“Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist.”
Those words, spoken by estimable essayist, author, and critic James Baldwin, speak to the complex role of an artist making creative work in a cruel, complicated world. On the ninety-second anniversary of his birth, MusiQology continues to honor Baldwin through our own creative output: Dr. Guy’s recent concert series, “Everybody’s Protest Music,” draws its nominal inspiration from the writer’s 1949 work, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” “On the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations,” Baldwin wrote. “But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
While Baldwin did not focus solely on music, his meditations on the place of the artist are worth engaging with for any students of creative work. Below, in tribute to one of the most important African American critics and intellectuals of the twentieth century, read and experience Baldwin on topics related to art and the place of the artist in the world making it.
On Integrity
“It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings.”
—“The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (1962)
On the Power of Music
“There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except for the climbing soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating, beating, beating together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. When I first heard the Messiah I was alone; my blood bubbled like fire and wine; I cried; like an infant crying for its mother’s milk; or a sinner running to meet Jesus.”
–“Previous Condition” (1948)
On the Whiteness of Canon
I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use–I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine–I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme–otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write.
—“Autobiographical Notes” (1952)
On The Blues
“I have observed that not many of us can say, or sing, “Hallelujah.” Perhaps it is because one first [must] descend into the valley, where one learns to say: Amen. If one can find in oneself the force to say, Amen, it is possible to come to Hallelujah. But Amen is the price. The black experience in the valley of America remains, my friends, America’s only affirmation. We have sung the Lord’s song for a very long time, in a very, very strange land […] Perhaps that is why so many like to say that only black people can sing the blues.”
–Narration from The Hallelujah Chorus, authored by Baldwin (1973)
“I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being, but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate. I am engaged, then, in a discussion of craft or, to use a very dangerous word, art. And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy.”
–“The Uses of the Blues” (1964)
On the Subjectivity of Creation
“We all craft our approaches to experience as it crafts its superior approach to us. No one is smarter than one’s own life.”
On Black Production in Private
“[Langston] Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand–or sleight-of-hand–by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary–without the faintest notion of what it really means–the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.”
—Review of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, The New York Times (1959)
On Bessie Smith
It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very dep. I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a ‘nigger.’”
—Nobody Knows My Name (1961)
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
