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Lift
Every Voice and Swing Black
Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century
Vaughn A. Booker
New York,
NY: New York University Press, 2020 Paperback.
xi+331 p. ISBN 978-1479890804. $35
Reviewed by Babacar M’Baye Kent State University
Vaughn A. Booker’s Lift Every
Voice and Swing : Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century is an
excellent contribution to African American Studies. The book revisits the
periods from the 1920s through the 1960s, when, at the height of the Harlem
Renaissance, African American society reflected its most diverse music produced
by inventive artists who have made some of the longest-lasting influences in
American society. As Booker shows, this period was uniquely significant since
it was the moment when a few of the most creative African American artists,
including Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, and
others popularized Swing and Jazz in American culture. Booker examines how
these artists brought religious life into American popular culture during the
Jazz Age and its succeeding decades. Booker’s book is very important because it tackles the
antithetical separation between African American faith and music that
historically prevailed in the perspectives of black ministers who tended to
perceive jazz, entertainment, cabarets, and dancing as contrary to true
Christian beliefs and religious worship. Booker reverentially addresses this
sensitive issue by showing that many iconic African American racial representatives
perceived this opposition as superficial. One of these leaders was the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) clergyman Rev. W.W. Evans who
“addressed” W.E.B. Du Bois’s “criticism of African American churches as too
conservative and moralizing on matters of leisure and recreation, too
encouraging of Christian prayer as a solution to worldly problems, and too dependent
on religious revivals” [28]. Rev. Evans’s response to the question of
“revivals” in Du Bois’s criticism was on point. According to Booker, Rev. Evans
“prescribed the use of religious revivals in moderation, writing that ‘they are
essential to the spiritual awakening of the Church. Like everything else, like
dancing, drinking, smoking, and card-playing, they are subject to abuse and
must be used discreetly, advisedly and discriminatingly’” [28]. This
disagreement between Du Bois and Rev. Evans reflects the tension between
African American Church leaders and intellectuals during the early part of the
twentieth century. Booker successfully explores this conflict by showing how
both groups somewhat overcame the tension by mutually fighting for the
advancement of African American people despite their particular religious
beliefs. Another major aspect
Booker examines is how, during the twentieth century, a selected group of
African American artists had a sense of religious authority that allowed them
to represent their race while they were creating a space for their culture in
mainstream American society. These
artists were therefore not devoid of responsibility and allegiance to African
American civil rights struggle, history, and culture, let alone to the
religious traditions out of which they came. However, they were able to
transcend the major challenge that Lionel Hampton had also faced, which was the
difficulty to leverage their popularity to represent both their race and the
sanctity of the African American music they had received from their cultural
origins. “Hampton conveyed his religious
opposition to artists and producers of any race who sought to profit by
popularizing African American religious music” [1]. Though, like Hampton, he
perceived African American music as “sacred,” Ellington did not find it as
antithetical to amusement, dance, and cabarets. He did not regard the
deployment of African American music as “entertainment” as an art form that conflicted
with religious significance. Ellington stayed with his convictions even if he
shared the other artists’ perception of themselves as individuals who should
represent their race and propagate its values and dignity in American culture
during racist contexts in which admissibility and integration were still denied
to blacks in the United States. Another major quality
of Booker’s book is its interdisciplinary methodology. Booker does an excellent
job at reflecting how the African American singers and musicians negotiated or
overcame the relationships between their faith and music by relying on the
songs and personal writings of these artists. He combines archival research,
musical history, and historical and literary interpretations of songs to
provide a clear understanding of how a selected group of African American
artists infused their faith into their music or represented this art as
something sacred that should be kept away from entertainment. This is an
excellent methodology that other scholars could use to study the vast and rich
reservoir of knowledge and practice that African American music represents. Furthermore, Booker’s
study is a form of intellectual history since it shows the role that
African American artists played in representing their race and people through
positive ideas and postures. Yet it is also a form of religious history because it
explores the role of propagators of African American religiosity, Protestantism,
or Pentecostalism that these artists played by infusing these values through
their music or their attempts to separate their faith from it. A case in point
is the opening of Ellington’s song, “Supreme Being” which, as Booker argues,
“allowed Ellington to marshal many familiar religious descriptors for this
divine concept” [171]. Another example is Ella Fitzgerald who, as Booker
suggests, “did produce ‘religious’ representations of African Americans in the studio
and live performances that arguably provided more a cultural portrait than
genuine reflections of her own beliefs and practices” [103]. In this sense, it
seems that African American artists could not all be categorized as being
either in favor of or against the mixing of religion and music since they individually
regarded the music as sacred even if their role as entertainers and cultural ambassadors
ultimately led them to convey religious or spiritual sentiments into the
popular realm. For all these above reasons, Booker’s study is a pivotal and
much-needed contribution to the study of African American music.
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