Conference Agenda

On November 17, 1926, Fats Waller sat down at a keyboard to record “Lenox Avenue Blues,” a tune he had composed himself. What makes this event stand out was that Waller was not playing a piano but at a pipe organ—one located in a former Baptist church that the Victor Recording Company had recently transformed into a state-of-the-art recording studio. This session was Waller’s first time at this particular instrument and served as a test run to explore the feasibility of combining his stride style, a pipe organ, and modern recording technology. It would be the first of eleven such experiments.

This paper explores Waller’s pipe organ recordings for Victor, with a particular focus on the material he recorded between 1926 and 1928. In this era, Waller recorded both solo and group recordings on the instrument, all of which were released surprisingly not under their “race records,” but as part of the company’s “popular” series—the part of their catalog marketed to white listeners. Such a designation was rare for Black musicians. Yet, despite Waller’s inclusion in the mainstream popular series, Victor still expressly limited his musical style, thereby maintaining the restrictions they placed on Black performers.

Building on Paul S. Machlin’s study of Waller’s life and repertoire, as well as Karl Hagstrom Miller’s work on the segregated music industry of this time, I argue that Waller’s pipe organ recordings provide new insights into the racial logic of the recording industry in the early twentieth century. Namely, how that logic restricted Black musicians’ ability to sonically and instrumentally experiment. Specifically, this logic precluded Waller from recording classical works and instead restricted him to playing in the stride idiom, a particularly difficult feat on a pipe organ. Ultimately, Waller’s story encapsulates many of the larger discriminatory practices that Black musicians faced during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, it highlights a side of Black music-making that is often overlooked in accounts of this era.

Court festivals in early modern Germany, staged at major occasions of state, employed a variety of theatrical forms and media to affirm and legitimize the power of the celebrating social elites. These festivals not only emphasized self-proclaimed virtues, often represented by characters from Greek and Roman mythology, but also showcased representations of Others such as “Turks” and “Moors” who served as a negative foil to highlight these claims through the lenses of race, religion, and civilization. While previous scholarship has mostly focused on the political contextualization of court festivals, their importance as spaces of early modern race-making has not yet been comprehensively studied.

Building on Jennifer Stoever’s and Noémie Ndiaye’s work on Black sound and dance, this paper explores imaginings of blackness in early modern German court festivals through sonic, kinetic, and visual media. Based on my analysis of festival descriptions, illustrations in festival books, and notated music, I ask how sonic and performative components such as music and dance as well as visual elements, especially clothing and black-up techniques, were employed to construct sub-Saharan Africans as racialized Others. Focusing on a group of festivals staged at courts of the Protestant Union at the eve of the Thirty Years War, I will examine three case studies that feature “Black” characters: an ensemble of musicians and dancers as part of an Africa-themed pageant (Kassel, 1596), Duke Johann Friedrich of Württemberg’s impersonation of a dancing “Moor” (Stuttgart, 1616), and an entry of “Moorish” knights and crumhorn players in Halle in the same year. I will also investigate a group of notated instrumental dances representing racialized Others in festivals of the Protestant Union that I have been able to identify as music associated with the English court masque.

As I will show, these multi-media imaginings of sub-Saharan Africans were designed to affirm racial hierarchies by discursive strategies of generalization and denigration, and by blurring boundaries between human beings and animals—strategies of race-making that demonstrate that Germany around 1600 was by no means a political and cultural backwater but participated in racial discourses representative of Europe’s leading colonial powers Spain, France, and England.

In 1930, the animation artist Max Fleischer unveiled a brand-new cartoon character—Betty Boop. Betty Boop was closely modeled on the singer-actress Helen Kane, who was known during the late 1920s as the “boop-a-doop girl,” in reference to her distinctively nasal vocal delivery, and in particular, to her use of nonsense syllables to punctuate instrumental breaks. In her early film appearances, Betty Boop was voiced by “sound-alike” singers who imitated those attributes of Kane’s sung performances. Kane never consented to Fleischer’s imitation of her vocal style, however, and in 1932 she sued him and his distributor, the Paramount Publix Corporation, for unlawfully appropriating her vocal identity.

This talk examines the subject that dominated the testimonies given during Kane’s heavily publicized 1934 trial: the genealogy of African American “scat” singing. Although journalistic jazz histories long attributed scat singing’s origins to Louis Armstrong’s 1926 “Heebie Jeebies” recording session, there are numerous recorded examples of scat-like vocalizations prior to that (Friedwald 1990; Shipton 2007). Fleischer’s attorneys called a series of witnesses to attest to this fact, as well as to the longstanding ubiquity of so-called “hot licks” in live vaudeville performance. On this basis, the court ruled that Kane’s scat-like “boop-a-doops” were publici juris—a term of art for things that are in common use, and that cannot be claimed as anyone’s private property.

In this talk, I demonstrate how historic entertainment litigation like Kane’s lawsuit offers hitherto-untapped evidence about the racialized political economy of U.S. popular music. For one thing, the trial’s stakes quickly transcended the immediate dispute between Kane and Fleischer. As contemporary African American journalists recognized, the trial’s archaeology of “hot licks” instead became a referendum on the cultural and economic value of Black popular music all told, and on its status as what one columnist called a “Property of the race.” I also argue that the trial’s outcome resists analysis in terms of the “cultural appropriation” of Black music. The court’s determination that “hot licks” were publici juris suggests that the cross-racial dynamics of “scat” singing were instead understood in the 1930s in terms of musical expropriation—as a non-remunerative seizure of property for the collective (white) benefit.