I've uploaded an expanded and retooled written version of my first Blues Talk lecture to Facebook. It engages the "Blues is BLACK music!" and "No black, no white, just the blues" perspectives.
I was thinking of this topic as I heard this on the radio last Saturday. It is about Hip-Hop and not the blues, but many of the issues are very similar.
Last Edited by STME58 on Jan 20, 2016 8:19 AM
I haven't finished reading all of Adam's 'Blues Talk' yet .. what I have read has been written with style and have enjoyed the read so far..
While I was staying in Clarksdale Ms. for a few months last year, kind of a pilgrimage after a real nasty divorce … I had a few occasions to play harp alongside, and, get to know Mark 'Muleman" Massey a bit . Adam mentions his story in 'Blues talk' . He is a fine performer , who's lived as hard a life as anyone ..
Nice to see his story remembered in the "Conversation" !
It felt real good that Mark asked me to the bandstand at Red's Juke joint on those occasion's .. and that Red didn't complain : )
For those of you who don't know Red , or haven't been to his juke joint , he mostly hires black performers for Fri. & Sat. nights , and, white performers on Sun nights , yes, those occasions with Mark fell on Sundays … "It is what it is" (Red's favorite saying). That being said , some of the performers hired for Fri. & Sat. also allowed me to sit in ... very memorable occasions : )
Last Edited by mastercaster on Jan 20, 2016 8:25 PM
I was coming across the videos for the first time last week or the week before. I was hoping to get some discussion about the topics, but I wasn't sure if the forum was the right place.
EDIT: Wow, I see there is a whole forum dedicated to it. I should pay more attention.
Last Edited by Bugsy on Jan 20, 2016 9:32 PM
The history of blues I find interesting. The politics of blues not so much. If Black musicians choose to go in a differnt musical direction than the blues - so be it. blues is essentially niche music now. It has influenced beyond measure other musical forms However if the culture it originated the form chooses to leave it behind- you cant cry foul when others pick up the torch---No one is excluding the originators from playing the blues.
Blacks are about 12.3% of the US population. Of just the US members of the board I wonder if we have even that much Black representation here
Tastes change -people move on in their interests Respect the origins and carry on
I too have inter-racial children- I grew up listening to the blues. My kids are musicians and are blues fans. My wife and her family were strictly jazz, gospel and reggae--No interest in the blues at all coming up. It just is what it is.
I do find the state of Mississippis embrace of the blues kinda band wagonish- but no different than Spain embracing Flamenco while ignoring the fact that the Gypsys, Jews and africans that influenced it were persona non grata for many years.
I just wanna dig the music and I dont feel guilty about it
Adam: thanks for this - it really made me think! I particularly enjoyed the analogy about bluegrass...I could see how some of the originators of bluegrass music might be rubbed the wrong way if that happened. It's refreshing to see people talking about these issues in a thoughtful way.
The term and format we know as " bluegrass" wasnt used until the 40's or 50's ( named for Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys) so there is no real culture attached to it.
It is derived from celtic, old timey and hillbilly music- which is part of Appalachian tradition.
But I understand the point you made
Bill Monroe acknowledged african influence too ( after all the banjo is an African instrument)
edit to add old timey video
Last Edited by Goldbrick on Jan 21, 2016 6:12 AM
@JInx: I agree that it would be racism if white bluegrass musicians got angry simply because someone of another race were playing their music.
But Adam's analogy was about more than that. As I understood it, Adam was making the point that it would be understandable for "race Y" to feel some resentment if "race Z" comes in, takes over race Y's music, exploits race Y's music, and generally rips the music out of race Y's hands for its own purposes without regard for the history and community that gave birth to the music. Doesn't really matter which race is which here; it's just an interesting thought experiment.
So on the confluence of that premise, if someone from said "race y" comes along and exploits this new "race y" music....that would be OK. So, skin color matters. That's racist. ----------
The bluegrass thing was just a thought experiment, designed to give white blues fans and players a glimpse of how it might feel--just the barest flicker of insight--to sense oneself, in cultural terms, part of a beleaguered minority in a cultural context where the culture in question is felt to be of central importance to the folks who originated it and from whom it is, so to speak, being taken away.
As Goldbrick noted, the bluegrass/blues analogy doesn't quite fit, since blues has a long history of being a pop music, not just a folk music, whereas bluegrass has always been pretty much a folk music.
The other big difference is that the very ground of the blues was black oppression under white majority rule (Jim Crow). So there's a powerful irony, from the black perspective, in the idea that control of the music, in institutional and numerical terms, is now in white hands. It's as though the native American ghost dancing ritual were now a widespread white American cultural ritual, with ghost dancing societies in every American city, white-published journals about ghost dancing performances, etc. Indians might get pissed off. Would you blame them if they did?
It's worth thinking about other comparable versions of cultural appropriation/inversion. One that comes to mind is yoga in America: a practice with religious foundations that was once the province of a few intrepid Indian immigrants who sought to introduce the practice to America has now metastasized into ten thousand Hot Yoga, JoyFlow Yoga, Power Yoga, StudiOm Yoga, and other commercialized forms of yoga, with white folks in charge.
I happen to think that blues is a fascinating special case that can't quite be analogized with any other (appropriated) art form. On the one hand, it's indisputably an African American invention, a music whose greatest and most original performers have historically been African Americans. The syncopation, the call-and-response dynamic, the microtones in the blues scale, the field-holler residue, and above all the vernacular language (including hoodoo terms like mojo): that's all black culture, much of it tracing back to Africa. By the same token, whites became a part of the blues very early--starting with Antonio Maggio's "I Got the Blues" in 1908....
...and Marion Harris's "St. Louis Blues" in 1920....
Between 1960 and 1970, as young blacks dropped the blues in favor of soul music, young whites poured into the blues, as both audiences and performers. During that same period, black intellectuals had a big dispute about the meaning and value of the blues. Ron Karenga and Sonia Sanchez basically said, "The blues are yesterday's music, worthless to contemporary black activism. They're passive; they're slave music." Larry Neal and a number of others argued in the opposite direction. That was all happening at the very moment that whites were creating the first big blues festivals, starting with the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969. It's also a period of time when white bands like Cream were doing something truly original with rock/blues/jazz fusion, and when the Allman Brothers and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, both of which were interracial outfits, were also adding something new, adventurous, and important to the blues lexicon. Black cultural nationalists who attack white blues like to say "No white player has anything original to say" and "Whites may PLAY the blues, but they can't SING the blues," but when you toss those three acts into the ring--with "Sunshine of Your Love," EAST/WEST, and "Whipping Post" as featured tracks--that dismissal begins to fall apart.
Meanwhile, for the past 40 years, whites, in concert with black elders and some young black musicians and a sprinkling of black fans, have evolved a thriving blues culture--a multiracial blues culture that has now spread around the world, so that blues jam sessions can be found on at least six of the seven continents.
It's a complex situation! I do my best to body it forth in its full complexity. In my own small way, I've been a part of the worldwide-spread dynamic. I don't begrudge folks like Corey Harris, Sugar Blue, and the folks at Dominican University who flag race-issues in pointed ways. Sure, it's always worth pausing and saying "Where are we right now in this long march away from black community control of this music?" But I will always try to flag the inconvenient facts that problematize unilateral statements about what the blues is, are, or should be.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jan 22, 2016 7:10 AM
I agree that blues is a fascinating special case, but in many ways is is not unique. gospel, ragtime, jazz, rap, hip-hop and probably others that a person more versed in music history could list have been first demonized and then appropriated in a similar way.
I was very struck by the similarity of the description of Muleman in Adam's essay, and the description of Eminem in the radio article I linked to near the top of this thread.
The thing that is upsetting isn't that another race or skin color is appropriating the blues. It is that the blues came from a specific experience, circumstance, and social status of life, and now those who are not a part of it (and those who some see as propagating it, being above it, and unaffected/benefited by it) are now appropriating it. A sort of David and Bathsheba deal. (Please, I know it isn't a good analogy logically, but consider the metaphorical story the prophet Nathan told to David.)
I would also like to nitpick and mention that skin color has nothing to do with it, and really never has. It was just the easy way to identify race, as you can't know a person's genes from just looking at them. In a way, I suppose it did back in the day, but our understanding is much different than theirs. We are more "scientific" now and understand skin color, race, genes, etc. as much more distinct and separate things than they did, but it is clear from our knowledge that what they cared about is more analogous to what we understand as race or genes. Think of these two cases: light-skinned or albino blacks, a slave's mixed bastard kid.
I would like to explore our American conceptions of "white" and "black" a little more, but I would get horribly off topic and it isn't particularly relevant to this discussion of blues. I'll just say that the "blues is BLACK music" side has to do with race, and not because it matters now, I think, but because it mattered in the past. It is a weird situation.
Last Edited by Bugsy on Jan 23, 2016 12:20 AM
And of course you had guys like Jimmie Rodgers Crossing hillbilly with blues--in thw 20's and 30's who sold a lot of records and had the working class background to give it " street cred"
Bugsy: I'm working with facts. You're retailing mythologies. "Children of those who caused that suffering" is a loaded phrase--and it's not factual. Moreover, it completely ignores the international spread of blues culture. Blues is huge in Australia, Japan, France. Those people weren't implicated in slavery and segregation in the USA.
The word "now," too, tends to make us want to ignore the 100-year history of whites playing the blues. Heck, the phrase "blues" was current in white culture long before it was picked up by black musicians.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jan 22, 2016 1:52 PM
@Goldbrock - I agree the has a ton of talent. What a voice. I've been wanting to share the guy here since I first stumbled across him but it's been tough finding a proper thread. If he notices I hope he's not pissed that I chose this one.
Okay, I don't think what I meant to say came across the right way. I blame writing this just after waking up.
I wasn't trying to convey facts, and certainly not my own view, I was trying to communicate the emotional reaction that I know is out there to better help those who might have trouble understanding both sides. I could have sworn I typed a clarifying parenthetical and a bunch of quotation marks onto that statement, but I must have deleted it when revising the post and forgot to type it back in, so I am sorry about that.
Again, I was trying to convey emotional content, so I loaded that phrase on purpose hoping that some emotion would ring through, as that aspect of the situation is just as important for getting a full understanding.
I do not think what I said is a departure from what was said before, but I see how the last sentence of that paragraph can change the whole tone of the post. I can get rid of it if you think it is unproductive to the conversation.
I do appreciate the erudition and scholarship that you guys bring to this never ending discussion...... But could the reason a lot of young Afro Americans didn't want to listen to Blues was for the same simple reason I didn't want to listen to my parents Glen Miller or Sinatra albums it was 'their' music.
Ok so, from now on, every time I get a dollar in my hat while playing a blues, I'll make sure to kick back a nickel to the next random black person I see. In respect for his racial patent, it's only fair. ----------
Last Edited by JInx on Jan 22, 2016 11:10 PM
the blues have been here since the beginning of time. it has been handed down from generation to generation. the slaves that built the pyramids were using call and response. it is shallow and short sighted to think it is a recent phenomenon.
---------- if you appreciate what you have... it becomes more.
Bugsy: Fair enough. Your edited version is something I pretty much agree with. I think one of the sticking points for me in this whole thing is the word "is" in Corey Harris's rallying cry "Blues is BLACK music!" From one perspective, that statement is so obviously true as to raise the question of why one would think it even needed to be uttered. It's like saying "Tamales are MEXICAN food!" Duh. Of course they are. The masa harina, the corn husks. Who would possibly dispute the Mexican origins of tamales?
But of course tamales have also, since the early 20th century, been a Mississippi Delta specialty, and many of the leading tamale creators these days are African American. Tamales were brought to the Delta by Mexican laborers back then, but--well, culture then did what it does, and local folks started working their own changes on tamales.
At this point, if a Mexican chef came along and angrily cried "Tamales are MEXICAN food!", serious foodies might want to say, "Well, of course. But also, no." Because history keeps moving, and culture keeps evolving. At this point, there's a multi-generational drama of Mississippi Delta tamale-making that has become part of the story.
I see blues in roughly the same light. From one perspective, a solid and centered historical and aesthetic perspective, of COURSE blues is black music. Only a fool would try to argue "Blues is WHITE music!", at least if what we're talking about are the complicated aesthetic origins of the form (heavily indebted to Africa), the music's evolutionary arc between 1920 and 1960 (black players and audiences drove the idiom's transformations), the mass of sociohistorical experience rendered in blues lyrics (read BLUES FELL THIS MORNING by Paul Oliver), and, not least, the greatest and most original practitioners (make a Top-10 all time list: Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, B. B. King, Lonnie Johnson, Little Walter, etc.). Come on. Of COURSE blues is black music, in all those senses--even though whites have been playing, singing, and recording it for 100 years.
The historical and aesthetic claim "Blues is BLACK music" can, of course, be nibbled away at, even in that pre-1960 period. When one goes granular, when one looks for the paradoxes, they are there to find. During World War II, for example, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" by The Andrews Sisters was a big hit. It's a blues. They're white women. Blues, as mobilized in that particular song, is American music; nationalist music. Jimmie Rodgers, as Goldbrick (I believe) has pointed out, was a bluesman; his "blue yodel" influenced a handful of black masters, including Howlin' Wolf. But yes: Blues is black music. Acknowledge all the paradoxes and still, aesthetically and historically, it's hard to argue with that claim, at least into the early 1960s.
Still, there's that pesky word "is." If we're speaking empirically and honestly about what blues these days actually IS, and what it has been over the past 50 years, it most definitely IS "white music," in profound and impactful ways. But it's more than the province of white audiences, musicians, societies, etc: it's a world music. People from all over the world--players from all over the world--have passionate investments in the music. In some cases these investments translate into continuing idolatry for African American performers, who still, to those people, represent the gold standard in "authentic blues." In other cases, a black presence doesn't seem particularly important to non-African American practitioners.
To the extent that the phrase "Blues is BLACK music" is simply trying to remind us of the indisputable historical importance of African American culture and practitioners to what blues is and has been, I completely agree.
To the extent, however, that that statement seeks to delegitimize, erase, morally and aesthetically repudiate, and stigmatize ALL non-African American blues practice and practitioners as cultural appropriators and/or interlopers, I strongly disagree, for half a dozen different reasons.
I think that Harris and others aren't entirely sure what they're trying to do, but it's pretty clear that they're not just asserting Column A; they've moved heavily into Column B as well.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jan 23, 2016 6:52 AM
I sympathize with what Cory Harris is trying to get across and finally accomplish, to reclaim blues as the exclusive dominion of black creators, but the desire is more nostalgic than practical. One might as well say "back to the good old days" , in which we not only return to blues being the property of black blues musicians, but also a return to unrepentant racism,subjugation, poverty , brutality and lynchings. Blues is a music that is black in origin and in innovation, but music that gets made gets heard by anyone who happens to be around where the music gets played, and a good many of those who are exposed to the blues thousands of miles from the Delta fall in love with it and find something in the form that effects them on a deep emotional and spiritual level. It ought not surprise anyone, least of all Mr.Harris, that thousands of whites who are attracted to the blues want to be blues musicians themselves and express their emotional life in the same chord structures black geniuses from the day created. It's also natural new elements are brought in to the blues by the newer musicians, cultural, intellectual, musical. The music changes , it is adapted for a more contemporary experience, it remains vital. The music is taken up by newer artists, black or white or asian or Brazilian or what have you you--and is used in manner that cogently fits the younger artists' view of the world--aware of the tradition but with an eye on his or her place in the world as it currently exists--and helps keep the music alive, relevant. One could argue as to whether what's been done is really blues at all, but there again we have what I consider a naive,if earnest desire to reduce blues music to formal presentation, a reconstructed museum piece out of sync with contemporary life. ---------- Ted Burke tburke4@san.rr.com
Jimmie Rodgers is not mixing blues and hillbilly. In my opinion, he was purely a blues musician. Same for Doc Boggs, Roscoe Holcombe and many others. I think there was much more cross pollination than people are generally aware of. It has been argued, since bluegrass music has been mentioned, that Bill Monroe was a blues musician. I've studied his playing, and I definitely agree. There is no doubt that blues is an African American phenomenon though, at least majorly, and developed out of profound injustice and cruelty. To deny or trivialize that fact is idiotic.
So, I have nothing but respect and gratitude for the people who created this music, but I am not sure how to feel about trying to play it. Thanks all, for the discussion. ---------- For every moment of triumph, every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. HST
