Eileen Jackson Southern: A Tribute and a Mandate

by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.

Although I cannot claim to have known Eileen Southern personally, I speculate that this is probably not the kind of tribute she would have enthusiastically endorsed. In her professional writing—the mode through which others of my generation and I “knew” her—she rarely talked about “the personal” in the realm of her groundbreaking scholarship on African American music. But Southern’s passing on 13 October 2002 couldn’t be felt more personally for those of us who consider the field of black music research our scholarly home, and is certainly reason for reflection on her impact on the field.

I first met Professor Southern in the early 1990s when as a graduate student I served as a research assistant on what would become her final project on the National Association of Negro Musicians. As she was to so many others, Southern was a legend to me, the grand dame of black music research, the woman who had single-handedly turned the field into a legitimate scholarly specialty. I suspect I first spied her best-known publication, The Music of Black Americans (1971), on the bookshelf of one of my undergraduate professors, years before I even dreamed of becoming a music scholar myself. Her work would not have its fullest impact on me until later, when I would follow in her footsteps and pursue advanced degrees in music. Faced with doing research in the area of black music for the first time, I consulted the book as my usual first stop for any topic that interested me. While I recognized the value of her work—something about anything one would need to know about black music traditions in the U.S. seemed to be there—it would still be some time before I could fully comprehend the significance of this woman to our field.

By now her life’s story is well known. She was born in Minneapolis in 1920 and raised and educated primarily in Chicago. The city became, during her formative years, a hotbed of creative activity that many refer to as the “Chicago Renaissance.” Other black female musicians of the western art music ilk such as Florence Price and Margaret Bonds were also weaned in this dynamic artistic environment. What is not often emphasized is that Southern spent many years as a gigging musician. I was made aware of this fact as I poured over issues of the Chicago Defender during my brief stint as her research assistant. Her activities were reported on as she concertized locally and toured widely as a classical pianist. A capstone experience in her early performing career was playing a Mozart piano concerto with the symphony of the Chicago Musical College, an institution where she studied piano.

She was inspired to her ultimate life’s work in scholarship by her father, a Brown University-trained chemistry professor, who encouraged her to pursue the life of the mind. Like many of her generation, she spent her early college teaching years at historically black institutions, a familiar situation for educated African Americans during the era of Jim Crow segregation. When she moved to New York City and entered the Ph.D. program in musicology at New York University in 1951, Southern cut her musicological teeth on Renaissance Studies under the preeminent scholar Gustave Reese. She would later call the experience “real musicology.”

But “real musicology,” for all of its pleasures, had its drawbacks. In fact, Southern was angered when several of her fellow musicologists suggested she scrap her idea for a course she was developing on black music history. Like Rosa Parks before her, Southern showed the world how a single gesture could become a watershed event. The materials for the course became The Music of Black Americans, which was followed shortly thereafter by the appearance of the journal she and her husband Joseph Southern founded in 1973, The Black Perspective in Music. Taken together, both of these efforts represent, in my view, the dawn of contemporary black music research. A voluminous list of field-defining publications and achievements in the field has followed. Her work and tenacious spirit ultimately earned her an appointment at Harvard University in 1974, adding yet another accomplishment to her very long list of what might be called “the first/only” syndrome, in which minorities are allowed to break through the glass ceiling of racism and sexism.

As the first black woman to become a tenured full professor and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard, I can only speculate on the difficulties and slights that Southern endured over the years. By the time my generation of scholars came on the scene, she had all but disappeared from the conference circuit where we could rub elbows with the venerables of her generation. All we knew was that the books and new editions kept flowing with the assistance of her faithful protégés Professors Josephine Wright and Doris McGinty. Although Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. has recently dubbed her a “quiet revolutionary,” one can sense the roar of a lioness behind the gentle smile we see in her photographs. (I certainly felt a hint of this when she returned my first efforts at research for her with some quiet but extremely firm instructions on how future work could better meet her specifications.) She remained a restless scholar in her later years: I was extremely impressed—better, blown away—when I read about rap music in the 1997 third edition of her somewhat conservative The Music of Black Americans.

I have learned recently that Floyd conducted a series of taped interviews with Southern that are now archived at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago. Reportedly, she talks quite candidly about some of her experiences through the years as the first/only. Floyd was instructed that scholars could access them on the event of her passing. Although I haven’t heard the tapes yet, I suspect that we will learn as much from them about the unspoken history of musicology as we did about the unwritten history of African American music from Southern’s scholarship. We might learn, for example, why after all these years there still exists a paucity of black female scholars in the academic music disciplines. We might also learn why it’s time for us to become simply “revolutionary.”

—University of Pennsylvania

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