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The Lyrics in African American Popular Music Robert Springer (ed.) Peter Lang, Bern, 2001 211 pp.

Casual followers of popular culture are generally unfamiliar with the works and traditions that have influenced modern cultural forms. One of the best examples lies in the area of African-American music. While the music of black America has always had a profound influence on mainstream American culture, much of it has remained underground, invisible to the general public until it bursts into the light, seemingly full grown with no visible past. Thus rap and hip hop are generally seen as reaching back as far as the mid-'70s and the work of DJs like Kool Herc in the South Bronx, but its earlier history, embracing such figures as the Last Poets, Muhammad Ali, and the black American traditions of the dozens, is known only to the historian and true aficionado.

Robert Springer's volume, a collection of essays presented at the international conference on the lyrics of African-American popular music, held in Metz, France, in September 2000, reminds us that the past and the present are clearly linked when it comes to understanding the meanings of black American music. The book itself springs from the premise that the study of black music has concentrated primarily on the music itself and not on the lyrics. The authors herein wish to change that. The essays cover genres as diverse as the blues, gospel, and rap, and reinforce the notion that these styles are connected through an underlying subtext: that the language of African-American culture is separate from that of the dominant culture that enslaved and oppressed African Americans for hundreds of years.

Theories of the development and meanings of the African-American vernacular have been fairly prevalent in recent decades, including perhaps the seminal text on the subject, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey (1987). The contributors to The Lyrics in African American Music are less theoretical in their approaches, presenting their findings as case studies of specific styles and eras. The contributors include such notable blues scholars as Paul Oliver, David Evans, Guido Van Rijn, and Luigi Monge, each one bringing intense and indepth research to the study of the blues. The emphasis on language reflects an interest in exploring how African-American communities have defined themselves and their relations to the dominant white culture in America.

The most significant essays compare African-American song texts across time and space. Evans's piece, "Traditional Blues Lyrics and Myths: Some Correspondences," benefits from the author's background in anthropology, as it probes the similarities between the characters and situations of the blues with those of more traditional mythological texts. Evans's conclusion is that blues singers and their songs function as myths, presenting stories that provide lessons and warnings about the world in a language codified to escape the attention of the dominant powers. Robert Springer makes a similar argument in his introductory essay, "Text, Context and Subtext in the Blues," repeating Angela Y. Davis's assertion that blues songs are often "metaphors about oppression" (16).

Another valuable essay, Earnest Lamb's "From Coon to Gangsta: The African American Identity Crisis Represented in Popular Music," provides a fascinating comparison between today's gangsta rap representations of black America with turn-of-the-century "coon songs." Both styles portray blacks as salacious, violent criminals, putting forth a negative stereotype that has nonetheless been reproduced by African Americans themselves to promote racial authenticity and commercial gain. Lamb's well-developed piece provides a worthwhile comparison between a forgotten genre and one of today's most popular. Paul Oliver, meanwhile, delivers a piece that shows connections between the blues and vaudeville.

Other essays in the collection offer interesting insights into blues and gospel lyrics and how they reveal attitudes about their worlds. Relations between blues musicians and the law are revealed in Chris Smith's "Reachin' Pete and Johnny Nab: The Police in Commercial Blues Recordings to 1943." How blues artists have felt about the economy is set forth in Guido Van Rijn's "The Dollar Has the Blues: Deflation and Inflation in African American Blues Songs." Luigi Monge looks at representations of blindness, while Robert Sacre shows the importance of mothers in African-American music. These pieces reveal the immense wealth of material available to the blues and gospel scholar, as names like Barbecue Bob, Cow Cow Davenport, Peg Leg Howell, and Rosa Henderson are brought back from the mists of the distant past.

It should be noted that this collection includes three pieces written in French that investigate the language and context of rap music, including one by Eric Gonzales that focuses on the work of Public Enemy. It is unfortunate that these articles, which would seem to be of broader interest, may be inaccessible to many with potential interest. Overall, this is an interesting volume, though the majority of articles will be of interest only to the true blues aficionado. But for those seeking a greater understanding of African-American culture or the use of language to define communities, these essays do provide insight into the prehistory of one of current mass culture's most popular phenomena.

Paul R. Kohl

Loras College, Dubuque, IA