ABSTRACT
Poised on the threshold between two centuries, W.E.B. Du Bois looked both back into U.S. history and ahead into the nation’s future as he made his prophetic statements about the twentieth century: its problem would be the “color line” separating Black and White. In the concluding chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1990), Du Bois offered equally significant comments about African American culture, focused specifically on music:
A century later, both the opening and closing sections of Souls have proven accurate in a myriad of ways, some discouraging but others more inspiring; in particular, the continuing evolution of Black music has sparked aesthetic endeavors that reach beyond song and instrumentation to numerous other fields, including literature. Rooted in Africa, marked by the horrors of the Middle Passage, and intertwined with the manifold experiences of enslavement, Black music originates with a people denied the written word, kept illiterate by slave masters and thus forced to rely on oral expression throughout the antebellum years. As Franklin Rosemont notes, “Black
music developed out of, and later side by side with, this vigorous oral poetry [field hollers, work songs] combined with dancing, both nourished in the tropical tempest of black magic and the overwhelming desire for freedom.”1 Repression ironically-and felicitously-led to amazing creativity. And from the early decades of the twentieth century to its closing years, African American writers have testified to the power of the musicgospel, blues, jazz, bebop, rap, and beyond.
