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0:00
- Good afternoon everyone. I'm John Suau, the new executive director, pardon my phone for ringing, I'm the new executive director of The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum. That's my great pleasure to welcome you to the second talk in this year's, it's more than History lecture series, sponsored by the Baltimore National Heritage Area and presented by The Peale. This is the fourth year we brought this series to people and we're thrilled to keep it going.
0:27
Today's event, Baltimore's Billie Holiday and the Birth of Jazz features a presentation by Professor Lawrence Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, and the director of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts.
0:44
Today's online program is being recorded, and the recording and transcript of the discussion will be available after the program on our YouTube channel. Please keep your mics on mute during the program. If you have questions, please add them to the chat at any time and we'll try to answer sequentially during the question and answer session after the presentation. We'll have an ASL interpreter with us throughout the discussion and chat as you can see.
1:12
You can also turn on closed captions in your Zoom toolbar.
1:17
I'd like you to add that accessibility is a core value at The Peale, so you will find almost all of our online programs have ASL interpretation. So please tell your colleagues and friends. Our aim is to be accessible to all. The Peale's mission is about amplifying and sharing the voices and stories that too often have been overlooked or intentionally erased from the historical record. So before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge that The Peale in Baltimore stands on the traditional
1:47
ancestral grounds of a number of indigenous peoples, including the Piscataway and the Susquehannock. Our work is ongoing to better understand the pre-colonial history of our city and region, and also to support the indigenous peoples who are part of our communities today. You can pick up our free copy of the Illustrated Guide to East Baltimore's Historic American Indian "Reservation" walking tour map from The Peale, and also download the Guide to Indigenous Baltimore app for free.
2:20
I'd like to thank Ryan Koons and the Maryland State Arts Council for the Land Acknowledgement references they have made available to us and to local leaders like Ashley Minner Jones for ensuring that indigenous voices are heard and recognized in Baltimore today.
2:37
Please go ahead and sign up for our next lecture in this series, the B&O Railroad and the Emerging Nation on The Peale's website. It's being hosted on Friday, April 25th. I'm really happy to introduce Shauntee Daniels, executive Director of Baltimore National Heritage Area, one of our great partners. Shauntee, thank you once again for allowing The Peale to present these compelling, insightful talks. Its more than History Lunchtime Lecture Series. Please take it away, Shauntee. Thanks so much.
3:07
- Well, thank you, John. Thank you very, very much for that introduction. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Lawrence Jackson. He is the author of many books, including "Chester B. Himes: A Biography", "The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics."
3:30
Second to that is "My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War" and "Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius." Dr. Jackson's latest books are "Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West" and "Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore."
3:58
He teaches English and History at Johns Hopkins University and writes occasionally for Harper's Magazine.
4:05
I will say that I have the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jackson at another lecture
4:13
that he gave on the community of Sharp Leadenhall and the communities around it. So Dr. Jackson has a full wealth of information and history recording for Baltimore's history, and that's what we are about, is Baltimore National Heritage Area. We are about preserving the history and the culture for the current generations and future generations. So before I turn it over to Dr. Jackson, I wanted to let you know that this is the women's history, women's heritage month,
4:49
and that's why we were presenting Billie Holiday
4:53
and her story of jazz in Baltimore. In addition to Billie Holiday's work, she was also very instrumental in the Civil Rights Movement. And with that, I wanted to let everybody know that we have these beautiful t-shirts that commemorate the civil rights leaders of Baltimore on sale
5:16
with the Baltimore National Heritage Area.
5:19
We recognize Billie Holiday, Elijah Cummings,
5:24
Thurgood Marshall, and of course, excuse me, and of course Frederick Douglass. So if you are interested in that, there'll be information about the t-shirts, about the Baltimore National Heritage Area
5:39
will be listed in the program at the end where you can get those t-shirts or you can find out more about who we are in our organization. With that, I will turn it over to Dr. Jackson. Thank you, Dr. Jackson for being here. - It's my pleasure to be here today. I'm really looking forward to sharing some new information with everybody with the community. I have to sort of begin with an apology and a bit of a, maybe a, hopefully only a slight disappointment. The nature of academic research
6:17
or maybe just being an academic at a place like Johns Hopkins is that you have the opportunity to sort of pursue your passion. And I have been pursuing my passion for the last semester, and what has happened is that my research has taken me
6:38
into new directions. And so I'm actually going to share new research with you today,
6:46
but maybe not quite as focused on Billie Holiday as some of you might have liked. But I promise you, you know, every chance that we have to talk about the marvelous history and legacy and the rich art of Holiday, you know, we sort of take advantage of that. I ask you to join us at some of our upcoming events at the Baltimore Museum of Art on April the 10th, and then at the Lafayette Square Jazz Concert. I think that the date is September 7th, where we will have our banners up again
7:20
and talking about the heritage of Holiday. But today, we'll sort of get up to Billy Holiday. But really what I wanna talk to you about is the emergence of, I'm using the term black vernacular musical expression, the emergence of African-American music, native music produced by people of African descent, African people here on the North American mainland. As we've already been reminded on the lands of the Piscataway and the Susquehanna and the Palatan, the Algonquian speaking peoples.
8:01
We often sort of think about a sort of all like a holy place
8:08
for the emergence of what we call jazz music. And I would just sort of remind everyone that the no less a persona jazz, Duke Ellington never used the term jazz, right? He said he was a negro folk musician. That's what he said. He said he was playing negro folk music.
8:28
So, you know, you always had a sort of a contested idea about nomenclature and, you know, what was his term gonna be? My friend and colleague, Jamal Moore, contemporary African-American musician here in Baltimore. You know, he says, "I don't like this word jazz and, you know, sort of remains." But we think about this sort of like this holy place in New Orleans where all of these things come together at once. And what I'm gonna talk about today is that I want us
8:58
to think about Baltimore at the same time and at the same place in almost sort of decade by decade, and to sort of conduct an important comparison. And of course, because so much of the national history or well, the regional history of Baltimore and the shape impact and influence of people of African descent here is, you know, I would just say it's kind of like, it's weekly known or it's diluted or it's not fully recognized for a host of reasons. I think that we're not doing enough to cultivate
9:40
a very important heritage and legacy in Baltimore National Heritage kind of thing, right? So, you know, that's where we are today, "The Birth of Jazz in Baltimore." And I'm gonna try to kind of go through a couple of slides, you know, somewhat quickly and leave us some time for discussions. And I would say, you know, the one thing about this kind of research is that it's still in a sort of a speculative place, and I'm sure there are many people who are listening
10:06
who have, you know, really great information. Some of the, and I hope that you do share with me, some of the most important insights that I have gotten so far that directed the research came from my cousins Charles and Jennifer Dugger. And years ago, I don't know, years ago Charlie said to me, he said, "Hey, Larry, there used to be music
10:33
on the boats downtown at the harbor or something, right? When I was 12 years old, I used to hand out flyers Inner Harbor opened and, you know, "Hey, here's what's going on at the Inner Harbor." But the idea that there had been something before that time, you know, was like, that was very difficult for me to imagine.
10:54
But it's sort of sparked a curiosity and lo and behold, there's a strong tradition in Baltimore that I won't mention today, but anyway, of, you know, sort of riverboat excursions and bands playing on the riverboats. And then Charlie's wife, Jennifer, cousin Jennifer, she mentioned, she said, they live on Bari Street today, and she said, "Larry Bari Street was always important to black people." And I know, you know, I only know a little bit now,
11:26
but very, very little about the world below Pratt Street. And I've had this great fortune to be able to be in, you know, a community that includes Sister Betty Bland Thomas of the Sharp Street, Leadenhall Community Organization, and the Ebenezer A.M.E Church where I met Sister Shante Daniels. And it turns out, I mean, you know, of course our city has been reconstructed, you know, with filling in different parts of the waterways and creating highways especially,
11:59
and stadiums that have, you know, sort of recreated the urban terrain and the topography and the lay of the land and all of that. But it redirected my efforts. And when I had the antenna, you know, alert, I started to notice and then I would say, you know, sort of speculate about other kinds of things. And then what I'm most interested in is the African-American musical culture. And the last thing I say before try to race through these slides is that,
12:31
and I do want to thank our sign language folks who are working with us today, it's really wonderful and it's such an incredible skill. And I hope that I'm in good partnership with you as we try to communicate with our audience. The last thing I would say is that learning to dance or let's say feel comfortable dancing in public,
13:01
but I belong to like the sub genre or the sub world
13:08
of house music people, right? The tribal world of house music in Baltimore and other parts of the world, but United States. But learning to dance was like, it was such a major part of my adolescence and young adulthood. But anyway, high school and college especially. And I started noticing dancers in Baltimore, but especially one older man at the Inner Harbor that I used to watch dance and who I actually imitated and shared the imitations with other people
13:47
and the acquisition of rhythmic movement,
13:55
I'm always striving to be a more rhythmic person. The acquisition of rhythmic movement and rituals and ceremonies have had a, you know, like a tangible impact in my own life. And so I've always sort of been curious to think about the past and how these traditions were conveyed, and maybe not in a super technical way, but certainly one with strong interest in the description. So what you're looking at right now is actually a 1791.
14:30
Sometimes these drawings, I'm sorry, I forget the technical name of the production of the print. Sometimes they were coloured, but you have a whole book that was created devoted to Cap-Français, the North of Haiti. And they often noted the different musical celebrations
14:53
that were taking place and the kinds of instruments. And so if you notice on the, what is for me, the far right of the screen, you have a person in a side, a very large cylindrical drum. And then there's another person who has sort of a mandolin looking instrument up to their chin, but they seem to have, you know, two open hands or one hand closed, left hand closed around the neck, and then an open right hand. And then there's another drummer in the very middle of the scene.
15:26
And then there are two couples dancing. This is cropped, there's actually a bit more that's going on. You can also see European women and one European man, or two European women, and one European man who are, you know, sort of in the back of the scene, there's an umbrella over their head. But this moment of the dance, the kind of celebration and the music, I mean, obviously this is a, it's a pastoral representation of enslavement in Haiti. French enslavement practices in Haiti are known to be
16:00
among the most brutal of any enslavement regimes that were ever created by human beings. It's important to remember that in 1790, Haiti accounts for 40% of all of the coffee consumed by Europeans, 60% of all the sugar consumed by Europeans, the coming revolution in Haiti completely devastated the French economy. But in this pastoral portrait, the emphasis on a very precise clinical, scientific emphasis on black music and dance, you know, I think it's really useful for us and for our imagination.
16:47
So to begin with, you know, one of the things that's so fascinating about this work for me is that sort of like the idea of New Orleans as the foundation of jazz, it really, in so many important ways or crucial ways, I think it returns to the figure of Benjamin Latrobe. And I'll show you the passage, you know, sort of on the next page, you know, maybe we'll just sort of go through that quickly. But Latrobe goes to New Orleans in December of 1818,
17:22
and he is there for a day and a half, and he walks sort of like, you know, directly to the center of the downtown to what's called Place Publique. And he sees a celebration, African dancing, and he makes an a really meticulous record of what he sees. And Latrobe is a, I think is really important American. We know his son, John Hazelhurst Latrobe, I think, you know, who's kind of like raised in Baltimore. He goes to St. Mary's and then he lives and works here for most of his life
18:02
or maybe even the rest of his life.
18:07
But he is the, John Hazelhurst Latrobe is the son of really one of like the,
18:14
a Benjamin Franklin kind of a figure. I mean a really, really important architect and engineer in the American early national life. And Latrobe is not a gentleman. In fact, you know, he is always sort of remarking about the way that the planners and the merchants are derisive or disdainful in their interactions with him. Latrobe is an architect and an engineer, a learned man always seeking more learning and refinement.
18:47
And, you know, obviously he's the key person, you know, in the creation of the Basilica and the Exchange Building. And he's probably, I guess, the major architect for the US Capitol. There are three architects for the US Capitol. But if you look at this segment from his diary that is preserved at Maryland Center for History and Culture, you can see him actually making a drawing of what he saw in Place Publique in New Orleans in 1818. And you know, the place that comes to us today
19:19
as Congo Square. And so you have the Latrobe with the rendition
19:27
of Congo Square, which you know, is sort of like bar none.
19:34
The one that all histories of jazz music, all histories of African music. I mean, everybody returns to this account that he gives where he says,
19:46
"I heard the most extraordinary noise, which I suppose to proceed from some horse mill." Because he's always creating, you know, like these different kinds of mills to not so much, you know, like for grain, but I mean, you know, like he wants to make a mill so that you can work in the quarries, and get the marble for the capital. And he's an engineer and he's making these steam engines and, you know, so he is always interested in sort of like manufacturing and early industrial processes.
20:17
One of the early investors with Fulton in the steamships, you know, he's interested in how things work. "The horse is tramping on a wooden floor. I found, however, on emerging from the house to the common that it proceeded from a crowd of five or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square. I went to the spot and crowded near enough to see the performance. All those who were engaged in the business seemed to be blacks. I did not observe a dozen yellow faces.
20:44
They were formed into circular groups in the midst of four of which I examined, but there were more of them, was a ring, the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands and set to each other in a miserably dull and slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a string instrument. An old man set a stride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter
21:14
and beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and fingers. The other drum was an open-staved thing held between the knees and beaten in the same manner. They made an incredible noise. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument with no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the fingerboard was the rude figure of a man in sitting posture and two bags behind him to which strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.
21:41
It was played upon by a very little old man, apparently 80 or 90 years old. The women squalled out a burden to the playing at intervals consisting of two notes, as the Negroes working in our cities respond to the song of their leader. Most of the circles contain the same sort of dances. One was larger in which a ring of a dozen women walked by way of dancing round the music in the center. But the instruments were of different construction. One, which from the color of wood seemed new,
22:08
consisted of a block cut into something of the form of a cricket bat with a long and deep mortis down the center." He's describing something like a xylophone or what they call a marimba. "This thing made a considerable noise being beaten lustily on the side by a short stick. In the same orchestra was a square drum looking like a stool, which made an abominable loud noise. Also a calabash with a round hole in it. The hole studded with brass nails, which was beaten
22:34
by a woman with two short sticks. A man sung an uncouth song to the dancing, which I suppose was some African language for it was not French. And the women screamed a detestable burden on one single note, the allowed amusements of Sunday, it seems have perpetrated here, excuse me, perpetuated here those of Africa among its former inhabitants. I have never seen anything more brutally savage and at the same time, dull and stupid than this whole exhibition. Continuing my walk
23:04
about a mile along the canal returning after sunset, near the same spot, the noise was still heard. There was not the least disorder among the crowd, nor do I learn on inquiry that these weekly meetings of the Negroes have produced any mischief." Now, there are a couple things that, you know, just for our purposes today, you might take note of. I'm not an ethnomusicologist or a real expert in, you know, sort of the deep history of musical instruments and musical sound,
23:32
but I want us to think about some of the social aspects and we'll be making these comparisons to Baltimore. So Latrobe's recognition, like for example, about what seems to skin color and the way that he is noting African-Americans in cities and black people that he worked with would be significant. Latrobe, as I have on the other slide, right? He's actually living in Baltimore from the end of 1817 or early 1818. He moved to Baltimore, he went bankrupt,
24:06
and he's living on Lexington Street at Pine Street at the far West of the city. His sons go to St. Mary's Seminary. I don't know if he walked. He was excited about them being able to be day students, like he didn't have to pay for them to board. And somebody from his household is walking them to school day to day.
24:27
This geography in West Baltimore I will return to, but his assessment that, you know,
24:36
it's a dark skin group of people of African descent or African people here gives us a sense of some of the things that he might have been more familiar with in the Chesapeake region where he spent most of his working life. Something else to notice, I think is that he's talking about the way that it does not seem to him to be like,
25:02
refine music, intellectual music, complex music. And this is going to be I think, a really important feature of, you know, sort of whatever it is I'm able to, the conclusions I'll reach either that, you know, we're effectively producing a very, very similar kind of dance music for African-American enjoyment in Baltimore on par with what's taking place in Louisiana, or that there are some really, really important differences. And we will find it will not just be the Ferdinand,
25:40
I mean Ferdinand, the Benjamin Latrobe's of the world who would be making this assessment about African-American vernacular, musical expression, that actually we will have a similar assessment from educated African-Americans themselves. So, you know, there will be a sharp kind of contrast between high culture and low culture, particularly as the nation state evolves in the early 19th century.
26:11
So the project in one way is called like In Search of Cuffy Square. And you know, we have this, I think it's a remarkable map of Baltimore from 1851. And then, you know, I'm sure everybody knows like, where I grabbed this picture, you know, that's Charles Street, you know, going up the hill towards the Washington Monument. It's like one of the really wonderful galleries that you see on the facade of one of our town homes, you know, again, like you would see in New Orleans.
26:42
So before I sort of lay out my argument or try to wow you with the evidence, I just wanna say a few words about some of the reasons why, like, especially if it's a new idea to you that like jazz could have had, or black musical expression could have had an independent origin here in Baltimore.
27:03
Why it might seem like an unusual idea. I would say it really does have to do with a profound split between high and low culture. You know, that is in some ways quite characteristic in Western society,
27:19
but especially one that might be connected with some of our important historical figures. And as you might imagine, so many of them have a really, really deliberate and tangible tie with Baltimore. So Frederick Douglass is, you know, ultimately gonna wind up being like Mr. High culture, and that's an overstatement. But for our purposes, you know, he'll stand at one end of the poll. Frederick Douglas, you know, is supposed to be like the person without peer, you know,
27:51
is like autodidact self-taught, you know, is always recognized as being, you know, sort of the extraordinary individual in his group or in his environment, in his circumstance. Douglass learns to play the violin while enslaved here in Baltimore city. And I really, am admiring of Ed Pappas's work and argument,
28:14
but that you have like an elite society or social circle that Douglass at least somewhat, you know, participates in as a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old here in Baltimore that is doing things like encouraging,
28:33
I mean, it must have been the ability to read music and play the violin. I mean, ultimately he does go on to become a polished violinist, but I'm not talking so much about like a vernacular hoe down or you know, what they used to call the Negro ball. But something that you know, you would do in the parlor, in the salon. On the other side of this debate, or not quite, but somewhat would be Martin Delaney, who was the, you know, he is the first black officer in the military,
29:11
you know, he's admitted to Harvard University for Medical College and he writes for the North Star, you know, one of our important figures. But Delaney is gonna be, he's born free, unlike Douglass. But Delaney is going to be like, I believe in my ancestry and my black ancestry is like, my African ancestry is the most important thing that I have going for me. And my dad is from, or it might be his grandparents, right? My one side of my family from Angola,
29:42
and the other side of my family is Mandinga from, you know, Gambia River, Niger River in the Guinea Highlands, right? And I am doing everything, you know, in my power to, you know, live up to that ancestral heritage.
30:01
And Delaney will ultimately, in 1860, or I guess he goes in 1859, he will lead an expedition up the Niger River, you know, modern day Nigeria go in up through the Hausa lands. Maybe a little bit of Nigeria, I guess to, you know, through like to going towards Mali. But I think everything he does is pretty much in Northern Nigeria and, you know, it's like, "Hey, I'm gonna find ancestral land and I'm going to, you know, begin another kind of a colonization effort back to Africa."
30:40
And so you could sort of see the emergence of a split. Douglass used to say, "Some people are, thank God that they were made human beings." And Delaney thanks God, that he was made in African human being, right? You can see, you know, some tendencies towards
31:01
like a cultivation with moving the direction of Western high culture and a sense of the power significance and importance of African cultural products.
31:17
Whether it's a survival, whether it's something that you learn and celebrate and do in an African way, you know, that these would be really, really important. Coming into the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston, who of course graduates from high school here in Baltimore at Morgan, will be one of the key people who would be acknowledging and celebrating the significance of folk expression. She's not alone, but she would be maybe the most important person.
31:51
And, you know, she has published work that we can turn to who would say, well, you know, we need to go and visit the folk and collect the stories and tales and the songs and the dances with all of the means that our disposal and to preserve them. And we perhaps should be reluctant to disturb them or to process them over much. You know, Zora Neale Hurston always will have this famous argument with people like, is not William Grant Still, it's another one
32:28
of the celebrated choir directors, you know, where she would be like, you're taking the spirituals and then you're over orchestrating them and you're ruining what the work of art is supposed to be about or do.
32:43
The arguments that we have today about the significance of a lot of these remnant residue parts of African life
32:54
and culture really driven home by two 20th century linguist anthropologist, Lorenzo Dow Turner, who made the argument about the African survivals in the Coastal South Carolina Sea Island, you know, it's like archipelago along South Carolina and Georgia, where you had enslaved people more or less left alone with very, very few whites in positions of even as supervisors, but who would have, you know, more rigidly reinforced English speaking patterns, English cultural patterns.
33:43
And at the end of the Civil War, or actually very early in the Civil War, when the Union takes over that island chain, people started to collect these songs that they heard there. And, you know, a lot of people were really taken with the fact that, you know, this seems to be like the original black culture that was created by, you know, sort of the first Africans that arrived in the United States. But I just wanted to emphasize that this linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner is one
34:13
of the earliest people to notice the significance of different kinds of words from Congo, different languages in the Congo, excuse me, and starts to do some preservation work. And then maybe a more total argument about African-American people is made by Melville Herskovits that really, you know, sort of carries forward into our own period, right? Even though it's almost almost 100 years old, or it comes out in the 1930s into the 1930s. But certainly this would be the academic work
34:53
that would be inspiring Leroy Jones as he's writing, you know, blues people and as the folks from the,
35:06
also people like Katherine Dunham. But as folks in the 1960s begin the black arts movement, the rejection or the sensibility that there are very, very few Africanisms among, you know,
35:24
North American black people, whether it's cuisine, language, dance, or music, it really does, it gets boiled down
35:35
or it gets emphasized in its most succinct way, perhaps with the Baltimorean, E. Franklin Frazier. And I don't know if we think so much about Frazier and the 18 years, you know, that he lives here in Baltimore City,
35:56
but Frazier would write at the same time that Herskovitz is, you know, sort of making a really, really elaborate argument about a continuum between whoever is coming from, you know, West Africa and Central Africa to the Western hemisphere, to the Atlantic world, and that they were successful in passing down to, you know, multiple generations. Some dimensions of a culture that, you know, could be recognizable
36:28
or might be recognizably African.
36:32
It really, you know, would be like in the Negro family in United States, and Frazier writes the isolated instances. They tend to show how difficult it was for slaves who retained a memory of their African background to find a congenial milieu in which to perpetuate the old way of life. Even before reaching the United States, slaves have been subjected to influences that tended to destroy the significance and meaning of their African heritage. Now, you know, that point of view like is important
36:57
for a place like Baltimore where you have, you know, 1860, but as early as 1820. So in the 19th century, right?
37:09
Remember everybody pretty much is kind of convinced, with the exception of a couple large planners. I mean, I guess this would be the South Carolinians, right after the Revolutionary War. Everybody is like, "Well, you know, it's gonna be the same kind of gradual manumission that you see in the Northern states. And the slavery will more or less, you know, sort of be ended by the 19th century. And then it is the explosion of the cotton commerce that takes chattel slavery to the West and forward.
37:38
And, you know, this settlement or European settlement
37:44
of the rest of the continental United States, you know, and sort of the bringing into the different states of the union, slave states, free states really, you know, because of this commerce in the new national economic fortune." But it's interesting if you think of this person from Baltimore sort of insisting on the inaccess
38:14
or the inability that someone would have, because Baltimore, you know, between 1820 and 1860 is the home of the largest concentration of freed people in urban America, right? So you're just nonstop seeing all of these African-Americans who are like making their own decisions about where they work and who they live and you know, what their lives are gonna be about. Part of the pressure by the time Frazier's writing. And it's very, very contemporary. I mean, I know that I'm getting older
38:47
and everything, you know, the time, your perspective on time changes, but it's such a contemporary moment, especially relative to music. Jonathan Heyward is going through the music of Duke Ellington in the next week. And so the Baltimore Symphony is looking at it, and of course the 1930s and the 1940s, it's like, you know, it's the great moment of so much of the remarkable music of Duke Ellington. But when Frazier is coming into his sense of black culture,
39:21
it is really, really at a moment in the early or the late 1910s, early 1920s when you just can't get away from this sense
39:37
that jazz music is some kind of atavistic return
39:45
to primitive tribalism. And, you know, so 1924, you know, I have this, you know, this little thing, you know, you've got Vogue Magazine. They're like, "You know, you listen to these jazz musicians in New York, and this is like the moonlight in an African jungle in the Afro-American newspaper. You know, you have them writing, you know, this music, it's imported from Haiti and Cuba as opposed to have originated in West Africa. The savage medicine man is thought to have go to this tribe
40:16
to frenzy by the use of it. It reached New Orleans and survived there in the underworld resorts, and then it went from the Mississippi to Chicago and it went out and became popular. And it's these inventors of this new music, new things to know that the most popular music of the day is centuries old. And at the bottom it is nothing more than the wild syncopated Boompa of a drum of the African Wild man, right?" You know, this is sort of, I mean,
40:41
this is coming from the African-American middle class. I grew up in the St. James Church and George Freeman Bragg, you know, he uses his early newspaper to create the Afro. And you know, these are folks who, if they could have, if they had their power, would've scattered, you know, this music into a thousand pieces and thrown it into the wind. And one thing that we should remember with Frazier, I'm sorry, I apologize for this picture. So Frazier is growing up at 511 St. Paul Street
41:19
throughout the first two decades of the 20th century. He's born in 1894, but he's basically Center Street and St. Paul Street. And so Frazier, he is precisely the person who actually lives through the creation and the building of Preston Gardens, you know, like where modern day Mercy hospitals, just on the other side of you guys who were at the Peel, if anybody's down at the Peel today. But this is one of the earliest examples, it's an imminent domain by Mayor Preston
41:53
where he basically forced out.
41:57
I haven't looked at the like deed records or anything to see if the city, how much money City gave people, but it is the kind of like the forced removal of a huge African-American neighborhood that's right on the other side of City Hall and the Courthouse. And this is really what begins the great movement up, you know, Druid Hill Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue to the, what used to be the North, that was the Northwest of Baltimore at the time. But so Frazier himself, you know, like has to make
42:29
an adjustment in his own family life, you know, 'cause he's got younger siblings, but as you know, this sort of massive relocation of African-Americans occurs. And I'll get back to that one again. But anyway, those are some of the dimensions or elements that have shaped how we think about, you know, what we might know or what's possible. And in what I'm looking for, I'm calling it not Congo Square, but Cuffy Square, Cuffy is the, it's sort of like the transliteration
43:05
of the Akan-day name Kofi for Friday. If you were a male child born on Friday, you're called Kofi. And for any number of reasons in the Chesapeake, especially the two day names Kofi for Friday and Kujo for Thursday, they wind up being picked up and becoming like, you know, catchall terms for a black person, cuffy, sometimes C-U-F-F-E-E. And, but it is also evidence of a certain kind of an acculturation process that takes place in Maryland and Virginia in the 17th century,
43:46
and by the 18th century is quite profound. On this 1851 Sydney and Neff map, and I've spent a lot of time just sort of pouring over a couple of maps
43:58
from the 19th century, first half of the 19th century. But on this map, if you could pay really, you know, look really, really sharply, "Hey, how may I help you." You'll notice that here at Ridgely and West Street you have the Potters Field, and then they have designated by 1851 that there's a little part that's the African cemetery on Ridgely and West. So it's some kind of a sub shop there today. This is almost directly across the street from M&T Bank Stadium.
44:39
But the place where the funeral rights of destitute African-Americans would've been performed, because this cemetery it's chartered in 1793.
44:52
I think that it winds up being hugely significant if we're looking for a place that would be similar to or in the same region as a Congo Square. And I've spent a little bit of time looking at like, some of the import patterns from West Africa. You know, you have like a lot of English ships going from Liverpool to the port called Saint Louis at the Senegal River,
45:25
and then also at the Gambia River. You know, in some ways, like very much the Kunta Kinte story, the Alex Haley story about hiss Mandinga ancestors coming from The Gambia River in the 18th century to Annapolis. And would I find particularly important or really wanna focus on it sort of goes into, well, or I'm spending a little bit of time on two areas. So on the one hand, these people from Sene-Gambia, you know, like I've done some DNA testing, right?
46:02
This would be like a very common kind of answer. But anyway, you know, I too would've distant ancestors from this region of West Africa, the Mandinga
46:14
and the bambara, the Syria, the Susu, the Wolof, the Fulani. I would say it's probably mainly, or it seems to me like it's mainly the Bambara are the people who are trafficked most successfully by other groups at different times. And then some groups are kind of like, they lose the war and they're, you know, wiped out. And very many of them are transported. But that this and the musical traditions of these groups are gonna wind up being especially significant in Maryland.
46:47
I mean, I think, as you should know, or I hope, you know, or maybe you've been thinking about the other major parts of Western Africa and Central Africa that bring captives to the Chesapeake. We're talking about maybe 80,000, 87,000 people, something like that in the course of transatlantic slave trade. So like really from the mid 17th century until about 1762 here in Maryland,
47:17
you also have large numbers of people who are being brought from what is thought of by the European sailors as the Bight of Biafra, the Igbo lands of the Delta lands of Southeastern Nigeria.
47:32
And then it's a very large territory, you know, it was basically thought of as almost Congo, Angola, but in Maryland, like coming from the Congo region, you know, you only have like a handful of boats, but you have four or 500 people at a time being brought. And when the anthropologists look at the way cultural traditions are sustained and passed over to say the most important thing is that you have like a kind of a steady, usually like if a boat is coming from The Gambia,
48:06
it'll be like 80 people, 100 people. But that you have a steady return of people
48:17
from a similar cultural tradition or region. And that even if you brought large numbers of people at one time, it would be more difficult, you know, to sort of keep that going over the decades. And, you know, the centuries. And the other really important group of course, you know, I mentioned the day names would also be the Akan people who don't come in huge numbers at any one time come steadily over the decades. And this is a English preference for people from, you know,
48:48
what they call the Gold Coast of West Africa. But anyway, modern day Ghana and you know, in some ways also parts of Togo and Benin and what I'm trying to figure out or to think about is like where people are winding up having concentrations of enslaved and free people in early Baltimore where there might have been open spaces possibilities for expression, less supervision. And it keeps leading me to this cove area and to the bricky yards around the water's edge.
49:26
Like the most famous representation that we have of early, or the earliest representation that we have in, you know, what becomes the United States, British North America is this 1790 painting attributed to a South Carolina planter. And in it you can see very clearly the banjo as an instrument, the same one described by Latrobe, and then also someone with two sticks, you know, beating a gourd as a percussive kind of an instrument. There are a number of instruments, one of 'em called the qua qua
50:01
that involves, you know, sort of keeping a rhythm with it. You have the women with handkerchiefs, you have a man dancing with the stick, stick dances are important and ubiquitous, but I just emphasize, you know, for the sake of our very much faster paced talk soon to come. But I just emphasize that this is at the bottom of the screen is the earliest banjo that's been recovered. It's from 1770, and then in the middle of the screen is a Gambia River, akonting.
50:35
And for the most part it's an instrument played by people.
50:41
They call people the Jola people. I lived in West Africa for a year in 2013, 2014. Jola is a trade language, like Swahili is a trade language. And so all over West Africa, like if you're a merchant or something, and often if you're a Mandinga person or a Bambara person, you speak Jola as another kind of language, but you can see very much or very easily that this is a tradition that absolutely is brought over. And I would encourage us to think about,
51:13
or I'm trying to think about as much as I can that it seems, or there's certainly is strong logic for to have appeared in the Chesapeake first or to have had an especially powerful evidence in the Chesapeake. And probably the best description that you get prior to Latrobe of black musical performance is by a young Englishman who is at Nanjemoy
51:43
and sort of the pattern, you know, there is one ship that comes directly from Gambia River to Nanjemoy in the mid 18th century. But you know, if you were at Nanjemoy or Port Tobacco, you know, sort of on the Northern side, or maybe it'll be like the Eastern side of the Potomac River on the Maryland side, you know, that's the sort of tributary to join this other community
52:13
up the Patuxent River and, you know, modern day Prince George's County or Upper Marlboro and lower Marlboro or important places then. But Creswell, it's fascinating when Creswell sees this account, I don't have time to read it, but he sees the dancing, he hears the music, he goes, like, in a couple of days he crosses the Patuxent and he goes to Annapolis. He does not come to Baltimore because in 1774 there is no Baltimore right, there's no point for having a series
52:41
of tobacco warehouses here at that time. But it shows you also this route, you know, where you have really, really large enslaved communities in the South and the movement North up to the city. Another fascinating feature of early vernacular musical expression or ways that it's impacted would be the 500 people of black people of Haitian descent who come at once and remember what I was saying, like in the process of transmitting culture is better if a few people come steadily over time.
53:18
But it seems impossible to me that if you have, in 1793, there are 1500 people of African descent in Baltimore, and in two weeks that number increases by 35%. Now not everybody stays here in Baltimore sometimes, you know, people wind up gonna Cecil County, they wind up going to Frederick County. But there certainly were many opportunities and evidence of the impact of so many Haitians coming in the fall of Cap-Français in the summer of 1793.
53:54
And, you know, maybe there'll be more to do about that.
53:58
And I think I have it with the earlier slide, but I don't wanna go back, but on the Western side of, it's Baltimore County, on the Western side of the city, at the beginning of the 19th century, it's where the expatriates, the white planters, it's where they go and they sort of staggered their farms or their farm, I assumed that the land was very cheap, but if you found the people who owned, the people who fled Saint-Domingue, the white slave owners,
54:33
if you wanted to find people who had, like, who owned say seven or eight people, they would all be in this cluster on the West side of Baltimore, not far from the say persians, you know, St. Mary's College and Seminary. I mean, maybe that's unsurprising, but it's-- - [Host] Jackson, I got a two minute warning for you. - Okay, great. I'm moving on. But one of the things that's fascinating about that point is that we also know that even if you don't have the opportunity for, you know,
55:05
sort of this like reinfusion of people who have mastered a cultural tradition, if you're in clusters and you can go sort of from like one farmer's land to the other farmer's land, when someone gets married, someone dies, someone's born, when it's Easter, when it's Christmas, when it's the ascension holiday, then often, especially musical traditions will be preserved and really focus in on South Baltimore. We wanna remember these two figures, or there are two great figures that come,
55:32
like specifically from this area who have a lot to do with the preservation of black culture. Helmsey Nichols and Harlem Renaissance fame, Earl Snakehips Tucker, right? They're like both from the same section of the city. The powerful black church that has thousands of members in its congregations may have been a force that would have worked against African-American cultural expression or, you know, common expression. You have the A.M.E minister in Baltimore, you know, trying to wipe it out.
56:07
However, and befitting women's history month, Daniel Payne is assaulted at the altar of the church for attempting to eliminate what he called, you know, the cornfield diddies and the extravagances of worship. So culture is defended here in Baltimore and in the, you know, era of the Civil War, after the Civil War really begins to expand and break out. And I think that these institutions, they're moving around. This is Frazier's neighborhood up here, the Bethel Church,
56:42
the St. James Church, the Union Baptist Church, the Douglass Institute, City Hall is right here. I guess, The Peale museum is right here. That's where you're gonna have, you know, one of your early African-American high schools. And then this is around, you know, like where Frazier would be, you know, sort of up at the top of the map. But this is a hugely important section of the city along with the South Baltimore expression and would lead to the great kind
57:10
of exodus up Centre street to Howard Street and Eutaw Street and Paca Street, and then the launching of, you know, sort of like what we would recognize as, you know, like the syncopated orchestra of the early 1910s. And then it's in 1917 that the Afro, you know, will start proclaiming, "Hey, you know, we've got these different jazz bands or people who are using jazz as a sort of a marketing thing." But the last point that I have a chance to make today is just to think of the two figures.
57:43
So there's Billie Holiday's dad, Clarence Holiday, and there's Billy Holiday's, godfather, Elmer Snowden. So these are major musicians. Clarence Holiday plays guitar for McKinney's Cotton Pickers, which also includes parts of the Andy Kirk Band. And then he plays for Fletcher Henderson. Those are the swingingists. They're more swinging than Duke Ellington's orchestra in the 1920s and in the 1930s or first section of the '30s. Those are like the most rhythmically driven
58:17
of all the jazz orchestras who are creating what becomes, you know, sort of modern dance and swing music.
58:26
Though Henderson would bring in Louis Armstrong, you know, like it's gonna be, it'll be different from what Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong are doing sort of in the smaller combinations. But we've got to do more to bring these Baltimore musicians who go out into the world and, you know, take it on. But to understand how they're being produced. And both Clarence Holiday and Elmer Snowden are playing in Doc Simons
58:56
in Old Town. They are learning the Elmer. - [Host] You're running outta time. - Okay, Elmer Snowden is learning, you know, he's the-- - I got a question for you real quick here. Is the research published yet? - No, no, it's not. - Okay. Not published yet.
59:13
- He's the great banjo player. So we have somebody that takes us all the way back to the beginning and the creation of the banjo and African-American vernacular expression. But let's finish with a picture of Billie Holiday. - Thank you. - Thank you very much. Yeah, love to hear questions from you. - Thank you so much for attending The Peale's online program. Don't forget to check our website at thepeale.org for info on the next, more than history lecture on April 25th.
59:38
And if you enjoyed this program, please join our mailing list and consider making a donation to the Baltimore National Heritage Area to support the cost of this and future lunchtime lectures. You can do that on the VNHA website, explorebaltimore.org. Thank you everyone. I appreciate your time. I'm so sorry we ran short. It is a fascinating topic and I look forward to a more extended version of this. We look forward to your published research as well. Thank you so much everyone.
1:00:10
- [Attendee] Dr. Lawrence, this was so interesting. We have to meet as we plan to, because this is a direct connection here in South Baltimore. - It always is. - Yeah. I guess, I will give you a call. - Okay.
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