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Jump for Joy: The Jump Trope in African America, 1937–19411

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Fdormer Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell wrote, “People in all kinds of cultures are known to ‘jump for joy’ in moments of supreme happiness. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport organized around jumping.…It's possible for a player to jump because he's happy, but it's more likely that he's happy because he's jumping. I have heard players complain about almost every detail of the game — the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape or temperature of the dressing room — but I've never heard anybody complain about the fact that the game requires jumping.”

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

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78. “A lot of tunes were called stomps, and a lot of bands were called stomp bands,” Count Basie said (Basie, Count, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray [New York: Random House, 1985], 6)Google Scholar.

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83. Encyclopedia are universally nonspecific in defining jump. Hugues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier's Guide to Jazz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) call it a “synonym for ‘swing’” (156). Kernfeld, Barry in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz calls it a “style of jazz related to swing…a precursor of rhythm and blues” ([London: Macmillan, 1988], 639)Google Scholar.

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86. Albert Murray, conversation with the author, August 30, 1996.

87. Brian Priestley in Jazz: The Essential Companion suggests that the jump bands were the “first to start emphasizing the up-beat…which [was] more pronounced in what became rhythm-and-blues” (Carr, Ian, Fairweather, Digby, and Priestley, Brian, Jazz: the Essential Companion [New York: Prentice Hall, 1987], 274)Google Scholar.

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196. See Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1Google Scholar; and Epstein, Dena, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 278–86Google Scholar.

197. Johnson, James Weldon, Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926; rept. New York: Viking, 1951), 33Google Scholar.

198. As in this description of an 1864 service, “the women sitting around him, rocking & swaying & throwing up their arms” (Epstein, , Sinful Tunes, 357Google Scholar).

199. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 37Google Scholar.

200. Payne, Daniel Alexander, Recollections of Seventy Years (1886; rept. New York: Arno, 1968), 256Google Scholar, cited in Piersen, , Black Legacy, 173Google Scholar. As for jumping itself as a physical expression of joy, I offer this note: “[James W. C.] Pennington, describing his feelings when he realized that he must be near free soil, said that ‘my spirits were so highly elated, that I took the whole of the road to myself; I ran, hopped, skipped, jumped, clapped my hands, talked to myself.’ [In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain transforms the passage so that] Huck tells us that Jim, seeing one last light that looks like Cairo, says, ‘We's safe, Huck, we's safe! Jump up and crack yo' heels, dat's de good ole Cairo at las', I jis knows it’” (MacKethan, Lucinda, “Huck Finn and the Slave Narratives: Lighting Out as Design,” Southern Review 20 [1984]: 247–64Google Scholar, cited in Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 200 n. 68)Google Scholar.

201. Olmstead, Frederick Law, The Cotton Kingdom, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), 1: 311Google Scholar, cited in Piersen, , Black Legacy, 174Google Scholar.

202. Courlander, Harold, Negro Folk Music, U. S. A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 195Google Scholar.

203. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 31Google Scholar.

204. Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 152, 181Google Scholar.

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207. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 25Google Scholar.

208. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 27Google Scholar.

209. Jones, and Hawes, , Step It Down, 5556Google Scholar; and Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 255 n. 30Google Scholar.

210. Minstrelsy scholar William J. Mahar believes Jim Crow must have been energetic to attract as much attention as it did. Mahar also suggests it bore the influence of Stepping groups, for in some acts the dance was called Stepping Jim Crow (William J. Mahar, conversation with the author, March 24, 1996).

211. Poster on display in National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee. For more on the National Negro Congress, see Pfeffer, Paula F., A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 32Google Scholar.

212. According to Jazz Records, Ellington recorded one tune with the borderline-jump title “Jumpy” in 1936. The Classics CD (1993) of Ellington's repertory of 1938 includes the tune “The Jeep Is Jumping.” In February 1941, Ellington recorded “Jumpin' Punkins,” and then the band opened in “Jump for Joy.”

213. Willard, Patricia, program notes to Jump for Joy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 1Google Scholar.

214. Ellington, , Music Is My Mistress, 175Google Scholar. Jump For Joy has its roots in the Hollywood Theatre Alliance's “Negro Revue” (Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 2: 1941–1967 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 26)Google Scholar.

215. Ellington, , Music Is My Mistress, 460Google Scholar. Out of Jump for Joy came what Ellington, described as a “feeling of responsibility” that culminated in his long masterwork Black, Brown, and Beige (1943)Google Scholar.

216. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 31Google Scholar.

217. Paul Webster, Ray Golden, and Hal Borne, “I've Got a Passport from Georgia,” manuscript in Smithsonian American Archives, Duke Ellington Collection. I thank Ann Kuebler and Deborah Richardson at the Smithsonian Institution for their assistance.

218. Paul Webster, Sid Kuller, and Duke Ellington, “Jump for Joy,” 1941; manuscript in Smithsonian American Archives, Duke Ellington Collection.

219. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 31Google Scholar.

220. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 21Google Scholar.

221. Davis, , Livin' the Blues, 49Google Scholar.

222. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 21Google Scholar.

223. Oliver, W. E., Herald-Express, 08 8, 1941Google Scholar, cited in Willard, , Jump for Joy, 22Google Scholar.

224. Hasse, , Beyond Category, 248Google Scholar.

225. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 196Google Scholar.

226. Wright, Richard, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project (New York: Viking, 1937), 44Google Scholar.

227. For discussion and examples of early resistance, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” and Kenneth W. Goings and Gerald L. Smith, “‘Unhidden’ Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862–1920,” in Goings and Mohl, New African American Urban History.

228. See Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Scott, , Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, both cited in Kelley, , “We Are Not What We Seem,” 189Google Scholar. I am grateful to Kenneth Goings for calling this work to my attention.

229. Quoted in Anderson, Jervis, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 9Google Scholar, cited in White, and Graham, , Stylin', 223Google Scholar.

230. Matthews, Ralph, “The Negro Theatre: A Dodo Bird,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Cunard, Nancy (1933; rept. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 195Google Scholar. Surveying Harlem, white heiress Nancy Cunard praised the dance in terms terrifying to those espousing dignity for the good of the race: “The Lindy is the more astounding as it is as violent (and as beautiful)” (Cunard, , “Harlem Reviewed,” in Cunard, , Negro, 49Google Scholar).

231. Davis, , Livin' the Blues, 34Google Scholar. In the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes's jazz and blues poems elicited harsh words from African American intelligentsia. Reviewing Hughes, 's The Weary Blues in 1926Google Scholar, Countee Cullen wrote, “I regard these jazz poems as interlopers in the company of the truly beautiful poems in other sections of the book…I wonder if jazz poems really belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry” (Cullen, , “Review of The Weary Blues,” Opportunity, 02 1926, 7374Google Scholar). Hughes's 1927 volume Fine Clothes to the Jew drew disgusted headlines from the Pittsburgh Courier — “Langston Hughes Book of Poems Trash” — and from the Amsterdam News — “Langston Hughes — the Sewer Dweller,” cited in Barksdale, Richard, Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics (Chicago: American Library Association, 1977), 25Google Scholar.

232. Berger, Morroe, “Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture Pattern,” in American Music: From Storyville to Woodstock, ed. Nanry, Charles (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1972), 16Google Scholar. In the same article, Berger noted, “The most prominent chroniclers of Negro achievement in America, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois and Edwin R. Embree, scarcely mention jazz in their books” (16).

233. Berger, , “Jazz,” 15Google Scholar.

234. For a survey of intellectual positions on this issue in the 1930s, see Pells, Richard, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 96150Google Scholar.

235. Locke, Alain LeRoy, The New Negro (1925; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1970), 4Google Scholar.

236. Dinerstein, Joel has presented a fuller discussion of these ideas in his paper “Depression-Era Chaos and Big Band Swing's New Foundations,” presented at Pew Fellows Conference,New Haven,Connecticut,May 1, 1998Google Scholar.

237. Susman, , Culture as History, 162Google Scholar.

238. Levine, , Unpredictable Past, 92Google Scholar.

239. Scott, , Weapons of the Weak, 288Google Scholar, cited in Goings and Smith, , “‘Unhidden’ Transcripts,” 147Google Scholar.

240. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 194Google Scholar.

241. Even though the correct spelling should have been “tympani,” it usually was not in Jordan's publicity.

242. Chilton, , Let the Good Times Roll, 138, 136, 126Google Scholar.

243. The jump is long lived. Chuck Berry's 1956 “Around and Around” contains the line, “The joint was jumpin' goin' round and ‘round.” Hadda Brooks recorded “Jump Back Honey” in 1952 (Blackhawk Music Company). In 1968, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard's “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (Mirage) recalled the jump blues craze, and Curtis Mayfield's “Jump” became a best-selling record for Aretha Franklin (Atlantic) in 1976. Carolyn Rodgers's poem “Jump Bad” carries some of the political overtones of jumping, when she says “Us Black Folk is gonna have to sho'nuf jump bad to git ourselves liberated from this honkie,” in Brooks, Gewndolyn, Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Detroit: Broadside, 1971), 109Google Scholar. Blues singer Koko Taylor brought back “Jump for Joy” on her 1990 album (Alligator). A women-oriented sports magazine for teen girls called Jump appeared in 1997.

244. Berger, , “Jazz,” 40Google Scholar.

245. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 24Google Scholar.

246. ESPN Chilton poll, 1997.

247. Murray, , The Omni-Americans (New York: Vintage, 1970) 54Google Scholar