Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018 Vol. 143, No. 1, 173–210, https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2018.1434352 Mastery and Masquerade in the Transatlantic Blues Revival ROSS COLE We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, — his debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. (Paul Laurence Dunbar)1 When Dunbar, the most celebrated African American poet of the Reconstruction era, published his terse commentary on the trauma of racism ‘We Wear the Mask’, he distilled an abiding facet of the relationship of black to white: whether slave or free, African Americans had been forced to perform a veneer of mirth veiling an inner self torn asunder. Indebted to and necessitated by artful deception and the tactics of trickery, this igurative disguise – manifest in expressive culture as well as the ‘myriad subtleties’ of vernacular language – is the mask of racial alterity. What Dunbar is implying is that black voices of both acquiescence and resistance were mediated by this process of masquerade. he meanings and histories of black music, in consequence, are complex and polysemous. As Charles Keil airmed in 1966, black music functions as a ‘projective test’ through which ‘white liberals, black militants, and others of varying pigmentation and persuasion hear in the blues essentially what they want to hear, ind in the blues ethos what they expect to ind’.2 Such insights serve as a perennial warning for scholars caught up in what Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman have called the ‘racial imagination’ – a network of unexamined assumptions that lead us to view music Email:
[email protected] I wish to thank Sam Barrett, Philip V.