Images: Iconography of Music in African-American Culture, 1770s-1920s. (Cultural Topics).

Images: Iconography of Music in African-American Culture, 1770s-1920s. By Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. [xxiii, 299 p. ISBN 0-8153-2875-2. $95.00]

While many facets of African American music history have been examined in detail in recent years, iconography has remained relatively unexplored. This text by Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright is both a valuable resource for anyone interested in African American expressive culture and an Important contribution to the fields of iconography and African American music history. The book contains reproductions of artworks which many readers will find familiar--Henry Ossawa Tanner's oil painting The Banjo Lesson (1893), for example, which depicts a young boy intently cradling and plucking a banjo in the lap of his older teacher--as well as an abundance of lesser-known images.

The title is a bit misleading, for the book's scope is not limited to musical iconography, but includes the iconography of many other forms of African American expressive culture as well. From the outset the authors propose to examine not only music but also "the traditional performing arts (music, dance, and religious and secular oral literature)" (p. xvii). Accordingly, the authors' survey of artworks casts a rather broad net, including a wealth of images of people making music and dancing, as well as scenes of preaching, street peddling, and storytelling, and images illuminating the social and historical context under discussion: depictions of plantation slave quarters, for example.

As their point of departure, Southern and Wright have selected 260 artworks--paintings, drawings, sketches, engravings, and photographs, all reproduced in black and white--that represent over 115 artists, including celebrated ones like Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, as well as lesser-known and anonymous ones. The book is organized chronologically and divided into three main Sections. The first explores iconography from the colonial and federalist eras; the second and third examine the antebellum and postbellum eras, respectively. Throughout the text the authors endeavor to group and discuss the artworks according to their genre and thematic content. As Southern explains in the introduction, the book "focuses on identifying, describing, and analyzing the cultural art forms and activities represented in the pictorial records that lie at the roots of African-American traditional culture" (p. xviii). Often drawing upon contemporary literature, the authors discuss almost every artwork in some detail, providing valuable information about the action and expressive behavior depicted, and information about the cultural context. An index of artists provides a concise biographical sketch of each of the known artists represented in the volume.

The first and briefest of the book's three units opens with an inquiry into the African roots of African American expressive culture and continues with a discussion of "Everyday Slave Life in the United States." This latter section includes some of the earliest pictorial representations of the banjo in America, showing how the instrument was often used to accompany dancing, and that the soundbox consisted of a skin stretched across a gourd cut open at its greatest circumference. A number of the artworks in this unit and the next were actually conceived many years after the events depicted. One example is The ...