Harris's flawed thinking is most likely the result of his own musical frustration. While he is passable as blues stylist, he has been unable to develop his own voice. His stuff is entirely derivative and lacks the innovation and creativity found in all great art.
It seems his frustrations have developed into a diseased mental state which seeks to fill inadequacy with racially impaired thinking. He grasps at imagined straws to validate his lackluster musical blues. Sad.
Not only is Harris's mental paradigm sad, it's dangerous. This is exactly the same irrational disorder exploited by the Nazi's to rally a nation into a war of unimaginable atrocities.
----------
Last Edited by JInx on May 14, 2015 10:27 AM
Charlie Pride proved that a black man can sing country and western and was whole heartily accepted by white audiences and he paved the way for Darius Rucker, who began as a pop star. So, hell, if you have a passion for the genre, it doesn't make a difference what your ancestry may be if you can do it well. If an African American wants to devote his talents to Celtic folksongs and can pull it off, I don't think anyone would have a beef ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N, iTunes, iBook THE DEVIL'S BLUES--ditto HOWLING MOUNTAIN BLUES--Ditto too, now available
I presume the fact that a thread about this is so long show us it is a problem many people have. In my world it's quite simple.
To say that no other than black people can play the blues is like saying that you can not play the blues if you have a good economy. There are a few blues lyrics about white oppression and they have a white hard to understand. But to say that only black people who have problems with booze, women and money that 99% of blues lyrics are about. It is ridiculous. BTW: I do not like the term "play the blues" A good musician can play the blues. But only a blues artist can convey the feeling of the blues. It is feeling and empathy expressed in "that" tone. It has nothing to do with skin color.
Last Edited by arnenym on May 15, 2015 3:28 AM
How dare these white men play the blues way back in the 1920s. Had to be taboo. Just because Chicago and Chess got the blues to the masses in the 1950s with all black artists, doesn't mean that white people didn't play and influence blues long before then.
Relevant to this discussion are the Ebony Hillbillies, an ensemble of black musicians who play what is considered "white" folk music, mountain music, Applachian music, English and Celtic in derivation. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
I wonder what some of the white pros think about this and Corey's letter? Adam Gussow, has always been honest and up front about the whole subject and then some and total respect to him and his opinions.
I also understand that a lot of musicians might want to stay away from this subject but it does make one curious especially about those who learned, shared stages and were also close friends with black blues musicians.
P.S I also noticed that Corey only replied to comments on his blog that agreed or praised his opinion and no replies to anyone who disagreed. I guess his letter of opinion was also drawing a line under it for him.
Last Edited by marine1896 on May 16, 2015 12:37 PM
I honestly think that most musicians dont give a rats ass what Corey Harris writes.
As I said before I respect him as a musician but I dont care what he thinks anymore than I care about who Bruce Springsteen wants us to vote for or what amp Buddy Guy endorses this week.
He must have felt the need to " keep it real" so wrote a bunch of half thought out stuff.
It will not dissuade any musician from playing what they feel like.
The devil is in the details, Ted--or rather, in that word "considered." The Ebony Hillbillies play a range of musics, most of which have African elements. In some cases they're playing blackface minstrel tunes that were white Irish Northerners' takes on black plantation music. In some cases they're playing their own interpretations of actual plantation music. There was, as you may know, a black fiddling tradition of very longstanding. The fiddle was, as Theresa Jenoure's and Paul Cimbala's scholarship has established, by far the most popular instrument among the slaves, and the black slave fiddler was arguably the most important musician in the antebellum South. After freedom came, black fiddlers remained central to southern tradition. (Big Bill Broonzy was a fiddler.) Muddy Waters was playing with Son Sims when Alan Lomax first recorded him at Stovall Plantation. One of the Ebony Hillbillies--the fiddler, actually--works as a historical interpreter at some New York slavery site. (Sojourner Truth was a slave in upstate New York, but his site was closer to the city.)
What I forgot to mention is just how important the various African fiddling traditions are to a full understanding of the fiddle's importance to slaves and free blacks. I was unaware of African fiddling traditions until I got schooled, rather aggressively, by Tony Thomas, the reigning expert on the black banjo. He told me to read Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje's new book, FIDDLING IN WEST AFRICA: TOUCHING THE SPIRT OF FULBE, HAUSA, AND DAGBAMBA CULTURES. I bought it and did. Although few Hausa ended up as slaves in North America, many other Africans from regions that had fiddling traditions did. So when slaves, stripped of their instruments, got ahold of European fiddles, they had a pretty good idea how to use them.
Here's a video:
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 16, 2015 2:03 PM
As a person of mixed racial heritage - half Anglo-Saxon from Canada and half Trinidadian via Barbados and China (Chinese are everywhere) - I have always felt (and been viewed as) somewhat of an outsider, but then I will never fit in a dualistic category, white or black. I was talking to my mom yesterday and she said that growing up in Trinidad she was aware that people came in many different colours, but it wasn't a "thing" until she moved to Canada. Nothing makes me want to do something harder than if someone says, "no you can't." A No Entry sign is an invitation to trespass.
Thanks for the background, Adam. The fact that much of the music was originally performed by blacks and adapted by poor whites as their own music problematizes Harris's question about expressive authenticity even more. Interestingly, the website for Ebony Hillbillies doesn't insist that they are reclaiming an important part of black history (although that is precisely what they're doing), but rather refer to the music as "Americana". Although I think the term is a bit too convenient a label for lazy reviewers to slap on non-rock and non hip rock music, it does, all the same, make you think that this is a music that is a rich swath of styles that everyone who made music contributed to. What it does, of course, is force us to rethink our notions of what legitimate and real expression is, whether moral rights are indeed a factor we have to consider along racial lines so far as performing certain kinds of music, and perhaps, after tropes and counter tropes are exhausted on either side we can , maybe, regain our capacity to be moved by honest music, plain and simple. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
Last Edited by ted burke on May 16, 2015 7:34 PM
Well yes, it's a little OT in a way, but it's the first I'd heard that French folk feel that way, though I know they take issue with others using their regional names for wine. Which is why we have Australian sparkling rather than Australian champagne. I have forgotten just who the blues performer was (maybe Robert Lockwood) who came to Australia and made an analogy about blues, using tea. He said you could make many a palatable hot drink by infusing leaves in water, but if they weren't tea leaves, it wasn't tea. It was something, and it might be good, but it was not tea. Someone else, a black performer visiting Australia, heard Matt Taylor (a white Australian harp man) sing and play, and declared he played the blues "no kind of blues like I've ever heard" but blues nonetheless. And brownie McGhee visited my town and asserted we should listen to the blues because 'blues is truth'. Champion Jack Dupree just told the audience 'everybody take a drink'. i guess I've formed my take on the topic by a process of reconciling those pieces of information. People have different ideas about the blues, and that's ok. Sometimes it's hard to play someone else's song without 'channelling', but I think it's good to be conscious of how that comes across. I heard guys doing it at our local blues club gig recently, and even when it's a member of the same ethnic group it's somewhat jarring imho.
This what Danny Kirwan from the original Fleetwood Mac had to say
MC: What does the blues mean to you?
Danny Kirwan: Its a black man's language... something that stems from the the black nature of man.
MC: Can a white man sing the blues?
DK: Well ...he can, but he might do himself damage
MC: How did you come to play that style of music?
DK: Whats there was there...you get involved in things and that's it. I was around and gathered it all up and got involved. I didn't think 'I want to be a musician' ... it just kind of happened. At first I listened a lot to Paul McCartney - really loved Daytripper - and then I got into older music.
MC: And you learned and got involved very quickly
DK: Well there was nothing else i could do...if you're a white man you have to learn the blues you don't know them. Its as simple as that. The thing is...those black guys play the blues the way they are, because its their music. Its developed with them. But if you understand your brain content and you're a white man, you can play it, if you're clever. You see, I was infiltrated to the extent that I picked up a bug - I got into the blues and it got into my system like a bug gets into your system. But when you're a kid and you walk around with your family you don't notice the blues.
MC: And you soon formed a band, Boilerhouse.
DK: Yeah, but that was only a scrap kit.
MC: You, with your Watkins Rapier electric...
DK: Oh yeah, hahah! That bloody little thing! It only cost me 30 quid down the Kennington Rd - saw it in the shop, loved it, bought.
MC: You were very into Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton weren't you?
DK: Jimi Hendrix yes... I always fancied what he played. He was doing a gig down at the Ram Jam club in Brixton and I got in touch with him a little bit. I suppose because he was a pretty nice bloke.
MC: And Clapton?
DK: I dunno...sometimes I don't like him and sometimes I do. Yes, I guess he's alright, 'course he is. But as I say, I was more of a Hendrix fan.
MC: You also listened to big band music and Django Reinhardt didn't you?
DK: Yes, those were the kind of records I'd buy down at Dobell's near Charing Cross. I worked out Jigsaw Puzzle Blues from that stuff and then played the signals to the rest of the band and John McVie knew every signal you could give out. Signals to say, 'You do this and you do that' and they'd do it and it would all come together. That band was so clever - they knew all the signals and could do it. Which was great because I'm no Rod Stewart...thankfully.
MC: Who were your favorite bluesmen?
DK: Albert King - you'd drop out of last week for Albert wouldn't you? And Otis Rush - he had this nice sting in his playing that was his. Its called a timbre of guitar playing, and he had a thick timbre, that was his stamp. But you see, those guys were blacks, singing and playing about what it is to be black in their country, which isn't really their country.
MC: What was it like joining Fleetwood Mac?
DK: Mick Fleetwood asked me...there I was sitting like a little dum-dum, so he asked me. I didn't know what to think, once I'd joined because before then I'd just been straddling around and then I was on stage and there were television cameras, and I got a bit paranoid.
MC: Can you remember how Albatross came about?
DK: Well that was Monsieur Peter Green - I called him Monsieur, you know - and I played with him. On Albatross he told me what to do you know, all the bits I had to play
MC: Peter has said that he'd never have done Albatross without Danny Kirwan...
DK: Well, that's okay...as long as I'm Danny Kirwan without being dead next week, heheh!
MC: And you did that country blues duet Like Crying together...
DK: Yes, we did...(big grin). I remember Peter sat up on this chair and just singing, 'woman's got the blue - oo - ooze' again and again. Then I started writing it from that. When he sang that, it made me think of Bessie Smith, the woman who's got the blues.
MC: One Sunny Day was a great blues rock track.
DK: It was a bit too powerful that one; Mick Fleetwood was a very strong drummer.
MC: How did you fit in with Fleetwood Mac as people?
DK: I always liked Mick Fleetwood - he was like family but nowadays its a bit distant you know, people living in different cities. But I still think of them as friends. John McVie is the cleverest person and I could see that at the time. A nice bloke and highly intelligent, he was like my best friend in the band for a time.
MC: And Jeremy Spencer?
DK: He was a bit sarcastic - you know, those rock 'n roll songs he'd do was...sarcastic. And although I used to get on with John and Mick, it got very cliquey. The thing with rock bands is that they get very interested in themselves and their own relationships with each other - a cliquey kind of thing. Spencer and Green, for instance, knew each other well and were...mischievous. It was a very mischievous band. So I wasn't actually a part of them really. I only got mixed up with them.
MC: Were you surprised when Peter left Fleetwood Mac?
DK: Not particularly, I suppose. You see we just didn't get on too well basically and so he left me there. I mean we played some good stuff together, we played well together but we didn't get on. I was a bit temperamental you see.... End of Interview
This argument that the blues is music to be played by black people (only American black people?) is put forward regularly but I have not seen the same protagonists argue that the blues is music to be listened to by black people which, to me, would seem to be the natural extension of the thought.
The proposition that a cultural identity which is linked to the original makers of the music is required to perform has to be tied in with a similar line of argument that a cultural link to those for whom the music was originally played for is required to listen with validity today.
This would of course slam the door in the face of the todays audience. Visit any blues festival in the UK and it is 99% white. I can not comment on American or other international festivals. Attend any blues workshops and the student body is predominantly white. It is these white audiences that are buying the cd's, buying the tickets, buying the t-shirts and so on that enables the black musicians to be employed and earn an income.
It is a self protectionist racket to try and create a clique of musicians who can claim to be the only genuine and legitimate performers thus securing a degree of mystique on which they can trade and sell more tickets and white people.
If black musicians who truly believe the music is theirs were only to perform to black audiences and sell cd's to black audiences the music would die.
It is the same in any field of endeavour. I have met many white performers who have just as strong links to the founder blues players through their associations with subsequent generations of musicians as Harris can claim.
The idea that the colour of skin gives a superiority over a different colour of skin is one which needs leaving alone.
Style, substance, skill, sincerity, ability, passion, delivery are all legitimate judgements regarding a musicians performance of the blues. Colour of skin is not.
---------- 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
Ted: Aha! I agree 100% with what you've written in your reply. Yes, the moment you look closely at American culture in historical aspect, the moment you get granular, it becomes much hard to maintain a hard-edged pose of cultural and ideological purity. There's been a lot of mixing since the beginning.
And yes: the audience DOES matter. This is why I think there's some bad faith, or maybe just real ignorance, in Harris's refusal to think through the meaning of the contemporary "black" blues scene--i.e., the soul-blues scene, where a 100% black cohort of performers entertains a 99.9% black cohort of audience members and no one is anxious about whites "stealing" anything.
If I try to put myself in Harris's shoes, the most enervating thing is surely to be a black artist of real talent and wide-ranging tastes who seeks to make a living in the mainstream scene and who finds myself, for better or (mostly) for worse forced to compete with white acts for festival and club bookings; forced to navigate the authenticity demands of whites at every turn ("I don't like the way he mixes politics with music"); forced to listen to white folks tell the story of blues so that it proceeds from dead black ancestral greats ("Now B. B. has joined Albert and Freddie in the great blues band in the sky") to contemporary white inheritors (Kim, Charlie, Clapton, and Joe Bonamassa) while writing out contemporary black inheritors (Taj, Joe Louis Walker, Bettye Lavette). I think that would get to me. Superadded to that, though, is Harris's fairly poisonous embrace of Rastafarianism and aggressive Afrocentrism AND--not to be discounted--whatever anxieties attach to the fact that he has been the beneficiary of a MacArthur "genius" grant: $100,000 a year for five years. I think it must be tricky for a Denver-born musician, a graduate of Bates College, and the recipient of major certification and largesse by rich white philanthropists to come up with a clear, internally-consistent, and workable narrative line that articulates, so to speak, his black blues self. Rather than embrace THOSE paradoxes, it becomes somewhat easier to dissolve into the angry certainties of the Rasta faith and blame all the bad stuff on The Man.
What gets lost in all this is the fact that there IS, as far as I'm concerned, a debate worth having here. I spend a lot of my own time growling at the radio and the choices made by Lou Brutus, the programmer at Sirius/XM's Bluesville. I've been exposed to a lot of great contemporary blues there; I've also been exposed to a surprising amount of pretty bad stuff. (I've also been a major beneficiary of their willingness to play relatively unknown white artists. Don't bite the hand!) I wish Bluesville would acknowledge the contemporary soul-blues scene--and more mid-career black artists. They're trying, though. It's my go-to station.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 17, 2015 5:06 AM
I can't help but to think that in many ways this question is very similar to whether or not the Elgin marbles should be returned to Greece. A recent NY Times article on the subject of the marbles ends with a quote equally applicable to the blues: “Over time, the whole thing becomes a symbol of something, and symbols are very dangerous things."
There is also a very strong argument that the Brits have preserved the Elgin marbles for the future, and kept them in the public eye, in a way that the Greeks would not have.
Last Edited by yonderwall on May 17, 2015 5:35 AM
@yonderwall ; I agree in part and I also agree in part with Adam's point, a point he has addressed a few times on here about the contemporary soul-blues scene, I would call it more a southern soul-blues scene born out of what we in the UK would call northern soul of the late 60's and early 70's. This is a subject really about did African-Americans abandon the blues! Well, yes and no in equal measures, times and tastes move on, I think African-Americans did not so much abandon the blues but more redefined it to move with the times and the period so to speak, like the contemporary soul-blues scene takes in elements of blues, classic soul, gospel, hip-hop and modern R&B this is what happened to the blues in the 60's and Adams point about the almost exclusive African-American audience that exists for the soul-blues scene of today as far as one can see Corey Harris is talking about them but directs none of his musical endeavourers in their direction i.e. in the soul-blues vein but rather he incorporates many musical traditions and tries to sell that as contemporary American blues for and about African-Americans. Also did African-Americans really think that from, for the sake of talking say the...1920's to the 1950's that they should have been sharing their musical heritage with the white folk of the USA I think not and in that time they would be right, why should they given the past and the ongoing problems of the time so that when white people did start taking an interest in blues does anyone honestly think that an African-American was going to turn around and tell a white cat ''to fuck off and get your own music''...no and I'm sure a lot of African-Americans would welcome the barriers coming down for no other reason than they were just decent humans wanting to get along with with others showing mutual respect and I'm sure there were other people who thought the opposite but however mundane it may sound but... people, attitude's and times change and that's life.
As for why do lots white folk love African-American blues music, have a never ending adulation for (especially)African-American original blues musicians, want to sing like them, want to emulate what they did musically, want to constantly discuss and analyse their music .... do you know why because we are human and that's what humans do, always have and always will regardless of race, colour or creed no rights or wrongs here its human nature. Academics will argue that the African-American ex-slave population were acculturated to a considerable degree by and among thier Scots-Irish neighbours living in similarly poor housing and economic conditions and the influence of equally impoverished native Americans you could go on with this but it's always going to come back to human nature. People like Joachim Ernst-Berendt, Chris Barber, Horst Lippman, Fritz Rau and Willie Dixon (and others) do you think their plan to bring us the blues on an industrial scale was a conspiracy to rob African-Americans of their musical heritage or simply they just loved the music and letting some great musicians earn a crust? If their are African-Americans out there that believe that whites should not listen to nor play blues music then that's that! There will be many others who don't and the bottom line is about respecting the music and the origins and if I want to specifically fixate on blues and rhythm & blues from the early years to the 60's, basically preserving that style of music from those era's and selectively there after, then that's my choice and it has been since 1985 and similarly with reggae and ska music since my mid teens. I know there are more pedantic arguments that could go on and on but like Corey Harris has done we each need to draw a line under it and stand your ground.
No one is purposefully denying anyone their right to their cultural heritage wittingly or unwittingly its there if you want it and how you want it.
Last Edited by marine1896 on May 17, 2015 12:45 PM
Just 2 comments -- the soul-blues ( chitlin) circuit is even deader than standard blues.( look at the age of the ladies in the Sease clip and thats an old video, cause he has been gone 5 years or so) I live in what used to be an area bustling with that type music and it is now almost non existent in Miami=marvin Sease (RIP), Clarence Carter bobby Rush , Blow Fly were/are trotted out for the occasional party or picnic gig but most people under 40 arent listening to it and I dont know any young cats playing it.
I love this music ( crazy I know- guity pleasure) and my guitarist friend did some studio work back when Miami was jumping with soul blues in the late 70's
Here is clarence reid- a huge presence on the chitlin circuit
Sunday morning there is an R and B radio show on public radio that might play some of the old locals like Bobby Stringer, Betty Wright, or Clarence Reid
The old music stores and clubs that used to play it in Miami are long gone
So that would be a dead end if Corey Harris had an interest there.
Also- Bobo Ashanti Rasta are exclusionary and Black separatist but other groups like 12 tribes are more inclusive and believe like Selassie that color is of no importance.. edit to add video
Last Edited by Goldbrick on May 17, 2015 8:12 AM
WOW............... Don't know what to think. Why is the article peppered with "Black people" and then "white people"? Why not "black people" and then "white people". Better yet just people. Johnny and Edgar Winter are Albino. I think they got us all beat...........
This took the cake:
"Stevie Ray Vaughn could play some guitar...."
SRV could play circles around Corey Harris. He'll always be remembered for Scuttle Buttin.
What song will Corey Harris ever be remembered for? I got nothin.
Can Corey Harris play the blues when consumed with such anger and twisted perspective?
Anyway, anyone can play the blues and anything they want some people are going to be better than others and play it with more feeling and some folk are going to be derivative and some are going to be more individual. It's all about respect and reverence of the people and the artform. And it's that artform that found it's way in the big wide world and as such we were all taught by the originals how to sing/play the blues or maybe that's your blues.
But, no one these days are going to really get 'the blues' like the originals for lots of reasons if your African-American or not.
And I know some folk will say I can say that cos I'm white!
Last Edited by marine1896 on May 17, 2015 9:18 AM
You've got to decide, finally, whether you think that Bonnie Raitt and Kim Wilson doing their best to honor Elmore James during the Year of the Blues is a good thing or a bad thing. What do you think? Are they honoring an ancestor, or claiming the music, or both? Is what they're doing here a good thing, or cultural theft? Or both? Please weigh in.
With all due respect, I think the thread as passed its sell-by date. I do think that Bonnie Raitt and Kim Wilson doing their best for any reason is an unadulterated good thing, in any case. ---------- Phil Pennington
I believe with all my heart that the woman has the right, and the only right, to choose what she does with her own body. Actually, I believe everyone has that right.
I also believe with no doubt whatsoever that we all have the right to choose what we intend to do with our time here on this planet, even if it's the most out-to-lunch-improbable way of doing so, even if it goes against all odds and common sense, and any of us would say this to anyone who was pursuing a dream, "Of course you should follow your instinct, your dream, your intention, of course you should, and don't let anyone stop you."
And I'm sure that Corey Harris would say that, too.
Great comments in this thread... I think you guys have it wrapped up and I have nothing new to offer except that this topic always makes me think of this song (punkrock not blues so don't click if you would prefer to avoid that)
"Johnny Twobags doesn't have the blues and it makes him sad, brings him down but not down enough to have the blues"
What I love about this debate is that it's full of what lawyers call "bad facts": stuff that an advocate needs to find a way of burying.
I haven't been paying a lot of attention to Corey Harris's teaching career, but it seems that he is absolutely one of the anchoring personalities for Sonic Junction's blues teaching mill:
His co-teachers are Duke Robillard, Guy Davis, Rusty Zinn, Jerry Portnoy, and Rick Estrin.
If Corey Harris is so intent on proclaiming "Blues is BLACK Music!" (the title of his blog), why is he also so intent on teaching that music on an all-comers basis--to white guys and gals, and lot of other folks? Why not retreat into the mountains of Jamaica and refuse to convey the good stuff into the hands of infidels?
The answer is surely the one thing nobody has yet acknowledged: maybe the man is just a softie at heart, behind all the political flag-waving, and actually LIKES conveying information to folks who really want to learn. Not a lion, but a pussycat. Or--more in line with the blues--both a lion AND a pussycat.
Do I have to be Austrian to play Mozart? Of course not. Can Asians play classical music? Of course they can. Some of the best classical musicians in the world are Asian.
This is a bullshit argument, period.
As a friend of mine said "I'm Italian. I like Italian food. I don't care who cooks it as long as it tastes good. And once in a while I like to taste a little innovation in my dish."
Watched a rare interview clip with Howlin' Wolf. And again - as with most of the greats - his focus was that Blues was the music of the people who were feeling bad.
If guys like Wolf and Muddy and Brownie McGhee (IN my hearing, that last one) didn't see colour as even a relevant issue with Blues, then what the hell is the problem?
---------- My YouTube Channel - Any Likes or Comments appreciated. :)
Danny, are you really asking the question--and interested in the answer? Or are you asking it rhetorically and uninterested in the answer?
Greg, I know you to be a thoughtful, sensible guy, someone who keenly appreciates various sorts of subtleties in your own specialized field of enterprise. So I'm surprised that you think that the statement "Do I have to be Austrian to play Mozart?" carries any real weight at all in this particular discussion. It doesn't.
The question isn't whether one individual white blues player can play the music, but rather what has happened to the music--its history, aesthetics, and core values--when, as in the present day, whites control it in almost every key way. I don't begrudge Harris's right to ask such questions. I agree with some of his analysis, in fact. But I don't agree with all of it.
Here's one very brief attempt I made to think the issue through. It's a footnote in a forthcoming article on the film "Crossroads."
The claim “Blues is black music” has, of course, a certain indisputable baseline validity, especially if one is speaking about the four decades between 1920 and 1960 when blues made by African American artists for African American audiences was the foundation of a race-record market that placed the music at the center of the black popular sphere. It is impossible to speak intelligibly about blues without acknowledging the form’s grounding in a whole series of African American cultural practices, including black vernacular language, signifying, and call and response aesthetics, not to mention the way in which the blues lyric tradition is marked, and profoundly, by race-specific histories of economic expropriation, social exclusion, and disciplinary violence. Speaking in terms of sheer numbers, ninety-five percent of the most original, influential, and irreplaceable blues performers down through the years (we might stipulate, and the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame inductees list corroborates) have been African American. By the same token, whites have been composing, singing, playing, and forming significant audiences for blues music for more than a century. Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #9” (1930), The Andrews Sisters’s “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy” (1941), and Annie Ross’s “Twisted” (1952), are all white-authored blues, performed by whites (in the case of Rodgers and Ross, with black collaborators), that were embraced by a range of audiences that included blacks as well as whites. Elvis Presley’s first series of hits, almost all of them 12-bar blues, dominated black urban radio in 1956—a result, some have argued, of a crossover hunger within black audiences sourced in the integrationist tenor of the Civil Rights movement. The last half-century in particular has watched blues musical cohorts and audiences expand not just throughout every non-African American precinct of contemporary America (including Native America), but throughout Europe, Russia, Japan, and much of the rest of the world, a proliferation indexed by the several hundred bands that participate every year in The Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge in Memphis. This has happened even as mass black audiences for the blues were melting away in the course of the 1960s, deserting blues in favor of soul music (and, later, rap and R&B), an exodus driven in part by the rejection of blues as politically retrograde by Black Aesthetic intellectuals such as Ron Karenga, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez. To the extent that the insistent claim “Blues is black music” seeks to evade, obfuscate, or invalidate portions of this complicated, paradox-rich, and now thoroughly globalized history, it is propagating mythology rather an honest and accurate account of what the music is and has been. For two versions of the “blues is black music” argument, see Corey Harris, “Can White People Play the Blues?,” Blues is Black Music!, 10 May 2015, (http://bluesisblackmusic.blogspot.com/2015/05/can-white-people-play-blues.html), and Paul Garon, “White Blues” (circa 1993), http://www.bluesworld.com/WHITEBLUES.html. For the counsterstatement, see Vincent B. Leitch, “Blues Southwestern Style,” in Theory Matters (New York: Routledge, 2003), 137-164; Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Michael Urban with Andrei Evdokimov, Russia Gets the Blues: Music, Culture, and Community in Unsettled Times (Ithaka and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Gussow, “’If Bessie Smith Had Killed Some White People,’” New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Collins and Crawford, 227-252. For the Blues Hall of Fame inductees list, see http://www.blues.org/hall-of-fame/performers-in-the-blues-hall-of-fame/
One answer to the claim "Blues is BLACK music!" is to say "Of course it is! Let's stipulate that, without argument." In historical and aesthetic terms, as a first analytical move, this is an entirely reasonable claim. I don't see why anybody would dispute it--unless they truly didn't know both the history of blues music, the identity (and genius) of the great foundational figures, the social history that underlies the thousands of recorded blues issued between 1920 and 1960, and the aesthetic framework (signifying, call and response, vernacular language, African-derived microtones, etc.) in which blues functions.
Of course, when you actually begin to drill down, even those certainties begin to complicate in ways that need to be appreciated. W. C. Handy, in FATHER OF THE BLUES, talks about how in "St. Louis Blues," he was trying to sum up the history and sound of black America. But the first peformer to make the song a hit was a white singer, Marion Harris. There was quite an active, parallel blues tradition among white country singers in the 1920s and 1930s; Jimmie Rodgers was part of that, but there were many others.
Beyond that, the world we live in as contemporary blues players transformed radically between 1960 and 1970, and we are all still living in the aftermath period. To say, today, "Blues is BLACK music!," as though that tells us anything nuanced about the many and various roles the music actually plays in the year 2015, is an entirely different sort of claim, and terribly problematic. And THAT, from Harris's perspective, is the problem: blues today, if it's anything, is white people's music. Far more whites than blacks are playing it, listening to it--and judging it, making money off it, dancing to it (some of them quite well, some of them rather stiffly), and celebrating it our own weird, list-creating way. The horror, the horror!
Harris is plainly horrified by that. To the extent that he just doesn't think most white blues players sing or play very well, and to the extent that he has specifically been subject to racism as a performing musician, he is fully entitled to his opinions; I'm sure that I can sympathize with some of his aesthetic distaste in the former case and almost all of his anger in the latter case. But to the extent that he's intent on delegitimizing ALL white blues playing a priori, simply on the basis of skin color, and attacking the entire mainstream world of club owners, promoters, record label owners, journalists, and scholars, simply because the preponderance of them happen to share my skin color, that's wrong and I'll continue to say so. Some of us are racist, clueless jerks; the great majority of us are not. And, even more importantly, most of us--I think!--live our lives as musicians and fans with a keen sense of double-consciousness. We KNOW the tradition that we've entered and in which we function is grounded in some elemental way in the genius of African American blues players who have come before us. We do our best to take them as models, as inspirations, as prods to our own growth. We've spent a lot of time, some of us, in performing environments dominated and/or hugely impacted by the soulful personalities and performing genius (or merely skill) of African American musicians. We've been culturally blackened, in some sense--either in person, or at second-hand, via intense connection with recordings. That's a good thing. It CAN be a good thing for all parties concerned.
We also know, many of us, that at this point, the history of the blues offers white models of blues excellence as well as black ones. We know that Jimmie Rodgers, Paul Butterfield, Rory Block, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton (for his Cream stuff), Bonnie Raitt, Jason Ricci, William Clarke, have added something indelible to the blues tradition, however one slices it. Anybody who tries to simply write those artists off, for racial reasons or aesthetic reasons or both, is making a mistake. Those artists all inspire me. They've earned their place in the pantheon. They're not imitative--although all of them, to be sure, began by imitating their black influences, as all the black players I know, including B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson, began by imitating their black influences.
In 2013-2014, Harris went out on tour with Alvin Youngblood Hart, Guy Davis, and several other black blues performers on the "True Blues" tour.
I don't have any problem with all this--until it becomes determinedly, pointedly ideological. Then, although it's something I'm happy to teach in class, it's also something that potentially tries to tell me, "There's no earned place for you here." And that's not true. I've earned my place, such as it is. I'm also too well aware of the paradoxes that undercut the project, such as it is, of insisting that IN THE CONTEMPORARY MOMENT, "Blues is BLACK music."
One of those paradoxes, as I note above, is that Harris is actively hooked up to the teaching gravy-train: he's lending his name, prestige, and talents to SonicJunction's project of teaching the blues to everybody, not just young black people. If he's engaged in authentic teaching, if he truly wishes to give of himself in that way, then he hopes in some way that his students--whichever of them sticks with it and has real talent--will end up really mastering the music, making whatever long journey is required to do that. And at some point, if he's a good, inspiring, committed teacher, some of those (white) students are going to be making records, playing gigs, and...well, becoming a part of the whole "white thing" that is apparently causing Harris so much grief. So....what does he hope to achieve?
I've made my own version of that journey, as have a number of people who contribute to this forum. You, Jason, P.T. Gazell, Brandon Bailey, Danny Starwars, J.Bone, and many others: we're making that journey. Paul Oscher has made that journey. It shows in every note he plays.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 08, 2015 5:36 AM
Although lot's of what CH wrote in his blog are fully formed valid point's I still can't get over the 7th paragraph! Again, there's some valid, truthful point's he makes there is also something insidious to what he writes there, and also he comes across with a "You sit over there and I'll sit over here" mentality! As for his True Blues first time I heard him he was pretty much forgettable, The Blues...where is the oppression, violence, sex, humour and pathos in his voice and blues???? Years ago I devised a way of determining what I considered a musician that had deep blues and I defined it by saying either they are "heavy blues" or "lightweight blues" heavy being you can hear that Muddy, Nighthawk, Son House thing going on or at the very least they had studied and respected the music so hard it was screaming out of them or lightweight, a good musician neither here nor there but enjoyable enough to take em or leave em...to my ear's CH is lightweight...just listen to him! ----------
"Those British boys want to play the blues real bad, and they do"
Cory Harris is pragmatic, if nothing else. Teaching white people to play the blues, though, probally isn't intellectually repugnant too him; I imagine he relishes the position of being assumed Authority by dint of ancestry and scholarship, especially to students who are, likely, most white and other wise non-African American. What I would say to Harris is that the Blues is a black American musical form that is no longer the exclusive property of black Americans.After my discovery of Butterfield and Hendrix, I learned the blues listening and imitating Waters, Wolf, Hooker, a host of geniuses. But I have lived long enough and experienced enough to say that when I play the blues, the music belongs to me. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ http://www.yourURL.com tburke4@san.rr.com ----------
Last Edited by nacoran on Jun 08, 2015 4:35 PM
Harris's main theme seems to be the music isn't yours, it never will be yours, you will never be as authentic sounding as a black blues musicians no matter how hard you try, you haven't earned it blah blah blah. I had to just shake my head as to why he is beating that same old drum again.
After giving it some thought, I guess I can understand a LITTLE of what is going on in his head. About a month ago I went to a Mary Chapin Carpenter concert (yes I did!) and he very talented guitarist started playing an instrument that looked like a small guitar, but sounded oddly like something I had heard before. After the song was over, Carpenter told the crowd "{so-and-so, I forgot his name] on bouzouki. Being Greek, the only thing that I could think at that moment was (1) it doesn't look like a real bouzouki; (2) it sounds somewhat like a bouzouki, but with a lighter sound and tone; (3) He wasn't playing it in the way I have always heard traditional Greek bouzouki, even though some of the lines sounded vaguely Mediterranean (perhaps Spanish) in origin; and (4) if I never heard the sound of this particular "faux" (in my mind) bouzouki again, it would not bother me one bit. My experience has been that only Greeks can really play bouzouki with the kind of feeling that the instrument is known for. So within me there was a bit of ethnic pride in the rejection of what I heard on the stage that night.
Harris's argument also remind me a little of the comments by Sugar Blue in the Chicago Tribune in 2012 (previously posted in this Forum)
"And it seemed to me that it's very, very important to make a statement about that … because this (music) is of the black experience and always will be. And the fact that it has become universal is a wonderful thing, because it says how important and influential and powerful this music is.
"But it must be remembered that though you are welcome to the house, do not try and take the home. Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you're in."
Harris's main theme seems to be the music isn't yours, it never will be yours, you will never be as authentic sounding as a black blues musicians no matter how hard you try, you haven't earned it blah blah blah. I had to just shake my head as to why he is beating that same old drum again.
After giving it some thought, I guess I can understand a LITTLE of what is going on in his head. About a month ago I went to a Mary Chapin Carpenter concert (yes I did!) and her very talented guitarist started playing an instrument that looked like a small guitar, but sounded oddly like something I had heard before. After the song was over, Carpenter told the crowd "{so-and-so, I forgot his name] on bouzouki. Being Greek, the only thing that I could think at that moment was (1) it doesn't look like a real bouzouki; (2) it sounds somewhat like a bouzouki, but with a lighter sound and tone; (3) He wasn't playing it in the way I have always heard traditional Greek bouzouki, even though some of the lines sounded vaguely Mediterranean (perhaps Spanish) in origin; and (4) if I never heard the sound of this particular "faux" (in my mind) bouzouki again, it would not bother me one bit. My experience has been that only Greeks can really play bouzouki with the kind of feeling that the instrument is known for. So within me there was a bit of ethnic pride in the rejection of what I heard on the stage that night.
Harris's argument also remind me a little of the comments by Sugar Blue in the Chicago Tribune in 2012 (previously posted in this Forum)
"And it seemed to me that it's very, very important to make a statement about that … because this (music) is of the black experience and always will be. And the fact that it has become universal is a wonderful thing, because it says how important and influential and powerful this music is.
"But it must be remembered that though you are welcome to the house, do not try and take the home. Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you're in."
p.s. Regarding the Elgin Marbles comment by yonderwall -
The Elgin Marbles were stolen. Pilfered. Ripped off and never returned. No such thing has happened to the blues. The marbles are a physical thing, music is not. As to whether they would have "survived" - of course they would have, just like all of the other antiquities in Greek museums and ancient sites. The problem with the marbles - in contrasts to blues music - is that the marbles MUST be seen in a place other than their origin. There are no such restrictions on blues music. And the inference that white players have somehow preserved the music in a way that others might not have done is utter BS.
Last Edited by atty1chgo on Jun 08, 2015 1:24 PM
@Adam - was a genuine question - I am aware the some of the issues on the table are more difficult to grasp from a a totally different cultural background. I am happy to keep reading posts to see if I can understand better, and I appreciate your words on the issue.
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The upshot of all this , I think, is that there is a difficult equilibrium to achieve and maintain, the first being that players of blues music need to acknowledge and remember that blues is the creation of Black American musicians and that it is a musical record not just of several generations of innovation from geniuses aplenty, and that two, because the music has pretty much been the rosetta stone through which all interesting American-based musical stylesl have evolved, the blues has permeated every aspect of American culture, like it or not, and now belongs to the collective Amerian Experience. It isn't a higher calculus to understand that people who are attracted to music will want to make music in that style and find their own voiced. I wanted to write like James, Mailer and TS and Eliot and imitated and came out through it all writing like someone else altogether, distinct. I wanted to play like Butterfield and Sonny Boy Williams and wound up, likewise, coming up with a style that is as much influenced by guitarists, tenor saxophone players and pianists, especially jazz players. The attraction will not pay attention to the rants and nagging by those claiming a true vision for what art intrinsically is, or who it belongs to. When the facts of the situation do not fit the theory, you change the theory. In that regard, we all have our work cut out for us. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ http://www.yourURL.com tburke4@san.rr.com
See, what I play is of my experience, and not anyone else's. Having listened to Corey Harris I can see how what he plays could very well be someone else's experience, though.
1896 said "But, no one these days are going to really get 'the blues' like the originals for lots of reasons if your African-American or not."
True dat--Corey Harris wants a fight where there is none--he is a talented college man , who I doubt spent anytime behind a mule pushing a plow. However it is his musical heritage as an American black man and you cant negate that.
You can play the blues form with respect and leave it at that- every culture has its own " soul" that you need to be born into to REALLY be a part of.
Play Django all you want you may be respected but you still aint a Manouche. White kids can wear dreadlocks but they aint Rasta You can be a "good" gangster- but unless you are Sicilian you will not be Cosa Nostra ( our thing)
What is wrong with that? You can play it, you can feel it but you Aint all of it-and that doesnt make you a poser-it makes you a musician in that style
Be yourself and stop worrying if you need permission
There is a story that when Muddy Waters found out that Johnny Winter was using heroin - he told Johnny that you can play the Blues without living it
Blues is a language just like flamenco or any ethnic music.Some people never get past speaking the style,others can sing it and others are poets in the language.I speak English and ame-rican !I also speak blues,and when I get deep in it I sing it too.It`s beyond race if you`re in the soul space.if you`re not you have a problem ?
(Editing note: Ted, it looks like maybe in the process of editing your comment ended up with two signatures and some sort of open HTML. The editing was just to fix that. It was making the next comment display all wonky off the page to the right of your comment.)
I don't have much I can add to this discussion but I have been following it with interest. I have been doing some in depth reading about the reconstruction era and the end of reconstruction and the so called "redemption" of southern states. It is heartbreaking to read about and I would never want to try to equate anything I have suffered leading to the blues, with the magnitude of suffering I am reading about.
That said, I would like to ask for some help from those of you with a more extensive knowledge of the history and the music. I would like to find some examples of early blues songs that may have a deeper meaning than what the song seems to be about on the surface, and may actually be about the failed promise of reconstruction. I am sure a direct song about disappointment with "redemption" would have gotten its writer killed. Can anyone point me to examples?
What Mr. West said there is in agreement with the history I have been reading.
I would still be interested to find some early blues that references, directly or indirectly, reconstruction and redemption. I have found a few hateful songs written from the vantage point of unreconstructed rebels, but I have not found anything yet from the other point of view. The closest I have found so far is "Give Us a Flag" this is pre-blues.
STME: In answer to your good question: Reconstruction and Redemption were Big Ideas; blues tends to represent things on a more personal level. If you listen to my Blues Talk lectures #2 and 3, which I've just been doing, I talk through the history you're talking about. In particular, I talk about "Joe Turner Blues" and how it evokes a sadness about a "disappeared" black male lover who has in fact been caught up in the so-called carceral network; he's been taken away by Joe Turney, an employee of the Tennessee Dept. of Corrections (more or less) who chained convicts together and marched them off to prison.
I'm surprised this keeps coming up as a point of discussion. The history of the inventors of this music are Black. They people who continued to evolve it were Black. Most of the historical advances were created by people who were Black.
That being said, you can play whatever type of music you want. Multi-racial and multi-ethnic bands have been around for decades. If you want to play the music with the feeling and emotion of the masters, you need to listen to and understand their music and the music of those who influenced them.
The people who aren't Black who do this tend to stand out in the degree of soulfulness of their music. If you don't love it and live it, you can't recreate it. You certainly can not recreate the emotion of the experience or the intent of the author.
That's why so many Blues bands end up sounding like Blues Hammer. (If you don't get the reference, watch the movie, Ghost World.) If you've seen the movie, you're white and still don't get it, you're part of the perception problem.
KUDZU: Thanks for your response. The concept you stated of “Big Ideas” vs. personal reaction I find quite useful. When I read of things like Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876, or the “Mississippi Plan” it makes me quite angry, and I have no close personal connection with the events. I thought it would be easier than it is to find songs expressing outrage over the myriad of events like this. Perhaps it is there, just not expressed specifically. Perhaps mixed in with all of this unresolved turmoil, are the seeds of the questions about who has the “right” to sing the blues.
I will go back and look at the first 3 “Blues Talks” again. Your comments about “Joe Turner Blues” brought to my mind another song about the carceral system, “Another Man Done Gone”, and made me think of it in a slightly different light. I have been listening to this song in versions done by Sugar Blue, and Carlos Del Junco.
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