In my very humble opinion and I stress that, but here it is ... me personally and how I view white people playing black American blues music is for me, I/we play (in some cases stylistically) that 'blues' music form that comes from black American culture and life experience that I have not, nor will I ever experience and fully understand, and depending on the individual I personally WANT to and do know it's history!
Last Edited by marine1896 on May 11, 2015 2:44 AM
Wow! He makes some powerful arguments. It is a complex issue to be sure. I agree with his comments on the vocal aspect, in particular. Mere instrumental virtuosity or shredding doesn't make an emotional connection. I do try to respect where the blues comes from, while I enjoy playing and listening to it. BronzeWailer's YouTube
Ralph Ellison called the song that Harris is singing, "beating that boy." Shelby Steele called it "race holding." I call it a fairly predictable, entirely unsurprising ideologization of the blues. The arguments that Harris makes, with few exceptions, have all been made before; they're all half-truths. Half-truths contain some truth, but to the extent that somebody who utters them believes he's uttered the final word, from a position of high and mighty righteousness, he's deluding himself.
The one surprising moment is when Harris's diatribe veers, in the final paragraph or two, towards something that is actually in line with his life as a blues playing professional who also makes quite a bit of money teaching white people how to sing and play the blues. THAT paradox is worth pondering. Harris doesn't admit that he engages in such teaching--i.e., that he's the creative director of a blues summer camp in the Pacific Northwest--but he gives it away by the actual tenor of his remarks:
"White blues lovers who want to sing and play in the style should stop trying to sound Black. Keep it real and sing like who you are! Be true to yourself! Express yourself, not your imitation of someone from another culture. This is what true artists do."
I completely agree.
One of Harris's many errors is in insisting that because blues is "culture and history," white folks don't have an earned and organic relationship with it. White people have been playing, singing, and dancing to blues for more than a hundred years at this point. It's time to stop pretending that it's all one big stupid ripoff. Jimmie Rodgers and Roscoe Holcomb aren't ripoffs. Marion Harris, a white blues singer from the 1910s and 1920s, had a lot of black fans.
One thing that Harris doesn't do--because people who make his sort of angry case for blues as BLACK music never do so--is discuss, or even mention, the contemporary soul-blues scene: black music made by black performers for 100% black audiences. He's not a part of that scene. He has zero audience among that particular crowd of black blues lovers. They're just not interested in his particular version of the blues. That must hurt! Choosing as he does to perform a repertoire that draws on older styles, he's condemned himself to a life in limbo--making pilgrimages to Africa, communing with musicians there, spreading his separatist Afrocentric gospel, occasionally voicing his pain and sense of cultural outrage in blog posts like this and on the occasional conference panel, even while his living depends on playing clubs and festivals and teaching blues musicianship at events in which white promoters, white audiences, and white musicians dominate.
Me, I'm intrigued by those sorts of paradoxes. I'd respect Harris more if he was willing overtly to entertain them. But doing so would interfere with the purity of his ideological position. Ideological purity isn't something intrinsic to the blues. Blues--real blues--has more of a sense of irony than that. As Kalamu ya Salaam once said, "life is not about good vs. evil, but about good and evil eaten off the same plate." Harris surely knows Salaam; they were fellow blues-loving New Orleanians for a period of time.
I'm finally getting around to reading the published version of BLUES ALL DAY LONG, Wayne Goins's long and remarkable biography of Jimmy Rogers, Muddy's guitarist. Wayne, a black Chicagoan, grew up in and with the blues; his father was a friend of Little Walter's. Wayne sits at the opposite extreme from Harris: an amazingly gifted jazz/blues guitarist as well as professor of music, he has no ideology, or certainly no ideology that seeks to parse the blues into black and white. He's more interested in the whole arc of Rogers life--an arc that took Rogers from an entirely black musical environment into a place where his supporting cast was almost entirely white musicians, including, notably, our own BBQ Bob, who was ultimately replaced by Steve Guyger in Rogers's touring ensemble. Goins has interviewed everybody; he starts the book with a long monologue by Kim Wilson. What comes across, at least in the portions I've read, is Roger's sense of exactly what he was questing for, musically, along with the irony that it was white blues musician/producers, including Rod Piazza and Wilson, who ultimately helped him recuperate the music he was hearing in his head and gain the public recognition he deserved.
Goins writes without rancor, and with amazing coverage; he's got EVERYBODY in this book--more than a hundred interviews that he personally conducted (many of them with the white blues guys aforementioned), along with all sorts of interviews from Living Blues (another paradox: without white folks who loved the music and conducted the interviews, the black blues stories would never have seen the light of day).
I recommend it highly. It is, in its own way, the counterstatement to Harris's jeremiad. It's about how blues culture actually works, in our time; it's about a long swath of history that we're still sorting out. It's about the excitement felt by young (black) men in the mid-to-late 1940s trying to come up with a new sound; and it's about the excitement felt by an older Rogers and his younger white disciples as he began to come back on line and his "old" sound caught the fancy of the white blues imagination in the late 70s and early 80s.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 11, 2015 5:48 AM
I like Corey Harris' music. He is a scholar, teacher and a good guitar player doing what many academics do best -defending their fiefdom. Yes he is black- I doubt he has picked much cotton or walked behind a mule- but he is black
I do find it amusing that he puts on a kinda fake Jamaican accent when he plays his reggae-
What a crazy topic. (I speak as someone from a mixed race parentage). Any argument that would question the validity of white people playing the Blues would be racist if reversed (questioning if black people have the right to do something classified as culturally white/European/Caucasian) and is therefore nonsense.
Muddy Waters told Eric Clapton to "keep the faith."
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But then I got to read excellent essays from Kudzu and Ted, and a great comment from Danny on the subject. With a litle luck, this thread will die a quick unremarkable death.....or not. I mean how can what's written above be improved upon? Has this not been discussed and disected from every conceivable angle on the forum in multiple threads before?
Then again, I clicked on it right? Maybe I'm part of the problem LOL.
blues is black music...... harris says not to try and sound black? black people feel the beat on the two and the four white folks on the one and the three its just the way it is
if you cant get the groove right it is not blues same with the vocals just because someone stands in front of a microphone does not make him a blues singer.. most of what passes for blues these days is nothing more than a caricature.
Everyone has an opinion and just like the armpits they own, they think theirs doesn't stink. Mr. Harris is entitled to his opinion but our host Adam Gussow, actually has an opinion which doesn't stink. In fact, I was more than impressed with all that kudzurunner has written. It is these kind of statements which I can bring to my grandchildren, and show them that certain points of view can be proven unacceptable with good logical debate. Thank you Adam for sharing such great thoughts with us all. You truly are a scholar and a gentleman.
(By the way, serendipitously, I am reading the same book and I just got to the point 1968-69, where Jimmy makes his comeback. I really enjoy that a big part of the reason he left the music scene for a while, was that he put his Family ahead of all else. His return to it, was for similar reasons, he needed to feed his Family.) ----------
If I was going to sing a song like Strange Fruit I'd make sure I put it in context and let the audience know what it was about and why it's important and that I was doing it as an homage to the suffering of others.
If I'm singing a song about being poor, well, I've been there at points in my life so I feel like I can sing it like I own it (well, no in the copyright way, but you know what I mean).
I can't sing a country song about my pickup truck breaking down because I've never owned a pickup truck, but I can sing about my car breaking down.
We all have our experiences. To assume that all songs in any genre speak uniformly for everyone, whether they are a member of the cultural group that wrote them or not, is looking at them as a form, not as individual pieces. That offends the writer in me. If something speaks to you, sing it. And even within a specific song, even if you have never experienced what the song is about, well, good writing isn't just about sharing a common experience- it's about conveying an experience. I've never worked on a killing floor, but Hard Time Killing Floor Blues breaks my heart because it's able to make me understand a little.
I think it's possible to culturally appropriate from ourselves too. I used to sing shape note music, old church music. It involved a lot of songs about funerals for people dying from simple diseases that don't kill people today. It was about the tragedies in a world that (thankfully) doesn't exist in modern America on that scale anymore, and it was written by people who culturally are my ancestors. It's about suffering that I haven't experienced. I can feel a connection to it, but I don't own that connection. We all have this part of us that wants to claim our pain for ourselves. It's part of how we build identity. We define ourselves by our common suffering. We celebrate our WWII heroes, even although, because of the march of time, 'we' are not them. (You'd have to be in your mid to late 80's now to have served in WWII). We sing Danny Boy on St. Paddy's Day even though we are only 1/4 Irish (and more English) and we sing Yankee Doodle even although none of us fought the British for American independence, and it helps us feel like part of the group. That may even be one reason we play the blues, but the minute we go from saying, 'hey, this pain hurts, let's get together and wallow together' to 'hey, this is my pain, get your own' we better be sure we really felt that pain and aren't applying a double standard. The color of your skin or the spelling of your last name may have impact on your life, but it's not the only thing that forms who we are. It's not the only formative force in the mix.
Harris starts out with a quote from BB King. I thought to look around for more things King has said on record. I'm sure I missed a bunch, but nothing I found suggests that he is anything other than generous with the music. Like I said, I could have missed much. My search was brief, not exhaustive. but I'm left with the impression that Harris took it out of context and misused it. ---------- Phil Pennington
Can a black person play classical music ? I my self have jammed with a black man who couldn`t play blues as good as classical music../.he had classical training on his instrument...It`s just people looking for lint !!!
I have had great joy and horrific pain in my life. I am white and I know the blues. I use the blues as my chosen medium to express myself. No, I don't sing about life situations I've never had, but I've had plenty of pain to know "the blues" and sing it authentically about my own life experiences.
The argument that only the original group of people that creates an art form can truly understand it and use it to express emotion and feeling, is ridiculous.
I've seen/heard Butterefield and Portnoy play with Muddy. And then there's Wolf's London Sessions. If only those two Blues masters had been told white boys can't play.
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I wouldn't sing Strange Fruit.. I do think that song remains starkly in leave alone territory. I respect the song for what it is, what it was, and who has the right to sing it.
Too bad no body told this guy to stick to his side of the color line AND the gender line. Maria Callas would be hard pressed to do it better. Musical- and gender miscegenation, o perish me!
I don't think Gamble and Huff cared that these guys were not black when signed them nor the string players from the Philly Orchestra that played on all those Soul Records.
I decided to push back against Harris's jihad a little more full-frontally than I usually do. I revised and expanded what I wrote above, then tried to submit it as a comment on his blog. Of course it was too long. So I put it on Facebook, along with a link to his blog post, as "an open letter to Corey Harris."
The issues are complex and important, not simple and trivial, and the can-a-black-guy-sing-opera thing is a very bad analogy. If you want to use black people and opera, you need to imagine a situation that doesn't exist: millions of black people around the world are singing opera, some of them very well and some of them not so well. Black people have formed opera societies; they've got a motto "keep opera alive"; they've got several big awards shows in which black opera singers tend to win most of the awards--even though a fair number of non-black opera singers are still out there, singing their asses off. When they write the history of opera (in that imagined world), black opera historians and aficionados tell the story of opera so that what once began as an Italian ethnic music back in the homeland has led to a named handful of great black opera singers, the Eric Claptons and Stevie Ray Vaughans of the black opera world, you might say--even while the great dead Italian opera singers are revered as the forefathers of the (black) thing opera has become. Meanwhile, the white opera audience just isn't really there; the big audience now is black opera fans. So the white opera singers have no choice but to smile and play for the black folks.
In such a world, don't you think there might be a little pushback from white opera singers who find themselves somewhat decentered or displaced from the culture and history that THEY see as their own? Of course there would be.
This little story is a much better analogy to the present state of contemporary black blues players like Harris, although it's not a perfect analogy. But it's much better than the one off video of one black guy who can sing opera.
In any case, I don't deny that Harris feels what he feels, but his feelings are leading him to miss a lot of important paradoxes, qualifications, and details.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 12, 2015 7:41 AM
Charlie Pride didn't let this kind of thinking stop his musical career in country music. Don't let it drag you down. We can enjoy performances by actors without debating their religious beliefs or political views. Similarly, I suggest that we should just enjoy Mr. Harris's music and don't get caught up in his divisive narrative.
I listen to and play American Roots Music and Americana. There is definitely "Blues" in there, among other things. I don't claim to be "a blues man" but people of a variety of racial groups seem to enjoy the music I sing and play, and some of it is "blues" music.
I believe we should play and enjoy whatever music that moves us. If we play it in our own way to the best of our ability, people will either enjoy it or not.
Self appointed arbiters of musical correctness should have no impact on our enjoyment of making music.
@kudzurunner -- I couldn't help but think back to a night while I was with Jimmy Rogers and the only tune of his we never got a chance to rehearse was My Last Meal, and when someone in the audience requested in, he went right into it and we followed him. After the set was over, he was impressed because the way we did it that night on the bandstand was the way he originally wanted to record it (featuring Big Walter Horton on harmonica), but Leonard Chess had other ideas and had turned it into more of a "pop" song, which he really didn't care too much for and it was one of the things that got him into retiring from music by 1960 until he returned to it in 1968 after the his clothing store got burned down in the Chicago riots in 1968.
There's kind of a parallel thing happening here in ballet because of a black ballet dancer named Misty Copeland and the stereotype that blacks don't/can't do ballet here.
In the time I spent with Jimmy, I learned a lot from him in ways you often can't from recordings alone, and not just from the musical side of things. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Bob, I like how you think, too. A lot. I watched 60 Minutes this past Sunday and thought that was a great piece. I was rooting for Misty. Most of the good people tend to root for the underdog.
Thanks, Goldbrick. You've taught me something. I'd never seen that video. "...cause I go back to workin'....gotta buy my kid a brand new pair of shoes."
Blues music is a great thing. Haggard takes it seriously. He makes it work for him.
I hate to quote a naff source, but I like the quote 'The Blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad.'
As far as I can tell, guys like Muddy and BB and others had no problem with white guys playing the Blues; whenever I hear such people talking about what it takes to play the Blues, it's having gone through painful experiences.
THAT is the Blues Badge.
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Okay, this may not be the right generational example, but here is what cultural appropriation looks like from the other side, when the 'other' (in this case a misogynistic rap artist getting his hands on Kurt Cobain, who, although also known as a heroin addict, what actually very involved in feminist causes.)
I wonder why people get so upset over this issue? I play my music for me. If others like it that is great but it has no impact on what or why I play music. People can label it any way they like, like it, hate it, love it, have no opinion on it. I play for me and don't feel any need to be affiliated with any style to legitimize my music to myself. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year in the Tunnel of Dreams Studio. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
Komuso: I really like that interview with Keb' Mo'. He's one of my favorite contemporary blues singers and blues composers; top 3, for sure. He makes the blues live, freshly, for our moment. His opening statement, about making the music that he's called to do, seems very honest and true. The only place he goes wrong is when he invokes the Willie Lynch letter. It's been established fairly conclusively that the letter is a hoax. I don't know any professional historian who thinks it's legit:
The truth about North American slavery, and the many decades of Jim Crow segregation, is ugly enough. Although of course it, too, contains paradoxes. For example: only 5% of the 18,000,000 Africans brought to the New World as part of the slave trade ended up in North America. A whole lot more than that ended up in Brazil. (I think I got those statistics right. I'm citing from memory the statistics provided by Michael Gomez in EXCHANGING OUR COUNTRY MARKS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AFRICAN IDENTITIES IN THE COLONIAL AND ANTEBELLUM SOUTH.) Statistics about slavery are often misquoted and easily abused. For example: only 5% of white southerners in 1860 actually owned slaves. But 25% of white southerners lived in slaveholding families--because dad "owns" the slaves, but mom and the (white) kids also live in the house. So a fairly high percentage of white households had a material and emotional investment in the institution of slavery. And this particular statistic varies greatly by state. In 1860, 50% of white Mississippians lived in slaveholding households and nearly that many South Carolinians as well, but far fewer Kentuckians lived in slaveholding households. It's not surprising, given that fact, that South Carolina and Mississippi were the first two states to secede.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 13, 2015 5:56 AM
The Delta Blues Booking Agency here in Mississippi, run by Carol and Ron Marble, books mainly older black bluesmen from the Jackson area, so I was surprised when I got an email this morning in which they said they were now working with Johnny Riley. (Three of her black artists testify that "he feels the music," a sure sign we're talking about a white artist.) I'd never heard of Riley, but I've been checking out his website and his videos and he's an interesting character. He's a Clarksdale-born, Deep South twangin' white bluesman, somebody who crosses over to country and back. A preacher's son with Texas as well as Mississippi roots. I don't know what to make of him, but after you've watched this video, you'll feel as though you know a little more about the bluesy music actually being made by contemporary southerners.
His harmonica playing isn't quite up to the level of his singing.
Here's his website. I really like the tune "Crossroads of My Life," which can be previewed on the site:
I did not want to get in this again but I felt compelled. I have real deep feelings on this. I will ask some questions that perhaps Mr. Harris would answer himself and reflect on what the questions and answers tell him personally, and what they may tell him about someone else. Was he born into a poor family, last of six children, with one breadwinner in the family? Did his father pass when he was very young, merely trying to support his wife and six kids? Did his mother go to work, doing anything respectable she could, to bring money home to provide for her children, sacrificing everything to put them in a decent school, keep them fed and clothed and even find ways to take them on vacations- camping in tents in the woods, at Cape cod (in the "Poor Peoples" campground), Ocean City Md.( relying on her brother to help to fund a once in a lifetime experience for her kids)? Was this same mother taken over by alcoholism, betrayed by her next husband, a pedophile and philanderer who fathered children with other women and incested his own children along with his step children? Was Mr. Harris referred to as "trash", "loser", "oh THOSE people"...? Were hand-me-down clothes a big part of his "wardrobe"? Did he find solace on a.m. radio, listening to the only true music that could reach him late on Sunday nights? Was he taken by despair and addiction to places as toxic as any to be found on any continent? Did his own relatives despise him for his poverty even as a small child? Did he find his only comfort in a genre of music that was in its way foreign to him, yet so compelling and right feeling, he could not help but embrace it?
Did Mr. Harris stubbornly struggle for decades to find a way to do this great music justice?
I am not saying his experiences are less than mine and I have no doubt that in some ways he has been further down the path of discrimination and poverty than a lot of people, but my whole point here is to show that we each of us may have a common experience which shaped us, and from which the only respite was a certain set of chords, a certain heartfelt expression of pain and despair, and its ability to give comfort, not just to the player but to the listener as well.
To put it much more generally, we are all pink inside. Our hearts all pump red blood and we all feel love, joy, pain, despair, fear, the same way.
Can we not then have a commonality of expression of these feelings, and by that a comfort from life's burdens?
I see people of all races and colors respond to blues music. Whether they know it or not they find something positive in that music which may make their day a bit better. And I am part of that. And I feel better as well. I seek to give something good to my community. How can that be negative?
Will I ever be a LW or a Cotton? No. But I can still spread some love via blues. That's all I want. ---------- http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
The French believe that they are the only nation in the world that can make great red wine. The rest of the world knows better. Fabulous red wines are made the whole world over, particularly in the USA. Most importantly nearly everyone knows that wine is made to be drunk. Wine bores can spend so long talking about and then deciding what to wine to choose, they can lose sight of the need to drink it So it is with music. No one person or group owns it, but wonderfully everyone can enjoy it In any way they please. Please please don't get too boring by analysing it so much.
This issue is so silly it's not an issue. Blues is feeling. If you can play a little and can release emotion into your playing, then you are playing the blues. Even if it's just for you.
I tell my students and bandmates all the time... "The Blues is not about how you feel when you play, the Blues is about how you play when you FEEL".
Someone asked on another thread if, or maybe asserted that, the blues is boring. It can be, but for sure I think interminable discussions about who owns the blues and if white people can play the blues become boring. If suffering and pain are prerequisites for playing/singing, is there a threshold or measurable quantity of such that one has to reach before he or she has the right creds? Appropriate shades of various racial 'colors' against which one may grade authenticity? I mean, can we apply some numbers to this so we each can assess where we fall on the continuum of proper blues expression? There might be an argument if the blues was one continuous repeat of "Black, Brown, and White" and "Strange Fruit", but talk about boring.... I am a fairly recent "student" of the blues, but even I have figured out that there's a whole shitload of blues that lyrically, emotionally, and expressively have virtually no connection to those blues. And yes I've done Adam's Blues Talk and was moved by it. If someone were to suggest to me that I am trespassing on the blues, I'd ask why. If the answer was that my harping sucks, I don't know what a groove is and can't follow it and I sing like Tiny Tim, I'd guess I'd have to work on it some more or try something else. If the response was that while I've had my ups and down, I'm still an old white guy who's had a relatively decent life and is sitting relatively comfortably at this stage, so haven't met the threshold. I'd have to say "GFY" I'm having a good time. This topic is boring. Of course, I keep checking it out and I've just spent 20 minutes or so participating in it.... Gives me the blues.... ---------- Phil Pennington
I think Corey Harris wades in difficult waters when he cant separate his want or need to " keep it real" from the fact that you dont have to be "real" ( ie black) to play the music
Bob Marley sang he "who feels it knows it". Then again, Marley being only half black might not be "real" enuff for a culture fascist.
