Stories about and about the blues

From Michael Groth

The history of the blues is varied and ambivalent. In the 19th century, music offered slaves the opportunity to set a counterpoint to their daily burden and oppression. Today most of the blues are played and heard by whites.

Even the slave owners realized that money could be made with the performances of the Afro-Americans. This cultural appropriation continued until at least the seventies of the last century – with corresponding resistance and protests. From Paul Whiteman to the Rolling Stones, countless white artists have used the blues scheme for their music. The African-American audience withdrew.

The music of the black working class

“The Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen” was the name of a concert, the proceeds of which went to a foundation that aims to bring the blues closer to American youth. This is necessary, especially in the USA. The young listen to rap, hip hop and rhythm and blues in their various forms, the middle and older generation, especially Afro-Americans, associate the blues with bad times of racist oppression and economic hardship. According to Bruce Iglauer, president of Aligator Records, a blues label in Chicago, that’s not all.

“Blues has always been the music of black people from the working class, sometimes from the economic lower classes. Blues was frowned upon. It’s not jazz, not pop and not gospel. It is music that people drink and dance to. Or they bring each other around. Or they have sex. “

The economic background of the blues

Ronald Radano is a music ethnologist at the University of Madison, Wisconsin / USA. He wrote a book on so-called “Race and Black Music” called “Lying up a nation”. In it he explains the economic background against which the appreciation of Afro-American music arose.

“I think that it is largely an economic question. It goes back to the 1940s and 50s of the 19th century. That was when” Negroe music “, as it was called at the time, was first mentioned. Musician Performed in the southern slave societies in what I would call public culture. They began to work semi-professionally, they made money for their owners. They were rented out to entertain people. The musicians remained the property of the Slaveholders, we are faced with a situation where it is a form of human property that is being sold, but which is also kept by the black person.

Time and again it has been shown that practices that develop in an impoverished Afro-American social and economic class drive the emergence of a predominantly white practice. This then becomes very popular among whites. The African American audience turns away. We know this pattern from the ragtime era. As soon as black musicians create valuable music, it also attracts white musicians and a white audience. The African Americans then move away and develop something else. Or take the blues. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the blues were very popular among African Americans in Chicago and Detroit. The popularity of the blues among largely white college students, which has since expanded, became not just an opportunity for black musicians to make a living. It also became a sign of devaluation as the blues became mainstream and the African American audience moved away from it. “

Blues as a role model for the Rolling Stones

Why were the black musicians role models for the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and all the others? They saw a value in this music, a quality of which they thought: Something is happening here that does not happen elsewhere. A kind of expropriation of black music begins, a new kind of competition on an economic level that black musicians are losing. It was assumed that black music was interchangeable like any other form of commodity, such as soap or potato chips.

But black music is not interchangeable. Because black music is so important to the formation of African American culture, African Americans rightly say: This is our music. They consider black music to be part of their heritage and consider whites’ performance to be some kind of theft.

The blues conquers Europe

In the 50s and 60s of the last century, the blues migrated to Europe, so to speak. Especially in England, young bands saw the black Americans as role models that had to be followed musically. Perhaps the best-known example is the Rolling Stones. One of her blues songs is “You Gotta Move” by Mississippi Fred McDowell, born in 1906, died in 1972.

Musically admired, economically discriminated

There were places in the southern United States where racial segregation, which was practiced until the late 1960s, was musically irrelevant. Black and white studio musicians played together at Stax in Memphis and in the popular production locations around Muscle Shoals, Alabama. For example with the Allmann Brothers and their guitarist Duane Allmann. According to the music scientist Radano, this did not detract from economic discrimination. The question of cultural property had been controversial since the 1920s at the latest. Also and especially among black musicians.

Black Facing

In the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th century “Medicine Shows” roamed the United States. Quacks sold products that were supposed to help against all physical and mental ailments. Musicians were hired to entertain the audience. The ethnomusicologist Radano describes the social role of the so-called “ministrelcy”.

“The phenomenon of painted black faces in white performers is a northern phenomenon. It begins in the 1940s and 50s, especially in New York City. This” minstrelcy “was particularly popular among Irish immigrants. Some historians say that Irish immigrants who have been exploited and mistreated, distinguish themselves from another underclass – blacks – wearing a black face, rattling and making fun of them like an African American caricature, is a way of getting attention The Irish said, ‘Hey, we mock you, we belong to a privileged class of whites.’ This behavior spread in the US in the mid-19th century. There was little difference in the programs of the white musicians with their black faces and the programs of the Afro-Americans. Socially, of course, it was different. In the 80s and 90s the African American musicians in circuses and medical shows, within a very hostile white racist society. “

The blues are moving to town

In the 20th century, the blues conquered major American cities. According to Ronald Radano, this was not without economic consequences.

“After the first great wave of African American migrants to the cities of the north in the second and third decades of the 20th century, black musicians initially kept to themselves. If the Jim Crow laws did not prevent this, they still tried to advance Performing to a white audience. They paid better there. It was a very difficult way to make a living, but it was better than working in steel mills and in mass production industries.

During these years “Race Music” was born. What sounds like a hostile or contemptuous term was actually a label. These were recordings that were made for a black audience. A new type of property developed among African American consumers. People bought these records because they loved the music. The record industry realized that there was a market here. There have been electrical recordings since 1925. The sound got better, you could record everything with a microphone. This especially helped the blues singers. The sound developed. African American jazz musicians saw the economic value of white symphonic jazz and began to adopt this type of music. Take the Fletcher Henderson Band. In 1924 their sound was clearly shaped by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. But Henderson made something completely different out of it. “

The blues is going electric

Bruce Iglauer, head of the blues label “Aligator” describes the path from acoustically influenced country blues to urban, electrically amplified tones:

“From the 1920s through the 1960s, the blues were pressed into singles for a black crowd. There were radio stations that catered specifically to African Americans. People like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis heard and built on this music It was a different world for someone like me from the white middle class. Since the folk boom in the 1950s, some blues artists were known to white audiences, and in the 1960s there were albums by Big Bill Broonzy and by Leadbelly. That was acoustic music. Electrically amplified sounds were not accepted by us at the time. That was different with the black audience. Muddy Waters took over the baton and presented his electric blues to the white audience at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. “

The future of the blues

Bruce Iglauer believes in the future of the genre under changed conditions:

“We are very aware that although the blues is alive, our audience is small. The music is not part of the popular mainstream, it is more traditional. But today people are moving further and further away from the situations that bring the blues into life The blues came into being in the most difficult of conditions for African Americans. It was created as a consolation. But it wasn’t about wallowing in pain. Blues was music to celebrate, it was about community, the pain was overcome.

The blues has now become a kind of world music. There are good blues musicians in Japan and Germany, to name just two examples. But she and I understand the blues differently. We didn’t grow up poor and seedy in the southern United States. I come from a middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. I didn’t know about the blues, but the blues speaks so loud and clear that even people who didn’t grow up in its culture can feel and understand it.

Its magical. We can perform the blues as long as we portray it through the filter of our own lives and not trying to imitate others. I despise people who try to sing like Howlin ‘Wolf. When I hear people try to sing in what I call false black voices, I find it insulting. But if they sing songs that tell from their own lives, in their natural voices, that’s fine. “

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