Title: Birmingham and the Voice of Al Hibbler

Abstract: Before the dreadful church bombing that killed four young girls and brought national attention to civil rights actions in Birmingham, a campaign for employment and desegregation had been underway. The blind vocalist, Al Hibbler, was the first celebrity to join in the protests, using his fame to draw attention to the struggle in Birmingham and to raise money for the protesters. In this paper I will consider a single artifact from that campaign, a tape recording of a “mass meeting” where Hibbler speaks and sings for the protesters. I argue that Hibbler’s idiosyncratic use of the voice presents a challenge to the orthodoxies of “voice studies.” Where voice studies has tended to emphasize the sound of the voice and the site of vocal enunciation over the linguistic meaning of vocal utterances—encouraging attention to the saying over the said or the uniqueness of vocal emission—Hibbler’s voice, and the complex ways that he employs it, functions like a litmus test by which the robustness or shortcomings of any theory of the voice can be measured. 

Brian Kane is Professor of Music and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. A scholar of jazz, philosophy of music, and sound studies, Kane is the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Theory in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014) and Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (Oxford, 2024). He heads the Yale’s Sound Studies Working Group and co-directs (with Prof. Daphne Brooks) the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group.