Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W.E.B. Du Bois


Using the lens of double consciousness seems the best way to understand Roland Hayes, a great tenor who made his breakthrough in 1917. Driven by his “Negro” soul, Hayes helped open the stage to black American artists; he brought spirituals to the American stage, and, fairly early in his career, recognized and celebrated the blackness he found in his voice. At the same time, Hayes felt pressure to conform to the standards of white America. Indeed, this mindset reverberated through his music, especially early in his career, as Hayes tried to pattern his singing after European masters. At the same time, on some level, Hayes was aware of the great importance of the culture of the black community. African American music and dance formed some of his earliest memories and shaped his childhood identity. Not until much later, however, would he come to understand the complex contributions of Africa to his own cultural background. My conference presentation will focus on Hayes’s struggle with “warring ideals” and his attempts to reconcile himself to his African cultural heritage.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Country music’s debt to African American musical influences and African American musicians has long been recognized, and dozens of popular press and scholarly articles over the past decade have explored a rich tradition of African American engagements with country and pre-country styles, a line that runs from the black stringband sound of the Mississippi Sheiks to the hick-hop of Cowboy Troy. Even after rehearsing this trajectory, however, observers invariably frame their inquiries about black engagements with country in terms of the genre’s enduring whiteness. Among both sympathetic and cynical critics, black country artists and fans are imagined as always already exceptional, racially scandalous and transgressive, performing and listening to country music through an inescapable intermediary whiteness.
This paper uses the surprising circulations of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” to suggest an alternative conception of black country music practice that emphasizes the broad range of emotional connections—to family, faith, rural pasts and presents, class solidarity, and Southernness, among others—that African American artists and fans have expressed through country music. By tracing the path of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” from Glenn Campbell’s country-pop hit to Isaac Hayes’s revolutionary soul cover, and examining the use of the latter in “A Simple Poem to Mae” by the Black Arts poet Omari Kenyatta Tarajia, I suggest the ways black engagements with country music mingle some of the most obvious hallmarks of black cultural style with a specific semantic association that connects country, not to whiteness as either performance or privilege, but to black identities anchored in region, rurality, migration, and generation.
The paper begins by exploring what Hayes and other soul icons like Al Green and Aretha Franklin might have been trying to express about themselves as artists by performing country covers. Hayes thoroughly transformed the song first made famous by Glenn Campbell, simultaneously deepening the identifiably “country” tropes of the lyrics even as he constructed a sonic landscape of urbane black modernism. Like the country covers of Al Green, this maneuver can be read as Hayes’s effort to synthesize black urban and rural southern identities in the post-migration era. This moment of generational transition dominates Omari Kenyatta Tarajia’s mobilization of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” as well. In “A Simple Poem to Mae” Tarajia uses the song to figure its subject, the Black Arts poet Mae Jackson, as both a symbol of black nationalism and a natural, simple, and honest beauty, connecting her to the emergent structures of feeling around black cultural nationalism and to the residual structures of feeling around the Great Migration and resistance to southern segregation. This circulation suggests an overlooked relationship between country music and historically specific constructions of blackness that displaces the hegemony of country’s whiteness.