I've Got the Blues

Today, I’m going to be controversial. I seldom do this on my weblog, because political weblogs abound. Also, politics usually gets people angry and fighting with one another.

The history of the blues is the history of racial intermixing.  Throughout my life, I’ve been told that blues is black music. Many times, I’ve been interviewed by kids at college radio stations when I’ve played in their towns, and often the questioning becomes quite hostile, along these lines:

“What do you think you’re doing playing the blues? Aren’t you ripping off blacks?”

Well, no.  I grew up a little south of Chicago, and my musical career started there. If you are from Chicago, white or black, you play the blues. I didn’t decide to play the blues.  The blues was just always there, always part of my life.  The great Paul Butterfield was a boyhood friend, and he was Jewish, for God’s sake.

The blues was born in whorehouses, shotgun shacks and dives throughout the South, and eventually found its urban expression in Chicago.  One of the reasons that blues has been defined as black music is this:  the political left makes its living focusing on racial hatred and violence. Thus, the history of racial intermixing, and interracial sex, is one of the greatest taboos of the left. To be blunt, folks go to the whorehouse for a different kind of meat.

If the blues is black music, then why is Eric Clapton probably the best known electric blues guitarist and vocalist of the past 40 years? Why is Jorma Kaukonen probably the best known acoustic blues guitarist and vocalist of the past 40 years?

“The House of the Rising Sun” is probably the most famous of all blues songs, and the structure of the song is pure Irish lament. For that matter, the I-IV-V chord structure and the melodic patterns of the blues are borrowed directly from Irish folk music. Isn’t it interesting that the Animals, an Irish group, sought to sound as if they were born with a black Chicago dialect when they recorded the song?

Blacks migrated to Chicago from the South on the Illinois Central and on the Mississippi River.  Irish migrated from the East Coast to Chicago along the Ohio River.  The collision of these two cultures in Illinois gave rise to the modern blues form.

In any event, the notion that blues is entirely black music accounts for the depressed economic state of the blues.  Why do liberals enforce this idea of segregation on the blues?  The result is that the kids stay away, for two reasons.  First, they hate the idea of segregation.  Second, the liberal outlook on the blues makes the music seem as if it’s a preachy lesson delivered by a Sunday school teacher. Blues last prospered in the 1960s when musicians deliberate sought to break down the racial barriers.

This is not to deny the great contributions of black blues musicians. Muddy Waters has always been my inspiration, but so has Jorma Kaukonen.  (Interestingly, Jorma and Paul were both neighbors in Woodstock at one time.  Gabe, Paul’s son, showed up a few years ago wanting to form a band.)

The history of the blues holds some great secrets that leftists don’t want you to know. In Chicago, blues is still thought of as get down music. Integrated audiences dance to the blues.  On both coasts, the blues is mainly thought of as a lesson in the Civil Rights movement. Who wants to hear that?  And, this is what has been most suppressed by the leftist insistence that blues is black music. Blues tells the story of racial intermingling, the story of blacks, whites and Asians having a good time together and loving one another. As I said, this is the great taboo of the left. Leftists don’t want you to know that the past is a history of anything except racial violence and hatred.

Comments

[Derek]

Stephen --
I disagree with you about the nature of liberalism and race -- not a big surprise. I think that most liberals, if anything, have been more than willing to confront race mixing when others wanted to deny it. Certainly one aspect of the movement was to deny the idea that race mixing would bring down civilization. I also absolutely reject that liberals segregate" music any more than anyone else. Some fetishize it, to be sure, but i don't buy that it has to do with politics so much as with some silly conception of 'authenticit," something that can be found in discussions of other kinds of music (talk to serious bluegrass afficianadoes, for example) as well as food (come down here to texas and tread lightly when talking about what is and is not Mexican food, my friend!).
All that said, though, I 100% agree that compartmentalizing music by race is futile, and that it lessens music. lord knows that rock and roll as we know it has been hugely influenced by the blues, but that many blues musucians have embraced rock & roll -- Muddy Waters with the Stones or BB King with U2 for example. Sly Stone was once absolutely great, and hbe was reknowned for his rhythms, rhythms he wrote, but that his white drummer helped carry out; Jimi Hendrix played supposedly white music, but with a white drummer who often could pound out rhythms that some might see as fitting black music. For me music is music. I have an enormous music collection in which Marvin Gay and Nick Drake, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, Miles Davis and Glen Miller, the Replacements and Hugh Masekela, Sleater Kinney and Toots and the Maytals can all sit together. I suppose that some music (Masekala, for example) comes from a specific historical context where race obviously matters, but it should not be determinative -- in other words, race is a factor in the music that many artists create, but so too might be what their older brother listened to, what their parents allowed in the house, what knocked them on their ass when they were 14, what was on the stereo when they first had sex (and subsequently when that person broke up with them), what part of the country they lived in, and so forth.
My musical heritage, my own music fan (and musician) biography cannot be seperated from the fact that Aerosmith got their start in the town next to us, that there was not a whole lot more than classic rock to listen to, that Mom and stepdad were hugely into rock and roll, that dad once was a rocker but fast turned toward country, that I played and sang jazz and big band and show tunes and doo wop as a musician in high school college, and beyond, that the Replacements changed the way I loved music, that Public Enemy opened up worlds to a white kid from New Hampshire that had been closed pretty tight, and maybe, somewhere in all of this mishmash the fact that my politics are what they are played in as well, but I doubt they are prominent. Music is not about black or white, but I thank God for my black friends in college who exposed me to things from which I had shied away or never heard earlier. And my friend and teammate Stuart similiarly experienced that sort of interchange -- the nickname i gave him as a freshman was "Boogie," which some people mistakenly thought was one of our sly references to race, but in fact came solely from the fact that his name reminded me of the Zeppelin song "Boogie With Stu."

dc

[Stephen]

Hello Derek:

I thought that Aerosmith's blues album was great. Loved it, and I appreciated that they gave back to the music.

The Rolling Stones were, at one time, the world's greatest blues band... back when Mick Taylor played lead guitar with them.

I'm glad to have Derek as a friend. Life's too short for enemies, isn't it?

Derek is off to England as an Oxford fellow. The blues was brought to Britain by the very great John Mayall. He's still out there playing, I think. If you get a chance to see him in England, grab it.