From rhythm and blues to the emerging forms of rock ‘n’ roll taking center stage in American culture, black music facilitated the stories and struggles of the civil rights movement through signs, rites, and totems, voicing protest in ways that could never be defined as absolute correlation. The “structure of feeling” that black music created, conveying historical themes and motifs on the edge of articulation, was a vehicle for the kind of stories that were otherwise repressed. One of the strongest images in the poplore that emerged was that of the mythical promised land, its presence and relationship to America — the quest of black culture to “go home” strengthening at a time when the civil rights climate of the United States meant that it could not and would not be that home. This climate intensified as the Vietnam conflict intensified, underlining the failure of the United States to “bring home” true democracy through civil rights.

Black music during the civil rights moment, rooted in the folklore of black culture and empowered by electronic and digital modes of production, shaped a poplore whose influence can be interpreted through Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling. Williams defined structure of feeling as that which “describes an area of feeling and thought, of experience, that has not achieved articulation, which is at the limit of coherence and comprehension. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase.”¹ Structure of feeling deals with the undefined and the implicit, the history and background of a cultural form, for as Williams also states, “There are no backgrounds in society; there are only relations of acts and forces.”² Black music was rooted in the specific historical location of place and time at the nexus of art and civil rights, ancient lore cycles and deliberate speed. Artists who did not openly set out to advocate the messages at this nexus nevertheless found their work permeated with it. As W. T. Lhamon explains in his book Deliberate Speed, “To negate correlative representation, for instance, is not to negate representation. Rather, it means that representation is more complex, more tonal and circumstantial, more interpretive and creative, sometimes concrete, sometimes vaporous, always elusive.”³ This elusive, improvisational quality was intrinsic to jazz, in its spontaneous, free-flowing form as much as its absorption and reworking of blues music, “as when urban combos answered downhome remorse with exaggerated horn boohoos.”⁴ Jazz and rock ‘n’ roll became vehicles for the narratives and lore of black culture, carrying it into the heart of white society disguised as an innocuous commercial form.

Among the foremost artists of this poplore was Chuck Berry, who in bridging both white and black cultures with the accessibility of his music, “smuggled black reality and black anxieties into the smiling heart of America.”⁵ Lhamon breaks down several of Berry’s songs, notably “Maybellene” and “Brown-eyed Handsome Man” to reveal that the underlying themes and motifs echo black culture through reference to the blues and the trickster figure. “Berry, then, created an early variety of rock ‘n’ roll by stamping the emerging world of pop culture with Sambo strategies sinister enough to satisfy those seeking menace, smiling enough to please audiences hoping to escape.”⁶ In creating a commodified form of the poplore, Berry insinuated his music through cracks in a gate that the civil rights movement was battering against. “Maybellene” addresses through music the same issues on which other musicians were being blacklisted for taking an explicit stand.

Speaking out against the racial climate perpetuated by the federal government carried a high cost for the musicians and artists who dared, particularly those who sought to gather support internationally. Paul Robeson endured heavy blacklisting because of his open stance on civil rights in the US, as documented in Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist. As Ossie Davis said, the federal government went after Robeson as one of the most powerful figures in the group, so as to break the spirit of the whole. “His ‘frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries,’ they explained. ‘It was a family affair.’… Blacklisting seriously interfered with Robeson’s ability to perform and earn a living within the United States for many years.”⁷ Canada Lee was blacklisted into depression and a heart attack. Josephine Baker, despite having no American passport to confiscate, was tracked down by the long arm of US embassies and foreign connections and banned from nearly every international venue she approached. Louis Armstrong was marked out by the federal government for the reverse sin, showing a marked lack of enthusiasm for the US after the events at Little Rock. “Some level of liberal activism would be tolerated, but only if articulated in a way that did not challenge the democratic order. Armstrong’s offense was that he seemed unwilling to defend the nation against communist critics.”⁸ The Civil Rights Congress summed up the fight against blacklisting in their petition:

It is our hope, and we fervently believe that it was the hope and aspiration of every black American whose voice was silenced forever through premature death at the hands of racist-minded hooligans or Klan terrorists, that the truth recorded here will be made known to the world; that it will speak with a tongue of fire loosing an unquenchable moral crusade, the universal response to which will sound the death knell of all racist theories.⁹

The voice of black Americans was silenced when it spoke explicitly against the US racial climate, but when it sang its message, cloaked in layers of sign and ritual, it escaped censorship. The structure of feeling was a necessary form when defined was dangerous, and only Trojan horses could get through the gates.

One of the most poignant themes that black music carried into poplore was the idea of a promised land, and its relationship to the U.S. Berry’s “Brown-eyed Handsome Man” links to baseball and Jackie Robinson hitting a home run, but as Lhamon asks,

For what home is he heading? Is he a conventional American sport doffing cap to fans while heading for home plate in a hot dogs and mustard baseball game? Or is he a sly fellow heading home to his briar patch, to the traditional blues code for the sanctuary of one’s culture, as when the invisible youth urged his Harlem crowd to ‘go home’? He wouldn’t be the brown-eyed handsome man in the mid-fifties were he not running toward both destinations simultaneously.¹⁰

The gaps and synchronicities of the U.S. and the Promised Land provide a powerful and tragic theme for black musics, for despite the move to “return to Africa”, nowhere else but the US do black people find “home”, yet even here “home” is not fully realized. The Promised Land is not complete; in fact, it never may be. “No such place can exist in a racist society. No such place has yet materialized for blacks in white America, not even in California. The term signifies a place necessary but impossible to believe in on earth.”¹¹ This contradiction results in a tangle of desires to both escape and recreate, yearning for a promised land that is elsewhere but here at the same time, here recreated into elsewhere.

The 1964 film Nothing But a Man illustrates these warring urges in the story of Duff Anderson, blacklisted from jobs because of his refusal to play the Sambo for white supervisors. He flees town in a bid for escape, but ties of family to his wife Josie and his son James Lee draw him back. His visit to and the death of his father seems to inspire in him the realization that the promised land never comes but through the efforts of the people who make it; that there is no mythical land waiting beyond the horizon, and he could spend a drunken, violent life looking for it. The soundtrack of the film also reinforces this yearning for a promised land; the lyrics of the Miracles’ “I’ll Try Something New”, for example, declare, “I will take you away with me as far as I can, to Venus or Mars / Then we will love with your hand in my hand, you’ll be queen of the stars.” The Marvelettes add their story of “a lover way over there” on some other side, but “They tell me, that the river’s too deep and it’s much too wide / For you can’t make it over to the other side / Don’t know I’ve got to get there.” The other side is an unreachable, impossible myth, that takes on a powerful presence through the poplore of black music, and even links Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the musicians. “King, Berry, and their followers both believed and disbelieve in America as a promised land, were sure that democracy was real and sure that it was a carrot cruelly eluding its most dogged pursuers.”¹²

King took on even more prominence in the lore of a promised land as the Vietnam War intensified, belying every illusion of the US as a free and democratic society. Speaking out against the war, King said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”¹³ As another protest petition declared, ” We don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell here under this American Democracy.“¹⁴ The gap between the US’s self-image as a champion of freedom, a real-life promised land as the black musics yearned for, and the reality of a nation still locked in segregation and racial hatred, became glaring under the lens of the Vietnam War. King said, “We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”¹⁵ The poplore of the Promised Land, a tool for the aims of the civil rights movement, was embittered by the harsh realities of US federal policy.

Black musics of the civil rights movement used the elusive, thematic forms of blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll to shape society to the rituals and voices of black culture, creating a “structure of feeling” that achieved what outspoken black artists could not. Unable to blacklist music itself, unaware of the underlying totems and signs conveyed by the music, white culture allowed the poplore of the civil rights movement to enter the very heart of their culture.  However, no such heart emerged for black culture; they were futilely seeking a Promised Land that did not and could not exist.

¹ Matthews, 124.

² Matthews, 121.

³ Lhamon, 239.

⁴ Lhamon, 111.

⁵ Lhamon, 82.

⁶ Lhamon, 85.

⁷ Dudziak, 63.

⁸ Dudziak, 67.

⁹ Dudziak, 64.

¹⁰ Lhamon, 81.

¹¹ Lhamon, 84.

¹² Lhamon, 84.

¹³ Young, 199.

¹⁴ Young, 198.

¹⁵ Young, 198.

Sources

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights. Princeton University Press. (Princeton, 2000.)

Lhamon Jr., W. T. Deliberate Speed: Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950’s. Harvard University Press. (Cambridge, 2002.)

Matthews, Sean. “The Structure of Feeling of Raymond Williams.” Studies in Languages and Cultures, No. 9. Pg. 117-133.

Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars. Harper Perennial. (New York, 1991.)