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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
"blues is black music"
"blues is black music"
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Shaganappi
66 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:14 AM
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But per Frank's comment per "…the black blues performer always leaves me feeling like I witnessed the real deal.", that says a lot … I have to admit I usually feel the same deep down if I am honest with myself. Which evidences that we often cannot totally shake biases except on an intellectual basis.
But overall, culture is a killer (often literally) IMO therefore I tend to discourage racial pride-type stuff (either white or black). In fact, pride overall is generally misplaced. Just because someone of your race did a great thing, that should not give anyone else of a similar race any reason to revel in it.
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bloozefish
142 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:26 AM
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jbone writes about a phenomenon that some of us can relate to. There are white folks who, because of circumstance and surroundings, have become what has been referred to as being "culturally blackened." This includes feeling excluded by mainstream society. Early poverty certainly contributes, as both jbone and I can attest. So does holding cultural values different from the local norm.
I'm a white southern male with a rural early background. I also learned early about the nastiness of racial oppression surrounding me. My heroes at age 13 were the Freedom Riders, mostly white college students who went into the Deep South to help reform the Jim Crow election laws. This passion has informed my entire life.
This certainly set me apart from most of my contemporaries. At a bit later age I was what has been called a hippy. I had old white men scream at me to get out of a grocery store, that I didn't belong with decent folks. I wasn't allowed to use restrooms in gas stations...they were suddenly "out of service." I was watched carefully in stores because I was "obviously" a thief.
I have no idea if experiencing this type of discrimination contributed to my love of blues. I found that some of the lyrics resonated powerfully. Maybe I just liked the groove.
This doesn't answer the original question, but maybe sharing a personal story may contribute something of value. Love this forum!
James Turner
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Slimharp
73 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:32 AM
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I saw Butterfield in 67 & 68. What that band did was off the hook. Butterfield at the time was one of the greatest ( IMHO ) and Bloomfield played some of the finest blues I have ever heard in my life - to this day. It never crossed my mind what color they were, it was about the notes.
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kudzurunner
4434 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:33 AM
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I don't disagree, up to a point, with the last few posters vis a vis the "real thing" idea. But I think that the "real thing" idea is a very tricky thing. Is this the real thing, for example? It's a video by John Lee Hooker, Jr.:
Hooker, Jr. is the son of the great one. I love his songwriting to death. When he played Oxford, he had no idea where the Delta was relative to where he was. (It was 60 miles due West.)
Is this real? Tab is a French-inflected white American:
Here's one of my current favorites. This is real blues. But you have to be willing to have the same expansive definition of the blues that...that....well, that African American audiences have had for many years, and that the soul-blues videos I posted earlier clearly exemplify. Bonamassa has a great, deep song here; he has a bluesman's voice and he's a dazzling, original blues stylist. "...I'll play you the best damn blues."
It all depends what you want from the music. If you want a powerful, original talent who treads on dangerous psychological material for the sake of working some kind of healing spell--well, Bonamassa does that to me, here.
Is Michael Hill "real"? I think so. But I know that some here don't like his post-Hendrix guitarism:
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kudzurunner
4435 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:53 AM
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We live in a remarkable moment of stock-taking for the blues. B. B. King and Buddy Guy won't be around for ever. The world is about to discover the wonderful music of Leo "Bud" Welch, an 82 year old former logger from Mississippi whose debut, SABOUGLA VOICES, will be out in a few weeks. But there aren't many 82-year old Mississippi bluesmen left, and there are a whole lot of incoming players in our current multicultural stew--including guys like Aki Kumar, naturalized immigrants who clearly play, and sing, the hell out of the blues.
What comes next? One way of negotiating that is to get the fullest, most nuanced possible sense of what has actually come before.
There's absolutely no question that blues was, between 1920 and 1960, a hugely popular music with black audiences across America. There's no question that whites, for all that, were singing, playing, purchasing, and dancing to the blues, both live and recorded, during that entire period. The Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B" was a blues, and a huge hit:
Something changed between 1960 and 1970: the blues, first real country blues and then real Chicago/electric blues, got hugely popular with white audiences in the US and the UK. By 1960, country blues had a very small (but real) black audience. (Cephas and Wiggins played house parties with that kind of music up into the early 1980s. It never went away. But it wasn't commercially popular.) And black urban blues was suddenly much less popular among black audiences than soul music.
In any case, there was a long background, chronologically speaking, to the emergence of a mass white blues audience in the 1960s. We're all living in the aftermath of that decade, regardless. And we're trying to figure out where we are and how we got here.
If blues is black music--and there's no question that the VOCABULARY of traditional blues is black language through and through--then how can a guy like Hook Herrera or a band like Indigenous make claims on the music from a Native American perspective? Certainly the language of crawling kingsnakes and don't shake my peaches if you don't want my tree aren't native to Native peoples. But of course the music opens itself to all sorts of claims. Sometimes those claims are based on ethnic experience and the pain of being subordinate individuals and peoples in white-dominated nations. But in the case of the Russians described in Michael Urban's study of post-Soviet Russia, RUSSIA GETS THE BLUES, people glommed onto the blues because their Communist world was falling apart. B. B. King's example galvanized Russians into creating a whole blues-soaked underworld of mutual fellowship, a kind of underground band culture.
My principal objection to a statement like "Blues is Black music" is that seeks, at heart, to shut down a conversation rather than have a conversation. It's a possessive claim, and a prescriptive one, rather than one that seeks to open up the table so that we can talk about how blues music actually functions in the contemporary world. It also gets in the way of the needed historical investigation. Simplifications are myths, which is to say that when you actually start poking around in the evidence, surprising and unexpected things often start to show up.
We live in a very interesting time. We need more conversation, not less.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 12, 2013 11:01 AM
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atty1chgo
792 posts
Dec 12, 2013
10:59 AM
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Adam, when you get a chance, could you post a reading list that might encompass a lot of the themes being explored here? Thanks.
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kudzurunner
4436 posts
Dec 12, 2013
11:08 AM
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On the individual pages on which my Blues Talk videos are posted, I've got lots of links and suggestions for further reading. Here's the page for Blues Talk 1:
http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/blues-talk-1.html
Actually, the 12th and final video has some good links:
http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/blues-talk-12.html
I'd encourage folks who haven't dipped their toes into Blues Talk to take a look:
http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/blues-talk.html
If you only have time to watch two videos, watch the first and the last. They do the best job of evoking the confused, interesting place in which the contemporary blues world actually finds itself. The others fill in the history, culture, and literature.
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rosco1
30 posts
Dec 12, 2013
5:49 PM
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"It has been agreed within the jazz community that jazz is black music.
Jazz was born out of blues, so what does that make blues music? methinks black music."
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The Iceman "
Yes, and Opera is white European music, black or brown people can not perform it as authentically as Italians and Germans. (for the sarcasm impaired-this is)
Last Edited by rosco1 on Dec 13, 2013 4:59 AM
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Frank
3471 posts
Dec 12, 2013
6:40 PM
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Again - this is my subjective view from shows that I have seen...I have seen white blues artists that were outstanding in everyway and I was thoroughly entertained and blessed to witness their awesome performance...But when I experience a black blues artist, for me there is a sense that I'm not being bullshitted ...It is difficult for me to describe - but, for me - there is a difference in how the music is delivered...It's a different experience for me, strange but true :)
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Hondo
261 posts
Dec 13, 2013
5:21 AM
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This is what has people like Sugar Blue pissed off IMHO
Walterharp-
Blues was MOSTLY black music
now blues is MOSTLY middle aged white guy music, in the US and Europe at least.
I just went to the Memphis blues awards photos.
Performers 4 white women, 3 black women, 10 black men, 22 white men.. mostly not very young people. The one crowd shot had over a hundred people in it only a few were obviously not white... maybe the wrong venue, but I get the feeling that is a pretty good representation of who is interested across the US, maybe skewed toward people who have money to travel though
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Hondo
262 posts
Dec 13, 2013
5:30 AM
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And I've never seen Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard telling people to WIPE THEIR FEET and SHOW your respect before you come in THEIR HOUSE and then high 5'ing like Sugar Blue and the White dude did in that panel video. Being someone who grew up during integration and teaching my children to judge ALL people by their character, that kind of thing really pisses me off. He may can play better than me but I am far more color blind than him, which is what I thought was a main objective.
Last Edited by Hondo on Dec 13, 2013 1:46 PM
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The Iceman
1328 posts
Dec 13, 2013
6:51 AM
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re: comment by Rosco1.
It isn't about who can perform the music authentically now.
It is about where the music originated...at least that is where I am coming from w/my comments.
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The Iceman
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Shaganappi
67 posts
Dec 13, 2013
9:33 AM
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A high five was over the top IMO. Do hope there were some regrets per that moment although it is not obvious if so. Again, it appears that racial pride, ego and the need to be heard (publicity?) took precedence over common sense. Toss culture to get a better world.
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kudzurunner
4437 posts
Dec 13, 2013
12:31 PM
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Iceman:
It all depends on what you mean by originated. The song "Dixie," for example, was written by Dan Emmett, a white Ohioan, and first performed by white actors in blackface on a New York stage in 1859. It's "northern culture," in that sense. Then again, the lyrics are in black southern dialect and the singer of the song is a black slave who "wishes" he was "in Dixie." Is it a northern or southern song, at that point? In any case, we all know what happens: the South, about to break away from the Union, embraces the song as a kind of national anthem, a source of morale and Southern self-identification during their long fight--and the song is embraced down here to this day. Yet scholars tell us that it's possible that Emmett got the song from a black man in his Ohio hometown who got the song from his slave-mother. So is it a white song or a black song? A northern song or a southern song? It's certainly gone on to become a white southern anthem, and a controversial one, regardless, and the question of where it originated is, in many folks' minds, not nearly as important as the history that it accumulated in the 150 years since it was first performed.
Most people, when they talk about where the blues originate, are talking myth rather than fact. They talk about the blues being "born in the Delta," for example. They talk about the blues being born "out of the suffering and the strivings of the oppressed Negro people." Heck, I wrote a book in which I did my damndest to prove that the blues were in some way a response to the efflorescence of spectacle lynching in the South in the 1890s. And there is, indeed, some evidence for that claim.
But there's also plenty of evidence that white people had a hand in the creation of blues from the very beginning. Much of that evidence is contained in a book called Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850-1920, by Peter C. Muir:
http://longlostblues.com/about/
Muir's book isn't nearly as well known as it should be. What he does is prove is that by 1920--the year that the first official race record, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (black female singer with all-black band), was released, more than 450 sheet music compositions with the word "blues" in the title had been published. Many of them were by white composers. Some of them had already been recorded by white performers. Not all of them were 12-bar blues, but that's not really the point. The point is that white folks were there, writing, singing, and recording blues, from the very dawn of the form's existence AS blues. They had a significant investment in the form. Blues music MEANT something to white people, very early on--and not just as consumers of "black music."
This doesn't mean that there were nearly as many white guitarists roaming the late 19th century and early 20th century South singing blues as there were black guitarists doing the same thing. Although, if you read Karl Hagstrom Miller's SEGREGATING SOUND, you realize that white and black guitarists share a whole lot more material back then than most people realize. But then the recording industry came in and said "If you're white, you will be recording hillbilly and old-time music. If you're black, you'll be permitted to record blues." The melting pot got segregated. Blues was sold to black people, thanks to the racism of the recording industry. And when white folks like Jimmie Rogers, the "singing brakeman," did his blue yodel and sang "T for Texas, T for Tennessee," doing a memorable 12-bar blues in his own distinctive fashion--well, it wasn't called a blues. It was called hillbilly music. But is was blues--and that blue yodel influenced a lot of black blues musicians. Rogers is the one white bluesman whom black blues autobiographers all remember with admiration. Howlin' Wolf's falsetto howl comes from Rogers blue yodel.
I'm an anti-fundamentalist. I like the big story, but I've also been chastened enough times by my own generalizations that I've learned to dig down into the granular, close-focus stuff.
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The Iceman
1329 posts
Dec 13, 2013
1:35 PM
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Kudzu..
good info. lotsa stuff of which I was unaware.
Seems like this is an academia discussion and I understand those in academia inhabit a different world than do I.
I assume we are talking about the origin of blues a/la academia and not concerned with styles? (Piedmont, Delta, Chicago, etc.)
Can it be argued that these styles were created by black culture and personalities?
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The Iceman
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harpfox
2 posts
Dec 13, 2013
1:47 PM
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blues belongs to anyone who believes in the blues...it just so happens to be that black people experience(d) blues. so they can easily believe in it..therefore can inject REAL feelings and sound more convincing..
when you read blues off tabs, you definitely don't understand it. when you learn blues as a subject, you don't get the intangible feelings and therefore are less convincing..
nothing to do with race, but belief.
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smwoerner
231 posts
Dec 13, 2013
4:27 PM
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How about this, if blues is a black man’s music then basketball is a white man’s game. In the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s the majority of blues players were black and the majority of basketball players were white.
Blues music is motivational and helps people deal with tough economic and social conditions. It helped people working and in unfamiliar circumstances stay motivated.
Basketball was developed to help urban school kids stay in shape during the winter. It helped kids stay healthy and out of trouble.
In the heyday of the blues, the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, it was black people in the southern US who believe that opportunities have been taken away from them and given to other based on race and gender, people that are struggling to fit into society and feel uncomfortable about the future. At the same time white kids in urban areas were the ones that needed structured activities for an outlet.
Now in heyday of professional basketball it is poorer intercity youth who most need structured physical activities to help them deal with their living conditions. It middle class white folks who believe that opportunities have been taken away from them and given to other based on race and gender, that feel that they are struggling to keep up with where society says they should be and feel uncomfortable about the future.
When cities were primarily white and often both parents worked and needed an outlet for their kids, basketball fit the bill. Black folks struggling out in the country had the blues.
Now that many of the cities are primarily black and the kids needed activities, basketball fits the bill. White folks struggling out in the suburbs have the blues.
So, who owns what?
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Purveyor of Optimized New and Refurbished Harmonicas.
scott@scottwoerner.com
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Frank
3491 posts
Dec 14, 2013
9:42 AM
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A great modern documentary would be...Gathering together 5 hardcore black bluesman and 5 hardcore white bluesman, 5 hardcore Spanish bluesman etc.
Get as many different ethnicity's of bluesmen together as possible in one room and film them swapping stories and playing their blues individually then with each other. What do you think -
Would that help us understand a little more about this great genre of music?
I'm going to this blues show that is coming to Pittsburgh and looks educational...Corey Harris, Guy Davis, Alvin Youngblood Hart
:)
True Blues:
Last Edited by Frank on Dec 14, 2013 10:17 AM
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JInx
686 posts
Dec 15, 2013
2:39 AM
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Pretty much after Page got down with the blue it was all over. I think it was Blilly Blind that said that.
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Sun, sun, sun
Burn, burn, burn
Soon, soon, soon
Moon, moon, moon
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kudzurunner
4440 posts
Dec 15, 2013
4:55 AM
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Gene: You're right when you claim that blacks didn't have a monopoly, so to speak, on servitude and suffering, but this is where a sense of proportion is required. By the 1820s, white indentured servitude was long gone. White men had the vote. Meanwhile, between 1820 and 1860, the Cotton Kingdom was in full flower; slavery--of blacks, not whites--was massively expanding. Blacks were being lead in chains from the depleted tobacco lands of Virginia down across the Appalachians into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. The slave pens of New Orleans were in full flower. Racism was rapidly being cranked up, thanks to the work of a range of scientists who measured "brain size," etc. When Emancipation comes during the Civil War, that doesn't make blacks equal to whites--although there are a couple of decades where black men can vote. Then in 1890, the southern states all begin stripping black men of the vote. Hard-core segregation gets put in place, and it last for the next 60 or 70 years.
Meanwhile, whites can vote and look down on blacks in every conceivable way, thanks to "separate but (un)equal." Or at least that's the case in the South--which is, of course, where the blues are evolving during precisely that extended period of segregtion.
So your point was....?
If people are interested in how poor whites were oppressed during the colonial period, I'd urge you to pick up Jim Goad's THE REDNECK MANIFESTO. But I'd also urge white folks, of whatever class, not to protest too loudly about the way they, too, have been mistreated. The one-two punch of slavery and segregation, including the one-drop rule, wrought havoc on black Americans and their striving for basic respect and citizenship in a way that even the trials of poor whites can't begin match. Hillbillies may have been mocked, but at least they could vote and drink water from the White water-fountain. They were never at the mercy of vagrancy laws and lynch law the way that blacks were. There really isn't any honest comparison that can be made. U.S. law and southern custom forcibly and directly impinged on the rights of all blacks for centuries.
But of course blues are, and were, always about more than social oppression. They were also about the fact that slavery was over and black folk were free to travel and hook up--which meant that relationships, now freely engaged in (as opposed to compelled, as during the slavery period), were also profoundly destabilizing. Freedom means being able to hook up with, share your joyful freedom with, anybody you want to. But if you're free to do that, so is the woman you've just hooked up with. And that causes pain. That gives a man, and a woman, the blues. That's the core argument made by Angela Davis in BLUES LEGACIES AND BLACK FEMINISM.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 15, 2013 4:59 AM
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aharpon
1 post
Dec 15, 2013
12:33 PM
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It's interesting how it's mostly just white folks who have academicised both blues music and blues harp. They've tried to describe and notate the latter in a white kind of "orchestral" way . There ain't no black players who do that . They realise the language of the blues is emotional and not notatable . They talk about "groove" . White players worry about perfect pitch ....perfect everything .....like they would if they were playing Mozart or Chopin. Thing is a lot of blues music ......and harp playing .....is raggedy.....like a wail of emotion and it's just got IT. I'm afraid for my money all the white "learning" and a deeply unhip Caucasian attitude to "box" things blues often kills the groove . And where are the black modern blues harpists? Not many around . Probably put off by all the white harp boffins!
Isn't great blues played by those who carry some weight....emotional weight.....sensitivity weight. If your ancestors were slaves followed by generations of the dirt poor....you're gonna be good to play good blues. Maybe too , if you're a white sensitive with emotional and musical insight .....and maybe carrying some personal pain and had an ear for the sexiness of great blues....you too might do a fair job that had groove.
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aharpon
2 posts
Dec 15, 2013
12:52 PM
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Blues as FAST FOOD!
Maybe some would say blues is black music because us white guys are purveying a cod blues? Blues was very quickly commercialized because people realized it had some "fast food" ,must have , merchandisable sexiness......as Adam describes above.
In shit fast food that means fat, carbohydrate , and sugar . It's what has made billions for Coke, McDonalds etc. In great cuisine the same elements are combined in inventive inspired ways by great chefs to create extraordinary dishes. But what most of us lowly white players do is make a feeble attempt at expressing generations of blueness using superficial "blues elements" .....and it's often a bit like fast food! A quick superficial hit with no balls to it.
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harpfox
11 posts
Dec 15, 2013
12:57 PM
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Blues belongs to whoever believes in it.
someone who learned blues as a subject will never be convincing at playing it. but someone who's experienced it can play it easily with variations that make sense.
for example: its very hard to mess up a beat on a song you grew up with..because its completely internalized.
you have the feeling.
blues today, apart from a few players is so domesticated. its hard to believe the artist, its not sincere.
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Honkin On Bobo
1173 posts
Dec 15, 2013
1:10 PM
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What is a "white harp boffin"?
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tmf714
2251 posts
Dec 15, 2013
1:20 PM
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"If your ancestors were slaves followed by generations of the dirt poor....you're gonna be good to play good blues."
Its statements like that that set race realtions back 400 years-as are most of the posts in this thread-including the title-
Last Edited by tmf714 on Dec 15, 2013 3:48 PM
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gene
1147 posts
Dec 15, 2013
3:26 PM
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Adam: “So your point was....?”
Me: My post was in response to Harpfox: “it just so happens to be that black people experience(d) blues. so they can easily believe in it..therefore can inject REAL feelings and sound more convincing.” Of course, I can’t know what was in his heart when he wrote that, but it certainly comes across sounding ignorant and/or dismissive of the suffering of others, and contemptuous.
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Adam: “You're right when you claim that blacks didn't have a monopoly, so to speak, on servitude and suffering, but this is where a sense of proportion is required. By the 1820s, white indentured servitude was long gone.”
Forgotten Slaves (FS)article: “Moreover, in the 18th century in Britain and America, the Industrial Revolution spawned the factory system whose first laborers were miserably oppressed White children as young as six years of age. They were locked in the factories for sixteen hours a day and mangled by the primitive machinery. Hands and arms were regularly ripped to pieces. Little girls often had their hair caught in the machinery and were scalped from their foreheads to the back of their necks.
“White Children wounded and crippled in the factories were turned out without compensation of any kind and left to die of their injuries. Children late to work or who fell asleep were beaten with iron bars. Lest we imagine these horrors were limited to only the early years of the Industrial Revolution, eight and ten year old White children throughout America were hard at work in miserable factories and mines as late as 1920.”
Me: 1920 extends into the creation-of-the-blues era. Did these white children and their parents not have “REAL” feelings that they could inject into the blues?
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gene
1149 posts
Dec 15, 2013
3:32 PM
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Adam: “Meanwhile, whites can vote and look down on blacks in every conceivable way”
FS: In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.
Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. "Oh," said the worker, "the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything."
Me: Did those people get a vote?
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Adam: “There really isn't any honest comparison that can be made. U.S. law and southern custom forcibly and directly impinged on the rights of all blacks for centuries.”
Me: I disagree that honest comparison can’t be made. As for U. S. law, you might find this interesting: “Anthony Johnson sued Robert Parker in the Northampton Court in 1654. In 1655, the court ruled that Anthony Johnson could hold John Casor indefinitely. The court gave judicial sanction for blacks to own slave of their own race. Thus Casor became the first permanent slave and Johnson the first slave owner.
Whites still could not legally hold a black servant as an indefinite slave until 1670. In that year, the colonial assembly passed legislation permitting free whites, blacks, and Indians the right to own blacks as slaves.”
That is from America’s First Slave Owner Was a Black Man
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Adam: “Freedom means being able to hook up with, share your joyful freedom with, anybody you want to. But if you're free to do that, so is the woman you've just hooked up with. And that causes pain.”
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gene
1150 posts
Dec 15, 2013
3:33 PM
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Me: This kind of blues occurs in ALL races (and many other species of the animal kingdom). Are these not “REAL” feelings that can be injected into blues?
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Adam: “But I'd also urge white folks, of whatever class, not to protest too loudly about the way they, too, have been mistreated.”
Me: We don’t, but why shouldn’t we? Are we supposed to go ‘round feeling guilty for what our ancestors did to blacks AND whites, while ignoring what some blacks have done to their own? Are we supposed to believe that ALL whites were oppressors and none were oppressed? Are we supposed to believe that ALL blacks were held slaves and none owned slaves? (I am, by the way, aware that MOST of the black slave owners “owned” black slaves for the benefit of those slaves, but that was not ALWAYS the case.)
Slavery isn’t a recent thing, as you all know. It goes way, way, way back. All peoples have ancestors that were slaves. The negative effects of a people (any people) being oppressed has always rippled down through the centuries, but how many of those peoples are still complaining about the sins of past centuries? One.
_____________________________________________________
BTW: The word “slave” comes from “Slav”, as in the European Slaves. Click.
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Conclusion:
All peoples have the right to sing the blues. (LOL! Conveniently ignoring the bloodline of the elite ruling class still FIRMLY in place, today, who have ALL OF US enslaved…But that’s a topic for a completely different website.)
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CWinter
83 posts
Dec 15, 2013
4:08 PM
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"THIS" issue again?
Goodbye Modern Blues Harmonica website. I used to love signing on to read the postings. Now, it just feels embarrassing.
Really, the race issue, again? Why does this crap always seem to be started by white people?
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gene
1151 posts
Dec 15, 2013
4:27 PM
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"Why does this crap always seem to be started by white people?"
I don't know that it is, in general, but I do know that on political discussion forums, by a vast majority of the times, the issue of race is initiated by black people.
It would be my uninformed guess that, all in all, it's pretty close to 50/50, and I wouldn't try to guess which way it might lean.
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kudzurunner
4443 posts
Dec 15, 2013
4:36 PM
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“According to the U.S. Census report in 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. Out of a population of 27 million whites only eight million lived in the South, and out of this population fewer than 385,000 owned slaves. In short, the total white population own about 1.4, while the southern white population own about 4.8 enslaved Africans.
On the other hand the black population in 1860 was 4.5 million, with about 500,000 living in the South. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. In New Orleans over 3,000 free blacks owned slaves, about 28 percent of the free Black population in the city.”
Gene, Gene. Where do I start? As Mark Twain once wrote, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This particular set of statistics has taken down many people; now it's taken down you.
385,000 white southerners did indeed own slaves in 1860, which is to say, 5% of white southerners owned slaves. They were the heads of household: white men. They had wives and children. 25% of white southerners lived in FAMILIES that owned slaves. That makes the situation look somewhat different, doesn't it?
And, as Walter Johnson shows in SOUL BY SOUL: LIFE INSIDE THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVE MARKET, many white southerners who didn't own slaves or live in slaveowning families spent a fair bit of time scheming about how to get their hands on--i.e., buy, own, and work--a black slave. The dream-life of the antebellum South in the four decades leading up to the Civil War revolved around cotton farming, which is to say around slaveholding.
Have you ever read Olmstead's THE COTTON KINGDOM? I've read it three times and taught it twice, all 600+ pages of it. Read it before you take one quote to represent the whole.
As for whether poor white children in the southern and northern textile mills had feelings that they could "inject into the blues": I'm sure they had such feelings, but please enlighten me: Which children-of-the-mills blues singers are you talking about? Is blues what they sang? In THE PRINCE OF FROGTOWN, Rick Bragg talks about his own "hybrid hillbilly" father, who did everything he could to avoid the wage-slavery of the mill village in Jacksonville, Alabama, but the folks in that town didn't listen to, or sing, much blues. They did, of course, like Hank Williams.
You lack the sense of proportion that I'm talking about. I don't particularly like the game of Whose Oppression Was Worse, but neither white southerners nor white northerners faced anything, in the post-Emancipation period, like the combined onslaught of lynching, disenfranchisement, and convict lease of the sort described by Douglas Blackmon in SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: THE RE-ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK AMERICANS FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR II. The girls of the Lowell mills were citizens. They weren't lynched. Bad as their lives might have been, they had certain rights.
I've never claimed that blues--and blues music in particular--can be reduced to the undeniable facts of oppression that striate the American historical landscape. But get real. Bragg is a good go-to source on this. He knows that the shame of the south was that his people, poor whites, had only one thing that they could feel good about: they were white and therefore better than blacks. That perverse race-hatred was something that William Alexander Percy and W. J. Cash both worked hard to understand. After all, both poor whites and poor blacks were poor: it was the plantation owners who were making all the money from cotton sharecropping.
I don't know who has a right to sing the blues. That's not the question, as I see it. The fact that people make that the question, in fact, is what I consider the problem.
In fact, I'll go further than that: "Who has a right to sing the blues?" is a stupid question. Two much more productive questions are "Who sings (and plays) the blues well--and what do you mean by 'well'?" and "What range of social functions do the blues....
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 15, 2013 4:51 PM
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kudzurunner
4444 posts
Dec 15, 2013
4:38 PM
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...actually serve in the contemporary world?" Those are interesting questions. The "rights" question is a diversion.
Actually, I need to add a few more questions that are probably more important than the two questions above:
§Who gets to tell the story of the blues, and what sort of institutional and financial power stands behind them?
§When people refer to "the real blues," as they frequently do, what do they mean?
§Since the shadow of Deep South slavery is far behind us and the shadow of Jim Crow has purportedly been vanquished--i.e., we live in a "color blind society"--is there any legitimate way in which "the blues," as a sense of racially-inflected oppression and subordination, still live on in contemporary America?
§If you answered "yes" the preceding question, is it possible that some of our blues-playing African American peers (Corey Harris, Sugar Blue, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Billy Branch) are speaking, when they speak about blues, from a different place, a different feeling-space, than you or I?
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Dec 15, 2013 4:50 PM
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gene
1152 posts
Dec 15, 2013
5:14 PM
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Aharpon has a good point. I guess whites DO intellectualize it too much, and that might have driven modern black blues harp players away, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t also have soul.
In Adams response to me, he mentioned something about bigotry being bolstered, in part, because of “the work of a range of scientists who measured ‘brain size,’ etc.” I know he meant “brain size” to be just be another one of the etceteras, so I did not consider “brain size” to specifically be of any pertinence to this topic. However, the point Aharpon brought up might well show that brain size actually is a factor. There are studies that show that there are, indeed, differences between the races. (Example)
But that certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the blues. We’re not robots.
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gene
1153 posts
Dec 15, 2013
6:45 PM
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I was skeptical of the stats, too. (I just copy/pasted that stuff, with links) I found a wide range of stats online, and recognized them to be dubious. Nonetheless, I’m trying to bring light to the illusion that just about all the white folk had slaves. Slaves were expensive to buy and had to be fed. Slaves were for the rich, those plantation owners….But this is straying off topic.
About that “poor white kids in the mills” thing, I couldn’t tell you who sang what! I have NO idea. But in your original posts, you discussed the cultural mix of the blues. These kids and their families had the blues…”REAL feelings” to inject.
“I've never claimed that blues--and blues music in particular--can be reduced to the undeniable facts of oppression…” I’m not sure what that paragraph’s about. I never denied that race-hatred wasn’t alive and well.
I’m with you on “Who has a right to sing the Blues?” is a stupid…(well, appalling, rather) question! I’ve been drawn to these discussions, before. … Not because I have a strong bias to MY answer (“Anybody does.), but because I find the question appalling. A “stupid” question? Well, in my OPINION, it is, but my opinion must be wrong…After all, look how much discussion it inspires! I prefer the questions you indicated: Social function, what people mean by “real blues’, etc. … Also, “What position should I play…?” Edit: Maybe it's that damned segregationist attitude of the question that draws me to these discussions. I want to chime in and say "EVERYBODY DOES!"
“is there any legitimate way in which "the blues," as a sense of racially-inflected oppression and subordination, still live on in contemporary America?
§If you answered "yes" the preceding question, is it possible that some of our blues-playing African American peers (Corey Harris, Sugar Blue, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Billy Branch) are speaking, when they speak about blues, from a different place, a different feeling-space, than you or I?”
I answer “yes” to both questions. Those guys did have stories to tell different from you and I. The early white blues folk also had stories different from you and I … and from the black artists, as well…But it’s still the blues. … And this is where somebody will give an opinion on whose blues is real and whose is not.
“Gene! That is the most ridiculous statistical error I've ever seen….” I dunno. Like I said: I just copy/pasted. Points were being made with the general info. Not everything in the article would be meant to support a point I was making. The The exactness of the stats seems to be beside the point. You found those stats, I found these stats, I’d bet somebody else would find other stats…
Last Edited by gene on Dec 15, 2013 7:05 PM
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Frank
3507 posts
Dec 15, 2013
7:22 PM
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gene
1154 posts
Dec 15, 2013
9:08 PM
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Well said, Frank! :D
Last Edited by gene on Dec 15, 2013 9:08 PM
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Frans Belgium
7 posts
Dec 16, 2013
12:24 AM
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I thought we were done with that kind of discussions.
Clearly not.
Of course, blues is ‘black’ music. So is jazz
Which does not withhold me from seeing Jason Ricci, Peter Green Bill Evans, Art Pepper and Steve Lacy as the all time greatest. on their particular instrument. Just to name a few. All of them white.
And what does THAT prove? Nothing…. ;-)
Maybe in the Us, things are felt differently than over here in Europe, where this black - white thing always has been less of an issue. Just think of all the black musicians that had to cross the pond to feel at ease and gain much deserved succes.
But as said before, I really thought we had that behind us by now.
Last Edited by Frans Belgium on Dec 16, 2013 1:28 AM
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aharpon
3 posts
Dec 16, 2013
1:21 AM
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I think the intellectualization of blues music and harp playing tends to have moved it more into the realms of a science where 1 add 1 makes 2 and E=mc2. What a lot of us white folks have missed is that blues is magic and alchemy and devilment and is best when it is inexplicable and transcends the normal when it's creation adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It's essentially an unsophisticated music with a direct connection to the soul . Great....worship great acoustic tone.....worship scales.....worship overblows........but WORSHIP THE DEVIL TOO!
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The Iceman
1330 posts
Dec 16, 2013
6:59 AM
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Us white folk...
House mortgage is under water. My health insurance was cancelled. Car payment is overdue.
We just have a higher class of blues.
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The Iceman
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harpdude61
1929 posts
Dec 16, 2013
9:58 AM
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kudzurunner
4448 posts
Dec 16, 2013
11:00 AM
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walterharp
1257 posts
Dec 16, 2013
11:05 AM
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well, this is a blues and a harp group. It does seem like black players deserted playing harp first of the instruments, or white players took over this position first?
In general the strongest reactions here seem to be if someone takes the statement to say that they personally are not playing real blues because they are white..
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Honkin On Bobo
1174 posts
Dec 16, 2013
11:22 AM
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The gene / Kudzu back and forth was highly entertaining..................in a Monty Python kind of way.
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gene
1156 posts
Dec 16, 2013
12:13 PM
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That's funny! :D
Only thing is, though, I never tried to say some whites had it worse than some blacks. I was pointing out that some whites had it bad, TOO. (Also. As well. Besides. Likewise)
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colman
281 posts
Dec 16, 2013
4:07 PM
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Yes ! blues is black music,thanks, now the whole world is playing them.And "I`ve got the key to the highway"
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harpdude61
1930 posts
Dec 16, 2013
7:57 PM
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I have learned a lot and enjoyed this thread. The bottom line...."why can't we all just clap together"?
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jbone
1446 posts
Dec 16, 2013
8:34 PM
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@ harpdude- hear hear!
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http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000386839482
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa7La7yYYeE
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timeistight
1458 posts
Dec 16, 2013
9:00 PM
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"why can't we all just clap together"
Because white audiences can't find the back beat?
Last Edited by timeistight on Dec 16, 2013 9:01 PM
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