Kant’s sentiments reiterated those of the great Carl Linnaeus, who taught in his lectures given at the University of Uppsala in the 1740s that “God gave men beards for ornaments and to distinguish them from women.” In the eighteenth century the presence or absence of a beard not only drew a sharp line between men and women but also served to differentiate the varieties of men. Women, black men (to a certain extent), and especially men of the Americas simply lacked that masculine “badge of honor” – the philosopher’s beard. As Europe shifted from an estates society to a presumed democratic order, sexual characteristics took on new meaning in determining who would and who would not do science.

INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPES

The new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fostered in a landscape – including universities, academies, princely courts, noble networks, and artisanal workshops – that was expansive enough to include a number of women. In the sustained negotiations over gender boundaries in early modern Europe, it was not at all obvious that women would be excluded from science.

During the eighteenth century, men and women of letters throughout the Atlantic world repeatedly celebrated the revolution they had witnessed in all the many branches of philosophy. Drawing on the rhetoric and historical vision of those who had championed the achievements of the “new science” of the seventeenth century, apologists for the Enlightenment claimed that humankind had finally been able to progress far beyond the narrow intellectual horizons of antiquity and the “dark ages” thanks to the new methods of inquiry forged by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In this heroic reading of the genesis of modernity, Bacon was cast as the father of the experimental method, and Descartes played the tragic role of the flawed genius who used reason to liberate humankind from the shackles of scholasticism only to foist yet another false system of philosophy on the learned world. Locke was assigned the part of the humble reformer of metaphysics, who replaced meaningless verbal disputes with the patient empirical investigation of the mechanisms of mind and language and who carefully mapped the limits of human knowledge. But to the siècle des lumières it was Newton – apostrophized in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) couplet, “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night./GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.” – who towered above the other founders of the Enlightenment. Not only had Newton divined the secrets of Nature by demonstrating that his theory of universal gravitation explained the motions of both celestial and terrestrial bodies, but he had also taught the salutary lesson that philosophers could discover the truth only by eschewing arbitrary hypotheses in order to focus their attention on what could be proved using the combined tools of geometry and experiment.

Historians of science and technology have not identified the eighteenth century as one of the most significant periods in Chinese history. The ambitious examination of the world of science and civilization in China by Joseph Needham is explicitly confined to the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, and other works, examining the contributions of the Jesuits, stress the importance of the seventeenth century. The more conservative atmosphere of the mid-Qing (c. 1720–1820), marked by the orthodox neo-Confucianism promoted by the Manchu rulers, stands in contrast to the more open intellectual climate of the late Ming (c. 1550–1644) and early Qing (c.1644–1720). By the early eighteenth century, Jesuits were limited both by the relatively obsolete nature of their knowledge and by their closer integration at court level. Outside the imperial capital at Beijing, the most important trends in eighteenth-century scholarship were marked by a shift away from an interest in Jesuit science toward a rediscovery of ancient knowledge. In the Yangzi Delta, followers of evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue), or philological “search for evidence, ” were concerned with precise scholarship and practical matters, but they generally appropriated Jesuit science in efforts to “rediscover” their own presumed scientific tradition rather than attempting to contribute new knowledge to mathematics and astronomy.

JESUIT SCIENCE

If the seventeenth century was a significant period of cultural interaction between Jesuit missionaries and Confucian scholars, little further scientific knowledge was transmitted during the eighteenth century. Not only were the Jesuits mainly interested in using science as a way of achieving religious aims, but also the Church’s injunction in 1616 against the teaching of heliocentric astronomy, as well as other aspects of science, severely limited the nature of their knowledge.

Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers of the Western tradition have placed a premium on the organization of knowledge. When knowledge is ordered, subdivided, and controlled we speak of trees, fields, maps, and bodies – metaphors suggesting definite structures and relationships. When knowledge is regarded as chaotic, overwhelming, or undifferentiated, we speak of labyrinths, mazes, or oceans – still perhaps implying that an order exists but acknowledging that it is not yet visible. The ancient philosophers endorsed the first, and positive, side of this dichotomy in two related ways: first, by privileging logically demonstrable, or at least systematically organized, bodies of knowledge as scientia or science, distinguishing them from other forms of knowledge, such as opinion, craft, or technical skills (techne); second, by seeking to demonstrate how the various sciences are related, in some rational manner, to one another in an overarching classification of knowledge. These maps or charts indicated appropriate paths of education and learning. Schemes of this kind were produced by the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages and they informed, and were themselves reinforced by, the pedagogy and curricula of the universities through to the Renaissance and beyond. To travel one of these paths was to master the “encyclopedy,” the circle of sciences.

CULTURES OF PRINT AT THE ONSET OF ENLIGHTENMENT

During the eighteenth century, natural knowledge became the focus, the vehicle, and the archetype of public enlightenment. This chapter describes some of the most important conditions underpinning that development. Its central subject is a distinctive realm of print that matured toward the end of the seventeenth century and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth – a realm differing in important respects from anything that had existed before. The chapter explains its principal characteristics, showing how they came about and why in the end they proved unstable. It outlines how printed materials were made, circulated, and put to use. From there it proceeds to explain how the features of this realm affected the creation and distribution of knowledge. The materials created by printers and booksellers – not only books themselves but also new objects such as periodicals – substantially changed the construction and representation of knowledge. The chapter’s major claims in this regard are of a general character. They are certainly applicable to what we would now call science; but they also extend far beyond that, and encompass knowledge of many other kinds.

The world of the book in the eighteenth century was simultaneously uniform and various. On the one hand, the régimes of custom and regulation guiding the conduct of printing and publishing in most countries rested, to a greater or lesser extent, on similar mechanisms of guilds, licensing, patronage, and privileges. In France, for example, Louis XIV’s reign saw the establishment of a comprehensive system of press regulation based on these foundations that would last until the revolution a century later.

The eighteenth century represents a distinct era in the organizational and institutional history of European science. Growing out of an “organizational revolution” that accompanied the intellectual transformations of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scientific enterprise became newly solidified in the eighteenth century. Indicative of this solidification, European governments increasingly supported and structured novel social and institutional forms for eighteenth-century science. Governments moved to support science for the perceived usefulness of expert knowledge of nature.

Science reorganized in the eighteenth century centered on national academies of science modeled after the Royal Society of London (1662) and the French Académie Royale des Sciences (1666). It also involved observatories, botanical gardens, and new forms of publication and scientific communication. This characteristic Old-Regime style of organized and institutionalized science matured over the course of the eighteenth century and was replaced in the nineteenth century by an equally distinct form for organized science that came to involve specialized societies, disciplinary journals, and a revived university system.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the itinerant pianists working in the whorehouses, gambling dens, bars and lumber camps of the American South played in a style known as barrelhouse. Blues, gospel and boogie-woogie piano styles all emerged from barrelhouse and so to understand the roots of these styles it is to the early days of barrelhouse that we must turn. The “race” recording industry was not underway until the 1920s and so the only sources that we have for studying the pianists of the pre-recording era are the occasional piano roll and the written and recorded recollections of a younger generation of “piano professors.” Therefore this chapter can only recount a partial history, trying to draw together fragments of a much deeper culture into something coherent. This I have done by examining the playing techniques that unite and separate these interwoven styles, their genesis, transformation and cross-genre transplantation that has so informed the development of popular music through the twentieth century.

The early rural and urban barrelhouses, juke joints and honky-tonks were bars where entertainers sporting exotic-sounding stage names such as Papa Lord God, No Leg Kenny and Drive' Em Down would play on “honkytonk” sounding pianos. Some pianists only played barrelhouse blues in their performances, others would combine blues with ragtime, popular songs and classical pieces. These piano “crushers” or “pounders” had to make themselves heard over the noise of the bar often at the expense of accuracy and certainly without much in the way of formal technique. Combined with the function of providing dance music, these conditions helped to form an aesthetic that was quite unique.

The human voice is like a thumb print, aurally and spectrally identifiable. The extraordinarily affecting voices of gospel and blues singers have, in their recordings, given us access to those singers' deepest emotions and, in so doing, allowed us to glimpse their individual and common struggles for dignity and freedom in an often terrifyingly hostile environment. Unlike other instruments, the voice emanates from and is played inside the body. In this respect it is unique. Contemporary understanding of “voice” must therefore incorporate the connection between the personality, physicality, spirituality, individual experience and social history of each singer. For the listener, description of these singers' vocal production is fraught with difficulties not least because the plethora of interpretations reflect individual singers' personal expression, as well as their commonality of experience in African American culture and society pre- and post-slavery. My own responses to this work emerge from my love of these musics and singers, and are subject also to my own cultural understanding and experience as both listener and singer/teacher. There are so many elements to “voice” that this brief chapter may only scratch the surface of the many extraordinary vocal performances in these genres. Each individual “voice” has its own story, its own personal history. I have focused on particular singers and examples in an attempt to raise some of the aspects of these relationships, personally, stylistically and in the context of their culture and society, but the voices I omit are by no means less important. Their omission is due to constraints of space and does not represent any aesthetic judgment on my own part.

Appropriations of blues and gospel – taking musical and textual elements and recombining them in new contexts – is a topic bound up with issues of race, identity, culture, and social and economic class, as well as music history and theory. Viewed benignly, such appropriations are part of the inevitable evolution of musical styles and cultural values, both within societies and between classes and races. In a broader view, however, they are emblematic of the exploitation found throughout history in encounters between groups of peoples. In the United States, black musical expressions in blues and gospel have been appropriated by the recording industry for the mass white audience throughout the twentieth century, in a tension between music as identity and culture and music as mass-marketed, profitable diversion. Of the many aspects to the role of blues and gospel in U.S. society, I am concerned here with their contexts within the legacy of slavery, and the appropriation of musical elements by other genres. How do blues and gospel songs give rise to styles – rhythm and blues, rock'n'roll, doo-wop, rock, heavy metal, soul, funk, disco, rap, ska, reggae, pop-gospel, contemporary Christian, and others – which continue to dominate all forms of media today?

Categorization, crossover, fusion

Writing about music involves categorization to facilitate comparisons of styles, but unless we discover a musical area equivalent to the Galapagos Islands, we inevitably find that musical styles result from many influences which defy clear boundaries. The terms “crossover” and “fusion,” while useful, rely on such categorization and thus need qualification. The roles of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley in the rise of rock’n’roll (r&r) in the 1950s are often cited in relation to appropriation, crossover, and fusion, and will serve as examples.

Between 1890 and 1910 new sounds – melodic, instrumental, and verbal – began to penetrate the repertoire of African American music hitherto dominated by spirituals, functional songs of work and play, narrative folk ballads, banjo tunes, and fast-paced instrumental dance music. Drawing from all these older forms, as well as the simultaneously emerging ragtime and jazz, these sounds coalesced fully by the end of this period to the point where they could be recognized as a distinct genre of music called the blues. This new music conveyed a remarkable sense of immediacy, purporting to express the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the singer as well as the spontaneous inventions and variations of musicians at the moment of performance. Yet for all of its immediacy, blues as a whole had a power of endurance that would sustain it throughout the twentieth century and see it at the end of that century as a major form of popular music with worldwide appeal.

Contemporary reports and later recollections of blues during this early period place the music in rural areas, small towns, and cities throughout the South, especially the “Deep South” from east Texas to central Georgia and the Carolina Piedmont region, the land where cotton was king. Blues appear to have been rarer or non-existent along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and in older settled regions such as Virginia or areas such as the Appalachian Mountains where the population was overwhelmingly white. From the Deep South blues flowed along arteries of commerce and transportation, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and the various railroad lines stretching northward and westward.

A crucial factor in recognizing blues and gospel songs as what they are, is the way they sound. Through close focus on twelve recorded performances, this chapter illuminates characteristic details of form, style, genre, and historical period. These recordings should not necessarily be understood as the “best” of their type, but as examples which typify the features under discussion.

“Fred McDowell's Blues”

Fred McDowell, voice and guitar; Miles Pratcher, guitar; Fanny Davis, comb.

Recorded September 21, 1959 in Como, Mississippi.

Recorded in early stereo during a field trip by Alan Lomax, “Fred McDowell's Blues” is suggestive of a very old style of folk blues; the generic title reflects its non-commercial origin. The two guitars provide a steady foundation, with Pratcher setting down a regular “boom-chick” beat in a swing rhythm and McDowell adding a simple repeating melodic pattern or other more prominent lines. The guitars offer a riveting support, and foil, to McDowell's voice. Their pace is upbeat, and speeds up during the song; this is characteristic of older folk blues, as is the single “drone” chord to which they remain anchored throughout. McDowell's guitar reinforces Pratcher's rhythm, but he plays other lines too, often doubled by the kazoo-like sound of Davis' comb. He tends to play a simple, repetitive riff, and when he sings, his guitar loosely follows his vocal melody. He also takes two brief instrumental solos in the middle of the song, similar to the lines he plays while singing. In the solos you can hear especially clearly his use of a slide, making a fluid and sharp-edged sound similar to that of the comb.

Entering the world of blues and gospel music literature is like entering a botanical garden: nomenclature is everywhere. Singers' nicknames intrigue: Gatemouth Brown, Big Time Sarah, Lazy Bill Lucas, Mojo Buford, Bumble Bee Slim, The Devil's Son-in-Law, Cow Cow Davenport, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blues Boy King, Driftin' Slim, Honeyboy Edwards, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters – the list goes on and on. Names of blues songs suggest real and imagined worlds: “The Gone Dead Train,” “Judge Harsh Blues,” “Tim Moore's Farm,” “Rough Dried Woman,” “Don't Lose Your Eye,” “Bye Bye Bird,” and “Money, Marbles and Chalk,” to name but a few. Perhaps more pertinent to this book, a formidable terminology classifies blues and gospel music according to style, genre, period, and geographical location. Promising mastery and control, these labels conceal a good deal of confusion and misleading information. On the other hand, without labels it is difficult to discuss music – or anything else – in its historical, geographical, and formal aspects.

Names exert control. An anecdote concerning the provenance of gospel music will reveal the stakes involved in naming. George Nierenberg, the filmmaker who conceived, shot, and edited Say Amen Somebody(1983), the best-known documentary film about African American gospel music, had asked me to be a consultant, to suggest ideas for filming, and to review footage. Looking over the rough cut, an early edited version, I directed a comment toward the inevitable historical section, suggesting that he provide something about the origin and early development of the term “gospel hymn,” particularly in the last few decades of the nineteenth century as a descriptor of a genre of religious music composed by white Americans such as Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), and made widely popular in mass religious revival meetings by Ira Sankey.

Both blues and gospel are strongly formulaic in many respects. One area in which songs demonstrate the degree of originality necessary for them to become memorable to a particular audience is in the types of images to be found in their lyrics. This chapter is not therefore concerned with the description of everyday events, or the way narratives are created, but with the use of the imagination to render the commonplace in some way extraordinary.

Blues and gospel music belong to the oral tradition. Access to these lyrics can, therefore, be highly problematic. Record transcriptions present a great many difficulties both because of the condition of the often very rare records and the highly idiomatic articulation often employed. Early folklorists and publishers printed many lyrics from songs that were sung to them. The pioneer of recorded blues lyric analysis is Paul Oliver, but his 1960 Meaning in the Blues and his 1968 Screening the Blues contain only isolated stanzas. The same holds good for Samuel Charters in his 1970 The Poetry of the Blues. Paul Garon's surrealistic approach to blues lyricism in his 1975 Blues and the Poetic Spirit, while a controversial but stimulating effort, does not lay the groundwork for a comprehensive study.

To analyze the use of imagery in blues and gospel songs an accurate written corpus with complete transcriptions is required. In 1969 Eric Sackheim published his The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters. At the time this was a breakthrough publication and although the (complete) transcriptions in it are more than adequate, there are many lines in italics, which indicate phrases Sackheim could not hear.

Blues and gospel are widely familiar as generic labels, and have extensive histories both in their own right and as genres influential on other forms of music. They emerged within oral traditions of African American culture, embodying interpretation of, and responses to, experience in two differing realms (broadly, the secular and the sacred). They were then both taken up by the music industry and disseminated particularly from the 1920s. We know them through recordings, particularly, but their surrounding circumstances we know through writings. In this introduction, I want to lay out some of that knowledge, raising a few of the key questions as to how these genres function.

Although many books devoted to them treat them as separate, if related, genres, in this book we acknowledge their deep linkage. Indeed, Samuel Floyd (1995: 6) goes so far as to insist that they originated in exactly the same impulses, and that they are therefore alternative expressions of the same need. This is such a crucial issue that it is worth focusing on it straight away. Take the music of the Rev. Gary Davis. Was he a blues singer? Was he a gospel singer? In listening to him sing “Twelve gates to the city,” to which genre are we responding? His guitar playing provides both the solid sort of underpinning we might expect from a street musician, together with flashes of virtuosic brilliance and moments of call-and-response patterning (that wonderful bass scale), and extensive bent thirds. The structure and content of the lyric, however, are far from this – the “city” is celestial, not earthy. Or take an avowedly blues singer.