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Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2020

STEPHANIE DOKTOR
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Abstract

After her performances in Shuffle Along (1921) on Broadway and in Dover Street to Dixie (1923) in London, Florence Mills became one of the most famous jazz and vaudeville singers. Known as the Harlem Jazz Queen, Mills was revered by Black Americans for her international breakthrough and because she used her commercial success as a platform to speak out against racial inequality. Extensive descriptions of her performance style and voice exist in writing, but there are no recordings of her singing. I respond to this archival loss by considering the sound of Mills's voice in two compositions written for her: William Grant Still's Levee Land (1925) and Edmund Thornton Jenkins's Afram (1924). In my analysis, I show that Still and Jenkins imagined a much more musically complicated and politically powerful voice than that found in the racialized and gendered stereotypes permeating both her vaudeville and Broadway repertory and the language of her reception. While scholars have written about how Mills's outspokenness regarding issues of race and omission of sexually explicit roles made her central to 1920s Black political and artistic life, I consider how the sonic properties of her voice positioned her as a leading figure in the New Negro Renaissance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 451 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020

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References

References

Florence Mills Collection, 1896–1974. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Edmund T. Jenkins Collection. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. New York, NY.Google Scholar
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Barkan, Elazar. Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Conceptions of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Bozeman, Kenneth. Practical Vocal Acoustics: Pedagogic Application. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1919. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brooks, Daphne. “‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood.” American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 617–27.Google Scholar
Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Colbert, Soyica Diggs. Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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DeVeaux, Scott, and Giddins, Gary. Jazz. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.Google Scholar
Doktor, Stephanie. “Edmund T. Jenkins, Afram (1924), and the New Negro Renaissance in and Beyond Harlem.” American Music Review XLV, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 7–12. http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/hitchcock/publications/amr/v45-1/doktor.php.Google Scholar
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Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre. In Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, edited by Bloechl, Olivia, Lowe, Melanie, and Kallberg, Jeffrey, 338–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gordon, Bonnie. “Feminist Noise.” Paper Presented for the Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture at the National Meeting for the American Musicological Society. San Antonio, Texas, November 2018.Google Scholar
Green, Jeffrey. Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894–1926. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Hagstrom Miller, Karl. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. New York: Routledge, 2015.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kostka, Stefan. Materials and Techniques of Post Tonal Music. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linton, David and Platt, Len, “Dover Street to Dixie and the Politics of Cultural Transfer and Exchange.” In Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, edited by Platt, Len, Becker, Tobias, and Linton, David, 170–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, Alain, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. First published 1925 by Albert and Charles Boni (New York).Google Scholar
Lott, R. Allen. “‘New Music for New Ears’: The International Composers’ Guild.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 266–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsalis, Wynton. Sweet Swing Blues on the Road. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.Google Scholar
Marquis, Donald. In Search of Buddy Bolden First Man of Jazz. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
McGinley, Paige A. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows. Introduction by Eastman, Max. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.Google Scholar
Murchison, Gayle. “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland Between the Wars: Style and Ideology.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1991.Google Scholar
Murchison, Gayle. “‘Dean of Afro-American Composers’ or ‘Harlem Renaissance Man’: The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still.” In Smith, Catherine Parsons, William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions, 40–60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Oja, Carol J. “‘New Music’ and the ‘New Negro’: The Background of William Grant Still's ‘Afro-American Symphony.’” Black Music Research Journal 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 145–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quin, Carolyn L. “Biographical Sketch of William Grant Still.” In William Grant Still: A Bio-bibliography, edited by Still, Judith Anne, Dabrishus, Michael J., and Quin, Carolyn L., 15–44. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Radano, Ronald. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Updated ed. New York: Basic Books, 2018.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Paul. By Way of Art: Criticisms of Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture, and the Dance. New York: Coward-McCann, 1928.Google Scholar
Schenbeck, Lawrence. Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schomburg, Arthur A. “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Survey, March 1, 1925. Reprinted in Locke, ed. The New Negro, 231–37.Google Scholar
Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Dover Publications, 2001.Google Scholar
Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, James. Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Still, Judith Anne, Dabrishus, Michael J., and Quin, Carolyn L., eds. William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Washington, Booker T. The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today. New York: James Pott, 1903.Google Scholar
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Harlem Moon, 2006.Google Scholar
West, Cornel. Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hoy, Patricia J., conductor. Music of Afro-American Composers. Northern Arizona University Wind Symphony. Celeste Headlee, soprano. NAUWS 003, 1995. Includes William Grant Still's Levee Land.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Edmund Thornton. Afram. Manuscript, 1923. Box 1, Folder 1–3 in Edmund Thornton Jenkins Scores and Other Material. Center for Black Music Research Library and Archives. Columbia College. Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Still, William Grant. Levee Land. Flagstaff, AZ: William Grant Still Music, 1925.Google Scholar
Florence Mills Collection, 1896–1974. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Edmund T. Jenkins Collection. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Edmund Thornton Jenkins Scores and Other Material. Center for Black Music Research Library and Archives. Columbia College Chicago. Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Adair, Zakiya R. “Respectable Vamp: A Black Feminist Analysis of Florence Mills’ Career in Early Vaudeville Theater.” Journal of African American Studies 17 (2013): 7–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Lee D. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, Davarian. Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, & Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Davarian L., and Makalani, Minkah, eds. Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkan, Elazar. Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Conceptions of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Bozeman, Kenneth. Practical Vocal Acoustics: Pedagogic Application. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1919. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brooks, Daphne. “‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood.” American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 617–27.Google Scholar
Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Colbert, Soyica Diggs. Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, Natalie. Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent: Recorded from the Singing and the Sayings of C. Kamba Simango (Ndau Tribe, Portuguese East Africa) and Madikane Čele (Zulu Tribe, Natal, Zululand, South Africa). New York: G. Schirmer, 1921.Google Scholar
DeVeaux, Scott, and Giddins, Gary. Jazz. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.Google Scholar
Doktor, Stephanie. “Edmund T. Jenkins, Afram (1924), and the New Negro Renaissance in and Beyond Harlem.” American Music Review XLV, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 7–12. http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/hitchcock/publications/amr/v45-1/doktor.php.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Talented Tenth.” In Washington, Booker T., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today. New York: James Pott, 1903. Reprint, Lanham, MD: Dancing Unicron Books, 2016.Google Scholar
Egan, Bill. Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen. Studies in Jazz, No. 48. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre. In Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, edited by Bloechl, Olivia, Lowe, Melanie, and Kallberg, Jeffrey, 338–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fry, Andy. Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Jr. Louis, and Gene Andrew Jarrett, , eds. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gordon, Bonnie. “Feminist Noise.” Paper Presented for the Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture at the National Meeting for the American Musicological Society. San Antonio, Texas, November 2018.Google Scholar
Green, Jeffrey. Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894–1926. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Hagstrom Miller, Karl. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. New York: Routledge, 2015.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kostka, Stefan. Materials and Techniques of Post Tonal Music. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linton, David and Platt, Len, “Dover Street to Dixie and the Politics of Cultural Transfer and Exchange.” In Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, edited by Platt, Len, Becker, Tobias, and Linton, David, 170–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, Alain, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. First published 1925 by Albert and Charles Boni (New York).Google Scholar
Lott, R. Allen. “‘New Music for New Ears’: The International Composers’ Guild.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 266–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsalis, Wynton. Sweet Swing Blues on the Road. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.Google Scholar
Marquis, Donald. In Search of Buddy Bolden First Man of Jazz. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
McGinley, Paige A. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows. Introduction by Eastman, Max. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.Google Scholar
Murchison, Gayle. “Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copland Between the Wars: Style and Ideology.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1991.Google Scholar
Murchison, Gayle. “‘Dean of Afro-American Composers’ or ‘Harlem Renaissance Man’: The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still.” In Smith, Catherine Parsons, William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions, 40–60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Oja, Carol J. “‘New Music’ and the ‘New Negro’: The Background of William Grant Still's ‘Afro-American Symphony.’” Black Music Research Journal 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 145–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quin, Carolyn L. “Biographical Sketch of William Grant Still.” In William Grant Still: A Bio-bibliography, edited by Still, Judith Anne, Dabrishus, Michael J., and Quin, Carolyn L., 15–44. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Radano, Ronald. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Updated ed. New York: Basic Books, 2018.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Paul. By Way of Art: Criticisms of Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture, and the Dance. New York: Coward-McCann, 1928.Google Scholar
Schenbeck, Lawrence. Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schomburg, Arthur A. “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Survey, March 1, 1925. Reprinted in Locke, ed. The New Negro, 231–37.Google Scholar
Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Dover Publications, 2001.Google Scholar
Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Smith, Catherine Parsons. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, James. Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Still, Judith Anne, Dabrishus, Michael J., and Quin, Carolyn L., eds. William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Washington, Booker T. The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today. New York: James Pott, 1903.Google Scholar
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Harlem Moon, 2006.Google Scholar
West, Cornel. Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hoy, Patricia J., conductor. Music of Afro-American Composers. Northern Arizona University Wind Symphony. Celeste Headlee, soprano. NAUWS 003, 1995. Includes William Grant Still's Levee Land.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Edmund Thornton. Afram. Manuscript, 1923. Box 1, Folder 1–3 in Edmund Thornton Jenkins Scores and Other Material. Center for Black Music Research Library and Archives. Columbia College. Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Still, William Grant. Levee Land. Flagstaff, AZ: William Grant Still Music, 1925.Google Scholar