Race Music
Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
Chapter One
Daddy's Second Line
Toward a Cultural Poetics of Race Music
History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for
analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred;
history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but
the group it binds.... There are as many memories as there are
groups.... Memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective,
plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to
everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.
Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire"
Cultural memory, obviously a subjective concept, seems to be connected
with cultural forms-in the present case, music, where the "memory"
drives the music and the music drives memory.
Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music
In the summer of 1999, Stevie Wonder's hit recording "I Wish" from two
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