The period of the nadir involved an introspection relevant to the trope of the musicians involving sighted perceptions of a blind interiority. The idea of a blind interiority represented in downhome expressions by artists is vital to the history of racial prejudice against African Americans. African American interiority that has been denied, unwritten, and “excised” from discourse. Morrison discusses the central role of imagination in the act of writing the unwritten interior life of a Black past.279 Blind musicians musical expression counters denials of African American humanity,
interiority, reflection, and creativity that were used to justify slavery. Morrison identifies figures who presented these fallacies in their work; Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson—all considered profound contributors to Western thought, yet with deep racist biases. The reflectiveness of the blues is a validation of African American interiority. Blindness demonstrated an interiority that was not merely responding to external stimuli, but creative
The institutional subjugation of African Americans during Reconstruction that continued through the period of this discussion resulted in the disillusion of the possibility of achieving equal rights in the United States. This subjugation was not universal and there were African Americans who thrived in the atmosphere of adversity, including (at times) the musicians of the discussion. Williams describes the historiography from the turn of the twentieth century of this psychological phenomenon that in “the consolidation of racism forced many black people to ‘turn inward’ as they struggled to make sense of the loss of their civil and political rights.”280
279 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” in Russell Baker and William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth : The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 92.
280 Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press,
Blind musicians performed from an alternate space on the phonograph, and from a space outside of the visual experience of Black invisibility as well as the white gaze. This is relevant because sight transmitted these signs, one that involves the psychological distress of racism and disablism. Arguably, society disembodies people with impairments through excluding their participation in the constructions that surround them, which results in an invisibility.281 This is important to the musicians because the medium which transmitted the artists’ work disembodied their performance. The notion of Benjamin that mechanical reproduction diminishes the aura of performance conflicts with the sentiments related to the uncanny effect of the phonograph related to the reception of blindness as a component of the past. The solitary blind performer was often listened to by small groups of listeners and phonograph owners. These social experiences were unique from the usual transmission of music, especially downhome music.
Scholarship suggests that African Americans who had relocated to urban areas were vital to the popularization of downhome and therefore the prominence of Blind artists because rural Southern communities often did not yet have the means nor access to records and phonographs. However, recognizing the significance of consuming technologies as social currency, like the phonograph during this era, is of great importance in providing a sense of societal inclusion. This is especially relevant to marginalized communities.282 The data are inadequate to determine the
specific demographics of consumers of downhome records. This is despite early efforts by the Black press, presumably to demonstrate the viability of an African American consumer base to establish a presence in the phonograph industry.
281 Waldschmidt, Berressem, and Ingwersen, Culture - Theory - Disability : Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, 77.
Phonograph technology is central to this discussion of Blind musicians, without their records, there is scarcely any evidence of their existence. Kenney cites Calt and Wardlow who state that the “$13.85 suitcase model was the phonograph of choice” for Race records consumers, which would facilitate an owner’s mobility. 283 This portable device could be taken with the listener
and allowed them to bring the downhome with them. The phonograph had a sleeve to keep records inside. It reflects the period of mobility and modernity, just winding it up allowed playback of these recordings.
Figure 15. 1920s Artophone Talking Machine
Phonograph reproduction was of a past performance, as Alexander Weheliye notes in
Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro Modernity, the technology dislocated the sound from its
source.284 However, the downhome was unique in its reflection of the past. Before the introduction of the downhome, classic blues and jazz musicians adapted to the technology both in its sonic and
283 Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life : The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945, 129.
284 Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham
temporal constraints. This also changed notions of performance, which was limited to a strictly sonic field. For this reason, the purely sonic aspect of this re/performance compelled listeners to create an imaginary visual component, and in relation to the “Blind” appellation, this translated to one of disability.
Weheliye describes the phonograph as a projector of an “aura not of the original musical utterance but in the mode of reproduction.”285 Blindness is a contributing factor to this aura and the construction of cultural memory, which resulted as musical performance transformed from an ephemeral present to a reproduced artifact. Steven Connor states, “Before the development of the phonograph the auditory realm was wholly transient, immaterial and temporal.”286 Through
repeated listenings, recorded performances became familiar and embedded in memory. This repetition facilitated by phonograph transformed ephemeral aspects of music consumption in that nuance of single performances could become deeply internalized.
In the phonographic sonic performance of blindness, the listener conceivably constructed a multifaceted displacement beginning with that of the performer. This displacement was a dislocation, a separation from the body, as in the phonographic “disembodied voice” described by Katz.287 These musicians were born to parents and grandparents who were born into slavery, as were members of their audience. This generation of African Americans born into similar communities faced decisions of how to utilize their agency and mobility to pursue opportunities outside of Southern agrarian sharecropping, tenant farming, and menial labor into which many
285 Ibid., 47.
286 Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I.” in Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London ; New York: Routledge, 1997), 215.
287 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound : How Technology Has Changed Music, Rev. ed.
were indentured from emancipation. Violent acts of dislocation are pervasive in African American narratives—from the forced dislocation from a homeland to the dislocation of families being sold and bought into chattel slavery, both through physical separation and the trauma of the constant threat of this separation. The freedom of ones’ thought was dislocated from the physical captivity of ones’ body. For African American Race record consumers living a generation after emancipation, the agency to pursue the opportunities in the Great Migration continued to interrupt the stability of families and communities.
David Levin cites Martin Heidegger’s equation of sight within philosophical tradition “as access to beings and Being” in Being and Time, while Levin describes this as “perpetuat(ing) the very tradition” of ocularcentrism “he is trying to destroy.” 288 The ocularcentric notion that sight
facilitates an immediate engagement with the material world supports a construct in which blindness is reduced to an absence. Indeed, the disablist primacy of vision renders blindness to a dislocation not only from the visuality of the material world but as a result of this, also disables subjects from being actively involved in the present moment. This relates to the conflation of blindness with the downhome past and gives currency to the idea that consuming these recordings was participating in a community forming act of memory. Levin also describes the elevation of vision to the position of a “paradigm for knowledge and rationality” relevant to perceptions of the musicians and their production as premodern and folk. Ironically, the musical concepts, technical proficiency, and innovations of musicians like Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Blind Willie Johnson have maintained their position as the most significant influences in blues and popular music a century later.
288 David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, 1 ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 7.
The limited aesthetic variety of the production of the musicians reinforced the privileged status of disablist normativity by aligning blindness with a sonic that was perceived as premodern. This expression, while it emanated from within Black culture, was a contrast to other production on Race records. Katz describes the cultural centrality of music, as it functioned in social contexts, which was disrupted by the phonograph.289 Blindness was sonically transmitted through the displaced performance of the phonograph.290 This is important in communicating a disabling perception of the rupture of blindness by an ocularcentric society. Jacques Derrida describes the idealized immediacy of the sensory experience of vision, implying that sighted people experience the present moment mainly through sight. This suggests that blind people experience the “present” differently, one might argue absent the immediacy of the external visual world. This work and other texts related to the primacy of vision offer insight into societal constructions of blindness. 291
In contrast, Sterne introduces the audiovisual litany which describes historical debates around the seeing/hearing binary proposing the centrality of the faculty of hearing over seeing. This becomes an otocentrist as opposed to an ocularcentrist view of society, based on the idea that hearing is immersive while seeing is distancing. He points to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening to support this idea of anti-ocularcentricity in recent scholarship. Adrienne Janus identifies this early twenty-first position as an “anti-ocular” turn. Like Levine, Janus similarly refers to the work of
289 Katz, Capturing Sound : How Technology Has Changed Music, 17.
290 Kate Cregan, The Sociology of the Body: Mapping the Abstraction of Embodiment
(Thousand Oaks, Calif;London;: SAGE, 2006).
291 See David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy; Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993). Jay Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
Century French Thought, 1 ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Jacques Derrida
and Musée du Louvre., Memoirs of the Blind : The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Heidegger. 292 She identifies Heidegger’s theory of multiple auditory experiences as a basis for Nancy’s study Listening.