Sidewalker Productions

Black music is so intertwined with the wider history of Amercian music that the story of the one is to a great extent the story of the other. Everything runs along the color line, As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the The Soul of Black Folk. Still, it's worth asking why the music of 10 percent of the population should have had such influence. In 1939, a Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein tried tried to give an answer, in a paper titled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music." Great music in the European tradition, young Bernstein declared, had grown organically from national sources, both in a "material" sense (folk tunes serving as sources for composition) and in a "spiritual" sense (folkish music speaking for the ethos of a place). Bernstein's two-tiered conception, which acknowledges in equal measure music's autonomy and its social function, makes a good stab at explaining why black music conquered the more open-minded precincts of white America. First, it made a phenomenal sound. The characteristic devices of African-American musicking - the bending and breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound - opened new dimensions in musical space, a realm beyond the written notes. Second, black music compelled attention as a document of spiritual crisis and renewal. It memorialized the wound at the heart of the national experience - the crime of slavery - and it transcended that suffering with acts of individual self-expression and collective affirmation. Thus, black music fulfilled Bernstein's demand for a "common American musical material."

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.