Black History Month -- Week 2

This week we feature items from the collection that deal with the performing arts: music, film, and theatre.

From Cultural Codes: Makings of a Black Music Philosophy: An Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop by William C. Banfield.  

     The blues is the first great Black American music form with its own unique musical language, structure, practice, style, ethos, and philosophy, complete with cultural mythologies and cosmology and a form that provides a vehicle for inventive, individual creative musical expression.  It is as well an openly social form that represents the freedom and desire to speak what you want about your experience, which is universally adopted and understood as a form that evokes and contains this as "existential musical meaning."  It was the first popular music form that the world could point to and say, "Black people, they created that."  This is why it is so fundamentally important in the historical quest for definition and identity in Black American culture.  (p.101-102.)

You will find this Cultural Codes among the displayed books on the desk between the stairs and the circulation counter on the main level.  If you look for it after this week, you will find it at call number ML3479 .B364 2010.

Scott Joplin (1867-1917), known for his many ragtime compositions, was trained and composed in the classical tradition as well. His largest works are the operas A Guest of Honor and Treemonisha.  This photo by an unknown photographer is from about 1907.

Learn more about Scott Joplin by clicking here.

You can hear his own pianola recording of The Maple Leaf Rag here , and Solace (my favorite rag) here .

Ma Rainey (1886-1939) was an important blues singer and the first woman blues singer to be recorded professionally.  From a musical family, she started touring at a young age with minstrel and vaudeville shows.  (Photo, by an unknown photographer, is in the public domain.)

Read a short biography of Ma Rainey at biography.com .

Hear her sing Prove It On Me Blues  by clicking here .  (If you click nothing else, click that.  It's terrific.)

Bill Robinson (1878-1949). Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1933.

Want to see some unbelievable dancing?  BillBojanglesRobinson.youtube.com

From Ossie Davis' Preface to  
The Impact of Race:  Theatre and Culture by Woodie King, Jr.
 

     ...Black Theatre is itself little more than a figment of a dreamer's imagination.  Still, the more it doesn't exist, the more we love it and defend it, and argue about it, and fight over it, and promote it, and tell ourselves great big lies about it existing--mostly in the eye and in the heart of the beholder--what it means and what it's all about and why its presence is absolutely essential to our status as a people.. . .

     Someday we will prevail, and we Black folks will understand why we must ultimately come into control of the images we want the world to know us by; we will come to respect and depend on our own Black Theatre, which will have something more to offer than genius and raw gumption, good intentions and fly-by-night productions.  We'll have stable, respectable, black middle-class institutions owning and operating their own theatres from one end of the country to the other.  Our playwrights and our performers will join our musicians and our athletes as carriers of the message of black artistic excellence.

Ossie Davis, 2003

This portrait of Ira Aldridge is from about 1830.  Aldridge is dressed as the character Mungo from The Padlock by Isaac Bickerstaff.  Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge emigrated to England about 1827.  He performed many roles, including Shakespeare's Othello and Aaron (from Titus and Andronicus), for audiences in London and throughout Europe until his death in 1867.

 For more information about Ira Aldridge, see Ira Aldridge .


There is interesting information about African-American silent films in the blogs: www.amoeba.com, and normanstudios.org .

Actor Rex Ingram (1895-1969). In costume from The Green Pastures. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.

You'll find a biography of Rex Ingram at aaregistry.org

Ossie Davis (1917-2005).  Photo 1951, by Carl Van Vechten.  

 

See an impressive list of the film and TV apprearance of  Mr. Davis at imdb.com .  This, of course, is only a fraction of his life's work as an activist, actor and writer.  You can read more about him at georgiaencyclopedia.com .

All photographs by Carl Van Vechten are from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/vanvechten/index.html, and are in the public domain.