The Blues
By 1860, there were roughly four million Africans enslaved in the United States. Forcibly transplanted to a new land, they brought with them a rich, African heritage—including songs. Adapted to…
Author: Michael Conklin
In what way would the music of savages be inferior to that of civilized man? – Hugues Panassie (Locke vs. Baraka).
Locke’s condescension of the spiritual’s inherent worth reaches its apogee when he claims the musical genre received its “highest possible recognition” when employed as thematic material for Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony…
The Misguided Principles of the Harlem Renaissance.
Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays (1990), edited by Floyd, places music at the epicenter of this period of cultural change. He argues that while the Harlem…
The “New Negro.”
Alain LeRoy Locke has been proclaimed as the “Dean of the Harlem Renaissance” for his conviction to cultivating cultural change in America. In 1925, he published the epoch-making anthology, The New Negro.…
How Does It Feel to be a Problem?
“How does it feel to be a problem?” African American intellectual, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, hereafter W.E.B. Du Bois, posited this query in his seminal text, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903.…
Fighting for Freedom Abroad…and at Home.
On February 17, 1919, a mass of nearly two thousand black soldiers triumphantly and stoically marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City in a tight formation reminiscent of the…
Welcome to Hearing Harlem!
The luster of twentieth-century America was seductive. The age of modernity was ushered in by the automobile, motion picture, radio, and transatlantic flight. The mores of the Victorian era were…
Hearing Harlem 