[0] A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Kofi Natambu

Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95.

A narrow fixation on the examination of the individual musical celebrity as cultural icon and economic commodity has dominated most writing on American music for the past two decades. Rarely (and this is especially true since 1980) has the critical or analytical focus been on the social and historical context of the music itself as it reflected or was influenced by the events and cultural circumstances that it emerged from. In fact it is characteristic of a great number of texts to separate and isolate form from content to such a degree that all too often we lose sight of exactly why a specific musical style or expression became significant in the first place.

As a result very few books by music historians and critics wind up saying anything particularly insightful or even interesting about why music matters beyond the academic or strictly commercial concerns of musicologists and music industry executives (and their advertising partners in mass media). This is why it was such a profoundly satisfying pleasure to read a new book by Craig Werner entitled A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. Werner, a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he teaches music and cultural history, has mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys, implies, symbolizes, and represents ideas as well as emotions, but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories.

This precise attention to historical nuance as well as cross-cultural dynamics and traditions permeates Werner's lucid analysis of the exceedingly rich and hybrid reality of American music in all of its dimensions from Gospel, Jazz, and the Blues to Rock and Roll and Hip Hop. This has allowed Werner's text to enter the elite pantheon of truly great books in the genre. Such seminal texts as Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1968) by the legendary poet, playwright, critic, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), as well as such major and provocative books as Mystery Train (1975) by music critic and cultural historian Greil Marcus, Peter Gurainick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986), Nelson George's acclaimed works Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound (1985) and The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1989), and Shadow & Act (1964) by the late novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison have given us new insights into what makes music such a central f orce in our lives.

As in these texts, Werner keeps his laser-like eye focused on what the music means to the people who both play and listen to it. What he discovers is nothing less than the fundamental hopes, desires, fears, dreams, fantasies, and aspirations of Americans during the twentieth century acting themselves out in great sonic dramas of melodic lyricism, rhythmic intensity, and harmonic dynamism, as well as atonality and pure noise elements. And what a grand panorama of musical styles and pageantry it is! Werner reminds us that the twentieth century would be completely unintelligible without the monumental contributions of such inspiring artists as Mahalia Jackson, Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Eric Dolphy, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, George Clinton, Bob Marley, Al Green, Stevie Wonder , Chuck Berry, (the Artist formerly known as) Prince, Gil Scott-Heron, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Donny Hathaway, Cassandra Wilson, Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Run-DMC, KRS-one, etc. Theyre all here, plus a multitude of others in a dense yet highly accessible tome of some 400 pages that feverishly examines the endless links among music, politics, history, literature, visual art, philosophy, religion, and social/cultural reality over the past five decades.

What Werner brings to this ever fascinating narrative is a great knowledge and appreciation of precisely how such major historical events as the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, as well as the Vietnam War, the rise of the Feminist and Gay/Lesbian movements, and the multiple political assassinations of the 1960s were pivotal to understanding how music played such a significant role in our consciousness of the meaning of these events. He also makes this particular legacy of music-making history more intelligible, and thus useful; for analysis and cultural/political activism continue down to this very moment, in which the various musical movements of the past twenty-five years (e.g., Disco, Punk, Reggae, New Wave, Funk, and Hip Hop) are strictly predicated on, and draw their fundamental strength and energy from, the social/political context of their various cultural origins.