Riots, Rituals, and Ceremonials: The Multifunctionality of Rhythm and Blues and Soul as Generational Music in David Henderson's Early Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I study the multifunctional role of rhythm and blues and soul in the poetry of David Henderson as a continuation of Langston Hughes's use of music in “Ask Your Mama” (1961) and as an example of the Umbra group of poets' “multi/blk vision.” In Henderson's poetry, the music becomes a fluxional vernacular performance that can translate into all spheres of cultural and political activities. Soul and rhythm and blues –and free jazz –constitute the music of the generation of black artists who reconceptualized their work according to the political battles civil rights and Black Power activists fought in the streets. To this end, the essay is divided into three interrelated parts. I first argue that rhythm and blues is the music moment of a dramatic moment in black American history: it is the music black poets/activists often associated with political upheaval. I argue that Henderson's theorization of rhythm and blues as the generational sound of the black revolution both anticipates and echoes the prevalent definitions of the music of his contemporaries. I then contend that Henderson theorizes the music's ritualized performativity in terms of its potential for cultural reinscription and as postulation of “soulfulness,” an affirmation of “authentic” blackness that problematized definitions of black identity in the 1960s. Finally, I show how Henderson employs the music to memorialize African American leaders, who have given their lives for black civil rights and freedom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".