Abstract:


In this talk, I present the beginnings of what I am theorizing as “Black musical tribute work,” a musical process of paying tribute to a Black musician, living or deceased, through musical performance. To accomplish this task, I engage specifically with the play of similarity and difference in covering the works of the artist to whom tribute is paid, especially the semiotic capacities of such musical activity. Here, I build on my previous work on "musical qualia of Blackness” (Gómez 2024) and musical metapragmatics of Blackness (Gómez 2026) to consider how attention to what linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein calls ethnometapragmatic indexicality and “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003), facilitates the musical process Black musicians paying tribute to one another through musical sound and practice. Finally, I argue that such tributes enable a kind of “metapragmatics of presence” (Nakassis 2017) for Black musicians and listeners.



To demonstrate this method, I look to the 2005 album, So Amazing: An All-star Tribute to Luther Vandross, as a case study. Vandross’s position as an understudied yet widely-beloved figure in Black musical history makes him, and the tribute work done for him, an ideal place to begin thinking through this process. While Vandross is my chosen example here, my hope is that this method will prove useful to a far wider range of artists, time periods, and genres in Black American musical history.