creative contradictions and tango tourism: a book review of "Culture Works" by Arlene Dávila

Ten years ago Richard Florida, a regional planning professor then known mostly for comparative studies of industrial management, published The Rise of the Creative Class. His dual thesis — that "creative" sectors were at the forefront of developed-world economies, and that their cauldrons of innovation, economic relations, and human labor were organized by urban form — was galvanizing for a time when urban boosters and economic analysts had only begun to abandon the "smokestack chasing" strategies of the industrial economy in search of lessons from the new economy. In the ten years since, critiques of Florida's analysis, his booming urban consulting business, and many cities and regions' uncritical and expensive embrace of his creative-class paradigm have been legion. But no critique has entirely refuted the underlying empirical dynamics that Florida certainly brought to wide notice, but that scholars had been simultaneously observing:

Technology, design, advanced business and consumer services, professions, academia and cultural production sectors — i.e., the so-called creative industries — are, at their highest value-adding levels, led by the labor-market demands of elite workers, not the traditional organizational dictates of corporations. Perhaps the recording industry notwithstanding, "big business" in these sectors hasn't exactly gone extinct over 15-20 years of being called "dinosaurs" and "elephants"; in important ways, corporations in these sectors have subsume their labor-control interests to the interests of these elite workers. This move was, after all, an important source of short-term, "flexible," advantage in the new economy.

Elite workers vary in the goals they pursue in labor markets, but they characteristically pursue assorted modes of labor autonomy in the workplace and throughout the broader sphere of labor reproduction. The latter points to the domains of private life, the schedules and balance of work and life, socializing and socialization outside the workplace, and — maybe most visibly, but not cut from a cloth wholly different than the other domains — the geographic location of the workplace.

In the flexible organization of (let's just use Florida's shortand at this point) creative sectors, workers' life course and cohorts constitute an important terrain upon which labor control is negotiated. When managers need workers to commit to burn-out "start-up" hours on the job, then single, child-free, 20- and 30-somethings start to characterize the workforce. When workers' immersion in the latest collaborative practices, academic wisdoms, consumer styles etc. are sources of economic advantage in talent-driven industries, then the workplace takes on trappings of the college dorm. And when business involves the churn of start-up firms, the project-based hire of talent and independent contractors, and the regular vascillation between periods of intense work/high pay and no work at all, then the lives of elite workers start to resemble episodes of serial workplace monogamy punctuated by bouts of "sabbaticals" and the reordering of personal "values" and wants, with each stage textured by settings and milieus corresponding to workers' lifestage and peer (sub)cultures.

Florida's explanation in The Rise of the Creative Class of "creative" (elite) workers' labor-market demands is lacking, I've always thought, because he understands these workplace/workstyle features as intrinsic to workers' values and modus operandi. In fact, since the late 1970s the creative economy is enabled and constrained by the broader dictates of "flexible" management and the market organization of everything — the relations of employment and workplace, the spheres of social reproduction, and policy thrusts in social welfare and economic development — that we call neoliberalism. But, fine: thanks to Richard Florida, the lifestyles, workstyles, and place-based amenities that creative workers pursue have become germane topics where popular/policy interest in urban economic development are concerned. This shift in the discussion is appropriate, given the empirical research, if not the last word on the matter.
An issue that's obviously pressing when these economic dynamics are in play is the hierarchical racial and class ordering of the creative economy. Surprisingly, this issue hasn't been taken up in a sustained, multidisciplinary fashion. Why not? To name four examples of critical scholarship on these new economy regimes, Richard Sennett, Richard Lloyd, Andrew Ross and I have been focused on the external forces and structural contradictions embodied by creative workers and their workplaces. It's one thing to recognize that capital externalizes costs upon groups and communities not advantageously tapped into the highly educated, highly mobile, and largely white workforce, but it's another to devote attention to those groups and communities. And while this scholarship has paid considerable attention to the consumerist lifestyles and complex gentrifying gaze with which creative workers transform the cities and neighborhoods they inhabit (Lloyd's idea that neobohemians make residential decisions and consume urban amenities through the prism of "as-if tourism" is especially clever), it hasn't yet satisfactorily examined the costs and contradictions of the creative economy from the spatial/global bottom up, as it were.
These shortcomings in the critical urban scholarship on the creative economy underscore the much-needed contribution of Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press, 2012), the latest book from anthropologist Arlene Dávila. In it, Dávila advances a powerful critique of the creative-class paradigm, particularly its proposals for culture-based urban economic development and its ideas about creative workers' migration (the latter an increasingly explicit subject of Florida's last three books). In significant contrast to many of Florida's critics, Dávila doesn't arrive at her critique from a traditional urban studies approach. From the field of Latino/a and Latin American studies, she explores the racialization of the creative economy not just in terms of material inequalities of socioeconomics and geographic mobility (these being the usual focus of sociologists like myself), but also the cultural politics of representations that legitimate and contest these inequalities. As an anthropologist, she brings ethnographic insights into the ethnic enclaves and developing-world populations that are impacted by — and, in turn, challenge — creative-economy restructuring and the state policies that promote it. Dávila's institutional analysis is keen, particularly regarding the state and nonprofit agencies that promote arts, culture and tourism. Around the middle of the book, chapters on the behind-the-scene politics of museum formation and arts funding, among other things, reveal her further deftness in radical cultural advocacy and art criticism.
Dávila's ultimate target is neoliberalism itself — the actually existing neoliberalism that encompasses the trends in economic restructuring and urban policy described above, as well as other developments on the geopolitical scene. Neoliberalism further entails the highly contested opening of developing world economies to capital: not just the establishment of export processing zones and global commodity chains familiar to observers of the international division of labor, but to flows of real estate investment and tourists from the global north. The state hardly shrinks away under neoliberalism; while rolling back public welfare services, it actively promotes and enforces neoliberal policies by deploying regulatory and policing/military powers on behalf of private interests. Legal codes proliferate to regulate contract activity and public-private ventures in the sphere of commerce. Alongside parallel developments in the nonprofit sphere (particularly to organize funding allocation and grant competitions), these shifts in state and legal activities valorize firms, cities and individuals as competitive entrepreneurs in the market, and accordingly encourage evaluations of social goods and activities in terms of their value to economic well-being. Additionally, with the safety net pulled back and rights of citizenship narrowed around capital's needs, the informal sector blossoms in a variety of ways — one of neoliberalism's unsurprising paradoxes.
'Culture' in all its manifestations is especially affected by neoliberalism in two key ways, as Dávila argues. First, cultural producers are evaluated, celebrated or denied institional support in terms of the economic benefits they generate; this is a crucial implication of the creative-class paradigm, if not Richard Florida's original intent. Second, as evoked by the title Culture Works, cultures of expressivity, geography, community and identity are (in Dávila's words) reduced and instrumentalized into economic policies. This is the gist of contemporary place branding and state promotion of tourism most notably, but it further involves the institutional regulation and hierarchical ordering of cultural producers themselves into primary and secondary tiers. To put a New York city face to this dynamic, Davila invites us to imagine a "highly educated, white, liberal, Brooklynite independent writer" from the economically ascendant, institutionally sanctioned 'creative economy' alongside the barrio creatives of East Harlem, the city's venerable Puerto Rican enclave:

In today's economy, street writers, bomba y plena dancers, and tamale makers are not regularly considered cultural creatives.... When [these] local cultural creatives are recognized, it is primarily for providing background, color, and vibe, rather than as agents who in and of themselves are worthy of investments and policy initiatives.... The question I ask is, how can [New York City] be so widely considered "the global arts capital" when the majority of its residents remain at the margins of its creative economy? And how would the city's economy be enriched or transformed if we accounted for the hidden contributions of its cultural workers of color? (pp. 73-5).

Dávila organizes the book into three sections corresponding to three research sites that comprise a suggestive tour of cultural productions and political stances by Latino/as and Latin Americans across the Americas. The first is Puerto Rico, the de facto colony of the United States where consumption-based investment (in the form of shopping malls and public-private artisanal fairs) has recently increased under the pro-business/pro-statehood policies of Governor Luis Fortuño. The second is New York City, where Latino/a cultural advocates have challenged the institutional funding and curatorial criteria that customarily disenfranchise Latino/a artists and cultural producers. (Their battle extends geographically to Washington D.C. for one chapter documenting the struggle to establish a National Museum of the American Latino as part of the federally funded Smithsonian Museums.) The third is Buenos Aires, where tango music and the urban scene have drawn growing numbers of visitors and migrants under the anti-neoliberal administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
The section on Puerto Rico examines spaces of cultural consumption and production. A chapter on shopping malls extends the "point of purchase" analysis of Sharon Zukin and other consumption scholars, by examining into how shoppers recognize and contest the national stereotype that (as one informant) "shopping is our national pasttime," with the highest density of shopping malls across Latin America. Modestly interesting, this chapter sets up a far more engaging chapter on the folk art/craft fairs sponsored by shopping malls and other private interests looking to generate consumer traffic with artisanal events. Traditionally a field informed by strong cultural nationalist sentiments and dominated by older male artists, folk art has exploded as an informal income-generating strategy for Puerto Rico's poor and (more recently) middle classes who have lost earnings and jobs under neoliberal economics.
In this chapter, Dávila articulates two themes that recur throughout Culture Works. First, the incorporation of cultural production under neoliberal enterprises and their emphasis on extrinsic criteria of economic benefit invariably triggers authenticating discourses that are contradictory and interpreted differently among different stakeholders. Second, at least where cultural producers are concerned, neoliberalism and the claims to authenticity that emerge to challenge it give rise to a curious phenomenon of middle-class informality. It takes social capital to get choice spots in these fairs, and cultural capital to explain to sponsors and regulators how innovative craftwork falls under the umbrella of nationalist artisanal tradition. Without these forms of advantage, poor and unlucky artisans have to resort to crashing fairs and setting up in unsanctioned events that police regularly shut down; they find themselves in disrespected fields like craft jewelry and unable to successfully explain how their work satisfies the highly regulated standards of national folk art.
Hierarchical conflicts over artistic authenticity and economic value resurface in the section on New York, where Latino/a artists and cultural advocates find themselves on the institutional defensive in museums and galleries. The still-ongoing initiative to establish a National Museum of the American Latino finds itself running headlong into the unfortunately familiar culture-war demand that it "benefit 'all the cultures that make up the American identity, and [present itself] foremost about reinforcing U.S. national identity, rather than only one of its components" (pg. 99). In New York City, cultural advocates for communities of color band together as the Cultural Equity Group (in which Dávila has participated extensively) to challenge two expressions of institutional bias in the city's art fundings. First, in a city of over 1400 recognized arts and culture groups, 34 institutions receive 75-80 percent of the city's art budgets. These recipients include famous institutions that are no doubt legitimately funded, at least to some degree, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. But why aren't the New York Historical Society, the Whitney Museum of American Art, much less the great number of institutions representing the arts and cultures of NYC's ethnic communities?
The second form of institutional bias comes from the aesthetic criteria adopted by curators and arts funders alike. While it's romantic to believe that "art for art's sake" is the best principle by which the artists can challenge neoliberalism's insistence on economic value, this belief is premised upon "the dominant Western-based universalist notion that art is most valuable the more global, universalist, and disconnected from particular communities it is posed to be" (pg. 113). Organizations in the Cultural Equity Group are systematically disadvantaged by this belief. Generally originating from the city's civil rights and ethnic nationalist struggles of the 1960s and 70s, these groups serve communities of color through multidisciplinary programming that can include neighborhood development and residential empowerment; to that end, they're sometimes receptive to public-private solutions that are anathema to the romantic "art for art's sake" perspective. As Bill Aguado of the Bronx Council of the Arts explains, "They see us as a social service organization, but not as arts groups or as valuable assets.... It's all a colonial situation" (pg. 87).
In fact, community engagement and collaboration with so-called social service missions can be enriching experiences for artists, as Dávila learns from Miguel Luciano in a chapter dedicated to this young artist whose work is celebrated for its pop-culture savvy and conceptual ruminations on Puerto Rican identity:

One of my challenges in accessing [traditional galleries and] commercial spaces is that these have not been the most interesting spaces for my work, because they are interested in the bottom line and in selling to their base. I'm interested in having these conversations about culture, history, identity, and empowerment, and this type of work works best with institutions where I can work with communities and where a conversation can be built around the work and where the concern is not with the market but with the experience of the work (pp. 123-4).

Platano Pride, a 2006 sculpture by Miguel Lucianoas featured on the cover of Reggaeton by Raquel Z. Rivera et al (eds.) Overall, Dávila is skeptical of the vision that creative-city boosters would have us entertain of creatives and visitors actively "engaging" some generic, ethnically unspecified urban arts scene:

Connection to place represents another significant impediment to the evaluation of barrio cultural creatives. Our contemporary creative economy values movement and mobility, and it is "fickle" cultural initiatives that can pack up and leave that are most valued and that are said to require incentives and to demand romancing: the chain restaurant, the Starbucks, the museum from downtown seeking a cheaper location in a gentrifying neighborhood. In contrast, cultural institutions that are anchored in place, or whose activities revolve around their identity, are easily taken for granted. Most problematic, barrio creative work is devalued because it is regarded as instinctual to ethnic communities and lacking in any training and expertise. You are Puerto Rican; you dance bomba y plena. You are Mexican; you cook tamales. It is what you do; it is in your DNA. You are moved to "protect your culture" for ethnic pride or, in the eyes of many people, for ethnic chauvinism. If no higher degree is involved, if you do not come packaged with the appropriate credentials, then there is no creative work to talk about, despite the hours of training and the sacrificed income that characterizes most cultural work (pp. 81-2).

Mobility moves to the forefront of Dávila's section on Buenos Aires, which to my thinking is the high point of Culture Works. The two chapters here make the most explicit and valuable contributions to urban studies and cultural geography, and Dávila's ethnography is at its liveliest, not least because she's a participant in the "tango tourism" that provides one chapter's subject. This phenomenon refers to the marked boost in tourism to Buenos Aires since 2002, when Argentina ended its economic crisis by devaluing the peso devaluation. At the center of this tourism, mostly from America and Europe, is the consumption of tango music, in the form of experiences (dancing in tango venues, watching others dancing at themed restaurants, taking lessons, navigating "tango maps" of the city) and goods (CDs, "tango shoes," etc.). Tango tourists correctly recognize that this globally popular dance and music came from Argentina, but few grasp how local Porteños (residents of the port city of Buenos Aires) regard tango with greater ambivalence. Most importantly, the generation that lived to see decades of military repression in Argentina end associate tango with this era:

Decades of military repression, alongside a postcolonial-fueled resistance to the acceptance and validation of tango, took a toll on how Porteños learned and related to the dance, to the point that few dancers, except newer generations or older dancers, have memories of learning to dance within the family or in intimate social encounters. In my interviews, older dancers recalled that after the Revoluión Libertadora in 1955, tango dancers would be followed from milongas [tango dance venues], questioned, and harassed by the police and that subsequent military governments promoted rock music and global rhythms, which were considered less politically volatile. Because of this legacy, learning to dance tango has become a matter of schooling, a time-consuming and costly venture more accessible to middle classes than to the popular sectors that historically originated it. In sum, the tango-Buenos Aires connection is not generalizable to the entire city or to all sectors of society. As one musician explained, "There's no tango in the villas miserias [slums], there's no tango in the provincias [provinces]." There you are more likely to hear cumbia or other more popular rhythms" (pg. 139).

Tango in Argentina is thus consumed primarily in delimited spheres — highly sanitized tourist bubbles in the day, milongas at night where foreigners outnumber Porteños as much as four to one. This is of course a fertile environment for authenticating discourses regarding tango. Dávila describes how controversy abounds over flashy kicks and exaggerated moves, and how umbrage is taken over clumsy dancers or foreign women unable to wait for the initiating "look" from a male Porteño. Controversially, in 2011 one tournament organized by city government was targeted to "Argentine natives" and required one partner to be an official resident of Buenos Aires. Yet Porteños' participation in tango is complicated by class and race. Tango's economic benefit to Porteños is enjoyed mainly by middle-class participants, those most likely to have the training and English-language proficiency that result in renumerable opportunites, from "taxi dancing" (male dancers for hire) to careers in performing or teaching overseas. Moreover, the high cost of admission to milongas as well as the broader impacts of tourism-fueled gentrification means "locals can hardly afford to go dancing on a nightly base, as is commonly done by tourists."
In fact, many Porteños look favorably upon foreign tango enthusiasts, distinguishing mere "tourists" from those who appreciate the dance in good faith, and even recognize them as "gente como uno" (people like us). As Porteña dancer Susana Miller explains, "No hay extranjeros en el tango, si entendés el tango como producto porteño" (There are no foreigners in tango, if you understand tango as a Porteño product; pg. 158). This moral identity, obviously a source of collective pride, is infused with middle-class anxieties over Buenos Aires' stature in the world at large in the era of the devalued peso. Few Porteños are able to visit the global north as easily as tango tourists do their city. However, the popularity of their dance and their city with Americans and Europeans — especially Europeans, since Argentina has long been regarded as the most European of Latin American cities, a distinction that connotes a troubled history of Peronism and racial classifications vis-a-vis indigenous people of color — offers a sense of symbolic citizenship that compensates for this economically downgraded status.
The book complements this supply-side view of Buenos Aires' allure with a chapter on the demand-size view of Buenos Aires' burgeoning expatriate community. Many expats cite tango as the initial attraction (for instance, read "lifestyle designer"/self-help dude Tim Farriss' perspective on Buenos Aires), but even the choreographically challenged find much to admire in the city's cosmopolitanism, urban amenities, easy-going way of life, and advantageous cost of living. The city certainly makes it easy for expats to stake a claim in Buenos Aires, rarely checking white foreigners' documentation and ushering in urban gentrification by opening neighborhoods up to residential/commercial property developments in residences and commerce suited to expat tastes.
Dávila's key insight is that expats' view of Buenos Aires living is spatially relational, predicated upon "the 'wages of empire' afforded by their nationalities, in ways that soften the economic uncertainty, insecurity, and downgrading that increasingly characterizes workers in creative sectors in the United States and Europe" (pg. 166). She elaborates:

This quest for a more balanced life was repeatedly mentioned by expats I spoke to, who openly shunned the stress and tediousness that they felt was characteristic of their respective career paths back home. Drawing on familiar dichotomies of rationality versus emotion, work versus enjoyment, and technology versus arts and beauty that have historically circulated as part of nationalist/imperial ideologies to distinguish the United States from Latin American countries, they tended to see Argentinean culture as an oasis of familiarity, social life, enjoyment, and liesure that many believe to be characteristic of Argentinean culture and the unique cultural disposition of Argentineans, rather than the product of the political and economic conditions that facilitate expats' ability to achieve a greater degree of leisured living (pg. 174).

Although Dávila doesn't inject her analysis of expats' mobility with a great deal of theory from economic geography, this chapter provides illuminating ethnographic detail on the economically structured geographies through which people migrate from industry cores in the north to discretionary destinations in the peripheries. These are "creative" geographies not because the creative workers necessarily appreciate urban and cultural amenities more than other people (despite what Richard Florida might insist), but because their economic identities and "flexible" employment give them greater freedoms to prioritize lifestyle and pursue those priorties in places of their choosing. (In my writings, I've called these people quality-of-life migrants, and places like Buenos Aires quality-of-life districts.)
In these geographies, success in labor markets back home inform the status hierarchies that expats enter into in Buenos Aires. At the top, the group Dávila calls "cyber workers" still draw high incomes from the north and thus have the greatest resources to enjoy the city at its fullest, if only for finite periods of sabbatical. Retirees also experience the city this way, although perhaps at lower income levels. Then there are various categories of labor-market dropouts who couldn't afford this quality of life back home. Many of these become entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires, filling a peculiarly non-local niche: bed and breakfasts, taco restaurants, bagel and cupcake shops, and so on. "A few expats have even become successful brokers of Argentinean culture abroad," Dávila notes, describing the case of electro-cumbia DJ Grant Dull, who internationalized a local music that underground Porteño DJs lacked the connections, savvy and influence to market abroad.

Promotional clip featuring Grant Dull in support of his ZZK label tour

If the cultural gaze with which expats often view Buenos Aires is often explicitly colonial — one expat describes the city as an ideal "halfway house" between the global north and Latin America (pg. 177) — it nonetheless finds some sympathetic reception among Porteños who have internalized the colonial assessment that their city is less "modern" than the European centers it was modelled upon. In this way, a moral reciprocity is established between expats and Porteños, neither quite seeing the other in their individuality so long as they symbolically soothe each others' cultural anxieties.

I confess to not being very familiar with Arlene Dávila's scholarship, so among other things I don't know if she would call herself an urban anthropologist. But the Argentina section highlights how Culture Works is an important work of urban anthropology, insofar as the latter revolves around the study of people's movements to cities. Customarily this is the move of indigenous or rural people to cities, still the most important manifestation of 'urbanization' in the developing world, but Dávila has pulled off a cool trick in redirecting the urban anthropological question toward a developed-world group celebrated (by Richard Florida, at least) for their peripatetic mobility and consumption of place.
If Dávila insightfully strips the presumption of geographic immobility (which is traditionally an outcome of socioeconomic security) from the privileged groups in urban hierarchies (in this case, "creative classes"), I found myself once or twice nagged by how she problematically projects the presumption onto barrio creatives. On the whole, she succeeds her in aim "to expose that creative industries generate particular mobilities, that they favor certain type of mobile bodies while circumscribing the social and physical mobility of others" (pg. 16). And at least where mobility into elite institutional settings for art training and grant funding are concerned, she elaborates and further illustrates the concern that art historian Yasmin Ramirez raises in regards to New York art funding: "It's not enough to say black and Latino organizations. You have to focus on the communities these organizations serve, and where they're located, and address the class dimension at the heart of why some institutions serving blacks and Latinos languish and others are able to get monies and tap resources."
But then there's the case of Miguel Luciano, the Puerto Rican artist who is the subject of a whole chapter in Culture Works. Luciano was born in San Juan, received his MFA at the University of Florida, and then moved to New York because, Dávila reports, "he was attracted to what he described as the city's symbolic importance for the Puerto Rican community" (pg. 113). A crucial event in his career was his first mainstream gallery show, curated by Juan Sanchez at the Chelsea-based CUE ART Foundation.

Luciano's selection for a solo show by the revered Nuyorican artist Sanchez was especially meaningful to Luciano and was evocative of his longstanding identification with the Nuyorican artistic community. Juan Sanches is not only one of the few Nuyorican artists who has received nationwide legitimacy from mainstream galleries and collectors; he is also an artist who has never been shy to explore topics related to Puerto Ricans' identity and experiences with poverty, colonialism, marginalization, and empowerment both on the island and in the Diaspora. These are concerns that Luciano shares with Sanchez and that induce his pride in having his work identified with a Nuyorican artistic tradition, even though, in his own words, he is a "transplant" who did not experience what he described as a "typical" Nuyorican trajectory, having moved to New York City from Florida. The key identification is neither geographical nor historical; a "Nuyorican" tradition is thus conceived as the extension of the politicized and community interventions of Taller Boricua and the community of Nuyorican artists who broke artistic barriers in the 1980s alongside the Nuyorican movement to formulate the work that was in intimate conversation with the empowerment of the Puerto Rican community both in the States and on the island (pg. 121).

The issue I find odd here is an inconsistency (or, worse, a double standard) in what Dávila regards as legitimate mobility for the creative class. His artistic interests notwithstanding, Luciano surely counts as the creative class, not the barrio creatives — if an MFA and critical acclaim doesn't give you that status, what does? His community membership among Nuyoricans is symbolic, not 'real' in terms of residential origins. How then does his mobility and institutional status not put him on the wrong side of the "class dimension" (in Hernandez's words) that divides artists and artistic institutions of color? I don't think an answer necessarily involves revisiting or reworking identity politics, so much as an acknowledgement that mobility is a more complex phenomenon that Dávila describes. It's among this book's many achievements that Culture Works introduces such questions into the on-going critique of the creative economy and its simplistic celebration.

listening to home, encountering the other: book review of "Migrating Music" (Jayson Toynbee and Byron Dueck, eds.)

The settlement of foreign-born ethnic migrants has to be the oldest source of urban vitality. It's also a wellspring of musical innovation. Might the latter connection offer insights into the modern city? That's always my hope when I read books like Migrating Music (Routledge, 2012). Edited by Jayson Toynbee and Byron Dueck, this volume addresses the cultural dynamics and social consequences of music that travels across borders. The most common scenario described within the volume is the diasporic one in which ethnic groups move to new countries and bring or rediscover their 'homeland' music. In other chapters, music migrates independently of a 'native' constituency. Hip hop takes hold of youth in countries with no basis in the African diaspora, this volume documents, while jazz performers and Brazilian genres might migrate at the behest of music industries and institutions.

I've written recently about the prohibitive costs associated with recent edited volumes of musical scholarship. Although this was an issue when Routledge originally published Migrating Music in 2011, the book has now been released at a (comparatively) more affordable paperback price. The writings here grew out of a 2009 conference sponsored by the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, and its contributors are predominantly based in European institutions. Accordingly, with a few exceptions the research gathered here was conducted in European settings, although the diasporic circuits that this volume charts extend into Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The omission of research on diasporic music in the Americas might irk readers looking for the latest thinking on banda or reggaeton, yet as Toynbee and Dueck point out, "more than one-third of migration in recent years has been to Europe, making it the most important region of destination for migrants around the world" (pg. 13).

The book is organized into four sections. "Migrants" and "Translations" give respective emphasis to the listeners and forms/transformations of migrating music, while "Media" and "Cities" suggest the importance of material contexts for, respectively, disseminating and producing migrating music. As these edited volumes often go, Migrating Music is a bit of a mixed bag across the chapters. This is true perhaps more so in terms of its sections, which are otherwise well served by the various introductions prepared by the editors. While conceptually the importance of media and cities to the question of migrating music is inarguable, and (separately) the chapters within each section are generally quite interesting, these concepts' development in the context of the volume's organization isn't as consistently up to snuff as the first two sections on "Migrants" and "Translations."

Despite the title's promise of entering new terrains, Migrating Music pays almost no attention to the digitally-circulated, club-focused fusions that sometimes get called World Music 2.0. (If this phenomenon doesn't ring a bell, listen to music made by MIA, Diplo and Moombahton, or check out the writings of Wayne Marshall and Larissa Mann.) So, Pitchfork readers may find very little here to make their hearts skip a beat. A possible exception is Helen Kim's chapter, "'Keepin' It Real': Bombay Bronx, cultural producers and the Asian scene," which examines the London Asian urban music scene in which a "post bhangra" sound incorporates fusions with hip hop, dancehall and R&B. However, her concerns in this chapter aren't musicological but instead more reflective of a cultural studies agenda, e.g., how generic distinctions (here vis-à-vis the tasteful, drum-n-bass-flavored "Asian Underground" associated with Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney) reflect contested ideas about British Asian youth identity.

The opinion that the Asian Underground was not for Asians is a loud declaration that not all Asians are alike. It furthermore reclaims 'Asian' for a decidedly less highbrow audience, construing the Asian Underground not only as 'middle-class', but additionally as inauthentic insofar as it colludes with white middle-class tastes. By defining themselves in opposition to the Asian Underground, cultural producers [at London's Bombay Bronx] assert that they are countering white, middle-class, hegemonic space (pg. 22).

This example highlights two defining features of Migrating Music. First, the intellectual undertaking here is typically rooted in the anthropology and cultural studies traditions. I confess a little disappointment that there's almost no musicological analysis (much less music criticism) in Migrating Music, if only because as a sociologist I'm most familiar with the social scientific approaches. Who knows, maybe the musicologists and critics will find these approaches a valuable corrective to the scholarship they're used to. But as cultural studies is especially prone to do, these approaches support a narrative that eventually abstracts out of the particularities of their subject matter—the historic/geographic contexts, collective dynamics, and cultural artifacts including the music itself—to arrive at a recurring set of social functions: the collective negotiation of identity, the restoration of community, national/ethnic reaction to change from without, etc.

Social science writing shouldn't have to be a poetry contest, of course. At one level, the predictability of these scholarly 'punchlines' reminds us of the stability and durability in the organization of the social world, without which the social sciences would be lost. But it would be nice to hear these general facts of the social world within the music, wouldn't it? In this regard, the most notable chapter is "Un Voyage via Barquinho: Global Circulation, Musical Hybridization, and Adult Modernity, 1961-9" by Keir Keightley. Reviewing the 'migration' (really, the diffusion by key composers, filmmakers, and media gatekeepers) of the Brazilian bossa nova via the Roberto Menescal/Rondaldo Bôscoli composition "O Barquinho," Keightley describes the emergence of a very particular, indeed now quite retro, structure of musical feeling: that sense of pre-rock "adult modernity" associated with early-1960s signifiers of James Bond-cool and the jet-setting journey into the "now." (Later groups like Stereolab, Portishead, and Broadcast mined this specific musical vein quite well.) Keightley's critical analysis of a key track (from Francis Lai's soundtrack to the the 1967 film "Live for Life") makes the reader want to listen closely:

Consuming the adult good life, whether via jet or wine, appears as the imperative of a new sensibility; why else would the injunction "live for life" be necessary? The chord progression's half-step drop occur and reoccur, creating an effect suggestive of lingering in one place and thn moving onto another. Presenting a montage of moments at both the lyrical and musical levels, the song's harmonic instability and pleasurable pausing remind us of the restless mobility that characterizes the global consumption at issue (pg. 119).

In a second defining feature, Migrating Music isn't especially preoccupied with the 'newest and most exciting' musical forms if the latter are understood to be whatever excites young people in diasporic communities (or popular music scholarship). To its credit, the volume is even-handed in covering music that resonates across the generations. It's enlightening to learn of what older Afghanis who have fled their wartorn country are tuning into—the subject of "Music, Migration and War: the BBC's Interactive Music Broadcasting to Afghanistan and the Afghan Diaspora," a fascinating chapter by John Baily. It's important to examine the circumstances by which young migrants find new relevance in 'old-fashioned' music from their homeland (as Carolyn Landau recounts for one Moroccan Londoner in "'My Own Little Morocco at Home': A Biographical Account of Migration, Mediation and Music Consumption"). An ethnographically rich chapter by Laura Steils, "'Realness': Authenticity, Innovation and Prestige among Young Danseurs Afros in Paris," documents the unexpected appropriation of 'old world' Congolese/Ivoirian styles of music, dance, fashion, speech and display by French-African youth caught up in the musique afro movement of the last decade.

This attention to the 'old-fashioned' extends to the "Media" section. While elsewhere the book establishes the importance of the Internet and social media to disseminating music across borders, all four chapters in this section primarily address radio. Even more curiously, half of these chapters pertain specifically to British broadcasters. In "Migrating Music and Good-Enough Cosmoplitanism," Kevin Roberts interviews Robin Denselow and Charlie Gillett, the latter a storied music writer whose work as a radio DJ exposed untold numbers of British music fans to "world music" (a generic designation that has been partly attributed to Gillett). In "Ports of Call: An Ethnographic Analysis of Music Programmes about the Migration of People, Musicians, Genres and Instruments, BBC World Service, 1994-5," Jan Fairley recalls her programming work on the titular show, which was recorded in English for global broadcast. (I'll not count Baily's chapter in this category, as the two Afghani radio programs for the BBC World Service he describes were broadcast in the Pashto language.)

If the rationale (never made explicit) behind operationally defining 'media' as radio include the fact that the latter remains the chief medium of musical distribution around the world, for native-born residents and transnational migrants alike, then the point is well taken. So too is the editors' reminder that radio is indeed interactive (increasingly via real-time telephone calls and e-mails with listeners) and can now be heard on a variety of Internet-ready devices. Still, the Roberts and Fairley chapters address quite Anglo-centric topics, and in a breezy, analytically undeveloped manner no less, which gives off an unfortunate whiff of academic laziness. In principle their British views into "world music" is interesting, insofar as they hail from a classic setting of the colonial gaze that these authors wrestle with —well, at least Robins does—from a contemporary context. But I also noted that the contributors to the "Media" section were among the most senior and august scholars in this volume (e.g., Fairley is a past International Chairperson of the IASPM). Did these selections originate as informal "conversations" in the 2009 conference? Do they merit inclusion in Migrating Music alongside the empirical research of the other chapters?

To return to a familiar point of reference for most readers, let me address the issue of youth-based pop culture once again. Were the assembled authors given a vote, I think it's likely they would nominate hip hop as the most widely practiced lingua franca among youth cultures around the world. In all its artistic (and contested) diversity, hip hop is central to Laudan Nooshin's chapter on "Hip-Hop Tehran: Migrating Styles, Musical Meanings, Marginalized Voices") and Antti-Ville Kärjä's chapter, "Ridiculing Rap, Funlandizing Finns? Humour and Parody as Strategies of Securing the Ethnic Other in Popular Music." Elsewhere, hip hop gets alchemized along R&B and dancehall in Helen Kim's chapter on London's "Bombay Bronx" club, while the danseurs afros in Laura Steils' chapter reject hip hop's earlier grip on Afro-French youth to embrace Congolese and Ivoirian flavors.

This spectrum of local responses to the global spread of hip hop highlights Toynbee and Dueck's chief theoretical contribution to the scholarship on migrating music, which elaborates anthropologist Michael Taussig's ideas of mimesis and alterity (also the title of his 1993 book). Taussig's concepts offer a different, more relativistic framework for understanding the encounter with a dominant culture's influences than simplistic ideas of "Westernization" or "cultural homogenization." Mimesis (or imitation, what the assimilation of outside influences evidently results in) can occur when two cultures encounter each other, as a way of containing their misunderstood or threatening cultural differences (or alterity). Taussig asserts that this process is rarely unidirectional, as both cultures are transformed in some significant way when appropriating the other's elements; in this way, homogenization isn't a foregone conclusion of mimesis. But the editors point out that Taussig's framework still supposes the binary of the colonial encounter, whereas migrating music can reveal responses to more local, less hierarchicalized orders.

None of the assembled authors in Migrating Music takes up Taussig's framework or the editors' elaboration explicitly, but the eclipse of hip-hop by musique afro among the Afro-French youth Steils studies offers a good illustration of what Toynbee and Dueck are getting at. Whereas hip hop was assimilated as a means of addressing the racism of French whites, it became less relevant once assimilation of Congolese/Ivoirian influences gave Afro-French youth a way to renegotiate more subcultural (e.g., banlieue-specific) meanings of "realness." This is a potentially productive framework, I think, for understanding the often complex semiotic innovations of diasporic cultural production. Certainly it's an alternative to "glocalization," an unlovely piece of academic jargon that the all the authors thankfully neglect. More to the point, mimesis and alterity highlight the signifying politics at work in diasporic cultural production, far more than the broad, ambiguous notion of glocalization does. However, the latter evokes a spatial framework that is intuitively salient to urbanists. The absence of such a spatial framework in this book underscores the limits of Migrating Music's contributions to cultural urban studies, as well as the insights that a more active urbanist reading of this volume can yield.

Throughout the book, "cities" are on the whole conceptualized narrowly as material sites for cultural production. In Kristin McGee's chapter "'New York Comes to Grongingen': Jazz Star Circuits in the Netherlands," Grongingen is the location for a musical academy whose jazz program derives international repute from its connections to NYC. In Helen Kim's chapter on Bombay Bronx, London is the site of a particularly influential weekly nightclub. In Sara Cohen's chapter, "Cavern Journeys: Music, Migration and Urban Space," Liverpool is the site of the Cavern Club, a performance venue that sustains musical communities as well as (in the neoliberal era, with tragic historical oversights) supports urban brands. This focus on cultural production means the city qua community—of ethnic/migrant groups, neighborhoods, music fans or otherwise—is largely undeveloped in Migrating Music.

However, elsewhere the volume highlights diasporic 'publics' that are constituted by migrating music. As various chapters show, these publics may have urban foundations, although the analysis typically emphasizes publics' manifest content—e.g., the imagining of cross-border diasporic nations and ethnicities—over their geographic milieu. (As a reader from urban sociology, I was puzzled how frequently some authors downplayed the physical location of their human subjects, at least in comparison to the imaginary locations evoked by the music.) The volume's relative neglect of urban milieux for diasporic publics, and of the prospect that settlement in concrete places can in fact transform and differentiate the scattered members of diasporic publics, puts it at odds with the thrust of much scholarship in urban studies. Then again, the latter might benefit from this volume's insights into the signifying work that goes into imagining publics, a work that involves considerable agency on the parts of audiences and contingency in the materials available to construct publics. Just think of how the concept of publics might retorque the critical scholarship on urban branding and hipster enclaves, to name two recent topics in urban studies.

The migration of music and people also supports another feature of cities: cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Byron Dueck questions the conventional association of cosmopolitanism with cities: "Unacknowledged comopolitanisms are hidden everywhere, all the more easily ignored when they seem to be manifestations of the traditional, the rural or the sacred" (pg. 199). This is a valid way to understand what's at stake when (as John Baily's chapter describes) women from Afghanistan call into the BBC World Service program Zamzama and share their zamzama—Pashto for everyday humming and singing:

AMINA: Salaam. Where are you speaking from, Farahnaz Jan?
FARAHNAZ: I'm from—in the north...
AMINA: And are you married?
FARAHNAZ: Yes, I'm married.
AMINA: Farahnaz Jan, do you listen to music?
FARAHNAZ: Yes, I listen to music, especially to the BBC. When I go to the kitchen I take my radio [mobile telephone] with me and listen every minute I'm in there. This is the song I want to sing.
[Farahnaz sings]
AMINA: Farahnaz Jan, thank you very much. I thought I could hear someone in the background while you were singing. Is there anyone else with you who would like to sing?
FARAHNAZ: No, there's no one around because my husband's very strict. That's why I came to the kitchen as soon as my phone rang.
AMINA: I hope your husband is not too strict.
FARAHNAZ: Because of the situation in this country and because we're in a village, people feel they have to be strict, they're so nervous about upsetting someone.
AMINA: Your husband won't be upset if he hears you singing on the BBC?
FARAHNAZ: He doesn't know my [singing] voice that well!
AMINA: Thank you very much (pp. 189-90).

Ultimately, I think it goes too far to suggest that such mass-mediated musical exchanges occur outside the auspices of urbanism (as social condition). My view on this isssue may be more philosophical than empirical, but it seems that what Georg Simmel and Max Weber would recognize as the techno-rational media for modernity—in this case its structured encounter with the 'other,' the abstract reflection such encounters facilitate, and (ideally) the civilizing effect that results—emerged in fundamental respects out of the historic cauldron of city life. To acknowledge that modernity has since escaped its original setting hardly means that indicated urbanism has lost its significance. On the contrary, giving a nod to Louis Wirth, urbanism is now a portable way of life. In this way, perhaps new encounters with urbanism are among the best of what migrating music offers its listeners.

on the stroll: a book review of "The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll" by Preston Lauterbach

Cities shape music, we know, but how does music shape cities? To be specific, how can a DIY music industry heat up urban economies, enliven public spaces, foster local idioms and local traditions of artistic practice, and even create jobs? This question suggests the policy criteria adopted by creative-city analysts, as well as the legacy asserted by musicians and fans of punk rock and hip-hop. But they can be insightfully posed toward an older, less documented, but undeniably influential era of popular music: the chitlin' circuit of jazz, blues, and soul music that flourished in the American South from the 1930s to the 1960s. 

This is the titular subject of The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, a fantastic book of music history by Preston Lauterbach (W.W. Norton, 2011). Most histories of black music frame the topic through the lens of particular genres, musicians, or record labels. Lauterbach takes a different tack, focusing on the many nightclub owners, promoters, publicists, do-gooders and street hustlers who brought live music and racous good times to the black neighborhoods of the Jim Crow South. No single musical movement or figure held the stage over the period Lauterbach studies, from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Indeed, such creative dynamism, he argues, gave rise to rock 'n' roll—not the circuit's primary destination, but a legacy too often overlooked by music audiences and critics—in its continuing evolution as a base for soul and (finally, it seems) blues music today.

While music buffs should count The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll in the best music writing lists of 2011, the book can also be read as urban theory of how an oppressed people's cultural practices—musical performance, nightlife rituals, and economic activities (legal and illegal)—can put cities and regions on the map, so to speak. Lauterbach documents how, in a historical context of Jim Crow and African migration from the agricultural countryside to industrial cities, a subaltern music industry established, extended, and deepened a regional geography of venues and affiliated activities that supplied entertainment and collective validation to black communities. Studying the chitlin' circuit reveals the cultural significance of cities like Indianapolis and Houston that usually go unexamined by urban theory (or, for that matter, much 20th-century African-American history). Arguably, the chitlin' circuit revived Memphis, a legendary center of African-American cultural production, whose black district inspired W.C. Handy's seminal jazz trilogy ("Memphis Blues," St. Louis Blues," and "Beale Street," written between 1912-16) only to stagnate over three decades of police harassment and political oppression. Like alveoli in an expanding lung of black culture, the chitlin' circuit developed African-American markets and created community consciousness across small cities and podunk towns in the South. How many of us can locate, much less say we've visited, all the cities where the chitlin' circuit touched down?

No dot on the map was too large or small: Ardmore, Muskogee, Oklahoma City, Taft, and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Houston, Longview, and Tyler, Texas; El Dorado, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, Arkansas; Monroe, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Tallulah, Louisiana; Greenville, Hattiesburg, Jackson, McComb, Vicksburg, and Yazoo City, Mississippi; Dorthan and Gadsden, Alabama; Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Cordele, Macon, Savannah, and Waycross, Georgia; Jacksonville, Pensacola, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Tampa, and West Palm Beach, Florida (pg. 50).

PLAYING THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

There are several so-called chitlin' circuits where different forms of black performance culture have flourished under the radar of mainstream (white) commercial culture. The comedy chitlin' circuit gave us Redd Foxx, Dolemite and Richard Pryor; the drama circuit has most recently launched Tyler Perry into bigtime success. At times these have merged with the live music chitlin' circuit that Lauterbach documents; before the Depression, they all came together in a black vaudeville circuit that also included dancers, novelty acts, and burlesque entertainment. Whatever the type of performance, the chitlin' circuit refers to a low-budget scale of venue where black performers play primarily for black audiences. These are pointedly not the great theaters of Harlem, Chicago, and other industrial cities where African Americans moved en masse over the Great Migration of the early 20th century, but rather the no-frills dancehalls, roadside shacks, storefront backrooms, converted churches, and other utilitiarian spaces that black entrepreneurs could wrangle in the segregated south. Circuit veteran Sax Kari remembers:

Chitlins to black people were like caviar to Europeans. It's played out now, but it was a delicacy. The average chitlin' dinner was a dollar. You could go to one place and buy supper, drinks, and see an orchestra perform. It doesn't exist now as it did then. Back [in the 1940s] you had big bands, anywhere from ten- to twenty-piece bands that had to squeeze themselves into a corner if there was no bandstand. There were no inside toilets at many of the places; you had to use privies. Now, when you got into a place that had running water inside, why you were fortunate. They sold ice water. They didn't have air conditioners; they had these big garage fans: two on the bandstand and one back at the door. These were wooden buildings on the outside of town; there were very few concrete buildings or places in town. It was seldom you'd find anyplace for blacks that would hold more than six hundred. The people'd be damn near on top of you. We'd get the brass and reeds on the back of the stage and get the drummer and rhythm section down front where you could see over their heads. You would play for two and half hours straight, then take a thirty-minute break, then come back and play for the next hour and a half. Four-hour gigs (pg. 10).

As this suggests, the chitlin' circuit entailed hard work for musicians in unpretentious settings—hardly the glamour associated with famous venues like New York's Apollo Theater, much less the urban theaters and big-time nightclubs that commercial crossover to white audiences brought. Additionally, there was the unrelenting hustle associated with touring the circuit. Another veteran, drummer Earl Palmer, recalls circuit bands as "always traveling, working one night stands. Barely getting by, but [sounding] good. The raggedy bands, we called them, big raggedy road bands" (pp. 91-2). Laterbach writes, "The chitlin' circuit's pounding succession of one-nighters kept bands on the road, sleep-deprived and sardine-fed, for hundreds of miles a day through poor weather and past cops who took exception to a Cadillac limo or flexi-bus full of slick black dudes" (pg. 159). For this exhausting and often risky musical life, the pay-offs were playing raw and uncensored music before audiences itching to let loose the daily burdens of racist America, hopefully ending the evening with a few dollars in your pocket, and living the dream of the musician's life.

A few stories and sounds drawn from over six decades of the chitlin' circuit illustrate the diversity and ethos of the music performed on the chitlin' circuit, as well as Lauterbach's gifts as a raconteur, historian, and critic:

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm 

The all-girl International Sweethearts of Rhythm began, similarly to their stablemates the Carolina Cotton Pickers, in the late 1930s as a moneymaker for the all-black Piney Woods Country Life School near Jackson, Mississippi. Piney Woods founder Laurence Jones assembled the group and bestowed the "international" tag to emphasize the Chinese sax player, Hawaiian trumpeter, and Mexican clarinetist in additionn to the fourteen African-American girls in the group. Rae Lee Jones, whom the school assigned to chaperone the girls on their travels, had convinced the ladies to throw off their amateur status mid-tour in early 1941, astutely pointing out that they could top their Piney Woods-mandated eight-dollar-per-week salary. They absconded to Arlington, Virginia, under the guidance of real estate developer Al Dade, who assumed their management. Piney Woods principal Laurence Jones did not take the news well. He reported the band bus stolen and several of the band's underage members missing. The Sweethearts ditched the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and made it to Memphis, where a roadblock netted the fugitives. Four of the girls returned to Piney Woods, and the decidedly square Laurence Jones threatened to withhold diplomas from the rest. They seemed to prefer Dade's tutelage, who reportedly introduced them to the wonders of makeup. He lodged the refugees at his property, redubbed "Sweetheart House," and they called him daddy. Clearly in need of a positive role model, the Sweethearts joined forces with Denver Ferguson as one of the first major acts at Ferguson Brothers Agency. Tiny David, a three-hundred-pound, proud lesbian vocalist, joined the group just prior to "one of the greatest one night tours ever staged by any attraction," as did Toby Butler, the group's first white member. The Sweethearts had as many nicknames as members of a male orchestra, counting "Rabbit" Wong, "Vi" Burnside, and "Trump" Gipson among their membership, and claimed to have musical chops on par with any bunch of no-good men. Still, the ladies understood femininity's value to the blues crowd. As vocalist Anna Mae Winburn sang, "I ain't good looking and I don't have waist-long hair, but my mama gave me something that can take me anywhere" (pp. 82-3)

Amos Milburn  

Milburn and his gang of five played every Houston joint, the Peacock, the Boston Lion, and the Big Apple, but they harbored a special affection for a rustic camp outside the city replete with picnic grounds, sixteen cabins for rent, and a commissary that served deep fried shrimp, steak, and chicken all night. Though formally known as Sid's Ranch, Milburn cooked up a theme song for the place called "Chicken Shack Boogie," a sure enough portrayal of a classic chitlin' circuit dive. Milburn lays down friendly, half-spoken verses, elaborating on the shack's out-of-the-way location and humble architecture, then leads his band through torrid instrumental breaks to illustrate the fun all would have. On stage, Milburn perched at the enge of the piano stool nearest the audience, turned his body toward the crowd, pumped that right leg, lashed his pompadour toward the keyboard, tore through his set, and ruined the audience for anyone less charismatic than T-Bone [Walker]. As a jazz quartet leader who was to follow Amos at the Keyhole recalled, "He was supposed to open for us, but we couldn't go on" (pp. 124-5).

Roy Brown  

"Boogie at Midnight"... captures [Roy Brown's] group's explosive form fans heard on the epic 1949 tour. As he had with "Good Rockin' Tonight," Roy sang it as he saw it on the chitlin' circuit in "Boogie at Midnight," in Billboard's description, "a frantic, shouting, hand-clapping, job that sounds like cash in hand." The song rocks harder than Roy's previous records, and would become his biggest hit to date, peaking and no. 3 on the Billboard R&B chart. You can hear rock's New Orlean's brass roots, the sanctified hand-clapping and choir chanting Roy brought to the sound, and Roy and [saxophonist Leroy] Batman [Rankins] pushing each other higher up the rafters. No more compelling document exists of rock 'n' roll as it was made on the chitlin' circuit (pp. 166-7).

Marvin Sease  

A former gospel singer named Marvin Sease wrote a song called "Candy Licker" in the late 1980s, and has enjoyed steady chitlin' circuit headliner status since. More than mere song, "Candy Licker" is a sometimes belligerent, ten-minute liberation of cunnilingus from black man taboo, sung from the perspective of Jody, a mythical lover conjured from the mists of Yoruban trickster lore. Jody does what othr men do not deign discuss. Even more subversively, he cares about female satisfaction. Jody calls out the sorry-ass men who won't go down. A sharp ploy, considering the conventional wisdom, dating to the 1930s, that black women buy more blues records than black men do (pg. 5).

THE CIRCUIT IN HISTORIC AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Many of the performers described in the book are known to fans of American black and/or roots music; a good number of them (like the highly successful Carolina Cotton Pickers who barnbusted the South through the 1930s and 40s) never recorded, which only underscores the great contribution of Lauterbach's research to American music history. But the book's broader relevance to urban research is twofold.

First, Lauterbach contextualizes these musicians' careers within the broader fabric of the black South under Jim Crow. His attention to the details and texture of black life, its historic events and subtle shifts over the decades of the Great Migration, is often astonishing. Dig the evocative poetry of this extended passage introducing 1920s Indianapolis, home of one of the chitlin' circuit's central characters:

In 1920, Denver [Ferguson] moved into a small home at 412 West North Street, abutting the Avenue's south end. He'd arrived with enough money to open the Ferguson Printint Company, and after some initial success running the business out of the house, he set up shop nearby at 322 Senate, overlooking Indiana Avenue, which would hold Denver's headquarters for the next twenty-five years.

From Denver's office, the Avenue streetcar line stretched horizon to horizon. The trolley clambered along the cobblestones, where the last stubborn carriages frustrated motorists. Buildings on the Avenue's south end near Denver's shop were brick, some oxblood red, others sandy brown with black flecks, two and three stories tall. They extended from two storefronts to a half-block wide. They housed junkmen, fish and game shops, clothiers, and cobblers. Striped canvas and painted tin awnings reached from the façades over the sidewalk, shading the concrete in the absence of trees. After sunset, electric lights, five milky-glass globes on an iron post, a half-dozen per block, wiped away the darkness in soft yellow puffs. Avenue men dressed the same, in long-sleeved, collared, white shirts, suspenders, and dark trousers. A few sported vests; fewer wore suits. The greatest variety was seen atop their heads: newsboy caps, ivies, derbies, bowlwers, straw boaters, and fedoras. Ladies' fashion functioned primarily to keep male imaginations active. Continuing up the street, broad brick buildings shrunk to double storefronts, with one- and two-story, tin-roofed wooden buildings interspersed among them. The architecture appeared increasingly modest farther up toward Fall Creek—raw plank shops and homes that would have blended in fine on an unpaved thoroughfare in the Old West.

The Avenue's first picture-show house, of corrugated iron, stood on bare ground. Each evening's show began with a fresh scattering of wood shavings to absorb the torrents of tobacco juice. The nearest thing to an orchestra in those days—a trio of piano, violin, and fiddle—sawed through the night at Vinegar Hall, where patrons dipped whiskey from a communal barrel. Another of the era's recreation spots, Bob Parker's Hole in the Wall, occupied the entire second story of a quadruple storefront. It was remembered only as "an institution of wide notoriety," a truly awesome distinction in this open town.

People lived above Avenue storefronts, where it stayed loud, and then spread throughout the rooming and shotgun houses along the cross streets. By 1920 most residential blocks adjacent to the Avenue were nearly 100 percent black. Sprawling family homes were divided to board the latest arrivals, and black families filled rooms where once a single white body had slept. Migrants adapted old Kentucky architecture to its new, high-density urban setting. They dug wells around back, and in one tenement installed a two-story privy that upstairs tenants had to reach by braving a wobbly, splintery footbridge. In winter, coal smoke from stoves and furnaces blackened the foggy, chill air, and ashy-gray snowmelt sloshed in the gutters. In summer, the fragrance of tomato plants punched through the humidity.

The Jews hung on around Indiana Avenue—Abraham Tavel and the Sachs Brothers ran their pawnshops, and the Schaeffer cleaners and Kappeler jewelers still did business—but the migrants had begun to transform the strip and were deep in the process of making it their own. Small-town Kentucky ways translated well to the Avenue. People lived intimately, publicly. Most homes lacked comfort, so folks spent their time visiting, out on the porch, walking the street, or lounging in a café, many of which served "Kentucky oysters," local code for hog intestines. Consequently, the track buzzed night and day. Everybody living on top of and in front of each other lent the weekly Indianapolis Recorder a penetrating vitality. It kept a second-story office halfway between the pawnshops and the hospital, where it saw and reported on everything. You might open it Saturday afternoon and learn who your sweetheart was seeing on the side, go find the cheaters in a café, cut their asses in front of everybody, and end up in the next edition (pp. 18-21).

Second, The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents the story of the music industry that organized the circuit. It's a story with a generous share of hustlers, criminals, and the temptations of the musicians' life—elements familiar to readers of Frederic Dannen's Hit Men and Dan Charnas's The Big Payback—but the businesses and hustles generally operated beneath the high-stakes arenas of the mass record industry and mainstream radio.

Perhaps in some way the chitlin' circuit should be understood as an accidental consequence of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the the south, for it was in the North, and in black Americans' reverence for the artists and writers associated of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Remainssance, that a peculiar market niche emerged which the Southern chitlin' circuit would serve. In the 1920s, Harlem and Chicago were strongholds of black swing orchestras (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie) who performing for white audiences in big-city theaters of the North under the booking monopoly of the mob, a.k.a. the syndicate. The white criminal underworld had successfully forced its way into a mutually beneficial relationship with the white record companies: syndicate bookers needed records to promote their bands, and the Northern record companies needed personal appearance tours to promote their recording artists.

If a black musician wanted even to entertain this level of success, they would necessarily have to pursue their livelihood in the North. Conversely, since all the lucrative markets lay in the North, the big swing orchestras had little need to visit the Jim Crow South. African Americans in the South participated in black commercial culture via Northern output: recorded music and literature, including black periodicals, like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, that were "a forbidden pleasure, an ally from the outside world, and a trusted source for style points" (pg. 39).

On the stroll: Walter Barnes 

The end of Prohibition, the incarceration of mob kingpins like Al Capone, and the nosedive in consumer spending with the Depression brought this system to a steady close over the 1930s. Lauterbach argues that the first to perceive the commercial rewards of bringing Northern music to the South was Walter Barnes, a bandleader at Chicago's Cotton Club and a Southern migrant himself. Fortuitously, Barnes wrote a column on the black big-band scene for the Chicago Defender, which he unashamedly used to publicize his own orchestra as well as his more famous peers. More importantly, Barnes' column was the Twitter of its day (if you will) for the scattered territory bands of Black America:

These colorfully named orchestras worked according to the lean scale the Depression imposed. Many held a hotel ballroom residency and broadcast from there over low-watt radio stations, then toured as far as their reputations and broadcasts carried. Around these acts grew the rudimentary infrastructure of the Southern black dance business: dusty dance halls, hustling dance promoters, and hucksterish dadvance men, who went around drumming up gigs and publicity. In the absence of full itineraries, they barnstormed, packing into a Ford AA bus or Model A Woody, tying their instruments down to the roof, to catch gigs as they could.... They sent Barnes their locations and provided as much of a plan for the future as they had scripted: "Lee Trammell and his Spotlight Entertainers are barnstorming Arkansas. Skeet Reeves is traveling in advance. The unit will route for northern states in March and may be reached this week at Stuttgart, Arkansas." Though he began as Chicago orchestra columnist and self-publicist, Barnes rapidly became central dirt dispatcher for traveling black jazz bands. Barnes's readers learned the whereabouts (and names) of Dittybo Hill and his Eleven Clouds of Joy, Herman Curtis and his Chocolate Vagabonds, Walter Waddell and his Eleven Black diamonds, Jack Ellis and his Eleven Hawaiians, Belton's Society Syncopators, Smiling Billy Steward and his Celery City Serenaders, and A. Lee Simpkins's Augusta Nighthawks (pg. 40).

Barnes' column relayed musical news from black America's dispersed enclaves, or what he called in his hep lingo "the stroll": racially segregated black districts of Southern cities that were economically self-sustaining (at least until the era of desegregation and urban renewal). His dispatches also proved to be highly valuable "road intelligence" when he decided to tap these distant markets with his own Chicago band. Barnes toured the South regularly from 1932 until 1940 (when he and 208 others died in the famous Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi). While on the road, he published boosterish dispatches from the Southern cities he plays in, thereby publicizing the urban markets for black entertainment and and the scattered venues, lodgings and services open to black musicians:

We are now driving down Desiard Street, the stroll in Monroe, [Louisiana]. . . . The Red Goose Barber Shop is the place where all the boys have their grooming down. . . . Lovely Brown's Beauty Shop is where all the ladies get fancy waves for the dances. . . . The Grog Cafe is the dining place of the profesh, and what good, Southern, home-cooked meals they serve here. . . . The Frog Pond ballroom located at 1003 Desiard Street is the most beautiful and spacious dance palace here (Walter Barnes, December 1936, quoted on pg. 53).

 
In the South, Barnes worked with regional promoters whose names would become eventual legend in chitlin' circuit lore: Don Robey of Houston's Third Ward; Frank Painia, former barber and owner of New Orleans' famed Dew Drop; Clint Brantley of Macon, Georgia's Cotton Club (and future manager of James Brown); Bill Rivers, Cracker Johnson, and Charlie Edd in Florida; and so on. But in the 1930s, their operations were largely unconnected and limited to an intra-state area, maybe a few states. It was Denver Ferguson, an Indianapolis booking agent, who coordinated these promoters into a single industry and thus, Lauterbach asserts, deserves credit as "the man who invented the chitlin' circuit" (quoting Sax Kari, pg. 5).

Stickin' his neck out: Denver Ferguson 

Originally a printshop owner, Ferguson first became a mover and shaker in the Indianapolis numbers racket by printing daily lottery slips that resembled harmless baseball scorecards. His career in musical entertainment started with a tip about a lucrative parcel of Indiana Avenue real estate across the street from an unannounced future housing project. Here he built the Sunset Terrace, which flourished in the 1930s amidst the Depression, cutthroat rivals, and corrupt police, until a 1940 nightclub murder brought enough heat to lead him into a somewhat safer venture, talent booking. In 1941, Ferguson opened the Ferguson Brothers Agency to serve a bigger and remarkably underserved market for entertainment.

Denver, knowing well how the syndicate controlled black bands in the big Northern Cities, built his circuit in the territory Walter Barnes had pioneered for black bands in 1932 and virtually closed with his death in 1940. Unlike the syndicate, Denver put the black audience first, a simple variation at the core of his innovation. Denver knew the black South intimately... Denver understood the ways black neighborhoods functioned, and he knew that because of racial segregation, all-black enclaves existed in every excuse for a town. Whether he had read Barnes writings or not, Denver was in touch with the stroll concept and its prevalence across the map. He brought his own street-financial expertise to the enterprise. The money principles of the numbers game applied: the Negro individual lacked financial resources, but the stroll possessed collective wealth in nickel and ime increments. Add those nickels and dimes, multiply by numerous bands playing different joints simultaneously with a percentage of proceeds from each flowing back to Ferguson, repeat nightly, and you come to see, as Denver correctly surmised, that there was serious cash down there (pg. 87).

Ferguson puts his printing press to use printing advertising materials and tickets to be couriered to future tour stops. His publicity machine also benefited from a board member placed within the black periodical Indianapolis Recorder. J. St. Clair Gibson, a.k.a. "The Saint," relayed tall and flattering stories about Ferguson acts, such as the "creation myth" of one reasonably overlooked King Kolax, for black America via the Associated Negro Press wire:

They were holding a jam session at the Savoy Ballroom one night in the month of May 1940 . . . and all the cats had their axes sharp for some deep cutting. . . . As the session started and the cats started swinging . . . a young fellow came up from out of nowhere and asked to sit in. . . . This young fellow with his horn under his arm hit the stage in two jumps and told the pianist to take "Honeysuckle Rose" in E flat. . . . This kid raised his horn toward the ceiling and started blowing and for 10 choruses he kept them jumping, hitting the high notes with a different riff for every chorus. When this kid had finished, one of the old timers said, "There is your new King of the Trumpet" and this new king was King Kolax (J. St. Clair Gibson, July 31, 1943, quoted on pp. 85-6).

Perhaps the most game-changing of business practices that Ferguson introduced involved his method for securing effective local promotion across a staggeringly expansive region. Lauterbach writes that Ferguson "stuck his neck out," sending his people on the road and making many roadtrips himself to enlist the dispersed regional promoters from the territory-band circuit or "make" them (instruct a well-placed novice) himself.

Denver approached his relationship with these far-off promoters just as he had his numbers runners on the Avenue. If a promoter failed to pay Denver or his act according to the terms of their deal, then Denver would drop them from the circuit. No need for violent reprucussion. He could always make another promoter. He wanted his freelancers, either in the street or on the circuit, to recognize the long-term value of their arrangement. He wanted them to see that they would make thousands more dollars with him over time than the few hundred they'd make off with by disappearing with the proceeds of a single dance. If they were incapable of this, let them go, Denver said. This was the closest thing to loyalty he could breed (pg. 88).

Characteristically, he would sell each promoter blocks of shows across their region, which would encourage them to tap all their established venues and then find some more. The concerned parties—regional promoters, local venue operators, and his own performers—would then be linked together with a contract of Ferguson's devising. The tradition on the chitlin' circuit was to pay performers "first money in the door," which promised next to nothing if a gig was poorly attended. Ferguson transformed this incentive structure into a mutually reinforcing association:

Denver negotiated for his talent to ensure that the act, and agent, got paid before anyone else regardless of attendance. Denver and the promoter settled on a guaranteed fee. Denver extracted a deposit from that figure, paid before the show to "guarantee" the appearance... refundable only if the artist failed to show. If the gig proceeded smoothly, Denver kept the deposit and the artist kept the remainder of the guarantee, which the artist collected from the promoter at intermission. The promoter kept an amount equal to the artist guarantee, and if profits exceeded payouts, the artist and promoter split the surplus, according to the term of their deal referred to in contractual lingo as the "privilege," often, but not always, 50 percent. A chunk of this also went back to the boss. A Ferguson-employed road manager (who might also be the bandleader, as in the Carolina Cotton Pickers' unfortunate case) accompanied the agency's acts to count heads in the dance hall and then wire the cash into Denver's pockets—just like an Avenue numbers runner (pg. 90).

The circuit starts rockin' 

With more cities and towns to play in, the far-flung chitlin' circuit set in motion big changes for black music in the South. World War II was an important catalyst. Wartime mobilization put blacks to work at rates not seen since before the Depression; thus, folks had some money in their pockets to spend on entertainment. The war froze the record industry for several years, as jukebox factories converted to martial production and shellac rationing brought record manufacturing to a stop in 1943. Thus, black demand for entertainment in the South would be channeled into live entertainment. These were about as good a set of circumstances in which black musicians could pursue a career, and the chitlin' circuit began to overflow with performers.

Finally, wartime allocations hasten the decline of the big jazz orchestras, as the Office of Defense Transportation imposed a bus ban as part of fuel rationing, a direct blow to the traditional means of big-band transport. The end of the war saw blacks lose work en masse, and the subsequent dampening of entertainment demand meant club owners could no longer afford big orchestras' fees. Smaller units were best adapted to these circumstances; with fewer musicians to pay, savings could be passed on down to ticket prices. The meteoric rise of Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, the small jump-jive combo fronted by a zany bandleader, to the top of Billboard Magazine's "Race Records" charts in 1943 illustrated the decline of the jazz swing orchestra in black America's popular music (this music would remain beloved to mainstream white audiences for many more years). 

Instrumentation would change with the shift to smaller bands; vocalists and electric guitar would especially benefit in the musical space opened up. Guitar and saxophone would symbolize a new aesthetic. Now, the music rocked, and the lyrics would often say as much, most famously in Roy Brown's 1948 smash hit "Good Rockin' Tonight"; Lauterbach asserts this was the first rock'n'roll record (albeit before the genre had such a name) to come out of the chitlin' circuit and reach major commercial success.

The shift to smaller bands in turn changed black musicians' employment circumstances. "After Louis Jordan's rise pushed the vocalist into the limelight, the band became an afterthought," explains Lauterbach. "Early rock star-attractions Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, T-Bone Walker, Cecil Gant, and Ivory Joe Hunter traveled without bands. Hell, anyone could be the band, as long as the star, whose voice you heard on the jukebox and face you'd seen on the posters, was there on stage" (pg. 116). For most chitlin' circuit musicians, finding a gig no longer involved joining a roadworthy band, but rather being in the right place when touring musicians came to town. This was the context in which Memphis' musical juices began flowing again:

By [1949], area band activity all ran through Sunbeam [Mitchell, the main promoter in Memphis], as the Mitchell Hotel became an informal musicians' employment agency, a regional chitlin' circuit hub. Like New Orleans's Dew Drop, Dallas's Empire Room, and Indianapolis's Sunset Terrace, bandleaders organizing tours of the region would check in at Sunbeam's cantina to find musicians to hire. Rain or shine, night or day, someone could be found (pg. 193).

From this setting, unknown Memphians could occasionally become overnight stars (e.g., Johnny Ace, who hit big in 1952 with "My Song" only to by his own gun in a mysterious accident two years later). Thick with local talent, Memphis would be the site of America's first radio station with an all-black music format: WDIA, "73 on your dial," in October 1948. A Mississippi guitarist named Riley King would get a DJ slot on WDIA as "Bee Bee King," ultimately to become blues legend B.B. King. Memphis musicians would transform and blues and "rhythm & blues" (Billboard's new name for its former Race Records chart) into soul music on local record labels like Stax and Hi. The rest, of course is history.

THE LOCAL HEART OF THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

The story goes on, with a significant chapter closing as the record industry eclipses the chitlin' circuit to make stars out of Southern musicians like Little Richard, James Brown, and Al Green.  But for urbanists, what's especially interesting about the chitlin' circuit—and there's no reason to think this has changed significantly, although the caliber of venue (at least the quality of its construction) has slowly upgraded—is how much it got the whole of each far-flung black community involved in the local show. It's well known how central were music, performance, and nightlife for segregated black America at this time in history, but Lauterbach offers new insights into what happened before each gig. In "making" his promoters, Ferguson would explain in considerable detail how to enlist local businesses ("the black barber and beauty shop, restaurant and bar" [pg. 88] and assorted hustlers into the work of promoting each show. Today, the old concert posters and window placards collected blues and roots music afficianados evoke the neighborhood publicity machine that Ferguson set in motion, and which still gears up for new generations of booking agencies and promoters pushing chitlin music below the commercial radar.

The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents some unexpected aspects of tearing down the fourth wall between performer and audience. In touring stops too small to support black hotels, promoters would plug out-of-town musicians into home-style accommodations. "We couldn't stay in the white hotels," bandleader Andy Kirk recalled. "I'm glad now we couldn't. We'd have missed out on a whole country full of folks who put us up in their homes, cooked dinners and breakfasts for us, told us how to get along in Alabama and Mississippi, helped us out in trouble, and became our friends for life" (pg. 90). The local economies that grew to support touring musicians (let's not forget local tailors to mend uniforms, auto mechanics to fix the cars...) saw their parallel within the club. In these "nondescript places" (as Sax Kari called them), nightlife amenities were rarely provided in-house. Providing the suppers, cold beer, garage fans, frontdoor security and the like would be tasks outsourced to local residents.

Maybe it's tempting to overstate the solidarity among musicians, their employers, audience and community. The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll has its share of backstabbing, violence both threatened and real, and mundane exploitation—and that's just inside the club. Lauterbach is appropriately unsentimental about how racial oppression and economic misery could be the parents to the desperation, predation, and self-destructiveness found in so many ghettoes. Still, this book testifies to the fact that the backbone of the gemeinschaft that the chitlin' circuit instilled in so many black districts of the South lay not just in folks' love for the music, but in the economic networks—often legit, sometimes informal, and once in awhile just plain criminal—that emerged in each city and town to make the show go on.