The following is a guest post by Music Reference Specialist Morgan Davis.
In celebration of Black Music Month, the Music Division welcomed Dr. I. Augustus Durham as a featured speaker for Live! at the Library on June 5, 2025. His lecture, “Marvin Gaye: Melancholy and Genius in Black Culture and Media,” explored the influence of creators, such as George & Ira Gershwin, Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, on music from the crime thriller “Trouble Man” scored by Marvin Gaye. While perhaps not a novel concept at first blush, Durham’s deftly interdisciplinary approach towards grounding the influence of these creators in the realm of Black melancholy and genius offered the audience a new and insightful way to consume and interact with Black creativity. Durham’s work challenges long held racial and gendered notions of genius by charting it through the evolution of the Black feminine maternal in the production and cultivation of genius.
Durham’s lecture was based on his book “Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius,” which draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, gender and Black studies. In addition to Gaye, Durham’s book explores the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Octavia E. Butler and Kendrick Lamar. Ultimately, Durham’s work describes a unique brand of melancholy through a lens of blackness. The lecture invited the audience to engage with Gaye’s work through a perspective that accounts for the psychology behind the societal pressures and abusive familial dynamics that impacted Gaye’s creative output and process.
Following the lecture, Durham joined Music Reference Specialist Morgan Davis in conversation. Their conversation delved into a few of the denser, lesser-known concepts discussed during the lecture, such as “ghostolalia” – a portmanteau of “ghost” and “glossolalia,” an abstract concept that suggests the ability of creators to commune with or call out to the spiritual realm through their creative output. The conversation included commentary regarding the operatic influences of Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now” from “Porgy and Bess” and the inspiration behind Durham’s book.
Those in attendance were treated to a display of treasures from the Music Division curated by Davis. Highlights from the display included a program inscribed by Marian Anderson from her 1939 Lincoln Memorial Concert (Coolidge Foundation Collection), holograph manuscript sketches of “My Man’s Gone Now” and “Lonely Boy” from “Porgy and Bess” (George and Ira Gershwin Collection), the latter of which was cut from the original production due to timing concerns, and published copyright deposits from the film score for “Trouble Man.”
Durham’s work centers the legacies of some of the most well-known Black creators with a uniquely multifaceted approach that comes with a few prerequisites: a willingness to actively suspend preconceived notions about the intersections of blackness and media, an unlearning of the application of Euro/Anglo-centric psychoanalytic models of engaging with (or ignoring) blackness and non-whiteness, and perhaps most readily tangible, a functional knowledge of the evolution of gender and Black studies. When asked about his intended audience and recommendations for introductory texts for those who wish to build context and further engage with his work (see below for his list of suggested readings), Durham offered the following response.
“…, even as a scholar, much of [my] work involves unlearning how I have been taught to read and [,] also who gets a certain kind of regard disciplinarily and otherwise. Nevertheless, I think the audience for my book is anyone who is curious about people they would call “heroes” and are open to alternative readings of them in the cause of sharing and producing knowledge. As I shared [during our conversation] …, the work is dense, but I want to encourage the reader that it is dense for me too; by that I mean, I am sitting with these figures on the journey of the book such that it is an expedition we take together. In these ways, I want to afford to these people’s lives a level of rigor often unmet with for black thought and provide a fresh perspective on people and subjects we purport to know very well. While I admit that the language and concepts are weighty, there is a payoff which is a perfect segue to what readers should grasp ahead of opening the text: at base, a question or idea I sit with in the work, perhaps in the abstract, is . . . you know how people often say the best works of artists comes out of the hardest circumstances? I am wrestling with how black people create out of their sadness. So again, a curious reader who wonders how genius emerges across various time frames feels like a good precursor to engaging ‘Stay Black and Die.’”
Dr. Durham’s Recommended Reading and Listening
- “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” by Roberta Flack
- “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans” by Claudia Tate
- Psychiatry Comes to Harlem by Richard Wright