In the nineteen-twenties, the auto magnate Henry Ford started proselytizing (successfully) for a square-dancing revival precisely because the music that accompanied it was not black. It involves not his reputation but that of the music he played, with which he became literally synonymous-more than one generation of Southerners would refer to popular dance music simply as “old Frank Johnson music.” And yet, in the course of the twentieth century, the cluster of styles in which Johnson specialized––namely, string band, square dance, hoedown––came to be associated with the folk music of the white South and even, by a bizarre warping of American cultural memory, with white racial purity. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered.Ī final explanation for Johnson’s absence from the historical record may be the most significant. In 1898, a racial massacre in Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been among the most important black towns in the country for more than a century. There is also the racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern one on some unrecorded tour and turned away. There was also a doppelgänger for scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions published. It may have been impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum slave-holding South that Johnson had.
#Meaning of folk tune dona dona dona skin#
One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. And yet, after excavating the records of his career-from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters-and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival. Never mind a Wikipedia page-he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was.
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