Abbott, Lynn. 1992. “Play That Barber Shop Chord: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” American Music, Fall. From his book in progress, To Sing and Never Get Tired: The Vocal Quartet Tradition in Black New Orleans. Abbott, Lynn, and Seroff, Doug, “America’s Blue Yodel,” Musical Traditions, Late 1993. Allen, Zita, “From Slave Ships to Center Stage,” https://www.thirteen.org/freetodance/behind/behind_slaveships.html Author unknown, “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,” The Dearborn Independent (The Ford International Weekly), Dearborn, MI, August 6, 1921. Badger, R. Reid, “James Reese Europe and the Prehistory of Jazz,” American Music, Vol. 7 No. 1, Spring 1989, 48-67. Baker, Houston A., Jr., “Hybridity, the rap race, and pedagogy for the 1990s,” Black Music Research Journal, 11:2, 1991, 217-228. Barol, Bill, “The Kings of Rap, together: Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys hit the road,” Newsweek, June 29, 1987, 71. Berry, Jason. 1988-90. “African Cultural Memory in New Orleans Music,” Black Music Research, Vol 8, #1, 1988-90. Bernard-Donals, Michael, “Jazz, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rap and Politics,” Journal of Popular Culture, 28:2, 1994, 127-38. Brown, Cecil, “Doing That ‘Ole Oscar Soft-Shoe,” San Francisco Examiner Magazine, March 26, 1995. Brown, Farnum, “The kids are all white,” Mother Jones, Sept-Oct., 1991, 73-74. Cable, George Washington. “The Dance in Place Congo & Creole Slave Songs,” in Katz, Bernard, The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States, New York:Arno, 1969. Calt, Stephen, “The Myth of Rock and Roll,” 78 Quarterly,Vol I No. 6, 1991. Carby, Hazel, “The Multicultural Wars,” in Dent, Gina, and Wallace, Michele, Black Popular Culture, Seattle:Bay Press, 1992. Carroll, E. Jean, “The return of the White Negro,” Esquire, June 1994, 100-7. Cocks, Jay, “Rap Around: Rad-hungry kids are dressing down and acting up in a worldwide rhythm revolution,” Time, October 19, 1992, 70-71. Cohen, John. “The Folk Music Interchange: Negro and White,” in Sing Out!, Dec.1964-Jan 1965, 42-49. Cohen, Norman. “The Skillet Lickers: A Study of a Hillbilly String Band and Its Repertoire,” in Gentry, Linnell, ed., A History and Encyclopedia of Country, Western, and Gospel Music, Second Edition, Nashville:Clairmont Corp, 1969. Collins, Gail, “Rap as a second language: Three middle-aged mothers master the possibilities,” Ms., January-February 1989, 56-58. Conway, Cecilia., “Black Banjo Songsters in Appalachia,” Black Music Research Journal, 23:1/2, Spring/Fall 2003, 149-66. Danaher, William F. and Blackwelder, Stephen P., “The Emergence of blues and rap: A comparison and assessment of the context, meaning and message,” Popular Music and Society, 17:4, 1993, 1-13. Delaney, Paul, “Pop culture, “Gangsta Rap: and the “New Vaudeville,” Media Studies Journal, 8:3, summer 1994, 97-101. DuBois, W.E.B., “The Souls of White Folk,” in DuBois, Essays Elwood, Philip, “Splendor in the Brass,” San Francisco Examiner Magazine, October 23, 1994, 10. Europe, James R. , “A Negro Explains Jazz,” 1919. Reprint in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser, 12-14. New York:Oxford, 1999. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, “Interrogating “Whiteness,“Complicating”Blackness”: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly, September 1995, 429-465. Forte, Dan, “Roots of Rockabilly,” Guitar Player, December 1983, 67-70+ Francis, Cleve, “Country & Black Listeners: Not An Oxymoron,” Billboard, February 4, 1995, 5. Gates, Henry Louis, “Sudden Def,” New Yorker, June 19, 1995, 34-42. Green, Archie, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore, July-September 1965, 204-228. Green, Archie, “Old Dan Tucker,” JEMF Quarterly, Vol XVII, No. 62, Summer 1981, 85-106. Handelman, David, “Sold on Ice,”, Rolling Stone, January 1, 1991, 40-44+. Hammond, John, “An Experience in Jazz History,” in Black Music in Our Culture, Kent:Kent State U., 1970, 42-61. Hardy, Ernest, “Devil’s Helper: Tricky: Between rock and a harder place,” L.A. Weekly, October 4, 1996, 47. Hay, Fred J., “Black Musicians in Appalachia: An Introduction to Affrilachian Music,” Black Music Research Journal, 23:1/2, Spring/Fall 2003, 1-19. Henderson,Alex, “Active Indies,” Billboard, December 24, 1988. Herskovitz, Mellville. 1935. “What Has Africa Given America?,” New Republic, September 4, 1935. _____________. 1941. “Patterns of Negro Music,” Illinois Academy of Science Transactions, 34:1, September 1941, 19-23. Jabbour, Alan, “Fiddle Music,” American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 1996, 253-56. Jefferson, Margo, “Ripping Off Black Music,” Harper’s Magazine, Jan 1973. 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Lawrence, Keith, “Arnold Shultz: Godfather of Bluegrass?”, Bluegrass Unlimited, November 1989, 39-43. Lawrence, Keith, “Arnold Shultz: The Greatest (?) Guitar Picker’s Life Ended Before Promise Realized,” JEMF Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 61, Spring 1981, 3-8. Leland, John, “Rap and Race,” Newsweek, June 29, 1992, 47-51. Light, Alan, “What does a white girl, Monica Lynch, know about hip-hop music?”, Vogue, January 1992, 73-74. Lightfoot, William E., “A Regional Style: The Legacy of Arnold Shultz,” in Allen, Barbara and Schlereth, Thomas J., eds., Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures, Lexington:University Press of Kentucky, 1990. _________, “The Three Doc(k)s: White Blues in Appalachia,” Black Music Researach Journal 23:1/2, Spring/Fall 2003, 167-93. Locke, Alain, The Negro and His Music” Bronze Booklet Number 2, 1936. Washington: The Associates in Negro Folk Education. Lomax, Alan, “Bluegrass Background: Folk Music With Overdrive,”Esquire. Oct 1959, 108. 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(For discs and videos, ask your library if they have them, and why not.)
This very short list was selected to help open the ears, to hear old music in a new way.
Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, 5-CD set The Cats and the Fiddle: I Miss You So; Bluebird/RCA, 1939-41 (black string band) Gospel Hummingbirds, Steppin Out, Blind Pig, 1991 Wynonie Harris, Wynonie “Mr. Blues” Harris, Charly CD 244. Emmett Miller: The Minstrel Man From Georgia; Sony Legacy Roots & Blues Series, 1996. Dom Flemons, Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys, Smithsonian Folkways/African American Legacy Recordings/National Museum of African American Culture. SFW CD 40224, 2018. Dom Pedro, Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango. AMA Productions, 2013 Lesley Riddle, Step By Step—Lesley Riddle Meets the Carter Family: Blues, Country, and Sacred Songs, Rounder CD 0299. Big Joe Turner, Shake, Rattle, & Roll, Tomato R2 71666, 1994.
Compilations:
The Alabama Sacred Harp Convention: White Spirituals from the Sacred Harp; recorded by Alan Lomax, New World Records, 1977 Altamont: Black string band music from the Library of Congress; Rounder (recorded 1942-46) Before the Blues, Vol. 1-3, Yazoo, 1996. Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia, Smithsonian Folkways, 1998. Blues Originals, Vol. 6, Rhino Records Blues Masters, Vol. 14, Rhino Records, 1993. Deep River of Song: Black Texicans – Balladeers and Songsters of the Texas Frontier. Alan Lomax Collection, Rounder, 1999. Louisiana Piano Rhythms, Rhino R2 71568, 1993 Negro Church Music, Atlantic Records Southern Folk Heritage Series 1351, edited by Alan Lomax New Orleans Originals Rhythm, Country & Blues; MC Records, 1994 (Blues and Country superstars paired up) Roots of the Blues; New World Records, 1977 Roots of Rock; Yazoo Records Singing Preachers and Their Congregations The Southern Journey; CD, Prestige recorded by John and Alan Lomax, 1959 (black religious, Appalachian, etc.) Square Dance With Soul, Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Folkways, 1969. Wade in the Water; Smithsonian, audio series on gospel narrated by Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1993 Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams, others; Ziegfeld Follies of 1919; music by Irving Berlin and others; Smithsonian.
Videography
Birth of the Blues, Bing Crosby, 1941. Bluesland: A Portrait in American Music, “Masters of American Music” series, BMG Video, 1993 Dancing, Part 5: New World, New Forms; PBS/WNET, 1993. Deep Blues, dir. Robert Mugge, writer/narrator Robert Palmer, 1991. Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo, PBS Gurumbe: Afro-Andalousian Memories, dir. M. Angel Rosale. Intermedia Productions, 2016. History of Rock and Roll, PBS International Sweethearts of Rhythm: America’s Hottest All-Girl Band, 1986. Jazz Classics (series) John Hammond, From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen, WNET/CBS Louie Bluie, black string band A Patchwork Quilt (series): Appalachian Journey, Jazz Parades, Cajun Country, and The Land Where the Blues Began,produced by Alan Lomax, 1990. Routes of Rhythm, series narrated by Harry Belafonte; PBS, 1991. Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango. By Dom Pedro. Distributed by ArtMattan Productions. www.AfricanDiasporaDVD.com. 2013. Times Ain’t Like They Used To Be: Early Rural & Popular American Music, Shanachie, 1992.
Ch 2 Early Fusion Music The African American roots of the Charleston Old African Polyrhythms
Ch 3 The Plantation Ring shout re-enactment by Geechee/Gullah women Spiritual Roots of Blues African Parade 1 African American girl games Cakewalk Hokey Pokey western Hokey Pokey Jamaica Hokey Pokey hip-hop Lindy Hop – the Breakout Ray Charles – C&R
Ch 5 Sleepy Time Down South Carolina Cocolate Drops: Snowden’s Jig The Earl White Stringband plays “Hickory” on The Floyd Radio Show Dom Flemons: Can You Blame The Colored Man? Banjo, children dancing Banjo and singers, 30s Fiddlers w/ FDR—Soldier’s Joy String band early 30s Fiddles and Clogging Irish step dancers Square dance caller Work songs, African and African American
Ch 6Cowboys: The West Was White? Home on the Range 30s 2 audio clips: “The Old Chisholm Train,” sung by Moses “Clear Rock” Platt, 1933 “Western Cowboy,” sung by Leadbelly, 1934.
Ch 7Sea Chanties Neely on chanties Audio: Adieu, Fare-You-Well sung by Women’s League, Anguilla. Recorded by Alan Lomax, 1962. Goodbye, Fare You Well, sung by Leighton Robinson & friends Georgia Sea Island Singers, “Pay Me My Money Down” Singers from Anguilla, Caribbean, recorded by Alan Lomax, 1962 A Long Time Ago—Harding Barbadian melody version
Ch 8Old Time Religion Ralph Stanley—Gloryland Rockin’ spiritual Gospel 1930s Sacred Harp W2 Shape Note, AA1 Ralph Stanley—Old Village Churchyard Amazing Grace—Allstars
Ch 9Time For Rags Over The Rainbow (in ragtime) Cartier Williams (tap)
Ch 10Hollers, Looks, and Levees: The Blues Memphis Minnie – Me And My Chauffeur Blues Work songs, Mississippi William Hart Sam Chatmon Bessie Smith Sugar Chile Robinson AA jug band 30s
Ch 11Black Barbershops Fairfield Four – Roll Jordan Roll (feat. Crossroads) My Evaline – Barbershop Quartet (Close Enough) Signature – Somebody to Love (Queen cover) Never gonna give you up but it’s a barbershop quartet
Ch 12Jazz Marches In Ford Dabney’s Syncopated Orchestra – Doo Dah Blues – 1922 Congo Square Mardi Gras Indians—short Henry Red Allen + Jelly Roll Morton 1940 – Panama to Rug Cutters Holiday – Freddie & Flo Soundtrack: The Four Blackbirds – Swing For Sale Palesteena – Original Dixieland Jazz-Band , 1920 Henry Ford’s Antisemitic Assault on Jazz | The Breakdown with Dara Starr Tucker
Ch 13Jazz: What Is It? Syncopation Spanish tinge Blue note Call and response
Ch 14Latin America: US How to play Rumba Clave & Son Clave Habanera Mariano Neris & Bella Malekian—Rumba Cubana Cuban Music 1 Tango roots Dizzy on Chano Habanera interlude Jambalaya Gene Autry (Blueberry Hill) 1941 Fats Domino “Blueberry Hill” on The Ed Sullivan Show Mambo
Ch 15Up River: The Bleached Chorus Castles James Reese Europe in Europe Cab Calloway Ethel Waters 1951 Goldkette Orchestra Paul Whiteman Orchestra—At Sundown The Boswell Sisters—Crazy People 1932
Ch 16Broadway: Operetta Meets Jazz Ruth Etting—Shaking The Blues Away 1927—Irving Berlin Songs Bing Crosby blackface Gershwin plays I Got Rhythm (1931) Al Jolson–Swanee Jimmy Slyde
Ch 17Swing And Its Kings African American dancers and band Duke Ellington, “Take the A Train” Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman—Stealing Apples Benny Goodman Orchestra, “Blue Skies” with Fletcher Henderson Glenn Miller—In The Mood Boo Hoo—Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians Dizzy Gillespie—Bebop The International Sweethearts Of Rhythm— “Jump Children”
Ch 18Broadway, Part Two: The Great White Way Oklahoma! Title Song (Hugh Jackman) Robert Goulet “If Ever I Would Leave You” as Sir Lancelot My Fair Lady—Wouldn’t it be Loverly
Ch 19 Crooners And Their Sweet Inspirations Hubba Hubba Hubba Billie Holiday—Don’t Explain (Live, 1958) Frank Sinatra (Live)—I`ve Got You Under My Skin Dinah Shore & Ella Fitzgerald Andrews Sisters—Gimme Some Skin, My Friend Try a little tenderness—Bing Crosby with Orchestra. 78rpm, 1933 Otis Redding 1967—Try a little tenderness Doris Day—Que Sera Sera
Ch 20New South, New Country Clarence Ashley Ed Young and Hobart Smith Murphy Gribble, John Lusk and Albert York play Pateroller’ll Catch You Jimmie Rodgers, 1930 Emmett Miller—Take Your Tomorrow Allen Brothers, Chattanooga Blues Uncle Dave Macon—”Take Me Back To My Old Carolina Home” Frank Hutchison – Cannonball Blues Audio: Tom Darby and Jimmy Tarleton, “Little Ola,” their take on Aloha Oe. ~1930 Roscoe Holcomb, Pretty Polly Dock Boggs: Country Blues, 1966 Frailing Clayton McMichen & the Georgia Wildcats—Wild Cat Rag The Carter Family—Wildwood Flower Hank Williams – Hey Good Lookin’ Cool Drink Of Water by Mr. John Dudley Rare 1943 Sol Hoopii Video—Part 1 Merle Travis – Midnight Special (solo guitar, 1968) Doc Watson-Deep River Blues Willie Jones – American Dream
Ch 21Western Swingers Bob Wills Bob Wills—breakdown bluesy fiddle Shuffle Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang – Wild Cat (1930) “King Of Jazz” Wendy Holcomb – Steel Guitar Rag
Ch 22Bluegrazz Earl Scruggs Bill Monroe on Arnold Shultz Alison Krauss
Ch 23Rhythm And…Rock Louis Jordan – Caldonia (1946) Ike Turner – Rocket 88 Bill Haley – Rocket 88 (1951) Little Richard – “Long Tall Sally” – from “Don’t Knock The Rock” 1956 Muddy Waters – Got My Mojo Workin’ Roy Buchanan Elvis and quartet – gospel Elvis, Baby I Don’t Care Elvis—Got a Woman Elvis on Ed Sullivan R&B covers Righteous Brothers Rolling Stones—Satisfaction Michael Bolton, Georgia Phil Driscoll James Brown Respect – Aretha Franklin Stevie Wonder Supremes Animals—Rising Sun Purple Haze (Live at the Atlanta Pop Festival) Kool & The Gang – Get Down On It
Ch 24Rapping Up Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – The Message Queen Latifah – Ladies First (feat. Monie Love) RUN DMC – Walk This Way (Official HD Video) ft. Aerosmith Beastie Boys – Sure Shot Jawga Boyz – Chillin In The Backwoods
To be white in America is to be very black. If you don’t know how black you are, you don’t know how American you are. -Robert Farris Thompson[i]
Here’s a hint: We are not who we think we are. ‑Michael Bane, White Boy Singin’ the Blues
The United States, a nation built by seized labor on seized land, laid down railroad tracks and put Blacks on the wrong side of them. The Blacks who helped lay the tracks also laid down musical tracks; White folks found themselves on the wrong side of these. Since Whites dared not cross the tracks, they begged, borrowed or stole the music, and the tracks crossed over the tracks. Call it syncretism or love and theft, it’s American music.[ii]
From this abbreviated tale of cultural hybridity, plunder, apprenticeship, and contention and confusion, this much should be clear: our music is an amalgam of influences, a stew in which one seldom tastes the original ingredients separately. This is so, even more than in most countries, where in general fewer influences have mingled, much more slowly and much further in the past, though the explosion in migration these days is changing all that. Stateside, even while the European-American population remains socially and economically dominant, so does the Black cultural influence, even in the Whitest hour, as Gunther Schuller points out:
The American popular song is inextricably and profoundly linked with jazz, the one serving—along with the blues—as the basic melodic/harmonic material on which the other could build.[iii]
So how come my highly educated informants at the beginning of this study didn’t know that? Let’s face it: Americans—especially those of the White middle classes who have precious little tie to their own roots—wouldn’t have much of a way to know the sources of the national culture(s), thanks in large part to media and schools that, at best, take no interest.
Ponder for a moment the influence of African‑American culture on food, clothing, and handshakes, and of course slang, and you get the sense that our self‑conceptions, our very identities, are shrouded in myth. Today, a century and a half after the official end of slavery, millions of “non‑Black” people sing, dance, talk, dress, and even clap their hands in a way they would not without the Black contribution to our culture. We see it all the time in the movies. And cartoons: was that sly trickster Bugs Bunny actually Br’er Rabbit? Comedy, especially standup, is worth another book, and there are several.[v] In literature, there is evidence of African American influence on Twain, Melville, Eliot, Pound and more.[iv] And yet, observes Michael North, “preemptive mimicry of Blacks is a traditional American device allowing whites to rebel against English culture and simultaneously use it to solidify their domination at home.”[vi] So mimicry is not always what it seems.
Appropriated graphic – source unknown
Carl Jung noticed, in 1909, a “subtle difference” between White Americans and Europeans, encompassing language, modes of movement, and ways of thinking, which he ascribed to African-American influence.[vii] In an essay called “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ralph Ellison asserted that “most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it.”[viii] Black English started as an African version of the language of the masters, but went on to influence non-Africans. So too the music.
Leonard Pitts, Jr. tells the story of his 99 percent Black high school reunion being crashed by a group of White refugees from their own reunion, which they said was boring, and his reaction to that. He talked of whites who “raid the storehouse of black cultural treasures.” One of his readers wrote to ask “Am I supposed to feel guilty because I’m white and use black slang?”—to which he responded that his complaint was that “after raiding the storehouse, many whites still consider blacks “outsiders to the American mainstream.”[vix] I’m reminded of a particularly embarrassing moment backstage at a community theater rehearsal for a play about Huck Finn, in which I played his friend Joe. It was 1966; the cast was White. One young actor was entertaining himself screaming in the style of James Brown. “What are you doing?” he was asked. “I just love the way the niggers scream!”
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac mused that he wished he was Black. Chicago jazzman Mezz Mezzrow married a Black woman and moved to Harlem, cutting his ties to White society. A friend of Jimmie Rodgers said “He was more colored, really.” Janis Joplin lived her life as Bessie Smith redux. Bob Smith listened to Black DJs in New York in the late forties and became Wolfman Jack, later opining:
It’s a wonderful thing the Afro-American people gave to us. That music—I mean just imagine, we’d be living like those English folks or those French folks, man. It’d be a horrible existence.[x]
Of course the English and the French now have That Music too. As a teenager I tuned in to the Wolfman and never thought of him as one race or another—just a wild and crazy guy spinning great records. My own private Memphis.
So what happens when White people copy Black culture? Is it what Cecil Brown says?:
When you want to take somebody else’s identity, you say “Oh, I love you!” The next step is, “Now I steal it!”[xi]
Or as parsed by Wesley Morris,
And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won’t stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations—jazz, funk, hip-hop—have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow…[xii]
The Young Black Teenagers—kids of the Caucasian persuasion—grew up in Black neighborhoods. Their music drew more of an Eminem level of respect, rather than Vanilla Ice. They were outsiders, rejected by or rejecting their “mainstream culture,” and they turned to Blacks for identity. In the film The Commitments, a Dublin band manager explains to his musicians why they are playing soul music: “Because the Irish are the Blacks of Europe.” The voice of the downpressed touches the alienated, be they beats, hippies, or millennials. The question is whether those being touched have respect for those beat-upon as much as for their beat.[1] How could this be encouraged? John Philips suggests:
Pride in their African heritage is something that white children should be taught along with Blacks. It could help improve not only Black self-images but also white images of Blacks, Black images of whites, and perhaps some whites’ images of themselves.[xiii]
[1] Or as a Jules Feiffer cartoon had it: “I like their music, their dancing, and their slang – but do I have to like them?”
“Black culture,” noted Ben Sidran, “has always been a ‘counter-culture.’”[xiv] Norman Mailer explored this question in his 1957 essay, “The White Negro:”
So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries…And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.[xv]
Mailer goes on to cite a few words included in the dowry: man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square. And that was only 1957.
We rely on Black culture for our cultural catharsis,[xvi] without even knowing it. Ralph Ellison talked about what White society hides from itself, and how that affects both democracy and creativity:
[S]ince 1876 the race issue has been like a stave driven into the American system of values, a stave so deeply imbedded in the American ethos as to render America a nation of ethical schizophrenics. Believing truly in democracy on one side of their minds, they act on the other in violation of its most sacred principles…This unwillingness to resolve the conflict in keeping with his democratic ideals has compelled the white American, figuratively, to force the Negro down into the deeper level of his consciousness…Indeed, it seems that the Negro has become identified with those unpleasant aspects of conscience and consciousness which it is part of the American’s character to avoid. Thus when the literary artist attempts to tap the charged springs issuing from his inner world, up float his misshapen and bloated images of the Negro…and he turns away, discarding an ambiguous substance which the artists of other cultures would confront boldly and humanize into the stuff of a tragic art.[xvii]
And further,
One of the most insidious crimes occurring in this democracy is that of designating another, politically weaker, less socially acceptable, people as the receptacle for one’s own self-disgust…reducing the humanity of others…With us Negroes it started with the appropriation of our freedom and our labor; then it was our music, our speech, our dance and the comic distortion of our image…
In other words, by an act of “moral evasion,” the White artist-writer-American is cheapened, has lessened his/her ability to understand society and humanity and him/herself. Consider here the operation men have traditionally performed on women: in her book on the anti-feminism of the 1980s, Backlash, Susan Faludi wrote that
Once a society projects its fears onto a female form, it can try to cordon off these fears by controlling women, pushing them to conform to comfortably nostalgic norms and shrinking them in the cultural imagination to a manageable size.[2]
[2] There are also economic reasons to force women and Blacks to conform to nostalgic norms and to shrink them in the cultural imagination.
This could be the process for corralling any psychic threat. The patronizing portrayal of Blacks in minstrel shows echoed through subsequent film and television productions, becoming less blatant only after the 1950s, and a similar portrayal held true for women and other marginalized populations. Control has continued to be exercised through the images projected on a screen; the cultural imagination enlarges only when the patronized groups break out of their cordon in real life.
And yet, at the same time, Whites reach out across the cultural divide, looking for sustenance, for catharsis, in the culture of their suppressed neighbors. They seek a gateway to creative, liberating possibilities. And logically, those who reject for any reason the tastes and mores of our society, or who are rejected by society—can you spell LGBTQIA?—can turn for expressiveness to those who cannot blend in.[xviii] The speech, song, and style that these communities concoct are ways of experiencing society, and oneself, differently.
If we perceive a society, a civilization even, as an organism composed of interdependent parts, we can see how systemic dysfunction arises from injustice. The displacement of the fruits of labor (wealth) from one class of people to another within the system requires a regime to maintain the system of injustice, common to most civilizations. There will be, foremost, a dehumanization of those victimized in order to justify the theft and suppression. Second, there will be ignorance of these processes among the privileged. Finally, there will be myths about the goodness of the society, propounding a narrative of progress for the de-privileged to balance the myth of their inferiority. They have then got you, coming and going.
But part of what is denied—and yet subconsciously acknowledged—is that the oppressed classes maintain their humanity while it withers in the privileged classes, due to their alienation both from the classes they enslave and from themselves. Their alienation results from living a lie and from living off of others. The displacement of right livelihood, personal honor and dignity, and even sexuality onto the Other is mostly, as I say, not conscious. But it is essential: it puts the “body,” however perversely, barely back in balance. An unsustainable balance, ultimately, but in the meantime it will keep everyone in their place, more or less.
The culture of survival holds a powerful attraction not only in the United States but wherever “American” culture has penetrated. The African drum, once banned by the slave-master, has indeed conquered the conqueror. Black music has entered the White soul. About which Jon Carroll says:
I grew up in a world of white America where black culture was kept in the closet and under the rug. The big change in my lifetime is that black culture has become, exuberantly, a part of the mainstream. It has reached every area of life.[xix]
Yet still, we are a nation that prefers to forget what we have done, and therefore who we are. Short‑term memory loss is nothing compared to historical amnesia.
It would be helpful if musicians would educate themselves and their audiences about the sources and contexts of the music. Many have this knowledge, but do not spread the wealth. And what about those all-White high school cheerleading squads busting Black dance moves to rap tracks at the homecoming rally? There’s a fixer-upper.
Broadcasters—to the extent that there is still radio and that anyone listens to it—should see each programming day as an opportunity to enlighten as well as enliven. But they won’t, unless there’s a real lot of money in it, or unless they’re forced to—let’s say, by such a thing becoming dope, chill, or even woke. So let the force be with us. After all, they’re our public airwaves, right? Shouldn’t there be a Truth in Origins law, like truth in advertising? OK, that will take a while. Meanwhile, a simple credit uttered from the stage now and then—for a song, a hot lick, a style—a simple Blacknowledgement would do wonders for cultural justice, good community feeling, and race relations. “We’d like to thank Africa for that last riff.” These are mechanical, perhaps silly suggestions. But if there were a Black Music History Month…
And now a moment of science regarding “World Music,” and the world economy that birthed it. The question of cultural interaction has always been bound up with that of economic interaction, which unfortunately has seldom been played on a level field. Many countries are full of impoverished people, and a few countries are full of fairly well-off people, and a few neighborhoods are what we might call unduly well-off. Looking at our situation from a distance, we can see that most of us in the U.S. are in the economic middle between rich and poor, between corporate executives of whatever nation and the many millions throughout the world who grow food for export but have little to eat themselves.
Bear with me now, this is about music. For just as the truly non-needy seem to have a nasty habit of enriching themselves from the labor and resources of those at the ladder’s bottom, so the middle classes habitually appropriate their culture, from minstrels to the blues to jazz to jitterbug to funk to fads like the didgeridoo and Guatemalan-patterned clothing. This is hardly surprising when you consider that, just as formal “highbrow” art often uses folk art as its source, so the middle and upper classes use the “folks” as a source of entertainment. In Europe, the courtly and genteel formal dances were often derived from peasant dances; so today, our middle classes suck up the styles of the street. The creativity of impoverished classes is coveted by those who are better off materially but more impoverished artistically. That’s a serious charge, but a look into the social motives for creativity, which we’ve been undertaking here, suggests that it’s a big part of what’s going on.
We’ve been evolving to a “free market” (again, without the level field) in all commodities, including culture. We grasp for roots to anchor ourselves—any roots will do in a landslide. But a plant is a living thing, and if we break off a branch and take it home to display its beauty, we will soon find it has shriveled and died. If we appropriate the cultural contributions of others for our sustenance, yet know not what we do, our souls will remain impoverished, and racial harmony and cultural justice will continue to elude us.
The World Music market niche appeals partly to people who, having lost their contact to roots, land, and sense of self, seek it through the cultures of others. “Peasant chic,” a market variant of “prestige from below,” offers the chance for modern people, alienated from the rhythms of life basic to human existence, to re-connect to nature, to grit and verve. As “high” art borrows from folk creativity, urban sophisticates plow the fields of timeless folk cultures for soul-enrichment.[3] Usually not in order to walk the walk, but just to cop the dance steps. As always, the mass market bends the music to its needs, and musicians all over the world enter recording studios and mix their beats with rock, funk, disco, or whatever leavening will make the sale. We find ourselves consuming commercialized and “Westernized” versions of somebody’s folk music. It would be nice if the pre-electronic versions or something like them were preserved for that occasion, a few years down the road, when we wake up and realize that entire musical species and cultural languages are being lost. It’s not that none of the new mixes are worthy; it’s just that the product receiving the corporate watering tends to outgrow all others, often killing off the roots in the process. People around the globe are in danger of losing their culture to the whims of Amazon and Spotify, to the rapidly shifting trends of the music industry, to the chase for the quarterly profit.
[3] The borrowing from below goes back to forever. (Of course it goes both ways, and sideways too, but it’s the From Below part that usually disappears in the written record, which becomes the received wisdom, which warps who we think we are.) Rome is more Greek than we know—the conquered conquering the conquerors. Educated Greeks came in as slaves and/or teachers to Roman households. And Greece is part Egyptian (shhh). Compare this to enslaved Africans’ relationships to plantation owners’ kids. …and so on.
There’s more to the story than theft and ruin, of course. As we’ve seen, there’s lots of honest, appreciative interplay between and among cultures. Lots of artists who create their own variation of the mix do acknowledge their sources; but others make hay from “personas and performances that are studies in ventriloquism and minstrelsy.”[xx] Culture today is a nearly unsortable laundry of mixed influences, which is both a great thing and a problematic one. Why problematic? Because over time, the appropriation, the grab, has never been dealt with. African-Americans continue to provide the spark, the soul, for the next generation of cultural innovation, then watch as it’s blended, blanded and bleached. Plantation celebrations became minstrel shows, southern Blacks invigorated White matter with Black manner, ragtime and rock were shorn of their origins, and jazz was softened for mass consumption. All along, the roots have been Sousa’d, Dorsey’d, Booned, and Elvis’d. Shouldn’t every monument to Elvis have Otis Blackwell and Arthur Crudup standing beside him? Where are the milk cartons searching for Arnold Shultz, Leslie Riddle, Jim Europe, and Juba? Where are Black Patti, Rastus Brown? Who knows about Stephen Foster’s captive housekeepers? Who knows that we wouldn’t have rock or funk or hip-hop without corn shuckers, buckdancers, ring shouters, Black barbers, swamp singers and halam-playing griots?[4]
Cultural justice is a necessary component of social justice. If we could acknowledge the musical truth, maybe we could use it to get at the social truth, to come to appreciate people through their cultural and material contributions to our own lives. If music tells us who we are, and we are not who we think we are, then we must not really be listening. As our music changes, we ourselves change, yet we fail to look at ourselves and fail to achieve an honest sense of self. We need a culture that transcends denial, that faces not only the better side of our history but also the bitter side. By acknowledging that our mainstream is made up of streams we have forgotten or denied, we can come to treasure these streams, and accelerate our journey towards a place where we can all, as the sage said, get along.
[i]Fishkin 1993, 132. [ii] Lott, 1993. [iii] Schuller 1989, 5. [iv] Fishkin 1995, pp. 430-33. [v] See Watkins, Mel, in bibliography. [vi] North, p. 3. [vii] Black Scholar, 24:1, 22. [viii] Time, April 6, 1970, 55. [ix] “Bitter Reunion: Racial Insensitivity Charge Brings a Storm of Criticism,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 22, 1994. [x] Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, Smithsonian Radio. [xi] Brown, Cecil, 38. [xii]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage [xiii]Philips, 236. [xiv] Sidran, 129. [xv] Reprinted in Mailer, Advertisements For Myself, New York:Perigee, 1959, 301-02. [xvi] In the words of Franz Fanon, Martiniquan-Algerian sociologist-psychologist. [xvii] Ellison, “Beating That Boy,” New Republic, October 22, 1945. [xviii] Sidran, 15. [xix] Jon Carroll, “There Has To Be A Way To Say It,”, San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1995, E8. [xx] Jefferson, “Ripping Off Black Music.”
According to both Chuck D and Ice T, White youngsters as early as 1995 were buying between fifty and seventy percent of the rap music being sold.[i] In 2007, Republican mastermind Karl Rove appeared at the White House Correspondents Dinner as MC Rove, doing an inept minstrel hip-hop dance routine as comedians mocked/lauded his criminal prowess. In 2013, Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke offered their version of twerking at an awards ceremony.
What’s that all about!?
From the streets and house parties of New York in the late seventies emerged a community of athletic breakdancers, bold graffiti artists, innovative record-scratchers and rhyming verbal improvisers. The rap artists broke through the resistance of the music industry and surfaced a new style from the underground, drawing on Jamaican “toasting” DJ’s, African-American verbal traditions, funk, rock, reggae and James Brown.
One of the first rapping DJ’s was Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), who came to the Bronx from Jamaica, where party DJs shouted out their neighbors’ names with catchy rhymes over the records. Herc named the breakdancers b-boys (and later b-girls). He and his Bronx crowd also began to abbreviate names—Easy-E, Ice-T—and all kinds of words, whether they were giving props (proper respect) or diss(respect)ing. All of this was poured into the mix that poured out of the Bronx.
Once again a new Black music was feared and condemned by the mainstream. Rap was castigated for its violence and misogyny, which it certainly has had, in bulk. Of course many feared it because it’s Black and often angry, and many simply can’t countenance the supremacy of rhythm over melody. Some say rap regenerated poetry. It brought back rhyme with a vengeance, stuffing rhymes internally anywhere they would fit, and then some, and soon, spoken rhyme sections were inserted in otherwise non-rap songs by all manner of rock artists. It has kicked language alive, flooding the mainstream with vernacular. Allen Ginsberg was enthusiastic about rap’s prospects:
This movement is a great thing: the human voice returns, words return, nimble speech returns, nimble wit and rhyming return…It serves to cultivate an interest in the art by cultivating a great audience—an audience of amateur practitioners.[ii]
Some scoff and many denigrate, but if rap were set to music that old-timers are more familiar with, it might draw appreciation from the nay-sayers; Leonard Bernstein once demonstrated this principle in reverse by singing lines from Macbeth as a blues.
♬SUBSTITUTION: Choose some rap lyrics and sing to your favorite jazz, blues, bluegrass (rapgrass) or any other instrumental record. In your head, rap them to your favorite Willie Nelson or Gilbert and Sullivan song. Go ‘head, no one’s listening.
Diverse strains continue to evolve, with various politics; female rappers liberate the form from its male dominators. As rap mutates, it carries on debates on many social questions—debates other genres might should aspire to. Certainly rap is in your face—although there is all manner of Rap Lite. Rap The Whole Office Can Enjoy (Rapzak) can’t be far off.**
Following the tremendous growth in the White audience for rap came an increase in the number of White rappers. The scope of opinion on what has been happening with, to, and by rap is as wide and wild as it was on any previous Black crossover music, from minstrelsy on. Let’s look, briefly, at some of the cultural moments that have been crucial in the diffusion of this latest subcultural music in society, and remain so with hip-hop: the roots, the crossover artists and audience, the “mainstream” artists, and the industry, including media. We’ll follow this with an examination of some of the logics behind White rap fandom.
The Roots
Inspired by Kool Herc’s import of toasting[1] from Jamaica to the South Bronx, Afrika Bambattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and others in New York put together sound systems and the skills to match. Rapping evolved from a few toasts to extended boasts. But the multi-cultural aspects of rap’s roots are worth a moment here. First of all, the music was part of a larger artistic scene that included graffiti artists and breakdancing, which prominently featured Puerto Rican youth. Second, there were a few key White figures in the industry—not at the point of origin, but not far behind.
First of these, or nearly first, was Rick Rubin. The White Jewish punk rocker from Long Island co-founded Def Jam Records in 1984 (with Russell Simmons), which he ran for a time out of his NYU dorm room. He promoted Public Enemy as well as the Beastie Boys, a White punk band turned rappers. In one of the first crossover acts, he added distorted guitars on Run-DMC records. Was he the John Hammond of rap? Sort of.
A few women rose to important positions: Sylvia Robinson, a singer turned producer in Englewood, New Jersey, put together the Sugar Hill Gang, who had the first commercial hit rap record with “Rapper’s Delight.” Then came Monica Lynch, president of Tommy Boy Music, a rap label producing Queen Latifah, De La Soul, and Naughty By Nature, among others. Lynch came up in the seventies and failed to click with rock. Hip-hop was more receptive, as an industry, to women working in it—a paradox, given the initial and persistent male domination on the artist side. Maybe the alternative/outlaw nature of the genre and its record companies was more conducive to the inclusion of women than the corporate labels; in any case, she was accepted not only as a woman, but, as she noted later, “I didn’t really get any beef about the fact that I was white, either.”[iii] Lynch was responsible for some of the progress of women in the field, shying away from signing “bitch baiters” to the label. And she gets respect: Shock-G of Digital Underground called her “more a homegirl than an exec.”[iv]
Without puffing up the role of Whites in the nascent business, we can say that there certainly was White interest in the form’s development early on. Recall here the White backup musicians at Stax/Volt in Memphis in the sixties and the involvement of Leiber and Stoller as songwriters for the Coasters. Abbott’s music integration principle, again.
Outside interest always raises the question of diffusion vs. defusion: Is the music spreading out and taking over, or is it being watered down and outright pilfered? Most often the answer is both. But the relationships in the processes are tricky, and judgment of the results varies widely. Alongside the triumph of rap and its dilution/cooptation lies the general transformation of pop music by the sensibilities of hip-hop. Such metamorphoses are often subtle and not always acknowledged. Like the nineties teenager who couldn’t hear the blues in the Stones, we have now a newly hybridized, hip-hopped mainstream pop music in which some White folks already can’t hear the hip-hopping.
Crossover Artists
The key early link was between rap and metal. Run-DMC recorded “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith in 1986; later Anthrax covered Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noize,” with PE’s Chuck D guesting on the mike. The first of these deals was put together by Rick Rubin, but in the case of the second, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian had been hanging around the PE record office years before. He loved what PE was doing—pioneering the metal style in rap, among other things. Chuck was reluctant at first to collaborate, but eventually he waxed it, and waxed enthusiastic.[v]
Run-DMC went on the road with the Beasties, and PE with White rock/punk bands like Sisters of Mercy and Gang of Four. Other collaborations included Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols in 1984, The Fat Boys and the Beach Boys in 1987, Sonic Youth and Chuck D in 1990, and R.E.M. and KRS-One in 1991. Ice-T formed a metal band, Body Count, responsible for the much-heralded song “Cop Killer” of 1992. Nashville’s racially mixed rock/rap band The Hard Corps boasted production by Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay; 24-Spyz released a metal-rap record; and Vallejo, California rapper B-Legit cut a record with Daryl Hall.
An important crossover mechanism has been the adaptation by Black pop acts of rap to their own styles. Sometimes this takes the form of a rap interlude by a guest artist, as with Grandmaster Melle Mel’s contribution to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You” (1984). Another intermediary role has been played by Chicano acts, including Kid Frost (“Hispanic Causing Panic”); Cubans like Melloman Ace and Skatemaster Tate; other Latino groups including Cypress Hill, the Beatnuts, and Fat Joe; and Samoans like the Boo Yaa Tribe, who grew up in southeast LA. There was also the production outfit Soul Assassins, which worked with the Italian Grandmixer Muggs, Chicano B-Real, and Cuban Sen Dogg. They went to number one on the pop charts in 1993 with Black Sunday. But wait, it gets better: Soul Assassins also produced FunkDoobiest, a Puerto Rican-Sioux-Mexican mix.[vi] All this helped turn hip-hop into a voice for “women, Chicano, Asian, Irish, gay, and all the variants covered by Black Jamaican, Dominican, etc.”[vii]
An Italian rapper called rap “rediscovering the tribal rhythms of our ancestors.”[viii] There’s German rap, and Russian, and Mexican. Afrika Bambaataa established a racially mixed hip-hop organization in Paris in the mid-eighties.[ix] The Dutch group Urban Dance Squad put out Life ‘N Perspectives Of A Genuine Crossover. In Brazil, laid-back samba rap competed with harder stuff from Sao Paolo, served up by groups with names like Sons of the Ghetto. In Cuba, rap is rampant. Also in Israel, and Palestine too. Given the worldwide diffusion of previous trends in African-American culture, we cannot be surprised by the planetary spread of rap and associated styles.
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THE DOZENS, WITH STRINGS
A parallel from south of the border (with Brazil): Throughout the 19th century and down to today, Afro-Argentines have matched musical wits in the ritual duel of guitarist-singers, payada, a competition with roots in Iberia as well as central Africa.
Think of it as the dozens with a dozen strings. Or— obviously—a rap battle. The great payador Gabino Ezeida famously defeated his challenger in a two-day battle in 1894 with this final stanza, translated as:
I see no equality in this here rink I improvise, simply and quickly, you have to sit down and think.[x]
“Living in verses,” said Thompson,” “Ezeida would not be matched in this hemisphere until 1940s calypso and 1990s rap.” The tradition continues.[xi]
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Hip-Hop In Morocco
One couldn’t concoct a better lab experiment than the case of the White rap fans at the high school in Morocco, Indiana. Hardly a Black face to be found in town, yet these teens, out of sheer boredom, find hip-hop style and climb aboard.[xii] Offended by their outfits of flannel shirts, headbands, and baggy shorts, fellow students yell “wiggers!” (White niggers) and attack, as school officials stand by. There’s an undertow [sic] of White girls gone Black here, as in Black man gonna get your sister, that might help explain the vehemence of the response. Sure enough, two young African-American fellas from Lafayette—nearby in geography only—cruise on up and help the kids get their clothes, music, and haircuts right. It all reminds me of Buddy Holly’s encounter, real or merely cinematic, with a recording engineer who dissed him for playing “that nigger music.” When Holly’s mother asked him if he got along with the Black bands on tour, he responded “Oh we’re Negroes too. We get to feeling like that’s what we are.”[xiii] Holly lived in the era of Norman Mailer’s “White Negroes,” hipsters who saw Black culture as the only way out of the white bread ghetto. In some places, and some places in the mind, that era continues. Or perhaps everywhere.
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The White Artists
As hip-hop diffused through the mainstream, it became naturalized: it makes “common sense” for anyone to rap, just as it has long made sense for anyone to rock, from Bill Clinton to Lee Atwater to Bart Simpson. And then there were the Lawrences: “just your ordinary middle-aged Jewish couple ‘n the hood,” on the downside of an insurance-brokerage tax evasion debacle, waxing tracks on the Upper East Side and shooting video of themselves giving away turkeys to the homeless in Harlem. Lauren Lawrence, rap name Infidel, carried a $5,000 Hermès purse and rapped about her “Terrorist Lover.”[xiv]
In 1985, producer Maurice Starr taught New Kids on the Block to sing and dance “Black.” In 1992, New Kids member Donnie Wahlberg’s brother Marky Mark did the act with Black folks added to the set. Vanilla Ice was the great White hope for a New York minute. His promo material was full of exciting personal stuff, like stabbings for instance, that later turned out to be fanciful. His handlers got him a posse of Black dancers, and he even drove through Harlem once.[xv] He did in fact grow up on reggae and soul. Was he Elvis? Or just Pat Boone?[2] And who was Debbie Harry of Blondie when she released “Rapture,” the first alleged rap record to top the pop charts?[xvi] All this conjures up “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the Irving Berlin song that provoked the ragtime explosion of 1911: the song was ragtime in name only.
[2] Ice in fact paid no royalties to his Black producer, Mario Johnson, who wrote the music for his hit, until after the courts forced him to. (Rose, 12)
The Beastie Boys sold four million copies of Licensed to Ill in 1986. Street scholars differ on their merits; Run-DMC they weren’t. On the other hand, Vanilla Ice they weren’t either. They were picked up by Capitol in 1988. Then there were the Young Black Teenagers, produced by top African-American rap producer Hank Shocklee (Public Enemy, Ice Cube). They were White, but down, at least with what they called “the hip-hop mentality”—and they didn’t claim to be the originators.[xvii] Their song: “Proud to Be Black.”[3] Too bad they didn’t tour with The Average White Band. And Third Bass felt African American enough to join in the dissing of Hammer for not being street enough.[xviii] House of Pain, an Irish group, had a Latvian DJ. Their album: Fine Malt Lyrics. And the Irish-Canadian rapper Snow, who grew up street-fighting and parroting the accents in a Jamaican neighborhood in Toronto, got airplay in Jamaica. Heavily influenced by dancehall reggae, he performed with Jamaican DJs.[xix]
In the new millennium came Country Rap. Not the mellow Tennessee variant of the African American group Arrested Development, but White southern male artists performing “hick-hop”[4] at dirt road festivals attended by proud self-styled rednecks. Despite the prevalence of confederate flags, there are a few Black performers and attendees. The racial politics of the participants are all over the map, and often lean toward the inchoate and self-contradictory. My take-away is that once again, Whites are adopting the prevalent music of their era and ignoring its roots.[xx] Prove me wrong.
[4] One rapper who rejects the hick-hop tag is Struggle Jennings, grandson of Waylon.
The Industry
Certainly a driving force behind crossover, if not the most important, was the medium of diffusion: can you spell MTV? Originally so resistant to Blacks that Herbie Hancock kept his face out of his video to ensure airplay, they did an about-face with Michael Jackson.[xxi] Not initially—”Billie Jean” wasn’t big enough. It took “Beat It” to beat the system, or to join it.
But a whole generation of stars was made by video, and many of them played the demographics of the medium to a T, creating borderline identities calculated for crossover. George Michael, Boy George, Prince, and Michael Jackson—maybe, as MJ said, it doesn’t matter what you are. But all of them were heavily influenced by hip-hop—if not at the start, then of necessity somewhere along the line.
In any case, MTV’s rap show broke out of its late night ghetto and became the site to see, the place to be to find out what was going on at the cutting edge. MTV was also responsible for the dissemination of rap-rock collaborations that couldn’t be contained in any genre-specific hour. And they may have been partly responsible for the inclusion of Ice Cube, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called Quest in Lollapalooza.
Rapper/dancer Hammer was even morphed into a Saturday morning cartoon. This was a watershed: after all, if it’s ok for the toddlers, it must be ok for everyone. Hammer might have seemed harmless, and critics might say his rap had been bled dry, but culture moves like a caterpillar: the back jams up against the front, poises in mid-air, and the front is forced forward.
Radio continued to drag its feet. When “modern rock” stations played rap, they favored White artists, often playing rock tunes with rap mixed in.[xxii] Of course there’s been resistance to rap on Black radio as well, and for some of the same reasons: “This music very rudely pulls them [the audience] back on the street corner, and they don’t want to go.”[xxiii]
Underclasses habitually create new artistic forms that vent their spleen (openly or otherwise), define their identity, and unite them in that identity against their dominators. A moment occurs in the cycle of rebellious creativity when the existing social-cultural-economic system recoups its losses from the rebellion, a process of recuperation. It operates through the conversion of subversive sentiments and their signs and signals into commodities. Certainly this has happened with rap.
But is there something different here? There’s an unprecedented amount of artistic and financial control being retained by the artists and their posses. Equally important, the White kids are not—with some exceptions—going for the watered down version, the White copy.[5] They’re going with the original. This can be interpreted in several ways, many of them compatible and overlapping.
[5] Michael Bernard-Donals asserts a pivotal role for certain off-beat intellectuals who “canonize the margins.” Mailer and Kerouac, he argues, helped transform the African-American bebop scene into a university course topic. New material washes up at the margins, to be colonized by culturally displaced Whites, and later canonized again.
White Kids On Rap: Why?
The first explanation for this fandom is that rap speaks to White youth. Lawrence Grossberg opined that the difference between White middle class youth from the sixties and the nineties was that in the sixties they wanted to be Black, and a generation later they felt that they were.[xxiv] He chalks this up to economic and social changes that caused youth in general to be targeted as an enemy, as African-Americans have always been. His contention has been confirmed by teens of my acquaintance. Sandy, a sixteen year-old White female who attended a racially mixed high school in the 90s, explained,
There’s a common thread between kids of all races of this generation. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of fear, and a lot of need for aggressive actions to the rest of the world, to say “Hello, I am here, and I need some help, and you guys are really screwin’ up where I have to live when I grow up.[xxv]
But the pull of hip-hop could also be chalked up to the cyclical American routine of Black innovation/White imitation. Rap is the biggest musical sea-change since rock and roll, and once again, White youth crossed the tracks.
This is the auspicious side. In 1992 Newsweek interviewed a group of Black and White teenagers, with encouraging results. Said John, an African-American teenager, about White fans, “When positive rappers talk about police brutality…or how they go for an interview and they automatically see you’re black so you’re not going to get this job—when white people hear about this…it helps bring people to unite more.” Dan, a White student, added, “I’ll be singing, and there’ll be a Hispanic kid, black kid, we’ll all be singing the same song.” Jessica chimed in that when the White kids are listening to “N.W.A. or whatever, they’ll have a black friend with them, bopping their head along with them and just chilling with them.”[xxvi]
All these comments reflect positive contact, music boosting people over racial barriers. In the case of White youth who sincerely want to befriend their Black peers, rap became an opening, or an extra boost.
There’s always a yearning among some non-Black youth to get a purchase on some part of the black experience, a desire for “listening in on black culture” in Tricia Rose’s words.[xxvii] The records may or may not be authentic stories—they may be constructed to appear so by “studio gangsters”[xxviii]—but White youth imagine they’re contacting the Black experience, with the help of the industry. White performers can never fill the same need. And of course not everyone’s happy about this, or ever has been. As Greg Tate framed it,
African Americans are the cotton-picking base on which Western capitalism stands. We built this country twice over, first economically, then culturally, and remain an exploited and second-class citizenry. Tell me how much a white American loves our music and all I can think [is] look what they done to my song, ma.[xxix]
Granting all that, it’s also the case that rap captures the despair and cynicism of the age—faces them down, in fact—which is a dirty job somebody’s gotta do. That has an attraction for youth facing a morbid future.
Even though there’s a strong tendency to go for the harder stuff, there’s a parallel propensity to be pulled into rap through the “nicer” artists like Fresh Prince and Salt ‘n’ Pepa and the Beasties..[xxx] There’s lots of anger in rap, but there are other emotions. Some artists are intellectual and politically analytical, some are bouncy and lighthearted, some appeal more through sex than through violence. Some of them might pull the pre-teen and post-twenty-five sets, middle class listeners, and various subsets of women as well. Many listeners start with acts like De La Soul or Arrested Development and move on to embrace the tougher stuff, as was the case with White listeners with many previous forms of Black popular music.
Meanwhile, what is the particular appeal of women rappers to non-Black audiences? Hazel Carby asked “why black women…are needed as cultural and political icons by the white middle class at this particular moment?” She was speaking of Zora Neale Hurston, but I think of Beyonce (or Oprah) when she ventures that
the black female subject is frequently the means by which many middle-class white students and faculty cleanse their souls and rid themselves of the guilt of living in a society that is still rigidly segregated.[xxxi]
And more generally,
Black cultural texts have become fictional substitutes for the lack of any sustained social or political relationships with Black people…[xxxii]
This brings us to the minstrelsy interpretation: some say that the purveyance of gangsta rap in particular is aimed at White youth who want confirmation of their worst stereotypes of Blacks. It’s also arguable that even if it’s not so designed, it has the same effect.[xxxiii] David Samuels laid out the minstrelsy theory at length in the authoritative hip-hop journal The New Republic in 1991. To his ears, “The Message,” the seminal political rap record, was a calculated ploy to reach Dylan-bred Whites; “Fight the Power” a mere college hit; and “Fuck the Police” a “constant presence at certain college parties, white and black.” Samuels calls White fascination with rap “cultural tourism” and quotes Henry Louis Gates comparing it to “buying Navajo blankets at a reservation road-stop.”
My informant Sandy worried about this too:
I know a lot of white kids who I, in my mind, think, “Oh, they listen to rap, therefore they must be open-minded,” and yet they have all these stereotypes about Black people all living in ghettoes and walking around with guns in their pants. And I think stereotypes are easier. If you’re worried that all the Black people out there are gonna shoot you, that’s a really good reason to stay away from them, and you’ll never have to get to know anybody different from you.
This undoubtedly happens, yet it also happens that Black cultural production is routinely conducted in the fabled dual consciousness mode: artists know that Whites are hot for their “soul,” but they’re aiming at a Black audience as well. If it’s possible to fashion the product for the home audience without losing the mainstream bucks, they’ll do it. It’s a thin line to walk, even thinner than the one walked by folk artists who go pop, Country artists who go Nashville, etc.
Some in the industry may be aiming at White ears purely for the cash, making no particular attempt to exacerbate the Zip Coon presentation. “We’re marketing black culture to white people,” said MTV jock André Brown in 1992. Why do they buy? KRS-One reasoned that “Right now everybody needs the ‘pure black’ to help them feel relaxed.”[xxxiv] That’s an interesting choice of words; to me, “relaxed” implies at home. Do some Whites feel naturally more at home with Black music, or is it a mediating force that temporarily and partially resolves racial tension in society? It certainly is an easy way to connect, as the critic said of listening to “race records” in 1928, “without bothering the Negroes.”
Then there’s the pull of the beat, to the exclusion of the words and whatever worldviews go with them. I once stood a few feet from the “two-tone” reggae band UB40 as they explained the background of their song about Gary Tyler, a Black prisoner in Louisiana who proclaimed his innocence of a murder rap. They explained, they sang, the kids around me sang along, but they sang from memory, seemingly ignoring the intro, the point, and the prisoner.[xxxv] That was my subjective impression. It’s amazing what pop music can do. And not do. As Greg Tate said, sharing everything except the burden.
Rap replaced hard rock, punk, metal, and grunge as the aural expression of rebellion. All these forms are verboten at the office—”rock without the edge” is as edgy as it gets there. A radio station in Philadelphia built an entire ad campaign for itself around its “no-rap workday.”[xxxvi]
Perhaps some people are down with the beat, and maybe the poetics, and ignore deeper levels of meaning. One can argue that even so, it’s a positive thing for Whites to gravitate to Black music. But then, of course, the less conscious the kids are of the context, the more they’ll con the text and grow up to perpetuate racism in their own ways, perhaps more subtly than their parents’. One White teen rap fan reports on a friend of his who is “sickeningly prejudiced,” yet listens to rap. He enjoys the guns and violence.[xxxvii]
Back To The Tracks
You can’t really issue a cover version of a rap, though you can steal a style. Of course in a lot of rap the music is almost all covered—sampled, that is. But as for the words, when you step up to the mike, you better have something to say and your own way to say it. It would be hard to copy the voices that echo
African griots, black preachers, Apollo DJs, Birdland MCs, Muhammed Ali, black streetcorner males’ signifying, oratory of the Nation of Islam, and get-down ghetto slang.[xxxviii]
Still, some will always try, copying everything but the burden.
Finally, there might be another, more particularly American-historical element: Michael Dyson noted that gangsta rap “draws its metaphoric capital in part from the mix of myth and murder that gave the Western frontier a dangerous appeal a century ago.”[xxxix] Is the inner city the final frontier? Or are the relations among our multiple sub-cultures now the frontiers where hybrids are constantly created, moving us more and more in the direction of a common culture? Cultures never move in only one direction, as we’ve seen from the contradictory uses White folks have made of hip-hop. Looking on the dark side, there’s a continuation of manipulation and of privileged young folks grabbing culture from others. On the brighter side, as Gregory Stephens suggests, “we ought to be proud that black grooves are writing the basslines to a new multicultural song.”
[i] Rose, 187. [ii] Gates, New Yorker, 40. [iii] Light, Vogue. [iv] ibid. [v] Ressner, Rolling Stone. [vi] Garofalo, 422. [vii] Cross, 58. [viii] Cocks, Time. [ix] Shusterman, Critical Inquiry. [x] Beatriz Seibel, ed., El Cantar del Payador, 1998. Buenos Aires:Biblioteca de Cultura Popular, 45. [xi]Thompson, 95 [xii] E. Jean Carroll, Esquire. [xiii] Lipsitz 1990, 122. [xiv] Kaplan, New York, 46. [xv] Handelman, Rolling Stone. [xvi] Garofalo, 412. [xvii] Brown, Mother Jones. [xviii] Baker, 223. [xix] N. Jennings, Maclean’s. [xx] David Peisner, “Backwoods Rhymes,” Rolling Stone, January 11, 2018, 15-17. [xxi] Leland, Newsweek. [xxii] Rosen, Billboard. [xxiii] Henderson, Billboard, R-21. [xxiv] Interview with author, October, 1996. [xxv] Interview with author, December, 1996. [xxvi] Leland, ibid. [xxvii] Tricia Rose, 5. [xxviii] Dyson, 163. [xxix] Tate, 102. [xxx] Danaher, Popular Music and Society. [xxxi] Carby, Black Popular Culture, 192. [xxxii] loc. cit. [xxxiii] Leland, ibid. [xxxiv] Leland, ibid. [xxxv] I didn’t interview them but I’m pretty sure. [xxxvi] Baker, 222. [xxxvii] Leland, ibid. [xxxviii] Baker, 221. [xxxix] Dyson, 185.
In the wake of the Black migration to northern cities during and after World Wars I and II, the blues morphed into rhythm and blues, an urban evolution stirring the blues together with elements of gospel, jazz, country and western, and big band jazz. The name came about because Jerry Wexler, a reporter for Billboard Magazine, was tired of segregationist marketing terms like “race music”[1] and “sepia series.”[i]
The demise of the big bands in the forties produced, alongside bebop, a pared down, charged up modernization of swing called jump blues (Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Count Basie’s smaller bands, etc.), which intersected with revved up Chicago-style urban blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Guitar Slim, Big Mama Thornton, T-Bone Walker, et al), giving birth to rhythm and blues and presaging rock and roll.
Of course I would never want to inject politics into a discussion of culture…but, if there were any two events that caused rock and roll, they were both World Wars. The glut of war industry jobs in Chicago—along with the collapse of the European cotton market in World War I—was largely responsible for the exodus of five million African-Americans out of the South. The largest number went from Mississippi to the south side of Chicago, where they created the new blues that would become the Big Beat.
And not to inject technology into a discussion of taste, but let us return briefly to the persistent question of the juke box. This little wonder surfaced in the thirties; within seven years there were 100,000 in operation. It became the best source of folk music, White and Black—much more reliable and democratic in those days than the radio. In the early days, when juke boxes were musically segregated according to neighborhood, one might search out tunes from across the tracks at the border: Decca Records’ founders had a shop at the edge of the African American community in Chicago, and White folks plunked down many a nickel there.[2]
[2] The famous Rock-Ola box, by the way, was not named after Rock. It was named after the company’s founder, David Rockola.
juke box, insides
And what were those records made of? My grandfather used to sell shellac, a wood finish made from bug secretions in Asia, for a living. At the time, it was also a crucial ingredient in musical discs. With World War II came a shellac shortage, and the record companies scaled back on their Country and blues discs. This created a big vacuum for the record-buying public, and 400 independent companies eventually sprang up to fill it: Savoy in ’42, Apollo in ’43, King in ’44, Specialty in ’46, Atlantic and Chess in ’47, and on and on. This boom of independent production and distribution helped boost the new urban musics to success—after the war. By then, grandpa was out of business.
While we’re talking tech, let’s pause for a quick look at radio and related boxes. Radio had been the national instantaneous medium until the late forties, when television eclipsed it, as far as the big money and exposure went. One result was an explosion of local radio stations, with local programs and local advertisers, thanks to lowered prices. Because African Americans were earning more than before, there was a market for Black advertisers on Black programs. The most famous example was King Biscuit Time, a 15-minute live blues show from Helena, Arkansas featuring Sonny Boy Williamson, which started in 1941.
Another result was that Whites started to hear Black music. This process got a push from the 1941 national boycott of radio by composers, organized into ASCAP as mentioned earlier. Their feud over royalties resulted in the formation of a new group, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which collected the “folk” folks, the semi- and non-professionals, from outside the Tin Pan beltway. This gave a big push to White and Black folk-type and popular musicians, and it was the first time recorded Black music had really been aired on the waves. Black music stations were critical not only for the formation of Black urban culture, but also for its spread to White youth—20% of Atlanta’s WERD listeners, in the early days at least, were White.[ii] And over in Memphis, one E. Presley listened to WDIA, the first station in the nation with an all-African American music format.
Louis Jordan
All this tech change led to changes in the charts. Louis Jordan, who had played with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and Ma Rainey and sung with Chick Webb’s big band, topped the charts in 1946 with “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and stayed on top of both Black and White charts for ten years. He incorporated White country music influences and produced a combination that, like Chuck Berry’s, was appealing to White as well as Black youth. His music was cousin to rockabilly and also became known as one of the several birth-points of rock and roll. Milt Gabler, who produced both the Louis Jordan and Bill Haley versions of “Rock Around the Clock,” named Jordan as his choice for father of rock and roll.[iii]But Jordan was bitter about his offspring:
I’ve had white musicians hang around me twenty-four hours if I would let ‘em, hang around until they learned something from me. And then I couldn’t go to hear them play![iv]
Sam Phillips declared the first Rock and Roll record to be 1951’s “Rocket ‘88,” sung by Jackie Brentson in 18 year-old Ike Turner’s band, the Delta Cats (and recorded in Phillips’ studio). Bill Haley’s cover of that tune led to his contract with Decca, where he bounded into position as the “inventor” of rock and roll.
Ike Turner, “Rocket ’88” 1951
Bill Haley, ” Rocket 88″ 1951
Of course, the differences between established and newer music genres are partly a matter of perception, both at the time and in hindsight, resulting partly from the mode of packaging for sale. Thus rock ‘n’ roll is not any more entirely new than jump blues as a stripped down big-band variant was. Speaking of which, let’s digress briefly back to 1937, when Ella Fitzgerald sang a song about swing, but using some now-startling lingo:
It came to town, a new kind of rhythm Spread around, sort of set you sizzlin’ Now I’m all through with symphony Oh, rock it for me…. It’s true that once upon a time, the opera was the thing But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme, So won’t you satisfy my soul with that rock and roll![v]
And so, back to R&R: once again, an innovation from Black musicians became the mainstream of American youth music.[vi] In New Orleans, Professor Longhair mixed mambo, rumba, and calypso as only a port city pianist could do, and the effects slithered through rhythm and blues and its later variations. From Macon, Georgia came Little Richard, whose combination of boogie woogie with jump blues makes him another contender for the title of first rock and roller. So too Joe Turner, who had been playing similar music in Kansas City since the thirties. Likewise Wynonie Harris, who cut “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in 1948. He had played in Lucky Millinder’s band, which segued from the big band era to jump blues and then R&B. They featured Dizzy Gillespie, and later Ruth Brown. In 1938 they recorded as the backup for a rare female electric guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe,[3] who came from and remained in the gospel world, though she was oft-expelled for her profaning of it with, let’s face it, rock and roll. She influenced Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Little Richard, 1956. All-White audience. Shades of the Apollo, 1926.
♬substitution: Listen to small groups from the swing era, then to jump blues. Not so much difference. Especially the blues-heavy Kansas City sound from Basie et al—it links the old southern rural blues to the fifties big beat.
The developing scene in Los Angeles was especially diverse. In 1948, the bilingual “Pachuco Boogie” featuring Chicano street slang, scat, and blues sold two million records. And in 1956, bandleader/producer Johnny Otis recorded L’il Julian Herrera, who turned out to be Ron Gregory on the lam from his probation officer, or as George Lipsitz summed it up: “The first L.A. Chicano rock and roll star turned out to be a Hungarian Jew, produced and promoted by a Greek who thought of himself as Black!”[vii] Wholly multicultural, Batman.[4] Then came Ritchie Valens (Valenzuela), who put La Bamba on the charts with the help of gospel, R&B and jazz backing musicians. I never knew that the flip side, “Donna,” my favorite record when I was eight, was about a girl whose dad told her to stop going out with “that Mexican.”[viii]
[4] “Black by persuasion,” Otis called himself, much as L’il Julian was Chicano by affiliation.
But L.A. night spots hosting R&B shows that drew mixed audiences were shut down by the city, and various government and private forces combined to thwart the live venues, radio stations and small record companies. The music industry controlled the distribution of the music, and had the power to decide what to disseminate, guarding the nation from the reckless anarchy of cultural diversity.
And the new sound? Some called it jungle music, as they had called jazz before. Some White kids loved it; some White parents didn’t. By the early fifties some non‑African Americans were starting to play the new sound. But when White musicians played R&B it was called, and sold as, rock and roll. Compared to what Louis Jordan and Joe Turner played, it ranged from a bit lighter to a lot lighter. Black artists were not particularly marketable in the suburbs—correction: record companies didn’t want to market them. The assumption was that you couldn’t, therefore you didn’t. But radio broke this down: in the fifties I listened to Fats Domino and Lloyd Price on the same station that played Pat Boone and the Purple People-Eater. They really had no choice but to play at least some Black records, if they wanted to keep their audience from transferring its attention to Black radio.
Middle class White kids of the suburbs were a breed apart from southern or even urban Whites, who had at least some contact with Black folks and industrial working class life. We were the first generation to be cut off so completely from our history, our roots, and the histories and roots of our less privileged fellows. We had no clue. We didn’t know that our very neighborhoods were created by discriminatory lending practices and linked to downtown jobs by new subsidized freeways built through (and destroying) Black neighborhoods. This was White society’s response to the influx of Blacks to the northern cities.
So even today, when we see photos of impoverished lowland folk in the South fleeing hurricanes, some of us feel it must be in some foreign country. We were so isolated from these cultures that when we received their music, in any of its many mutated forms, there was no way for us to feel the meanings it had collected over the generations. No wonder we treated it as a rootless commodity and assumed that whatever White band was playing it that week was the one that invented it. When I listen today to the music of my teen years, I marvel at how little I knew about what I was hearing and—as a musician—replicating.[ix]
And no wonder we grabbed on for dear life. It was as if our parents had taken us away from the playground and put us far away in a place where there was no playground, and not even a bus to get on to go back to the candy store. That is in fact what happened. And when we got to a certain age and started looking to define ourselves as different from our parents through own youthful culture, small wonder we grasped for what had been taken away. We wanted it, although often we simply knew not what we heard—or at least, where it came from.
Meanwhile, in the uneasily multi-racial working class schools, the racial divide was maintained by counterinsurgency-minded apparatchiks. In a Muncie, Indiana school rec room the jukebox blared White cover versions of Black artists’ tunes, while White kids danced and Black students cooled their heels. The Coasters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry were banned by the principal, on principle: “too suggestive.”[x]
How much has changed in the decades and generations since? Lots, but…what remains of that ignorance? What do we not know now, and what did I not know then? Well, take rock and roll. There are two competing definitions of the original rock and roll: one, that it was rhythm and blues under another name; two, that it was a new merger of Country with rhythm and blues. Jimmy Meyers, co-writer of “Rock Around the Clock,” took the latter position, claiming that “rhythm and blues is playing a 4/4 beat and rock and roll is an “ump chuck” beat, [emphasizing the] 2nd and 4th beat.”[xi]Meyers said this backbeat emphasis came from Country music. Lionel Hampton disagreed:
I was brought up in the Holiness Church, the Sanctified Church, [where] they always used that 2-4 beat. I brought it into jazz that way, and it left my jazz and went into rock and roll. And that’s the miracle of the beat today…It came from the black roots.”[xii]
Music professor Eddie Meadows concurred: “The 2-4 beat is an African concept…All rock musicians basically got the two-four beat from blues.”
Muddy Waters
Milt Gabler, having produced recordings of the same songs in Black and White versions, felt the main difference was in vocal quality. That would be, for example, the difference between Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters or, for a more extreme example, between Little Richard’s and Pat Boone’s versions of “Long Tall Sally.” Said Pat Boone, “It was rhythm and blues I was singing.”[xiii] Sort of. Muddy praised White guitar players and added, “but they cannot vocal like the black man.”[xiv] Why is that? Imagine taking a liking to Congolese music, and journeying to the Congo to join up with the native singers. “If you didn’t grow up in that culture,” wrote Robert Palmer, “your singing is going to sound like what it is: an imitation.”[xv] And not just an imitation of someone’s singing style. “Blues vocal style,” as Larry Sandberg and Dick Weissman point out, “is inextricably derived from Black speech, phrasing, and stress and intonation patterns.”[xvi]When you try to duplicate someone’s life experience—their culture—it’s worse than theft, it’s impersonation. Carbon copying can only lead to blackfacing. Also, it doesn’t work.[5]
Muddy liked the White guitar players more than the singers.
Another difference was instrumentation: The big bands had downsized to a few horns, then to a single sax. Early rock records have that sax, but many of the rockabilly tunes use the guitar instead.
♬substitution: Listen to one of each, guitar and sax, substituting the two instruments for each other in your innermost ear. Listen to an early rock and roll song with acoustic bass; the same song becomes “rock” with electric bass.
Further support for the “another name” argument is found in Billboard Magazine, which in 1956 referred to rock and roll as “a popularized form of r&b.”[xvii] This, after renaming “Race music” to “R&B” (1949-58), after switching to Race music (1945-49) from “Harlem Hit Parade” (1942-45). And Merle Travis called fifties rock and roll “not much more than the black man’s twelve-bar blues sung at a highly spirited pace, actually a cousin to boogie-woogie and the spiritual.”[xviii]Stephen Calt calls the very idea of rock and roll part of a shell game, one euphemism piled on top of another: race music becomes R&B becomes R&R, all for reasons of marketing, colored by race.[xix]
But rock, like jazz, is more a way of playing music than it is a form. This gets more true all the time; it’s attitude, not chord structure; manner, not matter, that makes the difference. Ditto Country. Just as Eubie Blake showed that anything could be ragged, likewise anything can be rocked, or countrified, or blues’d, or bluegrassed, etc. etc. Large numbers of early rock songs were recycled Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, from “I Only Have Eyes For You” and ”Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “My Blue Heaven,” or old folk and blues tunes like “Rock Island Line” and “Stagger Lee.”[xx]
This leads to a third view of rock, combining the first two and more: musical genres are always evolving, sometimes slowly, sometimes radio-fast or like internet lightning. There weren’t only two musics merging, but all kinds of influences. Vocal groups that sprang from old barbershop traditions as well as the Black church, White church, boogie woogie piano, honky-tonk, rockabilly—a generally stepped up, harder driving mutation of Country traditions. All these were evolving through crossover, cross-pollination, technology-driven amping up, and the general ramping up of life in the city. The urbanization and industrialization of life made everything, including music, faster and louder.[xxi]
Pop music radio DJ Alan Freed had played both Black and White records on his Cleveland radio show as early as 1951,[xxii] and organized package concerts across the color line. He refused to play cover versions, preferring to pull the covers back. His “Rock and Roll Dance Party” was pulled off CBS TV when a camera caught Black singing star Frankie Lymon dancing with a White girl.
It was Freed who named rock and roll (this time): he was playing R&B for White teenagers, but couldn’t call it by its name, so he just pulled a common phrase out of the blues lyric storehouse.[6] We might say more accurately that he’s the one who made the name stick, kind of like Columbus made “discovery” stick. The rock and roll handle was common at the time, and had been for a while; Langston Hughes cited a 1920s blues: “Rock me all night long, Daddy, with a steady roll,”[xxiii] and the Boswell Sisters recorded a song called “Rock and Roll” in 1934.[xxiv] The phrase goes back much further, though, as documented by Stan Hugill, writing about Black influence on sea chanteys of the 1800s:
The phrase “rock ‘n’ roll”…was a very common cry among shantymen—a shout of encouragement when hauling or heaving—and of course it emanated, just as the name for “rock ‘n’ roll” dancing did, from the American Negro.[xxv]
So Freed didn’t so much name the music as simply choose an obvious bit of slang that already had many uses under its belt. When the music came under attack, Freed defended it:
To me, this campaign against Rock and Roll smells of discrimination of the worst kind against the great and accomplished Negro songwriters, musicians, and singers who are responsible for this outstanding contribution to American music.[xxvi]
Another important development leading to rock and roll was doo-wop, that often-trivialized object of nostalgia that reigned on top 40 radio in the fifties. It drew its name from syllables commonly used by the vocal groups on the street.[7] Coming out of Black vocal improvising traditions (remember Barbershop?) and forties groups like the Ink Spots, the nonsense-syllable choristers blanketed the air waves starting in 1948: the Orioles, the Dominoes, the Coasters. Doo-wop, like Motown after it, was just smooth enough to cross the color line; Alan Freed unleashed it on his White audience. The formula had been found: gospel-derived harmonizing with just enough passion strained out to bring it in under the radar of White radio deejays, if not Indiana school principals. So I grew up on Black gospel, Trojan-horsed through top 40 radio? Who knew!
[7] These groups were also very popular among Italian-American kids.
The various streams leading to rock and roll coexisted and coalesced, as had ragtime and blues before, as would rock and reggae after, to name only two examples. Mergers and mutations are always happening. They’re happening as you read this. One 1952 concert put together by Alan Freed in Cleveland featured doo-woppers the Orioles and the Dominoes, R&B from Charles Brown, and jump bands led by Tiny Grimes and Jimmy Forrest.[xxvii] Everything was there, save rockabilly, which was just about ready to come out of the oven.
From Jimmie Rodgers to Chet Atkins to Western Swing to Bill Monroe, Country music has never been any more pure White than blues was pure Black. Less so, in fact. In form, they’re both fairly European-derived. But in feel, the blues is an African, micro-tonal moan, and Country music, White as it’s alleged to be, has never been able to shake the swing, the syncopation it got from Black musicians. You can take Country out of the country, but you can’t take the swing out of it. It’s long too late.
In the late forties, with Western swinging, jump blues jumping and country blues going Rhythm &, a series of Country “boogie” tunes came out, including “Freight Train Boogie,” “Oakie Boogie,” and “Guitar Boogie.” Hank Williams’ honky-tonk music, so despised at the Opry, thrived on the back-beat circuit. His important innovations included the mid-note changes in tone discussed in the jazz section and a mix of Country with Dixieland and Cajun that revved up Country for the new era. His fiddlers were closer to Western than Country. It was hopped up, and it was hybrid—something we often forget, as we have too often been raised on simple Black and White views. And then…
Then came rockabilly: Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, even Chuck Berry (bringing a sort of guitaristic boogie-woogie), and finally Elvis Presley.[8] It was southern, working class, White, and Black. The slow tunes were more Country, the fast ones more R&B. They were close cousins anyway, as Ray Charles pointed out: “They’d make them steel guitars cry and whine, and it really attracted me.”[xxviii] Lots of Black artists were influenced by White country music, including Lowell Fulson, who learned from one of Jimmie Rodgers’ back-up boys. And Brother Ray himself, having grown up on Country music along with gospel, issued two records of Country tunes.
Whether Whites were attracted or frightened by Black music, somewhere between Elvis and Pat Boone they found a way to come to terms with the new sound. Sam Phillips, Alabama-born and raised, was looking for these terms. He founded Sun Records in Memphis to make recording technology available locally to the many Black and White musicians in the area. (Non-southerners might want to check a map to see how close Memphis is to the blues-drenched delta of Northern Mississippi.) He recorded B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and James Cotton, along with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, and Roy Orbison. With an eye on the evolution of Black city music, he mused immortally, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”[9] In a more philosophical mood he elaborated:
I hate imitations. But having grown up in close proximity to the black man, I thoroughly believed that a white man, a Southern white man, could approximate the same sound and feeling. There was still a lot of hatred between the races in the South, but music was the one area where black and white were closer than people realized. The young whites loved the black music they got to hear. So I felt that if only I could find a white artist who could put the same feel, the same touch and spontaneity into his songs, who could find this total abandon of the black artists in himself, then I would have the opportunity, the means by which to give others the sound I had heard.[xxix]
[9] According to his secretary, Marion Keisker, cited in Clarke, 384, and in these exact words elsewhere. However, also cited in many variations, e.g. “I always said if I could find a white person that could sing with the feel, the essence, and the naturalness that a black person could convey, that I could make a billion dollars…Elvis Presley fit that mold.”
The dollar chase is well understood to be the prime motivator for the industry in purveying White imitators of Black culture. But for Sam, there was a possibly more controversial motivating factor: the dearth of innovation at that time in what were understood to be White music genres: “It seemed to me that Negroes were the only ones that had any freshness left in their music.”[xxx] Greil Marcus felt that the problem with “White country music” was that
…it so perfectly expressed the acceptance and fatalism of its audience of poor and striving whites, blending in with their way of life and endlessly reinforcing it, that the music brought all it had to say to the surface, told no secrets, and had no use for novelty. It was conservative in an almost tragic sense, because it carried no hope of change…it was a way of holding on to the values that were jeopardized by a changing postwar America. [xxxi]
Sam found Elvis.[10] Here was a poor Mississippi-born White kid who grew up on gospel music in the Assemblies of God Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, and then while living in a housing project near Beale Street in Memphis.[11] He also encountered blues players in Tupelo, and again in Memphis, and listened to Country music on the radio.
[10] More precisely, Elvis found Sam, and secretary Marion Keisker badgered Sam to pay attention.
[11]This church was one of many denominations of the Pentecostal movement, which was known for mixed Black and White congregations, something unheard of in other churches in the early twentieth century. The music of the church reflected this mix. See for example the Gaither Hour TV gospel music show.
Elvis and quartet – gospel
Elvis’ music was exactly what Phillips was after:
It wasn’t a matter of taking a piece of material and bleaching it white and removing all nutrition the way Pat Boone did.[xxxii]
Elvis studied the style of Calvin Newborn, a guitarist on Beale Street, who later said of him:
His success actually broke the ice for civil rights…the fact that he sent the black idiom all over the world with his music.[xxxiii]
In fact, people listening to Elvis’ first record thought he was Black (remember Peggy Lee and the Allen Brothers), so a Memphis disc jockey gave out the name of his high school, a sure-fire racial clarification. This “Not to Worry” harkens back to an earlier minstrelsy, when audiences watched blackfaced White imitators rather than Blacks playing some version of themselves. Publishers arranged for minstrel sheet music covers to show the performers both in and out of costume, so consumers would know they were getting the genuine imitation.[xxxiv]
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MEMPHIS
The musical meeting ground on the Mississippi: Into the late forties there was a Thursday night show on Beale Street featuring Black artists—for White audiences, like the Friday show Connee Boswell went to in New Orleans and the Cotton Club in New York City. Whites also came to Beale for the all-Black Jubilee parade. Meanwhile, Blacks couldn’t go to the zoo or the fair. They eventually got a Black day at the fair, to match White night on Beale. The “Black and White Department Store” was integrated: it had both Black and White lunch counters.[xxxv]
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But as it happens, Elvis had first been played on a program geared to Black listeners, and his encore performance of Arthur Crudup’s 1946 hit “That’s All Right, Mama”—note for note, just for fun during a recording session break—set the phones and cash registers ringing—among Blacks, not Whites.[xxxvi] Sam Phillips released five singles by Elvis before selling him to RCA, and each one had an R&B song on one side and Country-billy one on the other.
Of course, Elvis’ ancestors were not enslaved, didn’t suffer lynchings, and probably didn’t work and sing on penitentiary chain gangs. But he came from an impoverished southern family and did live in a tenement in the Black ghetto of Memphis for a time. In fact, like Jerry Lee Lewis, he grew up in the Pentecostal Church; he enjoyed the Black “Spirit of Memphis Quartet” as well as Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Texas Swing, and practiced guitar to WDIA, Memphis, the nation’s first Black radio station, which began airing R&B in 1948.[xxxvii] As Sam Phillips pointed out, it is the southern White who is most likely to be able to relate to the Black odyssey.[12] Jerry Lee Lewis heard Black gospel in Louisiana, picking up more of the music than the message. Mississippian Conway Twitty grew up on blues and the Grand Ole Opry. Key rockabilly guitar player Carl Perkins grew up on a plantation:
The coloured people would sing, and I’d join in, just a little kid, and that was coloured rhythm and blues, got named rock’n’roll, got named that in 1956, but the same music was there years before, and it was my music.[xxxviii]
His first guitar influence was an African American farmer named John Westbrook, who taught him “a lot of string pushing and choking” that he later poured into his renditions of country tunes.[xxxix]
Finally, an Alabama DJ named Sam and a Mississippi truck driver named Elvis, both raised around Blacks, joined the formula to the face, the voice, and the hips—the hips that brought on the screams and were banned from TV screens. In the days of black and white TV, some hips were just too loose. But we might note here, in the “Things are Not What They Seem” category, that Elvis’ hip moves, like his lip grooves, were often lifted whole cloth from elsewhere. The famous vocal quirks on his early records can be found in the demo records by African American writer/singer Otis Blackwell, whence came “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and other hits.[13] Elvis’ second single, a cover of Wynonie Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” opens a window on the Elvis style. Nick Tosches reports:
The pelvic jab-and-parry, the petulant curlings of his lip, the evangelical wavings of his arms and hands—these were not the spontaneities of Elvis, but a style deftly learned from watching Wynonie Harris perform in Memphis in the early 1950s.[14]
[13] Tosches 1996, 55. Blackwell also wrote “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis.
[14] Tosches 1999, 45. “Good Rockin’” was written by Roy Brown and first recorded by him, in 1947. Elvis once tried to sneak onto the stage at a Brown gig (op. cit., 77). Brown was crushed by the industry for demanding his royalties – an unseemly thing to do in those days.
…artfully lifted moves.
In fact, said Harris’ producer, “When you saw Elvis, you were seeing a mild version of Wynonie.”[xl] Another mild thing about Elvis was his backup singers, the Jordanaires; actually a White gospel quartet, they backed up loads of pop and country acts. Later, in Vegas, when it had become the norm, Elvis used Black backup singers as well as the White gospel singers The Stamps, seen in this video.
Black Backup
The record producers played no small part in the filtering of wild and mild, as critic Robert Palmer points out in his film Bluesland. They decided who got to record and, to some extent, what they would sound like. So the Chess brothers’ experience in producing Black musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf was brought into play and helped define the sound of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. And Sam Phillips had been recording Delta blues artists since 1950—a wealth of experience that in turn influenced the Elvis sound.[xli]
Elvis on Ed Sullivan
Rock and roll boomed its way into the northern suburbs, where the guitar pickers played their axes without ever having chopped with one. They lacked a background in work songs; rock persists as an expression of youth angst, but makes a mockery of its blues origins, since most Whites don’t know much about Black history.
Just as bandleader Paul Whiteman had put a White face on jazz for White audiences, so too rock and roll was transformed into the relatively white pill that suburbia could swallow. The White artists and their handlers didn’t just adopt the style, they “adopted” the songs, watering them down enough to be palatable (saleable) but retaining just enough of the risqué to tantalize. This practice was facilitated by a late 1940s court decision that musical arrangements could not be copyrighted, opening the way to the lifting of entire styles of singing, instrumentation, and riffs, enabling the production of virtual carbon copy records.
As with Jump Jim Crow, so with rock and roll.[15] With a White singer, White sales were assured (though in this case the White Sale is not advertised as such). The very first R&B song to make the top 10 in the pop charts, 1954’s “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, was immediately covered by the Crew Cuts and went to Number One. Patti Page buried Ruth Brown’s “Oh What A Dream,” Bobby Darin dittoed Louis Armstrong (“Mack the Knife”); Ricky Nelson counterfeited Fats Domino (“I’m Walkin”); Georgia Gibbs transformed Etta James’ “Roll With Me Henry” to “Dance With Me Henry” and eclipsed LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle-dee.” For the latter, the record company brought in all the musicians on the original version; the original engineer declined the honor. The inimitable Pat Boone denatured Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”
Elvis copied Big Mama Thornton’s version of Leiber and Stoller’s (“Hound Dog”). He likewise borrowed from Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti”), Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris (“Good Rockin’ Tonight”), Kokomo Arnold (“Milkcow Blues Boogie”), Lloyd Price (“Lawdy Miss Clawdy”), Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) Arthur Gunter (“Baby Let’s Play House”), Smiley Lewis (“One Night”), Little Junior Parker (“Mystery Train”), and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (“That’s All Right, Mama,” “So Glad You’re Mine,” “My Baby Left Me”). For his contribution to history, Crudup was paid a grand total of zero. Mama Thornton received $500 for her efforts on “Hound Dog.”[xlii]Songwriter Otis Blackwell sold “Don’t Be Cruel” for $25.[xliii].
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WHITE WRITERS, BLACK SINGERS
“Hound Dog” was performed by a black singer, then lifted by Elvis. The song’s authors were two Jewish guys, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote hits by the dozen for Black groups like the Coasters, and even one for Peggy Lee (“Is That All There Is?”). They also wrote for the “girl groups,” like New Orleans’ Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”), and the Shangri-las, two sets of sisters from Queens (“Leader of the Pack”). After Elvis hit it big with their Hound Dog, they wrote many more tunes for him. Leiber and Stoller were the rock and roll reincarnation of Harold Arlen, who wrote for the Cotton Club. In fact Stoller studied piano with James P. Johnson in Harlem, and later played with the Blas Vasquez band in L.A., doing Chicano versions of Black and White forms of popular music.[16]
[16] Stoller: “By the fall of 1950, when both Mike And I were in City College, we had black girlfriends and were into a black lifestyle.” (Lipsitz 1990, 140) A daring lifestyle indeed.
Another outstanding pair of White musicians working hip-deep in Black styles were the Righteous Brothers, who personified “blue-eyed soul.” They recorded Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “You’ve Lost that Loving Feelin” (1964) and blasted up the Black charts.
Righteous Brothers
Barry Mann’s lyric, “Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save the seat in the back of the bus just for me,” was rewritten, at the behest of Atlantic Records, to “only in America can anybody become President.” The Drifters recorded it, but R&B DJs wouldn’t play it. It was a hit for Jay and the Americans. Go figure. James Brown wasn’t there yet, so you had to be White to be proud.[xliv]
Producer Phil Spector created the sound of most of the girl groups. He wrote “Spanish Harlem” with Leiber.
Gerry Goffin and Carole King liked the dance their 17 year-old babysitter Eva Boyd did to their piano playing. They authored “The Loco-Motion,” which became a hit for the girl who became Little Eva. They also composed “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for the Shirelles—the first girl group. After them, the Black girl groups were created by the business, especially by Spector.
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Bill Haley’s promotion people had a special hand in obscuring rock and roll’s origins. Haley covered Louis Jordan (“Rock Around the Clock”), Little Richard (“Rip It Up”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle and Roll”); he also made a movie called “Rock Around the Clock,” in which Haley and his Comets are portrayed as the originators of a new type of music. Hollywood’s distribution power tilted the playing field; R&B slid out of sight as R&R was given a world-wide leg up.[xlv]
This leg-up cover-up was the main dynamic of the fifties R&B/R&R scene, but there were other angles as well. For one, there were Black artists covering records by Whites: in 1949 Bull Moose Jackson copied “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” from Country singer Wayne Raney; Wynonie Harris got his 1951 “Bloodshot Eyes” from western swing singer Hank Penny; The Orioles “Crying in the Chapel” was lifted from Darrell Glenn’s version.[xlvi] For two, there were White pop artists covering White Country tunes, often leaving the Country singer as deep in the dust as they left the Black artists. Elvis covered Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” a case of big rockabilly swamping small same. For three, sometimes the release of a new version elevated the original in the charts, giving the originator a boost or even a career, as with Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame.” And then there was all of the above, and more: “Crying in the Chapel,” first recorded by White singer Darrell Glenn in 1953, was a hit for the Orioles the same year, and was covered by Eddie Arnold, Ella Fitzgerald, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis Presley, and about 50 others.[xlvii]
All of this must be acknowledged and understood in order to grasp the whole messy enchilada. Complexities abound throughout this story—remember minstrelsy—but the overriding issue is who gets to ride up front and who gets ridden over. White cover artists rode to fame, recording companies got rich, and Black innovators ate their dust. When R&B singer Charles Brown tried to get his record royalties, he was told to chill out or they would just get someone who sounded like him.[xlviii] Decades later, record exec Dan Charnas would sum it up:
To me, what makes something appropriative is what gives White supremacy its fangs. The gatekeepers of the radio stations and record companies who have less investment in Black people and culture are more likely to elevate an Iggy Azalea over an Azealia Banks.[xlix]
Part of the problem with being an innovator is that you’re ahead of your time. That can mean you don’t get to reap the rewards of your contribution, because it’s too early for most folks to appreciate you. Some of those resistant folks might be the gatekeepers in the industry, who can’t figure out how to market something that combines strands of adjacent cultures, but which a few years later will be all the rage. For some innovators, the result will be a lack of recognition. For others, there could be recognition in their community but not beyond it—no White audience, for instance. So when we think of Elvis or the Beatles as the beginning of something new, we might want to pause and rethink them as the culmination of a process, the ones lucky enough to arrive when the industry people had already been educated enough to know how to market them.
In the sixties, covering of R&B tunes was continued apace by the British bands: The Animals did Ray Charles; the Stones did Marvin Gaye and Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters[17] and Robert Johnson, and studied Ike and Tina Turner and Little Richard. These groups, however, were open about their influences. Mick Jagger wondered “what’s the point in listening to us doing “I’m a King Bee” when you can listen to Slim Harpo doing it.”[l] Of course the point was that the Stones got hyped. Eric Clapton never denied the source of his music, but meanwhile, as Chapple and Garofalo point out, “the bluesmen whose licks he copied are starving to death.”[li]
[17] Both the Rolling Stones and Rolling Stone Magazine were named after Muddy’s 1954 song of that name.
Rolling Stones
The Beatles, who had begun as a skiffle band (see section on Lonnie Donegan, below), listened to Chuck Berry and tried to write like him. They covered Little Richard, the Shirelles and the Isley Brothers, and toured with Little Richard before their big break. John Lennon explained,
The only White I ever listened to was Elvis Presley on his early music records and he was doing Black music. I don’t blame him for wanting to be part of that music. I wanted to be that. I copied all those people (Black singers) and the other Beatles did, and so did others (Whites) until we developed a style of our own. Black music started this whole change of style, of attitude…rock and roll is Black. I appreciate it, and I’ll never stop acknowledging it.[lii]
Little Richard didn’t blame Elvis either—at least, not out loud: “He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”[liii]
Mitch Miller was not so sanguine about the British invasion, though, saying “I’m sick and tired of British-accented youths ripping off Black American artists and, because they’re white, being accepted by the American audience.”[liv]
These sentiments of woke White entertainers appeared in a popular Black magazine, where unfortunately they escaped notice by White fans. But at least a few earlier White R&B fans knew the score. Ken Goodman laid it out:
We learned from the black people. They taught us how to dance. They taught us what rhythm was. They let their hair down when they danced. They touched. They’d bump their butts together. They’d do things that we’d never seen before.[lv]
In other words,
Boy, you ain’t lived unless you been black on Saturday night.[lvi]
Similar thoughts were expressed by an African American observer of the music scene:
It is quite amazing to me to hear the joyful rhythms, which I found time to enjoy as a youth here in Atlanta years ago, coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent, or to see the Senator Javits and the Senators Kennedy lost in the dances which we created.[lvii]
That from Martin Luther King. He also noted that
School integration is much easier now that they [pupils] share a common music, a common language, and enjoy the same dances.[lviii]
Confirming the worst fears of Henry Ford, King lauded the spread of Black music and dance as “a cultural conquest that surpasses even [that of] Alexander the Great and culture of classical Greece.”[lix]
Elvis opened the door, and in flew the influences: Bob Dylan named Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Leadbelly as foundations; Paul McCartney mentioned Fred Astaire and Little Richard and said “I’d much rather have an American colored group doing one of our songs than us. Cause they’d do it better.”[lx] (Think of “She Loves You,” one of their first records, with the falsetto “ooo” refrain. McCartney dedicated practice time to copying that Little Richard riff.) Mick Jagger said of the Stones, “We started out simply to be a good R&B band.” Well, a good R&B band that sells. From Jolson to Bolton, Black music seemed to sell better to White folks when White folks made it: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Sting. Much as I like him.
♬SUBSTITUTION: Listen to White singers when they use back-up singers, soul style (i.e., gospel).[18] Close your eyes, forget who you’re listening to, and replace the lead singer, in your mind’s ear, with the Black vocalist of your choice. Presto: same music, but credit redistributed.
The immediate predecessor to rock and roll in British popular music was skiffle, sometimes called jug band music. It was a survival and update of plantation corn-husking music, via minstrel shows and ragtime[lxi]—improvised music on improvised instruments like jugs, washboards and spoons.
Skiffle started in the American South: enslaved Africans had played the washboard, a replacement for the African jawbone, and other “found instruments” that imitated what they had lost. The style was widespread in the 1920s and was transported to Chicago, where it was played at parties held to raise enough money to pay the rent. Skiffle was blues, jazz, Country tunes, anything anybody knew or sort of knew, all thrown in together. The musicians often weren’t even musicians.
The man who brought skiffle to Britain was Lonnie Donegan. “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight” was his American hit; he had thirty big ones in Britain. He was a one-man compendium of underclasses: an Irishman from Glasgow, Scotland’s gritty working-class city, who moved to the East End of London—Cockney turf—and made African-American rent party music. Born Anthony, later Tony, he re-named himself for bluesman Lonnie Johnson.[lxii]
____________________________________
Once the roots had been bleached, the marketing could begin. Elvis was packaged by Hank Saperstein, the same guy who sold us Lassie and the Lone Ranger.[19] When Elvis was drafted in 1958 and other top artists died in a plane crash,[20] TV dance show host Dick Clark turned to Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and Fabian, temporarily derailing the rock and roll rebellion into cute White teen idols with the guts—and Black cultural aspirations—taken out.
[19] This ultimate icon of the West may have been inspired by 19th-century African American marshal Bass Reeves, who worked “lone” and used disguises, detective skills, and horsemanship to capture over 3,000 criminals. https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/sport/lone-ranger-african-american-reeves/
[20] Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. February 3, 1959.
Dick Clark had a dress code on his show, a strictly enforced clean culture: no scruff allowed, no rebellion. Clark and his crew later admitted that most of the dance steps popularized on Bandstand originated with Black youngsters, but were performed on his program by White ones.[lxiii]
Clark took a liking to “The Twist,” recorded in 1958 by an R&B group called Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. He recruited squeaky-clean, smiling, teenaged Black singer Ernest Evans, who was renamed—by Clark’s wife—Chubby Checker (a “twist” on Ernest’s idol, Fats Domino) to clone the song and dance. Checker covered it with precision and is still a household name. Here we have a White industry mogul choosing a user-friendly singer, bleaching within the race. Hank Ballard at last report (1994) was still not too happy about it.[21]
Clark saw a teenaged Black couple on his show doing a new dance, and the rest was history. The Twist caused parents to recoil in horror; sex and race, though politely packaged, were still a potent brew.
Meanwhile, Black R&B artists had trouble getting recorded and distributed nationally. Black musicians have often been forced overseas to achieve recognition, but in this case overseas came to them. The first national company to record rhythm and blues artists, Atlantic Records, was founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of the Turkish ambassador to the United States. Ertegun, a long-time jazz fan, jump-started the careers of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and dozens more.
Ertegun was supremely dedicated to the music and the musicians. He told a Columbia Records rep he was paying his artists three percent in royalties:
And he said “You’re paying those people royalties? You must be out of your mind.” Of course he didn’t call them “people.” He called them something else.[lxiv]
Atlantic had an African-American arranger named Jesse Stone, who started out playing with the Blues Serenaders in the 1920s. He arranged for Jimmy Lunceford and Earl Hines, then became musical director for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in their peak period. At Atlantic he arranged “Tweedle Dee” for LaVerne Baker, “Sh-boom” for the Chords (soon covered by the Crew Cuts), and “Chains of Love” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for Joe Turner. He wrote “Money Honey,” the Drifters first hit, and later worked with Elvis and Ray Charles. You could say, as they did of Irving Berlin, that he was American music.
Barbershop researcher Lynn Abbott says that “musical trends and phenomena tend to integrate far more readily than the people who create them.”[lxv]In early rock and roll, even the audiences were integrated. This is partly because the apartheid demographics of the record industry were not quite functioning. The young people coming up in R&B and Country music environments found a new music that defied those categories by blending them, and the races flocked together until the industry got it together to pull them apart again with more efficient demographic marketing. Radio, after it recovered from Alan Freed, played an important role in this re-segregation.
In the South, the core of musicians playing the new music was also in some cases integrated. As R&B incorporated gospel and was re-christened “Soul Music,” Stax Records in Memphis and the FAME studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 150 miles away, produced Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and many more. In an ironic twist, teen buyers were mostly unaware of the White studio musicians and writers on these records—they were in the background for a change.[22] At Stax they included bassist Duck Dunn, guitarist Steve Cropper, Jim Dickinson, and Spooner Oldham, along with Duane Allman, who put licks on discs by Aretha and Wilson Pickett before he formed his own White Southern Blues Country Rock band.
[22] Even the back office was multiculti: Stax President Jim Stewart was White, Vice President Al Bell was Black.
Who were these guys? They were southern Whites who grew up hearing, then playing, music that was Black, White, and shades in between. Cropper’s high school band was even called the Royal Spades, since they were after all a White band covering Black hit tunes. Why did all this happen? Jim Dickinson gave some credit to Memphis radio DJ Dewey Phillips:
Dewey would jump from blues, to gospel music, to country, to rock ‘n roll – it all tied together in his weird mind and he could sell it to the audience as if it were all the same thing. So people in Memphis think it is![lxvi]
When the White soul bro’s wrote and played with Black singers, it was soul music with Country in it, not Country with soul. When they played with rock bands like the Allman Brothers, it was some other shade. When Dunn and Cropper joined with Black keyboardist Booker T. Jones and drummer Al Jackson, they became Booker T. and the MGs, the Memphis Group that was the house band for Stax and all its soul output. Cropper co-wrote “In the Midnight Hour” and “634-5789”[23] for Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” and Otis Redding’s “Mr. Pitiful” and “Dock of the Bay.”
Whites and Blacks often play the same sub-genres of music, but the feel of the rhythms, the nuances, and certainly the vocals are just different enough so that most folks don’t notice that it’s more the same than different. I went to a Stones concert in 1995 with a 19 year-old who couldn’t hear the blues in their music. He was growing up slightly unawares.
James Brown
From Georgia came James Brown and Little Richard, along with Otis Redding. These three are emblematic of the constant Black-White interchange in the South. You can hear a lot more Country in Otis than in James Brown. In a duet with Carla Thomas, Carla hurls an insult: “Otis, you’re country!” To which he responds, “That’s good!” Little Richard, like Chuck Berry, mixed Country influences with R&B. Nobody of either race is closer in style to Little Richard than Jerry Lee Lewis—a great example of Southern commonalities.
Ray Charles was a key player in the infusion of gospel into rhythm and blues. He had a simple device, and not an entirely new one, for this infusion: writing secular lyrics to sacred songs. “This Little Light of Mine” became “This Little Girl of Mine;” “My Jesus Is All the World To Me (“I’ve Got A Savior”) was born again as “I Got A Woman;”[lxvii] “Talkin’ ‘Bout You” replaced Talkin’ ‘Bout Jesus” and “Lonely Avenue” started as “How Jesus Died.”[lxviii]
Another bearer of the gospel to the pop charts was Sam Cooke, reared in a Baptist family and pirated away from his gospel singing group by record executives; he smooth-as-silked his way up the White charts. And then there was Aretha, a Cooke acolyte who took it in another direction.
Berry Gordy was the flip side of Sam Phillips: he found Black singers who could sound just White enough to sell to Whites. More accurately, he made them, and together they made smooth dance pop—no Muddy, no Howlin’. It was a brilliant and finely crafted exercise, built on an understanding and finessing of race and gender in early 1960s America. Early album covers even omitted photos of the singers, so you could think they were White if you wanted to. At Gordy’s Motown Records, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, and Stevie Wonder joined the Vandellas, Four Tops, Marvelettes, Isley Brothers, Jackson Five, Temptations, Miracles and Supremes to change the face of pop music. They reigned supreme in the days just before the British invasion.
Stevie Wonder, still Little.
The Supremes with Paul McCartney, 1968
The Beatles,[24] Rolling Stones, Who, Animals, Yardbirds, and later groups were all playing variants of rhythm and blues, but young White Americans who had never been permitted to hear the originals just thought it was some new kind of British music.[25] No roots, no routes. By the time we were eventually introduced to the source, it was a decade late and several million dollars short. Case in point: the old blues tune “C.C. Rider,” which Elvis used to open his shows with. Go to your parents’ CD collection, or your grandparents’ LP collection, and pull out The Animals; now go to the library or the internet and get Big Bill Broonzy doing the same tune. Play the Animals first, then Broonzy. You just saved your college tuition.[lxix]
[25] See Roots of Rock and Blues Originals in the discography.
The Animals
College tuition was out of reach to the children of the originators. The British invasion had two ironically paired and historically repeating results: it knocked Black musicians out of the top rungs of the business, and it made a variant of the Black community’s music into the sound of America and the world.
Jimi Hendrix
A stellar participant in the second wave of the invasion was Jimi Hendrix, originally a bluesman from America who burst upon the world as an English rocker—Black to Brit and Back Again, only this time all in one musician. He was yet another African-American who had to go to Europe for recognition; he found yet another musical middle ground that appealed to the White bucks—and their dollars.
As Whites drifted further from the sources of their new pop music, they transformed it into styles that got further from rhythm and blues. Heavy metal, a voice of alienated youth beginning in the seventies and eighties, was louder and harsher than fifties and sixties rock; it abandoned the rhythmic subtleties that derive from African rhythmic practices, retaining mainly the backbeat, and hitting it hard. This was rock with the roll extracted, a new variant that offered a means of self-expression unique to a community, but didn’t communicate so well across the color line. But punk and new wave musicians and fans, reveling in a hard, fast, stripped down style, would soon discover a surprising affinity to the latest Black street music to shake up the scene: Hip-hop.
Meanwhile, other purveyors of what would become “classic rock” were evolving their styles through new tools in the studio, new drugs, and new changes in the sales patterns of the industry. The Steve Miller Blues Band became the Steve Miller Band, the Grateful Dead birthed the era of jam bands, and the Beatles ceased performing and began incorporating styles from many eras, including the future, in their experimental but still commercial recordings. The new experiments, often incorporating old elements, were mostly not something to dance to. These were album cuts by performers who were becoming artistes. Some would say they wanted to do something that was really their own, rather than purvey poor imitations of Black artistry, as several of them have been quoted here as saying they had done. Others might emphasize their advancing age (no longer 22), college-heavy audience, or the cash cushion of the top-grossing acts.
In any case, a significant effect of this turn was a turning away from current Black popular styles. Elijah Wald argued that the Beatles et al “led their audience off the dance floor, separating rock from its rhythmic and cultural roots, and…split American popular music in two.”[lxx] In the decades since, we have seen both separation and interplay, segregated tastes and increasing knowledge and honesty about the key role of Black culture in creating the culture, the fabric, of America.
And then what happened? Disco, a boon to the dance club industry, bubbled up in the 70s through Black and gay communities and exploded with the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. You can hear its pulses in varieties of electronic dance music (EDM). It was essentially a simplification of funk, minus some syncopation and plus some polyester. The bass drum plays on all four beats; the hi-hat cymbal adds stresses in between. There is still stress on the backbeats (two and four) from the other drums.
Kool and the Gang
Disco was a link in the chain of musics bubbling up from the fertile swamps of popular innovation and dispersing through the paved neighborhoods. The Bee Gees in fact journeyed from their British/Aussie pop rock style to disco soul via producer Arif Mardin, who worked with Aretha and other rhythm and blues acts. Mardin squeezed the soul to the surface, breathing new life into the band and the style.
How many White singing stars have borrowed heavily from African American style? I mean besides Janis Joplin, Lyle Lovett, Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Winwood,[26] Joe Cocker, the Righteous Brothers, George Michael, Sting, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Robin Thicke, Iggy Azalea, Pink, and the Justins Timberlake and Bieber? And they get the kudos, at “The Whites-Trying-To-Sing-Like-They’re-Black music wards, otherwise known as the Grammys.”[lxxi]
[26] “I fancied myself black and I fancied myself poor.” – Winwood to Albert Goldman, reported in 1968 speech, “Musical Miscegenation.” No wonder Goldman called New York’s Fillmore Auditorium “The Apollo Downtown.”
How about Black singers who perform in Whiter styles? Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr. broke through the Black ceiling mainly because their style was so smooth as to be inoffensive to the racially-minded. Nat had been wilder, but he toned it down before making it big. Motown, of course, was consciously constructed just so. Josh White blanched the blues to reach a lighter-toned audience. And Roberta Flack. But what’s the essential difference here? It’s the direction the culture is headed, and has always been headed.
In addition to the cycle of Black musicians and fans getting fed up with artistic and financial “borrowing,” there’s another reason that African American music keeps changing, and pulling everything else along with it. African Americans are engaged in a protracted struggle, a long, uncertain ascent from the bottom of society. The story of America is in large part the story of the transformation of its oppressed groups, and their march toward real equality, and the resistance along the way.
But there’s a big difference between the fifties and the now, and that’s reflected in the music. The music will keep changing as underclasses climb out from under. Whites may get nostalgic for older music, “simpler times”: Swing or dulcimers or Motown or Old School Rap. But it could also be they don’t want to deal with real African Americans, and their music. They prefer the safety and certainty of the old days, good or otherwise. African Americans, though, while retaining the pride and pleasure of past innovations, tend to move on and express something new, something now. Sometimes there’s a commercial motive for that; other times it’s just the expression of evolving identity, and that identity retains a sense of separateness. Now as before, as it was expressed on the language front,
blacks invented new terminology so they could communicate without whites understanding them. Therefore, as Africanisms entered the speech of whites they left black speech.[lxxii]
John Edward Philips speaks here of specific words or expressions. And so it goes, musically too. The specifics may be left behind, but not the manner, nor the process of innovation, nor even the relationship to the dominant culture.
[i] Clarke, 271. [ii] Barnouw 1966, 289. [iii] Redd, Lawrence N., “Rock! It’s Still Rhythm and Blues,” The Black Perspective in Music, Spring 1985, 44. The discussion here of the definition of rock and roll is taken from this article. [iv] Shaw 1978, 74. [v] Kay and Sue Werner, “Rock It For Me.” [vi] Grendysa, Peter, liner notes for Blues Masters, Vol. 14, Rhino Records, 1993. [vii] Lipsitz, George, introduction to Otis, xxvii. [viii]Lipsitz 1990, 144-5. [ix] ibid., 120. [x] Williams, 159. [xi] Redd, op. cit., 44. [xii] ibid., 45. [xiii] ibid., 46. [xiv] Palmer, Robert, 125. [xv] ibid., 126. [xvi]Sandberg, 102. [xvii] Chappel and Garofalo, 234. [xviii] Cited in Douglas Green, 1976, xi. [xix] Calt, 68. [xx] ibid., 79-80. [xxi]Lipsitz 1990, 118. [xxii] Perry, 68. [xxiii] Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, New York: Knopf, 1940, 254. [xxiv] Clarke, 373. [xxv] Hugill 1961, 301. [xxvi] Downbeat, April 20, 1955, 41. [xxvii] Clarke, 373. [xxviii] Rolling Stone, Jan 18, 1973. [xxix] Palmer, 171. [xxx]Marcus, 17. [xxxi] ibid. [xxxii] Stanley Booth, in the film Why Elvis? [xxxiii] Calvin Newborn, op. cit. [xxxiv] Lott, 1991, Note #31, 250. [xxxv] Cantor, 11. [xxxvi] Charters, 191. [xxxvii] Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, 13-part radio special, Radio Smithsonian, 1996. [xxxviii] Lydon, Michael, Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon, New York:Outerbridge and Dientsfrey, 1971, 25-26. [xxxix] Forte, p. 68. [xl] ibid. [xli] Palmer, Robert, Bluesland; see videography. [xlii] Chapple & Garofalo, 235. [xliii] Clarke, 389. [xliv] Clarke, 438. [xlv] Redd, op. cit., 39. [xlvi]Lipsitz 1994, 320. [xlvii] Clarke, 369. [xlviii] That Rhythm…Those Blues, PBS, 1988. [xlix]http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/fade-to-white-black-music-white-artistsbig-money-504 [l] Rolling Stone, Oct 2, 1968. [li] Chapple and Garofalo, 253. [lii] Jet, June 14, 1982, p 56-57, quoted from a visit to Johnson Publishing Co. at an unknown date in the 1970s. [liii]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley#cite_ref-251 [liv] Wald, 231. [lv] Ken Goodman in That Rhythm…Those Blues, PBS, 1988. [lvi] Charles Corley, op. cit. [lvii] Speech to the Annual Convention of NATRA (National Association of Television and Radio Announcers), August 11, 1967. [lviii] ibid. [lix] ibid. [lx] Palmer, 237. [lxi] Abrahams, 131. [lxii] Clarke, 449. [lxiii] Jackson, John A., American Bandstand, 208-210. [lxiv] Chapple and Garofalo, 236. [lxv] Abbott 1992, 319. [lxvi]Jim Dickinson interview by Joss Hutton, January 2002, http://www.furious.com/perfect/jimdickinson.html [lxvii] Ewen, 680. [lxviii] Clarke, 469. [lxix] Thanks to San Francisco Examiner jazz critic Phil Elwood (1926-2006) for pointing this out. [lxx] Philips, 232. [lxxi] Up! Ye Mighty Race!, February 1994 [lxxii] Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n Roll, 246.
Back east and north a bit, Bill Monroe, a Kentuckian of Scottish descent, formed the Blue Grass Boys in 1938. As his music evolved, it stirred some blues and some considerable acceleration into the string band music of the Kentucky hills. The new style incorporated dissonance and syncopation—and, in the case of the fiddle, slurs—imported from blues and swing.
Another innovation was the three-finger banjo roll introduced by Earl Scruggs. By playing notes in groups of three, Scruggs set his rhythm against the prevailing count of four beats to the bar (recall the discussion of this in the Early Fusion section). This roll was developed earlier by Black Kentucky guitarist Sylvester Weaver, and can be heard on a 1924 Okeh release of “Smoketown Strut.”[1] This roll not only sets up a spinning, gyrating rhythmic tension, it throws the other players into the game, giving them the opportunity to play back and forth between the two pulses, or in between. The entire spectrum of rhythmic accents is opened up, freeing the music from a repetitive thudding on a simple pulse.
[1] Kienzel, Guitar Player, 39. Related styles include that of Murphy Gribbles with the black string band of John Lusk, and the white player Homer Davenport, who recorded in 1925. (Wolfe 1989)
Earl Scruggs
Monroe’s early use of fast riffs to fill in empty spaces accentuated the call-and-response aspect of the music. Elaborating on this manic tendency, the Blue Grass Boys evolved a third important difference from old-time string bands: the emphasis on improvised solos. This led the music toward jazz, since the more extensive soloing expanded the musical vocabulary in all available directions, and jazz/blues is the nearest neighbor to visit. Alan Lomax wrote in 1959,
The mandolin plays bursts reminiscent of jazz trumpet choruses; a heavily bowed fiddle supplies trombone-like hoedown solos…[i]
In its improvisation and also its bluesy quality, the mandolin style diverges from its Appalachian influences. As for the fiddle, Chubby Wise had in fact been playing western swing on it before joining Monroe.
Bluegrass, in other words, “completely assimilated hillbilly music into itself, as a jazz band can assimilate popular or even classical pieces into jazz.”[ii] The question was posed, said Robert Cantwell,
How, indeed, to do with strings what jazzmen did readily with drums, horns, and a piano…The answer was to touch Afro-American music, black music, at an earlier point in its evolution…at a point when it, too, was a rural, even a frontier music…to touch it, in fact, just where old-time music, through the minstrel show, had touched it: on the plantation, where, among plantation slaves, the “old southern sound had been born.”[iii]
♬substitution: Trumpet for mandolin. Trombone for fiddle. Robert Johnson for Bill Monroe. Pick up some rap lyrics and try them with bluegrass. Read them with a high lonesome tone.
So let’s get down to brass influences, or at least stringed ones. Monroe hailed from Ohio County, in the Green River valley, near Indiana; he got his start playing backup at square dances for no less than Arnold Shultz who, recall, played with Bill’s uncle:
The first time I think I ever seen Arnold Schultz…this square dance was at Rosine, Kentucky…People loved Arnold so well all through Kentucky there…There’s things in my music, you know, that comes from Arnold Schultz—runs that I use in a lot of my music.[iv]
Bill was only twelve when he first encountered Arnold, in 1924.
Another important source for Monroe was Clayton McMichen, the jazzy country fiddler. He recorded in the twenties—that first decade of hillbilly and blues recording that perched on the cusp between the old folk styles and the new media-induced sophistication and commercialization. A lot of players did time with his Georgia Wildcats, including Merle Travis.
Monroe was also inclined toward the music of Jimmie Rodgers, a seminal White bluesy guy, and professed an affinity for Black music in general, which he picked up from a number of musicians locally. In spite of all this, his singing style really comes from church singing schools that extend the method of the old shape-note days.[v] The harmony vocals are likewise extracted from White church traditions, but with a marked bluesy inflection.
Among Monroe’s early tunes were “Mule Skinner Blues,” “Dog House Blues,” and “Tennessee Blues.” Between Wills and Monroe, the blues was hammered deep into the soil of modern Country.
Blue Grass Boys guitarist Lester Flatt played in a style that emphasized the offbeat—a style that Cantwell traces to “a nineteenth century black guitar riff developed at about the time that the guitar took over from the banjo in Black folk culture.”[vi] It reproduces the same rhythm as clawhammer banjo style, which dates from the late minstrel era.
Minstrels as well as railroad workers brought the banjo into the Appalachians; they also brought the ragtime rhythms that evolved during the minstrel period. There are many string band and bluegrass tunes called “rags,” and the offbeat has come to the fore in bluegrass much more than in the older hillbilly sound.
Granted, there remains a steady bass thump on the one and three beats, driving the music relentlessly forward and underpinning it with a decidedly unsyncopated foundation. Without that, it wouldn’t be bluegrass. But it’s fair to say that bluegrass is to old-time music as jazz is to ragtime: smoother, less square, more swinging.[vii] Recall that all this innovation took place in the wake of the Swing era and its White Texas counterpart, Western Swing. We must also note, however, the addition of string bass in bluegrass, which facilitates a smoother, swingier feel than the old-time bass-less string groups; this change can be compared to the shift from Dixieland to swing, usually described as including a shift from 2/4 time to 4/4. More events per measure, smoother sound.[viii]
Speaking of minstrels, in the early forties Monroe organized a series of tent shows around his band. They included blackface comedians from the Opry and a clawhammer banjo player. He also hired, early on, a player of spoons, jug and bones who performed in blackface. He soon thought better of it and replaced him with a string bass.[ix]
The bluegrass tradition built on its Monroe-Scruggs beginnings to become an attractive alternative for its mostly White audience: ostensibly White folk music with more swing and virtuosity than its old-time predecessors. Although Monroe contemporaries Ralph and Carter Stanley hewed more to the old mountain style, Monroe alums Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs added a dobro player with a blues touch, Uncle Josh Graves. Cantwell called it the joining of the form of jazz to the content of hillbilly music.[x]Manner and matter. And from the 1970s on, the New Grass music of Tony Rice, Sam Bush, and others, and various progressive offshoots of bluegrass and Country from players like David Grisman, Mark O’Connor, and Bela Fleck, have leapt even further into the ring of jazz improvisation, unnerving the purists as they energize the adventurous.
Out in Texas and Oklahoma in the early thirties, Country music fans were beginning to swing to a new sound being pioneered by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies (Brown played with Wills from 1929-32). Western Swing was an offshoot of the old country string band tradition, Black and White, integrated with New Orleans/Dixieland jazz, swing, and elements of Norteño, Cajun,[1] Mariachi, and blues.
[1] Blues is a core element in the music played by White Cajuns. This is often overlooked by Cajun fans.
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
If Texas seems like kind of a White and Mexican place, don’t let’s forget Texans Scott Joplin, Charlie Christian, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey and Huddie Ledbetter. White jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden grew up near the same time and place as Wills, and credited his own rhythm and style to Black gospel tent revivals across from his home. (Fletcher Henderson would ask Jack, “Tell me, are you colored?”) Sleepy Johnson, guitarist with the Playboys, said the White musicians in Forth Worth studied all the “race” records that came out. Wills’ band made friends with a furniture store owner to listen to the records they sold—pop, blues, Dixieland, “race music.”
As a child in the Texas Panhandle, Bob Wills picked cotton; in the cotton camps he met Black families. Some of the pickers played trumpet at night, and Bob was fascinated. He danced jigs with the Black kids and heard the adults sing blues in the fields. Later, when the Wills family had their own farm, they hired Black workers.
Bob’s dad played fiddle, and Bob picked it up. In 1929 he entered a traveling medicine show fiddle contest and won out over the troupe’s fiddler, then blacked up his face to join the show. He told jokes and cut a jig. (You can watch his grownup stepping on YouTube.) In this dying corner of minstrelsy he was like the other bookend to Joel Sweeney: born and bred in the cotton fields of the southwest, he grew up singing and dancing with Blacks, unlike the northern minstrels who had learned their chops from Sweeney and other White southerners. Bob was kind of like Elvis that way. Or like Jimmie Rodgers—”he was more colored, really.” (Wills recorded Rodgers’ songs, but only the blues and jazz tunes.) And he idolized Bessie Smith, riding 50 miles on horseback to catch her show.
Wills’ first record featured a Bessie Smith song, along with a breakdown[2]—a multicultural recording gambit Elvis would repeat 25 years later in his own debut recordings. But Wills was dedicated to the dance hall, and dancers needed their bands to swing. He studied jazz records, adopting not only the swing but also the exchange of solos typical of jazz. This was new to Western music: he was transforming it into Black-influenced music for White dancers. Bandmate Ray DeGeer, who went on to play with many jazz greats, said “he was the first man I ever heard who made breakdowns swing…it swung on the Dixieland side. It had a very New Orleans Dixie beat.” Short-stroke breakdown fiddling was for square dancing, but the long, smooth bow strokes were for swinging.
[2]Breakdowns are defined by the Library of Congress fiddle tunes folks as “instrumental tunes in duple meter (2/4 or 4/4) at a quick dance speed. This general term in the American South is roughly equivalent to the term ‘reel’ elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But it does not imply a particular type of dance; a “breakdown” tune may be used for square dances, longways dances, or other group dances, as well as for solo fancy dancing.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/henry-reed-fiddle-tunes/about-this-collection/related-resources/
Wills’ early bands essentially played jazz on country folk instruments. It was sometimes called “hot dance” or “hot string dance” music—hot being a nickname for dance music, and for jazz. Out of 200 songs recorded in his peak period, three-fourths were jazz tunes or close to it—rags, stomps, Dixieland, swing. According to Wills, the music was called western swing not to distinguish it from other western bands, but to mark it off from other swing bands. Among his 35 blues and jazz recordings were “Drunkard Blues,” a re-write of ‘St. James Infirmary,” “Jelly Roll Blues,” by Morton, and “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks; also “Basin Street Blues,” “Wang Wang Blues,” and “Trouble In Mind,” a 1920s “race record” tune.
Wills himself was not a soloist, didn’t improvise choruses—only played the melody—and some in his audience preferred the melody to the improvisations anyway. But his sense of rhythm—ah, that came from his sense of blues and jazz. And as for his melody, “He did not hit the notes right on the nose,” said clarinetist Woodie Wood, “he sort of oozed into it.”[i] He was capturing the sound of the human voice, like a jazz musician. “I slurred my fiddle…to play the blues,” he said.
In performance, even on record, Wills also felt free to let fly with a cry every so often, an “ah haa” he picked from his dad and granddad. Some people came to his shows just to hear ah haa, it was that cool. He bantered with the musicians, joking, taunting, cracking wise, hollering—the sort of thing he’d heard Black musicians do in his childhood. His own impoverished childhood gave him the blues, and having shared it with Black sharecroppers gave him a means to express it.
The string bands out west diverged from the ones back east. What the heck is the difference between Country and Western anyhow? Well for one thing, there’s a kind of shuffle rhythm, which you can detect by listening to the staccato style of the rhythm guitar. (That shuffle also set the “western” swing bands like Count Basie’s in Kansas City apart from the backeasters. Hear it as triplets, 1-2-3, with the accent on the one and three.) Country and Eastern guitar players didn’t do that. East of the Mississippi, music was played more for sit-down shows. On the frontier, dancing was more important. In the early 1900s, west Texas and Oklahoma were still frontier-like places.
Shuffle rhythm explained by Sharne Andrews
Let’s pause for a minute and talk about the fiddle once agin. There had been a number of early jazz fiddlers, but they went by the boards because they couldn’t cut through the volume of the horns. Jazz bands and dance groups were leaving violins behind around the time Wills brought them to the fore. He brought the Southwest into the jazz age—despite prejudice from elitists who called the fiddle backward, an instrument for hicks, and from racists, who called the music “nigger fiddling.”
The guitar had volume issues too, but right about this time Reddy Kilowat showed up with an amp. Strings are the things in Country music, so here we have Country instruments playing jazzy runs on an instrument no longer associated with jazz. But you can fix that:
♬substitution: Listen to a fiddle or guitar solo on a western swing tune and imagine it as a trumpet, sax, or clarinet. Listen to classic jazz (New Orleans-style) and replace the horn with a guitar or fiddle. Now you’re in the middle of all American music of the period, obliterating categories. In fact you can skip this exercise—just get a Wills record with a horn section on it. And replace the vocalist with….your choice.
Now about those Playboys: second fiddler Jesse Ashlock idolized jazz violinist Joe Venuti. He said of Wills’ band, “We tried to do the same thing on strings they did on horns.” Vocalist Tommy Duncan was hired in part because of his ability to do Emmett Miller. Pianist Alton Strickland, who had never played Western music, was a disciple of Earl “Fatha” Hines. Guitarist Eldon Shamblin came from swing and went West, helping—along with Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang—to transform the guitar from a mere rhythm instrument into a lead one.
Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang
Also note that western swing developed in the wake of the Hawaiian music tsunami, which left its imprint via the pedal steel guitar. This instrument later became important in Nashville and helped to meld east and west into the new Country, for better and worse. The Texas Playboys use of the steel guitar was important in making the instrument popular down the decades, and it’s interesting to speculate how much the jazz-oriented Wills band affected the steel’s subsequent style. Leon McAuliffe often would slide his bar up the steel in imitation of a trombone, especially after the Playboys lost their trombonist. This stuff was so influential that in the forties the music journals started referring to both Texas and Nashville product as “country and western”—in case you wondered where that came from. And you can hear the influence already in the forties—listen, for starters, to Hank Williams’ fiddlers. And Wills fiddler Johnny Gimble went on to a career as a Nashville sideman.
Wendy Holcomb – Steel Guitar Rag 1980
This was also the first band in Country music to use drums, which opened up a new rhythmic connection between Black and White music. In 1935 Bob recruited drummer Smokey Dacus, who commented “I didn’t have to change from the Dixieland jazz style I’d been playing.” His rhythm was the 2/4 of Dixieland, brush stroking on the down beat, and accenting with the stick on the back beat (two and four). They called it the “suitcase rhythm” because, in an effort to strengthen the backbeat, he hit his drum case with the wide end of the stick. Outrageous? It worked.
And against the advice of jazz and western players and producers alike, Bob added horns. The folks he hired had played with the likes of Joe Venuti, Red Nichols, and Jack Teagarden; after the war he hired players from the old Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller bands. He added enough so they could drive dancers like a regular swing band did. Better maybe, because in Texas—and Tulsa—you swing with strings. And further west, on the coast, they liked their western to swing, too. It was kinda like what Bill Monroe was doing at just about the same time: giving an old music a kick in the rhythm. In fact, Monroe was a Wills fan, and his fiddler, Kenny Baker, allowed that bluegrass was just jazz played on strings.
The 1950s brought rockabilly,[3] with a rhythm and a swing closer to the Western one than anything else. In fact, Bill Haley’s band was originally “The Four Aces of Western Swing.” And Fats Domino, leading R&B voice in New Orleans, said he modeled his rhythm section after Wills’. The Western Swing sound, along with the Texas honky-tonk style played by smaller bands, was eclipsed in the fifties, but it remains a pervasive influence in Country music generally, giving it more of a blues-jazz tinge than in the old days. This tinge can be heard by listening closely to guitar and especially pedal steel solos, then comparing them to solos from earlier times.
In the formal sense, Wills was a relatively uneducated musician. But he knew the feel he wanted; it was based on his childhood, his musical influences, and his need to create music that people of a certain place and time would dance to. The feel took over from the hidebound structures and rules that others kept trying to impose. In his efforts to fit form to function, he drew on his closeness to the Black music that helped its people to survive. The challenge Wills met was that people wanted to dance to the latest thing; Wills provided it, and made Texas a swing state.
Many musical influences have flowed through the rural South over many generations, like rivers that intersect, merge and diverge again. Country folks went to town and came back with strange tales and new tunes. While in town they might go to a jook joint, or stop for a while to listen to a street singer. Staged theatrical and musical shows also traveled through rural areas, including minstrels, medicine shows, and vaudeville and tent shows. These productions featured a wide variety of genres, and were training grounds as well as stylistic expanders for country performers. Eventually there were radio stations and recordings: first cylinders, then big breakable discs. Electrical recording, which replaced singing into a lo-fi horn, came in 1925—as did Nashville’s WSM Grand Ole Opry, on the heels of Chicago’s WLS National Barn Dance.
Clarence Ashley, “The Cuckoo”
The centuries-old cultural interplay continued. Consider again the banjo: the most celebrated White banjo players of the early twentieth century all had contact with Black players. Back in the first half of the nineteenth century, near the intersection of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, lived minstrel man Joel Sweeney, the Black Knoxville banjoists, and the families that would later produce 20th century players Hobart Smith and Clarence Ashley. Smith recalled several Black banjoists living in the area during his childhood around 1910; he picked up some style from black fiddler Jim Spenser. Ashley’s family had come from Ireland to eastern Virginia and later to the mountains. Frank Proffitt, who both made and played banjoes, was influenced by his neighbor Dave Thompson, a Black player near Sugar Grove, NC. Thompson and Ashley both transferred an a cappella British ballad to the banjo; they also shared tunings. Thompson’s family hosted music sessions attended often by Frank Proffitt, as well as Doc Watson.[i] We don’t think of Blacks and Whites hangin’ in the hood in the early twentieth century, but there it is.
Ed Young & Hobart Smith, “Joe Turner,” 1959
Ralph Peer launched the era of recorded folk music: he recorded blues singer Mamie Smith in 1921 and Virginia’s Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1923, and lots, lots more. All this southern wisdom was released by the Okeh company on two separate product lines: “Race” and “Hillbilly”—these in addition to its “popular” series. These segregated categories were designed to be marketed back to the communities whence they allegedly had come; they had the effect of strengthening musical apartheid, drowning out the communication that had existed in the South for generations, and confusing the whole nation about the roots of American culture. But then, Okeh probably wouldn’t sell many Mamie Smith records at the 1925 Ku Klux Klan-sponsored fiddler’s convention.[ii]
For an example of music that was neglected and buried by commerce, we can look at the African-American string band led by John Lusk in south-central Tennessee, which was among the most popular square-dance bands around in the twenties and thirties. They played for White dances as well as Black, but were never recorded commercially. An ear-witness to a folkloric 1946 recording session tells us,
Suddenly, at the second part of the tune, the fiddle would leap into an upper octave, with a wild cry…The banjo would then play a loose and free polyphonic obligato around a rudimentary suggestion of the melody, ranging far away melodically, omitting strong downbeats, dancing a different step rhythmically—and this was most radical of all for banjo—not hitting all the upbeats and downbeats, with sudden startling gaps and hesitations…it produced a rolling syncopation like a jazz beat…It was far and away the most sophisticated square dance music we had ever heard…[iii]
Murphy Gribble, John Lusk and Albert York play Pateroller’ll Catch You (the man in the picture has no relation to the performers.)
John Lusk played a fiddle he got from his grandfather, a captive worker who was sent to New Orleans in the 1840s to learn his fiddling. Adult education increased his value to his master and all around him, value that was handed down to the next century.
In the early twentieth century South, White artists like Jimmie Rodgers soaked up the blues and incorporated their version of its feel into their musical style. A railroad brakeman, Rodgers learned the guitar, the banjo and the blues from Black musicians in Meridian, Mississippi, where he worked even as a boy. He later toured with a medicine show, where he learned a style in which condescension contended with imitation-as-sincere-flattery of African-American styles (kind of like what happened in rock and roll). He was a pivotal player in the merging of styles, moving away from plain singing toward ornamentation, interaction between voice and guitar, three-line blues form and bluesy melodies.[iv] He didn’t sound like Led Zeppelin, but each in their time spread a lot of White blues around to a lot of White folks.
Jimmie Rodgers, 1930
The “blue yodel” for which Rodgers was famous, and which was so influential on other country musicians, is generally seen as a combination of Swiss yodeling and Hawaiian falsetto—both popular at the time—and the Mississippi delta blues falsetto leap, which owed a lot to earlier field hollers.[v] African-Americans were already yodeling the blues—singers like Monroe Tabor, the “Yodeling Bell Boy;” Beulah Henderson, “America’s Only Colored Lady Yodeler,” and the celebrated Charles Anderson, a “Yodler of Note.”[vi] These and many other Black blues yodelers were active from around 1905, with yodeling becoming more and more prominent in their styles after 1910.
Another influence on Rodgers was Emmett Miller, a country and jazz singer who worked for decades in blackface minstrelsy. Miller came from Macon, Georgia, and set his falsetto-break style to wax in 1924.[1] He recorded as part of the Okeh Medicine Show, and went on to work with a studio band called the Georgia Crackers that were anything but: they intermittently included jazzmen Gene Krupa, Eddie Lang, Jack Teagarden, and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Hank Williams copied his version of “Lovesick Blues” from Rex Griffin, who copied his from Miller.[vii]
To my mind, Miller is the missing link, binding together city jazz and country twang. Listening to Miller makes you feel like there is one American culture, albeit woven of diverse strands. His tunes were religiously duplicated by Bob Wills and others, making a mark on western swing, which had only a few years left in the incubator. To the extent that Miller recorded two distinct kinds of music, it was largely due to the needs or demands of recording companies. He was widely accepted by both Black and White audiences. In fact, according to Merle Haggard, he was married to a Black woman and was buried in the Black section of a Macon, Georgia cemetery, with no marker until Haggard paid for one.[viii]
Emmett Miller, “Take Your Tomorrow”
When Jimmie Rodgers’ blue yodel records were released in 1928, the Black influence was unmistakable: a popular music critic of the time reviewed Rodgers’ second blue yodel record under the headline “White man singing black songs.”[ix] He was soon referring to Rodgers as a “White man gone black,”[x] and recommended that White listeners seek out African-American recordings as well because “Listening to race records is nearly the only way for White people to share the Negroes’ pleasures without bothering the Negroes.”[xi]
Rodgers did some recording with small jazz groups, even with Louis Armstrong and his wife Lillian in 1930 (Blue Yodel No. 9)—check out their enthusiastic interaction, which reveals their mutual admiration. And Howlin’ Wolf said later that Rodgers gave him his nickname when they met in the twenties.[2] His blue yodel was taken up by other Country singers including Gene Autry, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Davis, the Carter Family and the brothers Monroe, and persisted until the forties.[xii]
[2] Wolf may have been trying to imitate Rodgers’ yodel and thus blundered into his trademark. (Lipsitz 1994, 313)
♬substitution: Listen to a traditional-style Country tune by Roy Acuff or Buck Owens; dub in a trumpet or sax for the guitar or pedal steel. Or just listen to Emmett Miller with his Cracker-Jazz band.
Jimmie Rodgers was a key influence on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers (Leonard Slye), who were taken up by Hollywood. Through the alchemy of film and TV, hillbillies were turned into cowboys, mystifying the masses for fun and profit. Coal miners and mountain villagers sprouted chaps and cowboy hats. But the music persevered, and many decades later, New Orleans R&B hero Aaron Neville would credit his yodeling style to, among others, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.[xiii]
The influence of the blues on White country singers in the twenties was as pervasive as the influence of jazz on popular music. Take the Allen Brothers, Lee and Austin, two White blues boys from rural Tennessee, whose second record, “Chattanooga Blues” backed with “Laughin’ and Cryin’ Blues” (1927), was mistakenly issued by Columbia on its (Black) Race Record series—the New York office couldn’t tell one southern accent from another and the recording engineers in Atlanta hadn’t bothered to alert them to racial details. It is one of many such anecdotes, like that of Peggy Lee and her army fan, and Elvis, yet to come.
Allen Brothers, “Chattanooga Blues”
The Allens went on to release 34 more records, mostly in the genre then known as white blues.[xiv] White blues artists proliferated throughout the twenties and thirties: Dick Justice recorded “Cocaine” and “Brown Skin Blues;” Grand Ole Opry star Kirk McGee fiddled on “Salt Lake City Blues” and “Salty Dog Blues;” his brother Sam played “Railroad Blues” with all the “pulls, bent notes, choked chords, and even a high falsetto vocal done in unison with the guitar, in the manner of delta bluesmen.”[xv] Sam and Kirk learned their style from Black railroad workers out front of their father’s store near Nashville, and would later say they had kept to the same style the Black workers had taught them sixty years before.[xvi]
Which means what? Perhaps that what we think is White is maybe all that and more. The “white blues” are a good example of syncretism, the coalescence of a new style based on pre-existing affinities. Like the common pentatonic leanings of Celts and West Africans, the blues attitude straddled the gulf between southern Blacks and Whites. Poor rural Whites had plenty to groan about and had long sung all kinds of sad old Anglo songs. Of course, the blues aren’t all sad: they have at their core a way of dealing with adversity through humor and invention. That too had a universal appeal. The overall effect was to permanently infuse transplanted European folks with African-American sensibility, leaving behind the old-time British ballads. Gone was the a cappella solo, replaced by a new American music.
Although there are numerous instances in American music history of confusion over the race of a performer heard on radio, there is also a limit to the absorption of the blues and its related genres by White performers. William Lightfoot described White blues as “a deep appreciation of the blues, attempts at replicating the form that use certain key elements, the omission of equally important elements, and an amorphous notion about the fundamental nature of blues music.”[xvii]
The White blues was a Southern phenomenon, and with increased migration of Southerners to the North, White and Black communities separated and their musics drifted apart. Rock and roll would bring them together and there would be continuous evolutions of Country, blues, rock and soul styles in relation to each other. But the separation of Country—so much a product of mutual Black and White influence—from blues was a landmark negative development in race relations.
In the wake of the Hawaiian craze, the metal-bodied, self-amplifying National Guitar became popular with blues players who had already fretted with knives to create a slide effect; in the twenties Country musicians took up the National’s competitor, the Dobro, which later led to the electrified pedal steel guitar.[3] Clell Summey was among the early players of the Dobro, recording “Steel Guitar Blues” and others with Roy Acuff’s first band.
Uncle Dave Macon, “Take Me Back To My Old Carolina Home”
Another Tennessean influenced by the blues was Uncle Dave Macon. His 1924 record “Hill Billie Blues” was an adaptation of W.C. Handy’s version of “Hesitation Blues.” He had been schooled on a wide variety of songs from mines, roads and rivers, created by Black and White alike, all of which he brought into the Grand Ole Opry.[xviii], [4]
And up the road in West Virginia an Irish-American miner named Frank Hutchison picked up the blues from Black miners and railroad workers, beginning with Henry Vaughan, who taught the eight-year old Frank to play slide guitar with a knife in 1905. After further tutoring from Bill Hunt, an old Black hill-dweller who knew the old “common stock” tunes, Hutchison went on to record “Worried Blues,” “Stackalee,” “John Henry” and many others. He complained to friends that Okeh Records—where he recorded in a series with Emmett Miller and others—tried to move him away from the blues.[xix]
South Carolina’s Jimmy Tarlton and Tom Darby were a popular White duo; Tarlton reportedly learned slide guitar at the age of ten from a Black musician.[xx] Just as likely, he hung with Hawaiian musicians in L.A. during his travels.
Roscoe Holcomb, “Pretty Polly”
Roscoe Holcomb (1911-1981), a Kentucky musician, is among many who credited Blind Lemon Jefferson with bringing the blues to the hills in the twenties, when he sang for Black railroad workers. Writer John Cohen concurs, saying Holcomb’s singing style comes from Jefferson. Hobart Smith heard him too. Many White musicians picked up finger-picking from Jefferson in Dallas in the late twenties.[xxi] Another Black player often cited is Blind Blake, who recorded blues and rags together with White musicians in Kentucky in the twenties.
The influential Virginia musician Dock Boggs (1898-1971), also a miner, used to visit nearby Black communities and follow blues and string band musicians around. He repeatedly inveigled guitarist “Go Lightning” to play “John Henry” for him. “I had seen two colored men who picked the banjo with one finger and thumb, or with two fingers,” he wrote. “I said to myself, never telling anyone, that was the way I was going to learn.”[xxii] The band he heard featured guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and banjo. Boggs combined the fingerpicking he picked up there with the old frailing or clawhammer style.
Dock Boggs, “Country Blues” 1966
He also learned from records, a big advantage of the 1920s over some competing decades. He absorbed both religious and secular genres this way. Boggs developed a moaning, “mountain blues” singing style and a banjo approach that was widely copied and deeply embedded in the bluegrass lexicon. In one performance, Boggs introduced “Down South Blues” as “one of the songs that I heard a colored girl sing.” The colored girl was Sara Martin, who recorded it in 1923.[xxiii]
In Georgia we find Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, a classic/comic group who parodied their own mountain home ways, minstrel-style. Tanner was a hit doing imitations of “Decatur Street types”—Black folks, one would guess—at a fiddlers’ convention.[xxiv] In addition to Tanner, the key players were fiddler Clayton McMichen and guitarist Riley Puckett. They performed a mix of Tin Pan tunes, traditional hill tunes, and blues, with lots of crossover and crossback: trad tunes were rewritten by songsmiths, blues crept into Anglo-based tunes and vice versa. Their record company did its best to restrict them to hillbilly tunes, since their whole existence was based on the separation of the White market from the “race” market.[xxv]
Frailing
Puckett was a blind guitarist who played bluesy bass runs with flatted sevenths and twisted syncopations.[xxvi] He was partial to African-American tunes: “Puckett’s Blues” was really W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” and he performed “Cow Cow” Davenport’s “Mama Don’t Allow No Low Down Hanging Around,” versions of which have enlivened country repertoires both Black and White down the years. He played a slide version of “John Henry” that he called “Darkey’s Wail,” saying he learned it from a Black guitarist.[xxvii]
Clayton McMichen & the Georgia Wildcats, “Wild Cat Rag”
McMichen was the jazziest fiddler in those particular mountains, said to have been joyously jazzed when he first heard recordings from across the holler and down the pike a ways. Like his father, he was musically forward and outward-looking, listening widely and incorporating whatever he liked. It was his idea to play popular tunes on stringed instruments, rather than horns—something that would really catch on further down the line in Texas. He recorded with Jimmie Rodgers and also organized his own bands, including the Melody Men and the Georgia Wildcats, who later turned their hands to New Orleans-style jazz and played over Louisville radio until 1955.[xxviii]
Even solid old-time Roy Acuff had his McMichen in Red Jones, a band member who favored popular tunes and jazzy styles.[xxix] Because of these musical differences, however, McMichen left Tanner and Jones moved on from the Acuff sound.
Vernon Dalhart mixed “plantation” tunes and old blackface shtick with railroad songs and pop tunes.[xxx] Charlie Poole, with his North Carolina Ramblers, played an old three-finger banjo style that has been traced to minstrels—imitation plantation.[xxxi] The Ramblers played everything from “Hesitatin’ Blues” to “White House Blues,” with Tin Pan Alley and coon songs as well.
All this talk of White folks playin’ the blues, picking up the styles, loving the attitude, etc., begs the question of why—at least to us moderns—it mostly doesn’t sound the same when Whites do it. That’s a question of culture that you have to gradually wrap your mind around. Whenever people adopt their neighbors’ music, there’s some adapting going on too—sometimes more apt than others. Abbe Niles went so far as to say that with Black blues singers “it is the gaiety that is feigned, while in the white, it is the grief.”[xxxii] Maybe so—it certainly fits in with the “everything but the burden” thesis. Simply put, if one is not part of a given community, one is not likely to become so simply by copying a style. It might in fact be offensive to try, as it seems to indicate an effort to appear as something one is not, and has little chance of becoming. Later on, people who tried this act would be called wannabees, or posers. The alternative, that of absorbing new styles and combining them with one’s own background influences, is equally common and arguably more fruitful.
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RIDDLES OF THE CARTER FAMILY
A.P. Carter came from an all-White part of Virginia; Black guitarist Leslie Riddle(s)[5] came from a part of North Carolina where the races fraternized extensively.
[5] Often spelled “Riddles,” as folks from that region often add an s here and there.
A.P. would drive from Virginia to Tennessee to pick up his musician friend. Together they scoured the Appalachians, collecting songs from Black and White alike, Carter writing down the words and Riddle memorizing the tunes.[6] Carter’s easy friendship with Riddle and non-discrimination in his traveling habits was credited by his daughter Gladys to his being “partial to poor people.”
[6] One of Carter’s song sources was Riddles’ friend Brownie McGee, the Black guitarist who played with harmonica player Sonny Terry.
Leslie Riddles
Leslie Riddle’s music spanned the gamut of styles common to musicians in the Piedmont: ragtime, blues, ballads, religious tunes, pop tunes. He played at White and Black dances, mostly Black, throughout the twenties. Many of his tunes were transmitted to the Carters.
Riddle had lost half a leg on the job at a cement plant and received nothing in return, which conjures up the specter of numerous maimed and blind Black musicians who were disabled due to lack of health care or any societal caring for their sort. This drove many to music.[xxxiii]The Carters bought him a wooden replacement. Riddle later lost the two middle fingers of his picking hand in a mysterious gun incident, and had to retrain himself on guitar.
Riddle taught Maybelle Carter the melody guitar style associated with the blues, which complemented her more traditional White folk-based style. Prior to this, White folk guitarists rarely played melody, confining themselves to strumming. The playing of melody on the bass and middle strings and rhythm fills on the high ones was a banjo style, used also by Dock Boggs, who got it from Black players. Contrarily, playing melody on the high strings while picking out alternating bass patterns with the thumb was a ragtime approach she learned directly from Riddle.[xxxiv]
Maybelle on guitar, in front
Maybelle’s rhythm, influenced by old-time banjo style,
included, after the bass or melody note played on the down beat, a sharp downward brush stroke played with the back of the fingernail of the index or first finger, on the upbeat. Consequently, most Carter Family songs moved against a steady upbeat or “backbeat.”[xxxv]
The economic relationship between the partners was murky if not shady. Riddle seems never to have been directly paid for his part, and in those pre-commercial days it didn’t particularly occur to him to ask. But thinking back, he accused the Carters of duplicity:
He [A.P.] was learning, but I didn’t know it. They was learning. They’d have me play a song you know, and they’d listen to it. And then when I wasn’t around they’d practice on it, then when everybody’d turn their head, they’d go and make a record…They had more sense than I did, cause along then I didn’t have enough sense to get me nothing out of it…I didn’t get nary a penny out of it.[xxxvi]
He also didn’t get much respect from history; Riddle himself recorded only once. The important points, to my mind, are the enduring ignorance among Carter and Country fans of Riddle’s role or even his existence, and the overarching ignorance about the Black sources of Country music, including the Carters’. This in spite of repeated Blacknowledgements by such as Carter and Rodgers and many more.
Riddle was, in fact, entirely forgotten until Maybelle told Mike Seeger about him in 1963. He had not owned a guitar for 18 years, but he now recorded and performed at festivals. He died of cigarettes in 1980, after final visits from the surviving Carters.
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Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne
The major figure in Country music’s next era was King Hiram “Hank” Williams of Alabama. The Baptist church provided his first musical enthusiasm, and he found his music teacher while shining shoes and selling peanuts at age twelve: an old Black street singer-guitarist named Rufus Payne, aka Tee-Tot, in Greenville, Alabama. Hank frequented the Black part of town, soaking up the blues. Fifteen years later in Montgomery he would recruit Black men to take him to the local Black singers, and his audience included a significant segment of American Americans.[xxxvii]
Hank Williams, “Hey Good Lookin'”
♬SUBSTITUTION: Bill Malone suggests we give a listen to John Dudley, a Black prisoner in the Mississippi Penitentiary (Parchman), to hear a yodeling style similar to Hank’s.[xxxvii]
JOHN DUDLEY, “COOL DRINK OF WATER” 1959
Hank played the honky-tonks,[7] a southern and southwestern bar scene that produced western swing and all manner of polycultural southern music. His live honky-tonk music had more blues and swing in it than what he recorded or played at the Opry.[xxxix],[8] His career was at a peak in 1953 when he died, 29 years old, of alcohol and pills taken for the pain from a congenital spinal defect that wasn’t treated at birth because his family was dirt poor. At his funeral, African-Americans filled the balcony, and a Black gospel quartet sang.[xl]
[7]Named after the turn of the century Black bars in New Orleans called tonks.
In 1916, more Hawaiian records were sold in the U.S. than of any other kind of music. Jimmie Rodgers at one point played ukulele in a Hawaiian band. Rodgers’ back-up guitarist, Cliff Carlisle, played a steel-bodied guitar flat on his lap in a bluesy style that can be heard today from the bluegrass Dobro.[xli]Military and missionary music, along with sailors’ tunes from Portugal,[9]had been imported into Hawaii, and the islanders developed their own styles based on the influx of influences. Their penchant for slide guitar was then incorporated into Country music with the development of the Dobro, and later the pedal steel guitar. (Black southerners had already played homemade slide instruments, even slide banjo.[xlii] In fact, they used to slide a bottle on a wire strung on the side of a barn.[10] This “diddly-bow” was an African retention.)[xliii]
[9] There is even a Hawaiian-Brazilian connection, by way of the Portuguese. Imagine a samba rhythm and some percussion laying over the top of a mellow Hawaiian slide guitar tune.
[10] Watch Lonnie Pitchford play the side of a house on “Johnny Stole an Apple” in the film Deep Blues.
Sol Hoopi, 1943
Joseph Kekuku fretted the guitar with a comb, and first recorded the style in 1909; steel guitar star Sol Hoopii worked in Los Angeles through the twenties and thirties, playing a mix of Country, jazz and Hawaiian traditional music and evolving several tunings; his favorite one became the standard for pedal steel guitars in Nashville. In the forties, many Country players—including Jimmy Helms, who played with Hank Williams—lifted their solos note for note from Hoopii’s records.[xliv]
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We now arrive at the question of guitar picking style, and an important innovator whose name is well known among scholars and selected guitar geeks, but not elsewhere.
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ARNOLD SHULTZ
In the Green River region of western Kentucky, centered around Muhlenberg and Ohio counties, veterans of the revolutionary war were given free land; they brought with them “free” labor, a few enslaved folks per family. Matthias Shultz was one of the veterans, and his captives received his name. A hundred years later, a child was born to the last “Shultz” to live in slavery; he would make his mark on, if not in, music.
Arnold Shultz grew up playing music with his family, mostly for square dances. He began playing guitar in 1900, at age 14, and developed a thumb-style approach described by Robert Cantwell as syncopated melody, a steady, damped bass heavily accented, walking bass runs, melodic ornaments, a swinging or bouncing tempo, and, in contrast to other Country styles, sophisticated chording up the neck of the guitar, with all the strings stopped.[xlv]
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved laborers had become farmers and stevedores, and later, miners. In isolated roadless mountain areas, Blacks and Whites got along, relatively, and made music together. Arnold Shultz walked the railroad tracks of this area from around 1918 to 1931, jamming with Black and White string band players. They played hillbilly music for sure, but also blues and rags and gospel and just American music generally. Shultz also played on riverboats, and picked up a lot of styles traveling to the cities outside the immediate region; the Green River connects to the Mississippi via the Ohio, carrying outside influences including musical ones. Shultz brought them and taught them.[xlvi]
Racial interaction took many forms. One of Shultz’ playing partners was Clarence Wilson, a respected clawhammer banjo player. They had a group with a fiddler named Pendleton Vandiver—Bill Monroe’s uncle. Wilson’s daughter Flossie remembered a picnic thrown by the Black community for the Whites, at which Shultz played. It seems that Arnold broke down many racial barriers in Kentucky through the strength of his musicianship—but not all of them. Flossie says he always waited to eat till the Whites were finished.[xlvii]
One of the folks impressed by Arnold was Ike Everly, father of the Brothers. Ike’s father paid Arnold to teach Ike’s sister a guitar piece, and Ike was fascinated by Arnold’s ragtime style. Another student was Tex Atchison, who heard Shultz in a swing band in which he was the sole Black member. Atchison later replaced him in that outfit, before moving on to the Prairie Ramblers. He defined one of Shultz’s innovations:
He was the first…to play the lead and his own rhythm at the same time.[xlviii]
The bandleader, Forrest “Boots” Faught, concurred:
Yessir! Arnold was the only man I ever saw do it back in them days [1918]…And people were amazed: “Looky there—that man’s leadin’ that music on that guitar and playin’ his own accompaniment!'”[xlix]
Shultz also broke the gang out of their back-country three-chord prison, teaching them about passing chords:
Arnold Shultz says, “Throw that A in there!” And we’d start puttin that A in, and he’d say, “See how much better it sounded?”[l]
In 1920 a White guitar picker named Kennedy Jones was so impressed with Shultz’ thumb-picked style that he bought a box of thumb picks and gave them away to every guitar picker he met. This remarkable new technology spread the style through the Green River valley in a New York minute. But most directly, Shultz taught Jones, who taught 14 year-old Mose Rager on a porch in 1925.[li]Rager played with Ike Everly in the thirties. He glued together the styles of Kennedy Jones, Arnold Shultz and others, and taught it all to Merle Travis; Chet Atkins heard Travis on the radio at age 16, and it made his day. This is a piece of the story that helps explain why modern Country music is possessed of a distinctively jazzy, bluesy demeanor.
Arnold Shultz died at 45 in 1931, maybe poisoned, maybe not. Like Buddy Bolden, he was never recorded. The brilliant Merle Travis took his legacy to the outside world in 1936.
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Merle Travis, “Midnight Special” 1968
Guitar Stuff: Travis picking, as it is generally known, has a strong ragtime component, and features an alternating thumb-picked bass on the first and third beat. In between these beats come lighter beats, played by the thumb across the chord, tempering the traditional stiffness with a danceable bounce. All this on the bass, which is made more percussive by damping it with the heel of the hand, lightening the chokehold on the off-beats for greater bounce. Meanwhile, a melody is fingered on the high strings. As noted above, the player finds complex chords all over the neck, and applies the style to any type of music that gets in the way. As Eubie Blake said, “That’s your ragtime.”
Travis picking came to be the dominant guitar style in Country music. It came from the coal-mines of Kentucky, via coal-loads of players influenced by our man Arnold, and was perfected by Rager and Travis. But it had deeper roots: the thumb is imitating the bass notes in stride or ragtime piano, while the melody is fingered in a duplication of the piano’s right hand.
♬substitution: Listen to Travis or Atkins, followed by Jelly Roll Morton on piano or stride players like James P. Johnson or Fats Waller.
I played my primitive version of this style for years without even knowing it—I simply absorbed the feeling and found my own way of making the rhythms. It expressed my own multicultural (Country, jazz, blues, rock) heritage. I was a Shultz-Travis baby picker without even trying—and for the same reason: when you play alone, you have to play all the parts for the whole band. A middle class White boy from Seattle has roots in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and I’m grateful to Kennedy Jones for buying that box of thumb-picks.
Fancy picker Chet Atkins, the Country Gentleman himself, said he was raised on “a stack of records, half white and half black.” The traveling musicians of earlier times had been replaced by radio and records as the methods of cultural interpenetration. Atkins’ demigods included Belgian “Gypsy jazz” guitarist Django Reinhardt, who was also favored by Chet’s backup artists, Homer and Jethro.[lii]
♬substitution: In 1946 Atkins recorded “Guitar Blues,” with a fancy arrangement including clarinet. He did the substitution for us.
Doc Watson, “Deep River Blues”
Another superb Country and folk picker, Arthel “Doc” Watson from Deep Gap, North Carolina, played with tremendous swing, and professed a great love for the blues. He played swing, rockabilly, and honky-tonk guitar before becoming a folk idol. Referring to Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt, he said that “Somehow, I never could get the soul in my guitar picking that they do.”[liii]
Then there was the curious case of Jimmie Davis, who wrote and sang “You Are My Sunshine,” which helped him become Governor of Louisiana in the forties and again in the sixties. He was White, need we note. But he recorded with Blacks, including the all-Black Louisville Jug Band, and in his campaigns he was often charged with race-mixing.[11] Davis’ notable recordings in 1932 included “Red Nightgown Blues” and “Yo Yo Mama.”
[11] Back in 1924, former Governor Taylor of Tennessee had recorded a “negro spiritual” with his quartet. (Archie Green 1965, 217)
The interaction between Black and White music in the South had been going on for many generations before recording technology appeared, and the individual modern-day stories recounted here have their counterparts, more sparsely documented, in earlier times. The style of White players hasn’t been “pure European” for over two hundred years. And the developments among Black musicians of the last century have long since spread to White musicians; the blues and rags that Country musicians play are the best examples.
With the big migrations to the northern and western cities, Blacks moved on to urban music, nursing little of the nostalgia for a simpler rural life that many Whites tended to indulge in. Rock and roll was, indirectly, a result of White folk music’s failure to move with the times: Country music, although it evolved and interacted with other musics, came to idealize the old country ways, both in word and in sound. But for next-gen White youth, country and pop were superseded by a grittier, more urban, more Afro-American music. Rock and roll was a result of Black urbanization; its White variants were able to evolve in tandem with Black urban music, intersecting and cross-pollinating frequently over the years and through all the crises of modern urban race relations.
Over time, stylistic cross-influences continue to proliferate, through recorded media and live interaction of players from various traditions, and Country music continues to be pulled over towards the Black lane. There are a multitude of crossover tunes that start in one chart and rebound into another.[liv] On “New Country” stations, a more Country-rock sort of beat is heard. Nashville session players are forever spilling over if not jumping ship into jazz. Alt-Country folks aren’t too fond of the slick Nashville style, and combine their roots in swing, blues, soul and gospel. The beat goes on.
Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus
On the flip side is a stylistic adventure pursued by Black artists blending Country and Hip-Hop, like Lil Nas X (Old Town Road) and Blanco Brown (The Git Up), running parallel to the emergence of a generation of Black Country artists like Mickey Guyton, Kane Brown, Jimmie Allen, Brittney Spencer, and Willie Jones—all upending the mirage of Country as an exclusively hite zone, then or now.
Willie Jones – This song got a standing O at the Grand Ole Opry.
Black musicians certainly do, as noted, take on White influences. Most of the forms they use are of European origin. As Barry O’Connell described the interaction, “influences moved both ways, crossing, doubling on each other, reinforcing, and playing back.”[lv] That said, from its roots to the present, Black folk musical style tends to transform the European-based forms, to pull other styles toward it because it is rhythmically (a) more sophisticated and (b) less stiff, more fluid.[12] These are two things a musician leans toward eventually, and a lot of civilians do too. Listen to several versions of the fiddle classic “Orange Blossom Special” and note the rhythmic tricks the soloists (and also the rhythm section) resort to when they tire of playing it straight. They make it Mean a Thing!
[i] Conway 1995, 138, 145. [ii] Archie Green 1965, 214. [iii] Robert S. Jamieson in Wolfe, 1989. [iv] Johnson, JEMF, 1981, 77.[v] Russell, 67. [vi] Abbott and Seroff, op. cit.., 5-8. [vii] Tosches 1996, 112. [viii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-s-1nKQGNY, accessed 2-15-23 [ix] Niles, Edward Abbe, “Ballads, Songs and Snatches,” column in The Bookman, 1928. [x] Wolfe, “A Lighter Shade of Blue: White Country Blues,” in Cohn 1993, 251. [xi] Niles, op. cit., September 1928. [xii] Douglas Green, 1976, 55. [xiii] Fry, Macon, “Aaron Neville,” Wavelength, May 1985, 22. [xiv] Wolfe, Charles, in Cohn, op. cit., p 233-37. [xv] Wolfe, op. cit.., 262. [xvi] Douglas Green, 1976, 50. [xvii]Lightfoot 2003, 187. [xviii] Cantwell, 79. [xix] Wolfe, op. cit.., 242. [xx] Clarke, 145-56. [xxi] Malone 1968, 22. [xxii] John Cohen, 1964. [xxiii] Russell, 51. [xxiv] Daniel 1990, 7. [xxv]Lipsitz 1994, 312. [xxvi] Cantwell, 52. [xxvii] Norman Cohen 1969, 235-36. [xxviii] Cohen, Norm, “Early Pioneers,” in Malone and McCulloh, 1975, 33. [xxix] Schlappi 1978, 28-30, 107. [xxx] Archie Green 1965, 217. [xxxi] Winans, Robert, “The Folk, the Stage, and the Five-String Banjo in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American Folklore 89(1976),407-37. [xxxii] Niles, Introduction and notes, in Handy, 1972, 17. [xxxiii] As noted by O’Connell in his monograph. [xxxiv]Lightfoot 2003, 181. [xxxv] Cantwell, 56. [xxxvi] Interview with Mike Seeger, quoted in O’Connell, 9. [xxxvii] Flippo, 21-23, 50, 70. [xxxviii] Malone 1968, 233. Dudley is heard on The Blues Roll On, Atlantic Records, No. 1352, good luck. [xxxix] Bane, 87. [xl] Perry, 78. [xli] Douglas Green, 1976, 55-57. [xlii] Spottswood, Richard, liner notes for The Slide Guitar: Bottles, Knives and Steel, Columbia Roots and Blues Series, 1990. [xliii] Titon, 45. [xliv] Uncredited liner notes from Sol Hoopii: The Master of the Hawaiian Guitar, Rounder, 1977,1991, and Obrecht, Jas, “Slide Routes: The Honolulu-Hollywood Connection,” Guitar Player, August 1994, 94. [xlv] Cantwell, 31. [xlvi] This section is drawn from Lightfoot, “A Regional Musical Style: The Legacy of Arnold Shultz,” and Lawrence, “Arnold Shultz: Godfather of Bluegrass?” [xlvii] Lawrence, JEMF, 7. [xlviii] quoted in Lightfoot, 132. [xlix] Lightfoot, 132. [l] Lightfoot, 132. [li] Lawrence, Bluegrass Unlimited, 41. [lii] Kienzle, 46. [liii] Bane, 82. [liv] See Francis, Billboard, for a number of examples from 1995. [lv] O’Connell, 30.
