Matthew Frye Jacobson

Odetta's One Grain of Sand (33 1/3 Series) by Matthew Frye Jacobson is yet another insightful addition to the 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury Academic. This one, perhaps more than any of the others I have read, serves as much as a much needed biographical work as well as a study of this album within the context of the civil rights movement.

First, for those unfamiliar with this series, let me say something about it. Each book is based on an album but each is distinct in its approach. Some are show more more personal than others while moving outward from that to the world at large. Some focus on each song and the production of it, yet never loses sight of the time period within which it was made. What none of them are, based on the ones I've read, is simply a rehash of an album and the associated studio sessions. Even the Siouxsie and the Banshees volume, while highlighting where the record was made, still extends beyond a basic telling of the sessions themselves. This approach yields an amazing number of new perspectives even on albums and artists you're very familiar with, and serves as wonderful introductions to those you aren't.

When I saw this I dug out my CD of the album and listened to it again for the first time in about 15 years. I did this before starting the book and I'm glad I did, it reminded me just how powerful her voice and delivery were. I was fortunate to see her a couple times many years ago and each time sent chills through me. She was just that impressive. So I came to this book with some knowledge of who she was and what she did.

Jacobson chooses four songs on which to structure the book, each representing one aspect of the African-American experience after emancipation. The album was released in 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and a watershed year in the civil rights movement and the country as a whole. He focuses on the songs Midnight Special (her as archivist and the area being the prison), Cool Water (representing the coffeehouse, the sight of folk music's political activity), Moses Moses (the church or the spiritual geographies), and Cotton Fields (the plantation or social geographies).

For each song or area, Jacobson discusses both how Odetta interpreted the song and made it her own as well as the history that it speaks to. It is here that we see connections between how a song can have one meaning when we read the lyrics and yet another based on how the song is delivered. By placing this in the context of the period and of the civil rights movement, we understand how and why Odetta's performances are so moving. They do, and should, anger as well as shame members of the audience. She is both telling a personal story in each song (actually two, hers and the subject of the song) and a people's story. To not be moved is to not be fully human, I think.

There has been a shortage of good books about Odetta and I was fortunate to also be reading a book coming soon from Beacon Press, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack. To my knowledge this will be the first true biography of her.

I recommend this to any fan of music, especially those who like to read about the dynamics between music and social/cultural commentary. The number of artists who have cited Odetta as a major influence run the gamut from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus, with the Kinks and Carly Simon thrown in.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

A tough read, dense and academic, but very good. Excellent look at development of the concept of whiteness from a European-American perspective. Fascinating look at how the concepts of whiteness came to be, from a cultural, "scientific," and political perspective.

In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson examines how the variegated white races merged in the public consciousness into Caucasians from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. He argues, “The contest over whiteness – its definition, its internal hierarchies, its proper boundaries, and its rightful claimants – has been critical to American culture throughout the nation’s history, and it has been a fairly show more untidy affair” (pg. 5). Further, Jacobson writes, “Becoming Caucasian, then, has been crucial to the politico-cultural saga of European migration and settlement, and the process by which this came about touches the histories of every other racially coded group on the American scene” (pg. 8). Jacobson concludes that whites’ successes and stability both arrived at the expense of non-white groups. He draws primarily upon the elements of mass culture, from articles in Harper's Weekly to public speeches to novels and even popular scientific texts in the period he examines.
Jacobson identifies capitalism and republicanism as the two forces that shaped whiteness in the United States (pg. 13). According to Jacobson, while the Revolutionary generation tied race to republicanism on the grounds that only free people could fully participate in democracy, the tie between the two grew stronger through the nineteenth century (pg. 30). The eventual “fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct white races (now in the plural) was theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism, and myriad other venues of popular culture” (pg. 41). Jacobson writes of one particular example, “Racialism thus provided a powerful frame for interpreting and explaining Irish immigrant behaviors of all sorts, and for rearticulating at every turn the unbridgeable chasm separating narratives (Anglo-Saxons) from immigrants (Celts)” (pg. 48). Later, nativism and “the exclusionary logic of the 1924 [immigration] legislation represented not a new deployment of race in American political culture, but merely a new refinement of how the races were to be defined for the purposes of discussing good citizenship” (pg. 87). Like the immigration legislation, legal rulings played a key role in shaping whiteness.
Jacobson writes, “To become ‘Caucasian’ in the 1920s and after…was not simply to be ‘white’…; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white. ‘Caucasian’ identity represents a whiteness discovered and apprehended by that regime of knowledge whose cultural authority is greatest” (pg. 95). Following World War II, culture dominated notions of race rather than biology, with a focus on how races related to one another (pg. 98). In the realm of popular discussions of race, Jacobson writes, “In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme ‘What to Do with Hitler after the War’ by submitting the single sentence, ‘Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America” (pg. 112). Further, Jacobson writes of Harper’s, “Race seems among the organizing principles of the worldview at once demonstrated and reinforced by the magazine’s format” (pg. 161). Most stories discussed the white races in terms familiar to their audience, spreading the ideology of a hierarchy of whites. This, however, changed with the expansionism of the late nineteenth century.
Jacobson writes, “Continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its component – ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ – parts” (pg. 204). By the time of the early Civil Rights Era, “the emergent race politics of the 1930s and after dramatically heightened the salience of ‘Caucasian’ identity by imploring whites to dwell upon their whiteness and to work toward the eradication of its unjust privileges” (pg. 248). Jacobson concludes, “If race as a conceptual category is indeed a theory of history, then race as a perceptual category embodies that history in all its complexity and contradiction” (pg. 142). show less

Jacobson examines the concept of whiteness, beginning with the first restrictions on citizenship in 1790 (free white men) and tracing through how it changed into the twentieth century. Essentially, his argument is that whiteness continually changed to be more inclusive in response to the presence of a large clearly non-white population, usually blacks or Chinese. Initially, only Anglo-Saxons were white, but it gradually came to include other northern Europeans. By the twentieth century, it show more included southern Europe as well. Jacobson demonstrates the changing nature of the definition of white as the circumstances of the country changed. By WWII, it established the perceived racial dichotomy of black and white, with literally no shades of gray. show less