In 1920, Perry Bradford, a Black composer and publisher, had the crazy idea that African Americans would buy music recorded by Black artists and musicians. He convinced Okeh Records to shellac a vaudeville and cabaret singer from Harlem named Mamie Smith backed by Black jazz musicians. “Crazy Blues” proved to be a smash hit. Within two months of release, it had sold 75,000 copies. Record company executives (all white) woke up. There was a market here! Money to be made! And so “race music” was coined and advertised. When you have a success in the entertainment field, what do you do? You copy it for as long as the formula holds out. And that’s exactly what Paramount, Columbia, et. al. did. They went out and signed their own Black female singers to contracts. That’s why all of the first hits were delivered by a cohort of blues queens whose names, with the exception of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (and possibly Alberta Hunter), you’ve never heard of: Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson, Sippie Wallace and various unrelated Smiths (Trixie and Clara). These women were Black superstars of the era. However, they did not necessarily specialize in the blues. They were versatile theater and cabaret singers who performed a variety of popular music styles. For their race catalogs, the labels wanted blues, and that’s what they captured on record. In 1926, Paramount Records recorded a Texas street singer and guitarist named Blind Lemon Jefferson. Lightning struck again. The sides sold well, and Jefferson’s popularity initiated a wave of country blues records. These were primarily solo singers who performed their own compositions and accompanied themselves on acoustic guitar. Enshrined saints within that tradition are Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell. These artists came nowhere near the level of success or renown enjoyed by the blues queens, but their music was valorized by later generations in ways that the music of the neglected and forgotten foremothers of the genre were not. The Great Depression killed the careers of the Classic Blues queens – vaudeville circuits finally collapsed and the sound itself had fallen out of favor – but the heartfelt renderings of an oppressed Southern Black man still sold, and they were way cheaper to record! Between the Depression and the restrictions of materials (like shellac) imposed by fighting World War Two, the record industry contracted sharply. By the time it began recovery in the 40s, white men had discovered the genre as an artistic expression of authenticity and predictably took it over. Folklorists and collectors, such as John and Alan Lomax, searched for “roots” music in the South and invented a new narrative structured around the following values: GOOD INAUTHENTIC Rural male guitarists Urban female singers Solo performers Use of bands – even jazz bands! "Primitive" sounding styles Variety of styles, genres, and instrumentation Folk expression Professional entertainers Artists such as Robert Johnson, Son House, and Lead Belly became central to the emerging canon. The Classic Blues women did not fit the folklorists’ narrative, but while they could not write Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith entirely out of the account, the rest were consigned to the dustbin of history. The die was cast, and later developments in both the genre itself and the white historiography that developed around it only amplified the erasure. In the latter half of the 40s, the blues went electric in Chicago and unleashed a new cohort of male stars: Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Elmore James. (Shout out to Etta James who cracked the boys club late – in the 60s.) Electric blues spawned Jump Blues. The revival of the record industry introduced local scenes – West Coast Blues (T-Bone Walker), Swamp Blues (Lightenin’ Slim) – into the mix. Piano blues even recognized a white man, Mose Allison, as a legitimate practitioner. Race music got rechristened as Rhythm and Blues and started reaching towards the big money – the white market. Look at the list of blues stars from the 40s to the 60s and you’ll find few women. The blues world was a man’s world, and, honey girl!, maybe you should direct your efforts towards pop or jazz. The folk revival of the early 60s, although instrumental in resuscitating the careers of still-living country artists (Mississippi John Hurt), did nothing to challenge the younger generation’s acceptance of the sexist lens promoted by early histories ( The Country Blues  by Robert Charters, 1959) and supposedly definitive record collections ( The Anthology of American Folk Music , 1952, by the eccentric and extremely sexist collector, Harry Smith – 4 recordings by women out of 84 tracks).  When rhythm and blues morphed into a white genre in the mid-fifties, rock and roll was poised for world domination. With no knowledge of or interest in the blues queens who had launched the genre, British and American rockers continued to idolize – and sometimes share the stage with – Delta and Chicago bluesmen. The British invasion, with its covers of past blues hits (Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain” by the Rolling Stones; Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful” by Cream) sealed the deal – and the history. The blues origin story became: Delta men → electric blues → rock and roll.  Furthermore, all of the protagonists in this mythical lineage were unproblematically heterosexual, which was not an assertion you could make about the blues queens. Some of them even sang about economic independence (hmm), domestic abuse (sad but understandable), same-sex relationships (abominable), and female desire (what?!?). No wonder we had to bury the foremothers! But dammit – some of them wouldn’t stay dead! In 1970, Janis Joplin bought a headstone to put on Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave. “ The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.” — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Where My Mother’s Name Didn’t Come From. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Aimee Semple McPherson preaching at her Angelus Temple, Los Angeles My mother once told me that her mother, Jeanette, had named her Amy after the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I didn’t give this statement much thought at the time, but it would have been odd that my conflicted Jewish mother had inherited something from a Pentecostal evangelist.  When I did think about it, however, I figured that religion had nothing to do with Jeanette’s choice. In Jeanette’s world, men, even weak ones, held power. A few exceptional women, like Aimee Semple McPherson, did  have power. How any woman in America came to power in the second decade of the 20th century was certainly a conundrum. Women couldn’t even vote  in federal elections until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 – and this only after 50 years of ceaseless suffragette effort. Middle class women gained organizational and leadership experience through the burgeoning women’s clubs movement (social clubs, civic leagues, improvement societies), but although the hinges were being loosened on the doors to public power, the patriarchy successfully kept them closed. There were, however, two fields of endeavor where women could shoot to national renown: entertainment and religion. Aimee Semple McPherson amassed enormous success at the intersection of both when she ended her wandering life as an itinerant preacher to settle in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism was pretty fringe-y at that time (faith healing, speaking in tongues), but McPherson eschewed the fire and brimstone delivery for a softer (more feminine?) approach, and it was enormously successful.  It would take McPherson only a few years to reach the heights of power. She built and founded America’s first megachurch, the Angelus Temple, with a seating capacity of 5300. Multiple services and other programming went on all day, every day, and her dazzling approach of combining theatrical spectacle with the gospel made her a pioneer of Christian entertainment.  McPherson presented salvation through her legendary “illustrated sermons,” renting costumes and scenery from nearby Hollywood studios. The temple boasted a 14-piece orchestra, a brass band and a hundred-voice choir, two-thirds female, all dressed in white. She used live camels, tigers, lambs, palm trees — whatever it took to bring biblical truth to the hearts of her listeners.  Her critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity, but she built massive and lasting institutional power in a system designed to exclude women. She founded an entire denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.  The year after the opening of the Angelus Temple, McPherson broke ground for the televangelists of the later century when her church acquired a broadcast license, and she sent her sermons over the airwaves, making her the first religious figure to gain a national audience. By 1926, she was one of the most charismatic and influential women of her time, her fame on par with Charles Lindbergh ,  Rudoolph Valentino, and Babe Ruth. Yet she gave up nothing of her femininity. She worked through glamor, fashion, emotional expressiveness, and maternal imagery.  All this hoopla was far removed from my grandmother’s quiet domesticity in Hyde Park, Chicago. McPherson was so famous that even Jeanette would have known of her in her heyday. What did the content of Aimee’s message matter when Jeanette was considering a name for her only daughter? What my grandmother wished for her daughter in bestowing her that name, I hypothesized, was a kind of masculine agency that Jeanette may have wanted but was certainly beyond her ken. Her middle class aspirations as a Jewish woman – a servant, nice material things, social prominence in the “right” temple – were even more constricting than those of her Gentile counterparts. The only power she knew was exercised through charm, seduction, and an attractive appearance.  Unfortunately, the dates for this invented origin story didn’t work out. When my mother was born in 1920, Aimee’s fame was still confined to Pentecostalism and Angeleno circles. It’s unlikely that Jeanette knew of her. Still, my mother thought that was where her name came from, so the retrospective feminist gloss I came up with may have applied to Amy, if not to Jeanette. N.B. McPherson also anticipated the waystation of outsized religious figures blemished or brought down by scandal when she disappeared for five weeks in the summer of 1926. After an enormous funeral service for her, she stumbled out of the Sonoran desert near Arizona with a far-fetched story of how she’d been kidnapped and held captive. The subsequent media frenzy and grand jury investigations wounded her reputation but did not bring her down. She continued leading (and growing) her denomination until her (accidental?) death by an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in How the Women of the Classic Blues Got the White Patriarchal Erasure . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

It's funny how you can live in a society whose wealth was built upon the slave trade and not be aware of it even though the legacy of the trade is layered in the language, social relations, and racialized prejudices of the present-day population. No, I'm not referring to the American South. I'm reflecting on the time I spent learning about Swahili language and culture on the East African coast. My introduction, through a two-month intensive Swahili language program for graduate students, was not designed to bring out the dark underside of Swahili history. A cohort of 25 students from around the U.S. was subjected to language classes, lectures, and excursions in Malindi, Mombasa, and Lamu. The program, put together by Yale, was an elite training that drew its contacts and expertise from the Swahili crème de la crème of the Kenyan coast. Our principal lecturer, Sheikh Ahmed Nabhany, was a highly regarded poet and scholar but clueless about how to impart his deep, culturally embedded knowledge to American neophytes. (One of his lectures was comprised of a slide show and the Swahili names of 40 different kinds of local fish.) The men, during our stay in Mombasa (the women were housed elsewhere), were the guests of the illustrious Fahmy Hinawy whose family home had served as the Imperial German Consulate for Britain's East Africa Protectorate from 1903 to 1914. We learned about Swahili cuisine, marriage customs, Koranic education, styles of dress, local structures of government, but nary a word about slavery. I returned to the Swahili coast three years later, spending ten months as a Research Associate in the Literature Department of the University of Dar es Salaam. I was writing my dissertation on Ebrahim Hussein, East Africa’s best-known (but still untranslated) Swahili playwright. Hussein was also a product of elite Swahili society, but he came of age as part of the Arusha generation, briefly inspired by President Nyrere’s socialist idealism, and opened his thinking up to Marxism and class analysis that were permanently beyond the ideological horizons of Nabhany and his ilk. In fact, Hussein's second great play, Mashetani (Devils), confronted the great historical schism of the East African coast head-on, and still I didn’t see it!  The “secret” lay in the very name of the country that had adopted an indigenous language as its national medium of commerce, education, and government — a radical linguistic move that no other African country attempted. Tanzania was the welding together of Tanganika, the large inland empire that England had “inherited” from German East Africa when that country was stripped of its colonies after losing World War One, and Zanzibar, the Arab-dominated archipelago that had flourished under Omani and Swahili rulers as the last great slave entrepot in history. I had done my background research. I'd read that the sultanate of Zanzibar, at the apogee of its trade dominance in the mid-19th century, extracted enormous wealth from the African interior in slaves and ivory — as if "ivory" did not entail the slaughter of elephants and "slaves" did not require the dehumanization of the "washenzi" (savages) of the mainland. The coastal town where I'd visited the College of the Arts was called Bagamoyo — lay down your heart — because it was the point of departure for the tens of thousands of captives who were then transported to the Zanzibar slave market, where they were sold to masters in Arabia, India, and sometimes kept on the island itself. But there was no slave castle, no "Door of No Return," no anguished groups of New World Blacks confronting the brutality of their past — no physical evidence at all. When I spent time on Zanzibar, I, like all tourists, was dazzled by the exoticism of the Swahili populace, the coral rag masonry, the elaborately carved doors, the profusion of street food sold from the stalls fronting the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, my knowledge of Swahili allowed me to be adopted by a baraza of young men who met nightly for dominoes and banter. Now I was rubbing shoulders with the people, not the elite, who were mostly dark (colorism played its usual noxious role), mostly descendants of the inland tribes who had been forced to carry elephant tusks to the coast and then sold into a domestic slavery of clove plantations. And yet everybody was Swahili, everybody spoke Swahili, and — this was key — everybody was Muslim. Even though the Arab overlords had been killed or chased out during the uprising of the oppressed that fueled the Zanzibari revolution of 1964, Arab values and culture remained dominant.  Slavery had played an integral role in Arab culture from its burst onto the world stage in the 7th century to the 20th. The toll of the Arab slave trade on the African continent was much greater in terms of numbers (some 17 million as opposed to the 12 million of the Atlantic trade) and lasted almost 1000 years. Zanzibar’s most famous native son, Tippu Tip, had built up his fabulous fortune as the second richest man in history on the backs of the thousands of inland Africans he had forced into slavery. That was how the coastal language of Swahili had become the lingua franca of East Africa, the trade. And yet as far as I could tell, here in the amputated heart of the great empire, nobody spoke of it. It was everywhere and nowhere at once.  I returned to the States, finished my dissertation, published articles on Swahili literature, and privately vowed to return someday to Zanzibar, even though academia had cast me aside and I had no professional reason to go again. In 2022, I made good on my promise. My Swahili was in tatters, so I hired a local guide to pilot me through new tourist adventures. He took me to see something that hadn’t existed during my first sojourn, the Slave Monument located next to the Anglican Church, which began construction on the site of the last functioning slave market in the world when it was finally forced out of business by the British in 1873.  There wasn’t much to look at. The sculpture, five downcast figures in rough pebbled stone, is rather restrained. The underground slave chambers are empty. The nearby Heritage Education and Visitors Centre was simply two rooms containing large explanatory panels in English and Swahili. However, this was the only extensive public presentation of Zanzibar’s role in the slave trade, and the picture of the recuperated captives on the HMS Daphne that I photographed there I have not seen reproduced anywhere else. The guides add many gruesome details, not necessarily historically corroborated, about the ordeals that the upcountry captives had to endure during their passage through the slave market.  Many Zanzibaris refuse to visit the monument or museum, claiming that the narratives are born of more Christian prejudice or Western Islamophobia. That may be so, but look at the photograph. The difference between the slavers and captives, in dress, in demeanor, in gestalt , is just as clear as in any sketch of an American antebellum slave market. Having grown up in the United States, I associated these oppressions with race. I couldn’t do that with the Arab slave trade, at least not on the Swahili coast. The chasm between the masters and the enslaved was defined by religion. Swahili culture — and language — had been Islamized since its inception centuries ago. The word for "civilization" is  ustaarabu , the root being -arabu . There was no “black” population; everybody was “black.” There was no identifiable subset of slave descendants in the destinations of the Arab trade as there was in the West. The trade favored women over men, two or three to one, for obvious reasons. If a female slave gave birth to her master’s child, both were eligible for emancipation. As for the men, the vast majority were castrated, which either killed them off immediately or ensured that they’d leave no biological inheritance. Anyway, once the Arab dhows had sailed over the horizon with their doomed and helpless cargo, their fate provoked zero concern on the part of the Swahilis past or present. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in An Embarrassing History . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

Americans with a moderate knowledge of musical history know about the minstrel shows that originated in the 19th century — how could they not? Some of them might even be aware that the Black musical reentered and transformed the Broadway stage during the 1920s. But there is this gap from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1920s where only fragments of Black musicality (ragtime, the cakewalk) flicker through the imposed amnesia of the time. Why? Take a deep breath and read the following historical facts. The first popular song to chart a million sheet music sales was "All Coon Look Alike To Me," written by Ernest Hogan and published, to his permanent economic benefit (he was smart enough to put a royalty clause in his contract) in 1895. In spite of the Irish-sounding stage name he adopted, Ernest Crowdens (b. 1865) was unequivocally Black. As an early adaptation of the syncopation that became the hallmark of ragtime, Hogan's song sparked a "coon song" craze that produced a tidal wave of demeaning stereotypes phrased in an artificial "darky" dialect written by Blacks and whites alike — 600 songs between 1895 and 1900. An embarrassing history, indeed. But who deserved the shame — the white producers and audiences that skewed Black representations on stage — no matter who was under the burnt cork — into prefigured stereotypes of shiftless layabouts, dimwits, pompous blowhards, transparent con artists, razor-toting bad men, watermelon eating, chicken-stealing... the list goes on and on. Was it the white folks who published the songs, produced the shows, sold the tickets, bought the sheet music, and reaped the profits who felt embarrassed? Or was it the stage-struck boy, the musically inclined singer, the talented dancer who had to force himself into these clown costumes in order to make any kind of living and possibly — who knows? — strike the flickering bullseye of a hit song or comedic role and rise, however temporarily, above the circumscribed fate of his race?  The tortuous truth of the coon song was that while it was certainly a cultural straight jacket — as had been the minstrel show and Uncle Tom roles of the nineteenth century — it could also be an escape route. Coon songs and ragtime (the instrumental version, if you will) brought syncopation into American music, a wildly popular innovation whose Black origin could not be belittled or erased. Appropriated by white performers and composers for sure, but the music's popularity built the careers of the first generation of Black stage professionals whose achievements, in the first decade of the 20th century, were astonishing. With the exception of Bert Williams, the names of these extraordinary men (unfortunately few women were allowed in that vanguard) have been fogged over by the humiliating miasma of the coon song craze that launched their careers. "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome," wrote Booker T. Washington, who well knew the ground on which he and his post-Reconstruction generation, abandoned now to the not-so-tender mercies of a recrudescent white nationalism, had to stand. One need only look at the sheet music covers to see what they were up against.  And yet, Bob Cole turned the craze to his advantage when he wrote and produced A Trip to Coontown in 1898, the first musical entirely created and owned by Black showmen. (He also handily skewered Jim Crow injustice in the show's song "No Coons Allowed," reprinted in a special end section of the newsletter.) That same year, Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk, " a one-act musical by composer Will Marion Cook with an all-Black cast premiered on the rooftop of a Broadway theater and was a hit. Three years later Cook's music graced  In Dahomey , the first full-length African American musical to be staged at an indoor venue on Broadway. During its four-year tour,  In Dahomey  proved one of the most successful musical comedies of its era.The show helped make its composer and leading performers, George Walker and Bert Williams, household names. A command performance at Buckingham Palace capped its 1903 residency in the United Kingdom Dizzying heights had been scaled, at least in England. More triumphs awaited in New York. Ernest Hogan fulfilled his pet ambition to be the only colored star in a full-scale Broadway musical, Rufus Rastas , in 1905. Bob Cole, after having teamed up with composer J. Rosamund Johnson (of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" fame), created several Cole & Johnson Broadway shows that strenuously transcended the coon tropes still dominant on Tin Pan Alley. The leading man of The Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906-07) was a military hero and a college man. T he Red Moon (1908-1910) not only depicted a misceginated world of Black and Indian alliance but its plot turned upon a romantic relationship between its Black protagonist and his half-Indian love interest. (A serious depiction of romance imparted too much gravitas to Black characters and was thus avoided, it was mistakenly thought, until the return of the Black musical in 1921 with Shuffle Along .)  The Williams and Walker Company, quite large now and able to access financial resources unknown heretofore, continued its Broadway successes. Ernest Hogan wrote and starred in a second Broadway musical, The Oyster Man (1907). And then, it all came crashing down. Hogan had to leave The Oyster Man , closing the show, due to illness. George Walker retired early in the middle of the 1908-09 season also for health reasons. In 1911 Bob Cole collapsed on stage while performing with J. Rosamund Johnson. Syphilis carried off this first generation of giants, though the explanations offered to the public cited other causes. They were mourned by their contemporaries, but their memories did not survive. Bert Williams was absorbed and enshrined in the world of white entertainment as a headliner for the Ziegfield Follies from 1910 to 1919. Bereft of its stars, African American musicals entered a Wilderness Period from 1908 to 1921, during which Shuffle Along opened . Between the "embarrassing" beginning (coon songs) and the stigmatized end, there was much to celebrate — but much that was easier to forget. If you're African American, can you look at the sheet music cover of "All Coons Look Alike To Me" with equanimity? Discretion was the better part of pallor.  N.B. The family of M. Witmark and Sons, a founding force of Tin Pan Alley and major publisher of coon songs, was of Jewish origin.  — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Arab Slave Trade Finally Breaks Through . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Marion Michelle with FIAF colleagues, 1957 I've written elsewhere of how my cousin Marion Michelle probably made cinematic history filming the first guerilla documentary, Indonesia Calling , for the famous Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens , in 1945. This was well before I was born. Marion was the same generation as my mother — they were first cousins — although of course we were cousins as well. Since 1950, Marion had settled as an expatriate in Paris. I lived in Paris on two different occasions, once as a child of 11 in 1961 and again as a university student of 27 in 1977. It turned out, though I didn't know it, that Marion had extensive experience with the documentary film tradition as it developed in Europe. Marion was never one to toot her own horn, so I didn't learn about her association with Joris Ivens, how she had wrested the leadership of the International Federation of Film Archives from the derelict and imperious Henri Langlois, her sustained friendships with such giants of documentary film as Paul Strand and John Grierson until much later, until I myself had taken up documentary film in an accidental manner. But all of this knowledge came well after I had known Marion best, back in 1977. Had it not been for my unexpected detour into filmmaking and a class on documentary film, I might never have learned about or appreciated Marion's accomplishments. To me, she was cousin Marion, and even at 27 I was myopically focused on my life and its curious trajectory. I knew nothing about Marion's history, but she knew everything about mine. This didn’t strike me as unbalanced. I’d never been much interested in the biographies of my parents’ generation. Nonetheless, bits and pieces of her former life emerged. She told me about a Joris Ivens retrospective at the Pompidou Center — she unfortunately had to go to a film festival in Italy during that time — and I asked her who he was. She couldn’t believe I had never heard of him. .....“ Pare Lorentz ?” she quizzed further. .....I shook my head. .....“ John Grierson ?” .....“Who are these people?” .....“You didn’t watch any documentaries when you were growing up?” .....I racked my brains. “ Woodstock ,” I offered. .....She’d never heard of it. It was truly a dialogue des sourds , as the French expression goes, but Marion gave me a truncated version of her relationship with Ivens. Of course I'd seen many documentaries, but they were on television — shows such as See It Now and 60 Minutes — and didn't count. Without thinking about it, what Marion and I were both referring to were theatrical documentaries. There'd been plenty of those, mosty government sponsored, during the Great Depression and World War Two, but with the advent of television, whose 16 mm films stock required much less in equipment and the fine resolution that the big screen demanded, theatrical documentaries fell into a trough that extended for two decades. I never saw non-fiction films featured on cinema marquees. Woodstock was the first documentary for which I paid the full price of $1.50 to watch in a theater. And I did it again that same year, 1970, for Gimme Shelter .  The theatrical documentary was just beginning to rouse from its coma, but I didn't have much personal experience — and no historical knowledge — of the genre when Marion and I had our discussion seven years later. When I went to the Pompidou screening of Indonesia Calling , I came away unimpressed. The subject matter didn’t engage me; the editing seemed choppy; the soundtrack, blaring and overblown; and the narration bordered on corny. Even with the Aussie accent, I recognized the ponderous Voice of God from the “educational” films shown during my high school travails (“The Defensive Driver”), and I was not a fan. When Marion came back to town, she didn’t ask what I had thought of the film, and I let that sleeping dog lie. — Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Early Docs of the Harlem Renaissance . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

Cotton Club dancers circa 1930s This is a still from a British Pathé newsreel, filmed sometime during the 1930s of dancers at the Cotton Club. Up until the advent of the internet, it would have been impossible to find this episode titled "Harlem (AKA Harlem, New York)." Although the footage, long since recovered and incorporated into every Harlem Renaissance history, is now recognized as a unique and invaluable moving image window on Harlem during the waning days of the Renaissance, at the time the newsreel episode was a throwaway human-interest story buried deep in the vaults of British Pathé. Harlem! How colorful and exotic! This was an ur-documentary of the Harlem Renaissance before the movement had a name or was recognized as a cultural epoch. It did not arrive wearing a name tag. It crystallized as a historical phenomenon only after decades had passed.  As the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War eclipsed the 1920s energy, the Harlem Renaissance began being discussed as a bounded period (the 1920s and early 30s), a coherent cultural episode, something with a beginning, peak, and decline. But it wasn't until the 1960s that the Harlem Renaissance became a named historical phenomenon taught in universities, periodized in literary histories, and framed as foundational to African American literature and art. But the dawning realization that the Harlem Renaissance was a key cultural episode was slow to grow. (Guess why.) The first book to give the era a definitive historical synthesis was the now-forgotten  Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Huggins in 1971. The history was impressive in its scope and the sophistication of its analysis, but it was ahead of its time and didn't make much of an impression. Academia was not ready to accept the Harlem Renaissance as a fully-fledged historical epoch. That history was later nailed down by David Levering Lewis' magisterial volume, When Harlem Was In Vogue , published in 1981.  Although the party started late, the documentary was a late comer to even that party. African American history was marginalized and considered insufficiently important to expend the (white) money and resources necessary for the production of a theatrical documentary. Such a documentary could not even be conceived until the reduced costs of video production and the seismic shift to television broadcasting democratized, to some degree, the trajectory and subject matter of the American documentary. And even that might have been further delayed by the fundamental warp and woof of racism had not the Black Power movement of the late 1960s ripped through some of the fabric. The year after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr . , the public broadcasting syndicate National Educational Television (a direct predecessor to the modern-day PBS) instituted a magazine-style news program, Black Journal , devoted to the lives and concerns of African Americans. William Greaves, one of the only Black filmmakers and documentary producers on the scene (he had to get his training and early work experience in Canada) was promoted as the show's Executive Producer, and his three years at the helm produced an extraordinary run of non-fiction films. Leaving Black Journal to work again as a filmmaker, Greaves conceived and directed the first documentary to define and demarcate the period with a synthetic historical sweep. The first stand-alone Harlem Renaissance documentary,  From These Roots , was made for television in 1974, half a century after the epoch it set itself to contextualize. There was one little problem, though—moving pictures had missed the Harlem Renaissance almost entirely. No stock footage, no government-sponsored documentaries, no home movies of the places (the Cotton Club) or personalities (Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois) who had since been established as central players. What to do? Greaves made the radical move of creating the documentary from historical stills ( only historical stills) that were scattered and incompletely catalogued in libraries, archives, and private collections. The images he found have since become the stock-in-trade of all Harlem Renaissance documentaries and photo exhibits. The decision to tell an African American story through stills, though born of necessity, catapulted photography, even in the documentary genre, into the realm of witness, fact, and argument. Stills were no longer illustrations of narrated history. They were stand-ins for an absent cinema. As such, stills were treated with unusual reverence: slow zooms, careful reframing, voiceovers that supplied poetry and context, music that served as temporal glue. (The original score was written by Eubie Blake.) Greaves' seminal mix of stills, camera moves, narration, and music was Ken Burns before Ken Burns. The script, intoned by the African American actor Brock Peters, was a blend—not always signposted—of historical narration, quotes from the writers, and sometimes extensive excerpts from the era's most famous poems. Today , alas, the technological advancement in movie production and editing has relegated this groundbreaking achievement to a YouTube museum piece. It badly needs restoration and the appreciation that should be bestowed on an early cinematic miracle of Black creativity, invention, and reverence for the past.  — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Dialogue des sourds . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In January of 1975, I was lying on top of a water tower in the middle of Africa. It was a fine, warm night. A full moon had scrubbed the sky of its spangle of stars. Stretched out next to me was a handsome African man, one month younger than I. His name was Yves D-, a Central African English teacher at the high school that used to be serviced by the defunct water tower, which served as our perch. We were both stoned on grass I had purchased over the Christmas break in Bangui, the capital of the country where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I too was an English teacher at Bossangoa High. Though English was our shared teaching discipline, Yves and I spoke in French, the language of business, education, and occasionally friendship in the Central African Republic. Sango, the lingua franca, served most often as the language of intimacy, but intimacy with the Central Africans was difficult to achieve. Most of my relations with the people surrounding me were conditioned by a colonial past I had known about only in theory. The master/servant dynamic dictated by my race never ceased to disorient me, even as I made my accommodations. I had surrendered to the deference shown to me by shopkeepers, bus drivers, and public servants. I had my own servant, Jacques, who came every day except Sunday, whom I had “inherited” from the site’s previous Peace Corps Volunteers. I was on good terms with the other Central African teachers at Bossangoa High, but nothing developed beyond a collegial level. With Yves, it was different. He had lustrous skin, dark, regular features in a wide oval face topped by neatly cropped jet-black hair. His brown eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. I found him arrestingly good-looking, and I enjoyed the banter we exchanged in the shabby little room that passed as a teacher’s lounge. Several months into my first year, I asked Yves to help me perfect my French. The Peace Corps paid for lessons. Thus, through this mutually beneficial arrangement, our friendship formed. The evening on top of the water tower was the first time I’d gotten a Central African stoned. Drugs had none of the glamour for the locals that my youth culture had invested them with in the sixties. Smoking grass was considered low-class. But Yves, even though he had never left the country, was drawn, like all ambitious young men, to the glitter of the West. I asked him as we were lying next to one another, dazzled by the moon, if he had wanted to do something big. “I wanted to be a pilot,” he replied. “Even growing up in the bush, I saw the planes flying in the sky and going to places like Paris and New York.” “How did you end up as an English teacher?” “It was a strategic choice,” he replied with a hint of sadness. “I was enrolled in the science series in high school, but I couldn’t make the necessary grades to stay afloat. I was in danger of flunking out, so I switched to series C.” “The humanities series.” “Yes,” Yves replied. “Much easier than Series A.” By this time, I had absorbed enough of the French educational system to understand the difference between the various tracks (A, B, C, D) and where they were supposed to lead. The Central African school system, an exact copy of what reigned in the former colonial power, was ruthlessly efficient in cutting away all but the brightest students as they strove toward a middle-class berth that promised ease and power in a country where the gross per capita income scarcely matched the two-month salary of a factory worker in the West. The goal of the Central African system of education was to narrow the field of candidates for the limited number of jobs in the civil service. Yves saw that he was in danger of falling through the net and specialized in English, a foreign language in the C.A.R. This allowed him to get on the rolls of the state as a high school teacher, and America, anglophone America, glowed on the horizon like a full moon rising. At 24, Yves had married and fathered a baby girl. As a rare source of revenue in a peasant economy, he was already supporting a household of six, including two young cousins who were also attending high school. “How sad,” I wrote in my journal, “that he had to give up on his dream so early! A real-life counterpart to Bigger’s frustrated desire to pilot the plane he sees flying over Chicago. I wonder if I can find a French translation of Native Son for him the next time I’m in Bangui.” I was very literary in my journal. What I didn’t write – what I didn’t dare write and barely acknowledged – was that I was strongly attracted to Yves. There was a powerful erotic component to our friendship – on my side only. Friendship between men was well understood in African culture and often included a physical dimension that sometimes delivered an enjoyable surprise. Occasionally, an African would grab my hand, and though I had to smother the impulse to pull away, the gesture would fill me with pleasure and sometimes a powerful excitement. I let none of this show. Homosexuality was even more distasteful to cultivated Africans than drugs. They acknowledged it only in the context of white perverts who paid for their sexual pleasure with Black men. “La maladie des blancs.” As for myself, I was confounded by the unruly nature of my desires and filled with internalized homophobia. Yet my attraction to men powered my friendships in their direction and helped me break through the bitter historical shell that separated Blacks from whites. Once, during a reception at the high school principal’s house, I went to fetch Yves on my mobylette, a French motorized bike that provided Peace Corps Volunteers with a rare mobility in the African bush. As I rode into the principal’s compound with Yves’ arms around my waist, the one female student who had made it into the upper grades and who was preparing the meal remarked in Sango that I seemed to be really fond of Yves. Yes, the principal replied, also in Sango, he’d never seen that kind of friendship between an African and a white person before. Yves told me about the conversation, and I flushed with pleasure. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay Langston and Carlo - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten, 45, famous and well connected, published articles about his discoveries of life in Harlem in Vanity Fair. Hughes, 23, was still unknown and living with his mother in Washington, DC. Hughes was very beautiful, and Van Vechten, actively bisexual. There was cause to suspect that Van Vechten's interest in the young poet was not entirely literary, but the older white man played it cool. As good as his word, Van Vechten got The Weary Blues published in 1925 and wrote the forward -- a mixed blessing as Van Vechten's framing revealed a patronising stance and a tired -- but common -- belief in the salutary primitivism of Black culture. "You are my good angel!" Langston enthused, and although there was undoubtedly some sycophancy in his sentiments in the beginning, a genuine friendship developed between them. In fact, Langston saved Van Vechten's ass when the latter published his sensational novel, Nigger Heaven, in 1926. Feeling himself at that point to be a privileged commentator, Van Vechten arrogated the insider's use of the explosive term to insure its highest degree of visibility. (It worked but not always to his benefit.) In the same spirit, he casually lifted some blues lyrics quoted in the manuscript without attribution or permission, but a threatened lawsuit put him in a panic. He turned to Langston who was in his first year as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Langston jumped on a train and replaced the borrowed lyrics with originals in a night-long session at Van Vechten's apartment. Although the novel became the biggest best-seller of Van Vechten's career (amongst white folks), it caused an uproar in Harlem. Langston defended Van Vechten in print, arguing that the novel was "neither praise nor condemnation," but a portrayal of "life as it is." Langston's defense of the novel put him in a tricky position as the book's sensational title and white-authored voyeurism ignited anger among Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois who described it in his review as "a blow in the face." Still, there was a deep commonality of appreciation that Langston and Van Vechten shared regarding the valorization of popular Black culture -- blues, jazz, speakeasies – and a disdain for the middle class pieties of taste and morality embraced by the Talented Tenth. "You and I are the only colored people," Van Vechten wrote to Langston, "who really love niggers." Langston never upbraided Van Vechten for the effrontery of the "joke" and perhaps took it in stride as a condition of their friendship. We'll never know. Over the next 40 years, the two friends exchanged 1500 letters; letters filled with gossip, in-jokes, aesthetic judgements, and an evident mutual affection. (However they didn’t touch on queer topics nor evince any queer sensibility, a sensibility on full display in the scabrous scrapbooks that Van Vechten willed to Yale’s Beinecke library collection under a 25-year-seal of secrecy.) As Langston’s star rose, Van Vechten’s sank, but he had a personal fortune to cushion his disappointment of being culturally sidelined and forgotten. However one may judge Van Vechten’s role as cultural impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and mediator between the races, the genuine affection he roused in some of his Black friends went beyond fetishism or exploitation. Langston was no fool, and the friendship between the dandified magpie and the African American 25 years his junior was one of equals – a difficult feat to bring off between two people of such different class backgrounds and races to this day. – Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Yves and Robert - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

L to R: Mwalimu Jecha, my Swahili teacher, Muhammed Said Abdullah, and the scholar-in-training I first encountered African literature when I was an undergraduate at Merrill College at UC Santa Cruz, which offered a core course in Third World studies. We were introduced to a smorgasbord of writings from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The African novel on the curriculum was—unsurprisingly for 1968—Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I liked it well enough, but it didn't rock my world. My second encounter with African literature was far more extensive and unguided. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the French-speaking Central African Republic, I set myself the task of reading whatever African novels I could get my hands on to improve my French. As I grew enamored of African culture and was able to contextualize the novels through my own experience, I became excited about the idea that, once I returned to graduate school in literature (a foregone conclusion for such a writer manqué as myself), I could specialize in African literature. I eventually did this through advanced studies at the University of Paris and a master's program in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Although I immeasurably deepened my knowledge of the francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, I was unfavorably struck by the fact that all of my professors were French, not infrequently part of the colonial and postcolonial structures that had introduced them to the part of Africa whose literature they taught. None of them had bothered to learn any of the local languages, even if they had lived in Senegal or Madagascar for some time. Why take on the local patois when internationally recognized poets, novelists, and dramatists wrote in such beautiful French and were influenced by the same literary canon fed to their metropolitan counterparts? I would not make such a mistake, I determined with an endearing mix of arrogance and naivety. It was simply a matter of choosing the right African language and Swahili was the obvious candidate. It had the oldest tradition of written literature of sub-Saharan Africa, stretching back four centuries to manuscripts written in Arabic script and focusing on religious themes, battles, and Islamic heroes. I made my choice back in 1978 when all my training and presumptions told me that literature was written. Well, Swahili had aa written literature, and it was extensive! Even better, German and British colonialism in East Africa had imposed the Roman alphabet on the written script and had introduced Western genres as markers of modernity. The first recognizably Western novel was a Sherlock Holmes knock-off written by a Zanzibari newspaper editor, Muhammed Said Abdullah, published in 1960. And so it came to pass. Ten years later, I was in Tanzania researching my dissertation on East Africa's most celebrated, mostly untranslated, Swahili playwright, Ebrahim Hussein. My painfully acquired classroom Swahili blossomed in the humid coastal climes of Dar es Salaam, and I eventually befriended the Man himself. Suspicious of my motives at first, he only spoke English to me in our early encounters. Still, later, once a genuine friendship had developed, he switched over to Swahili, a landmark moment. During my year as a Research Associate in the Department of Kiswahili, I became friendly with the rising writers and critics of the day, translated the novel Rosa Mistika, a literary touchstone of the Arusha generation, into English, and facilitated the academic exchange of professors between the University of Dar and the University of Wisconsin, where I was pursuing my doctorate. Soon afterwards, I made my little mark as a scholar of Swahili literature with published articles on the persistence of oral forms in early Swahili writing and the analogous introduction of Western materialism that the new realism of the contemporary Swahili novel brought in its train (euphoniously titled, "Balzac in Zanzibar"). I was, to my knowledge, the only American literary critic writing authoritatively on Swahili literature. And then the rubber hit the road. I came on the job market in the late eighties. By then, there were plenty of African Ph.D. candidates vying for the same academic positions as I, or, if they weren't Black, they were at least women or nonwhite or anything else that contributed to the diversity that literature departments (or their students) were clamoring for. I was out and, having no more use for a language that was so far removed from any American cultural milieu, I let my Swahili dry up and blow away. Was it all for naught? If you look up Ebrahim Hussein in Wikipedia, you'll see some references to my work there. In studying and getting to know the man himself, I came to understand the tragedy of a keen mind and talented writer constricted by loyalty to a mother tongue that had no resonance in the West. What I didn't understand then was that I, too, had bound myself to a conception of literature — words on a page — that was too narrow, too shallow, too dependent on that same hierarchy of genres that extolled the slender achievements of the literary Harlem Renaissance to the detriment of the richness of African American folklore, music, and dance. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Year One of the (Literary) Harlem Renaissance SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

David Levering Lewis, one of the early—and still the best—historians of the Harlem Renaissance, deemed 1925 Year One. And why was that? Precursors to the Renaissance—Jean Toomer (Cane) and Claude McKay (Harlem Shadows)—had already made a splash. The 1921 musical Shuffle Along had spawned a host of shows trying to capitalize on the Black talent in music, comedy, and dance that white producers were only too eager to appropriate. The Great Migration, begun a decade earlier, had brought about a sea change in African American demographics and widened horizons. Still, Harlem became a magnet for the brightest and most talented of the generation born around the turn of the 20th century. Few, except Countee Cullen, were native Harlemites, but all—Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston—eventually answered the Black Mecca's siren call. The generation that had preceded them, luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and, crucially but least known, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, felt they had identified a chink in the implacable armor of prejudice and derision that sheathed white America: poetry, writing, the arts. If these race men could shepherd the talents and productions of the younger generation into celebrated works of literature, then the Negro's claim to equality would be self-evident. And once that was established, racial barriers would have to fall away -- "civil rights by copyright" to use Lewis' clever formulation. Johnson, head researcher for the National Urban League, founded its highly influential journal Opportunity in 1923 and turned it into a showcase for the visual and literary accomplishments of the cohort that was beginning to be termed the New Negro. Du Bois, longtime editor of the NAACP's journal, was much taken up with the Pan-African movement and, during the run-up to Year One, gave Jessie Fauset, as literary editor of The Crisis, a platform from which to disseminate her early discovery of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. Fauset had also written a novel, There Is Confusion, published in 1924, that provided Charles Johnson with the occasion to bring together the white publishers, writers, and critics with the New Negro artists whose careers he hoped to advance. The 1924 Civic Club dinner was supposed to celebrate Fauset's achievement (not much admired by the small coterie of African American writers and intellectuals). Still, between the machinations of Johnson and his newly recruited accomplice, the philosopher Alain Locke, the occasion turned into a dress rehearsal for the Renaissance itself. One of the attendees, editor of the sociological journal Survey Graphic, was so impressed by the presentations that he wanted to devote a whole issue to the subjects broached and to the African Americans who had presented them, or to their poetry. Alain Locke was tapped to edit the March 1925 edition, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." Riding high from his success, Johnson announced the establishment of Opportunity prizes to be awarded in May of 1925. Langston Hughes won first prize in poetry with "The Weary Blues," which so excited the white writer and tastemaker Carl Van Vechten that he rushed to introduce himself to the young poet after the ceremony and eventually arranged for the publication of Hughes's first volume, also called The Weary Blues, the following year. Countee Cullen (2nd place in poetry) and Zora Neale Hurston (2nd place in short story and drama) were also laureates. In the meantime, Locke was heroically pulling together and polishing an expanded version of poetry and prose from the Survey Graphic edition and the Opportunity prizewinners. This was published at the end of Year One under the title The New Negro: An Interpretation. The quality of Locke's editorship was little short of spectacular. He had not only culled the best African American writing of that time, but he had also enhanced it with superb portraits by the German artist Winold Reiss. Locke's anthology definitively announced the arrival of "the Negro Renaissance," as it was beginning to be called, on the literary scene. Of course, there was plenty of Black creativity and presence in the other arts—Louis Armstrong began leading his Hot Five band in 1925, and Paul Robeson starred in a revival of The Emperor Jones to great acclaim—but for a long time, the achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was viewed mostly through a literary lens. —Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Why I Specialized In Swahili Literature SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

L to R: Human #1, MAXIMILLION, Human #2, GRANDMA, Human #3, HAMLET, Human #4 It was a good life for a dog. We had returned to our mesa, so it was hikes on the weekends and a walk at night. Because our cul-de-sac was strictly residential, there was never much traffic, and the dogs went out themselves when nobody was available for their nightly outing. A nearby canyon led to the mountains. We left the gate open, and in the morning my mother would find them sleeping on the furniture of the mis-named living room where nobody lived. At first she made an effort to protect the “good” furniture, but that only insured that the burnt-orange upholstered couch and matching wing chairs became their nests of choice. And yet … it is impossible to get angry at a basset, much less a sleeping basset. A sleeping basset is the confirmation of a natural and benign order. Those vouchsafed the vision of a sleeping basset have received an intimation that, as Browning writes, “God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world.” A basset sleeping is as innocent as birdsong or a baby’s laughter. Hamlet was a particularly accomplished sleeper, moving fluidly from Position Three (side curl) to Position One (supine with limbs spread-eagled). And when she sometimes indulged in a gentle, mellifluent snore, it could only ease the aching heart. When Max slept it was the only time his ears left him in peace. They were monstrous—a mark of beauty in a basset—and they would have been a problem for a dog with a less devil-may-care attitude. My father would take Max’s ears in both hands, tie them over his head and sing: Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow? Can you throw them over your shoulder Like a Continental soldier? Do your ears hang low? Max would sit on the floor looking perplexed. The answer to these existential questions was a lamentable yes. Neither dog could drink water without the ears drooping into the liquid along with their snouts, but mealtime was the real debacle. The French say that one should not eat to live but live to eat, yet this ancestral wisdom (“basset” derives from the French basse) had not survived the Darwinian imperative. The two dogs attacked their dinners with alarming gusto; large mounds of dog food would disappear in seconds. Considering that mealtime was the summum bonum of their lives (and although we knew they loved us, we held no illusions about the basset’s scale of values), one would have thought they'd savor a bit this supreme moment. But the basset appetite should not be taxed with gluttony. They ate; they drank; they were merry – and they lived in the hope for more. It sometimes happened. So we had our two bassets, and they were happy and loving and sweet. And then one night, Alice and her boyfriend took the dogs on a walk in the canyon. They returned sans bassets, but this was not unusual. The following morning only Hamlet had returned to her spot on the living room couch. We scoured the neighborhood, fixed signs to telephone poles, put an ad in the newspaper. Silence. Every walk, each ring of the telephone was sharpened by an anxiety that only dulled slowly with time. We couldn’t believe had had been stolen, hoped irrationally that his disappearance was temporary. And I remember poking about the unbuilt fields of the mesa, calling out Max’s name with only the stars and dim noise of traffic for answer. The lights of the long, fairy-flecked city stretched out in the basin before me. Someone had seen him and taken him away. And this was the end of our beauty. They had seen and admired his pelt and form, recognized perhaps that he was a purebred, and they had taken him away. And it was bitter, although not in a way I could then understand, that the thieves had taken him for his “beauty” without knowing his real beauty: his sweet disposition, his calming affect, the unconditional love he had for us all. And now he was gone. For months afterwards we couldn’t hear the rustle of bushes without straining our ears, holding our breath, helplessly hoping for the jingle of his collar and the sight of his tongue hanging from his smiling mouth. -- Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, How Jews Birthed the Dog That Elvis Stole From Big Mama Thornton SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Everything You Thought You Knew About “Hound Dog” Is Wrong. On June 5, 1956, Elvis Presley exploded onto the 50s version of the culture wars with his performance of “Hound Dog” on the Steve Allen show. It wasn’t his first turn at national TV, but it was the first time he belted out his version of the song, swivelling his hips and swinging the mic in a simulacrum of sexual heat that thrilled the youths and enraged the adults. That performance catapulted Elvis into superstardom and cemented his image as a rebellious, electrifying force in (white) American music and culture. But it wasn’t just the pelvis. “Hound Dog,” released as a single one month later, launched into the strotosphere, selling 10 million copies worldwide It was simultaneously number one on the US pop, country, and R&B charts. On the pop chart it stayed at #1 for 11 weeks—a record that stood for 36 years. Not everybody was thrilled, however. Big Mama Thornton, the blues singer who had recorded the original version for a small Los Angeles label in 1953, said “He stole my song. But I don’t blame Elvis. I blame his manager.” However, in the restricted world of the blues, “Hound Dog” had done Big Mama well — at least in terms of her career. "Hound Dog," Thornton's only hit record, sold over 500,000 copies and spent 14 weeks in the R&B charts, seven of those at number one. Being Black and female, Thornton was cheated in the then routine manner of the times. "That song sold over two million records. I got one check for $500 and never saw another." “Rhythm and Blues” was now the more acceptable appellation of what used to be called “race music.” Few whites heard “Hound Dog” in its original incarnation. In its original incarnation, “Hound Dog” was not about a dog. It was sung by a fed-up woman kicking her no-good boyfriend out of her life. You ain't nothing but a hound dog Quit snoopin' 'round my door You ain't nothing but a hound dog Quit snoopin' 'round my door You can wag your tail But I ain't gon' feed you no more The song is squarely in the blues idiom, and Thornton brought the blues strain of female empowerment into the musical stew that birthed rock-and-roll. Four years later, the white genre transformed the black song. Elvis’ “Hound Dog” was faster, more pop-oriented, and lyrically neutered. “Hound Dog" shifted from a woman’s defiant blues to … a song about a dog. You ain't nothin but a hound dog Cryin all the Time. You ain't nothin but a hound dog Cryin all the time. Well, you aint never caught a rabbit And you ain't no friend of mine. So far it’s a familiar tale of white appropriation of Black culture. But wait! Here come the Jews! In 1950, two Jewish teenagers in Los Angeles, Jerry Leiber (words) and Mike Stoller (music), discovered a shared passion for the blues and found immediate success with the scrum of small labels looking for materials for the Black artists they had signed or were managing. Their first big hit was “Hound Dog,” but by the age of 20, Leiber and Stoller had seen their songs recorded by Jimmy Witherspoon, Little Esther, Charles Brown, Little Willie Littlefield, and Ray Charles. Where does this channeling of a Black musical sensibility come from? It’s rare, but it’s authentic when it happens. There are a few Jewish exemplars — Mezz Mezzrow, Benny Goodman — but the phenomenon isn’t confined to Jewish parentage. Johnny Otis, son of Greek immigrant parents who grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Berkeley, California, decided to live his professional and personal life as a member of the Black community. Born in 1921, Johnny Otis was a major figure in the West Coast R&B scene of the 40s and 50s as a bandleader, talent scout, and producer. He had an eye an for fresh talent and was open to working with white writers who understood and respected Black music. Otis had already discovered or championed Etta James, Esther Phillips, and Little Esther. He saw that Big Mama Thornton had a commanding blues voice and stage style that could reach a national audience — but she didn’t yet have a hit. In 1952, Otis brought Leiber and Stoller into the studio to work with Thornton. He asked the young songwriters to come up with material, and they wrote “Hound Dog” in 15 minutes, tailoring it to her bull dagger persona. Strangely enough, Thornton didn’t recognize the country-funky feel when she was handed the lead sheet. She began crooning. When Leiber tried to steer her in the right direction, she turned her fury intro a lewd joke. Otis stepped in and suggested that Stoller sing it the way the songwriters heard it. Thorton was ready to laugh at the white teenager trying to sing the blues, but, quoting from Stoller’s recollection, “Suddenly the joke was over. Big Mama heard how Jerry was singing the thing. She heard the rough-and-tumble of the song and, just as important, the implicit sexual humor. In short, she got it.” So … two Jewish teenagers write and help a seasoned Black (probably queer) blues singer “get” the raunchy blues they had dashed off under the auspices of a Greek American who identified as Black. He produces and records “Hound Dog,” spawning a major success that eventually morphs into a monster hit for the avatar of the rising rock-and-roll genre, Elvis Presley, whose discoverer, Sam Phillips said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars!” Now if somebody could tease out where the cultural appropriation takes place, please send in your best diagrams. --Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Family Dog SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts