Songs of Ourselves

Photographs of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday nearly crowd out the rest of American music on the cover of Richard Crawford’s opus, suggesting that “America’s Musical Life: A History” may be yet another companion volume to Ken Burns’ “Jazz.” Weighing in at 976 pages, the book takes nearly as long to absorb as the 18-hour documentary but, unlike the film, it doesn’t insist that jazz is the music of America or imply that it is America’s only or best music. In Crawford’s more generous and commodious view, shape-note hymns and Charles Ives and Broadway musicals are American music, too, and such pluralism distinguishes our music as it does our democracy.

If there’s any recent film that “America’s Musical Life” resembles, it’s the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” in which secular and sacred music, popular and traditional, black and white, the heartfelt and the hokey, collide and commingle in the Depression-era South. Despite the Coens’ fanciful narrative, their movie is musicologically dead-on. Although jazz originated and thrived in this kind of promiscuous rough and tumble, Burns and many of his talking heads (especially Wynton Marsalis), in their eagerness to elevate jazz to America’s quintessential musical art form, adopt an exclusionary hierarchy of values that ignores western swing, for example, because it’s white trash, and slights Afro-Cuban music because it swings with a foreign accent. Marsalis, Crawford notes, “has shown a strong tendency to preach the principles of his own taste.”

Crawford, a longtime professor at the University of Michigan and past president of the American Musicological Society, is more multicultural in his approach. Though by no means exhaustive, “America’s Musical Life” is the most encyclopedic history of American music to date. It devotes a remarkable amount of space to Native American music and to the Southwest and Southern California (whose original Spanish colonists, folk song collector Charles Lummis believed, enjoyed “the happiest, the humanest, the most beautiful life that Caucasians have ever lived anywhere under the sun”). Crawford is nearly swept away when he contrasts the voluptuous indolence of the song “La hamaca” (The Hammock) to the get-up-and-go of “gringo” music.

In Crawford’s view, American music is divided, like Gaul, into three parts. “Composer’s” or classical music emphasizes notation and aspires to transcend the present and last long into the future. “Performer’s” or popular music depends primarily on the verve with which it is performed and, leaving the future unconsidered, seeks as large a present-day audience as possible. Finally, traditional or folk music preserves the music of the past and celebrates a spirit of continuity. These categories are not hermetically sealed. Indeed, their porosity and interplay give American musical history much of its “eventful edge.” An excellent example is the way European classical and Middle Eastern ethnic music helped inspire Miles Davis’ modal jazz in the 1950s. According to composer David Amram, quoted in Ashley Kahn’s fascinating recent study, “Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece,” a common sentiment among jazz musicians in New York at the time was, “The baddest cats are Bela Bartok, Arnold Schnberg and the guys playing in those belly-dancing clubs.”

Crawford is on shakier ground when he claims that “the history of music in America revolves chiefly around performance.” One could just as easily argue that the history of our music revolves around its reception and consumption, as Crawford himself suggests when he describes rock ‘n’ roll largely in terms of the growth and desires of the teenage market. And if performance rather than composition is the criterion, there’s no excuse for neglecting America’s great symphony orchestras after the 1930s or the rise to international prominence of American classical musicians and singers. How can a history of American musical life not include in its index Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne and Van Cliburn?

Crawford also disregards performance when he footnotes a book about media stereotypes of women and calls the Chiffons’ “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” a song “about a deceitful, irresistible male charmer; its message is that it’s normal to want to yield to such boys as well as try to resist them.” True enough, but had he listened to the record, Crawford could also have described how the contrast between its rock ‘n’ roll beat and pseudo-classical string arrangement suggests the duplicity of the guy and the ambivalence of the girl; how sweetly the suave oboe solo talks; and how, at the end, the two counterpointed and overdubbed vocal choruses externalize and dramatize the young girl’s internal debate between attraction and caution. (He might also have avoided identifying the 1966 release as a 1960 recording.)

Unfortunately, Crawford seems not to have listened to any new music during the last 30 years apart from the so-called “minimalist” classical composers. This forfeits an advantage “America’s Musical Life” would otherwise enjoy over two excellent earlier histories of American music to which Crawford acknowledges a deep indebtedness and which are still in print: Charles Hamm’s “Music in the New World” (1983) and the revised third edition of Gilbert Chase’s “America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present” (1987). It also denies readers more of the close and insightful readings of individual pieces of music--from “Home, Sweet Home” (arguably the greatest hit of the entire 19th century) to Ives’ “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” to Frank Sinatra’s recording of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One for My Baby”--that enliven the rest of Crawford’s account.

When it comes to the first 41/2 centuries of American music, however, Crawford is superb. His original field of specialization was early American psalmody, and his account of the seesawing history of sacred song in New England--as ministers and singing-masters, congregations and choirs (not to mention composers) wrestled for the right to call the tune--is engrossing. He describes how early “irregular” composers of sacred music like William Billings gave every voice, soprano through bass, “an interesting line to sing” in a spirit of democracy that later generations sought persistently to subordinate.

Crawford is also excellent on the thorny issues raised by blackface minstrelsy and recognizes how it prefigured rock ‘n’ roll. When he quotes Little Richard’s boast that his music “regenerates the heart and makes the liver quiver, the bladder splatter, the knees freeze,” he might have recollected Mark Twain’s praise of minstrelsy as music that “will suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose.” He makes good use of publisher Edward Marks’ memoir, “They All Sang: From Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallee,” to paint a vivid picture of the nightlife of a turn-of-the-century Tin Pan Alley song plugger. One singer backed out on a deal to sing “The Little Lost Child” at a Bowery theater, performing a rival publisher’s song instead, because Marks had neglected to treat her to pigs’ knuckles at Luchow’s. “The best songs came from the gutter in those days,” Marks wrote. “The train of association whereby ‘Annie Rooney’ eventually appeared on the piano in a small town banker’s house would have shocked many a fine community.”

One of the things that distinguished American from European music from the outset, Crawford argues, was the absence of a royal court or national church to patronize it. If this freed American composers and musicians--in Germany, the American composer and violinist George Frederick Bristow scoffed, “an artist is serf to a nobleman”--it also left them at the mercy of the marketplace. Asked what kind of music his artists performed, 19th century impresario Bernard Ullman replied, “Financial music.” Many people deplore the crass commercialization of American music. In 1948, composer Roger Sessions complained that “music here is in all its public aspects a business.” Crawford, however, applauds the free market as a source of vitality and a spur to pluralism. American composers and performers can’t afford to be too purist or choosy; to appeal to a broad and diverse audience, they must be eclectic. That’s why Crawford adores George Gershwin and Charles Ives (though Ives’ good fortune in the insurance business spared him the necessity of selling his music). He prefers the minimalists to the previous generation of classical composers, insulated by tenured academic positions from commercial pressures. He admiringly quotes Philip Glass, the son a record-store owner: “The first thing I knew about music was that you sold it.” Glass and composers Steve Reich and John Adams, Crawford stresses, have absorbed jazz, rock and ethnic music, breaking the barriers of his own triune schema and thereby helping “to instill a spirit of democratic possibility and excitement in the classical scene today.”

Crawford might have gone further and argued that the pluralism that is the pedigree of American music includes a pluralism or juxtaposition of emotions. “It is an American trait,” wrote a classical music critic in 1908, referring to “Jubilee,” one of George Chadwick’s Symphonic Sketches, “to turn suddenly serious, and deeply and unaffectedly so, in the midst of its fooling to run away into sober fancies and moods, and then as quickly turn ‘jolly’ again.” John Philip Sousa told an interviewer he had “no hesitation in combining in my program clever comedy with symphonic tragedy, rhythmic march or waltz with sentimental tone pictures.” Ives and Armstrong were fond of mixing rhapsodies with raspberries.

Such impertinence goes back at least as far as America’s first international hit song, Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” After a couple of verses of seeming nonsense (“the sun so hot I froze to death”), an unexpected hush falls “when everything was still” and a vision or the ghost of the singer’s lost love comes “running down the hill,” at which point the tempo picks up and the tomfoolery resumes with “the buckwheat cake was in her mouth.” On his recent CD “Magic Beans” on the “Kill Rock Stars” label, Mike “Sport” Murphy dramatizes the continuity of this tradition by interpolating Foster’s verse into one of his own songs and following it with a verse from Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again.” (“I am convinced,” Murphy e-mailed me, “Dylan used ‘Susanna’ as his model.”) Interestingly, Chadwick’s “Jubilee” also quoted Foster, in this case his “Camptown Races.” Perhaps what Ralph Ellison called the “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” of the blues is the hallmark of all American music. *