Like CNN’s Don Lemon, Florence Price (1887-1953) did not have an uncle named Ned. Nor did she have an Uncle Joe.
I’ll explain that peculiar opening phrase later. For now, suffice it to say that Price did write a suite for piano solo that was originally titled Three Miniature Portraits of Uncle Joe and later retitled Three Miniature Portraits of Uncle Ned, before eventually being abbreviated and retitled yet again (“Two Photographs”). And that work, in its Ned iteration, has just now received its properly attributed world premiere, more than seventy years after Price penned it. At just over five minutes long, it’s a short piece – but a meaningful one. Its three movements portray Uncle Ned at ages seventeen, twenty-seven, and seventy; Price shows that the three portraits are of a single person by using the same thematic material in all three movements and transforming it according to Ned’s changing character as he progresses from jaunty youth to his confident twenties (beginning at 1’33”) and then to a slower, but wiser and more reflective, septuagenarian (beginning at 2’49”):
The credit for this superb rendition goes South Africa-born Jeanne-Minette Cilliers Richards, mastermind of the #SongsofComfort project that is introducing top-notch music videos of little-known works by Price and Margaret Bonds into the COVID- and Trump-traumatized world of 2020.
Some salient points of information:
First, this short suite actually has been performed in recent memory – but with the wrong attribution and in its earliest incarnation. That rendition was given by Marvin Mills (now at Morgan State University), and you can watch it here. The misattribution occurred because of a situation that is all too common as the musical world begins the slow and tedious process of coming to terms with the musical legacies of not only Price, but also another composer whose name has been remembered even as her presence in musical life has been marginalized – Margaret Bonds (1913-72). As is duly reported in any biographical material on these two extraordinary composers, the two knew each other well: Price stayed in the Bonds’s home for some time after her divorce; the two collaborated on several projects; and Price tutored Bonds in composition. Less well known is that on April 15, 1948 Bonds performed Three Miniature Portraits of Uncle Joe (i.e., the earliest version of the suite later revised as Uncle Ned) in the auditorium of Chicago’s Lincoln Center, in a program devoted exclusively to Price’s music.[1]
Second, the misattribution demonstrates why, to put it bluntly, philology matters – why it is important for musical scholars to have a grasp of the musical sources (manuscripts and, where applicable, publication and performance histories) for the works of the composers they study. And this in turn shows why it is important for those scholars and their performing and reading publics to know composers’ works holistically rather than selectively. For the Uncle Joe version of the eventual Uncle Ned suite survives in a holograph score in Price’s handwriting among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections in the Georgetown University Libraries (Washington, D.C.) That manuscript does not name an author, but it is in Price’s handwriting (which, to be fair, is similar to Bonds’s) and written on the same type of staff paper that Price used for most of her music after her move to Chicago in 1927-28. And its music is identical to that of an autograph that Price kept among her own papers – an autograph that was among the manuscripts that were found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009. The thousands of pages of music retrieved have been accessible to the public for more than a decade now. But even though that discovery has been widely publicized and discussed, Price scholars have continued to focus on the same handful of works that has been available since the 1980s – and as a result, have neither seen nor published nor discussed the Miniature Portraits. And so Price’s 1948 suite, once given a modern reading, was attributed to wrong composer. (The work is now available, with correct attribution, in a source-critical edition from G. Schirmer.)
A third point – one that I’ll talk about in a later post – is that Price eventually prepared a third revision of the Portraits. That final version includes only the first and third movements (i.e., those depicting the subject at ages seventeen and seventy) and is titled simply Two Photographs.
Most important, though, is the point that I started with. For the subject of Price’s suite is not any actual historical/biographical figure, but rather a racist stereotype – that of the “Tom caricature,” which, in the words of David Pilgrim, is “a smiling, wide-eyed, dark skinned server.”[2] This name attached to this stereotype changes (Uncle Tom, Uncle Joe, Uncle Ned – any monosyllabic male name would do), and it was memorialized in a notorious minstrel song with words and music by Stephen F. Foster (excerpted and edited for offensive language here):
And the importance of Price’s hitherto overlooked and misattributed suite is this: that in it Price does something that no racist stereotype ever does: she treats the “uncle” as a human – one whose character (represented in the theme and motives that recur in all movements) changes over time, one who has human emotions and stages of life – one, in a word, who ages. Price humanizes a subject that her own world, with its deeply embedded systemic racism and racist violence, worked mightily to dehumanize.
But not only her own world – for, as Pilgrim points out, the Tom [Ned] caricature persists. And that takes me back to my opening reference to CNN’s Don Lemon. In his podcast Silence Is Not an Option, Lemon chatted with his mother, Katherine Clark, about it. Clark noted (22’55”09”’): “What I didn't like is why we always had to be Uncle and Mammy in movies. We always had the name Uncle and Mammy. Uncle who? Who’s Mammy? I ain't none of your mammy. That bothered me. Yeah, very much so. It was like we were always played down in everything. I often wondered why we didn't have people of color or somebody that represented me.” When Lemon objected that “you still watched the movies even though there was a portrayal of black people like that,” Clark replied simply: “Well, I didn't have anything else to watch.”
That episode aired on June 25, 2020 – seventy-two years, two months, and ten days after Margaret Bonds publicly premiered Florence Price’s hitherto overlooked musical critique of the shameful racist stereotype of the smiling, submissive servant. Price – and Bonds – had the courage to defy the stereotype back in 1948.
Florence Price used her art to deliver a message in 1947-48 that is still relevant today, and Bonds publicly delivered that message in performing the Miniature Portraits. But publishers’ reticence to publish music by Black women effectively silenced Price’s message, and the latter-day musical world’s persistence in skimming across the surface of Price’s (and Bonds’s) output has made us complicit in that silencing, that erasure – even though, in principle, we detest it and protest it. We’ve turned a deaf ear to what Price tried to teach us in 1948.
When will we ever start to listen?
[1] See Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, ed. Guthrie P. Ramsey, jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 202-203. [2] David Pilgrim, “The Tom Caricature,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 2000, rev. 2012 (accessed 25 November 2020).
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