Billie Holiday by John Szwed Page B

a new kind of singing was emerging, even while segregation made it easy to ignore its origins. But by the 1960s there were those such as music critic Henry Pleasants who declared that the source of the American singing style was primarily black. He went even further with the radical suggestion that when the European tradition of classical music was becoming decadent in America, African Americansingers surfaced as the vital voices of the future by reinventing the “objectives, criteria and devices of the early Italian masters of opera” by treating song “as a lyrical extension of speech”: “They emphasize clear enunciation and conversational phrasing—and to achieve this effect, they employ the same musical devices as their distinguished predecessors, including the appoggiatura, the turn, the slur and the rubato.”
    Pleasants pointed out two other factors that contributed to the ascendancy of African American popular singers. First, they had the freedom to interpret that had been denied their classical counterparts, who increasingly came under the domination of the composer and the orchestra.And second, they were able to use the microphone to restore much of the charm, intimacy, and virtuosity that had been lost in classical singing when the emphasis changed from the rhetorical to the lyrical.
    â€œReinventing” was the word that Pleasants used to describe this shift of musical aesthetics, though “creolization” might have been an even more accurate term because it would call attention to the ways in which historically unrelated cultures can sometimes fuse to create a totally new form without concern for origins or a respectable patrimony.
    African Americans were leading the way in breaking with European musical tradition, and, strange as it might seem, this break had been anticipated, and maybe even urged, by the minstrel show, the first form of musical theater to reach the whole country. Its history is much longer than the eighty or so years that it is said to have lasted in the United States; its legacy is far more complicated than just a matter of white people copying black people, and even today questions about the sources of this music and its influence remain unsettled. Some minstrels were black, and some of those we now consider white performers were then categorized as nonwhite in one way or another. A few of the white performers who wore blackface, such as Al Jolson or Libby Holman, were very popular among people of color. Minstrelsy reached a much wider audience than just the United States, and it took on different meanings in other countries. In South Africa minstrel performances in blackfacehave been popular for over a century among nonwhite Africans in Cape Town during Coon Carnival in January of each year. AdolfHitler’s mistress Eva Braun posed in blackface for professional entertainers’ photos in imitation of her favorite performer, Al Jolson, who was Jewish. Billie Holiday, like many other black performers of her time, at least once had to darken her skin so as not to look too white when appearing with a band of black musicians before a white audience.
    The music and dance of minstrel shows were not copying Negroes so much as they were constructions of imaginary characters in imaginary antebellum settings by white composers and choreographers who put them together from various cultural ingredients. If they believed what they were presenting were simulations of real people, they had failed. More likely, they knew they were pastiches, or parodies, especially because many of the tunes of the minstrels and some of the humor had scarcely concealed origins among the tent and stage shows from the past that had minstrelized the Irish. A New York theater writer in the late 1800s remarked after a minstrel show he had just witnessed that he pitied Negro performers because they had to compete with the real thing!
    The subject of theatrical black masking continues to