Natural born ease man?: Work, masculinity, and the itinerant black musician

Natural Born Ease Man explores how disparate ideas of what constitutes work governed constructions of masculinity by and about traveling black musicians between 1896 and 1941. This study argues that differing beliefs about the nature and value of work—what we might think of as cultural definitions of work—yielded understandings of masculinity that diverged along lines of race and class. As figures existing on the border between the formal and informal economies, black itinerants are ideal test cases through which to understand where various observers drew the boundaries of legitimate work and respectable manhood and how divides of race and class shaped those responses. Through comparison of the assumptions about work and manhood apparent in vagrancy laws, popular representations of black musicians in film and advertising, the writings of black activists W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, and in working-class black music itself, this study demonstrates not only that the meanings itinerant musicians attached to work were a crucial factor in their constructions of masculinity, but also that the Jim Crow-era saw black working-class musicians become central negative referents for the gendered work identities of white citizens and black activists. The result is a picture of masculine gender construction as an interactive undertaking in which a variety of cultural groups influenced and responded to one another rather than a linear process of oppression and reaction—a shift in perspective which reveals black itinerants as central actors rather than peripheral figures.;Emphasizing the contested nature of work, this study holds ramifications for the early 20th century transformation of masculinity, a shift from emphasis on economic productivity and moral discipline in favor of commodity consumption and physical pleasure. While this study does not contradict the transformation of masculinity, by focusing on figures whose occupation was both work and play and involved both physical discipline and bodily pleasure it does suggest that this historical narrative does not apply equally to all groups. Indeed, black musicians demonstrate how illusory gendered distinctions between production and consumption were in the first place.