ABSTRACT
To talk about music in the novels of Claude McKay might seem like an exercise in paraphrase, since his novels so straightforwardly present an argument about Black music. The eponymous hero of the novel Banjo (1929/1957), for instance, plays the prototypical African American instrument that gives him his name, and his musical career illustrates the cultural arguments McKay sets out to make. The music Banjo plays, like that Crazy Bow plays in Banana Bottom (1933), or that Jake enjoys in Home to Harlem (1928/1987), and the vernacular culture these three characters represent, are contrasted quite explicitly to the deadening crush of Euro-American civilization, “the ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life” (McKay 1929/1957, 324). A typical passage is this on Banjo:
And although Banjo hits on the idea of starting an orchestra in order to make money in the first few pages of the novel, he doesn’t just play for the money, like White musicians: “They played in a hard unsmiling way, and only for sous. Which was doubtless why their playing in general was so execrable. When Banjo turned himself loose and wild playing, he never remembered sous” (40). The careless, big-laughing, grinning
primitive is his own antidote, or at least analgesic, to overcivilization and wage slavery.
