The Gift of Laughter (1925)

American music writing: an unruly history

“…‘The smile that hovered above blood and tragedy’, W.E.B. Du Bois offered a tribute book (Rowland 1923); Jessie Fauset's brilliant New Negro chapter (Fauset 1925), ‘The Gift of Laughter’, resembled Ellen Willis later on Bob Dylan as the cartography of an icon's mask. In 1970, Ann Charters, a Beats scholar (her husband Sam wrote studies of Country Blues early and a biography of Lucy McKim Garrison late; their collaborative marriage is an untold history), published Nobody , the ‘story of a man neatly trapped by the prejudice and intolerance of his time’.…”