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"Black Strings: The Symphony of a People and an Instrument"
PBS On Jim Crow -- Race In Presidential Politics -- Deconstructing Ralp Ellison: MUSIC Black Strings: The Symphony of a People and an Instrument -- On a spring day in 1841, Solomon Northrup set out from his Saratoga Springs, N.Y., his beloved violin in tow, to provide musical entertainment at a carnival in Washington, D.C. For the educated free Black farmer and musical virtuoso, slavery existed only in whispered tales, its specter looming only in the shadowy reaches of his imagination. But on the journey Northrup fell ill and awakened from a deep sleep to find himself in a slave pen -- shackled, chained and soon after sold to a Louisiana slave owner. Rescued in 1853 Northrup returned to his wife and children, but he remembered the source of his salvation throughout the ordeal. In his memoir,Twelve Years a Slave, he wrote: "Alas! Had it not been for my beloved violin, I sarcely can conceive how I could have endured the long years of bondage...It was my companion, the friend of my bosom triumphing loudly when I was joyful, and uttering its soft, melodious consolations when I was said." Once his musical skills were known (he borrowed an instrument from a fellow slave to play the "Virginia Reel" in the presence of a White overseer), plantation owners encouraged him to entertain fellow slaves, masters, overseers and other landowners. Violin artistry elevated his status above that of his peers, and while it may not have saved his life during his enslavement, surely improved his lot. Today, few people recognize the long tradition of Black violinists, which is believed to date back as far as 1690, when slaves crafted duplicates of West African goges from hollowed out gourds, calf skin and gut and played them with an arched wooden how. After slavery, the tradition of the Black fiddler continued with "string bands" that traveled through out the deep South. (Marshall Wyatt's compilation CD, Violin, Sing the Blues for Me (1926-1949), features the music of old-time Black masters fashioning a pre-guitar blues style.) And while slave fiddlers reigned in America, Blacks in Europe such as Chevalier de Saint Georges and Beethoven's friend George Bridgetower (who was said to have so impressed the German composer that he originally dedicated one of his most famous sonatas to him before the two had a falling out) mastered the classical repertory. Dominique-Rene de Lerma, a scholar of Black history and professor of music at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisc., points to the violin virtuosity of not only the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, "but his son and grandson as well." etc... |
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This intel was contributed by bjk48
bjk48
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May, 2012
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