Jeffrey Melnick the Right to Sing the Blues
A Right to Sing the Blues : African Americans, Jews, and American Pop Vocal
Description
All also often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, only picayune in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the fashion we call back well-nigh the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers merely such a revision.
"Black-Jewish relations," Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a style for American Jews to talk nigh their clashing racial condition, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts need an caption. Remarkably flexible, this narrative tin can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful concord on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made "Black" music in the beginning few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such every bit George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their "natural" affinity for producing "Blackness" music every bit a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness every bit a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness.
Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.
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Production details
- Paperback | 288 pages
- 156 x 235 x fifteen.49mm | 408g
- xv April 2001
- Harvard University Press
- Cambridge, Mass, The states
- English
- none
- 067400566X
- 9780674005662
Freedom Dreams
15 Jun 2003
Paperback
Rp278.428Rp297.083
Save Rp18.655
Tabular array of contents
Introduction: The Languages of Blackness-Jewish Relations "Yiddle on Your Dabble": The Culture of Black-Jewish Relations "I Used to Be Colour Blind": The Racialness of Jewish Men "Swanee Ripples": From Blackface to White Negro "Elevator Ev'ry Vox": African American Music and the Nation "Melancholy Dejection": Making Jews Sacred in African American Music Epilogue: The Lasting Power of "Black-Jewish Relations" Notes Index
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Review quote
Did Jews encompass the greasepaint masks and popular song of minstrel shows--the style, language, and nuance of black civilization--as a means of establishing their ain status equally whites? Melnick answers that provocative question with this wide-angle view, through the lens of pop American music, of blackness-Jewish relationships. * Booklist, an "Editor'due south Pick 1999" selection * In his complex and challenging book, A Right to Sing the Dejection, Jeffrey Melnick seeks to translate the narrative of 'Black-Jewish relations' within the context of the efforts of Jews in the American amusement concern to 'reorganize Jewishness as a species of whiteness'...Melnick's assay is intriguing and provocative. -- James C. Cobb * Times Literary Supplement * Links between blacks, Jews and American popular music are the focus in a title which examines Jewish songwriters, composers and performers who made black music pop in the first few decades of this century. The focus on shared experiences between Afro-Americans and Jews draws some of import connections between indigenous groups frequently at odds with one another. * Bookwatch * This is fascinating reading for those interested in music history, relationships between blacks and Jews, and American popular civilisation. -- Vernon Ford * Booklist * At the core of this inventive and entertaining test of black-Jewish relationships is Melnick'due south theory that Jews embraced the greasepaint masks and popular vocal of minstrel shows--the style, linguistic communication, and nuance of black culture--every bit a means of establishing their own status equally whites. * Booklist * Melnick's well-researched book explores Black-Jewish relations through the lens of US popular music in the 'age of ragtime and jazz,' when Jews became consummate minstrel and vaudeville interpreters, Can Pan Alley songsmiths, and vocal publishers...Melnick argues that Jews used their blackness musical forms for popular consumption and in the process to 'reorganize Jewishness as a species of whiteness.' -- K. Averill * Selection * Melnick uses the music manufacture to examine closely the nature of [the] ambivalent relationship [betwixt Jews and African Americans]. Focusing on Jewish Tin Pan Alley song writers and performers such every bit George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Al Jolson, Melnick explores how they balanced an analogousness for black music with the conscious endeavour to testify how they were transforming what was seen as a lower grade of culture into something more than palatable for mass white audiences. -- Dan Bogey * Library Periodical * Melnick argues that we need to rethink the cultural narratives of 'Black-Jewish relations' and examine the ways in which these narratives tell stories about class and articulate concerns most masculinity and sexuality. In a compelling account of the music industry, in particular, and the culture manufacture, in general, he examines how Jews and African Americans were not only objects of a sexualized discourse effectually jazz and ragtime but how the musical globe was a terrain in which they spoke to and about each other. A Correct to Sing the Blues is an absolutely fascinating and original account of the role of Jewish cultural piece of work in the product of African American culture. -- Hazel V. Carby, author of Race Men A Right to Sing the Blues will exist indispensable to any further discussion of 'Black-Jewish relations,' debunking many of the assumptions underlying that give-and-take in its past form and thus making possible far more productive ones. I learned a great deal from this volume. -- George Hutchinson, author of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White Jeff Melnick means to displace the narrative of a Blackness-Jewish political alliance as the fundamental, mythicized way of understanding the relations between Blacks and Jews in the Us. He goes back instead to the primal role of Jews vis-a-vis African Americans and African-American music in popular civilization, and how, finally, Jews developed new identities equally American Jews through their relation to real and imaginary African Americans and their music. Filled with terrific fabric that is unfailingly analyzed in a smart, lively, and oft vivid way, A Right to Sing the Dejection is a major book on a major and timely subject. This book is going to cause quite a stir. -- Michael P. Rogin, writer of Blackface, White Noise
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About Jeffrey Melnick
Jeffrey Melnick is Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston.
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Source: https://www.bookdepository.com/Right-Sing-Blues-Jeffrey-Melnick/9780674005662
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