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Today's
Stories
December 20 / 21, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
December 19, 2003
Elaine Cassel
Courts
Rebuke Bush for Trampling the Constitution
Robert Fisk
Raid
on Fantasyville: Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back
Zoltan Grossman
The
Occupation Has Failed to "Capture" the Loyalty of Iraqis
Mike Whitney
Bush's
Afghan Highway to Nowhere
Harold Gould
Has the Radical Arab Strategy Really Worked?
Gary Leupp
The
Neocon's Dream Memo
December 18, 2003
Ann Harrison
A
Landmark Victory for Medical Pot
John L. Hess
Catfish
Blues: The SOB's from Out of Town
Karyn Strickler
Ebola
is Good for You!
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Duryodhana
Dies
Harry Browne
Hail
Jim Hickey, the "Irish Hero" of the Colonial Occupation
of Iraq
Hammond Guthrie
Captured in Abasement
December 17, 2003
Robert Fisk
Saddam's
Cold Comforts
Gideon Levy
"Don't
Even Think About the Children"
Marjorie Cohn
The Fortuitous
Arrest of Saddam: a Pyrrhic Victory?
Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's
Last Act
December 16, 2003
Robert Fisk
Getting
Saddam...15 Years Too Late
Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam
in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain
John Halle
Matt
Gonzalez and Me
Josh Frank
The
Democrats and Saddam
Tariq Ali
Saddam
on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism
December 15, 2003
Robert Fisk
The Capture
of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War
Dave Lindorff
The
Saddam Dilemma
Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein
Norman Solomon
For
Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun
Patrick Cockburn
The
Capture of Saddam
Stew Albert
Joy to the World
December 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
December 20 / 21, 2003
Rhythm and Race
How
the "White Ripoff" Account of Rock and Roll Sells Black
Music Short
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
I have before me one of those thumbnail accounts
of the birth of rock--the most recent among many dozens, it doesn't
matter which. It says what they always say: that rock was born
when white kids ripped off--and sanitized--the raw sexual energy
of black blues, or rhythm and blues.
This used to be the standard account
of how rock was born. We are now blessed with excellent rock
historians like Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnik and a host of Europeans
who write on the blues: they paint a far more complex picture.
It provides background for what I will argue: that the ripoff
version of rock history, in its very attempt to do justice to
black artists, perpetuates the racial stereotypes it should be
fighting.
The ripoff account rests on generalizations
about black blues, and about other black music, that are offensively
wrong. Some black music is indeed raw, but some is--has always
been--exquisitely refined. Some is intensely sexual, made by
tough-sounding black men and black women who boast of their erotic
power. At least as often, relations between the sexes in black
music have all the emotional range you would expect of relations
between males and females anywhere. Charlie Spand (in Good Gal,
1929) doesn't tell his babe he's gonna put her down. He doesn't
have to get rollin' down the road, doesn't warn her she bettah
change her ways or else. He speaks with the very same direct,
cruel honestly that you hear in any culture when love grows cold:
You wonder why I treat you so,
You should have sense enough to know,
Good gal, good gal, I don't love you no more,
Good gal, good gal, I don't love you no more
--and the painful words are belied by
his beautiful, almost fragmentary piano. The guitar fills by
Josh White are complex, delicate figures, a thousand music miles
from the tough-guy licks that today form the public face of blues
music. And much more could be said in the same vein. Blues singers,
often as not, do not have slap-your-bitch deep he-man voices.
Often--and this goes for some of the genuine tough guys, like
Huddie Leadbetter--they have high voices, not deep, 'manly' ones.
The prevailing atmosphere of many blues
numbers is not raw defiance but--unsurprisingly--anxiety. Maceo
Merriweather is quite shaken to wake up and find his girlfriend
standing over him with a .45; he pleads for his life. The incomparable
Jimmy Yancey doesn't conjure up a violent or sex-charged world;
he evokes an atmosphere of quiet contemplation. And when Peetie
Wheatstraw sings sex, he doesn't come over like a big black stallion;
he has, as one critic noted, a 'lazy, arrogant' delivery, full
of irony and wit.
No doubt there is much to learn from
considering black blues as the product and possession of an ethnic
group. But familiarity with that music quickly proves that stereotypes
about the blues are as wrong as stereotypes about the race--and
crude histories of rock build on both these stereotypes. When
you begin to consider the music in all its diversity, you realize
that there it doesn't just involve a huge range of subject material,
mood, and presentation. It also involves a huge range of quality.
To tell the full story, you need to do a lot of something that
even good rock historians do very sparingly. You need to make
aesthetic judgements within the area of black music, just as
people habitually make them within the area of white music.
To put it bluntly, you can't trace the
careers of black and white music without acknowledging that some
blues 'artists'--even the most 'authentic'- are mediocre, and
some stink. This is what you would expect of any music played
by a large number of people who are themselves diverse. And
it is only by recognizing this range of quality, by distinguishing
the masters from the second- and third- and twelveth-raters,
that the great achievements of black music can be honored as
they deserve. No one can, with a straight face, put 'the blues'
up against Mozart or Beethoven. No amount of wishful thinking
will make, say, Sonny Terry or Furry Lewis, into great artists.
It is only when you admit how three or four black artists--among
them, I'd think, Robert Johnson and Little Walter--utterly dwarfed
those around them, that you can speak of black Mozarts and Beethovens.
And of course black audiences have always been ruthless in their
evaluations of second-raters: you won't find many black Sonny
Terry worshippers. On the other hand, Robert Johnson's contemporaries
said that he--the black Faust--must have sold his soul to the
devil to play like that.
Once aesthetic judgements are plugged
into musical history, a number of things become apparent, including
the absurdity of dating white attempts at blues from the mid-1950s.
What matters here is not that a few minor white artists like
Harmonica Frank mastered the black blues idiom to the extent
that passed for black among the black record-buying public.
The answers to "can a white man play the blues?" have
little interest compared to the real interplay between rhythm
and race.
Black blues and white music have intertwined
since before the dawn of recording history. Of course there
is no question but that the blues are black music, created by
blacks for blacks. But by the time the first blues--if you can
call it that--was recorded by the black nightclub singer Mamie
Smith in 1920, the blues were already something of a half-breed.(*)
Her orchestra, for instance, was probably the same one that backed
the white (and sometimes blackface) singer Sophie Tucker. It
was a jazz ensemble and quite far removed from blues roots. The
first recorded blues were therefore already 'sanitized'. This
may be part of the reason why one
writer on the history of the blues tactfully tells us that
"The first commercially successful
self-accompanied artist in the "race field" was Papa
Charlie Jackson..."
You could also say that Papa Charlie
Jackson was the first artist to record a blues not tailored to
the night-club environment of Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie
Smith. He did that in 1924. In the same year--before Blind Lemon
Jefferson, before Charley Patton, twelve years before Robert
Johnson--the white songster Uncle Dave Macon recorded Hill Billie
Blues. It was this song--a blues!--which brought the word 'hillbilly'
into music. Years before the earliest known masters of the blues
recorded, blues and country music were already interbreeding.
The intermingling of musical traditions
was not confined to the blues format. Papa Charley Jackson and
Uncle Dave Macon both recorded their numbers on banjo. This
was a kind of historical crossroads: not so long before that,
guitar was a white instrument, and banjo a black instrument.
So black people 'stole' Robert Johnson's instrument from the
whites, and bluegrass--not blues or rock--owes its soul to an
instrument 'stolen' from black people.
The commerce between black and white
music was not intermittent but constant. White musicians never
produced really first-rate blues--though Jimmie Rogers, recording
nine years before Robert Johnson, came fairly close. On the other
hand, white artists had developed their own version of the music,
nothing like a ripoff or a cover technique, long before the blues
had even begun to evolve into a precursor of rock and roll. Even
more important, the great black artists had long ago both appreciated
and incorporated white idioms into their music.
This should not be surprising. Black
artists--sometimes to the annoyance of their white fans and patrons--have
always shown a fondness for all kinds of white musical idioms.
The jug bands of the 1920's are one example. Another is Blind
Willie McTell, who covered such white tunes as "Pal of Mine"
and "Wabash Cannonball". In one remarkable number,
"Don't Say Goodbye", Leroy Carr does about half the
song as a perfectly nice but predictable blues and then--one
almost imagines him saying, "Oh, screw it"--finishes
the track as what can only be described as a country song. Some
of Washboard Sam's finest numbers, like "Good Old Cabbage
Greens", are as close to country as to blues. Black blues
musicians were people, not stereotypes. They loved music, all
kinds of music. They were not concerned with the racial purity
of their own work.
Even Robert Johnson, who more than anyone
else formed contemporary notions of the blues, was happy to play
little decidedly unbluesy jingles like "Hot Tamales".
Yet Robert Johnson had a fateful and perhaps fatal influence
on the development of the blues: he was so toweringly, utterly
brilliant, and his influence so overwhelmingly powerful, that
he did much to push the blues towards the stereotype under which
it suffers today. For one thing, Mississippi Delta Blues, which
itself showed great range in the works of earlier artists like
Charley Patton and King Solomon Hill, was all but reduced to
the work of the master who overshadowed his predecessors, themselves
artists of the highest calibre. For another, Robert Johnson became
virtually the single source of modern Chicago blues. Elmore
James, a superb artist, all but built his entire career on one
Johnson lick. Muddy Waters shaped the music by electrifying
some small portion of Robert Johnson's guitar work. The whole
rest of the blues--not only the blues of Texas, Atlanta, and
the Carolinas, but also the fine piano blues that fluorished
in Northern cities like Detroit and Chicago itself, became at
best a sideshow, more often, an obscurity. Paradoxically, Johnson's
very brilliance, his very inventiveness, ultimately impoverished
the music of which he was the greatest exponent. Virtually the
whole range of black blues was theoretically available well into
the 1950s, but it had a minimal public presence, even among blacks.
People wanted to hear it Robert Johnson style, even if they'd
never heard of the man.
More ominously, and increasingly, they
didn't want to hear it at all. By the time white musicians were
imitating the blues--not as they had done for decades, but in
that special way that produced rock and roll--the blues was on
its deathbed. The rock and rollers might have covered black material,
but they also gave it new life. Black people, apparently unwilling
to confirm expectations about their raw, sexual, violent nature,
had to a great extent gone on to other things. From just around
the time of Robert Johnson's last recordings in 1938, new trends
were taking over. That was the year Louis Jordan started recording.
His work was quick, slick, witty, and almost joyfully lighthearted
even when it tackled serious subjects. But it was also, at its
best, music of the highest quality, something that commanded
attention. If its approach was not so different from some of
the urban blues of the time, it was miles away from the aggressive,
ultraserious idiom that was on its way to becoming modern Chicago
blues. And black people as well as white loved it, just as they
loved that man who collaborated, not only with Jordan, but with
Jimmie Rogers--Louis Armstrong. From the jive of Louis Jordan
and the urban blues of the 1930s came rhythm and blues, usually
considered the precursor of rock and roll.
At about the same time another trend
in black music surfaced with the Ink Spots, who started recording
in 1935 and were best sellers from 1939 to 1943. They were the
first really famous black vocal group. Like Louis Jordan, they
may have been popular because they provided relief from the stark,
dark, rough blues which had begun to wear out its welcome. But
they also became popular because, like Louis Jordan, they were
damn good. They didn't produce a mere sell-out; they produced
something new and even beautiful.
The short of it is that whites did not
rip blues off in the 1950s. Blacks and whites played each other's
music as far back as we can hear, and each contributed to the
development of the others' music. And the blues did not develop
forever. It also narrowed, at least in public perceptions, and
declined. Meanwhile, blacks explored and forged other musical
paths, typically further and further away from the 'raw sexual'
stereotypes.
And here, as we approach the birth of
rock and roll, qualitative judgements become all the more important.
On the one hand, blacks increasingly turned away from hard-core
blues. This was partly obscured by the appearance of another
musical giant, Little Walter, who topped the R&B charts in
the early 1950s and made it seem as if Chicago blues was a true
art form, robust and musically nuanced. Not so. Chicago blues
involved many excellent artists like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells,
Magic Sam, Otis Span, and Elmore James. But it never again produced
anyone like Little Walter. Its best work was laced, not only
with clichés, but obvious and desperate efforts to avoid
them. There was no greatness, no beauty, and black audiences
turned their attention elsewhere. The music, after Little Walter's
masterpieces, failed to command a national black following, let
alone a white one. Little Walter--whose "My Babe"
in 1955 was the last Chicago blues to make number one on the
R&B charts--had a total of two number 1 R&B hits. So
did the Everly Brothers. Muddy Waters never made it past number
4. Unlike Elvis and Nat King Cole, not one Chicago blues player
appears in the top 60 R&B artists' listings. There are still
many fine black blues musicians, but their music is going nowhere.
The blues has left a beautiful corpse, but it is dead.
What then of rhythm and blues--not the
catchall category of today, but the classic numbers that preceded
rock and roll? If the white kids didn't steal the blues, did
they steal R&B?
There are four problems with any such
claim.
The first is that some of the very greatest
R&B hits of the early 1950s--Little Willie Littlefield's
"Kansas City", Big Mamma Thornton's "Hound Dog",
Charles Brown's "Hard Times", The Robins' "Riot
in Cell Block 9"--were written by two whites, Jerry Lieber
and Mike Stoller. They were not alone--Nat King Cole's wonderful
Route 66 also had white authorship.(**) Johnny Otis, a white
band leader who lived as if he was black, was central to the
careers of several important R&B artists. Moreover, an astounding
number of the greatest R&B hits came from white producers
like Sam Phillips and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records--this
at a time when the studio owners didn't just sign papers and
rake in cash, but would help out with the writing chores, clap
out a beat, or even join in on a chorus. It was precisely the
bluesier, rougher sort of R&B--the kind that had the most
influence on rock and roll--that also had the most influential
white involvement.
The second problem is that Elvis' original
Sun sessions, the sessions that make rock and roll, were not
mere covers. To varying degrees, they radically changed the
quality of the music: his performances were neither R&B nor
sanitized pseudo-R&B, but something with a more nervously
frantic, less precisely rhythmic, with a pronounced country sensibility.
The third is that, whether or not whites can play the blues,
they certainly mastered R&B before rock and roll. Moon Mullican's
compositions--recorded with King Record's black studio band--are
ample evidence of that. Finally, when the ripoff account is offered,
you have to pay close attention to chronology. Elvis first recorded
in 1954. The black 'kings' of rock and roll--Chuck Berry, Little
Richard, Bo Diddley--recorded later. Even Big Joe Turner's unambiguously
rock numbers came after Elvis', and were a wonderful but also
a patent attempt to cash in on the new sensibility.
Beyond arguments about who took what
from whom, something more fundamental shows how the ripoff account
is an injustice to black music. As black artists and black audiences
moved away from the blues, they did not simply move towards R&B
in the narrow sense of blues-oriented electric combos. They
did not gravitate towards the tough stuff, nor was it here that
they truly excelled in some way they could call entirely their
own. On the contrary, the greatest achievements in black R&B
were not the over-the-top rough-hewn numbers of someone like
Howlin' Wolf, who never made the R&B charts. Black music
prospered in two forms.
First, there were the exquisitely urbane
and sophisticated piano numbers of people like Cecil Gant, Willie
Mabon, Camille Howard, Amos Milburn, and others. This music was
very popular with black audiences, but white never gave it the
attention accorded to Big Joe Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Big Mama
Thornton, and similar artists. It seems that white audiences
would rather lavish praise on black artists who fit the stereotypes--the
big mama, the animal, the 300-pound night club bouncer. It is
telling that when Joe Turner recorded with one of the greatest
exponents of subtle, intricate, refined piano blues--Pete Johnson--he
got nothing like the response he received in the persona of a
big lusty black guy.
Then there was the sweet, sometimes naïve,
unbluesy world of doo-wop. It is not in violent, sexual music
that postwar black artists achieved fame and excellence. Perhaps
whites can sing the blues, but they never quite equalled the
either the elegance of the postwar black pianists, or the utter
sweetness of the vocal groups.
Doo-wop and its precursors drew on gospel
and a variety of white music, including barbership quartets.
They almost always avoided blues, but 'stole' all sorts of white
pop material, and there are even musical versions of Joyce Kilmer's
"Trees". The earlier groups were often composed of
highly professional, very disciplined adults: there were not
only practices, but fines imposed for those who missed them.
Yet doo-wop has been trivialized as the more or less inconsequential
music of cute but amateurish high-school kids. The magnificent
recordings of the Orioles, Dominoes, Flamingos, Five Keys, Five
Royales and other groups will not receive the broad recognition
they deserve as long as white audiences care only for black popular
music that fits the tough, sexual stereotype.
It was doo-wop--sweet, beautiful, innocent,
gentle music--that set black youth on fire. The black counterpart
of the rockabilly bands that kids across the South assembled
had nothing to do with the blues, nothing to do even with the
hard-edged R&B that influenced white rock and roll. While
white kids were forming hard-driving combos playing in a blues
idiom, black kids in their tens of thousands were forming vocal
groups whose music had left the blues far, far behind. Black
rock and roll artists had far more impact on white youth than
on black youth, whose gospel-drenched harmonies fed into Motown
and soul. While white musicians mined a blues tradition that
no longer lived in black sensibilities, it was doo wop that really
ruled the streets of the ghettos. Black musicians by and large
wouldn't have been caught dead covering Muddy Waters and Robert
Johnson like the Rolling Stones, and the leading black rockers
of the fifties--Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry--never
did nearly as well on the black music charts as Elvis. Far exceeding
all of these on the black charts were Ray Charles and Fats Domino,
whose relaxed style fits awkwardly with the 'they stole black
raw sexuality' historians. When the great harpist Sonny Boy Williamson
(Rice Miller) at last attained some popular success, it was with
those whitest of black music afficionados, the Yardbirds. The
idea that he would have played with any popular black group recording
at the same time is simply inconceivable.
None of this is in any way to deny what
clichéd histories of rock and roll affirm: that in music
as in everything else, blacks were shamefully robbed and exploited.
Black artists encountered racism almost everywhere they went,
and, though black record producers also exploited black musicians,
most of the ripoffs were at the hands of white recording entrepreneurs.
But the injustices of the ripoff account, which all but dismiss
the true geniuses of black music as mere instances of the black
stereotype, are as outrageous as the very robberies so justly
condemned.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*) You could say the same for country
music. The very first song on the Grand Old Opry in 1926 was
"Pan American Blues", performed by the black harmonica
player DeFord Bailey.
(**) As for black songwriters, perhaps
the greatest of them was Otis Blackwell. Here is his account
of his musical formation:
"TBE--Who were some of your early
influences?"
"OB--Tex Ritter was my idol. In
my neighborhood there was a movie theatre called the Tompkins.
I used to sit from morning to night watching cowboy pictures.
I grew up with cowboys--Tex was my man. I would have preferred
to sing country but when I went out I used to sing 'Ill Get Along
Somehow,' by Larry Darnell, that was one of the songs I enjoyed
doing. Larry Darnell and Chuck Willis were two other idols."
see http://www.kyleesplin.com/
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those
of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
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Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
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