Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film »

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William & Mary. He is coeditor of Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, published by Duke University Press.

From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film's classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals-a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars-Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge-emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites-even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

Disintegrating the Musical covers territory both familiar-Show Boat, Stormy Weather, Porgy and Bess-and obscure-musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne's first film The Duke Is Tops, specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short Jammin' the Blues. It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, Disintegrating the Musical shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Bamboozled.

A lively examination of an important, overlooked element of American cinematic history, Disintegrating the Musical will appeal to those interested in cinema studies and African American studies.

About the Author

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William & Mary. He is coeditor of Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, published by Duke University Press.

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Disintegrating the Musical	1
Ch. 1	Wearing and Tearing the Mask: Blacks on and in Blackface, Live	29
Ch. 2	"Fool Acts": Cinematic Conjunctions of White Blackface and Black Performance	49
Ch. 3	Indefinite Talk: Blacks in Blackface, Filmed	92
Ch. 4	Black Folk Sold: Hollywood's Black-Cast Musicals	123
Ch. 5	"Aping" Hollywood: Deformation and Mastery in The Duke is Tops and Swing!	169
Ch. 6	Jammin' the Blues: The Sight of Jazz, 1944	195
	Coda: Bamboozled?	231
	Notes	249
	Bibliography	301
	Index	327