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“An Authentic Record of My Race”: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Vaughn Booker
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Abstract

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Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.

This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short film Black and Tan in the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movement Black, Brown and Beige in the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

Keywords

jazzAfrican American religionCome SundayraceHarlem Renaissance
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Winter 2015 , pp. 1 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2015

References

Notes

I am grateful toWallace Best, Kwami Coleman, Judith Weisenfeld, and the participants in the 2011-2012 American Religious History Workshop at Princeton University for their encouragement and critical feedback on earlier versions of this article.

1. Duke Ellington, “Black, Brown, and Beige” script, undated, in Ruth Ellington Collection, 1940–1991, Series 6—Lyrics, Scripts, and Notes, box 7, folder 5, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

2. Duke Ellington often announced the latter song as “Billy Strayhorn's ‘Take the “A” Train,’” citing his co-composer responsible for authoring this and other tunes often attributed solely to Ellington.

3. See the works of Ellington scholars Mark Tucker, Janna Tull Steed, and Harvey G. Cohen. I intend to focus here on works Ellington composed primarily during his highest commercial popularity.

4. Weisenfeld, Judith, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 5–6.Google Scholar

5. A “classical” African American Christianity was not necessarily primitive in Ellington's rendering because he did not depict black Christians as a primitively religious people. In contrast, his musical depictions of pre-Christian enslaved African religiosity and West African drumming and rhythm (regarded as the progenitor of modern American music) reflected his notion of their primitive sensuousness. Ellington introduced his 1940 composition “Ko-Ko” at his 1943 Carnegie Hall concert as “a little descriptive scene of the days that inspired jazz … think it was in New Orleans, and a place called ‘Congo Square’ where the slaves used to gather and do native and sensuous dances, religious dances.” But, seemingly in response to criticisms of primitivist representations of African-descended peoples and their history, Ellington even qualified his usage of the word “primitive.” In the 1956 musical allegory A Drum Is a Woman, he narrated the journey of Madam Zajj, the personification of rhythm, as she traveled throughout the world. On the track “Congo Square,” Ellington declared, “One by one, every head turns to the entrance of the most primitive woman. / This, of course, does not mean simple or elementary. / She is an exciting, ornately stimulating seductress with patterns of excitement and the power to hypnotize and enervate the will toward total abandonment. / This, if anybody, must be none other than Madam Zajj.” I consider this descriptive attempt to render “primitive” African-derived rhythms as foundational, complex, and bearing efficacious sway over bodily responses to be Ellington's method of divesting them of negative connotations and signifying their consequential historical presence, although they maintain persistent social and cultural complications that accompany this descriptor (not to mention the feminine gendering of rhythm versus the presumed masculinity of the person producing/in possession of the rhythm). Ultimately, Ellington's descriptive work serves to make sophisticated a category often deployed to deride African and African American people and culture.

6. Huggins, Nathan, Harlem Renaissance, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10–11.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 77.

8. Hutchinson, George, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 182.Google Scholar

9. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 10–11.

10. Howland, John, “Ellington Uptown”: Ellington, Duke, Johnson, James P., and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 55–56.Google Scholar Locke; The Negro and His Music, 94–98.

11. Tucker, Mark, “The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 112.Google Scholar

12. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 72–73.

13. Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 182–84.

14. Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm, March 1931, 20–22.

15. “Duke Ellington Defends His Music,” Sunday Post, July 1933.

16. Gilbert, Gama, “‘Hot Damn!’ Says Ellington When Ranked with Bach,” Philadelphia Record , May 17, 1935.Google Scholar

17. Zunser, Florence, “‘Opera Must Die, ’ Says Galli-Curci! Long Live the Blues!” New York Evening Graphic Magazine , December 27, 1930, 45.Google Scholar

18. Mark Tucker notes that Ellington reflected often on the “Negro history” he learned as a student, a type of learning about race pride modeled on Carter G. Woodson's historical project. Musicians who kept alive the tradition of the spirituals, such as Eva Jessye, were also essential to signifying African American religion in a dated, “folk” light at the same time they wished to preserve this tradition as a “classical” form.

19. Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out.”

20. Ibid.

21. Porter, Eric, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xvi.Google Scholar

22. W. E. B. Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 as a response to his fellow University of Pennsylvania faculty, who asked that he prove, “on an academic basis,” that African Americans were responsible for the “bad government, prostitution, and criminality” in Philadelphia. Most black Philadelphians lived in the city's seventh ward, and Du Bois collected data on their living conditions and habits over the next fifteen months. Du Bois's specific findings on African American church cultures were linked to an historical assessment of black religion in America in his 1900 essay “The Religion of the American Negro.” In this essay, Du Bois asserted a natural religiosity for African Americans in attempting to explain the mass acceptance of Christianity by black slaves. Du Bois stated, “The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a religious animal—a being of that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches.” Du Bois made this historical case to then assert that there was a new type of African American, living in northern cities, who signaled the end of the older, naturally religious type who held onto the “vague superstitions” of an African past (and this latter type was to be found among the “unlettered” blacks, mostly in the South). This new, more cynical African American in northern cities left the churches for gambling halls and enjoyed the more “sensual” vices in addition to criminality. Du Bois's sociological outlines of the condition of African Americans in the North and South—the North representing black cynicism and vice with its loss of “religion” as the superstitious and ecstatic, the Southern blacks capturing that “authentic” religiosity—served a definite political purpose: the highlighting of social conditions, the types of human beings these social conditions produced, and their prospects for fuller incorporation into American civilization. Social change, for Du Bois, would elevate the Negro in the South beyond a reliance on unenlightened forms of religion and curb the urban immoralities of the northern Negro, for both were pathologies—in Du Bois's mind—stemming from the history of slavery and of living amid Jim Crow inequality. By treating African American religion as a subject of academic inquiry, Du Bois inaugurated a tradition of study that challenged sociology's sole dependence on “empirical” observations of people and subsequent analysis by incorporating their cultural productivity into discussions of social policy. According to his autobiography, Du Bois committed to the collection of facts for formulating public policy while vested in black social justice: “I was going to study the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and research, work up to any valid generalizations which I could.” See Bois, W. E. B. Du, “The Religion of the American Negro,” in Bois, W. E. B. Du: On Sociology and the Black Community, eds. Green, Dan S. and Driver, Edwin D. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 220;Google Scholar Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 154;Google Scholar Bois, W. E. B. Du, Dusk of Dawn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 51.Google Scholar

23. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 3–4.

24. Du Bois stressed the idea that a different cultural character was developing in the urban North than what he observed in rural black religious communities. His characterization of religion in the South was fleshed out most famously in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, primarily in the chapter “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” It was in rural religious spirituals and ecstatic religious practices (which he termed “the frenzy” in his study of a Christian revival service) that Du Bois essentialized a religious character for African Americans. Spirituals—religious songs created by black slaves—were “the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.” The se songs came from “African forests, where [their] counterpart can still be heard,” and the “tragic soul-life” of American slavery shaped their contemporary content as “the one true expression of a people's sorrow, despair, and hope.” See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 192.

25. Edward Ellington, K., Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 12–15.Google Scholar

26. Tucker, “The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,” 117–18.

27. Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 17.

28. Cohen, Harvey G., Duke Ellington's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 338–39,CrossRefGoogle Scholar 449; Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 113; Hudson, The odore R. “Duke Ellington's Literary Sources,” American Music (Spring 1991): 23.Google Scholar

29. See Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African- American Race Histories (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 35–36, 223–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For some examples of this prevalent theme in African American Christianity, see the Reverend James Morris Webb’s The Black Man, The Father of Civilization, Proven by Biblical History (1919) and Drusilla Dunjee Houston's Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926). Additionally, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion's Star of Zion weekly newspaper published a “Questions and Answers in Negro History” column in 1925 by George Wells Parker, who wrote on the topic of African presence in ancient civilizations (most notably, a pamphlet titled Children of the Sun) and co-founded the nationalist organization, Hamitic League of the World.

30. Franceschina, John, Duke Ellington's Music for the The atre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2001), 167;Google Scholar Peress, Maurice, “My Life with ‘Black, Brown, and Beige’” Black Music Research Journal (Autumn 1993): 153.Google Scholar

31. George, Don, Sweet Man: The Real Duke Ellington (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1981), 187–88.Google Scholar

32. See Cohen, Duke Ellington's America, 102–5.

33. Steed, Janna Tull, Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999), 53–54.Google Scholar

34. Johnson, James Weldon and Johnson, J. Rosamond, The Books of American Negro Spirituals, 2 vols. (New York: Viking Press, 1925/1926), 13.Google Scholar

35. Ibid.

36. Weisenfeld discusses early-twentieth-century arranger, composer, and conductor of religious music, Eva Jessye: “Whereas Du Bois saw spirituals as ‘redemptive fragments of a fading stage of folk life’ that needed to be given place of distinction in African American cultural memory, Jessye believed their dramatic performance to be a critical tool in the social, political, and spiritual development of African Americans.” See Weisenfeld, Judith, “‘Truths That Liberate the Soul’: Eva Jessye and the Politics of Religious Performance,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance, ed. Griffith, R. Marie and Savage, Barbara Dianne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 224.Google Scholar

37. Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name, 61.

38. Steed, Duke Ellington, 53.

39. This is my best interpretation of theHall Johnson Choir's lyrics while the Ellington band plays. Steed writes, “The choir continues to sing, seeming to intone the sound of church bells or a repeated two-word phrase that is indiscernible.” Steed, Duke Ellington, 54.

40. The Black, Brown, and Beige premiere concert in 1943 at Carnegie Hall featured preview pieces in Down Beat magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Following the premiere, largely negative reviews characterized the highly anticipated, long-form work as an unfortunate departure from the “authentic” jazz of Ellington's earlier, shorter dance compositions. Mixed reviews criticized the “Black” movement (which contained the instrumental “Come Sunday”) but appreciated “Brown” and “Beige.” Some criticism rested on the Ellington orchestra's performance that night, others on the supposed pretentions of Ellington himself. Attendant with the emergence of professional jazz criticism, debates over Ellington's performance and composition persisted into the 1970s as he came to occupy a seat in the jazz pantheon and as critics and musicians discerned his stylistic and compositional influences upon subsequent jazz artists. The first article analyzing the musical structure of the entire work, based on various recordings and transcriptions, appeared in the British journal Jazz and Blues in 1974. See Mark Tucker's compilation of Black, Brown, and Beige criticism in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 153–204.

41. Leonard Feather and Maurice Peress, Liner Notes to Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige, Louie Bellson and His All-Star Orchestra, Jazz Heritage Inc., 513633L, 1994, compact disc. Harvey Cohen provides a slightly different version of this introduction from an undated and unpublished narrative sketch (ca. late 1942 / early 1943): “Came Sunday. With all the whites inside / The church, their less fortunate brothers / Emerged from everywhere to congregate / Beneath a tree. Huddled there, they passed / The Word of God around in whispers … / When the whites inside lifted voices / In joyous song … / The blacks outside would hum along, / Adding their own touches … weaving melodic, / Harmonic, rhythmic patterns. / Thus the spiritual was born. / Highly emotional worshipping of God / In SONG” (217).

42. Ellington, “Black, Brown, and Beige” script.

43. While appreciating the vocalist for “Come Sunday,” the jazz critic Nat Hentoff was dismissive of the song's message (likely a reflection of his nontheistic personal orientation). In his Black, Brown, and Beige review, for which he rated the album “a major jazz work,” Hentoff wrote, “What makes this set most valuable are the simple, fervent vocals of Mahalia Jackson. She first burns the banality from the lyrics of Come Sunday and at the close of the record adds a moving interpretation of The Twenty-third Psalm.” Despite the later popular acclaim for Mahalia Jackson's vocal rendition of “Come Sunday,” a 1959 review of Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige recording of the same year was generally dismissive of Jackson's involvement in the project, characterizing her singing as “inappropriate” and often unintelligible while deeming the text “troubling in that [the words] exemplify the preposterous gulf that always seems to divide jazz music from its ‘lyrics.”’ See Nat Hentoff, “Black, Brown and Beige Review,” Hi Fi & Music Review (November 1958): 98–99; Robert D. Crowley, “Black, Brown, and Beige after 16 Years,” in Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 181.

44. Author's transcription. From Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige—featuring Mahalia Jackson, Columbia, EJC55430, 1958 [1999], compact disc.

45. See Matthew 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–34.

46. Anderson, Paul Allen, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 225.Google Scholar

47. Johnson, James Weldon, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1927 [1955]), 5.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 6–7.

49. Blount, Marcellus, “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,” PMLA 107, Special Topic: Performance (May 1992): 586.Google Scholar

50. Johnson, God's Trombones, 8–9.

51. “Is That Religion?” was recorded earlier in 1930 by Cab Calloway and his Orchestra, featuring “call-and-response” vocals from a chorus. According to a Chicago Defender article in April 1931, the Calloway version of “Is That Religion?” was “adjudged one of the best discs of the month.” Pittsburgh Courier reader Annette Brown wrote to the paper that “Is That Religion?”, as performed by Belton's Florida Syncopators, was one of her favorite tunes. See “Going Backstage with the Scribe,” Chicago Defender, April 4, 1931, 5; Snelson, Floyd G., Jr., “Duke Continues to Lead in Big Courier Contest; Others Gain,” Pittsburgh Courier , September 26, 1931, 11.Google Scholar

52. Reed, Teresa L., The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 77–78.Google Scholar

53. Author's transcription. From Duke Ellington, Early Ellington: The Original Decca Recordings, Verve, B000003N42, 1994, compact disc.

54. My People was first featured in the Century of Negro Progress exhibition in Chicago in the summer of 1963. Although attendance reached about one hundred thousand, this number was well short of the anticipated eight hundred thousand attendees that summer. Reviews of My People appeared in Variety magazine, the Chicago Defender, and Jazz magazine. See Cohen, Duke Ellington's America, 392–98. Coverage of the exhibition appeared in major black press outlets as well as a January 18, 1964, New York Amsterdam News review and a February 13, 1964, Los Angeles Sentinel review of the album. Jesse H. Walker, “The atricals” columnist for the Amsterdam News, wrote that the album is “at its best … when it's featuring straight jazz” but that “it becomes a bit pretentious when it dovetails into social comment—with the possible exception of Duke's ‘King Fit The Battle of Alabam.’” In the Sentinel, Stanley G. Robertson wrote that My People “will rank on a par with Duke's milestone, ‘Black, Brown and Beige’. It will be as absorbing as his 1957 television special, ‘A Drum Is A Woman’. And the oldtimers who were privileged to see it, will place this epic on the same level as his 1941 musical, ‘Jump For Joy.”’

55. Cohen, Duke Ellington's America, 393.

56. Author's transcription. From Duke Ellington, My People, Legacy, AK-52759, 1963 [1992], compact disc. On phonograph preachers, see Martin, Lerone A., Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014).Google Scholar

57. Blount, “The Preacherly Text,” 583–84.

58. This speech echoed the content of earlier public statements Ellington made about African American history, including a February 9, 1941, address titled “We, Too, Sing ‘America”’ (influenced by Ellington’s friendship with Langston Hughes), which he delivered at the Scott Methodist Church's Annual Lincoln Day Services in Los Angeles. The California Eagle, a prominent African American newspaper, published the majority of the speech on February 13, 1941. If this 1941 audience interacted with Ellington in call-and-response fashion, then it is reasonable to suspect that he attempted to recreate and represent a scene common to most African American congregations. See Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader, 146–84.

59. Author's transcription. From Ellington, My People. Harvey Cohen describes this monologue as Ellington adopting “the persona of a ‘soap box speaker’ as he listed black values and achievements in an impassioned preacher's cadence.” Cohen, Duke Ellington's America, 393. My contention is that, while secular, public speeches in African American communities may have elicited similar “call-and-response” participation by gathered crowds, “secular” black oratory has its origins in religious black preaching. Similarly, political messages were likely to emanate from church pulpits, so there is little need to overlook the deeper religious content and story in this public rhetorical style.

60. In 2007, R&B artist Angie Stone included excerpts from Ellington's speech in a track also named “My People” on her 2007 album The Art of Love and War. James Ingraham sings a verse in the song, which states, “People, my people, keep striving / The re's a greater master plan / We need to know our history / We were kings and queens of the greatest dynasty.”

61. Watts, Jerry, ed., Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2004), 110.Google Scholar

62. Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name, 4.