Article on Buddy Guy Including the Question of White Musicians Benefitting From/Appropriating Black Blues Music(ians), Stones-Related Content, interesting

OK, I had to break this down into three threads as I had trouble posting it as one, I think it was too much for the system. Perhaps BV can put it together in one thread tomorrow.

Yes, this article is interesting and provocative. Is is from the March 11. 2019 issue of The New Yorker. Almost makes you question your loyalty to the Stones.

This is a lengthy article, so to make it a little easier, I have excerpted some of what I see as the most potent parts which is what you find below. And, to narrow it down even further, I have put in bold especially significant parts and in red the key question relating to the Stones. Here goes ...


Buddy Guy Is Keeping the Blues Alive
Is the legendary guitarist and singer the last of his kind?


In the sixties, just as Guy was reaching a certain stature in the blues world, something curious began to happen. White people happened—white blues fans and white blues musicians. For its first half century, the blues was popular entertainment for, and of, black people. Not completely, but almost. Guy told me that, when he played clubs in Chicago during the late fifties, “if you saw a white face, it was almost always a cop.”

With time, it became clear that some white kids, including Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, were in the audience, watching Guy the way he’d once watched Guitar Slim. At the same time, the best of the British Invasion expressed a kind of community awe toward the American urban blues. When Guy first toured Great Britain, in 1965, all the white English guitar heroes—Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton—flocked backstage to ask him how he did this and how he did that. Guy had spent so much of his recording career backing up other musicians that he was shocked that people knew his name, much less the nuances of his work. But they did. As a young singer, Rod Stewart was so in thrall to Guy that he asked to carry his guitars.

“Our aim was to turn people on to the blues,” Keith Richards, who had formed a friendship with Mick Jagger by trading Chess blues records, has said of the early days of the Rolling Stones. “If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.” When the Stones were invited to play on the American television show “Shindig!,” they insisted on appearing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, who had never received that kind of exposure. They invited Ike and Tina Turner, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and B. B. King to open for them.

And yet there was something unsettling about the spectacle of the Stones or Eric Clapton playing turbocharged versions of Robert Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Muddy Waters to fifty thousand white kids a night, most of them oblivious of the black origins of those songs. Clapton, for one, experienced a measure of guilt and, eventually, acted on it. “I felt like I was stealing music and got caught at it,” he told the music critic Donald E. Wilcock. “It’s one of the reasons Cream broke up, because I thought we were getting away with murder, and people were lapping it up. Doing those long, extended bullshit solos which would just go off into overindulgence. And people thought it was just marvelous.” In 1976, Clapton went on a drunken, racist rant onstage, in Birmingham—an incident, he later said in an elaborate apology, that “sabotaged everything.” Clapton never stopped playing the blues. In 2004, he put out an entire album covering Robert Johnson songs; it sold two million copies.

Some critics, notably the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), found the prospect of white blues players making a fortune enraging. In “Black Music,” he wrote, “They take from us all the way up the line. Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anyone they were Black either.”
“Go wipe your feet on the neighbor’s doormat.”

Black performers almost never echoed that sentiment publicly; Waters and Guy were usually quick to express friendship with the Stones, Clapton, and the rest. Yet hints of their disappointment came through. “It seems to me,” Guy said in the nineteen-seventies to an interviewer for the magazine Living Blues, “all you have to do is be white and just play a guitar—you don’t have to have the soul—you gets farther than the black man.”

It also hurt that black audiences, particularly younger black audiences, were moving away from the Chicago blues. B. B. King told Guy that he cried after he was booed by such an audience. “He said that his own people looked on him like he was a farmer wearing overalls and smoking a corncob pipe,” Guy recounted in his memoir. “They saw him as a grandfather playing their grandfather’s music.”

As late as 1967, Guy drove a tow truck during the day and played the clubs at night. The hours were punishing, and high blood pressure and divorce followed. (Guy married twice and divorced twice; he has eight adult children.) In Germany, he played at the American Folk Blues Festival, but he got booed, he said, because the audience thought he “looked too young, dressed too slick, and my hair was up in a do. Someone said he was also disappointed that I didn’t carry no whiskey bottle with me onstage. They thought bluesmen needed to be raggedy, old, and drink.”

Expectations placed constraints on his recordings, too. As sympathetic as the Chess brothers were to black musicians, and as shrewd as they’d been in marketing their work, they had been reluctant to have Guy unleash the wildness in his playing. As the singer-songwriter Dr. John said of Guy’s early records, “You feel a guy in there trying to burst out, and he’s jammed into a little bitty part of himself that ain’t him.”

Elijah Wald, a historian of the blues who has written biographies of Josh White and Robert Johnson, told me, “I feel like Buddy Guy is somebody who, due to American racism, never quite reached his potential. He could have been a major figure, but he was pigeonholed as a museum piece, even in 1965. . . . Nobody from Warner Bros. was coming to Buddy Guy and saying, ‘Here’s a million dollars, what can you do?’ ” Bruce Iglauer, the owner of Alligator Records, a blues label in Chicago, agrees. Buddy Guy was one of a small handful of “giants,” he said, who helped define the blues but never got the chance to become household names: “The door was never open to them at the time when they were most likely to walk through. By the time the doors were opened by Eric Clapton and the Stones, these guys were already in their thirties and forties.”


peace/plexi

Now go to part 2 in a separate thread...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-11 10:53 by bv.

Part 1:

Buddy Guy Is Keeping the Blues Alive
Is the legendary guitarist and singer the last of his kind?


In the sixties, just as Guy was reaching a certain stature in the blues world, something curious began to happen. White people happened—white blues fans and white blues musicians. For its first half century, the blues was popular entertainment for, and of, black people. Not completely, but almost. Guy told me that, when he played clubs in Chicago during the late fifties, “if you saw a white face, it was almost always a cop.”

With time, it became clear that some white kids, including Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, were in the audience, watching Guy the way he’d once watched Guitar Slim. At the same time, the best of the British Invasion expressed a kind of community awe toward the American urban blues. When Guy first toured Great Britain, in 1965, all the white English guitar heroes—Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton—flocked backstage to ask him how he did this and how he did that. Guy had spent so much of his recording career backing up other musicians that he was shocked that people knew his name, much less the nuances of his work. But they did. As a young singer, Rod Stewart was so in thrall to Guy that he asked to carry his guitars.

“Our aim was to turn people on to the blues,” Keith Richards, who had formed a friendship with Mick Jagger by trading Chess blues records, has said of the early days of the Rolling Stones. “If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.” When the Stones were invited to play on the American television show “Shindig!,” they insisted on appearing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, who had never received that kind of exposure. They invited Ike and Tina Turner, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and B. B. King to open for them.

And yet there was something unsettling about the spectacle of the Stones or Eric Clapton playing turbocharged versions of Robert Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Muddy Waters to fifty thousand white kids a night, most of them oblivious of the black origins of those songs. Clapton, for one, experienced a measure of guilt and, eventually, acted on it. “I felt like I was stealing music and got caught at it,” he told the music critic Donald E. Wilcock. “It’s one of the reasons Cream broke up, because I thought we were getting away with murder, and people were lapping it up. Doing those long, extended bullshit solos which would just go off into overindulgence. And people thought it was just marvelous.” In 1976, Clapton went on a drunken, racist rant onstage, in Birmingham—an incident, he later said in an elaborate apology, that “sabotaged everything.” Clapton never stopped playing the blues. In 2004, he put out an entire album covering Robert Johnson songs; it sold two million copies.

Some critics, notably the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), found the prospect of white blues players making a fortune enraging. In “Black Music,” he wrote, “They take from us all the way up the line. Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anyone they were Black either.”
“Go wipe your feet on the neighbor’s doormat.”

Black performers almost never echoed that sentiment publicly; Waters and Guy were usually quick to express friendship with the Stones, Clapton, and the rest. Yet hints of their disappointment came through. “It seems to me,” Guy said in the nineteen-seventies to an interviewer for the magazine Living Blues, “all you have to do is be white and just play a guitar—you don’t have to have the soul—you gets farther than the black man.”

It also hurt that black audiences, particularly younger black audiences, were moving away from the Chicago blues. B. B. King told Guy that he cried after he was booed by such an audience. “He said that his own people looked on him like he was a farmer wearing overalls and smoking a corncob pipe,” Guy recounted in his memoir. “They saw him as a grandfather playing their grandfather’s music.”

As late as 1967, Guy drove a tow truck during the day and played the clubs at night. The hours were punishing, and high blood pressure and divorce followed. (Guy married twice and divorced twice; he has eight adult children.) In Germany, he played at the American Folk Blues Festival, but he got booed, he said, because the audience thought he “looked too young, dressed too slick, and my hair was up in a do. Someone said he was also disappointed that I didn’t carry no whiskey bottle with me onstage. They thought bluesmen needed to be raggedy, old, and drink.”

Expectations placed constraints on his recordings, too. As sympathetic as the Chess brothers were to black musicians, and as shrewd as they’d been in marketing their work, they had been reluctant to have Guy unleash the wildness in his playing. As the singer-songwriter Dr. John said of Guy’s early records, “You feel a guy in there trying to burst out, and he’s jammed into a little bitty part of himself that ain’t him.”

Elijah Wald, a historian of the blues who has written biographies of Josh White and Robert Johnson, told me, “I feel like Buddy Guy is somebody who, due to American racism, never quite reached his potential. He could have been a major figure, but he was pigeonholed as a museum piece, even in 1965. . . . Nobody from Warner Bros. was coming to Buddy Guy and saying, ‘Here’s a million dollars, what can you do?’ ” Bruce Iglauer, the owner of Alligator Records, a blues label in Chicago, agrees. Buddy Guy was one of a small handful of “giants,” he said, who helped define the blues but never got the chance to become household names: “The door was never open to them at the time when they were most likely to walk through. By the time the doors were opened by Eric Clapton and the Stones, these guys were already in their thirties and forties.”


Part 2:

In the late nineteen-sixties, Guy recounts, Leonard Chess called him into his office. “I’ve always thought that I knew what I was doing,” he told Guy. “But when it came to you, I was wrong. . . . I held you back. I said you were playing too much. I thought you were too wild in your style.” Then Chess said, “I’m gonna bend over so you can kick my ass. Because you’ve been trying to play this ever since you got here, and I was too @#$%& dumb to listen.”

Chess’s failure could have stayed with Guy as a bitter memory. But he has turned the episode into a tidy, triumphant anecdote. He refuses any hint of resentment: “My mother always said, ‘What’s for you, you gonna get it. What’s not for you, don’t look for it.’ ”

The richness of a form, however, does not guarantee its continued development or popularity. Guy didn’t begin to make real money until the early nineteen-nineties, when he was nearing sixty. Like Sonny Rollins in jazz, Buddy Guy was now in the business of being a legend, an enduring giant in a dwindling realm. In 1991, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” an album on the British label Silvertone, sold well and won a Grammy; not long afterward, two more albums of his, “Feels Like Rain” and “Slippin’ In,” also won Grammys. He began playing bigger halls around the world. His most recent album is titled, almost imploringly, “The Blues Is Alive and Well,” and one of the cuts is “A Few Good Years”:

I been mighty lucky
I travel everywhere
Made a ton of money
Spent it like I don’t care
A few good years
Is all I need right now
Please, please, lord
Send a few good years on down


Part 3:

Guy still performs at least a hundred and thirty nights a year, including a “residency” at his club every January.

Both of his ex-wives and his extended family came for Thanksgiving. Guy did all the cooking. He loves to cook. When I came by late on a Sunday morning, he was in the kitchen making a big pot of gumbo. Much of the animal and vegetable kingdoms simmered in his pot: crab, chicken, pork sausage, sun-dried shrimp, okra, bell pepper, onion, celery.

An enormous jukebox in the den offered selections from pop, gospel, rock, soul. “I listen to everything,” Guy said. “I’ll hear a lick and it’ll grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in there, everything I ever heard and stole from.”

As we looked at a row of black-and-white photographs, it was clear that the shadows of Guy’s elders in the blues never leave his mind. “I hope to keep the blues alive and well as long as I am able to play a few notes,” he told me. “I want to keep it so that if you accidentally walk in on me you say, ‘Wow, I don’t hear that on radio anymore.’ I want to keep that alive, and hope it can get picked up and carry it on.

“But who knows?” he continued. “The blues might just fade away. Even jazz, which was so popular when I first got here—all of that disappeared.”

In the late nineteen-sixties, Guy recounts, Leonard Chess called him into his office. “I’ve always thought that I knew what I was doing,” he told Guy. “But when it came to you, I was wrong. . . . I held you back. I said you were playing too much. I thought you were too wild in your style.” Then Chess said, “I’m gonna bend over so you can kick my ass. Because you’ve been trying to play this ever since you got here, and I was too @#$%& dumb to listen.”

Chess’s failure could have stayed with Guy as a bitter memory. But he has turned the episode into a tidy, triumphant anecdote. He refuses any hint of resentment: “My mother always said, ‘What’s for you, you gonna get it. What’s not for you, don’t look for it.’ ”

The richness of a form, however, does not guarantee its continued development or popularity. Guy didn’t begin to make real money until the early nineteen-nineties, when he was nearing sixty. Like Sonny Rollins in jazz, Buddy Guy was now in the business of being a legend, an enduring giant in a dwindling realm. In 1991, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” an album on the British label Silvertone, sold well and won a Grammy; not long afterward, two more albums of his, “Feels Like Rain” and “Slippin’ In,” also won Grammys. He began playing bigger halls around the world. His most recent album is titled, almost imploringly, “The Blues Is Alive and Well,” and one of the cuts is “A Few Good Years”:

I been mighty lucky
I travel everywhere
Made a ton of money
Spent it like I don’t care
A few good years
Is all I need right now
Please, please, lord
Send a few good years on down


peace/plexi

Now go on to part 3, the finish

Shouldn't the title of this thread start wit OT.

Guy still performs at least a hundred and thirty nights a year, including a “residency” at his club every January.

Both of his ex-wives and his extended family came for Thanksgiving. Guy did all the cooking. He loves to cook. When I came by late on a Sunday morning, he was in the kitchen making a big pot of gumbo. Much of the animal and vegetable kingdoms simmered in his pot: crab, chicken, pork sausage, sun-dried shrimp, okra, bell pepper, onion, celery.

An enormous jukebox in the den offered selections from pop, gospel, rock, soul. “I listen to everything,” Guy said. “I’ll hear a lick and it’ll grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in there, everything I ever heard and stole from.”

As we looked at a row of black-and-white photographs, it was clear that the shadows of Guy’s elders in the blues never leave his mind. “I hope to keep the blues alive and well as long as I am able to play a few notes,” he told me. “I want to keep it so that if you accidentally walk in on me you say, ‘Wow, I don’t hear that on radio anymore.’ I want to keep that alive, and hope it can get picked up and carry it on.

“But who knows?” he continued. “The blues might just fade away. Even jazz, which was so popular when I first got here—all of that disappeared.”


It now must go to a fourth thread, don't know why I am having such trouble.


peace/plexi

For the love of God Plexi...
Next time just post the link.





It also hurt that black audiences, particularly younger black audiences, were moving away from the Chicago blues. B. B. King told Guy that he cried after he was booed by such an audience. “He said that his own people looked on him like he was a farmer wearing overalls and smoking a corncob pipe,” Guy recounted in his memoir. “They saw him as a grandfather playing their grandfather’s music.”


Full Buddy Guy New Yorker Article



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-11 16:09 by Kurt.

not finished

I just closed all my windows and did a cold, dead boot, fired it up again, and I am STILL having problems, so I quit for today. Maybe tomorrow I can get all of it together in one thread and delete the multiple threads, maybe with BV's help.

You now can all be happy, I am ceasing and desisting for the evening.


PEACE/plexi

We appreciate all your efforts!

Meanwhile, Exile Stones just gave me some advice on my Test - Not Working thread but I have tried what Exile said, still having problems. I may yet be able to get it into one thread tonight assuming Exile continues to guide me along.


plexi

It's not clear whether reposting entire articles on websites (versus just posting a link, which is okay) is fair use.

[www.broadcastlawblog.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-11 05:17 by marianna.

Quote
marianna
It's not clear whether reposting entire articles on websites (versus just posting a link, which is okay) is fair use.

[www.broadcastlawblog.com]

This is not the full article, just extensive but selective copying and pasting. In any event, people on this board do paste full articles here all the time.


plexi

Too much text. Better to write a short introduction or a summary and then add a link. Now it only looks disjointed. You don't even know what to comment on.

Quote
Stoneage
Too much text. Better to write a short introduction or a summary and then add a link. Now it only looks disjointed. You don't even know what to comment on.

I might agree. If you get a lot of text then it is hard to understand. Posting an abstract of the essentials, then a link, would be my recommendation.

Bjornulf

The Rolling Stones were mostly about love and respect for the music and the musicians. Those blues guys were their idols. They wanted to play the music they loved which then became, mostly fuelled by Brian's obsessive nature, a drive to bring the blues to the masses. They were successful in that mission.

It is not their fault that the world was the way it was when they formed nor is it their fault that the public didn't buy or revere the original artists as much as them. Even with some controversial moments about race in their music, I would say they changed things for the better.

...

In controversial matters like this, the apparent victim is often seen as beyond criticism, but...

I would say that with this quote, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) shows that perhaps he didn't quite get The Rolling Stones...

“They take from us all the way up the line. Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anyone they were Black either.”

What is the difference? Love and respect.

And for all the talk of stealing something that isn't theirs. Buddy Guy, who seems to get The Rolling Stones, essentially describes both himself and them in this quote.

“I listen to everything. I’ll hear a lick and it’ll grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in there, everything I ever heard and stole from.”

...

Ancestry DNA results would throw so many spanners in to this kind of racial controversy. [www.youtube.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-11 12:16 by His Majesty.

There's lots of people - black and white - that are keeping the blues alive.

I recommend:

a) Keb Mo
b) Taj Mahal
c) Kenny Wayne Shepherd
d) Joe Bonamassa (though he kinda annoys me sometimes and I don't really know why)

as for the rest:

Blacks in America (and the world) got screwed over in a lot of ways and music was one of them. Their music is the root of basically all modern music and they've never been the primary beneficiaries of that. I think people like the Stones (and others) try to recognize that in their way.

The weird part is how much slavery and getting f'd over was part of the evolution and creation of "black" music - from spirituals to gospel to blues (to rap in the modern era).

It's horrible to say, but would "black music" have been the same without the experience of slavery (and getting screwed over after)?

I mean, so much of early "black music" was rooted in the slave-and-post-slavery experience. They took African musical traditions and fused them w/ their situation....and without that, would we have all the music we love today?

Africans & African-American contributed so much to US (and world) culture, it is absurd...and the lack of recognition is even more absurd.

Quote
stickyfingers101
Their music is the root of basically all modern music...

"their music" It's far from as straight forward as that. Whites are part of the story and had influence on it through out it's development.

"all modern music" is made up of music from a vast number of different cultures and technological developments. For example, think of the huge affect of magnetic tape has had on music of all kinds and then consider where it was invented and who developed it further.

The enforced conversion of, for example, black Muslims by slave owners to Christianity and how that influences things in the future from spirituals to the 'soul' of the blues.

[oxfordre.com]

"By the 1830s, slaveholders in the United States responded to slave rebellions by significantly enhancing the use of religion for social control, and this threatened the continuity of Islam. More aggressive efforts to convert blacks to Christianity also undermined the continuity of the Islamic tradition among enslaved Africans."

Their music? There's no racial, religious or national purity in any of this.

Has Buddy Guy become a Rolling Stone

White English bands, like The Rolling Stones, revived the blues in the sixties. And made up a new, white, audience for the old masters. I don't know if you can claim that the white groups
stole the music and the audience. The black public had moved on by then. Nowadays the blues is in the same predicament as jazz music. Still somewhat vital, but not for the big masses.

Sure, Buddy was under appreciated in the 60s and beyond. He is obviously a MAJOR influence on Jimi Hendrix. But, hey, he's big now. He's pretty much the blues survivor. His new album is fantastic, and he's headlining the Hollywood Bowl August 7th. Everything in its time.

I highly recommend Buddy Guy's autobiography "When I Left Home: My Story" which goes into a lot more detail and has some great first-hand anecdotes of many of the blues greats. He was very happy to be embraced by white kids, including the "hippy free-love girls". He also puts to rest the story of Muddy Waters painting the ceiling at Chess Records although he does love the Stones.

Saw Buddy with Jeff Beck a couple of years ago and it was stellar.

Quote
His Majesty

Quote
stickyfingers101
Their music is the root of basically all modern music...

"their music" It's far from as straight forward as that. Whites are part of the story and had influence on it through out it's development.

"all modern music" is made up of music from a vast number of different cultures and technological developments. For example, think of the huge affect of magnetic tape has had on music of all kinds and then consider where it was invented and who developed it further.

The enforced conversion of, for example, black Muslims by slave owners to Christianity and how that influences things in the future from spirituals to the 'soul' of the blues.

[oxfordre.com]

"By the 1830s, slaveholders in the United States responded to slave rebellions by significantly enhancing the use of religion for social control, and this threatened the continuity of Islam. More aggressive efforts to convert blacks to Christianity also undermined the continuity of the Islamic tradition among enslaved Africans."

Their music? There's no racial, religious or national purity in any of this.

I don't think you read my entire post as I clearly acknowledged the role of the experience of slavery.

However, to deny that the primary influence of spirituals, gospel and blues is "african" and/or "african american" is what is called cultural imperialism.

magnetic tape? yeah...whites (or others) probably created a lot of things that helped music along.

But, I'm sorry...the music itself is African and/or African-American at its roots....any discussion of "racial purity doesn't exist" is not seeing the forest for the trees.

they're called "Negro Spirituals" for a reason, dude.

This set (comes in audio and DVD formats) is a great study of the Blues:



[www.amazon.com]

[www.amazon.com]

[www.youtube.com]

[www.youtube.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-11 22:31 by bleedingman.

Quote
stickyfingers101


I don't think you read my entire post as I clearly acknowledged the role of the experience of slavery.

However, to deny that the primary influence of spirituals, gospel and blues is "african" and/or "african american" is what is called cultural imperialism.

magnetic tape? yeah...whites (or others) probably created a lot of things that helped music along.

But, I'm sorry...the music itself is African and/or African-American at its roots....any discussion of "racial purity doesn't exist" is not seeing the forest for the trees.

they're called "Negro Spirituals" for a reason, dude.

I read it all. Just highlighted a couple of points for further comment.

It's not cultural imperialism, it's noting the intertwined journey of race, religion, culture and world events.

"Their music..." That's a huge over simplification.

Quote
His Majesty

Quote
stickyfingers101


I don't think you read my entire post as I clearly acknowledged the role of the experience of slavery.

However, to deny that the primary influence of spirituals, gospel and blues is "african" and/or "african american" is what is called cultural imperialism.

magnetic tape? yeah...whites (or others) probably created a lot of things that helped music along.

But, I'm sorry...the music itself is African and/or African-American at its roots....any discussion of "racial purity doesn't exist" is not seeing the forest for the trees.

they're called "Negro Spirituals" for a reason, dude.

I read it all. Just highlighted a couple of points for further comment.

It's not cultural imperialism, it's noting the intertwined journey of race, religion, culture and world events.

"Their music..." That's a huge over simplification.

I don't mean "their music" in a genetic-DNA sense, which would clearly be simplifying the complexities of "race"

I think you are confusing DNA-genetic "race" with what was defined as "black" (or white) in what was a segregated society.

Segregation in the US was "White" or "Black" for centuries - there was nothing "complex" about the system at all...you were one or the other and had to live with the realities of that.

It was this very simplistic system of segregation (and treatment therein) that gave rise to "Black Culture" (or better stated - African-American Culture).

sure, there were lots of complexities within each racial category, agreed...but, gospel, negro spirituals, blues etc. emerged from the "black" part of that segregated society, not the "white" part.

I call it "their music" for this very reason. If you want to micro-analyze the "black" part of the culture and how there were intersections of race, religion and culture therein....and how that gave rise to gospel, blues etc., feel free....but, please don't try to tell me that gospel, blues, negro spirituals came from the "white" part of American society - b/c they clearly did not.

race is impossibly complicated, that's true...but, that doesn't mean there is no such thing as "black culture" based on the historical realities of the US - segregation does that to a society. Several music forms have their roots in the "black part" of that segregated culture and that is a fact.

[en.wikipedia.org]

[en.wikipedia.org]

I am saying there are white or better to say European influences in African-american music and culture before blues was even an identified form.

Quote
His Majesty
I am saying there are white or better to say European influences in African-american music and culture before blues was even an identified form.

agreed.

Christianity is a clear example of this influence (which isn't even 100% "euro" anyway). But the "black culture" took Christianity and made it something uniquely their own (ie. Negro Spirituals) and it evolved (largely among the black community) from there.

Same thing happened w/ Voodoo in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba and Rastafarianism in Jamaica.

yes, the "Euro"-influence is there, but the product is uniquely part of the "black experience, traditions and influences"

in other words, it's uniquely theirs.

if you are claiming the influence of Euros and the influence of "Blacks" is equal, you are over-emphasizing the role of Europeans and, thus under-emphasizing the role of "African/AA influence" (ie. Cultural Imperialism).

I'm not sure if this is what you are doing or not.

if you give me a stick of butter and I take a bunch of my own ingredients, creativity, traditions, influences (and most importantly - labor) and turn it into a cake...I'm sorry, you do not get equal credit with me.

I might thank you for the butter, if you gave it to me willingly and I willingly accepted it. But if you pounded me into submission, treated me like dog-crap and forced me to take the butter, I'm not going to say "gee thanks so much for the butter"

That's like Native Americans "thanking" Euros for the horse...sure, it was great in a lot of ways and they did amazing things w/ it, but look at all the crap that came along w/ it.

This was my original point - there is a "sadness" that so much great music had to come out of such horrific treatment.

"Blacks" in the US have been marginalized enough in terms of their cultural (and other) contributions to our society....to try to say that Blues et. al is not truly "their music" is just continuing that trend in my opinion.

Give credit where (the vast majority of the) credit is due.

The music I list originated w/ "blacks"...it's their music. Whites have added elements to it here, there and everywhere...but, at it's core, it is their music originating from their unique experiences and culture.

Regardless, thanks for the chat. It has made me think, which is always good.

If you want the last word, you can have it. Latah - sticky

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stickyfingers101


if you are claiming the influence of Euros and the influence of "Blacks" is equal, you are over-emphasizing the role of Europeans and, thus under-emphasizing the role of "African/AA influence" (ie. Cultural Imperialism).

I'm not sure if this is what you are doing or not.

No, just openly considering this quote and other interesting points in relation to race and culture and the premise, as put forth in the initial article/post, about stealing.

“I listen to everything. I’ll hear a lick and it’ll grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in there, everything I ever heard and stole from.” - Buddy Guy



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-12 14:48 by His Majesty.

OK gentlemen, I don't know that you will ever get a resolution to this, but it is clear that most modern music, or at least rock n roll, blues, rhythm and blues, hip hop, rap, country and a bunch of others, are largely and predominantly the product of African Americans and their experience.


peace/plexi

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timbernardis
OK gentlemen, I don't know that you will ever get a resolution to this, but it is clear that most modern music, or at least rock n roll, blues, rhythm and blues, hip hop, rap, country and a bunch of others, are largely and predominantly the product of African Americans and their experience.

peace/plexi

That's true... if you ignore a vast number of things about music, culture and technology... oh, and the world.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2019-03-12 22:29 by His Majesty.