From my first steps towards considering how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound, I have wanted to address the question of how Black musicians can effectively organize around the idea of shared musical histories and practices without straying into essentialist discourses. My goal has been to work towards understanding how sounds recognizable as Black emerge, develop, and transform over time, simultaneously offering a challenge to Blackness(es) as purely biological rather than cultural. Page 99 of my dissertation, “The Way We Play: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical identity,” is a critical point at which I make an intervention into anti-essentialist discourses. Roughly a quarter of the way through my second chapter, a case study of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), in a sub-section titled “the qualia of Black voice,” I argue:

While Hunter foregrounds race-based suffering as a component for “authentic” blues performance, her earlier claim that Black performers possess little “tricks” of performance that others frequently overlook, situates blues performance in practice rather than biology. The instability of these tricks from performance to performance, modified intentionally (as Hunter did to avoid a stable model for [vocalist Sophie] Tucker’s mimicry) or not, further marks an underlying improvisatory aesthetic which makes a singular set of performance characteristics difficult, or impossible, to grasp. I further argue that Hunter’s understanding does not reflect a biological notion of race but rather one socio-politically and culturally rooted in the particular experience of Black Americans within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society. (page 99)

The culturally-rooted practices to which I refer function semiotically as indexes of Blackness for those who hear them, commenting metapragmatically (cf. Silverstein 1993) on Black musical history through the act of performance. I reframe these practices as “musical qualia of Blackness,” sonic embodiments or manifestations of the quality Blackness, shared and transformed between and amongst Black American musicians across time and space.

Page 99 is a point of transition in my argument made via Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s thinking on “strategic essentialism” in her oft-cited Teaching to Transgress (1994). She argues that adopting an essentialist position may function as “a strategic response to domination and to colonization,” (hooks 1994, 83), offering an important lesson for the study of music. For Black musicians whose histories and culture are so frequently stolen, appropriated, or “silenced” (Trouillot 1995), music has been a critical site for the development, maintenance, and transmission of this historical and cultural knowledge. Such processes of knowledge production and sharing are accomplished via a kind of musical interdiscursivity (cf. Silverstein 2005), connecting Black musicians in the present to performances and performers from Black musical history. In that way, I pose a challenge to anti-essentialist considerations of Black music, by augmenting hooks’s argument, insisting that Black musical identities are historically-grounded and carefully “curated,” to borrow form Daphne Brooks (2021), within Black communities. Page 99 is a useful window into the thought process behind my desire to understand to offer an alternative to essentialist understandings of Blackness, taking seriously the histories, experiences, and choices made by Black musicians across time and space.

Jonathan A. Gómez. 2022. “The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity. Harvard University, PhD diss.