Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now Author(s): George Lipsitz Reviewed work(s): Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol.

55, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 185-199 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.55.2.0185 . Accessed: 01/04/2012 12:06
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Vol. 55, No. 2

Ethnomusicology

Spring/Summer 2011

Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now

Charles Seeger Lecture Presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, 2010, Los Angeles

George Lipsitz / University of California, Santa Barbara

t is a great privilege and pleasure to have the opportunity to deliver the Charles Seeger lecture at this years meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. It is a special delight for me to do so in Los Angeles, a city where I have learned so much from so many different kinds of people including the brilliant musicologists Susan McClary and Rob Walser, visual artists Betye Saar and Diane Gamboa, musicians Johnny Otis and Ruben Guevara, and spoken word performer Marisela Norte. Delivering this lecture also gives me a particular opportunity to express in public the deep respect and gratitude I have for the field of ethnomusicology and its commitments to cosmopolitan and egalitarian engagement with the vernacular cultures of people all around the world. Whenever I to speak to musicologists I am reminded of the response that hip hop artist Chuck D of the group Public Enemy gives to reporters who ask him questions about the expressly musical elements of his performances. Chuck refers these questions to the music expert in the group, William Drayton, who plays a character named Flavor Flav, a high-spirited trickster prominent in Public Enemys performances. This response usually surprises the questioners because the character that Drayton plays hardly seems like a source of insight. He wears a top hat and strangely framed sunglasses, contorts his body comically, wears a huge alarm clock with its hands stopped on the outside of his garish warm-up jacket, and intermittently points to the clock and says cryptically we know what time it is. In fact, Drayton is a musical genius, a fine singer and multi-instrumentalist who uses his voice brilliantly to help produce Public Enemys unique sound. Music questions should be directed to Flavor Flav, Chuck D explains, because Flav can play fourteen instruments while I cant play lotto. I know that when I
2011 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

186 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 speak to gatherings of musicologists, I am in the presence of many people who can play fourteen instruments while, like Chuck D, I cant play lotto. Yet while I cannot provide any specialized expert knowledge about music to you today, I hope to provide something of value from the perspective of an appreciative non-specialist about an important question: why does ethnomusicology matter now? At its best, ethnomusicology teaches us about the dynamics of difference, about the generative results that follow from recognizing that cultures are not the same even though we all share a common humanity. In the face of scholarly and civic traditions that find difference so vexing that they frequently can only offer us an unsatisfactory choice between disembodied universalism on the one hand and parochial particularism on the other, ethnomusicology enables us to imagine a third option: a universalism rich with particulars grounded in the dialogue of all, the dignity of each, and the supremacy of none. In short, ethnomusicology can help us see which differences make a difference. I have been thinking about this issue of difference constantly lately, for many reasons. I am engaged in a collaborative research project with the person who introduced my talk today, Russell Rodriguez. Our research seeks to rethink, reassess, and redeploy many ideas that originated with the great ethnomusicologist, folklorist, novelist, and activist Amrico Paredes during the last half of the twentieth century. Rodriguez is an anthropologist and an ethnomusicologist, a highly skilled and talented vihuela player and singer in mariachi ensembles. I am a sociologist and historian who believes that music has tremendous significance as a social force, even though I cant play lotto. In his research about mariachi music on both sides of the US-Mexico border and on the son jarocho revival among Chicanos in the United States (exemplified in the song Planta De Los Pies by the group Quetzal), Rodriguez asks and answers original questions about how newly emerging social relations in our time are creating new social identities and identifications that rely on unusually productive, insightful, and generative archives and imaginaries (Rodriguez 2009, 2010). On my part, my recently published biography of Johnny Otis compelled me to think less about what is emerging and more about things that may be disappearing in our time, in particular the democratic and egalitarian impulses encoded in the art and artistry of the rhythm and blues music that emerged from the experiences of the Black working class in the middle of the twentieth century (Lipsitz 2010). Coming from different perspectives and experiences, examining two very different kinds of music making prominent in the past and present of Los Angeles (and other cities), Russell and I have arrived at a common destination: a co-authored reappraisal of the enduring significance of the ideas of Amrico Paredes. We believe that his ability to link expressive culture, social identities, and social justice contains untapped resources for understanding where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going.

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 187 We are not conducting this research in a vacuum. Rodriguezs work on Chicano culture and my work on African American culture compel us to confront what time it is, to grapple with the increasingly harsh and indecent social conditions confronting the communities we study. The music that compels our attention responds to both old and new social conditions, to the long and still unresolved legacies of slavery, conquest, and genocide, but also to new forms of work and worklessness, new regimes of mass incarceration and austerity, new categories of differentiated citizenship and social membership. The urgencies and emergencies of our time require us to do our scholarship in new and better ways. This can be hard to do. The painful, slow, and arduous work of learning that we have done over our careers has provided us with valuable tools for interpretation and analysis. Sometimes that training leaves us psychologically and emotionally unprepared to unlearn and then relearn. Yet changing the way we work can be a good thing. As Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz quips, if we do not change our scholarship from time to time our research will come to resemble Scandinavian cooking, which Hannerz describes as something passed down from generation to generation for no apparent reason (1993:42). In evaluating how to change our work, we might do well to think again about Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. A man who proclaims we know what time it is while wearing an oversized alarm clock whose hands have stopped is telling us something important. He is saying that time has stood still, that progress is not being made, that we have cause for alarm because others do not recognize what time it is. Public Enemy is saying that we have to be on time for our time, that we need to open our eyes and ears to the things that are happening all around us. I learned about this kind of being on time years ago from Ivory Perry, a grass roots community activist in St. Louis. I published a biography of him in 1989 titled A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Lipsitz 1995). The subject of my book was not a famous person. He was a high school dropout, a semi-skilled factory worker who moved from job to job, and a person who owned no property. He never held public office or led an organization. He hardly ever even delivered a speech. Yet for four decades, Perry turned the alienations and indignities his community faced into inspiration for collective non-violent direct action campaigns that won significant victories. I hoped that the publication of my book would give this unsung hero some belated recognition for all he had done. But Ivory felt otherwise. Shortly after the books publication, we appeared together on a television talk show. The interviewer had read the book carefully and showered Perry with praise. Mr. Perry, you were ahead of your time, she observed repeatedly, going on to cite his visionary work in recognizing before others that families with children could not find affordable housing, that children in the inner city suffered from lead poisoning at epidemic levels, that landlords routinely violated local build-

188 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 ing codes and endangered the lives and safety of their tenants. I was pleased to hear her speak like this, to have Perry honored as a person ahead of his time, but Ivory was not pleased by this description. Finally, he interrupted her and said Ahead of my time! How can I be ahead of my time? This is my time. Im on time. Maybe somebody else is late! Ivory Perry did not want to be ahead of his time because that designation seemed to him to separate him from the people whose fate and destiny he shared. He wanted to be on time by bearing witness to their suffering and taking action immediately to end it. I think we need to draw on that way of thinking in our own work as scholars today. To write about music in our time, we have to (along with Flavor Flav) know what time it is. For working class and poor people of color in Los Angeles, and for millions in similar straits all around the world, the time is midnight. The have nots are struggling and suffering, while the haves are mired deeply in their own corruption and cruelty. These conditions conform to what Martin Luther King, Jr. described a half century ago as a kind of midnight in the social order, the psychological order, and the moral order. These midnights, in Kings judgment, produce darkness so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn. In times that require conscience, courage, and conviction, Dr. King complained, people instead resort to obeying what he called the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not get caught (King 1981:53, 5455). The darkness of this midnight can keep us from seeing what is right before our eyes. We may not notice at this conference that the men and women who clean the hotel rooms we sleep in, who serve us our meals, who carry our luggage, and who park our cars are people who face the full force and fury of the indecent and unjust social order of our time every day. Their parents and children and cousins receive starvation wages to pick crops that become the food we eat. They breathe in unsafe chemicals and suffer ergonomic injuries as they sew the clothes we wear on our backs. Housing discrimination contains them in artificially confined corners of the housing market that require them to take long bus rides to work. Condemned as parasites and loafers in newspaper columns and on talk radio, they work every day, cleaning our homes and offices, landscaping the grounds of our neighborhoods, and taking care of our children. For all their labor, they live in slum housing and send their children to poorly funded schools. They bear the brunt of environmental pollution and the inadequacies of the health care system. Their dignity and humanity remain invisible to those who despise them and deride them contemptuously as illegal aliens and the underclass. They are libeled as law breakers by many of the very people who profit from their low wage labor by breaking the law themselvesby failing to comply with laws that require employers to pay the minimum wage, to make contributions to social security, and to post information about occupational health and safety, labor

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 189 standards and requirements, and grievance mechanisms. Public moral panics about immigration and the alleged burdens it imposes on normative prosperous families seldom acknowledge that a key point of entry into the US workforce for undocumented workers is the suburban home. They do not acknowledge that prosperous people pay less for nearly every product and service they purchase because immigrant workers lack the power to bargain freely over wages and working conditions. Working people of color suffer most from our societys commitment to endless war while it shreds the social safety net. We defund social services while we build and maintain the largest prison system in the world. The skewing of opportunities and life chances along racial and class lines in our society today entails the organized abandonment of entire populations. Every day, poor and working class people confront the hypocrisy of a society where people do not practice what they preach. People in power preach universal inclusion but practice differentiated exclusion. They preach the work ethic but do not reward work. They praise peace but practice perpetual warfare. They preach the love of God, but they practice the love of gain. Our society remembers that Dr. King had a dream, but forgets that he also urged people to wake up. King argued that even the darkest midnight holds the promise of a new day. The Thirtieth Psalm proclaims that weeping lasts for a night but joy comes in the morning. The darkness that makes it hard for us to know which way to turn at midnight often occludes potential victories as well as defeats. In remembering the victory won by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, King recalled several years later that there was a time when many of the participants were certain they had been defeated and wanted to give up the fight. This moment of demoralization took place at the very time when the tide was actually starting to turn in their favor, but they did not know it yet. The darkest hour of our struggle, King noted, had become the first hour of victory (King 1981:68). King believed that it was our lot in life to suffer at midnight, but he also insisted that midnight means that we are always on the verge of a new dawn. Yet as Henry David Thoreau observed years ago, only that day dawns to which we are awake. I have long been interested in midnights. I took the title of my first book Rainbow at Midnight from a country and western song by Ernest Tubb that expressed brilliantly the combination of fear and hope that gripped the working class in the United States in the period immediately after World War II (Lipsitz [1981] 1994). I started my book American Studies in A Moment of Danger with a discussion of Senegalese singer Baaba Maals theory about midnight (Lipsitz 2001). Maal acknowledges that midnight serves as a popular metaphor to convey a time of trepidation and dread. Yet he believes that these times can serve positive purposes. Midnight, Maal explains, is the time when the spirit takes

190 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 stock and looks ahead to the new day. Its important for every person to have a midnight in their lifeto know what you have done and what you have yet to do (Cathcart 1994:271).Thirty years after the original publication of Rainbow at Midnight, I am still wrestling with the concept of midnight and trying to figure out what time it is. My most recent book is titled Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Lipsitz 2010). It takes its title from one of Otiss favorite songs, a piece he wrote in honor of a place right here in Los Angeles: the Barrelhouse nightclub on Wilmington Avenue between 107th Street and Santa Ana Boulevard that Otis co-owned and managed in the 1940s. This was the first night club in the world devoted exclusively to rhythm and blues music. It was the place where Johnny learned to strip down his big band into a small combo, where his musicians helped him create the sounds that would enable him to have hit record after hit record in the 1950s. The Barrelhouse attracted an unusually diverse group of patrons in a city that was then rigidly segregated. Otiss song pays tribute to the aggressive festivity and celebratory self-activity in the Black community in the postwar era. Featuring the blues guitar playing of Pete Lewis and horn arrangements styled in the manner of Count Basies Band, Midnight at the Barrelhouse explained in musical form that even though the clock had struck midnight for the big band era, a new dawn was emerging in the form of rhythm and blues. In the decades that followed, whenever his band was playing especially well, Johnny would direct them to play Midnight at the Barrelhouse, as if to say they had succeeded in bringing back a golden age when things worked well and even better things seemed just around the corner. He talks about the song as a kind of time machine capable of transporting the band and its audience back to the time when finger-popping was the order of the day and everyone understood It dont mean a thing if it aint got that swing (Otis 1993:13). Yet by the 1970s, playing Midnight at the Barrelhouse became painful for Otis and his musicians because it made them acknowledge what time it was. In the face of a counter-revolution in the 1970s and 1980s that reversed many of the gains won by the Black freedom movement, in the contexts of capital flight, outsourcing, and neo-liberal policies that shredded the social safety net, the chasm between the despair pervading contemporary Black communities and the utopian hopes recalled by Midnight in the Barrelhouse sadly underscored how much had been lost in preceding decades by Otis, his musicians, and his community. Otis had participated actively in the civil rights movement and mourned what he viewed as its betrayal by the nation. An unusual history led him to that work and to those conclusions. Born into a white working class Greek immigrant family in Berkeley, California, Otis quickly became fascinated by the speech, style, and music of the Black children in his neighborhood. He started attending services with them at

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 191 holiness churches where the intellectual power of the preachers and the musical artistry of the choirs spoke to him a way that exceeded the appeal of his parents Greek Orthodox religion. His life trajectory should be familiar to many ethnomusicologists. When he was a child his family used recordings by Greek singers Rosa Eskenazi, Rita Abrasi, and Marika Papagika to remind them of home and to keep alive the culture of their native land in a new setting. Johnnys family made their own music as well, with his mother on the violin, his sister on the cello, his brother on the clarinet, and Johnny on drums, while his father sang. Otis retained his love for this music all his life, but it also positioned him to hear Black music in a particular way. In the blues music he heard blaring from phonographs in his neighborhood and the jazz music he listened to by standing outside nightclubs in downtown Oakland, Johnny heard a music expressing a sense of exile, loss, and longing for home familiar to him from Greek music, but connected to the living culture of his own community. In an era of intense anti-immigrant nativism, Black music was virtually the only part of American culture that seemed open to him or even interested in him. It spoke to him in a rich way about his familys poverty, his alienation from teachers who diagnosed him as deficient without realizing English was not his first language, and his longing for pleasure, plenitude, dignity, and love. Involvement in Black music enabled Otis to remain faithful to the values of his parents but also to declare his independence from them, to become American in a way they could not. In the 1930s, Black music had become part of the lingua franca of an inter-ethnic and inter-racial alliance of young working class people, many of them children of immigrants and migrants, who coalesced around their shared experiences with racialization and ethnicization to form what Lizabeth Cohen calls the culture of unity (2008) and what Michael Denning identifies as the cultural front (2011). Like many ethnomusicologists, Otis authored a new cultural identity for himself through a complex process of defamiliarization and refamiliarization. He played the drums in Black territory bands, married a Black woman, lived in Black neighborhoods, and immersed himself in Black politics, religion, and culture. Drawing on the fortuitous homonym that united half of his Greek name Veliotes with a common Black name, John Veliotes became Johnny Otis. He described himself as Black by persuasion, but he meant more by that than a mere matter of belief or disposition. He became Black by living Black, by opening himself up to elaborate networks of instruction and apprenticeship in the Black community, and by putting into practice the things he learned. Otis combined a seemingly contradictory deep devotion to honoring the integrity and unique history of Afro-diasporic music with his own understanding (based on experience) that culture could be learned. Involvement in Black music and Black culture opened Otis up to the plurality and diversity of the Afro-diasporic experience. Otiss

192 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 wife, Phyllis Walker, was an Afro-Filipina. His business partner and manager Bardu Ali was part Black and part Bengali Muslim. His political mentor Mervyn Dymally was an immigrant from Trinidad whose parents were South Asian and Haitian. Some mixtures were even more complex, as he discovered in the mid-1950s when municipal officials in Los Angeles banned rhythm and blues dances and shows inside the city limits because they objected to the inter-racial crowds of teenagers attending them. Otis found himself forced to move his shows eastward into unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County populated by large numbers of Chicanos. A young man attending these shows introduced himself to Johnny as Julian Herrera and asked to audition to sing with the band. The young man was good looking, had a fine stage presence, and could even sing a little, so Johnny worked with him, had him perform with the band, and produced a recording of Lonely Lonely Nights by Lil Julian Herrera that became a regional hit. Young Chicanas especially liked his performances, making Lil Julian the first Chicano teenage idol on the rhythm and blues scene. One day a probation officer came to Otiss home asking to speak to Ron Gregory. Otis explained that he did not know anyone named Ron Gregory and was already closing the door when the officer showed him a picture of Lil Julian. The person Johnny knew as Julian Herrera was really a Hungarian American Jew from Massachusetts who had run away from home hoping to find relatives in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, which had significant populations of both Jews and Mexican Americans. Unable to find his relatives, the young man was taken in by a Mrs. Herrera who raised him as her son. So the first Chicano heart throb in rhythm and blues music turned out to be a Hungarian Jew managed by an ethnic Greek who thought he was Black. Otis managed his complex identity in the 1940s and 1950s by thinking of himself primarily as Black: as a Black artist and entrepreneur, as the father of Black children and the husband of a Black woman, and as a Black activist. He protested segregation in demonstrations in Los Angeles throughout the 1950s and 1960s, wrote a weekly column championing racial justice in a local Black newspaper, had crosses burned on his lawn, received death threats from local Klan sympathizers trying to silence him, and persistently used his visibility in the music industry to advance the careers of Black artists and to get them the degree of respect and reward he thought they deserved. Otis helped form a political action group devoted to getting Black candidates elected to offices in local and state government, to supporting the civil rights movement, and to building consciousness about freedom struggles in Africa. He warned many times that white resistance to the legitimate and just demands of Blacks would turn the nonviolent struggle into a violent conflagration. He was deeply disappointed, but not surprised, when frustrations in the ghetto erupted into the Watts Riot of 1965. On the third day of the riots, as Otis started for home at the end of long

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 193 work day, he saw black smoke in the sky and could discern flames leaping from the tops of buildings not too far from the office where he worked. He decided to drive in the direction of the riot, although he was not really sure why. He did not want to join in the violence, nor did he wish to stop it. The riot just seemed too important an event to avoid. The Black community in Los Angeles that formed the core of his social world had come to a crossroads, and in fact would never be the same again. Otis wanted to see for himself what was happening in neighborhoods he had come to know and love ever since he first came to the city to play drums in Central Avenue nightclubs in 1943. Rioting shook the area around the Barrelhouse nightclub where he had helped invent rhythm and blues music, near the Lincoln Theater where he had discovered Charles Brown, and near the Largo Theater where he encountered fourteen-year-old Little Esther in a talent show. As he drove into the riot area, Otis felt deeply conflicted. He took no pleasure in seeing people he knew and cared about being driven into ferocious rage, in observing places that he loved being destroyed. Yet a part of him recognized that the fury of the rioters constituted a logical and even justifiable response to unbearable human misery. I thought, burn you son of a bitch, burn, he later recalled. As he watched the flames with tears in his eyes, Otis thought of the gospel song Listen to the Lambs: the lambs are crying for the Lord to come by. They wouldnt listen to the lambs, he thought, the lambs cried and finally one day the lambs turned into lions (Otis 2009:5). Otis recognized that the Watts Rebellion marked the end of the optimism that permeated many midnights at the Barrelhouse and other venues in the 1940s, an optimism that had been honed and refined in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet for all his deep commitments to the Black freedom struggle, Otis was not Black. In the midst of the riot, he realized that his pigment and phenotype made him resemble the enemies of the Black community: the absentee landlord, the brutal police officer, the exploitative store owner, the abusive bill collector, the contemptuous teacher, the intrusive social worker, the drunken john seeking prostitutes, and the relentless rent collector. At one intersection, three men approached his car menacingly. Recognizing the driver as Johnny Otis, they urged him to leave the area quickly. At that moment, Otis recognized directly what he had long feared indirectly: that the life he was living was impossible, that even the most fervently anti-racist white still benefited from the vile privileges of white supremacy, that he still could drive away or move away from realities that allowed Black people no escape. At that moment, Otis made a choice that ruined his future viability in show business. He wrote and published Listen to the Lambs, a book about the riots that essentially took the side of the rioters. Drawing on testimony by eyewitnesses, Otis challenged the dominant story about who was to blame for the destructive-

194 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 ness of the riots, explaining that what started as a popular uprising against police brutality quickly turned into a police riot against the populace (ibid.:310; see also Horne 1997:128). Otis explained how not granting peaceful concessions to the nonviolent civil rights movement set the stage for the violence of the uprising. Perhaps most important, Otis insisted that the nation had to change its policies or face even more violence in the future. White America stands at a critical crossroad, Otis argued. She can meet ghetto disorders with increased police power in the belief that oppressive punitive actions will make the problem go away, or she can start getting at the economic and social causes of the riots. Unfortunately, the trend is toward punitive police power (Otis 2009:240). The account that Otis crafted in response to the flames he observed on rooftops on August 13, 1965 had disastrous consequences for him. It was as if the rioting motivated him to light a match and burn down his own career. Once Listen to the Lambs was published, Otis was finished as a viable commercial entertainer. He worked as an administrative aide and district representative for Representative Mervyn Dymally, became the pastor in a holiness church with a largely Black congregation, created and sold paintings and sculptures, taught classes in the history of Black music, produced and sold apple juice and wine, and operated a delicatessen and night club. But he did something even more interesting as well, something of tremendous significance for ethnomusicologists. On a public radio program that ran for nearly thirty-five years, Otis immersed himself in the vernacular culture of the Black working class. Essentially he taught the longest continuing public seminar on Black culture in history. These programs, many of which were recorded and are now housed in the Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University, are a treasure trove of evidence about the indomitable resilience and creative adaptability of Black musicians particularly and Black people in general. Running each program the way he used to run his rhythm and blue revues, Otis used his program to stage dialogues with an amazing array of artists, intellectuals, and activists, to challenge the market categories of radio and the recording industry, to reveal how artists emerged out of elaborate networks of apprenticeship and instruction, to introduce listeners to the politics and poetics of instrumentation, arrangements, and engineering, and to contest the practices, premises, and prejudices of commercial culture and the broader society in which it operated. Perhaps most important, Otis used the program as a platform to demand justice for the creators of rhythm and blues and rocknroll, to remind audiences repeatedly that white imitators routinely reaped financial benefits unavailable to the Black originators of the nations most lucrative popular music. It is this aspect of Otiss career that informs my collaborative work on Amrico Paredes with Russell Rodriguez. I think of Otis more as an educator than an entertainer, promoter, producer, composer, or instrumentalist, although

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 195 of course he has had success in those realms that few people can match. But during the twenty-five years I have known him, Otis has shown himself to be the most effective teacher I have ever seen. Like all good teachers (and researchers), he thinks it is important to have mastery over ones field. I discovered this during my first conversation with him. I had written him a letter asking about Lil Julian Herrera, in conjunction with an article I was writing about Chicano rocknroll. I didnt really expect an answer, so I was surprised one day while speaking to a graduate student in my office that the phone rang and the person on the other end introduced himself as Johnny Otis. The immediately identifiable and incomparable timbre of his voice and the articulation and pattern of his diction captivated my attention. Then he asked me an unusual question. What I want to know is, he asked, are you a real professor who knows things or just a BS professor who pretends to know things? Taken aback, I stammered and joked that in my line of work that could be an incredibly fine distinction. But it was a great way to start our relationship, because Otis was giving me a preview of something I would see over and over again in the years to come, that he thought it was hard to learn things but important to get to the truth and to give voice to it fearlessly. That quality, among other things, connects him to Amrico Paredes. Paredes was born in 1915 and Otis in 1922, both into families where English was the second language. They both came of age in the decade of the 1930s when a progressive culture of unity transformed the image of immigrants from unwanted aliens into redemptive insiders by celebrating ethnicity and immigration as the quintessential American experiences. It was in that decade that activism reconfigured the Statue of Liberty as a monument to immigration rather than to republicanism, when regional, transnational, and multicultural literature, music, dance, theater, and art emerged as symbolic expressions of the nations potential for democracy. Like many in their generational cohort, Paredes and Otis found their countrys culture more democratic than its politics. Yet for them, the racial order of US society discredited the nations pretensions about itself and motivated them to seek out counter-narratives. Paredes and Otis created performing ensembles everywhere they went; both had faith in the forms of collective knowledge that emerged from the experiences and expressions of aggrieved communities of color. Paredes authored his most famous book With His Pistol in His Hand in 1958 (Paredes 1958), the same year that Johnny Otis had his biggest hit song, Willie and the Hand Jive. They both used humor to uncrown power, to expose racism, and to revel in the impertinent creativity of their communities. Paredes died in 1999. Otis has been in ill health and secluded from the public since 2003. The works of art and scholarship they produced are not entirely forgotten, but they are both underappreciated and underutilized as guides for work in the present. They have much to teach us about what time it is today.

196 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 Paredes expressly theorized much of what he and Otis and many others did in practice. Years before the writings of Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Ranajit Guha, Paredes argued that vernacular culture was a rich repository of insurgent knowledge. His writings affirmed the dialogic dimensions of expressive culture, the ways in which (as Bakhtin states in another context) there is no pure monologue in culture because each speaker and listener enters a dialogue already in progress, where the word (or the note, the melody, the rhythm) is always half someone elses. Paredes delineated the power of discourse in social relations. Especially in With His Pistol in His Hand, he showed how racial hierarchies are learned and legitimated through an elaborate chain of signs and symbols. In response, aggrieved groups have to create their own long chains of oppositional signs and symbols that enable them to make a long march through discourse that patiently but relentlessly undermines dominant images and ideas. Jokes loomed large for Paredes because he recognized them as weapons of the weak, as symbolic inversions and subversions masquerading as innocent fun. Paredes prefigured the sophisticated stance toward identity that emerged later inside post-structuralism and women of color feminism. Especially in his novel George Washington Gomez, but also in his folkloristic and ethnographic writings, Paredes explored the composite, conflicted, and contradictory nature of individual identities (Paredes 2004). He cherished the collective nature of Tejano resistance to Anglo domination, but he never confused unity with uniformity. In opposition to both the negative ascriptions of racist stereotypes and the nationalist affirmations of the solidarities of sameness, Paredes warns that there can never be only one way to be Tejano or Anglo or Black, that even individuals do not maintain an unchanging identity over time. His faith in popular knowledge and performance led Paredes to do his scholarly work differently from those who were less connected to aggrieved communities. He recognized that good research about cultural life inevitably had to address the political dimensions of that life, that our work becomes weaker rather than stronger if we evade the power dynamics that pervade the production of culture and scholarship about it. As Toni Morrison says, Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery (Morrison 1993:12). In revealing how Texas folklore functioned as a political force, as a mechanism of Tejano subordination and a justification for Anglo privilege, Paredes unmasked the informing logic and guiding ideology behind what might otherwise seem like a unified community narrative. At the same time, he revealed that Chicano joking, storytelling, and music making emerged out of a concrete context of unequal power, and that their aesthetic figures, devices, and affective appeals made sense largely because of that context. In addition, Paredes pursued politics

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 197 outside his own texts, as a fighter on many fronts in different roles as a performer, poet, musician, novelist, journalist, scholar, teacher, administrator, and activist. Perhaps most important, Paredes taught that the object of our studies should be the creative act, not just the created object, that our interpretation and analysis become part of that act. This explanation enables us to write about musical texts in relation to their full social and historical contexts, but it also requires us to view those texts as inseparable from their performance. Paredes believed that participation in culture was an important way of understanding it, that Anglo anthropologists studying Tejanos suffered not only from their uninterrogated racist presumptions and premises but also from their stance as observers and spectators rather than as participants and creators. For him, the principle of participation extended far beyond cultural performances. He encouraged us to live the lives we sing about in our songs and that we document in our writing. Paredes valued the corrido because it was collectively authored over the span of many performances by many different performers. The verses that lasted were the ones that people believed suited their needs best. The community that collectively created the Ballad of Gregorio Cortez enacted in practice what the song envisioned in its lyrics: a world where the linked fate of a community produces solidarity among individuals who recognize they can do more together than they can do as individuals. The lessons we can learn from Amrico Paredes and Johnny Otis are especially important today as we encounter yet another midnight in the social order, in the psychological order, and in the moral order. The people who run this nation and the world cannot fix the things they have broken. Consequently, they must resort to a series of fixes designed to suppress any possible opposition to their rule. We have seen, and will continue to see, a seemingly endless succession of wars waged overseas, on our borders, and inside our own cities against enemies that are never clearly named or defined. Our leaders have subjected us to an ever more hysterical series of moral panics and demonization campaigns, assaults on non-normative sexual minorities and other putative deviants. The recreational hate that we hear constantly on talk radio and on television expresses the contemptuous belligerence of what must surely be the most surly, spiteful, and sadistic group of haves in the history of the world. Politics has degenerated into a series of sideshows designed to divert attention away from the ever more indecent and unjust social conditions of our time. If we ever needed a rainbow at midnight, we need it now. Ethnomusciologists have a special role to play at this time. The professions commitments to multi-lingualism, reciprocity, participation, performance, cosmopolitanism, and critical thinking are extraordinarily important tools for demystifying hierarchies today, just as they were for Amrico Paredes, Johnny

198 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2011 Otis, and so many others in the past. When the Johnny Otis orchestra plays Midnight at the Barrelhouse on a recording or in person, they are mapping the distance between a vaguely remembered past and the foreboding future. When young Chicanos rediscover and redeploy son jaorcho they are announcing the arrival of new identities and raising new demands for justice and dignity. Yet we need to remember that academics and professionals of all kinds can cross borders that are closed to others. The demographics of our profession do not resemble the demographics of the communities we study: a sign of inequalities and exclusions close to home that we need to address in order to create a field capable of doing better work. The communities whose cultures inspire our work are imperiled and embattled, plagued by neo-liberal economics, empire, war, racism, and exploitation. In a country that proclaims its right to wage pre-emptive war anywhere in the world, that uses torture in violation of international law, that views its growing inequalities as a model to be exported to the rest of the world, we need to stand up, and speak out. We live in a nation that legislates racial profiling in Arizona, that breaks up immigrant families by sending parents to detention camps, that incarcerates a larger percentage of its population in prison than any country in the world. We need to be heard on these and other issues, to stand forthrightly in favor of the DREAM Act and a path to legalization for undocumented workers, to call for an end to the policy of mass incarceration, and to champion human rights and a global minimum wage. Musicologist Rob Walser often quips that academics are always looking for a microphone when what we really need is a hearing aid. We need to be better listeners, to recognize the meaning of what we hear when we listen to son jarocho, mariachi, or the hip hop stylings of Chingo Bling. We need to learn the lessons of May 1, 2006 when millions of people took to the streets of our nation to proclaim the existence and legitimacy of a multi-lingual, multi-racial, and multi-national America. More than twenty years after Public Enemy unleashed Flavor Flav on the world, we need to know now, more than ever, what time it really is. Two decades after they first proclaimed we know what time it is in their video Fight the Power, Public Enemy still knows what time it is. In response to the passage of racial profiling legislation targeted at undocumented workers in Arizona, Chuck D in 2010 reworked By the Time I Get to Arizona, one of Public Enemys previous songs protesting the refusal of the state of Arizona to make the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. a state holiday. Fusing forcefully compelling lyrics with his remarkable rapping ability, and punctuating the music with a dazzling visual montage timed to captivating beats, Chuck D redeploys the words that Ronald Reagan once directed at the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War, telling them to tear down that wall. Chuck D hijacks Reagans cold war bravado to expose and rebuke the gap between the nations democratic pretensions and its undemocratic practices. The song and video demand an

Lipsitz: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now 199 end to border fences, vigilante violence, military campaigns, mass roundups, deportations, and jailings that enact incalculable pain on immigrants. The video features images from the mass pro-immigrant demonstrations of 2006 as an invitation to be on time in our time, even if everyone else seems to be late. Johnny Otis and Amrico Paredes teach us that it is always possible to tap into the genius of vernacular culture, to speak across borders of all kinds, to connect with the best possibilities in ourselves and others. It may be midnight in the social order, in the psychological order, and the moral order. But it is also always midnight at the Barrelhouse.

References
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