Adam Fairclough on Maurice O. Wallace’s *King’s Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.*

It is a truth universally acknowledged that reading the texts of Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons, and listening to recordings of said orations, are very different experiences.  A corollary of that truth is that King’s power to inspire, mobilize, and lead Black Americans—and to some extent white Americans too–depended, overwhelmingly, upon the spoken rather than the written word.  These facts have presented a double challenge for King scholars.  The first and most obvious is that the latter have struggled to analyze and describe, on the printed page, the sound of King’s oratory.  Many (including this reviewer) made only a perfunctory attempt to do so, concentrating instead upon transcribed texts.  The preference of biographers and historians for written sources has reinforced this tendency.

The second challenge is the difficulty, for scholars raised outside its traditions, to appreciate the centrality of the Black church, and its distinctive aural expressions in the form of prayer, song and sermon, to King’s ability to communicate.  Early King scholarship emphasized his academic training in theology and philosophy, and the influence of what Keith Miller dismissively described as “Great White Thinkers.”  This imbalance has been partially redressed by studies of King’s sermons and preaching style by, among others, Richard Lischer and Miller himself.

In this original, challenging, and difficult book, Maurice O. Wallace has set himself the near impossible task of analyzing the “effectual sound” of King’s orations.  In so doing, he aims to “challenge the hegemony of dominant historical methods” that focus on written texts to the all-but-total exclusion of what is heard.  “King’s virtuosity,” he explains, “was not primarily oratorical but was, above all, auricular” (6).

In developing his argument Wallace ranges far and wide.  An entire chapter is devoted to the playing of a recording, during King’s funeral service, of his sermon “The Drum Major Instinct.”  Wallace then discusses the acoustics of Protestant church architecture, which gave priority to the pulpit and the organ, and goes into detail regarding the successive pipe organs that adorned Ebenezer Baptist Church.  King’s request to saxophonist Ben Branch, made shortly before his death, to play “Precious Lord Take My Hand” at a scheduled mass rally in Memphis, prompts an extended examination of that gospel song’s genesis, and of the life of its author, composer Thomas A. Dorsey.  Another chapter, lamenting the neglect of King’s mother, Alberta, by King biographers, asserts that “King’s remarkable, resonant preaching was owed extensively to women.” Wallace cites the examples of gospel singers Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin; of King’s wife, Coretta, a classically-trained vocalist; and of mother Alberta herself, who played the church organ.  This “countergenealogy of musical women” he argues, suggests that “the grain of King’s voice [inhered] in black mother-tones” (139).

In seeking to pin down the aural qualities of King’s preaching voice, Wallace refers to the rarely-cited “phono-photographic” experiments conducted during the 1930s by University of Iowa scholars Carl E. Seashore and Milton Metfessel.  Although tinged with racist assumptions, these studies recognized the distinctive characteristics of black speech and song—the “subtle embellishment[s] of grace-notes, turns and quavers . . . and intonations not represented by any musical term”—and used mechanical means to convert these sounds into frequency charts (214).

All this material is highly original, and it is consistently thought-provoking.  Whether it is convincing, however, is another matter.  The arguments are sometimes exaggerated or far-fetched.  For example, given the patriarchal character of the black Baptist church—all of the preachers who influenced King were men, as were all of his clerical colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—the notion that King’s preaching voice was shaped by “black mother-tones” strains credulity.  Other arguments are just plain weird: Wallace devotes several pages to photographs of King, likening the photographer’s viewfinder to the crosshairs of a rifle scope (“it seems King was already a dead man—silenced already—under the photojournalist’s gaze”), and complaining of “still photography’s repressive designs on speech and sound” (191).  The first point seems absurd, the second redundant–we can all agree that photographers capture images, not sound, and they should hardly be faulted for that.  Elsewhere, the author engages in long digressions whose relevance to the book’s argument is hard to infer.  An extended analysis of an episode from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, and of another episode from the same author’s posthumous Three Days Before the Shooting, has little to do with the subject at hand other than the fact that they both feature pipe organs.

An error of interpretation is evident in the author’s discussion of Strength to Love, a collection of King’s sermons first published in 1963.  Correctly emphasizing King’s practice of continually updating, adapting and improvising his sermons, Wallace incorrectly asserts that such vocal “blurring” of the printed text was a development that occurred after the publication of that anthology.  Similarly, he mistakenly asserts that “King’s subsequent turn to historical memoir and to the long essay in his two books, Why We Can’t Wait (1964) and Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967),” reflected “his own disappointment by his sermons’ failure to achieve resonance in print form” (109).  King had, in fact, published an historical memoir long before Strength to Love: his account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958).  In truth, Strength to Love was an outlier among King’ writings.  Here is what King wrote in the introduction to that book:

I have been rather reluctant to have a volume of sermons printed.  My misgivings have grown out of the fact that a sermon is not an essay to be read but a discourse to be heard. . . . Therefore a sermon is directed toward the listening ear rather than the reading eye.  While I have tried to rewrite these sermons for the eye, I am convinced that this venture could never be entirely successful.  So even as this volume goes to press, I have not altogether overcome my misgivings. (King, Strength to Love, 7-8)

Strangely—and this might account for his misreading of Strength to Love—Wallace neglects King’s speechmaking before 1963, and dates the beginning of King’s leadership to 1957 rather than 1955.  The error over dates may be a simple typo.  Still, when it comes to analyzing the power of King’s voice, the essential starting point is his electrifying speech to the mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, at the Holt Street Baptist Church, on December 5, 1955—his very first address as a civil rights leader.

This study certainly merits a place on the shelf of important King studies.  But it is not an easy read.  The prose is littered with baffling neologisms and convoluted sentences that confound understanding.  One example shall suffice.

Although gapped scales set him apart and into Afro-diasporic tradition, [Thomas A.] Dorsey also defied the orthodoxies of “real music” in other ways.  As if the visual resemblance of the printed music to “a five- or six-year-old child with a tooth missing” was not hint enough of the general critique of gospel toward the material, even political conceits of “real music (like diatonic propriety, formalist harmonics, the extravagance of dedicated performance space, or, indeed, the cost of limitless paper), Dorsey’s vague three-part notation (SAT), over against the written system’s four-part convention (SABT), also opposed Western pretensions with an alternate logic inhering consistently, even constitutively, by the sense of “something missing,” as Moten (I think) suggests—which is to say (I think) by the sense of partial refusal and, thus, a necessary improvisation (of unseen black notation) overwriting the (glaring whiteness of the) material space where paper wasn’t necessary. (104)

A persistent reader can just about infer what this means, but surely the thought could be expressed more lucidly.  It is ironic that a book devoted to King’s voice, whose message was always as clear as a bell, should be weighed down by such turgid, impenetrable writing.