 |
Crossroad Blues
Jeffrey Melnick narrates a rich musical and ethnic history -- from a snide perspective.
By Chris Fujiwara
OCTOBER 25, 1999:
A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular
Song by Jeffrey Melnick (Harvard University Press), 276 pages,
$27.95.
Jeffrey Melnick tells us right off that he has a new approach to his volatile
subject. He takes black-Jewish relations in the entertainment industry not as a
"field of activity," but as a rhetorical construct, "a figure of speech, a way
of talking about many things -- including, but not limited to, the relationship
of African Americans and Jews." This promises a fairly sophisticated level of
analysis. It's disappointing, therefore, that what Melnick's study turns up is
largely the same old song of African-Americans getting ripped off by Jews,
merely transposed to the register of "discourse." For all Melnick's complexity,
he creates an impression of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen --
three of America's greatest songwriters -- that's not far from Alain Locke's
scurrilous characterization from 1936: "the Shylocks of Tin Pan Alley."
For a book of rhetorical analysis, A Right To Sing the Blues is
surprisingly flatfooted in its own rhetorical strategies. Melnick tends to
start with generalizations and abstractions, then proceed as if they had
already been substantiated, merely alluding to historical data that he has
neglected to provide. One of his key assertions is that "Jewish musicians
. . . learned to use their access [as Jews] to African Americans and
Black music as evidence of their racial health -- that is, of their whiteness."
But Melnick never shows convincingly why a Jew would have greater "access" (a
word he uses a lot, with increasingly sinister undertones) to black music than
any other listener. He tells us over and over that Berlin anxiously sought to
distance himself from African-Americans, but the composer's career and public
statements, as adduced by Melnick, fail to support this claim. One of the
book's refrains is that Gershwin used his Jewishness to bolster his credentials
as an interpreter of African-American music; the few quotes Melnick offers to
prove this point (mostly from Isaac Goldberg, Gershwin's biographer) don't
justify the weight he puts on it.
A tactic Melnick uses repeatedly, and distastefully, is to diminish the
stature and impugn the motives of Jewish composers through trivializing word
choices. Rhapsody in Blue is not composed, but "concocted." Gershwin's
field trip to South Carolina to research African-American music and folklore is
a simple-minded "going native" inspired by an earlier "public relations move."
Suggestions that Jewish religious tradition had an influence on
second-generation Jewish-American composers are dismissed as a "savvy
. . . rhetorical construct." Harold Arlen, who "would make much hay
out of" his cantor father's musical style, is doling out "mystical-genetic"
eyewash in citing it as an influence.
Melnick's snideness might go down easier if he offered any substantive
aesthetic criticism of these men's work. But although he sees fit to
tell us, for example, that "Gershwin's death at a youthful age no doubt
contributed to the inflated proclamations made about his agile talents,"
musical analysis is apparently outside Melnick's purview. In a chapter that
should be crucial to his argument, Melnick contributes nothing meaningful to
the question of the similarities between Jewish liturgical music and
African-American folk music. (He does hint that attempts to identify such
similarities may be part of a quasi-conspiratorial project to justify Jews'
theft of black music.) In his one attempt at musicological analysis -- a
tortured discussion of a quotation from "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless
Child" in Gershwin's "Summertime" -- Melnick shows a telling ignorance of the
function of quotation in music. According to him, "Gershwin's inventive
positioning makes it seem as if the African American spiritual is a product of
his own lullaby" by which the composer assumes "a Blacker-than-thou Blackness."
By the same logic, a jazz soloist who quotes from "Donna Lee" can be accused of
trying to steal credit from Charlie Parker.
The book has its strengths. Melnick's study of the history of Jewish blackface
performance is fascinating, if incoherent. He's good at questioning the use of
such concepts as folk, nation, and authenticity in the discourse about
African-American music. He writes incisively about how the concept of
"spontaneity" has functioned to allow whites to "depreciate African American
music as a primitive folk expression, while also enabling African Americans to
mark off the boundaries which, ostensibly, will protect their cultural stuff
from theft." For many readers, the book will be valuable simply as an
introduction to an endlessly rich and important area of social, ethnic, and
musical history. It's too bad the author has such an ax to grind.

|



|