Whether reflecting on the music of Barack Obama's presidency, the soundtracks to mainstream films such as Selma or the Civil Rights-era gospel currently opening Rev. Dr William Barber's revitalised Poor People's Campaign, what could be termed ‘civil rights music’ is inescapably recognisable to the ear, yet difficult to define. These sounds of freedom are made ever more poignant, at the time of writing, by recent violent manifestations of racial tensions in Charlottesville, Virginia, and across the USA, and as scholars and activists rightly question the very notion of a ‘post-civil rights-era’. All of which makes studies such as Reiland Rabaka's latest monograph both timely and necessary.
Civil Rights Music firstly explores some of the theoretical underpinnings of Rabaka's sociology and musicology of ‘civil rights music’. Rabaka borrows concepts from Africana theory, Michel Foucault, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the latter undoubtedly Rabaka's most profound inspiration, preparing the reader for a much more complex study than the reasonably penetrable text that actually follows. The monograph is then divided into three chapters arguing, reasonably, but hardly originally, that much black popular music can, and should, be considered ‘civil rights music’. Each chapter shines a light on a particular genre – namely gospel, rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll– and discusses a selection of musicians from these fields whose careers and music have special resonance in the context of the struggle for civil rights. By focusing on these genres and musicians collectively, Rabaka aims to foreground the ‘often inexplicable place where black popular music and black popular movements meet and merge’ (p. 2). Inspired in large part by his own grandmother, Rabaka argues that music for African Americans always means more than simply music and, as he reiterates several times, that there existed a ‘we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say’ aesthetic in black popular music between 1954 and 1965, a standard, if simplistic, periodisation of the Civil Rights Movement from Brown vs Board of Education to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Rabaka's text sits well with other Movement scholars who have turned to the cultural front and aesthetics of civil rights activism, and he should be applauded for his multidisciplinary and bottom-up approach to the soundtracks to the African American freedom struggle. However, there are many issues with his work. Firstly, historians will question how the political, cultural and social meaning of ‘civil rights music’ has changed over time and place, as well as for different audiences. Little is said on the trajectory, for example, of gospel music and freedom songs from the March on Washington to their performance inside the White House during Obama's presidency. The transition of such music from act of protest to canonical American popular song has inevitably altered what it means for a variety of audiences, activists and musicians. Similarly, several analytical terms are used so uncritically to describe certain musical styles – take, for example, the ‘organic’, ‘earthy’ and ‘rickety’ sound of classic gospel (p. 6) – that they might well raise the eyebrows of some musicologists. Finally, while more studies on what Rabaka terms the ‘rank and filers’ (p. ix) of both the Movement and civil rights musical culture are certainly required, Civil Rights Music rarely allows these unsung individuals to speak for themselves, or at least to give insight into their own complex relationship with, or even definition of, ‘civil rights music’.
Civil Rights Music succeeds in joining several dots between W.E.B. Du Bois's conceptualisation of ‘sorrow songs’, the various strands of secular and sacred black popular music associated indirectly or directly with the Civil Rights Movement and their musical and political legacies in hip-hop culture, which the author has well explored elsewhere. Still, throughout the volume, Rabaka seems more concerned with delineating a distinctly black aesthetic across the many musical styles he somewhat arbitrarily defines as ‘civil rights music’ than elucidating how such music was produced, consumed or, indeed, utilised directly by the Movement itself. This is surprising, considering that his topic offers such fertile terrain for research which other writers have well addressed.
More could have been said of how Mahalia Jackson delicately balanced the expectations of Movement activists, the church and her commercial backers, or how Chuck Berry regularly broke the colour line at segregated concerts with music inspired by white country artists as much as jazz and blues, or the multifaceted political world surrounding James Brown, who astonishingly barely receives any real attention in Rabaka's text. These gaps are most revealingly demonstrated by Rabaka's chapter on rock ’n’ roll, which ends up at best reiterating, and at worst oversimplifying, literature on the appropriation, indeed, occasionally outright theft, of songs by black artists by both white musicians and the overwhelmingly white music industry. The case can certainly be made that even exploited black rock ’n’ rollers such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino contributed in their own ways to what Rabaka terms the Movement's ‘soundtracks’, but little evidence is given here as to how they were received or appreciated as such by activists, the public at large or those involved with making and selling black popular music. In reality, this is a more complex story requiring a more nuanced retelling.
How and why those marchers kept singing the same freedom songs or how music sustained or articulated the Movement's broader aims are important questions for understanding the period in question, evaluating the value of music in social movements and, significantly, thinking about how activism and music might intersect in the troubled era under Obama's successor. However, Rabaka does not deal with the important dissident voices: those who did and do not associate black popular music with the struggle for civil rights in the USA. Considering the backlash many feel towards the overly nostalgic remembering and reimagining of Movement history – a process in which music plays an important emotional role, most notably seen in documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize, which itself was an inspiration for Rabaka – could have provided a pertinent counter-narrative to the author's main argument. Indeed, it could be mistakenly understood after reading Civil Rights Music that practically all black popular music of the period was unambiguously ‘civil rights music’.
Rabaka's text provides useful and speedy reading for introducing the topic at hand – and a valuable teaching resource with its bibliography standing at 45 pages, nearly one-fifth of the entire monograph – but unfortunately does not arrive at any useful definitions as to what does, or does not, qualify as ‘civil rights music’; nor does it pose deeper questions about who does the defining.
