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STREETS, SOUNDS AND IDENTITY IN INTERWAR HARLEM
| By Clare Corbould |
University of Sydney |
The twenty-eighth annual black Elks' convention culminated in a parade that marched up Fifth Avenue from Sixty-first Street to 110th Street, where it crossed west and headed up Lenox. It was 1927. Braving a downpour, the marchers "trudg[ed] sloshily" through the white areas of town, their "multicoloured raiment bedraggled," their "expensive regalia ruined." "Vast silent crowds" looked on, with thousands of spectators leaning out of their windows overlooking the streets, yet it seemed that this long-planned spectacle must be a failure. Only a miracle, a white reporter for the New York Herald Tribune speculated, could save it.
And like a miracle it happened. The 40,000 spectators, drenched into unwilling lethargy, saw Drum Major King Saul Chisolm, leading his Manhattan Lodge No.45 sixty-piece band, swing the corner into Seventh Avenue.[...] They saw his huge baton twirl valiantly, his lean old frame straighten up to its full six feet four, his white eyes roll in his ebony face, his wet white plume flirt in the air, and his huge Russian boots twitch in an old fashioned cake walk pigeon step too quick for the eye.
For yet a moment the pall of silence clung. Then there was a shout. Then a cheer.
And then a wave of sound grew like an explosion in a munitions factory.1
King Saul's individual moves were too quick to appreciate visually. Instead, the reporter expressed the overall effect in aural terms. As the marchers reached Harlem, they were carried along on a "wave of sound." Thirty black policemen were greeted with "loud cheers and applause" and although there were "[r]ules against singing, talking, chewing gum and dancing while in marching-order [...] the spirit of good-will which prevailed found many dancing to the music of the bands and shouting to friends at the sides."2 While the reporter had a keen eye for the vignette, it was the sound, not the sight, of the parade that indicated to her its success. |
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The sound of street life in Harlem was ascribed a particular quality in the white press. To be sure, other areas in New York City were also represented frequently as "noisy," notably Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Tin Pan Alley and, at night at least, Broadway. There was a certain something, though, to the sound of Harlem. In a less sympathetic account of the 1927 march that paid just as much attention to the sounds made, another white reporter concluded that "[t]he jungle is creeping up among the skyscrapers."3 On another occasion, an Easter parade, a New York Times reporter stated that it was "north of 125th street ... that one saw the most expansive smiles and heard the throaty laughter of thousands of contented negroes, glad in the sun and the brightness of the costumes.... There wasn't a spot in the city that seemed happier."4 It was in Harlem, according to another New York Times piece, that the best itinerant musicians still plied their trade. The reporter was especially impressed with "a one-man show that is principally composed of two pairs of clappers, a shrill whistle that fits under the black player's tongue, and a pair of cymbals strapped to the knees. When worked up to fortissimo pitch, Africa could produce nothing to excel this ensemble of primitive cacophony."5 Harlem—or "Little Africa"— was special, according to these authors, because its sound reflected a primitive "rhythm of life," characteristic of those they deemed racially inferior.6 |
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