| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. By Paul Allen Anderson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. x, 335 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8223-2577-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8223-2591-8.)

Paul Allen Anderson's rich and dense study carefully analyzes ideas about African American music from 1900 to 1940. The bulk of the study examines intellectuals' writings about slave spirituals and their potential value as a foundation for future black musical expression. W. E. B. Du Bois, Anderson argues, looked forward to "the elevation of the 'sorrow songs' [Du Bois's concept of spirituals] through cosmopolitan practices of formalization"—in other words, through the use of spirituals in classical music by elite composers and performers in the Talented Tenth. Alain Locke, herald of the "New Negro," shared Du Bois's cosmopolitanism, but his philosophical and scholarly preferences led him to emphasize aesthetic priorities over Du Bois's political goals. Spirituals, in Locke's view, were a key element of the Harlem Renaissance's "cultural racialism." The celebrated tenor Roland Hayes subordinated spirituals to lieder in his recitals, though, and in turn the white music critic and Harlem interloper Carl Van Vechten dismissed Hayes, championing instead Paul Robeson's "authentic" renditions. More pessimistically, Jean Toomer labeled spirituals the "swan song" of a vanishing rural culture. Zora Neale Hurston shared this view and tried to salvage this culture in her fiction and folklore studies. Hurston and Langston Hughes countered the would-be formalizers of spirituals with poetry and prose modeled on vernacular storytelling and blues lyrics. . . .

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