Black Culture and Black Consciousness by Levine Lawrence W.;

Author:Levine, Lawrence W.; [Levine, Lawrence W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

SECULAR SONG AND CULTURAL VALUES-BLACK AND WHITE

Inquiring into the fate of the English and Scottish ballad in the United States, Stanley Edgar Hyman has asserted, “it has become inadequate narrative, aborted drama, happy-ending tragedy, corrupt and meaningless verbiage, and bad poetry in general. Some of this may be the effect of transmission in time, which seems to degenerate and deteriorate folk literature wherever we can observe its effects. Some of it, however, is certainly the effect of the American ethos, with its denial of death, its resistance to the tragic experience, its deep repression of sexuality, its overriding pieties, and its frantic emphasis on the rationalistic, the inconsequential, and the optimistic.” In those British ballads that survived transplantation to the United States, Hyman argues, magic and the supernatural were dropped or diminished, extrahuman beings such as demons, ghosts, elves, and mermaids were rationalized or humanized, sex was repressed, and such unpleasant human acts as incest and kin-murder were expunged or played down. 1 After many years of collecting folk songs in both Great Britain and the United States, Alan Lomax was impressed by the differences he encountered. The “paganism,” the “easy and natural acceptance of the pleasures of the flesh and the bed,” which he found in British song, were foreign to American folklore. “The British song-tradition in America has been censored, both conscientiously and consciously.” The mass of “gently erotic ditties” which in England and Scotland were still common and widely heard, were in America relegated to the “nether world” of dirty songs and were replaced by ballads and love songs “shrouded in gloom, drowned in melancholy, and poisoned by sado-masochism.” 2

The same process of denial, dilution, repression, sentimentalization, and trivialization that Hyman and Lomax described has been particularly evident in American popular music. S. I. Hayakawa in his revealing article, “Popular Songs vs. the Facts of Life,” maintained that the lyrics of popular songs “tend towards wishful thinking, dreamy and ineffectual nostalgia, unrealistic fantasy, self-pity, and sentimental clichés masquerading as emotion.” Focusing upon the love songs of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Hayakawa in his brief analysis demonstrated how the idealization so omnipresent in these songs, by creating impossible demands and dreams, led first to frustration and ultimately to demoralization. 3 My own careful reading of those love songs popular on the American musical stage, in the movies, and on the radio and records during this period supports Hayakawa’s analysis. The titles alone indicate how important the elements of idealistic, dreamlike, magical love were in the hit tunes from 1920 to 1950. The following are typical: Love Will Find A Way, Angel Child, I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise, Don’t Wake Me Up Let Me Dream, Looking At The World Thru Rose Colored Glasses, My Blue Heaven, Dream Lover, You’re My Everything, Did You Ever See A Dream Walking? ( Well I Did), A Star Fell Out of Heaven, I Married An Angel, You Stepped Out Of A Dream, You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You. Frustration and disillusionment

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