My first professional encounter with Toni Morrison came as a result of music. It was the early 2000s and I had just arrived at Princeton University as an assistant professor in English and African American Studies when I received a call from one of her assistants. “Professor Morrison would like it if you could please speak to her class next week,” said the assured voice on the other end of the line. “The topic is racist songs from the 19th century.” Someone must have told her about my research on blackface minstrelsy and now I was being summoned by the literary lioness, one of the greatest novelists to ever live (and my all-time hero), to string some words together about the ugly, violent history of anti-black song in America.
That day in her class, I tried to keep my palms dry when she, the regal one draped in a flowing gray caftan, leaned in to shake my hand. It was an intimate workshop, and I shared the floor with a lauded classical vocal group who sang wrenching selections from the antebellum archive. Our discussion flowed from a consideration of the corrosive, casual hate entangled in the white supremacist songbook of Stephen Foster and others, to the liberation folk of black abolitionist Henry “Box” Brown. When it was all over, Morrison gently cupped my face in her hands for just a moment, looked straight in my eyes, cracked a sly smile, and said, “Well, aren’t you a smart one.” I remember coming down with an acute case of awkward black girl-itis. Words failed me. I simply beamed.
I think about that encounter quite a bit. Though I’d been one of the lucky ones to hear her lecture for a semester (and read from her new novel Beloved) when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, visiting her Princeton class all those years ago first showed me that she wasn’t just an exquisite writer, singular in nature, but a profound philosopher of sound. As our paths continued to cross on occasion, Morrison became my foremost model for writing about music as black radical action. Beyond her indelible mastery with words, Toni Morrison was a remarkable thinker who encouraged a whole generation of critics and scholars to lean in to her deep, daring, and instructive focus on music as one of the most potent forms we have to dissect America’s racial complexities, and to affirm the prodigious expanse of black humanity. She was, in my mind, a rebel sister theorist of music. “I am interested in restoring the articularity of sound,” she once stated in an unpublished lecture, and she often made the case for music as an insurgent expression of black interiority. Toni Morrison remained committed to reminding us that black sound, the original punk rock, had been “historically regarded as illegal.” Yet this was the music that was always “reinventing the center” of American life.
It’s heartening to see, in light of her recent passing, how many have noted the stirring lyricism of her prose, how the sagacity of her characters’ speech often amounts to blues poetry, how the spiritual ethics of her plot arcs sing truths like gospel, how her experimental structures sometimes resemble that of bebop cutting sessions. Likewise, there have been tributes that celebrate her revolutionary spirit, or rightly liken her black feminist vision to that of our most iconic musicians. Hers was the literature of the multitudes, spun out of the traditions bequeathed to her by giants—from Zora Neale Hurston to William Faulkner, from Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin, from Lady Day to High Priestess Nina. An earnest reading of Morrison’s oeuvre can unearth endless examples of music, like the “singing women” who emerge at the close of Beloved, bringing comfort to the novel’s protagonist Sethe, exorcising the ghosts of slavery by using their voices.
Morrison’s sixth novel, 1992’s Jazz, is the regular go-to for referencing her musicality, but it’s also confounding to some because of its refusal to literalize the jazz experience in America. The unbearable whiteness of The Great Gatsby and La La Land obscures the rich history that Morrison’s narrative vividly illuminate. Her novel gifts us with more challenging theories about a music invented by black folks that responded to and helped to give birth to the modern era. Jazz lays out the philosophical profundities of black life, illuminating the ways that African Americans brilliantly and tenaciously played through the changes of Reconstruction and its end, Jim Crow segregation, domestic terror, and the shibboleths of American democracy. It remains my favorite work by Morrison, in part because it maps the myriad strategies that a dispossessed people, faced with being told that they were nobody, would nonetheless keep improvising and making themselves new, thereby “consenting to not being a single being,” as philosopher Fred Moten puts it.
Jazz is also the work that led me to listen more closely to the Morrison who was musical off the page, a multifaceted artist in her own right. Before that, as she noted in her 2007 foreword to Jazz, she was a black girl forever curious about the mysterious allure of the culture swirling all around the music. That forbidden world of her parents’ 1920s youth was the thing she was after when, as she describes it, she pried open her mother’s storage chest and discovered a “crepe dress… an evening purse, tiny jeweled with fringe…” All of that vivacity and glamour, that sensuality and energy that constituted African-American sonic lifeworlds had driven her to want to “raise the atmosphere, choose the palette, plumb the sounds of her [mother’s] young life, and convert it all into language as seductive, as glittery, as an evening purse tucked away in a trunk.”
Last summer, I pried open what was, for me, the equivalent of Morrison’s mother’s trunk: the trove of papers, notes, lectures, letters, unpublished writing, memorabilia, and photographs that the author had donated to Princeton’s Rare Books and Special Collections archive in 2014. As I was finishing writing a book about black feminist blues and jazz women’s alternative sounds, cultures, and intellectual life, this was a pilgrimage I felt I had to make. I needed to know what those adolescent years had been like for her growing up in Lorain, Ohio.
What I found were meditations on the preciousness of her childhood—and so much more about the music of her life that seemed to sit at the very core of her being. “I was surrounded by all kinds of music as a girl...” she said during her Opera America Keynote in 2005. “All the adults in my family, it seemed, could play instruments when they picked them up. None of them could read music, but all of them could hear music and then repeat it.” And while it was her mother who possessed all of the talent in this realm—“My mother sang opera, she sang sentimental Victorian songs, she sang arias from Carmen, she sang jazz, she sang blues, she sang what Ella Fitzgerald sang, and she sang ‘Ave Maria,’” she once told Lears—Morrison would circle back to the musical roots of her family on multiple occasions. She worked with composers to produce magisterial theater works and chamber pieces. She performed in the round with her luminary counterparts in music and dance. She surfed genres. “I wrote some so-called art songs, some jazz lyrics, even a spiritual…” she once said. Her collaborations ranged broadly, from Degga, a 1995 performance piece with bebop drummer Max Roach and experimental choreographer Bill T. Jones, to Desdemona, a feminist reimagining of Shakespeare mounted in 2011 alongside famed theater director Peter Sellars and Malian musician Rokia Traoré.
Classical music would prove a repeated draw, perhaps because of the scale and grandeur it conveys, perhaps because some of our most skillful black female vocalists have disturbed the whiteness of that universe and used their virtuosic powers to convey histories of sorrow and survival. The analogies between the groundbreaking achievements of opera singers like Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, and Denyce Graves and Morrison’s own in the literary sphere are obvious. Late in her career, as she assumed Nobel Prize-winning goddess status in the public mind, she undertook many ambitious joint projects in this world. She wrote song cycles for the sister divas: Honey and Rue, in collaboration with Andre Previn, for Battle; Sweet Talk and Spirit in the Well, in collaboration with Richard Danielpour, for Norman. The opera Margaret Garner, with music by Danielpour, a libretto by Morrison, and a star role for Graves, was based upon the real-life ordeal of the captive woman commemorated in the title, who endured “unspeakable things” in slavery and ultimately inspired the plot of Beloved. The lyrics from these works evoke Morrison’s trademark gravity. A song like “I Am Not Prey,” from Sweet Talk, is a vehement rejection of subjugation, the battle cry for black feminist definitions of humanity. “For here in this place I am not prey,” Morrison’s lyrics declare. It is a song to be sung, as the score notes, “slow and sustained in the manner of a spiritual.”
This is “black classical music,” rapturous, heart-rending, demanding, like each of her novels. Such was the term that one of Morrison’s heroes and fellow travelers—Nina Simone—had famously given to her own body of work. It seemed to sum up the capaciousness of her repertoire, the excellence of her formalistic precision, the magnitude of her artistic ambition manifest in her sound. No wonder that Simone gravitated to Morrison, seeking her out to assist with an autobiography. “Dear Toni,” she wrote to Morrison in a 1995 letter, “Women have to do it themselves (first). I’ve been depending on too many men!” She signed off “in the name of Lorraine Hansberry” to seal their solidarity.
At a 2004 celebration to mark the first anniversary of Simone’s passing at Carnegie Hall, Morrison remarked upon how, when she was asked to write about Simone, she “searched but found no adequate words… I was no help.” She explained:
Morrison’s own original music was often fierce and heavy, as one would expect it to be. The first song she remembered writing, “First,” focused on a young girl who is about to enter prostitution. “I wanted her language to be the language of a 13, 14-year-old: simple, poignant, but not syrupy,” she said. “I wanted the listener to share the notion of her doom as well as her juvenile desire.” Always preoccupied with the dreams of black girls and young women, Morrison seized upon music as the site of black girls’ imagination and radical alterity. She was laying down a version of serious girl-group heartbreak in what had to have been her own distinctly potent register. If only the Chantels, the Crystals, Diana and the Supremes had had a crack at that.
Morrison making music is a thing to marvel over, just as Morrison moving to music is an electrifying thing to behold—which is why the archival photos of Professor M. in motion have brought collective joy to the internet in recent years. It’s 1974 and you’re right there on the dancefloor with her. You wonder what she’s grooving to, in that spaghetti-strap top and hoop earrings and a perfect fro, mouth wide open. She is glorious and the glory looking up toward the heavens with one arm raised, as though she’s apprehending something off in the distant universe, the thing on the other side of all of our constrictions. In this moment she embodies a line from her draft notes for Jazz: “The music was not only inside her and for her; it was about her.” We are and will forever be all about her.
Daphne A. Brooks is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: Black Feminist Sound Cultures, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2020.
