History Beyond the Text by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135688714
Publisher: Routledge

Models for future historical work

In the field I know best, the history of music in the USA, some fine models of this kind of work already exist. Unsurprisingly, the ones that make the most detailed use of musical examples have been written by historically minded musicologists. Two works on Latino music make particularly effective use of songs as the foundation of historical study. Ruth Glasser's examination of Puerto Rican music during the mass migration to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s centres in part on 'Lamento Borincano', a 'Puerto Rican lament' that, for many migrants, poignantly expressed their feeling of separation from their homeland. Glasser notes that 'a musical analysis' of the song 'would show the influences of Italian opera, Puerto Rican mountain music, and Cuban popular sounds' but she does not make such an analysis, focusing instead on the social context surrounding it. 'The song', Glasser notes, 'was purely a New York product.' Composer Rafael Hernández claimed that while meeting friends in a Harlem restaurant, 'the nostalgia of that cold, sad, and melancholy afternoon drew my fingers to the almost-falling-apart piano in a comer, and I began to play the melody of "Lamento Borincano".'13

Steven Loza's Barrio Rhythm explores the musical culture of Mexican-American Los Angeles. Loza, a native of east Los Angeles, conducted oral histories with veteran musicians and accumulated an array of other sources on the topic: recordings, playbills, school records, newspaper clippings and photographs. In several instances his exhaustive research revealed complex and rich cultural meanings in a musical artefact. One example of this is 'The Ballad of Pancho Lopez', a song in English written in 1956 by the veteran Los Angeles guitarist and songwriter Lalo Guerrero. The song, a parody of the recently popular 'Ballad of Davy Crockett', became the best-selling single record to date to come out of Mexican-American Los Angeles. Residents of the barrio accused Guerrero of pandering to Anglo record buyers with a song that perpetuated the derogatory stereotype of the lazy, slow-witted Mexican man. (Pancho Lopez does little but run a taco stand and take naps.)14 In the late 1960s, as Latino rock bands aggressively espoused 'Chicano power', the song passed into oblivion. Loza's research shows, though, that Guerrero had strong credentials as a performer and composer in east Los Angeles. As his song's success shows, he also suffered from a cultural marginalisation that especially afflicted Mexican-American musicians, who were caught between their roots and the constraints of the mass market.15

Individual songs such as these can serve as windows into cultural complexities and predicaments. Like 'Danny Boy' (whose lyrics were written by an Englishman who never set foot in Ireland, and which is most popular among North Americans of Irish descent), the two Latino songs were not 'pure' or 'authentic' expressions of the cultures with which they are identified. Their musical qualities and lyrical narratives provide evidence of group experiences in particular historical contexts. Other examples are easy to cite. An ancient Jewish tune became the famed standard 'Havah Nagila'

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