In the first half of the twentieth century, Chicago's South Side was second only to Harlem as a center for African American art, music, and culture. Several important studies have been written on black music performed there, but they have focused mainly on jazz, blues, and gospel before 1930 or after 1950.Footnote 1 Two new books, one focusing on the work of black musicians in a variety of musical practices and institutions and another focusing on a single music institution, go a long way toward filling gaps in black music scholarship and challenging some of the myths about musical life on the South Side of Chicago. In The Black Musicians and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967, Amy Absher argues that black musicians were often leaders in the struggle against segregation and explores their work not only in relation to blues and jazz but also in the context of more neglected topics such as black classical musicians and the integration of the Chicago musicians’ union. Thomas Bauman, unlike Absher, looks at a much narrower range of practices and a shorter time period. In The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago's First Black-Owned Theater, he provides an account of the Pekin Theater from about 1904 until 1924, when it closed. Though less analytical than Absher's book, The Pekin is rich in detail about the world of Bronzeville, the original center of African American life in Chicago, and the life of its most important theatrical institution. Drawing creatively on reviews and programs, Bauman illustrates the importance of respectability and uplift as strategies for combating racism.
As Absher's title suggests, her main theme is not just black music but black musicians and their struggle against white racism and segregation. She identifies two main approaches to segregation, the fight for integration and the creation of a separate black cultural sphere, and explores the ways in which musicians and the community employed these strategies. Absher builds upon the idea that musicians are intellectuals who have unique communication skills, a forum for expression, and access to both black and white audiences. Thus, understanding musical resistance to segregation is crucial to understanding race relations in Chicago in general. Unlike many studies of music, Absher does not focus on a single genre or practice but instead examines the ways in which her themes of resistance to segregation played out in a variety of musical practices and institutions. Rather than labeling some music as liberating and other music as not, she focuses on the agency of musicians of many stripes, revealing the nuances of their struggles. As might be expected, she examines blues and jazz (the discussions of which are interesting), but perhaps more exciting are her analyses of black classical music practices, the development of black-owned venues, and the desegregation of the Chicago musicians’ union in the early 1960s. Absher finds that South Side debates about music were often informed by class conflicts between established blacks and more recent immigrants from the rural South. Overall, her depiction of struggles of race, class, and music is nuanced and insightful, and it helps elucidate the years between William Howland Kenney's account of Chicago jazz in the 1920s and George Lewis's history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).Footnote 2
Unlike many other accounts of black music in Chicago, Absher's includes a fascinating description of black classical musicians. Classical music was an important part of black musical practice that could be heard in churches, schools, and even at the Pekin Theater, the home of black musical comedy. Absher reports that some black musicians, like Milt Hinton, only embraced jazz and blues because professional classical performance opportunities were closed to them (78). Classical music also played an important role in the strategy of racial uplift. In fact, black elites and intellectuals of the time were often suspicious of black folk culture, which kept the newly arrived immigrant working classes “hopelessly mired in the social situation,” preventing “African Americans from becoming modern men and women” (40). R. Nathaniel Dett was a leading classical musician in Chicago who formed the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), which held its first convention in Chicago in 1919. Dett and the NANM can be seen as advocates for integration because they worked to create opportunities for black musicians beyond the usual black practices. However, they also can be viewed as advocates for a separate black cultural sphere by creating work specifically for African American musicians and fostering performance and educational opportunities in the South Side black community. Dett sought to help blacks reclaim their music from the “false and low ideals of popular minstrelsy” and foster a classical music that, like the works of his colleague Florence Price, was serious music that incorporated African American themes without being distorted by the flawed mirror of minstrelsy (41). Absher's account of Dett and other black classical musicians in Chicago reminds us of the lively musical diversity found in the African American community. She also reminds us that musical meanings are not simply fixed in musical artifacts; they are also produced by the actions of human agents.
The struggle against segregation created a dilemma for black musicians in Chicago. Absher clearly depicts this dilemma—whether to fight for integration or develop a separate cultural sphere—in her account of the desegregation of the Chicago musicians’ union. In 1902, black musicians opted to form their own union, AFM Local 208. Walter Dyett and other leading musicians “believed in autonomy as a way to oppose and condemn segregation,” and in many ways this choice worked for them (64). It provided work, certain benefits, and a sense of community that helped musicians develop as professional performers. However, as Absher states, “[T]he growth in power of the Black local may have had an unintended consequence in that it provided Petrillo [the leader of the white local] with the room to argue that segregation was ‘entirely satisfactory to the colored membership’” (64). By the 1950s, a number of black musicians became dissatisfied with Chicago's segregated unions. While the black local had provided work and benefits to many black musicians, members noted that some seemed to benefit more than others and that little of the work ever happened north of 22nd Street. Red Saunders and others argued against the fear that an integrated union would be “a new form of oppression that would reduce Black representation in the union and erase Black community identity” (125). Following the departure of Petrillo and after months of debate, Saunders and his colleagues succeeded in convincing the unions to integrate. The fascinating details of this debate portray how the struggle against segregation could also be a struggle against members of the black community who had successfully created a vibrant local culture in the face of oppression.
In a related discussion, Absher argues that Muddy Waters's early recordings similarly embodied this conflict. Waters's records thrived in part because they were released into the void created by the AFM ban on recording, which was supported by black union leaders. “To gain access to the segregated music market,” Absher writes, “musicians had to go against their union. The Chess brothers’ and Waters's act of resistance set a dangerous precedent, because it suggested that liberating the musicians from the racism of the city could not be accomplished using the tools of Black-led institutions, such as union organization” (88). This was a conundrum faced by many blacks in their struggles against segregation in Chicago.
Absher paints a compelling portrait of the social conditions of musicians struggling against segregation in Chicago, but her attention to musical details does not always attain the same excellent standard. For example, she anachronistically refers to the music of Frank Sinatra as “sweet jazz,” a term more commonly associated with Paul Whiteman and dance orchestras of the 1920s (108). She also relies heavily on the notion that the closing of Storyville in New Orleans was an important factor prompting the migration of New Orleans musicians to Chicago even though jazz historians and some New Orleans musicians dispute this claim.Footnote 3 These issues, however, do not detract from her overall argument.
Absher's work offers new insight on black music and culture in Chicago. However, there are times when she might have drawn connections to other scholarship in this area. In particular, she tells the story of class conflict between the old-guard middle-class urban elites, with their fondness for respectability, classical music, and mainline Protestantism, and more recent immigrants with their Pentecostalism, blues, and rural manners. The Pekin championed the values of the elite at the expense of the rural southern migrants. “Attending the Pekin,” Absher asserts, “was a demonstration of rank and social order that debased, rather than uplifted the poor because at its center was the intentional erasure of the working class from public representation in the ‘black belt’” (39). Migrants and elites both laughed at the Pekin's shows, but the migrants were there as laborers, and their ways were often the butt of the joke. Absher's argument would have been even richer had she drawn connections between class issues in the blues as identified by Robert Palmer and similar conflicts in church music discussed by Michael Harris and Jerma Jackson.Footnote 4
Like Absher's book, Thomas Bauman's The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago's First Black-Owned Theater makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on black music in Chicago, but where Absher examines a wide variety of musical practices, Bauman focuses on a single institution, the Pekin Theater. He explores both the world of nightlife that gave rise to this venue and the high regard for respectability that shaped the music and theater it presented. Although no scripts have survived, Bauman gleans telling information from programs and newspaper accounts. African American reviewers lauded the theater's respectability, so modern readers may be shocked to learn that blackface minstrelsy and “coon” songs were prominent in the theater's offerings. The prevalence of these forms raises interesting questions of how they functioned for black audiences at the time. While Bauman touches on these questions, the bulk of his research involves documenting the vast number of plays, songs, actors, managers, and other details that are the nuts and bolts of the Pekin's history.
In Chicago Jazz, Kenney states that music, politics, and vice were linked in important ways in early twentieth-century black Chicago.Footnote 5 Bauman's account both expands and complicates Kenney's assertion. Robert Motts, the owner of the Pekin, did, in fact, get his start running gambling games; Bauman therefore also describes this world and Motts's contemporaries such as “Mushmouth” Johnson and “Poney” Moore. He also provides an entertaining explanation of just how the policy racket worked. Bauman's account helps to clarify Motts's relation to vice by emphasizing the role that respectability played in the black belt. Respectability was so important that members of the established black middle class were referred to as the “respectables,” and it was with this group that Motts eventually aligned himself. “His whole-hearted commitment to his theater, “ Bauman affirms, “led to a decisive break with his gambling past and initiated his eventual assimilation into the ranks of the ‘respectables’ in Chicago's black community” (xiv). Bauman, like Absher, notes that black struggles against segregation also often involved debates about vice and propriety as well as conflict between the established urban black community and newly arrived migrants from the rural South.
Although the Pekin was originally financed with funds through Motts's connections to gambling and nightlife, the “Temple of Music” quickly became an engine of uplift and respectability that inspired imitations throughout the nation. The entire staff, including the management, ushers, stage crew, actors, and musicians, were black, bringing much needed jobs, money, and training into the neighborhood, and many Chicagoans spoke of the Pekin stock company as both an acting troupe and a training school for the next generation of African American thespians. It was an elegant theater, praised by black and white critics alike for its splendor and for its elevation of the African American race. As Ida Wells-Barnett proudly affirmed, it was “a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without any restrictions,” while at the same time it went well beyond the stereotypes of black entertainment in the eyes of contemporary black and white audiences (xiv). The entertainment included classical musicians, and the orchestra was praised for its excellence in music ranging from ragtime to grand opera (38).
Much of the Pekin's entertainment had its roots in blackface minstrelsy and “coon” songs. One of the strengths of Bauman's research is his detailed cataloging of the plays and songs that appeared there (included in lengthy appendixes). Although no scripts survive, the titles alone would, without some explanation, cause my students to shudder. Words like “coon” and “pickaninny” appear regularly, and titles such The Man from ’Bam, The Hottest Coon in Dixie, and Captain Rufus certainly bring to mind the plantation scenes from an earlier generation of minstrelsy. In fact, several of the stars of the Pekin stock company started out with blackface troupes, and they continued to perform in blackface at the Pekin, apparently much to the delight of black audiences and theater critics.
To explain this situation, Bauman invokes the distinction between the racial other and social other (xvii). Whereas white audiences could experience blackface characters as representative of a race from which they sought to distance themselves, Bauman argues that black audiences at the Pekin, especially the “respectables,” were able to experience these characters as representatives of the less-educated, newly arrived rural migrants. Citing Kevin Gaines, Bauman states that performances at the Pekin were “yet another cultural means through which northern black elites drew and maintained distinctions ‘between themselves and the black masses’”Footnote 6 (xvii). This theme is important, and it is unfortunate that Bauman only infrequently develops it as he catalogues the many plays, songs, actors, and musicians presented at the Pekin.
One of the most remarkable achievements of this theater was the Pekin stock company and orchestra, which created and performed dozens of original musical comedies and served as a forum and training group for many of the best black actors, directors, and musicians of the day. Most of Bauman's study is devoted to documenting this important and underappreciated body of work. As such, his study will be of particular interest to students of Chicago theater. Yet, as important as this chronicle is, the data calls out for greater analysis, and the significance of the Pekin does get overwhelmed at times by the welter of names, dates, and titles. It is helpful to read Bauman and Absher together because Bauman tells so much about what happened and Absher provides some sense of why.
Bauman tells of the wide variety of ragtime, classical, and other music performed at the Pekin, and he presents discussions of several musical examples; however, his book is more of a history of a theater than a detailed discussion of the actual music heard. Bauman's book will be an excellent resource for readers who want to know which songs were performed at the Pekin; those interested in the details of what that music sounded like and how it related to other music in the black community will want to look beyond it. In the end, Bauman's book provides an introduction to the cultural life of early twentieth-century black Chicago and a catalogue of and a monument to the many musical comedies created and performed at the Pekin. As such, it broadens our knowledge of black music in Chicago and paves the way for more research on this fascinating and relatively neglected area of black music and theater.
Absher and Bauman each make important contributions to research on black music in Chicago. Both highlight neglected musical forms, and both illuminate the complex racial and class struggles performed through the music. Absher's work is perhaps more successful, and it will be of use to a wider body of readers because her work frames a wider collection of black music and history with a compelling narrative of resistance to segregation and class conflict. Bauman's book will be of greater interest to specialists because of the wealth of detail he provides on the Pekin Theater. Both authors remind us that there is much more to black music than is sometimes imagined.
