{"id":6190,"date":"2016-10-21T19:13:52","date_gmt":"2016-10-21T19:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6190"},"modified":"2016-10-21T19:13:52","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T19:13:52","slug":"slaverys-sad-song-swung-the-american-slave-coast-a-history-of-the-slave-breeding-industry-live-with-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/10\/21\/slaverys-sad-song-swung-the-american-slave-coast-a-history-of-the-slave-breeding-industry-live-with-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Slavery's Sad Song Swung\u2014The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry\u2014Live, With Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"9781613748206\"<\/a>Buy a ticket here<\/a>.
\nRead on, and find out why you just did.
\nA New York Times Magazine piece by Rachel L. Swarns in April of this year bore the headline: \u201c272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?\u201d
\nThat university is hardly exceptional in its discovery or the issues it faces.
\nIn the context of a consciouness that gave rise to the\u00a0Black Lives Matter movement, Ned and Constance Sublette\u2019s long, rich and meticulously researched book, \u201cThe American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry<\/strong>\u201d (Chicago Review Press) tells the harrowing and necessary story of how black lives mattered to a still-formative United States of America\u2014as not just forced labor, but also product and currency.
\nAt a moment when presidential candidates argue about jobs, the economy, race relations, international affairs and our country\u2019s moral direction, the Sublettes show how all those issues were rolled into the single ugly truth on which much of what some seek to \u201cmake great again\u201d was, well, made great.
\nAs the publisher\u2019s description states, the book offers \u201ca provocative vision of US history from earliest colonial times through emancipation,\u201d centered around \u201cthe brutal story of how the slavery industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as \u2018breeding women\u2019 essential to the young country’s expansion. Captive African Americans in the slave nation were not only laborers but merchandise and collateral all at once. In a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, their children and their children’s children into perpetuity were used as human savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery.\u201d
\nI\u2019ve written widely about Ned Sublette\u2019s previous books. (You can find my reviews of his excellent books on New Orleans here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.)\u00a0In those volumes, and in \u201cCuba and Its Music,\u201d ideas about cultural history are expressed via music against a common\u00a0backdrop of the slave trade throughout the Western hemisphere.
\nSomewhere around the 400th<\/sup> of the 673 pages of narrative in \u201cThe American Slave Coast,\u201d the Sublettes delve into the white supremacist leanings of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics for what would become our national anthem, including the rarely heard and objectionable third verse.
\nMusic in this book, too, as is, in a larger sense, the long song of racism\u00a0that still hums through life in the United States. I\u2019ve also written about Sublette\u2019s own propensity toward writing songs<\/a> (one of which was covered by Willie Nelson).
\nIt\u00a0seems only natural to recite the elements of \u201cThe American Slave Coast\u201d as spoken-word poetry. Why not<\/em> set it to music?<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s what the Sublettes are doing\u2014for one night only, at Manhattan\u2019s Symphony Space on Friday, October 28:<\/strong>
\n\u201cThe American Slave Coast: Live<\/a>\u201d is a spoken word-and-music performance piece drawn from the pages of the book. Alto saxophonist and composer Donald Harrison<\/strong> will lead the band. Speakers will include Jonathan Demme, Nona Hendryx<\/strong> and Carl Hancock Rux<\/strong>.
\nHarrison, who is\u00a0among\u00a0the most important jazz musicians of my generation, is also\u00a0uniquely qualified for this gig. Aside from leading jazz ensembles (he’ll lead a fine one at Symphony Space), he is, in his hometown of New Orleans, Big Chief of Congo Nation, which claims as its spiritual home Congo Square; enslaved Africans once drummed and danced there on Sundays, but until 2011, the city officially called the site \u201cBeauregard Square,\u201d in honor of a Confederate general.
\nCome join me on Oct. 28.
\nMeantime, here\u2019s a brief interview with Ned and Constance Sublette.
\n

\"Ned<\/a>
Ned and Constance Sublette<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nWhen you two began working on this book, did you envision it in other forms?<\/strong>
\nNed: We formally began work on it as a project in 2010.\u00a0 It took five years, plus now that it’s been out for a year we’ve been taking it around and doing events, so six years now.\u00a0 I hope this performance can be the beginning of a new cycle of events for it. Maybe we can even make it into a movie.
\nDid you ever imagine the\u00a0book would be so timely and resonant with daily news?<\/strong>
\nNed:\u00a0 I think we did, though we didn’t know how it would play out.\u00a0 At the time we were more worried about getting lost in the Civil War sesquicentennial deluge of books, which is now over.\u00a0 I think the sesquicentennial was an interesting moment that — for the people who have been reading, paying attention, trying to understand — marked a new sophistication in our collective understanding of American history with slavery at its core.
\nIt’s been astounding watching our book come to life in the news, in one way or another, in the last couple of years, right down to the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is in there. Every generation has different questions that they look to history to answer, and this is the history we need to know right now.
\nAlso, between the greater availability of research material in the post-Google era and the investigations of a new generation of scholars, we’re seeing all kinds of historians do really interesting work.\u00a0 So I see this book as part of a movement of greater awareness of this issue.
\nConstance: During the course of researching this book I became more and more aware of our present situation as a war on people of color.\u00a0 I became aware of white privilege in a way I never had before.
\nWhy did you need to bring this from the page to the stage?<\/strong>
\nNed: It seemed like a natural step to me.\u00a0 There are lots of people who are never going to read a 673-page book but who might sit down and watch a performance version.
\nI love the idea of discourse with music. I’ve been producing episodes of the public radio program Afropop Worldwide since 1990, and that’s what we do, juxtaposing narration and musical beds, so after 25 years of cross-fades, it seemed very natural for me to imagine our text flowing back and forth with music, kind of like a living audiobook or a radio version.
\nThis is my fourth book, and I’ve learned that you have to go out and perform your book, one way or another, after it’s published, so from the very beginning of working on The American Slave Coast, I was thinking of how to perform it.
\nConstance: We had to comb out all the bits that would make no sense to an audience hearing it without the context of the whole book.\u00a0 Fortunately, we’ve been reading parts of the script ourselves on tour, which helped a lot and gave us a chance to workshop it a little.\u00a0\u00a0On our book tours, at every stop, always, the Q & A at the end of a reading was transformational of the content, with all the varieties of communities that were present at our events — brilliant, passionate, people with their own insights.
\nDoes this presentation change the meaning of The American Slave Coast?<\/strong>
\nConstance:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 But it adds the dimension of actually hearing the voices that are in our text.\u00a0 It’s a tapestry of voices, so we hear from slave narratives — Charles Ball, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Louis Hughes — as well as a unique letter from 1853, written by a woman named Virginia Boyd who was being held for sale in a slave trader’s yard in Houston in 1853. And there are voices from the Fisk University and WPA oral histories.\u00a0 Plus everybody from Andrew Jackson to Karl Marx to contemporary scholars.
\nNed: Second that.\u00a0 This is a really exciting group of speakers to work with.\u00a0There exists an audiobook (from Tantor) of The American Slave Coast — no music, just straight narration by Robin Ray Eller — and it takes up, like, 25 CDs.\u00a0 So obviously we can’t cover but a small part of what’s in the book.\u00a0 In my mind the full musical version exists and I would happily go on staging scene after scene.
\nAny idea what Donald Harrison will play?<\/strong>
\nNed: I have no idea, other than that he’ll be working with a quintet that will have [guitarist\/banjoist] Detroit Brooks and [pianist] Zaccai Curtis in it.\u00a0 I’ll hear the music the night before the show, and we’ll hear it together with the seven voices on the day of, and then we do it, and then it’s over.\u00a0 Blink and you miss it.\u00a0 We’ve talked in general terms about what he would do, but I don’t know how he will respond to those conversations or to the script.\u00a0 Whatever he does will by definition be right.
\nI remember Donald from when he used to live in Brooklyn.\u00a0 I’d seen him play with Eddie Palmieri a bunch of times.\u00a0 But I didn’t get to know him until Constance and I moved to New Orleans for a very significant year in 2004.\u00a0 When I saw him in action as a Big Chief on Mardi Gras day 2005, I was knocked out, and his post-Katrina 2006 procession was the setting for the finale of my book The World That Made New Orleans.\u00a0 I asked him if he would do this like, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, and he said yes.\u00a0 He was my first choice for composer, and I didn’t have a second choice.\u00a0 The way I see it, he brings the music, but he also brings moral authority.\u00a0 As do all the vocalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy a ticket here. Read on, and find out why you just did. A New York Times Magazine piece by Rachel L. Swarns in April of this year bore the headline: \u201c272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?\u201d That university is hardly exceptional in its discovery or the issues … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Slavery's Sad Song Swung\u2014The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry\u2014Live, With Music”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[456,25,11,454,14,455,399],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6190"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}