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4 - Ralph Ellison’s music lessons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Ross Posnock
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music . . . . Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Within the first pages of the 1952 novel Invisible Man Ralph Ellison's narrator relates Louis Armstrong's music to his own desires and self-conceptions. ''I'd like,'' the narrator writes, ''to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing 'What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue' – all at the same time''. When Armstrong recorded the show tune by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller from the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates in 1929 he edited the lyrics to shift a dark-skinned female lover's lament over intra-racial color discrimination (the song's place within the plot of the musical Chocolate Dandies) toward a more general lament about racism. Ellison's narrator considers the lyrics but focuses more intently on the specifics of Armstrong's tone and phrasing. Ellison's seemingly central metaphor of invisibility takes on an aural dimension when he attends to Armstrong's ''lyrical beam'' and rhythmic mastery at creating a ''slightly different sense of time.'' The literary translation and transposition of Armstrong's mastery of swing rhythm opens a window onto the intellectual landscape where the author intertwined his musical and social thought.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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