|
View the H-Southern-Music Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Southern-Music's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Southern-Music's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Southern-Music home page.
Tony Thomas: I think it is ludicrous to think that the blues is any more "overwhelmingly, blues, as a cultural force, is now firmly entrenched in a white, male > conservative power structure." Than it was in the 1920s and 1930s, even if white people are largely the audience. I just think that performance and purchase of the blues and creation of new blues are largely done by white people for whtie people with whatever reference or non reference to Black tradition that they do make. This is an exaggeration from afar, perhaps, because while more white people are involved on all sides of the post-folk blues culture than Black people, this is hardly something that involves a major segment of the whtie population. It seems to be age limited, something that may die away and not something that seems to have much influence among young people who seek music as a site for dancing, romancing, and letting their hormones rule them. The salient point is not the white involvement, but the Black lack of involvement, whatever exceptions we can all find, there is miniscule Black interest in the Blues at least a constituted by what white Blues fan designate as the blues. The economic, social, psychological, and sexual atmosphere that brought forth a series of Blues genre--the blues was never ever really one genre--ended, just as at another time, African American life, culture, and social position made the Blues develop into a dominant genre among regular African Americans. While the blues expressed much of African American culture and life, it was never a fundamental challenge to any " white, male conservative power structure." Except in the directness that it asserted sexist sexuality, and in the way it affirmed African American life as it was, it hardly challenged the basic underpinnings of capitalist culture in this country. No recording company feared to sell Blues recordings because they threatened the ruling class's cultural hegemony. Songs with lines saying "I'm going to beat my woman until I get satisfied" are hardly a challenge to dominance especially male oppression of women, whether sung by Black or white lips. Indeed, if anything, white blues players, especially in the earlier days when the falloput from the 1960s radicalizations and struggles was still in the air, tend to play blues that speak to social struggle and social issues more than vernacular African American blues bands generally did. Indeed when the civil rights struggles came along, the blues' general lack of approach to social struggle and its individualistic voicing concerned with largely personal issues led African American secular and religious to reach back to the original African American pre-gospel religious songs, as songs of the struggle on one end and to look also to the new soul music and to then avant guard free jazz and soul jazz musicians, even though at the time of the struggle in its primary site, the Deep South, an active Black vernacular Blues culture existed. There is a two-sideness to Adams claim here: But the African > American literary and intellectual tradition has achieved > stunning success since the 1960s in reclaiming the blues as > a taproot of black creativity. Hurston, Hughes, and Handy > arguably began the process, but there are now an uncountable > number of black poets, novelists, and others who have done > with the blues what white authors find it all but impossible > to do: make the blues a deep and extensive explanatory > mechanism for a people's extended trials, multiple triumphs, > redemptive persistence, and deep sense of irony. As part of the acknowledgement of the strength of African American culture, there has been an embrace of the blues, but it seems highly musical and symbolic and except for a few people, it seems to have little reference to real Blues music, but the creation of the Blues as a separate entity from the many different Blues genres that African Americans have created. Quite typical of this attitude is the assertion that I date to Leroi Jones/Immamu Baraka's _Blues People_. That the Blues are the essence of all Black music and even some who will date Blues back to Africa and that the whole Black culture is subsumed by the blues or at least the Blues are (or should say "were' since tropes are not as popular as they once were) and numerous other statements that have little to do with the reality of the Blues. This is in stark contrast to African American intellectuals in the time the blues was extant in African American like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown whose interchanged with the work of the blues. The following article is an interesting examination of the distance of this entire phenomena from realities of African American folklore that is quite valuable. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Folklore, Folkloristics, and African American LiteraryCriticism Author(s): Sw. Anand Prahlad Source: African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 565-575 Published by: Indiana State University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2901337/ In a sense, there are major similarities between the appropriation of the blues by these middle class academics (I am proud to be a middle class academic) and similar appropriation of the Blues by non-vernacular non popular Blues musicians who play for the largely white post-Blues blues audiences. Their references are to symbolism of the blues, rather than to a living respect for the real music. Just from personal experience, no matter what homage these people tend to make to the Blues, their actual familiarity with real Blues music and their desire to listen to or foster its continuation in real African American life or even in the intellectual corners they occupy is close to non-existent. But how could it be otherwise, for homage is usually paid to the dead. It is easier to turn something that is not alive changing and staring you right in the face with it s complexity into what is safe for you to praise and refashion into what you want it to be than dealing with nasty real living social practice. Indeed among Black intellectual circuits a reflection of this abstraction about the blues is reproduction of some of the condescending and stereotypical attitudes towards the Blues and people for whom it was their music in a manner not too different from what Adam deems minstrelsy. On our sister H Net list on AA studies During the discussion on the talk show host who insulted Black woman athletes as "nappy headed hoes" there were actually several well degreed professors who wrote that being "a hoe" was part of the blues morality" and "life style" of poor African Americans, and the words should be turned around as one of pride. I have no doubt Adam posted that sexist piece of crap song and its lyrics because he is sickened by people Black and white who would defend the song because it was done by a Black artist or a Blues musician in a way that it would not have been defended if it were done by a white musician. Back to the main subject here. You know there is nothing wrong with being white. I actually like some white music. In the car right now I have Asleep at the Wheel at Arizona Charlies, a favorite CD of mine as it captures a live performance I actually attended. An exercise of moving my left index finger into my CD collection to find the nearest CD came to a draw between Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and Ian & Sylvia's Northern Journey. That there are white Blues musicians playing for white audiences in white venues,l does not make the music wrong. It just makes it different from what Black blues musicians did playing for Black audiences in Black venues inj the historical period where that was common. As Adam points out, Black musicians like myself who perform Blues primarily white audiences in primarily white venues, are doing something different no matter how much our revivalism and our demand to derive authenticity from the past or some classic iconization of the Blues demand that we remain faithful to what we see as Black approaches to the Blues. I must say I am also attracted to white approaches to the Blues especially the Jimmie Rodgers approach. To me the larger problem is the search for authenticity and the insecurity about it that drives so much of the approach to music among intellectuals of our generation in imperialist countries, or at least that segment of us who are involved in varieties of what I call folk and post folk music. I think added to that is the specific problems that white Americans have in not recognizing their own nationality except insofar as they identify its existence as necessarily including all racist attributes, when this is not involved among many white people and beside the point in much of white culture. This is a big stumbling block. Tony
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|