Stark-Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al...

Stark-Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, HarryetteMullen, and Al HibblerAuthor(s): Paul HooverSource: Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 5 (1999), pp. 71-85Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177080 .

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Stark-Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler Paul Hoover

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr. identifies Eshu as the most powerful of the gods due to his powers of interpretation. A "divine linguist," Eshu is represented in Yoruba sculptures as holding a calabash in his hands:

In this calabash he keeps ase, the very ase with which Oludumare, the supreme deity of the Yoruba, created the universe. We can translate ase in many ways, but the ase used to create the universe I translate as "logos," as the word as understanding, the word as the audible, and later the visible, sign of reason. Ase is more weighty, forceful, and action-packed than the ordinary word. It is the word with ir- revocability, reinforced with double as- suredness and undaunted authenticity. This probably explains why Esu's mouth, from which the audible word proceeds, sometimes appears double; Esu's dis- course, metaphorically, is double-voiced. (Gates 1988, 7)

It is his double-voicedness, rather than his physical powers, that enables Eshu to con- trol both humans and the gods. Gates sees Eshu as kin to the Western god Hermes, who was likewise a messenger and interpreter for the gods and the source for our word hermeneutics. In Gates's view, Eshu is a figure of the black critic, but in his doubleness, which connects him both to heaven and earth, he is also a figure of the priest and poet (8-9).

Eshu transmitted some of his powers to the god Ifa, his friend, when he taught him to read the patterns of the sixteen palm nuts that are thrown in the Yoruba divination ritual (11). As Gates explains, Ifa "can only speak to human beings by inscribing the language of the gods onto the divining tray in visual signs that the babalawo [priest] reads aloud in the language of the lyrical poetry called ese" (12). Thus, the gods are linked to humans by chance, divination, poetry, and hermeneutics.

I would like to take into account the powerful doubleness of Eshu as a linguist and interpreter and focus on visual and ver- bal punning in the art works of David Ham- mons; the complex overlaying of Sappho, Gertrude Stein, and the blues in Harryette Mullen's long poem Muse & Drudge; and cultural doubleness in rap music and the songs of Al Hibbler.

Gates (1988, 45) remarks on the connection between the standard English signifier, signification, and the black cultural practice of signifyin'.

The relationship that black "Significa- tion" bears to the English "signification," is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity. That, it seems to me, is inherent in the nature of metaphorical substitution and the pun, particularly those rhetorical tropes dependent on the repetition of a word with a change denoted by a differ-

71



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ence in sound or in a letter (agnominatio), and in homonymic puns (antanaclasis). These tropes luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference (be that apparent difference centered in the signifier or in the signified, in the "sound-image" or in the concept) yield in ei- ther an aural or a visual pun.

In his choice of the word Signifyin(g), Gates himself creates a homology and cultural palimpsest in which black and white meanings communicate through the same signifier. Gates intends to conflate difference and similarity in his use of the term; indeed, it is through agnominatio that critic Jacques Derrida created the key term of deconstruction, differance, which combines the French words for to differ and to defer (Gates 1988, 46).

Nathaniel Mackey's novel Bedouin Hornbook contains an extravagant use of such homologues. Mackey is aware of the implication of what is over and under in such acts of overwriting. "What I'm proposing," the narrator says, "is that we hear into what has up to now only been overieard (if I can put it that way, that we can awaken resources whereby, for example, assent can be heard to carry undertones or echoes of ascent (accents of assent)" (Mackey 1986, 19). Here the crossroads of meaning is triple rather than double. The accents of assent lead politically to ascent. What about the accents of racial difference? The concept of the "twoness" of African-American experience has been central since W.E.B. Du Bois announced the concept of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk: "two souls, two thoughts, two unrec- onciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (Du Bois [1903] 1997, 38).

The critic Mikhail Bahktin referred to the "double- voiced word," which Gates defines as "a word of utterance ... decolonized for the blacks' purposes 'by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has-and re- tains-its own orientation"' (Gates 1988, 50). Thus, the African-American usage "signifyin"' and the standard Eng- lish "signifying" are disruptive of each other as identical nonidentities. As Gates's palimpsestic "Signifyin(g)," the two words remain divided at the same time that they approach moral relation. A cultural lesson is learned when the echo of black voice is heard within, over, or under its standard English counterpart. In other words, "Signifyin"' signifies on "signifying."

A black-and-white photograph of the artist David Ham-



Stark-Strangled Banjos 73

mons, Cat in the Hat (1982), appears as the frontispiece of the book David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, a study of his work (Hammons 1991). Wearing a black suit, black shirt, polka-dot bow tie, neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, and sunglasses, the artist gazes at the camera with an impas- sive look. The most dramatic detail is Hammons' knit cap, which towers over his head. Of African fabric and possibly of Rastafarian reference, it otherwise resembles the hat worn by the title character in the Dr. Seuss children's book The Cat in the Hat. As a black man, Hammons is a "cat," in hipster jargon of the past. The sunglasses heighten the effect of hipness even as the festive bow tie, neatly trimmed beard, and somber suit suggest sartorial conservatism. The height of the hat connects Hammons, as the trickster Eshu, to the gods. Playing upon identity expectation, Hammons constructs a pun of surprising complexity. In controlling his own image, Hammons also controls our means of cultural seeing.

In Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), a site-specific work of performance art, Hammons took up a position in New York City's Cooper Square next to a street vendor. Wearing a win- ter coat and a hat, Hammons also presented himself as a vendor, albeit of a variety of snowballs of differing sizes presented in perfectly rounded shapes on a colorful rug. Be- cause of the problematic value of the snowballs, the piece offers a critique of art as commodity. Standing at the crossroads of poverty and wealth, blackness and whiteness, the material and the ideal, Hammons erupts any easy assump- tions about the value of art. What does the "wealth" of the blizzard bring to the streets? How is the vacant, albeit poetic, signifier of snow affected by its presentation by the artist as a black man?

The book David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble (Hammons 1991, 50-51) contains a photo of Hammons negotiating with two white, apparently middle-class buyers, who evident- ly are in the process of deciding on which snowballs to purchase (Hammons actually sold his product).Behind them are the unevenly laid out goods of Hammons' rival vendors, which consist primarily of old shoes. The "purity" of Ham- mons' product lies in poetic contrast with these revalued castoffs. Are snowballs of perfect shape worth more than a pair of used shoes? It depends on how happy you are with your shoes. Are the large snowballs worth more than the smaller ones? Should I buy one of each? Hammons' final joke as conceptual artist occurs when the buyer walks away with his or her purchase. Removed from the site of discov-



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ery and negotiation, the snowball is hollowed out as a signifier. Now the art collector holds only snow in his hands. Nei- ther a real snowball (unless it is thrown against a wall) nor a genuine art collectible (it must be kept refrigerated), it becomes the souvenir of a decision in value.

The most monumental visual pun in Hammons' work is Higher Goals (1986). Here is Kellie Jones' (1991, 28) descrip- tion of the work:

The piece was on view from April through October [of 1986], on a small strip of green-part of the larger Cad- man Plaza Park-facing the court buildings in downtown Brooklyn, New York. It consisted of five twenty to thirty foot high telephone poles topped with basketball hoops com- plete with backboards and blanketed with thousands of- mostly beer-bottlecaps. Some of these regal obelisks car- ried diamond, zigzag, and chevron designs on their mosaic- like surfaces, their tight configurations reminiscent of snakeskin, Islamic decoration, African textiles or even the patterns on Hammons' earlier hair quilts.... Hammons constructed the piece in situ for the first six weeks, me- thodically nailing and stringing thousands of bottlecaps. The process was an integral part of the piece, as was the in- teraction with the judges, lawyers, clerks, downtown shop- pers, residents and even police who contributed to and re- defined the work's meaning.

The Africanism of Higher Goals is evident in how the poles are decorated, like the setting of cowries on laterite cones representing the god Eshu. We are also reminded of the monumental (and multiple) Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, located in Los Angeles, which was similarly decorated with bottle caps.

Only gods such as Michael Jordan are likely to score on a goal twenty-five feet high. Hammons has said of the work: "It's an anti-basketball sculpture. Basketball has become a problem in the black community because kids aren't getting an education. They're pawns in someone else's game. That's why it's called Higher Goals. It means that you should have higher goals in life than basketball" (Jones 1991, 29). Yet Hammons has also commented, "The issue is, I was de- prived of a basketball career by being too short" (29). With ambiguity comes mystery and pleasure. Because the meaning of Higher Goals is so pointed, it loses interest as a sign.

A more recent work, House of the Future (1991), has the complexity of the undecidable. The work consists of a well-




constructed old house in Charleston, South Carolina, mak- ing the title ironic. If this half-painted, weather-beaten house is the house of the future, what future people will live in it? Or is it in fact the house of the past? Moreover, it is not an entire house but rather the cross-section of one. No more than five feet wide, it has a full roof, windows, a door, and external stairs to a long, railed porch upstairs. A frame house of old wood, it appears to have been partly painted blue over its original white color. The blue is attractive and "new," therefore a sign of hope. Yet the painting is unfin- ished, and the house itself is impossible to live in. The house's loss of utility transforms it into an art object, as well as a "slice" of American history.

In "On the Ideology of Dirt," Tom Finkelpearl (1991, 62) creates a list of "dirty" and "clean" artists in dialectical pairings. Thus, just as practice is the dirty version of theory and Edward Keinholz is the unsanitized Andy Warhol, David Hammons is the rubble's version of Jeff Koons. Both de- pend on visual humor, but Koons' giant puppy, which is constructed of live flowers, earth, wood, and steel, takes up its site in front of a French provincial mansion with a mansard roof. Hammons' characteristic site is the streets of New York City.

Harryette Mullen's fourth book of poetry, Muse & Drudge (1995), is a book-length work containing four quatrains to the page. Eighty pages in length, it contains no punctuation. According to critic Kate Pearcy (1997, 1), "Each page of the book ... seems to represent some kind of discrete poetic unit since in performances of Muse & Drudge Mullen rarely breaks a page itself but moves the order of the pages around entirely, reading initially pages which appear at the back of the book, continuing a few pages on, then perhaps reading pages which appear in the middle or wher- ever." Pearcy goes on to comment that "the phoneme often dominates, availing itself by way of both overt rhyme schemes and avoided rhyme, and there's a lot of homophonic punning and word play. Reading possibilities are therefore highly provisional and proliferate along several different axes at once, and perhaps might again alter on other occasions" (2) .-

Mullen has referred to her poem as a conflation of Sap- pho, Getrude Stein, and the blues: "There's the blues on one hand and lyrical poetry on the other hand, and where

Mullen has referred to her poem as a conflation of Sap- pho, Getrude Stein, and the blues.



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they intersect or overlap. Thinking of this poem as a place where Sappho meets the blues at the crossroads, I imagine Sappho becoming Sapphire and singing the blues.... The writing of the poem is influenced by compositional strategies of the blues, because blues verses are actually shuffled and rearranged by the performer, so new blues can be com- posed on the spot essentially by using different materials in different orders" (quoted in Bedient 1996, 654). Critic and poet Calvin Bedient believes that, in using such a method, Muse & Drudge offers "postmodernism with a memory" (655). Without writing an epic as such, Mullen achieves epic range of reference. She also creates a coaxial relation between oral and written and black and white cultures. Her desire is to "compress together things that come from very different registers or different lexicons; they jostle each other so there's more tension. Yet there's more elasticity in the utterance" (657).

Mullen's preference for the word shuffling doubles tex- tual indeterminancy with the racist term shuffling Negroes. Slaves "shuffled" in coffles. The shuffle is also part of African-American dance history. According to Edward Thor- pe (1990, 47), "The soft-shoe shuffle was an ideal dance for the minstrel to portray the fallacious image of the simple, happy, indolent Negro servant, and the dances were fre- quently accompanied by songs that reinforced such a stereotype."

Mullen's shuffling of pages also suggests the shuffling of cards in a poker or Tarot deck. It therefore invites compari- son to Ifa divination, in which sixteen cowries or palm nuts are cast on a tray in an act of prophecy. Based on the number of cowries falling face up, a poem is selected from the Ifa canon of 256 poems (the number sixteen squared), which is then recited for a fee by the babalawo or priest. The poem will contain the answer to the supplicant's problem or question, but the priest himself offers no further interpretation. Thus, the answer to the supplicant's problem is finally his, by "reading" the poem presented. Because the god Ifa learned his powers of divination from Eshu, the entire process originates with this trickster and master of inter- pretations. As Gates (1988, 21) puts it, "Ifa is the god of de- terminate meanings, but his meanings must be rendered by analogy. Esu, god of indeterminacy, rules this interpretive process; he is the god of interpretation because he embod- ies the ambiguity of figurative language."

Although the connection is probably coincidental, Muse




& Drudge has striking numerological similarities to Ifa divination. Each interchangeable page contains sixteen lines, and the number of pages in the book is eighty, a multiple of sixteen (by five). According to William Bascom (1980, 8), there are "five kinds of good fortune selected simultaneous- ly in Ifa divination: long life, money, marriage, children, and defeat of one's enemy." Of Osanyin, Yoruba god of heal- ing, art, and vetriloquism, Robert Farris Thompson (1984, 441-445) writes, "Ifa says there are sixteen styles of the Os- anyin wrought-iron staff. One kind carries a single 'head' (a single bird poised at the summit of the staff), while another carries two heads and still another displays three heads and so on until the highest number is achieved, sixteen birds in iron. The last is especially prestigious, 'for the highest people calculate their power by sixteen."'

Here are two consecutive pages of Muse & Drudge as presented in the published work, before any performance act of shuffling (Mullen 1995, 17-18):

keep your powder dry your knees together your dress down your drawers shut

a picture perfect twisted her limbs

lovely as a tree for art's sake

muse of the world picks out stark melodies her raspy fabric tickling the ebonies

you can sing their songs with words your way put it over to the people know what you doing

curly waves away blues navy saved from salvation army grits and gravy tried no lie relaxation

some little bitter spilled glitter wiped the floor with spilled sugar



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back dating double dutch fresh out of bubble gum halfstep in the grave on banana peels of love

devils dancing on a dime cut a rug in ragtime jitterbug squat diddly bow stark strangled banjo

According to the author, the phrase "stark strangled banjo" is a homophone for "star spangled banner" (quoted in Bedi- ent 1996, 663). Thus, although much of the energy of these two pages comes from their panoramic glimpse of black life in the United States in the twentieth century-double dutch, ragtime, jitterbug, grits and gravy-double meanings including homophones, puns, and other ambiguitites punc- tuate the poem with the politics of cultural difference. Since the banjo was of African origin and has largely passed into the hands of white bluegrass musicians, a "strangled banjo" is one choked to silence or forced to play. Both interpreta- tions comment on the position of black music historically.

The lines quoted here are rife with double meanings. In the line "keep your powder dry," for instance, Mullen puns across gender. An older woman offers admonitions to a young girl to ensure her social success. To "keep ... your knees together" suggests both how to sit and how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The latter meaning is heightened by the line "your drawers shut." But "keep your powder dry" is also a male admonition relating to the conduct of war. Thus, male and female reference are joined, with the final emphasis on the conduct of love in terms of military cam- paign.

In the second stanza, an anticipated noun following "a picture perfect" is missing. This empty signifier becomes the subject of "twisted her limbs," a phrase suggesting coercion. The line "lovely as a tree," which modifies her limbs, quotes Joyce Kilmer's famously mediocre poem, "Trees" (see Ras- bach 1922). Because of the poem's camp value, the reference adds an element of humor.

The line "muse of the world" is reminiscent of the Sap- phic fragments, but the melodies picked on Sappho's lyre are "stark," a word repeated only a page later in "stark strangled banjos." To tickle the ebonies is to amuse or provoke black people, as well as to play the piano's black keys. Essen-




tial to the metaphor of the keyboard is that its black and white elements work in harmony despite their evident sepa- ration by color. In one trope, therefore, Mullen opens a world of social commentary.

The most important stanza thematically is the fourth: "you can sing their songs / with words your way / put it over to the people / know what you doing." The "you" is black people, who sing the songs of white people their own way (giving them black meanings and inflections), as has been seen in jazz and other expressive arts. The black singer "dis- rupts" a standard song, as will be seen later in the example of Al Hibbler's version of "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me," recorded with Roland Kirk. But this disruption adds to our understanding of the song rather than detracting from it. Indeed, it may be argued that, when two cultural and speech communities interact, disruption is entirely neces- sary on both parts. The black speaker's inflections are al- tered by the tide of white speech around him, just as his own speech alters the course of the dominant idiom.

Moreover, the minority speaker is conscious of the power of his disruptions. Of particular interest in this re- spect is the preposition "to" in the line "put it over to the people." To put it over to means to communicate, to convert the signifier into the signified. But Mullen has also overwritten "on" with "to." To put one over to black people, by means of coded or inflected cultural messages, is also to put one over on the dominant (white) speech community. As the overwritten, "on" makes itself present as meaning despite its illegibility. This illegibility replicates the relation of social underclasses to the more visible groups "above" them.

There are additional hidden and double meanings in the passage quoted. The 1950s rock song "Blue Navy" lies hidden in "curly waves away blues navy." The musician Bo Diddly is to be found in the line "jitterbug squat diddly bow." The lines "halfstep in the grave / on banana peels of love" doubles the dance called the halfstep with the popular cliche "one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel." The suggestion is of an older man, one foot in the grave, having a love affair with a younger woman. Thus, whereas the organization and style of the poem are postmodern, the content is grounded in black experience. The poem's use of irregularly rhyming quatrains doubles the ballad stanza, with its ABCB rhyme scheme and coupling of story and song with blues lyrics. Mullen's quatrains are purposely unsteady

Since the banjo was of African origin and has largely passed into the hands of white bluegrass musicians, a "sstrangled banjo" is one choked to silence orforced to play. Both interpre- tations comment on the position of black music historically.



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and indeterminate in meaning but employ consistent fields of reference, much of it relating to African-American orality.

Asked about the "mongrel aspect" of her poem, Mullen responded, "I would say that, yes, my text is a deliberately multi-voiced text, a text that tries to express the actual diver- sity of my own experience living here, exposed to different cultures. 'Mongrel' comes from 'among.' Among others. We are among; we are not alone. We are all mongrels" (quoted in Bedient 1996, 651).

Even the title Muse & Drudge resulted from homophonic wordplay on the Zora Neale Hurston title Mules and Men. "Who are the mules and who are the men?" Mullen was asked by Bedient. Her response was, "If you think about black and white, then the black people are the mules and the white people are men. If you think about the black community, then the women are the mules and the men are the men. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the grandmother says the black woman is the mule of the world. I changed that to muse of the world" (666-667).

The overwriting of one music with another is a notable feature of rap music. In Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, Houston A. BakerJr. (1993, 48-49) traces the origin of rapper Tony Smith, later known as Tone-Loc:

Smith's nom-de-stage became Tone-Loc (pronounced with a long "o") when his voice was discovered and marketed by two young white businessmen named Mike Ross and Matt Dike. Ross and Dike knew the techniques of and had a pas- sion for rap. What they lacked was a representative voice; they found that voice in Tony Smith. Sampling Van Halen for a guitar riff, they took the phrase "wild thing" from Fab Five Freddy and Spike Lee. (See Rolling Stone, June 1, 1989, p. 31). Then they contracted Young MC (an LA-based rapper) to write lyrics. They put the resultant mix at the dis- posal of Smith's raspy voice. Lo and behold! A mega-hit called "Wild Thing" was born. Tone-Loc became a con- tender.

The Wall Street aspect of this collage of youthful ener- gies-this West Coast bricolage-is the fact that "Wild Thing" quickly became the second-best-selling single since 1985's "We Are the World." The follow-up success of Loc and the company's "Funky Cold Medina" (also written by Young MC) helped the album Loc'ed after Dark become the




first album by a black rapper to hit number one on the pop charts.

On the one hand, the white producers Ross and Dike pierced the veil of racial authenticity we expect and, in fact, demand of rap music. They appropriated black voice for profit. Yet as true fans of the music, theirs is a reformation of black mastery, to take liberties with Houston Baker's ex- pression. Tony Smith's is an authentic black voice; Young MC is a genuine songwriter in the rap style. Does it really matter that the rapper's identity was a white creation? One of the central techniques of hip-hop is the sampling of other music. Russell A. Potter (1995, 78) describes how rapper Ice Cube and his group Da Lench Mob sampled the racist phrase of a Los Angeles police officer, "It was straight out of Gorillas in the Mist," used to describe the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. The cover art depicts the group "wearing black ski masks and carrying automatic rifles (= guerillas)" as they stand in a "dense forest with a heavy un- dergrowth of ferns (= gorillas)." Thus Da Lench Mob constructs a powerful visual pun worthy of David Hammons, although a good deal less gentle. "In the title cut," Potter con- tinues, "Ice Cube Signifies on the political doubleness this homophonic/visual slippage enacts:

Fuck Grape Ape and Magilla I'm a killa, Magilla Gorilla ain't a killa, white boys swiped Godzilla from my supa nigga named King Kong Played his ass like ping-pong (78)

The visual pun on the album cover depends on the homonymic pun of "gorillas" and "guerillas." In effect, Da Lench Mob conjoins the visual and linguistic strategies of David Hammons and Harryette Mullen.

Potter also describes how Public Enemy, on their album Apocalypse 91: The Empire Strikes Black, "mix in painfully dis- torted but recognizable samples of bluegrass and country music; the out-of-phase banjo invokes not only an image of racist Southern whites, but the minstrel's banjo that was made to enact a seemingly endless jollity" (79).

Given David Hammons' use of recycled materials in his artworks, such as old bottle caps and even shavings of his own hair, it is also worthy of note that, according to Potter, "African-American cultures have mobilized, via a network of localized sites and nomadic incursions, cultures of the



82 Lenox Avenue

Why Hibbler makes use of ""white" dialect is unclear. His purpose may be political (the "other" satirized), formal (he enjoys the balance of speech kinds, much as a painter enjoys the contrast of shades or colors), or surrealist (dialect difference in a striking sound collage).

found, the revalued, the used-and cultures moreover which have continually transfigured and transformed objects of consumption into sites of production" (108). Even when he makes a performance-art video, Hammons' work is inexpen- sively produced. His seven-minute video Phat Free (1997) consists first of the sounds of a man rhythmically kicking a bucket and then the sight of him doing the same thing. Meaning lies largely in the work's title. The phrase "phat free" puns on "fat free" (the bucket is empty) and the suggestion that someone has "kicked the bucket," or died. But the word phat is also jargon for something that is emphatic in the best sense-a beautiful woman, for instance. Inexpen- sive found objects are also essential to Two Obvious (1996), an artwork in which cowrie shells spill from a broken piggy bank. Cowrie shells were used in West Africa as units of ex- change, or money. They were also employed in sacred Eshu figures and among some African groups as part of Ifa divination practice. Cowries are themselves multiple in meaning. To depict them spilling from a sacred piece of middle- class Americana is to display black wealth, both material and spiritual.

Al Hibbler's 1972 recording of "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me" blends black and white vocal phrasing. In the first verse, the phrasing is normal except for a plosive "why" in the lines "Why people tear the seam of anyone's dream / is over my head." But in the lines "If you should take the word of others you've heard / I haven't a chance," the word "of' is presented as a great sagging bass note, followed immediately by the arch upper-class British phrasing of "I haven't a chance." Together, the interruptive and jazzy "of' and the parodic hauteur of "Oi ha! vent" amount to a cultural palimpsest. The same thing occurs in the third verse, quoted here in its entirety:

True I've been seen with (uh-uh) someone new But does that mean that I've been (Oi've bean) untrue Though we're apart the words in my heart Reveal how I feel about you.

The interruptive "uh-uh" of the first line contrasts with the equally interruptive upper-class phrasing of "Oi've bean." A similar conjunction appears in the fourth verse, where the archly phrased "may hold" in the line "and other arms may hold a thrill" is followed by the strongly attacked, even growled, first word in "But please do nothing till you hear it




from me." After a long saxophone solo by Roland Kirk reca- pitulating the musical theme, Hibbler sings two more verses. The penultimate verse is a restatement of the third in a less- emphatic style. In the final verse, the words "my memory" are growled in one of the song's strongest emotional state- ments. A similar growl is found in the song's final words, "and you never will."

Why Hibbler makes use of "white" dialect is unclear. His purpose may be political (the "other" satirized), formal (he enjoys the balance of speech kinds, much as a painter enjoys the contrast of shades or colors), or surrealist (dialect difference in a striking sound collage). Such parodic phrasing is constant throughout the songs on A Meeting of the Times. In "Daybreak," Hibbler repeats British inflections in the line "I daydream (Oi die-dream) of you." In "Lover Come Back to Me," he uses a clipped phrasing reminiscent of Cary Grant in the line "I remember everything you used to do." Such consistent use of vocal color points to idiosyncratic personal style rather than political commentary. As a blind man and a singer, Hibbler was extraordinarily sensitive to sound, but he was also extremely elegant in his personal style, from his dress to his manner of speech. Richard Long (1998) of Emory University has suggested that Hibbler was in fact par- odying the vocal style of Billy Eckstine. According to jazz critic and former Downbeat editor Art Lange (1998), Hib- bler, like Eckstine and Herb Jeffries, was strongly influenced by the crooner sound of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1999, the 'Jazz Profiles" show on National Public Radio reported that, on leaving the Arkansas School for the Blind (he was raised in Little Rock), Hibbler started singing the blues in road- houses but "wanted to sing soft sweet ballads like crooners Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby" (Merrill 1999, 1). Al- though Hibbler had a major popular success with his recording of "Unchained Melody" in 1955, his work has been poorly attended to critically. A major listing of criticism in music journals shows only two entries for Hibbler: a brief record review in Downbeat of For Sentimental Reasons, his 1986 collaboration with HankJones (Axelrod 1986), and a review of the album Unchained Melody in Music Journal (Janu- ary 1958). Hibbler is briefly described by Duke Ellington, with whose band he sang from 1943 to 1951: "Hib's great dramatic devices and the variety of his tonal changes give him almost unlimited range. His capabilities are so many, but I should mention first his clear, understandable enunci- ation. He can produce a whispering, confidential sound, or an outburst that borders on panic [italics added]. He will adopt a nasal tone at just the right word and note, or affect a sud-



84 Lenox Avenue

den drop to what sounds like the below-compass bass. Cries, laughs, and highly animated calls-he uses them all to make the listener see it as he sees it" (Ellington 1973, 223).

According to Hibbler, the song "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me" was in fact written by Ellington especially to suit the range and intonation of Hibbler's voice (quoted in Merrill 1999). Ellington's ability as a songwriter to "read" the voice of Al Hibbler-and thereby sing through it-is a striking example of double voicedness in its own right, although not as a question of cultural difference.

As Aldon Nielson (1994, 17) comments, "Race is exces- sive and unruly. To reread the racial significations of Ameri- ca's literary texts is to engage in a double reading, to differ with texts and to differ from ourselves." Like David Ham- mons and Harryette Mullen, Al Hibbler places himself squarely at the crossroads of meaning and culture. As Eshu figures, they wear multicolored hats that give them alternate identities depending on the viewer's position. "We are not born as white or black subjects," Nielsen insists. "We must be taught to act as white or black agents" (21). Through vari- ous doublings and double-voicedness, Hammons, Mullen, and Hibbler reveal the complexities of racial identification. Jacques Derrida (1992, 9) has written of the new face of Eu- rope, "What is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself." Through cultural ventriloquy, we learn who we are by hearing the voices of those we are becoming.

Discography

Daybreak. A meeting of the times. Al Hibbler and Roland Kirk. At- lantic 1630 (1972).

Ellington, Duke. Do nothin' till you hear from me. A meeting of the times. Al Hibbler and Roland Kirk. Atlantic 1630 (1972).

Guerillas in the mist. Guerillas in the mist. Ice Cube, W. Hutchinson, G. Clinton, W. Collins, B. Worrell, and Mr. Woody. Street Knowl- edge Records/Atlantic 792296-2 (ca. 1992).

Hibbler, Al. Unchained melody. MCA 60113 (1955). Hibbler, Al, and HankJones. For sentimental reasons. Open Sky OSR

3126 (1986). Hibbler, Al, and Roland Kirk. Lover come back to me. A meeting of

the times. Altantic 1630 (1972).




References

Axelrod, Alan. 1986. Review of For sentimental reasons by Al Hibbler and HankJones. Down Beat (Decem- ber).

Bascom, William. 1980. Sixteen cowries: Yoruba divination from Africa to the New World. Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1993. Black studies, rap, and the academy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bedient, Calvin. 1996. The solo mysterioso blues: An interview with Calvin Bedient. Callaloo 19, no. 3:

651-669. Cannon, Steve. 1991. David Hammons' New York: Twenty years, retro-instrospection. David Hammons:

Rousing the rubble, 38-58. New York: Institute of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The other heading: Reflections on today 's Europe. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault

and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1997. The souls of black folk. Edited by David W. Bight and Robert Gooding-

Williams. Boston: Bedford Books. Ellington, Duke. 1973. Music is my mistress. New York: Da Capo Press. Finkelpearl, Tom. 1991. On the ideology of dirt. In David Hammons: Rousing the rubble, 61-89. New

York: Institute of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York:

Oxford University Press. Hammons, David. 1991 David Hammons: Rousing the rubble. New York: Institute of Contemporary Art;

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Jones, Kellie. 1991. The structure of myth and the potency of magic. In David Hammons: Rousing the

rubble, edited by Steve Cannon, 15-37. New York: Institute of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lange, Art. 1998. Telephone conversation with the author, Chicago, Illinois, October 20. Long, Richard. 1998. Comments. Interarts Inquiry Roundtable, Center for Black Music Research, Co-

lumbia College Chicago, November 14. Mackey, Nathaniel. 1986. Bedouin hornbook. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Merrill, Joan. 1999. Jazz profiles. Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/pro-

grams/jazz profiles/hibbler.html. Mullen, Harryette Romell. 1995. Muse & drudge. Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 1994. Writing between the lines: Race and intertextuality. Athens: University of Geor-

gia Press. Pearcy, Kate. 1997. A poetics of opposition? Race and the avant-garde. Paper read at the Conference

on Contemporary Poetry: Poetry and the Public Sphere, April 24-27, Rutgers University. Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular vernaculars: Hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism. Albany: State Uni-

versity of New York Press. Rasbach, Oscar. 1922. Trees. Poem byJoyce Kilmer. New York: J. Schirmer. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1994. Flash of the spirit. New York: Vintage Books. Thorpe, Edward. 1990. Black dance. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. Untitled review of Unchained melody by Al Hibbler. 1958. MusicJournal (January): 78.



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