Proposal: Methodology and Procedures

Entry

            I plan to find a host family that I might live with, who might help me enter some facet of the community in Paris where I might become more acquainted with Parisian-French culture.  Though I will do no formal interviews on French culture, I do expect the interactions and conversations I have to help me better understand the experiences of the expatriates I am studying.  Though I am aware that Parisian culture has changed in the last 100 years, given the length of time French culture has been developing, an hundred years will make little difference in the large scheme of culture, which has its roots in centuries of history.

            Furthermore, I hope to familiarize myself with the city, but particularly the parts of the city where African-American expatriates lived, worked, and socialized.  I hope to visit many areas in Paris with sufficient history and representation of French culture to help me gather a larger understanding of what the French value, and by association what many expatriates would have clung to as their own values.  I believe I will find these cultural insets within museums of art, history, monuments, churches and cathedrals, day-trips in and directly around Paris to important places.

            More specifically, I also plan to attend some of the most directly related areas where jazz and blues have been fostered in Paris, attend concerts, revues or small shows.  By making myself available to these activities, I hope to meet others who share these interests and might be willing to share their experiences and understanding of Jazz with me.

Informants

            I expect my informants to be musicians and writers of the period I study, and therefore will be reading and listening a lot, analyzing their work and my understanding of their work within their historical context.

            Though I don’t want to focus on contemporary Jazz and its modern expression in France, I will not turn down the opportunity to talk to others about jazz, soul, or blues, if they should want to.  In this way, I am sure my opinions and understanding will be altered by what is shared with me, but I do not plan on formal interviews.  If one should occur, or I find it necessary or beneficial, I will be explicit about the work and study I am doing, what part they play in it, and will most definitely share with them, if given the chance, the understanding they have helped me gain.

Sampling and Recruitment

            I will stick to those sources in American and French history and culture, and African-American music and/or literature.  Because my research focuses in history, few of those ‘sources’ will be living informants.  As such, conversations or interactions with living informants about these topics will either be informal and/or consented to.

            If interviews should be necessary or if they occur, I will have consent forms in French and English to help those informants be aware of my work, how they will influence it, giving them access to my final piece so they have an opportunity to be accurately and faithfully represented.  This is not the focus of my research, however, and so I do not expect it to be a time-intensive or significant part of my overall project.

Description of Method

            The methodology I will be using is primarily an American Studies methodology in which I will gather sources to help me with all four facets of the methodology: Textual Interpretation, Archive Building, Institutional Contextualization and Social Theory.  The intention of looking at all four facets of an event, a place, or an ‘artifact’ is particular to the American Studies field, as it is interdisciplinary in nature and seeks to regards facets of American culture more holistically than if one were to look at American culture through history, sociology, economics, or literary movements alone.

            Textual Interpretation will be gathered from autobiographies of the musicians and writers that lived in Paris and recorded their experiences in Paris.  It will include music recordings as well, and may include a close reading of certain areas of the city.  I will use theories of space and place to help me with this type of close reading.

            Archive Building will consist of everything I can get my hands on from an understanding of the city itself, and its history, African American history, but particularly the history of music and jazz, and the history of African Americans in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.  A lot of this will be history of people and places.  I will glean much of this information from books, but I plan to use the city itself as a guide, as I visit historical monuments, museums that can share particular insights on archeology, history, culture (art, music, etc.) and other influences the city has sustained or inspired.

            Institutional Contextualization will primarily focus on the institution of jazz and its contextualization within the time period, however once one tries to contextualize an institution with regards to a particular cultural artifact—i.e. a song, a painting, a particular building, or a wall of graffiti—its application differs.  As such, my use of this methodology will change in regards to particular artifacts or places.  I hope my understanding of jazz as an institution, particularly in France will be aided by my attendance to jazz concerts in Paris and a better understanding of how the French took in Jazz as their own during and after the 1920s.

            Last, Social Theory plays a big part in American Studies methodologies and the few I will focus on include race, transnational studies, and urban studies.  Again, much of this information will come from reading, however, I will also try to glean information from the culture of Paris that I observe as I become familiar and acquainted with the city, and the cultures that have contributed to its diversity and culture.  Much of this social theory, however, will be taking place within a better understanding of how African Americans were treated in America and a comparison of how they were treated in France.  Since I cannot interview those who experienced the move from America to France during this time, I will have to rely more on history and a strong ‘archive’ to supplement my understanding.
edited 3/6/12

un bonheur ordinaire, est-il possible?

Je sais que je ne comprendrai tous les chose.  Mais je peux essayer.

Elle me dit, qu'elle aimerait changer d'air

C'est vrai que par ici, les vies prennent la poussière

Elle me dit, qu'elle voudrait voir la mer

D'autres pays, un bonheur ordinaire

Elle me dit, qu'on pourrait se défaire

De ces utopies, qui rendent nos nuits amères

Elle me dit, ses doutes et ses colères

Comme aujourd'hui, lassée de toucher Terre

Même si notre histoire peine à s'écrire, j'ai le scénario

Même si l'on s'égare dans l'intro

J'ai, tu as tout ce qui me faut, j'ai tout ce qu'il te faut

Elle me dit, le pire et le meilleur

Le bleu et le gris, mes poches vide à toute heure

Elle me dit, que l'issue lui fait peur

Que je m'appuie sur trop d'apesenteur

"Elle Me Dit" - Ben L'oncle

God made this man for me.  A black, french, blues/soul chanteur.  Il n'y a rien de mieux.

I've been studying this song for a while now.  Je l'aime parce qu'elle lui disais "ses doutes et ses colères" mais il ne demande rien d'elle.  Within the first two lines he validates her doubts, her need for a change of scenery, "It's true, that here life gathers dust."  And with the rest of the song, he need not validate her, because you know he's listening, he respects her views, and is free to go along with them, because he believes she's right.  And why not?  For she has some beautiful ideas.  "She tells me, we could get rid of these utopias that make our nights bitter."  Une belle idée, n'est-ce pas?  Se défaire de ces utopies--les utopies qui n'existent pas--qui rendent les nuits amères.  Parce que c'est alors seulement qu'ils écrire leur propre scénario, et trouver "un bonheure ordinaire."

And I love her worries, her "doubts."  Tired of touching the ground.  Relying too much on weightlessness.  And he's going along with it.  Je l'aime parce qu'elle sait qui sait qu'elle peut lui dire ces choses, sans de jugement.  She's not holding anything back, you know?  And he, he's just telling us.

I think we fear that quite often--that when we tell others what we want out of something--life, maybe--that we will be judged for it.  I can't remember the last time I told anyone what I really wanted out of life, or why.  But the more no one asks, the less I care what my answer is.  The more I do what I can, what I want, without worrying that I'm pleasing anyone but myself, and God maybe.  I think that's an important part of this learning process.  That maybe it's not so much about the project I want to do but just being.  Finding that raison d'être as we would say the french would say.  Or maybe finding les raisons d'être pour les autres.

Isn't that what I really want? C'est la musique, non?  Pour tout le monde.  It's a big part of everything, I think.  And I take a long time to realize what its for.  Healing, maybe?  I'm just thinking now.  But what I mean to say, is that what I really want is to come back to the things that keep me sane.  Music.  Writing.  Curiosity.  Fairness.  Learning.  Exploration.  People.  And so maybe what I need to do is leave this "project" alone for a little while, and focus on what I want to get out of this experience, sans le projet.

"Feeling Bad for No Reason"

I know nothing about music apart from what I like.  I don't even think I could tell you what (and if there is anything) I don't like.  But lately I've been wondering maybe how I can be a little more specific in my work here, studying African-American expatriates in Paris and I've been giving some thought to what got me interested in African-American culture in the first place.

As a kid who grew up in Los Angeles I spent a good amount of my childhood in a car--in traffic.  You know, I'm sure my parents would report different, but I don't really remember minding, and as a child who grew up in a car--in traffic--my favorite pastime of traveling is still listening to music.  I would lie in the back of the van with my ear next to the car speaker while we were in bumper to bumper traffic listening to my dad's mix tapes and the oldies station.  I never got to choose what to listen to, and I don't think I ever expressed preference--except when I complained that the Classical music made my stomach hurt, which by the way is still the case, and my parents would change the radio station.  But there was one song in particular that was played often on KEARTH 101.1 which I have loved and never tired of.  "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye.  I cried if my father tried to change it.  Alas, when I had no knowledge of skin color, no understanding of race, no preference for one or the other, Marvin Gaye was my first love.

It was years later, probably High School when I found a Marvin Gaye album on my father's shelf and found this song again, and never let it go after that.  My family can vouch for how often Gaye's "What's Going On" album was played in our house that year.  I followed Marvin Gaye straight into the history of Motown, into the legacy that was black music.  It didn't take long to find Big Band from there, and Swing, and Jazz, and for a little while I lost myself in Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.  This, by the way, is a nice place to loose oneself.  But I soon returned to what really got me going.  Duke Ellington and Count Basie emerged.  Then, I continued to pry into the music of African-American culture.  And I was in love again with these voices.  Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, oh, Louis Armstrong, and then I found Fats Waller, Bessie Smith--and I just kept going. Robert Johnson, Josephine Baker.

My sister caught on to the whole thing.  She started listening to some Soul, to some Gospel, and so my family were plunged into the world of African-American music.  I started studying French, and found through a professor here at BYU Ben L'Oncle, a French-Blues singer who I fell in love with.  I came home and stopped listening to anything else, other than this soulful, bluesy stuff that was melancholy and imperfect.  And I was thinking, why is this something I can't let go of?  Why is this something that is so much a part of me that I can't say "I'm going to study African American expatriates" without saying, "You know?  Josephine Baker... Ada "Bricktop" Smith.  And what I want to want is to study the writers, and the intellectuals, but I think I'm going to have to admit to myself sometime that its the collision of France which has always appreciated the melancholic with old African American blues and jazz which has rarely had reason to be anything other than melancholic, that really gets me.

Maybe that gives me a place to start.  I've been wondering--why France?  What's the point in going there?  Who will I talk to?  What will I study?  I don't know anything about music, but could I?  Could I do something right by Marvin Gaye?  Pay  him back for this gift he's given me.  And keeps giving me.