"Why Do Whites Sing Black?": The blues, whiteness, and early histories of rock. by Mike Daley

"Why Do Whites Sing Black?": The blues, whiteness, and early histories of rock.
Popular Music and Society, June, 2003, by Mike Daley

The rock critic Albert Goldman, who was later to become notorious for his biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, wrote an essay in 1969 for the New York Times called "Why Do Whites Sing Black?" This essay provides a classic framework of essentialism and selective representation in discussing white appropriations of the blues. In the present article, I use Goldman's piece as a framework for a discussion of the 1960s blues revival. I argue that the blues revival depended on a stereotyped representation of black culture, and that this in turn was used to remedy a perceived lack of authenticity in white rock music. This colonization of black music involves a process of "Othering," where the dominant culture renders the subordinate culture in terms of difference, and that difference allows the dominant culture to define itself. The Other--coded as low culture--is used as a counterbalance to the high culture. Stallybrass and White identified this complementarity when they wrote:

A recurrent pattern emerges: the "top" attempts to reject and
eliminate the "bottom" for reasons of prestige and status, only to
discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent on
the low-Other ... but also that the top includes that low
symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own
fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power,
fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity....
(Stallybrass and White 5)

While one may be tempted to dismiss Goldman as a crank, especially considering the almost pathological hostility of his Presley and Lennon books, it might be instructive to remember that this piece appeared in one of the most respected newspapers in the world; moreover, I would suggest that his ideas only render explicit a number of unwritten and unsaid assumptions about black and white musics. It should also be noted, though, that Goldman's writing often appeared in newspapers and periodicals that were not marketed to the typical rock audience. Thus, he was regularly charged with explaining rock music to the "establishment," who may have regarded this music with some suspicion to begin with. Rather than challenging the racialist assumptions of the status quo, though, Goldman regularly pandered to mainstream ideas about the role of black culture in the arts. This is not to say that Goldman was an anomaly among rock writers. As I shall illustrate later, the ideas about race and authenticity promulgated in "Why Do Whites Sing Black?" were shared by writers like Chet Flippo, who preached to the converted (the "hip," younger rock audience) at Rolling Stone for many years.

To put Goldman in some context, I would like to discuss some of the contemporary tropes about authenticity and blackness in rock music as illustrated in some of the earliest published histories of rock. But the modern idea of authenticity is much more pervasive than just within rock criticism.

The discourse of folk authenticity can be traced back at least as far as the nineteenth-century Romantics, inasmuch as it articulates a longing for a fantasized lost innocence--as if the folk society is a reflection of the modern culture "before the fall," as it were. Writing in the mid 1960s, Charles Keil attributed white interest in black music to "a felt deficiency of some sort in the American mainstream" (Keil 49). If we can locate the historical center of the blues revival in the late 1960s, the time of Goldman's writing, then the unspoken obverse of the romanticization of the blues is the perceived commercialism--the loss of innocence--of mainstream rock. The discourse of pop music decadence probably began around the time of the payola hearings in 1960 and followed through the heyday of the teen idols of the early '60s, but it reached its peak thanks to the efforts of the first generation of rock critics and historians. These writers built a discursive construct of rock as an art form in constant precarious tension with the market forces that facilitated its dissemination.

Several histories of rock music appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first wave of rock historiography. Carl Belz's The Story of Rock is a good example. Like innumerable others, he constructs the history of rock as a series of discrete eras, beginning with the innocence of the '50s and culminating in the commercialized and decadent present, which for him was the period between 1968 and 1971. Rock music during that time was "plagued by uncertainty about its own identity--particularly in relation to pop commercialism" (Belz 210). He gives as examples of rock profiteering "the promotion of James Taylor as an authentic and original folk singer and of Johnny Winter as a master of the Delta blues" (212).

Langdon Winner, writing in 1969, places rock's crisis of authenticity somewhat earlier. He proclaims that, "[t]he issue of creativity versus pure commercialism, of course, takes us to the very heart of the motivational maladies which afflicted rock and roll at that time" (Winner 43). For a while, Winner writes, the commercial forces gained the upper hand: "For all intents and purposes, rock and roll died in 1961 and remained in that condition until its renaissance in early 1964" (39), a victim of surf music, teen idols, and Beach Blanket Bingo. The renaissance, as played out over the rest of the '60s, consisted of innovations in three areas: technology and technique, rhythm and time, and the scope of musical resources. Tellingly, all of these developments are related by Winner to new infusions of African-American musical aesthetics. The new technological possibilities of the electric guitar are revealed by Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix, three blues-raised musicians (Winner 45). Innovations in technique are attributed to renewed study of Albert King, B. B. King and Muddy Waters (46). The replenishment of rock rhythmic resources is ascribed to the "soul beat[s]" of James Brown, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding (47). Finally, the increased scope of musical resources available to rock musicians includes spirituals, Charles Mingus, and Chicago blues (48).

Robert Cantwell characterizes the entire folk revival as "a complex response ... to the ongoing adjustment of newcomer groups, whether racial, ethnic, or generational, to the conditions of life under an industrial and post-industrial social and economic system" (Cantwell 53). Comparing folk revivalism to nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, Cantwell argues that the "invention of the folk" provides a sense of security in a changing world, allowing the dominant culture to define itself contrastively (54-55).

The blues revival of the 1960s was in many ways an extension of the late '50s/ early '60s folk revival, at least in the US. In Britain, blues revivalism was an outgrowth of the trad jazz movement, which Ed Ward calls "a pallid but enthusiastic attempt to recreate the Chicago and New Orleans styles of the twenties" (Ward 343). Jeff Titon defines the blues revival as a time when a music "by and for chiefly black Americans [was turned] into a music by black and white Americans primarily for white Americans and Europeans" (Titon 223). I would add white European (mainly British) musicians to the mix as well. Titon traces the beginnings of the revival in the United States to the publication of Samuel Charters's book The Country Blues in 1959, and locates its demise at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival (Titon 223-24). I suspect that these watermarks a more a matter of personal meaning for Titon than of historical accuracy; but as the account of a fairly typical blues revivalist, his version will do for now.

The idea of blues itself is a constructed one, based on contributions from a number of sources: collectors who, in building discographies, helped to define blues by their exclusions and inclusions of certain records; critics like Samuel Charters, who created blues in their romanticized image of the Old South and untainted black culture, of the solitary, anguished bluesman in a shabby hotel room (I'm thinking here of that paragon of blues authenticity, Robert Johnson, who was kind enough to provide blues revivalists with a neatly delimited body of work, a Faustian legend, and an early death); and the musicians who reinterpreted the blues for a wide audience, inevitably narrowing its stylistic breadth and promoting a small canon of blues "standards."

The blues revival involved, at first, the collecting of old blues records. Almost immediately, urban musicians began to duplicate these performances, usually within the acoustic country blues idiom. By the mid-'60s, younger British musicians were adapting the urban blues as well. Eventually, some older black blues performers reaped trickle-down benefits from the publicity given them by Eric Clapton and others. B. B. King, Albert King, and Muddy Waters found large white audiences, especially on the college circuit.

In any case, most urban blacks did not participate in the 1960s blues revival--as Nelson George describes, blues was no longer relevant to the young, while the older listeners were uncomfortable in the new social contexts of the music (George 46). I should point out that this was not true in many regions of the United States, where blues continued to be very popular with black audiences through the '60s and beyond. But within urban contexts, many of the black blues musicians who suddenly found themselves playing for large, affluent white audiences welcomed the extended lease on their careers, and some in fact preferred the white audiences to black ones. As B. B. King told Time magazine in 1971: "The blacks are more interested in the jumpy stuff. The whites want to hear me for what I am" (Time 41). For musicians like King, who preferred to remain within the '50s style, the white audience was a boon. For other blues musicians who might have wished to update their styles, the revival was less fortuitous? The white audience, according to another King interview from 1968, "knew about the blues before I came there.... [T]hey were interested in what I had to offer, and they came to listen, not dance, not clap their hands, or do anything of this sort, just listen" (Time 41).

Goldman's 1969 essay is a distillation of some of the most potent ideas about race and authenticity that were circulating at the time in writing about rock music. The assumptions that he so vividly illustrates have had a lasting impact on the ways that we understand the history of rock, and, by extension, a large part of the cultural history of the last fifty years.

Goldman, in "Why Do Whites Sing Black?," begins with a romanticized scene of old Memphis, at a time when "America was still a land of brutal innocence" (D25). Describing a cast of "plough jockeys and parlor belles ... shouting congregations and shouting bluesmen," he talks of the "plangent sounds" of the blues "rising in a dense, pungent cloud over Memphis," where they remain until reclaimed by "this generation's longing for the good-time years" (D25). (2) Meanwhile, Beale Street has crumbled, and presumably authentic black culture as well. The metaphor of music as a cloud that arises from culture, to hover autonomously above while the world below changes, powerfully illustrates Goldman's assumption of music as autonomous from its social context, a body of texts which assume independent status as they are released, and which can be "retrieved," literally plucked out of the ether at a later date to infuse a new generation with some kind of magical culture energy.

Goldman praises the contemporary white appropriations of the blues as a vestige of racial harmony in the midst of strife. He writes:

Spun out of the grooves of a hundred million records and spread
across the country by a hundred million speakers, the Memphis Soul
Sound enfolds the nation now like an evangelical tent, rocking with
hymns to the newly proclaimed brotherhood of black men and white
men in modern America. (Goldman D25)

While it seems at first that Goldman is interpreting Memphis soul as integrationist, in fact he qualifies his statement by pointing out that his utopian black--white culture occurs through the mediation of "a hundred million records." His argument rests on the unstated assumption that because records circulate as commodities, the recording medium allows the easy crossing of cultural borders. But, as Robert Cantwell points out, "folk revivalism is inherently political ... because it involves the movement of cultural materials ... from enclaved, marginal, usually poverty-stricken people toward the centers of cultural power..." (Cantwell 51). The process of appropriation is always infused with the unequal power relations that operate at every level of Western society.

Yet Goldman asks: "how can a pampered, milk-faced, middle class kid who has never had a hole in his shoe sing the blues that belong to some beat-up old black who lived his life in poverty and misery?" Goldman answers his own question with a thesis that white kids are

trying to save their souls. Adopting as a tentative identity the
firmly set, powerfully expressive mask of the black man, the
confused, conflicted and frequently self-doubting and self-loathing
offspring of Mr. and Mrs. America are released into an emotional
and spiritual freedom denied them by their own inhibited culture.
(Goldman D25)

Here Goldman repeats the old stereotype of black culture as simple, instinctive, and carefree, unencumbered by the white burden of intelligence, introspection, and responsibility. Historically, this particular Othering of blackness has been traced by David Roediger to the resentments of immigrant white workers toward a perceived competition in the form of freed black men in the years prior to the Civil War. The black Other, Roediger writes, "embod[ied] the preindustrial, erotic careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for" (Roediger 13-14). As Brian Ward recently noted:

White enthusiasts routinely reduced the diverse sounds and lyrical
perspectives of Rhythm and Blues to a set of stock characteristics
which they had always ... associated with the unremittingly
physical, passionate, ecstatic, emotional and, above all, sexually
liberated black world of their imaginations. Paradoxically, in so
doing, white fans of black music neatly fitted black music, style
and culture into much the same normative categories so dear to the
most bigoted opponents of black music and black equality....
(Ward 12)

Eventually, though, Goldman writes, "the white kids will swing back into their own tradition, fortified and enlightened by the adventure of transvestism" (Goldman D25). The experience of immersion in the blues is seen as slumming, or, to extrapolate from Goldman's metaphor, sexualized role-play.

Goldman gives the example of Paul Butterfield, a white musician who came to study the blues and "so ingratiated himself with his black masters that they took him on as an apprentice and taught him the blues the way no young black boy is taught in these evil tradition-spurning days" (Goldman D25). Because of the new, upwardly mobile northern black middle class, the classic arts are lost on black youth. (3) It is left to the visionary white men to recognize the value of the blues, and preserve it in its most authentic forms. This is the trope at the center of the blues revival--the fantasy of the white blues aficionado as the savior of black music--the benevolent master. He retrieves the dying tradition from the clutches of decadent black culture and reanimates it, even improves upon it.

Michael Bane, writing about American white blues revivalists, argues that "they learned the music from the bottom up. They won acceptance in the black community because, and solely because, they were so damn good" (Bane 183). The white revivalist, the commentator is relieved to note, does not desecrate the blues but masters it. Bane quotes Nick Gravenites (another white blues musician and composer from Chicago) in the same book, recounting Paul Butterfield's early career:

I remember there was this place called the Blue Flame Lounge, and
Butterfield would be the only white guy there. He was part of an
all-black R&B review. At first he was a novelty act--white guy
playing blues harmonica. But he'd knock them out. He was better
than any of the people playing there, no matter who they were.
(Bane 186)

As the final element in the model, the white revivalist provides the black blues musician with his long-overdue financial rewards. As Gravenites boasted to Michael Bane, "We got 'em contracts ... and not just 'nigger' contracts either. We got them more money than they'd ever gotten before in their life" (Bane 194).

This is the classic model, but Goldman extends it further. Butterfield, writes Goldman, has transcended the limitations of the blues in a new music that uses the freedom of the blues as a base but goes beyond. Goldman describes Butterfield's music:

Faster, freer, more wide-open than the present style of Chicago;
more contemporary in its harmonies and rhythms than the sibling
style of Kansas City; a time-machined mix, half past and half
present, half black and half white, the Butterfield Band style
of the moment is that rarest of things in American music--a viable,
convincing and enormously enjoyable extension of an old and
honored folk idiom. Butterfield has done for blues what no black
lad could do--he has breathed into the ancient form a powerful
whiff of contemporary life. (Goldman D46)

Writing about a 1977 club show by the Rolling Stones, Chet Flippo strikes a similar chord:

The Stones fully reverted to what they actually were in the
beginning: English schoolboys faithfully aping American Southern
blues singers. If there were any way to get temporary skin
transplants, these Limey boys would be black every night onstage.
As it was, they played it a hell of a lick and still sounded
surprisingly blacker that most white Limeys and than even a few
gentrified, upwardly mobile American negro singers who sensed that
"the blues" was actually sung by field niggers not long off the
ship. Better a marcelled hairdo and a drape suit and a record
contract in Chi-cago or New York than Can't Bust 'Em overalls and
a chaw of Red Man tobackky and kowtowing to the White Massa and
moaning about staring up the backside of a mule on those endless
plow rows instead of singing about dancing with some foxy
high-yellow pussy at the Aragon Ballroom.... [E]ven Mick Jagger,
middle-class and socially grasping as he was, had the lungs and
the soul to out-soul many brothers. (Flippo 85-86)

Somehow in Goldman's and Flippo's discursive worlds, the avid study of black music allows the white artist to become a paradigm of hyperwhiteness, so white he's black. In a parallel story, Goldman celebrates Steve Winwood, following his apprenticeship in black music, as "Super-Whitey No. 1," as if immersion in black music paradoxically energizes the whiteness of its participants (Goldman D46). Eventually, too, the black practitioner is pushed out of the equation altogether. As Bane put it:

The central question changed from "Can a white man sing the blues?"
to "Can a black man sing the blues?" because after Cream the
whites had the terminology all sewed up. With the skill of a
surgeon, popular culture removed "black" from "blues" leaving the
term free to become almost synonymous with British groups in the
[John] Mayall cast. (Bane 159).

Albert Goldman's account of Paul Butterfield's musical development--his early apprenticeship in authentic blues, his mastery of the form, and finally his fortified return to superwhite rock--can be seen as a paradigm of the blues revival, at least within the discursive world of rock criticism and historiography. A more extensive study would be required to shed light on the ways that these ideas influenced actual practice--the ways that musicians and fans used these tropes in their music making, listening, and purchasing patterns. Nonetheless, I think that some of the viewpoints that I have highlighted may point the way to a better understanding of the fantasies and assumptions that informed late '60s and early '70s conceptualizations of rock.

Notes

(1.) This makes sense when one considers that by this time, the parameters of blues style had been codified for the mass audience by the blues revivalists. Thus the development of the form was arrested while a frozen, stereotyped pre-1960s blues style became dominant.

(2.) The characterization of black culture as simple and innocent can also be traced back to Romantic abolitionist literature--in "Africa Delivered; or, The Slave Trade Abolished," James Grahame wrote: "In that fair land of hill, and dale, and stream, The simple tribes from age to age had heard No hostile voice" (quoted in Brantlinger 189) "until," Brantlinger continues, "the arrival of the slave traders, who introduced to an Edenic Africa those characteristic products of civilization: avarice, treachery, rapine, murder, warfare, and slavery" (Brantlinger 189).

(3.) Even the original black buyers of early blues records were considered to be unworthy consumers of the music. In The Country Blues, Samuel Charters writes about two relatively unpopular blues singers, Rabbit Brown and Robert Johnson, on the basis that "the blues audience is capricious and not in the least concerned with musical or sociological concepts" (quoted in Titon 228).

Works cited

Bane, Michael. White Boy Singin' the Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1992 (1982).

Belz, Carl. The Story of Rock. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Brantlinger, Patrick. "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent". "Race," Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. 185-222.

Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1975.

Flippo, Chet. On the Road with the Rolling Stones: 20 Years of Lipstick, Handcuffs and Chemicals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Goldman, Albert. "Why Do Whites Sing Black?" New York Times, 14 Dec. 1969: D25, 46.

Haralambos, Michael. Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America. London: Eddison Press, 1974.

Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago, IL, and London: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Marcus, Greil. Rock and Roll Will Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allan. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Time, 9 Aug. 1971: 41.

Titon, Jeff Todd. "Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival." Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Ed. Neil V. Rosenberg. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1996. 220-40.

Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1998.

Winner, Langdon. "The Strange Death of Rock and Roll." Rock and Roll Will Stand. Ed. Greil Marcus. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. 38-55.

Mike Daley is a producer at CBC Radio in Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a Ph.D in ethnomusicology at York University while pursuing an active performing and recording career. His dissertation, on Jimi Hendrix and rock historiography, is near completion.

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