The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

That this country had a music—spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight—the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history—birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way—had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.