Atlanta Daily World

REVIEWING THE NEWS

BY WILLIAM GORDON

Managing Editor, Atlanta Daily World

Through Foolish! Pride, We Are Losing A Valuable Heritage

We had walked around Boston for more than an hour when we suddenly came to a small upstairs smoke-ridden room used for a night club.

Four Negro musicians occupied the band stand. The jazz they played was alright except that it lacked the real quality-that quality which once gave America happy feet and filled the souls of millions with a rhythmic beat whose roots run deep in African soil. In brief, these musicians were not playing real jazz music.

My colleagues for the evening were a young Belgian economist and his wife. They had come to America to study. But out of the trip grew the deep urge to learn more about the life of the Negro in America, the economic, social and cultural side, as it affects the race in the total American structure. Music was one of the things these people had long heard about and they wanted to listen and enjoy it as only a Negro can sing and play it.

We were in the place for only a short while when my friends suggested that we leave and look for another.

"This is alright," the young economist said, "but there seems to be something lacking in the quality and the way they play here." His wife nodded approval and also suggested that we move on deep in the Boston Negro community in search of more real music more representative of Negro life. Unfortunate for them, we failed to find what they wanted. We finally gave up the search and accepted what Arthur Schlesinger, Harvard historian once said: "Negroes are becoming more sophisticated."

There is absolutely nothing wrong with becoming sophisticated, but often during the process of change, there is a tendency to lose much of a valuable heritage. The race has experienced this down through the years, particularly in the area of music.

The contention is that we are rapidly becoming assimilated within the total population. Any effort to label us with the past is viewed as handing us a badge of inferiority. Negroes have been trying to forget their past. In the act of doing so, we have lost many priceless contributions.

On the way back to Cambridge, we talked about this priceless heritage. We talked particularly about the Negro spirituals and how choirs and choral groups have tried desperately over the years to overlook their value. Some choirs have been so bent on becoming so sophisticated that spirituals they feel, are below their dignity so they find themselves struggling with the mechanics of the "white man's music," much of which has become obsolete in our culture.

My friends did a lot of talking on the way back to Cambridge.

"When we came here a year ago," the economist said, "we went in search of music, but to our surprise, Negroes played too much like white people."

They could never understand the reason for this. The fact that people from all over the world still accept the Negro spirituals and the original jazz as the only true American music, made it even more strange to these Belgians as to why Negroes were trying to get away from their heritage. This was not a matter of a joke with these Europeans as it is true with millions of other people who search the world over for Negro music.

In the Negro they see originality and a quality not found in any other race of people. They view this as a quality of genius. They feel we have a monopoly on a quality of music and have begun to abuse it with foolish pride. In their search for real music in America, this Belgian couple referred to contributions by the Hall Johnson choir, the Fisk Jubilee Singers and many others. The millions of whites who travel thousands of miles in search of music created and rendered by Negroes do so not with the intent of fun, but more of a feeling of respect.

Music is an area where whites have long admitted that we hold superiority and stand completely in a class to ourselves.