ABSTRACT
The tension between individual and communal expression that African American artists faced in the early part of the twentieth century is poignantly articulated in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. The story of the ragtime pianist is narrated in the first person, the observations and analyses of African American music—both ragtime and spirituals—reappeared verbatim or were reworked in Johnson’s landmark commentaries on African American culture, the Prefaces to The Book of American Negro Poetry and The Book of American Negro Spirituals. Johnson, in his use of a narrator who decides to disappear into white American society and abandon his talent as a ragtime pianist and composer, illustrates the wasted opportunity for social advancement that the race could have attained through the efforts of the individual artist in the communal African American musical tradition. Frederick Douglass declares that “the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro”.
