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Music as Memory: Dr. Fredara Hadley on Music as Culture and W.E.B. Du Bois (Part 2)

• Rita Coburn • Season 1 • Episode 7

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🎙️ Episode 7 Show Notes

Episode Title: Music as Memory: Dr. Fredara Hadley on Music as Culture and W.E.B. Du Bois (Part 2)

Episode Summary

In Part 2 of this powerful conversation, Dr. Fredara Hadley returns to explore the deeper relationship between music, culture, and identity through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Together, we examine how Du Bois’ Northern upbringing shaped his understanding of Black music—and why genres like jazz, blues, and gospel were outside of his lived experience. From the legacy of blackface minstrelsy to the rise of racial uplift ideology, this episode challenges us to consider how context, geography, and history influence what we value as “culture.”

Dr. Hadley unpacks Du Bois’ evolving perspectives, and the complexity of labeling him as simply “elitist.” 

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

  • How Du Bois’ upbringing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, shaped his musical lens
  • The impact of blackface minstrelsy on perceptions of Black music
  • Du Bois’ critique of jazz and its cultural implications
  • The role of respectability politics and racial uplift ideology
  • The musical and intellectual contributions of Shirley Graham Du Bois
  • How Black music functions as memory, preservation, and cultural truth
  • Why we must avoid reducing historical figures to modern-day soundbites

Special Guest

Dr. Fredara Hadley – Ethnomusicologist, educator, and scholar of African American music and culture.

https://www.juilliard.edu/faculty/hadley-fredara 

Film Mentioned

American Masters
W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause premieres May 19, 2026

Resources / Links:

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Copyright:

Music “Do Ba” Courtesy of publisher CCW Worldwide with Christine Coburn Whack

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Rights: No known restrictions on publication

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014637057/

SPEAKER_01

I am the producer, director, and writer of W. E. B. Du Bois Rebel with a Cause, a PBS documentary that will air on American Masters PBS May 19th of this year, 2026. Please search for the YouTube trailer and share it today. We are here with our truth, our history, and our stories. There's not just the rewind, but there's let's go forward with Fradera Hadley. Our Fno musicologist from The Juilliard is back. This is a part two. Fradera, tell us about that.

SPEAKER_02

So I think when thinking about W.B. Du Bois and art and music specifically, we have to go back to the fact that he isn't from the South. He is from Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And so a lot of the music that become our early black popular music in the late 19th century, 20th century have their origin in the South. And so you can think about jazz, you can think about blues, gospel is born in Chicago, you know, born in Chicago in the 1930s, but through Mahalia Jackson and Thomas Dorsey, who move up from the South. That is not an experience that he has. He does not know these genres in their original context, if you will. And so what he does know and likely encounters before he gets to Fisk is blackface menstry, which is a caricature of these genres that have very rich and authentic cultural roots in parts of the country in which he does not live. So it's, we can't say for sure, but it wouldn't be impossible for him to already have kind of a negative connotation because what blackface menstress did is stood as an avatar of what black people were like for white people who did not know any black people, right? It sort of stoked this idea of fascination about who black people in the South were, what the South was, um, nostalgia for the old South. That is the propaganda that black-face menstrual sea is putting out into the world. And so after slavery ends, black artists participate in menstry because it is one of their main points of entry into the entertainment industry. So if he encounters that as well, it's understandable, especially not being from the South and having a kind of counterweight to that story, one might be repulsed from that, right? That's the world in which he comes of age and grows up. And then he comes to Fish University and he steps into a wider black world altogether. But the thing that these early Negro colleges are trying to do, they are often amplifying the notion that yes, the point of this education is to go back and serve your community, but also to elevate you, right, from the black masses and to refine you in very specific kinds of ways. And so for someone like W.B. Du Bois, who already doesn't have that lived experience of southern black musical community and touch points and all of that, I can understand how that pushes him further into an idea about, okay, how we show Black brilliance is by showing black brilliance through these arts that mean so much to the wider worlds, the wider worlds, right? Um, and so he is compelled by what the fish jubilee singers are able to do. Not only might that have been more um the music of the fish jubilee singers been more palatable, exciting, acceptable to white audiences, it also was probably easier for him to interpret and digest, given his own specific biography. So W.B. Du Bois, someone who is a self-proclaimed raceman and believes deeply in um advancing the race. All of this language that is associated with racial uplift, um, the thing that I always tell students is people don't know yet that that won't work. People don't know that yet. People really believe that demonstrating our mastery of Latin, of natural sciences, of romance languages, of literature, of all of these things will demonstrate to white people that yes, we are human too. We are capable too. They don't know yet that that actually is not the thing. And one of the things I think is so important about Du Bois is that in living for so long, he's not the same Du Bois. He does change, he does shift his views, he does change his mind. And I think that's really important. And so when people talk about Du Bois flippantly or glipply, they're like, oh, that's the talented tenth guy or whatever.

SPEAKER_01

They consider him an elitist. Yes. Talk about Du Bois' voice and what we might, we might dismiss him because of that.

SPEAKER_02

Um he his voice is a bit higher, um, and it does have a mid-Atlantic accent, which has a certain type of clip and cadence. Um and so if one's default is a southern accent or a type of southern accent, because there's mint there are many, um, it can sound really different to to the ear. And we can associate that with affectation, we can associate that with elitism, um, and then still kind of land in a place where, oh, this person is not black, right? Or or this person isn't um um associated with black community, and and those are inaccurate and dismissive uh claims to make. Um, you know, there are plenty of things to sort of pick up about Du Bois and consider and discuss and all of that. But I do think, especially when we're listening to voices from another time and era, sort of remembering that person's own biography. I remember someone talking about Sojourner Truth, and she, her first language is Dutch. And so we don't have any recordings of her voice, but she likely did not sound like a Southern, uh, a person who came out of slavery in the South, as we might imagine, because she was in the North and she spoke Dutch first. And so all of these um individual biographical notes really do matter when we're considering the whole of someone's perspective and someone's contribution.

SPEAKER_01

And yet, one of the reasons and one of the things that I learned with the documentary is not to reduce people to modern day sound bites. Right. That means that you are lazy. Yes. You dismiss them and you don't do the work. Because it's almost like if you read the paragraph before and the paragraph after, get out of 2026, try to go back to that time period, then you will find that the zeitgeist of that time was very different than where you're coming from. So when Du Bois hears music, and I can there were minstrel singers that um that died unhappy with the money that they made because they had to do a step and fetching and sing like a clown to get it. But it did get them out of a situation, so I don't place a judgment on that either. These are all human beings. So one of the interesting things about Du Bois is Du Bois does not like jazz. And when the Harlem Renaissance comes along, he doesn't feel that we have time for that type of music. He wants music that is gonna push the envelope for the advancement of people. So talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02

I think the evidence of Du Bois' disdain for jazz is in his own family when his daughter wants to marry James Lunsford, a Fisk man, but a jazz musician, he's like, absolutely not, right? He does not see that as a worthy pairing. Largely, even though Lunsford is educated at one of the finest Negro schools in the country, that's not enough to override the fact that and his school. His alma mater. Right. And his daughter's alma mater, it is still not enough to override his disdain for jazz. And he's not alone in this. So Elaine Locke, who we think of and associate with the Harlem Renaissance professor at Howard, um uh, you know, editor of The New Negro, he wrote uh very sharply about jazz. And and so, and I say this to say Du Bois is not alone. And he is elitist in a way, and we can say that without being dismissive of all of his efforts. He is elitist. He is, he does believe in the higher arts, right? He does believe that that closely mimics and aligns with uh what elite white people um sort of promote and how classical music is used in American society at the time. He does mirror that, but he also is a fan of and supports black composers like Samuel Colders Taylor, who are foundational for um helping to inspire black composers who would come later in the 1930s. Marian Anderson. Marian Anderson, a groundbreaking, incredible um opera singer, black opera singer out of Philadelphia. And so he is not on his own and sort of thinking that the way forward and and the vision of black excellence that will be most beneficial to the race, an element of that is meaning is the idea that it is successful at interfacing with white people. That is a part of it, right? Um, he focuses his energies on that because, and I go back to this, this idea of what the blues does for black people, what jazz does for black people, that is not in his wheelhouse. That is not an experience that he really actually understands. And so that allows him to easily be dismissive of it. And we can point that out and we can critique that rather than reducing him to, oh, well, I don't have to deal with Du Bois because he was only about respectability politics, and so he doesn't matter. That's that's a horrible mistake to make.

SPEAKER_01

Well, he also then marries Shirley Graham. And Shirley Graham Du Bois, before she even meets him uh the second time around, she meets him as a child uh because her father was an NAACP organizer. He stayed at their home. Um she's had a long history with him, which you find about out about in the film. But she is a composer and she uh composes and she's also a communist. So she's politically thinking at that time period, not communist to dismiss her, but the fact that there was a time in this society where capitalism wasn't assured. People thought uh communism might give everybody a piece of the pie, socialism might give everybody a piece of the pie. And we're still still struggling with is capitalism working for us. But the point here with music is that Shirley Graham does what type of music, and that is something that is respected by Du Bois.

SPEAKER_02

Shirley Graham Du Bois is a pianist. She attends conservatory, she attends Oberlin Conservatory, she teaches at what is in Morgan State College, she is in communication with folks and teaches briefly, I believe, at Howard. Um, she teaches at Tennessee State. And so she um she does recitals uh as a pianist. Um, and she writes an opera called Tom Tom, which is meant to be an epic that starts in pre-colonial West Africa, well, colonial Africa, um, kind of at the point of capture, and then comes to the United States, the antebellum south, and then travels ultimately to Harlem, um, and thinking about Marcus Scarvey and the flowering of jazz in Harlem. And so her compositional language really draws from romantic-era composers from Europe. She's literate in that, but she doesn't have exactly the same sort of dismissive attitude towards the music of black people writ large. And she finds ways to weave it into her artistry and it informs her and her art and sort of her trajectory because she also goes on later and works in Chicago as a part of the WPA, the in the Federal Theater Project.

SPEAKER_01

The Works Project Administration under Roosevelt.

SPEAKER_02

Yes. And so she is in touch with black communities artistically in ways that Du Bois is not, and specifically in music. In her master's thesis, she interviews uh three of the leading black composers of the decade, uh, William Dawson, uh, William Grant Still, and Florence Price, all of whom have some relationship with spirituals for sure, and varying views on black popular music. But part of the issue or the concern for her is still like this idea of preservation and elevation. So there aligns a bit there, even if her scope is wider and she does not see these music as unimportant, even if they aren't her wheelhouse. And so um what she brings to him on a uh many different levels is fascinating. But musically, and she is incredibly articulate in talking about um the musicological side of it, but also this impulse of why how the music carries our stories forward. And that is an appropriate medium for recounting our history. So unfortunately, her opera was never performed again after its premiere to 25,000 people in Cleveland, Ohio. But the lore is that she carried a manuscript of it, the score with her, um, and throughout the rest of her life, hoping to kind of return to it and bring it back to us.

SPEAKER_01

The music that we have is so important that it bears a little more study for everyone to understand how we get to the music we have today. And while Du Bois was not here for that, as he died in 1963 amid the music that carried a movement, uh, we start the film with We Shall Overcome, uh performed by the Morehouse Men's Choir, and it's performed in hums. That's how important our music is to us. W.E.B. Du Bois Family passed down from enslavement, and even across the waters a song Dobana Koba, and that is Wolof. And so we want to end with that. The music informs us that the music is deeper than we think, and inside of it we find another aspect of our truth, our history, and our story.