Around 1770 an anonymous white British man living in Jamaica wrote a manuscript based on his observations of black and enslaved musicians there. His writings included observations on how black musicians, including fiddlers, learned European tunes, their compositional methods, the circulation and performance of music from Africa, and, most unusually, notated examples of tunes that he had heard in Jamaica. This source, held in the British Library and known as the “Jamaican Airs” has come to scholarly attention in the past few years through the work of historians Devin Leigh and Linda Sturtz, with additional recent interpretations of the source by Mary Caton Lingold and Wayne Weaver. In this paper I build upon this work by considering how the “Jamaican Airs” may be used as a source to explore how the performance of European music by African and African descended people under colonial rule in the eighteenth century did not necessarily adhere to binary racializations of musical genres and styles. As survivors of the middle passage and their descendants adapted their musical practice to colonized contexts, they were also negotiating and determining musical nuances of race, racialization, and colonialism. Through my own research, as well as conversations and performances of several tunes from the manuscript with contemporary performing musicians, I demonstrate that the “Jamaican Airs” shows how “Europe” and “Africa” were still unstable musical descriptors in the eighteenth century that were in the process of becoming fixed into what would become the ideologies and logics of nineteenth-century scientific racism.

In March 1926, the seventy-year-old fiddler Julie Lamothe competed in the Montreal, Quebec qualifying round for an upcoming “Worldwide Fiddlers’ Contest” in Lewiston, Maine. “It is the first time in the annals of traditional music that a woman will play fiddle on a theatre stage,” declared the daily newspaper. In Montreal, fiddling on stage for an audience was itself a recent phenomenon, still not a decade old, but descriptions in contemporary literary sources and newspapers indicate that the instrument had been associated at least since the late nineteenth century with a gendered imagining of fiddlers as lumbermen and rural farmers. Women were largely excluded from the commercialization of fiddling in the 1920s and following decades, namely recording, stage, radio, and television opportunities. In this paper, we argue for fiddling contests as one of the few public spaces in Quebec that offered a socially acceptable visibility to women fiddlers in the early and mid-twentieth century. Slominski (2020) has argued that, in Ireland in the early twentieth century, the legibility of women traditional musicians depended in part on their alignment with nationalist tropes of “nurturing mother” and “innocent maiden,” which were in turn restricted by social norms. We compare this with Quebec, where women fiddlers were documented either when they were older women, well past their childbearing and child-rearing years, or in their youth. Through a close reading of primary source materials, we identify over a dozen women who competed in fiddling contests in Quebec in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Despite the long history of the violin in Black American music and the many Black American violinists who shaped the instrument beginning in the 17th century, the violin has overwhelmingly been constructed as an instrument associated with whiteness. Enter Black Violin, a Florida-based musical duo that blends classical with hip hop. Comprised of two classically trained string players, violinist Kevin Sylvester (Kev Marcus) and viola player Wilner Baptiste (Wil B.), over the past seventeen years the duo has cultivated a devoted fan following, selling out large auditoriums and performing alongside popular musicians such as Alicia Keys, Wu-Tang Clan, Aretha Franklin, Tom Petty, Lil Wayne, amongst others. Self-described as “two Black dudes playing violin” Black Violin has taken an instrument long associated with Western classical music and reframed it via the racial and gendered associations of hip hop. I conceptualize the performances of Black Violin through the lens of “disorientation” (Ahmed 2006); showing how they resignify the instrument’s “unmarked whiteness,” but in turn how the violin acts on them through particular modes of respectable bodily comportment that challenge racist stereotypes of Black men. In so doing, I aim to add to the critical reframing of organological studies by considering an instrument within the specific context of American discourses on race; illuminate a long genealogy of genre-bending Black violinists, whose innovations have been critical, but long ignored; and demonstrate how a musical instrument can be a vehicle of racial epistemology, undone in the hands of musicians.