"Representations
of the Other in the blues revival" by Mike Daley
York University
In 1969, the critic Albert Goldman, who was later to become notorious for his
biographies of Elvis and John Lennon, wrote an essay 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 this paper, I am going to use Goldman's article as a framework
for a discussion of the 1960s blues revival. I will 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..." (quoted in Hall 1996:5)
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.
The blues revival of the 1960s was in many ways an extension of the late 50s/early
60s folk revival, at least in America. In Britain blues revivalism was an outgrowth
of the trad jazz movement, which Ed Ward calls ãa pallid but enthusiastic
attempt to recreate the Chicago and New Orleans styles of the Twentiesä
(Ward 1992:343). 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
1993:223). I would add white European (mainly British) musicians to the mix
as well. He traces the beginnings of the revival in the U.S. to the publication
of Samuel Chartersâ book The Country Blues in 1959, and locates its demise
at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival (ibid.:223-224). I suspect that these watermarks
have more personal meaning for Titon than 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, black fans 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
1988:107-108). In fact, 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"(quoted in
Haralambos 1974:90). 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 sympathetic.
The white audience, according to another King interview from 1968, "knew
about the blues before I came there...they 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"(ibid.:90-91).
Albert 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" (Goldman 1969). 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" (ibid.). 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 body of static
products, which assume independent status they are released, and 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.
He 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."(ibid.)
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
transcends culture. 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 1996:51). 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." (ibid.)
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 might be traced to the resentments of immigrant white workers towards a perceived competition in the form of freed black men in the years prior to the Civil War. The black Other, David Roediger writes, "embod[ied] the preindustrial, erotic careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for " (quoted in Cantwell 1996:57)1 . 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 1998:12)
Eventually though, Goldman
writes, ãthe white kids will swing back into their own tradition, fortified
and enlightened by the adventure of transvestismä. 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 1969).
Because black culture has no self-respect, the classic arts are lost on black
youth. 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 saviour
of black music - the benevolent master. He retrieves the dying tradition from
the clutches of decadent black culture and re-animates it, even improves upon
it. 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
Butterfieldâs 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." (ibid.)
Somehow in Goldman's universe
this allows the artist to become a paradigm of hyper-whiteness. 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.
The discourse of folk authenticity can be traced back at least as far as the
19th 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 1966:49). 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 white rock. The discourse of pop music decadence
probably began around the time of the payola hearings in 1960, 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 fifties 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 1972:210). 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" (ibid: 212).
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 1996:53). Comparing folk revivalism to 19th
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 (ibid: 54-55).
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 super-white rock, can be seen as a paradigm of the blues revival.
While early revivalists slavishly imitated their cherished blues records, their
efforts eventually empowered later rock musicians to appropriate blues as a
'shot of authenticity' - a remedy for what was perceived as the decadent commercialism
of late 60s rock music.
Works cited:
Brantlinger, Patrick. 1986. "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent". Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. "Race", Writing, and Difference. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press:185-222.
Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. trans. by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press.
George, Nelson. 1988. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon.
Goldman, Albert. 1969. "Why Do Whites Sing Black?". New York Times, December 14, 1969: D25,46.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. "What Is This 'Black' In Black Popular Culture?" in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Haralambos, Michael. 1974. Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America. London: Eddison Press.
Keil, Charles. 1966. Urban Blues. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1996. "Reconstructing The Blues: Reflections On The 1960s Blues Revival". in Rosenberg, Neil V., ed. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 220-240.
Ward, Brian. 1998. Just My Soul Responding:
Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley: University
of California
Press.