I suppose if I wasn’t also as interested as I am in Civil War history, I’d be wondering what any of this had to do with music history.  Nonetheless, here we are talking about the Civil War, and whether there were black confederates. I think it’s impossible that there were as many as 3,000 black SOLDIERS in the confederate army which marched from Frederick to Antietam in 1862.  I think it is, however, possible that 3,000 black men were with that army, mainly as servants and cooks and porters, and that Steiner very cleverly avoids giving an exact number of how many of the negroes were armed or even how many were wearing confederate uniforms. He says they were wearing “not only…cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, state buttons, etc.” and that “MOST [emphasis mine] of the negroes had arms.”  I believe Steiner is deliberately inflating the number of actual black soldiers, of which there may well have been a few, at Frederick in order to make the confederates look bad.  Indeed, even Frederick Douglass’ assertion that there were black soldiers at Bull Run is dubious, as he certainly had the ulterior motive of wanting the Union to allow black soldiers, and the report of the battle upon which he relied is suspect, as it comes from a report of the battle riddled with other inaccuracies, as the analysis in the link from the email (http://deadconfederates.com/2011/07/30/frederick-douglass-reads-the-paper/) clearly shows.  Ultimately, it shows that if someone were to claim “well, if Frederick Douglass said there were black confederates, there must have been black confederates”, they don’t understand the aim of skepticism.  Frederick Douglass, though educated, esteemed, and a reliable source on many things, also had biases, motives, and faulty source material as much as anyone else of the period did. It would be wrong to claim that his words are unassailable simply because he’s black, and wouldn’t have had the same biased reason to claim there were black confederate soldiers as a white man.   As one last note, it’s worth noting that most of the sources I could find (such as http://www.marinersmuseum.org/blogs/civilwar/?p=2873, which may be a blog, but it’s one run by a museum and it also cites its own sources throughout the post) seem to agree that there were probably around 3,000 blacks who were actually official or semi-official soldiers ever in the Confederate army, which amounts to less than half a percent of either the total confederate forces or the black men of serving age in the south at the time, whichever way you want to look at it.  They also acknowledge that the reasons for serving would have been far more complex than merely supporting the cause, such as the blacks who were tasked with defending Richmond but never got the chance, who were promised their freedom.  Also, a large number of this comparatively small number were probably coerced. So, while it’s probably pretty factually accurate to say blacks fought as soldiers for the confederacy, it’s not like that undermines the claim that the war was fought over slavery. It manifestly was.

So, having finished Where Dead Voices Gather, I have to say I’m disappointed that my initial reactions held true throughout the book, and my hope for a greater focus on the admittedly fascinating story Tosches is telling never materialized. Ultimately, Tosches seems to care more about letting the reader know that he’s a great authority on the subject, and going off on tangential rants, and being weirdly critical of Elvis, and proving how smart he is, and cramming in every opinion he’s ever had about music prior to 1960, than actually informing them about the subject at hand. Sure, maybe that makes for a shorter book, but I wish an editor had told him to cut to the chase. I always felt like most double albums–The River and The White Album come to mind immediately, but I’m sure there are more examples–would have worked better as one fantastic single album, with higher standards for what makes the cut and what doesn’t.  I feel the same way about Tosches’ book.  I get that he’s trying to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative, but in the end he’s not Bukowski or Joyce or Faulkner, and it just comes off as pretentious to me.  It makes it all the more frustrating a read that I was truly fascinated by the story of Emmett Miller, to the point where I think I’d love a better telling of his life story–I don’t think there are enough known facts for a full-on biography, but this feels like it’s begging to be a movie to me.  For all its obvious and glaring faults, the minstrel show is perhaps the spark from which all of American show business and pop culture sprang, and learning about it was fascinating, if repulsive on a visceral level, as I imagine seeing a minstrel show were I to go back and time and do so would be for me.  However, Tosches, for reasons which I don’t even begin to understand, feels the need to defend the minstrel show rather than present it as an ultimately flawed, backwards, and horribly racist institution–yet one that perhaps did some good, was influential and interesting, and even allowed many black performers to get their start eventually.  He more or less calls us the real racists for rejecting the minstrel show, and basically argues that all pop culture is racist anyway, and besides which some of his favorite musicians are black!  While there may be racist elements in many parts of subsequent pop culture, that doesn’t make it alright that the minstrel show was racist to the core. I find Tosches repulsive and his position indefensible, which makes the vigor and vitriol with which he dies on that hill all the more offensive. I wish someone else could have told this story.

I was intrigued by Prof. O’Malley’s comments in class today about the parallels between movies and music recording.  It struck me that I’d never really considered why a close-mic’ed drum kit sounds more “real” to my ear than one recorded with one microphone, even though I’d never expect drums to sound that way if I was standing in a room with a drummer.  I had also seen Saving Private Ryan before and agreed with many critics who praised its realism, and it was slightly shocking to have it pointed out, cut by cut, that modern movie editing techniques are inherently unrealistic.  So, I decided to re-watch Saving Private Ryan with an eye to discerning what effect Spielberg’s directing and the movie’s cinematography have on me as a viewer, and whether the movie is truly “realistic” or just vivid.  I came away without a clear answer, I think.  However, I can say that while the movie’s portrayal of the events is quite true-to-life, and while the writing and acting is eminently believable, the movie is not presented realistically–had I taken part in the WWII story it’s telling, that’s not at all how I would have experienced it.  However, I think that this preference for an omniscient perspective is inextricable from the medium of film, at least as it’s developed over the last several decades.  However, the counterexample of the silent movie we watched in class proves that film doesn’t HAVE to be that way, and yet it nearly always is. Is the early film merely a product of technical limitations and a nascent medium whose creative potential had not yet been realized? Is this inherently unnatural omniscience in movies somehow ingrained in the human psyche? Or does the fact that movies developed this way represent some shift in human understanding, conscious or unconscious? I’m not sure I know the answer to this yet, but my interest has certainly been piqued. I will be seeking out more information on this topic in the weeks to come as I try to understand why I, like most people, prefer vividness to realism. I think I may need to start listening to music differently for a little while, too.