Introducing Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte arrives in the RISD Auditorium, January 29, 2013. Photo by John Maeda, via Twitter

I've had an ongoing interest in the power of oratory since I started researching "cultures of hearing" in the 19th century. Anti-slavery activists, temperance reformers, Lyceum lecturers, campaigning politicians, evangelical preachers--19th century urban Americans were not only surrounded by speech but believed in the potential of an utterance to transform one's life. This history really came alive for me last night, when I had the honor to introduce--and hear--singer and activist Harry Belafonte, who was visiting Rhode Island School of Design as part of its 2013 celebration of Martin Luther King's legacy.

Where can I possibly start to introduce you to the exceptional achievements of Harry Belafonte?  

For me, the best way to sum up this work is to think about the voice. The voice, of course, is the key tool of any singer and actor, and Mr. Belafonte's emergence as a star in the 1950s was centered on it--a controlled baritone, textured with a slight rasp, punctuated by sharp articulation, capable of explosive, raw emotion. His voice could work wonders with audiences. Starting out as a jazz crooner, he soon expanded to a broad repertoire of spirituals, calypso, gospel, the blues, and folk; in all, he transformed the melodic simplicity of traditional songs into passionate declarations of a diverse world. In movies, Broadway, and television, too, his voice became a recognizable element of the sonic landscape of America. He was the first African American to have a million-selling record, the African American to win a Tony, the first African American television producer, the first African American man to win an Emmy, the first African American to host "The Tonight Show"--the list of superlatives reflecting his boundary-breaking achievements as a singer and actor goes on and on.  

The idea of the voice, of course, also emphasizes the importance of Mr. Belafonte's social and political activism. More than any other entertainer in the latter half of the twentieth century, Mr. Belafonte has given his voice, enhanced by his celebrity, to the cause of global equity and human rights. It's another version of that Kevin Bacon "six degrees" game; name a social justice movement since the 1950s and you can connect Mr. Belafonte to it.  

He was a confidant of Martin Luther King and strategist for the Civil Rights Movement. He was a cultural advisor to the Peace Corps and liaison between leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and of liberation movements in Africa. He was a public advocate for the American Indian Movement. He established TransAfrica, a group instrumental in shaping the anti-Apartheid divestment movement. He was the founder of USA for Africa and its benefit album We Are the World, which addressed widespread famine in Ethiopia. He was a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, conducting fact-finding in Rwanda just after the 1994 genocide and later working across Africa to promote public education and awareness of HIV and AIDS. He organized Nelson Mandela's triumphant tour of the United States in 1990. More recently, he organized the Gathering for Justice to address the crisis of youth incarceration, and he led the movement against U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm only touching the surface, here, of his remarkable record of activism. 

This is not just about Harry Belafonte's voice, though. All voices are central to a functioning democracy. America is a country with a robust history of declarations, public hearings, presidential debates, oral arguments, mainstream voices, minority voices, dissenting voices, free expression. We all want a "chance to speak" and to receive "a fair hearing." It's why Walt Whitman celebrated "America singing" in 1850 and also why some of the most deeply troubling historical moments in U.S. history have involved silencing, from the sedition act of 1798 to the electoral exclusion of women and minorities. In this light, Mr. Belafonte has done something quite extraordinary throughout his career--not only has he raised his voice in song, not only has he given his voice to the cause of social justice, but he has, in doing those things, created new spaces in which those made voiceless can speak themselves and participate anew in public discourse.  

In Protestant Christianity, there is a tradition of being called to service, of hearing a voice that guides one to speak and act in the world, sometimes in ways that are contrary to worldly assumptions about value or success. However you might feel about the religious nature of this phenomenon, its basic idea has also animated democratic activism and change for centuries: voicing, hearing, and action are deeply intertwined. In that spirit, let us listen now, in the hope that we might find the inspiration to speak and act ourselves. Ladies and gentlemen, let us give a warm welcome to Mr. Harry Belafonte.

Dr. King's Voice

I have written about oratory before on this blog. Today, I just wanted to point to the enduring power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s voice--as heard, remembered, recorded, and re-created. Many talk about the content and message of King's speeches, as they should, but I have been struck also about how many news stories there are out there about the auditory experience of his speech: reprints of news accounts of him at the podium, people remembering where they were when they heard the "I Have a Dream" or "Mountaintop" speeches; stories about re-creations of his speeches in community centers and town halls and college auditoriums; people listening to recordings of him speaking and writing about their inspiration. In particular, there have been several accounts over the past several years about the recovery of "lost" recordings of King's speeches and the excitement over our ability to actually hear his ideas anew:

In Cleveland in 1967: http://www.cleveland.com/specialreports/index.ssf/2012/01/martin_luther_king_jr_in_cleve.html

At Kansas State University in 1968:
http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jan11/mlktape11411.html

At Bethel College in 1960:
http://hnn.us/articles/122249.html

Part of recounting where and when one heard Dr. King speak is a certain claim to historical authority; we elevate the knowledge that comes from encountering social leaders face-to-face or participating in significant historical moments. But beyond that, I think there really is something special about having the opportunity to give oneself over to the power and resonance of his oratory. After all, we could just silently read transcripts of speeches, or watch his televised appearances, or converse about his legacy. But that's not really how MLK Day has come to work for many Americans. Audio clips of King's speeches are all over the Internet; many people, every year, reflect through listening, just as King, a preacher, asked his congregants in the 1950s and 60s to reflect through listening. This is not simply mimicry. There is something about the recorded human voice that provides for many hearers a sense of immediacy; inflection and "grain" can feel like a more direct trace of a person's body and spirit than published writing or news photographs. His words are still--literally--with us. By re-gathering each year to hear King's voice, we celebrate his legacy but we also create and sustain a new kind of call-and-response, one that is not simply in the past but across the past.

"I Have a Dream" Audio:

http://www.archive.org/details/MLKDream

Hearing Disfluency

An article posted last week on Slate, Michael Erard makes the case for the usefulness of "ums" and "ahs" in speech, "disfluencies" that we typically discourage. Apparently, such pauses in the flow of speech engender a feeling of anticipation in listeners that can focus attention, if not overused. It reminds me, in a way, of musicologist Charles Keil's notion of "participatory discrepancies," the ways in which being slightly "out of time" and "out of tune" in performance actually can make music feel more, not less, groovy and danceable.

Unfortunately, it is far easier to understand a speech as an artifact that is to be delivered (without disfluency) rather than an utterance that is heard (with disfluency). In our culture, a public speech is commonly documented as a script that has gone through multiple drafts, can be scrolled on a teleprompter, and whose success depends on an accurate delivery. Even a transcript of a speech, after the fact, tends toward idealized representation, with the true messiness of non-sentences, false starts, and paralinguistic acts edited out and the dynamics of the speaking event largely ignored. Journalistic transcriptions of the annual State of the Union address are a good example of this sort of reduction. While the text of the speech is always offered for study, anyone who witnesses the event knows that a major part of its meaning is about the dynamics of delivery and response: how things are said and who in the room applauds, stands, sits, smiles, or scowls--and when. How is that behavior documented? Why don't we have good ways to represent it?

The institutionalization of langue over parole leads me to the problem of how we might recognize disfluency in the past. Imagine that you wanted to look back and really analyze the oratory of a public speaker and how his or her delivery was variously heard and understood by audiences. Could you do so? You can partially recover instances of speaking and hearing during the era of recording, using a combination of audio records, film, and contextual understanding of audiences from acoustics, linguistics, oral history, and social history. However, for 19th century public speakers like Henry Ward Beecher, or even early 20th century figures like Theodore Roosevelt (who apparently had a surprisingly high-pitched voice), such analysis is even more difficult. To account for how public speakers were heard before 1900 or so, you can only work with fragments: brief written descriptions (from letters and news reports) of how speakers may have sounded, or how audiences reacted; images and photographs, if you can find any, that might allow you to make something out of the body language and facial expressions of audience members. It's not promising.

It seems to me that the static nature of what we typically deem as "historical evidence" erases the dynamism of the events we would like such evidence to represent. I'm quite interested in thinking more about what, exactly, we archive as historical evidence, something that raises all sorts of questions about processes of interpretation and the limits of historical practice. I also think we can do much now to more fully document contemporary performing and audiencing (with its "ums" and "ahs") for the historians of the future.

Panoramic Audiences

The "panorama," a wide all-encompassing view of a subject (usually a landscape or a battle), was a regular feature of urban popular culture for much of the 19th century. Panoramas were painted on wide and sometimes cylindrical canvases and some had mechanisms that allowed them to rotate, but all offered spectators the illusion of immersion in a scene. Once photography became more common in the late 19th century, more "realistic" panoramas of cities and national parks were created by placing several wide-angle shots side-by-side; by 1900, specially-designed panoramic cameras were used by professional photographers to depict large structures, geographical expanses, and groups of people.

Panoramic photographers seemed especially interested in the increasingly large audiences for political rallies, sporting events, and concerts at the turn of the century. A stadium or theater audience was difficult to reproduce with an ordinary camera, since it typically stretched beyond the viewing field. But the panoramic camera could capture the entire seating area of a hall or amphitheater (albeit with slight distortion). And by representing the whole of that audience from a fixed position, something that was not possible to the normal eye, the panorama artfully enhanced the audience's significance. Such photographs are an untapped resource for audience studies in terms of the detail they offer about performance spaces, as well as audience behavior, public decorum, and the vital role of spectators and listeners in American popular culture.

The Library of Congress has an excellent collection that is available online. A few samples of the photographs follow.

New Theatre, Chicago, 1906

President Wilson addressing Associated Ad Clubs, Independence Square, Philadelphia

Harvard-Dartmouth Game, 1903

Rubenstein Club, 1908

The next three are too big to depict properly, but the detail is amazing. You can find them here and here and here....

Squires-Burns Fight, 1907

Arbor Day 1908

President Taft, State Fair, Detroit, 1911

Loving Lincoln

In honor of Lincoln's birthday, the American Antiquarian Society's Past is Present blog discusses sources on Lincoln and features a detail from an 1860 political cartoon, "The Republican Party Going to the Right House." The cartoon mocks depicting his supporters as social deviants, radicals, and crackpots, including pickpockets, free love advocates, Mormons, socialists, free blacks, and, yes, ardent followers. The woman closest to Lincoln (drawn with masculine features) treats him inappropriately like a celebrity, asserting her "passional attraction" to his "lovely face."

Over at the New York Times Opinionator online, Ted Widmer has published several linked articles that consider Lincoln's 1861 inauguration train tour in which he notes Lincoln's celebrity status and the frantic crowds that greeted him at stops:

Earlier inaugural journeys had also been public affairs. Washington’s trip from Mount Vernon to New York was a “prolonged coronation ceremony” – in Trenton, a chorus of “young virgins” threw flowers in his path, a custom we have wisely discontinued. Jackson’s journey from Tennessee was well-chronicled, as a westerner came in to clean the Augean stables of Washington. But nothing on the scale of Lincoln’s trip had ever happened. It had elements we recognize from our own time: the peculiar thrill of the traveling celebrity and his entourage, lurching from city to city, like a touring rock band (Tonight Only: Lincoln!); the frenzy of crowds, eager to catch a glimpse of this new American idol...

Finally, teacher and writer Jim Cullen, at his blog American History Now, has posted a tribute to Lincoln that brings the love of Lincoln into the present.

Hanging on Every Word

In our mediated hyperculture, it is difficult to imagine how listening to a lecture could be a form of popular entertainment. Not so, however, in the 19th century, where oratory was big business, involving legions of travelling celebrity speakers and regular, large, and eager audiences. As Harper’s Monthly explained in 1855: “New England is dreadfully belectured. Every evening of the week usually brings some 'entertainment' of the kind, as it is courteously termed. The Mercantile Library of Boston, like an immense corporation doing a tremendous business, runs, as it were, two express trains of lectures during the week.”

Ordinary people frequently sought out speakers, reflecting in their diaries about they heard. In fact, they tended to treat public lectures and speeches as they did sermons: sources of life-changing wisdom. A good lecture was one that galvanized the audience, moving them to act. Thomas Augst has written about this use of oratory as a "technology of the self" in The Clerk’s Tale; what interests me is the extent to which such attention might also be characterized as a form of fandom. Relying on the framework of authorship, the history of oratory is often about the power of speakers, but the other side of that power, of course, is the enthusiastic embrace of listeners.

Political oratory was especially meaningful to its audiences in the 19th century. Samuel P. Orth, (“Government By Impulse, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 100 (July 1907): 1-9) summed it up in the context of William Jennings Bryan’s electrifying—but failed—run for president in 1896: 

“The American people love their orators. No other people flock as we do to hear sonorous sentences, well-rounded periods, plausible epigrams, multiplied alliteration, and picturesque metaphors. Nowhere else is a resonant voice so potent as in America. Where else in the world, and in history, could be reenacted the scene that witnessed the nomination of an obscure newspaper reporter for the highest office in the gift of a great nation, because of the full orotund of his voice and the appealing figures of his speech? And what greater tribute could be paid to man than was vouchsafed by the assembled thousands gathered from every state at the eastern gateway of the continent, to greet the necromancer of words as he returned to his native land from a world tour? It is not Bryan the statesman, nor Bryan the sage, nor Bryan the politician, but Bryan the orator, whom the masses adore.

The political orator exercises a mystic sway. The enchantment of the human voice is singularly complete over the average American audience. They will stand in downpouring rain for hours, they will fill the largest hall to suffocation, they will gather in unwieldy crowds at monster mass meetings, to hear a mighty wielder of phrases; they will get out of bed at unseemly hours in the morning, or stay up until midnight, to hear a stump speech from the rear platform of the train that bears the favored orator from town to town in a journey of triumph. 

And why do we love to hear our orators? It is not merely idle curiosity, for curiosity is transitory; it vanishes speedily, once that it is satiate. Nor is it surely for the logic or the wisdom or the originality of the orator. The public speaker who has a reputation for syllogisms or philosophy speaks to empty benches. We love to hear our political orators, not for what they teach, but for what they inspire. They make us enthusiastic. We love the thrills they give, the impulses they radiate. The function of the stump speaker is not conversion or conviction, but stimulation. In some degree all republics have magnified the gift of speech. The spoken word is the medium of legislation and agitation. From the village debating club to Congress, volubility is the much sought gift.”

There is certainly something about the ritual occasion of political speech that evokes strong feelings of civic participation. It suppose that's why I still watch my political party's national convention on television every four years. Some of what you see is so old-fashioned, it seems almost a mockery of the past (plastic skimmer hats and balloons, really?). However, it's still part of the political process, and I feel like I need to be “in” it even if not “at” it. There is also the fact that democracy remains fundamentally a persuasive art, and in politics, speaking is still the primary medium of action. Public political speech is almost always a speech act--directing, declaring, and committing. Most of all, though, political rhetoric demands response. The situation of an eloquent leader, poised before an expectant audience, is a social drama with potential legislative consequences. Most of the time, hearing a good political speech reminds people of their values, their ideal strivings, and new possibilities to consider. Sometimes, however, when audiences are ready to do something with the words they hear, oratory sparks action. 

The State of the Union is Tuesday.