Editor's introduction.(European scholarship on black music)(Editorial)

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Center For Black Music Research

This special issue features a series of articles representing contemporary European scholarship in the area of black music research. Identifying a particular place or region as the source of scholarly articles is an unexceptional practice in itself if it has no higher purpose than to highlight a coincidence, intended or otherwise. But it becomes more hazardous if such a collection is presented as standing for scholarship on a particular subject in that region--especially if the subject is one of supranational significance, such as black music--and even more hazardous if it is thought to summarize it. Any such collection will almost certainly struggle to be representative and certainly could not be summative; and, in any case, that is not how scholarship in an area such as this actually seems to work or how it appears to have worked in the past.

In the introduction to his magisterial study of African-American vocal traditions on race records, Paul Oliver (1984) described the strengths and omissions of previous scholarship in a historical summary that is notable for the way it moves, almost without comment, back and forth across the Atlantic. In this particular book, Oliver's aim is to tell what he calls, borrowing the title of a 1928 recording by Rev. E W. McGee, "the half that ain't never been told" by bringing under the microscope styles and subjects that had previously been overshadowed by the priority accorded to the blues. He offers this contribution without reference to any perspectives or qualities that might have resulted from his being an English scholar who had carried out the vast majority of the research for this particular study in England. It would no doubt have seemed very strange to him to have addressed it.

Equally, it would be simply dishonest to claim that Europe has unfailingly exhibited special insights...

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