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Jesse Jackson is recognized for "florid oratory work' and what some have called his "brilliant use of the intimate stage of television" (Washington Post, 1988, p. C1). In the convention hall on July 19th, 1988, commentator Tom Brokaw proclaimed Jackson to be "clearly the most gifted orator in the Democratic Party today" (NBC, 1988). The Wall Street Journal opined that Jackson would be a more memorable figure than presidential aspirants, Michael Dukakis or George Bush, and that "twenty years from now, we'll still be talking about the speech Jesse Jackson gives tonight" (1988, p. 32).
But in order to know what makes a Jackson speech memorable, effective and unique one must look beyond the layers of style, content and occasion to rhetorical form. The central task of this essay is to understand the shape and form of Jackson's rhetoric.
Unlike conventional analyses of musicians which use melody to aid the rhetorical impact of a message, I will consider Jackson's use of melodic structure a form of rhetorical support. As such, I argue that rhetorical logic may be reinforced by certain laws of music so as to make manifest a rhetorical form otherwise undiscerned.
An analysis of Jackson's rhetoric without regard to his "whole" person would grievously misevaluate his form (Sullivan, 1993). Therefore, I will begin by offering the context for Black ministerial oratory and Jackson's role therein. I will then develop a methodology from a cross section of emergent ideas represented in the literature. This critical tool will be used to assay Jackson's rhetorical form. Finally, I will draw conclusions about Jackson's form and the use of music as an aid to rhetorical form.
Black Ministerial Oratory
The musicality of Black Baptist rhetoric is obvious and acknowledged in the literature. Speech and music are symbiont in African-American culture. Audience participation itself is indicative of Black preacher oratory wherein "one becomes aware of the close relationship between speech and music" (Smith, 1970, p. 269). This relationship quite naturally forms an "oral-formulaic method" for explaining "residually oral composition which is decidedly different from literary composition" (Ong, 1982, p. 61).
Classifying Jackson as an oral composer is fitting and appropriate in this context, despite the fact that a major part of his audience is cathected to culture....