King's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr

Maurice O. Wallace's study of Martin Luther King, Jr. traces his life through sonic innovations of Black modernity and modernism, demonstrating the acousmatic experience of sound in a counterpoint to visual technologies of the previous century—the entrapping frame of the photograph and its viewer—and its afterlives in our twenty-first century. While there are certainly studies of the rhetorics of Black sermons, and especially of King's most well-known speeches, there are no previous, sustained discussions of King's use of modern technologies (inclusive of venue, amplification, and recording) as a means of developing and advancing his liberation discourse. Drawing together theoretical approaches from R. Murray Schafer, French deconstruction, and the still-emerging field of Black sound studies, Wallace's work provides a transformative view of a twentieth-century Black modernism that sounds from even the photographs of the era. Wallace's nuanced discussion of these aspects intervenes in conventional discourses of religion, rhetoric, and Black cultural history that attach themselves to King (rightfully so) to tell a story of sonic cultures, twentieth-century Black experience, and the central role of what he calls “aural exorbitance.” King emerges from this study as a figure whose “absorbative instincts developed within the totality of sounds and silences animating black lifeworlds across modern time and space” (p. 7) and whose real-time practices demonstrate “the insufficiency of the normative grammars and protocols of historical practice to thoroughly apprehend the black witness to history in sound” (p. 6). His vibrato is but one such technique of “the complex encryption of black signs and signals” into the larger racialized soundscape of the twentieth-century United States.King's Vibrato spurns the celebrated and potentially reductive emphasis on performative aspects of the “I Have a Dream” speech, recognizing the fundamental quality of its “keynote sound”; it is Black audition that directs King's subtle alterations of it as he delivers the speech in varying forms in Detroit, Rocky Mount, and Washington, DC. The changes and improvisations are called for by the listening bodies gathered there, and the “greater sonic sensitivities” (p. 2) not only of King's audience but of contemporary listeners in the academic and cultural discourse of biography, history and historiography, Black studies, and sound studies. Wallace's book makes use of the unfulfilled promise of a King sound archive. He aptly draws on scholarly innovations in contemporary Black studies, working from the sound archive of King's speeches that never came into being to provide a study attentive to such sounds. What emerges is a rumination on the ways that archives of Black experience continue to sound, even if not heard, and the ways in which speculative explorations may yield fuller expressions of seemingly familiar subjects than those offered by conventionally defined genres, such as biography and historiography.King's Vibrato should be read in tandem with other pathbreaking studies of Black cultural history and sound that trace the “shadow archive,” notably Daphne Brooks's Liner Notes for the Revolution and Farah Griffin's Harlem Nocturne. “It is not enough . . . to simply assert that the sonic quality of King's remarkable, resonant preaching was owed extensively to women,” writes Wallace (p. 139). The “deeply gendered cultural logics” define King's, and the cultural era's, “deeply resonant” sound. The “four women” discussed in King's Vibrato—the iconic Alberta King, Coretta King, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin—are represented by Wallace as mothers, mourners, gospel innovators, and witnesses who resist the overdetermination of “Black woman” as a historical, “signifying excess” in “the sociopolitical order of modernity” (p. 56).Ranging from an address of Black voicing as sign and signifier of insurgency and critique, to the exploitation of the architecture and instruments of the Protestant church, to gospel-blues innovations, Black expressivity, and a Black feminist genealogy of sound, King's Vibrato concludes with rumination on the potential deadliness of Black spectacle and the entrapping photographic frame made evident in King's time and in our own. Wallace attends to the expressions of grief and defiance following George Floyd's murder, a profound example of how Black imagination defies traditional historiography to sound protest in expressive, fungible forms. Fugitive movements away from potentially deadly epistemologies such as the photographic frame are bolstered by Wallace's hope of a “keener hearing” of “history in black,” one that is not performative but human.