His foray into free & open forms comes later. One also must factor in three more speech communities with HT: 1) South-Central Los Angeles of the 1940s & 1950s 2) jazzspeak 3) Horace’s own personal idioms and argot and vernacular - (I always say Horace spoke haiku) - his own mannerisms which is a sub-genre unto itself! Los Angeles hipster talk.Īnd possibly a fourth dimension, one that linguist Peter Farb points out in his masterful book WORD PLAY (1974) that Black Americans participate/employ/”suffer” was his word, from a form of “linguistic schizophrenia, a sort of diglossia” bouncing between Standard English and Black.īut, let’s face it, Horace was a bebopper. Black English is a dialect with it’s own set of rules. ![]() The only verbal changes I made were removal of some of the intercalcations: “you know,” and “Uhmm,” and not many others, as some are more than vacant pauses, they relate to the sound system of American Speech patterns, Black or otherwise. His foundation was the intellectualism of the Charlie Parker generation. Also, Horace has used Black English his entire life, but I didn’t “correct” any of HT’s use of that dialect, and even though Horace spent the first 9 years of his life in Houston, he had none of that southern or Plantation Creole, an outgrowth of which was still around back then with Southern Blacks, but that wasn’t Horace. This is also two years post-hospitalization for his aneurysm stroke of summer 1978, and he’s almost fully recover’d, although, still formulating sentences, starting them over, and rebuilding them in segments. ![]() At the time I was Los Angeles correspondent for CODA, but, in an earlier transcript the editors decided against using it. In this interview, up to this time, Horace had never really been interviewed at length concerning his career (he’s 46, I’m 27) and between us we’re both learning how to conduct a formal interview. IT ALL INTER-RELATES - A talk with Horace Tapscott Horace Tapscott - J- photo by Mark Weber
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