ABSTRACT
Note how the group imagined has the instrumentation of a typical jazz quartet-brass, piano, drums, and bass-which shows how Morrison, in calling on an African American musicking tradition, thinks of jazz as central to that tradition. Overall, though, this passage illustrates that,
despite all her formidable talents as a writer, Morrison is forced to concede that African American musicians are the artists who could best express Cholly’s deep despair. Morrison’s concession of the higher ground to the musical tradition over the literary should not surprise us, as influential African American cultural commentators in the 1960s, when she was writing the novel, were continually downplaying their literary tradition and valorizing what they saw as a much more vital musical tradition. Of course, this was not a new development, and both Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois in their writings in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had situated the musical tradition (and especially the “sorrow songs”) as central to early African American folk culture; however, Black nationalists of the 1960s went much further.
