Hard Histories in the JHU Levy Sheet Music Collection
Should we show visitors how popular culture promoted racism?
Visitors to the JHU George Peabody Library will discover how racism runs through our own archiveal collections in a new exhibition, “Grace Notes in American History: 200 Years of Song From the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection.” News coverage has largely fixed on one piece — titled “Mr. Po” signed by “EA Poe”. Still, at Hard Histories we were drawn to the show’s coda which introduces the “Difficult History in the Levy Collection.” The exhibit explains how sheet music supported “nefarious ideologies, including the movement for White supremacy” and how the Levy collection preserved “songs from the dark corners of US history so students and scholars could confront them.”
This coda to the exhibition leads to a question: Should racist sheet music be exhibited alongside examples that promote “a catchy tune,” a “work of art,” or a “rallying cry for a protest movement?” In this show the answer is no: “These racist, sexist, and xenophobic songs in the collection do not deserve public display” even if they are crucial parts of US history. For visitors who want to better understand how American sheet music also promoted racism, there is a discrete digital exhibition located on an iPad kiosk that permits them to privately scroll these troubling materials.
There is of course more than one approach to engaging audiences about the history of racism. Curators, archivists, and public historians have long confronted the challenge of how to tell the history of American racism — how to show that history — in ways that do not exploit, sensationalize, invite crude spectatorship, or impose the harms of the past on exhibition visitors of the present.
Still, audiences can confront hard histories and perhaps they should. This was the view taken by Hard Histories director Martha Jones and her co-curator, Clayton Lewis, in the 2009 exhibition, “Reframing the Color Line: Race and the Visual Culture of the Atlantic World.” In that show, sheet music examples were shown to be among a broad range of popular vehicles for creating and promoting anti-Black racism. Yes, visitors encountered troubling images. And then they were encouraged to see the long life of those images in contemporary popular culture. Racism in visual culture is not only an artifact of the past, in this view. It is also an inheritance that persists in our own time.
The Clements Library also immersed visitors in the broader historical context out of which such images were produced — including this one from illustrator Edward Clay that introduced the racist caricature of “Jim Crow” that JHU’s “Grace Notes” declined to display. When it came to promoting racism in visual culture, Clay was an originator whose cruel, distorted renderings of Black Americans resonated for generations in popular culture. In this view, sheet music not only reflected the racism of its time. Sheet music publishers were inventors of racism who ensured that such ideas made their way into classrooms, parlors, and the everyday lives of white Americans.
At Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia aims to teach tolerance through objects of intolerance. With its start in the private collection of Ferris State sociology professor Davis Pilgram, today the museum includes 10,000 objects. The museum’s on-line exhibit takes a deep dive into a sheet music example, “Turkey in the Straw,” to explain its connection to a predecessor, the racist “Old Zip Coon.” Visitors can compare lyrics as well as images to understand how minstrelsy, the 19th century’s most popular form of entertainment, changed over time.
Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum also took up this challenge. In 2018, selections from the Jim Crow Museum filled its galleries in a show titled “Hateful Things.” Viewing the exhibit, Johns Hopkins Professor Nathan Connolly explained: “For many of the people who will view this exhibit, those images are not in the past…. There’s an ongoing struggle in America over black representation. That struggle has not ended.” To ensure that visitors understood the debate and the challenges to racist images, the Lewis Museum also hosted a companion exhibit, “Reclaiming Racist Stereotypes,” in which contemporary Black artists responded to the artifacts displayed in “Hateful Things.”
Be sure to visit “Grace Notes” at the Peabody Library. And, as the exhibition recommends, you can make your own inquiry into the Levy collection’s “difficult history.” You can use keywords to browse its 30,000 plus items and deepen your understand of this popular genre. Sheet music was an outlet for Black American creative expression, as evidenced by the many examples of music published by Black composers. A companion to that story is more difficult to tell. It is one about how sheet music — its images, its lyrics and its broad circulation— taught so many Americans the tenets of anti-Black racism. Such lessons are not lost on us even today.
— MSJ