billtron.org

My first academic publication. From Mediascape, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, volume 1, number 3 (Spring 2007).

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A year and a half ago I was sitting in a university library listening to some new Smithsonian Folkways recordings when I stumbled upon a statement that took me by surprise. The remarkable quotation appeared in the liner notes of an album by Kentucky folk musician, Roscoe Holcomb. The account came from bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe [Figure 1], who asked: “How can Roscoe go out on stage without any idea of what he is going to do?”

The first time that I hear the name Appalshop, I was square dancing at the Brooklyn Brewery, invited by a friend and fellow banjo player more clued in to the local social scene than I. Enticed into the cold winter night by the prospects of live old-time music, unlimited beer and whiskey, and dancing in a crowd of rowdy hipsters in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood, I showed up alone, paid the five dollar cover charge, and proceeded to dance and sweat and laugh for five hours straight.

Seen as a reconciliation between the subjective positionings of artistic representation and the responsibilities of scientific documentation, the history of ethnographic cinema is filled with figures, usually holding cameras and developing new ways of seeing, whose innovations, either technological or methodological, cause the accepted practice of documentary filmmaking to shift irrevocably.

The veracity of a unified and historically constructed African-derived aesthetic among African-Americans is contentious. On one side of the argument, cultural critics warn that any attempt to represent a homogenous group of people, based on geographic and cultural origin or physiological features perpetuates racial narratives from the colonialization of centuries past, and only through critical engagement with these narratives can people overcome the limitations inherent in essentialization.

Observing popular culture with a critical eye reveals aspects of historical trends, social struggles, aesthetic signification, and other aspects of cultural practice that are superficially unapparent. American culture, in particular, when examined hermeneutically, will often reveal remnants of this society’s violently racialized past that still exist and affect social interaction at every level.

This paper is an investigation of the history of music in colonial New Orleans as presented by American musicologists. My desire is to show that the texts that have been written have depended quite heavily, at times singly, on writings of European colonizers and travelers.