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.
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]
[4] There is in fact a set of music awards given annually, since 1996, in Britain, called the Music of Black Origin awards, or MOBOs. Recipients include Lauryn Hill, Eminem, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Tina Turner, and Amy Winehouse. Categories include jazz, hip-hop, reggae, and R&B.
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.”