In Search of Soul: Hip-Hop, Literature, and Religion by Alejandro Nava

Author:Alejandro Nava [Nava, Alejandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Music, History & Criticism, Genres & Styles, Rap & Hip Hop, Religion, Christianity, General
ISBN: 9780520293533
Google: 1TcrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-09-05T00:49:46.374000+00:00

5

The Souls of Black Folk

Ralph Ellison’s Tragicomic Portrait

Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common was explored and poetized. . . . The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson1

If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning for jazz.

—Jelly Roll Morton

With the ghostly presence of duende as our guide, I hope that we can begin to notice some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions, especially as we explore in this chapter Ralph Ellison’s depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, we place ourselves in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.

Ellison’s project, which brought shades of black and blue to the pale cast of soul in America, resembles Lorca’s use of the duende as a force of revitalization for tired and spent conceptions of soul. Music—gypsy ballads and deep song for Lorca and spirituals, blues, and jazz for Ellison—gave them their formula for a richer view of art and literature, one with sparkle and fresh vitality, one that renovated rusted and worn-out words. Both of them came to literature from an early, formative affair with music—Ellison played the trumpet and studied music at Tuskegee, while Lorca was a trained pianist—and both wrote as if the flows and meters of music were always playing in their ears, lending harmony and synchronicity to the stridency of their lives. More than all other art forms, music, dance, and the spoken word were revelatory for the two men, breaking open the secret chambers of a culture’s soul (DS, 47).

Besides sculpting their language with a lyrical sensibility, affection for music kept the musings of Lorca and Ellison close to the ground and close to the poetry and folklore of common people. Although the reclamation of vernacular and folk traditions had been a widespread trend among European and American writers since the nineteenth century, Lorca and Ellison avoided some of the most glaring deficiencies of this fashion. Unlike romantic caricatures of non-European cultures—examples of exotic and noble savagery, rich in flair and passion but lacking in intellectual sophistication—Lorca and Ellison displayed a more intimate, thick knowledge of their traditions; they were participants, not just voyeurs.2 While they, too, ascribed

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