A Half-Jubilee: Twenty-Five Years of Multiracial Scholarship at the Journal of American Ethnic History

DAVID ROEDIGER

IN PERFORMING THE TITLE track from his arresting 1972 album Sail Away, the songwriter and singer Randy Newman could hardly do justice to the searing points that his own lyrics made regarding forced and free migrations. His peculiar delivery—by turns flat and jaunty, throaty and nasal, comic and merely odd—settled nowhere. It emphasized the theatricality of his efforts, and the fact that he was singing of an experience far from his own. The words themselves bespoke the utterly incommensurate content of American Dreaming stories of Europe-to-United States migration with those of the slave trade. Newman imagined a promoter on the coast of Africa, conjuring up a series of what students of immigration would call "push and pull" factors in order to lure volunteers aboard. These ranged from the absence of lions, jungles and the "mamba snake" to the presence of the "sweet watermelon" and the "buckwheat cake," the latter pair sardonically gesturing at centerpieces of antiblack racism. The barker in "Sail Away" also positively promised passage to a nation where "every man is free," rhyming that claim with "family," a supposedly sacrosanct realm in the new nation. Urging all to "Cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay," Newman repeated the refrain of the promoter's siren song: "Come along, little children, and sail away with me," in a way sure to recall slave songs of flight and freedom. But with so many crosscurrents present, his song was as likely to be heard as being in pursuit of the sensational as it was to achieve any deeply critical and ironic bite. Indeed it teetered, however boldly, on the edge of offensiveness.