connection between the pandemic and this feverish new music with its convulsive dance style. These were the very qualities that attracted young audiences, for whom the First World War had broken down tired social conventions. Dance is a good barometer of social change.

By 1929 jazz had completely reshaped vernacular music with its hot rhythms and blaring solos and created an immediate divide between pop (which effectively meant global music of black origin) and local or folk styles.

It’s a distinction that persists to this day. Even though black people often remained economically and socially disenfranchised, their music had taken the cultural high ground.

 The purging of Storyville

 What took jazz from the ghetto to the mainstream so quickly? There is a small historical explanation. Storyville, New Orleans’ red light district, was “purged” in 1917, which meant a large number of people who had helped engender the new style of music were suddenly let loose into America’s bloodstream.

American soldiers brought early jazz recordings to Europe in 1917, and American orchestras followed in the hectic inter-war years, when Europe hungered for fresh aesthetic experiences. But this doesn’t explain the specific appeal of black music, or its underlying connotations.

The American literary critic Leslie A Fiedler once argued that miscegenation, or interracial sex, is the defining drama of American life. But American music is now so thoroughly multi-racial that you wonder why critics and fans still agonise over Michael Jackson’s whitening or Prince’s hybridising of R’n’B and rock.

Incremental legislation and a corresponding erosion of prejudice helped deliver the US presidency to Barack Obama. Even if it had taken 150 years from emancipation, and 40 from the end of legal segregation in the South, it was a logical evolution.

The other two most prominent African-Americans of the election period were Michael Jackson, who effectively redefined “otherness” for a whole generation, and the mumbling, shambling figure of Muhammad Ali, once the male acme of “black is beautiful”, now battered to a standstill in the gladiatorial lists and, more significantly, reduced to near-silence.

In a once-influential 1965 book called Sex and Racism in America, the poet and scholar Calvin C Hernton, who was professor of African-American Studies at Oberlin College, established a hierarchy of colour and gender that put the African-American male at the bottom of the totem pole. The powerful white male and the desirable but untouchable white female stood predictably at the top, while the black woman derived some value from her combined utility, allure and relative absence of physical threat. Hernton developed his argument in Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-ups (1966)

But shortly before Hernton’s death in 2001, another scholar, Ben Arogundade, argued that amid all Hernton’s sociological, economic, political and cultural arguments, simple physical attractiveness had been overlooked, claiming “Black beauty remains a cause without a portfolio.”

Arogundande accepted that many battles had been won: emancipation, education, economic betterment. “But beauty is also a battle. And the right to be beautiful and to be acknowledged as such whoever you are, wherever you are from is not so much a folly as a human-rights issue. In writing the history of the black experience, did we forget something important? Did we forget about beauty?”

Amnesia may not be the problem. Perhaps the question has been guiltily buried away, resurfacing in unconscious and troubling ways. It certainly takes central place in Posing Beauty, in which Obama campaign biographer Deborah Willis attempts to trace the history of self-presentation and self-representation in black culture.

Its strong, simple cover is a monochrome portrait, taken in the 1970s, of the model Susan Taylor a stalwart of the American monthly magazine Essence, “Where Black Women Come First”. Taylor’s shaven head and large, “tribal” hoop earrings are now perhaps ­assimilated as fashion statements, but would once have been regarded as transgressive and dangerous. Look at the photograph of Isaac Hayes, with shaven head, shades and a wildly striped shirt, taking calls in the Stax office, a flipside version of the conventional record executive. Look at Ray Charles, ranked number 10 by Rolling Stone in 2004 in their list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Look at Josephine Baker, the celebrated dancer, nicknamed the “Black Pearl”, and the first African American female to star in a major motion picture.

Then there’s James Brown and Muhammad Ali at a parade in Chicago in 1968, Brown wearing a loud, spotted shirt with his hair straightened and slicked back.

Hair, or its absence, is perhaps our most potent and straightforward signifier of beauty: overt but not overtly sexual, and easily changed -- straightened, bleached, dyed, Afro’ed, dreadlocked, cornrowed. Billie Holiday’s gardenia, which actually covered a damaged part of her scalp, has become essential to our understanding of her. In a similar way, Tina Turner’s leonine wigs cover up hair that was drastically thinned by a faulty chemical process, while the most interesting thing about Jackson’s appearance wasn’t the plastic nose or the pale skin -- whether deliberately bleached or the result of vitiligo hardly matters -- but that strange, androgynous hairdo. You understood what Aretha Franklin meant when she sang (You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman -- she meant: you turn me on, I enjoy sex with you -- but for her original, 1960s audience Sister Aretha was also understood to mean “natural” in the sense of “unprocessed”. African-American doctoral students used to argue passionately about whether it was possible to be a black nationalist with straightened hair.

 More than just music

 How beauty, male and female, is understood and culturally processed is a profound and subtle business. When Kanye West rudely yanked a microphone away from award winner Taylor Swift earlier this month at the MTV Video Music Awards to rant Beyonce’s praises, it wasn’t just about the music. In the same way, the Mobo awards are always about visual style as much as about music. West’s outburst reenacted a persistent white American nightmare: the frail, pale white woman threatened by the black male celebrating the greater sexual potency of the black woman. Who says the racial dramas of American life have been quelled?

The earliest image in Posing Beauty is a hand-written notice from 1863 about an escaped female house-slave called Dolly. Her “owner” Louis Manigault includes a cropped photograph of the woman, apparently from a carte de visite he had printed to show her off to friends, taking pride in his concubine. Manigault says nothing about her domestic skills but describes her as “rather good looking, with a good set of teeth” and suggests that she may have been “enticed off by some White Man”. No need to point out the power of this appearing at the head of a book that ends with an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Michelle Obama, head turned away, hair swept back, looking like a Nile queen.

But Willis’s book mixes profound observation with some extraordinary omissions. Surely Playboy magazine stands as prominently as Ebony or Sports Illustrated in the cultural construction of beauty, and yet Willis doesn’t mention it at all. Not until March 1965 did Hugh Hefner’s magazine run an African-American centrefold -- the light-skinned Jennifer Jackson. Not until 1990 and Renee Tenison was there a black Playmate of the Year -- seven years after Vanessa L Williams became the first black Miss USA. (The first black African Miss World, the Nigerian Agbani Darego, was crowned in 2001.) Nor does Willis find room for any of Robert Mapplethorpe’s fiercely eroticised images of black males.

Charlie Parker and James Brown, Cab Calloway and John Coltrane, Little Willie John, Little Richard, Robert Johnson and Duke Ellington: the history of black American music has both its victims (Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Dinah Washington) and its survivors (Prince, Etta James). All, though, share certain common threads of suffering. These coalesce, arguably, in the shape of the late Sammy Davis Jr, who is another inexplicable omission from Willis’s book. By his own rueful admission, being a one-eyed black Jew with a thirst for liquor he was always at a handicap in the entertainment steeplechase, but Davis had a genius that brings us almost full circle. Not only was he a great singer and a funny man but he was also an instinctive dancer, one of the few vaudevillians who sustained the connection between jazz and dance into the television age.

Davis’s career began at the age of three, and by 1959 he was a member of the Sinatra circle known as The Summit or, with staggering insensitivity, The Clan, but known to the world at large as The Rat Pack.

But for half his life, Davis was a devoted photographer and a dogged chronicler of the years when African-American entertainment intersected with the civil rights movement and the liberal wing of the white establishment. However, he felt slighted by the Kennedy administration and eventually embraced (quite literally) Richard Nixon.

This was not the most controversial kiss of the singer’s career. Twice, he was credited with the first inter-racial kiss on American network television, once with Carroll O’Connor in All in the Family, and once more famously when he kissed Nancy Sinatra in the 1967 TV special Movin’ with Nancy. He remains a complex and troubling figure, quickly marginalised by the rise of Tamla Motown and by a new generation of more politically radical and nationalistic black actors. He is, though, the god-uncle of a generation of acts such as P Diddy, Lil’ Kim and Kanye West.

Between the so-called Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and now, four generations of African-American entertainers have acted out versions of the same fatal and fateful glamour: admired, but abused; desired, but guiltily so; consumed and either discarded or destroyed. The lynch mob may have given way to the bad review or the critical backlash but the underlying violence of white appreciation is never far from the surface. It is worth re-reading the words of the mixed-race poet Jean Toomer, the most radical and innovative voice of the Harlem Renaissance, whose grandfather was the first African-American to become governor of a US state (Louisiana, for just 35 days, in 1872-73). In the 1920s, Toomer wrote a short portrait that sums up the deep ambiguities of black beauty, violence and desire suspended like a blues chord:

Hair -- braided chestnut,

coiled like a lyncher’s rope,

Eyes -- fagots,

Lips -- old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath -- the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

of black flesh after flame.

Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present by Deborah Willis is published by WW Norton on October 20, priced £35.