Topic: Get off my lawn? Corey Harris' blog post "Can White People Play the Blues?"

[Rivers]

Big Joe Weems, there are a lot of discussion venues for electric blues on the internet. This is not really the place for that. The focus here is on acoustic blues & close relatives from the great exponents of these styles, going way back to the beginning of recording and earlier.

Sure some electric stuff gets discussed, but when it's plugged-in it's generally country blues played in the same spirit, just using cheap instruments and amps. Rock blues stars don't get much air time here, and that's the way we'd prefer to keep it if that's OK with you.

Incidentally this topic is in the wrong place, it probably belongs in Jam Session (?)

[Blaydon Races]

Just thought I should add that for those of you who may be interested Corey Harris has written a follow up article to the one mentioned here, in which he discusses the reaction to the original post. The link is as follows http://bluesisblackmusic.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/can-black-people-write-about-blues.html

[big joe weems]

It's official after reading Harris' blog part two that he is an unadulterated racist.  The essence of racism is claiming that anyone has a "birthright" to anything based upon their race.  Lacing his grossly racist statements with several true facts does not make his racism less nauseating.  It sounds like the source of his anger is a frustration for being underpaid.  He has exposed himself as much more of a businessman than an artist.  Sad on one hand.  But on the other hand you can't be affected much by someone you don't respect.  And a racist gets no respect from any truly intelligent person.  I, along with hundreds of others on this site, reverence and revere the hundreds of black artists who are talked about here daily.  But Harris has no place among that group, and is now living proof that book learning and real intelligence are very different things.  I would say, "God help you, son," but it don?t seem like to me that God takes care of old folks and fools.

[One-Eyed Ross]

Well, after reading Part II, I'm inclined to be say that my opinion hasn't changed.  I hope this hits him in his pocketbook...

[Rivers]

Corey's slightly passive aggressive rant in part 2, if you make it to the end, seems to be all about declaring ownership, nothing more, nothing less. He would like everyone to say, all together now, "Blues is Black Music".

I trust that will make him feel better, but probably not, since everyone knows darn well it's black music, mostly, and only a deluded few would claim otherwise or accuse blues fans of not acknowledging that basic fact.

Perhaps he's just a naturally grouchy person, I dunno, I've never met him.

[Rivers]

BTW, he states that while blues is black music that does not mean people of other colors can't or shouldn't play it.

This is great news for the Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, South African and West Indian cricket teams, etc. I was about to go online and bitch endlessly about how how cricket is an English sport and they should stop being so good at it and accept that the English invented it and they'd darn well better let them win occasionally.

[alyoung]

This is great news for the Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, South African and West Indian cricket teams, etc. I was about to go online and bitch endlessly about how how cricket is an English sport and they should stop being so good at it and accept that the English invented it and they'd darn well better let them win occasionally.

New Zealand just did exactly that. Took a last innings collapse (both openers out for 0) at Lords, but the English were allowed to win. Can't say they seemed teddibly grateful.... Seemed to act like they deserved it.

[Rivers]

Hey don't ruin my absurd analogy with facts!

[CF]

Adam Gussow wrote this response a while back. I agree with much he says although his tone & the 'jihad' stuff were unfortunate. I agree with much of what Corey says as well, I just think that coming from him it's a bit loaded. For some of the reasons Adam mentions in his response. This is a complicated issue that many in the Blues world are just not adult enough to talk about.

https://www.facebook.com/adam.gussow/posts/10152883507203061?hc_location=ufi

An open letter to Corey Harris, prompted by his blog posting earlier today, "Blues is Black music!"

http://bluesisblackmusic.blogspot.com/?/can-white-people-pl?

Hey Corey:

Ralph Ellison called the song you?re singing, "beating that boy." Shelby Steele called it "race holding." I call it a fairly predictable ideologization of the blues: an oversimplification made for polemical purposes. The arguments that you make, with few exceptions, have all been made before; they're almost all half-truths. Half-truths contain some truth, but to the extent that you think you?re uttering the final word on the blues, from a position of high and mighty righteousness, you?re fooling yourself.

The one surprising moment is when your diatribe veers, in the final paragraph or two, towards something that is actually in line with your life as a blues playing professional who spends a fair bit of time teaching white people how to sing and play the blues. THAT paradox is worth pondering. You don?t speak in this essay about that teaching--i.e., the fact that you?re the creative director of the Port Townsend Country Blues Festival--but you give it away by the actual tenor of your remarks at the very end of your essay:

"White blues lovers who want to sing and play in the style should stop trying to sound Black. Keep it real and sing like who you are! Be true to yourself! Express yourself, not your imitation of someone from another culture. This is what true artists do."

I completely agree! That?s something I hammer away at on the forum of my own blues-focused website, Modern Blues Harmonica. I was taught that lesson, forcefully and repeatedly, by my own African American blues master, Sterling Magee. (When I listen to Tab Benoit and Bonnie Raitt, I hear blues players who have learned that lesson and have much to teach us about how to make the music live.) I?m glad we agree on something. But we disagree on many things.

One of your many errors is in insisting that because blues is "culture and history," white folks don't have an earned and organic relationship with it. White people have been playing, singing, and dancing to blues for more than a hundred years at this point. It's time to stop pretending that it's all one big stupid ripoff. Jimmie Rodgers and Roscoe Holcomb aren't ripoffs. Marion Harris, a white blues singer from the 1910s and 1920s, had a lot of black fans. So did Elvis in 1956. He was mobbed by black female teenyboppers at the WDIA show in Memphis. He had number #1 hits on black urban radio in a dozen cities across America that year. If blues is a call-and-response music?and I can?t believe you?ll argue with me on that point?then aren?t the audiences, black and white, an important part of what the music is about? Shouting ?Blues is BLACK music? unwisely writes off that half of the blues equation. Either you care about bringing pleasure and enlightenment to your many white fans, or you don?t. Which is it? Or is it both?

One thing that you don?t do--because people who make your sort of angry case for blues as BLACK music never do this--is discuss, or even mention, the contemporary soul-blues scene: black music made by black performers for all-black audiences. I?m talking about the kind of music people listen to in my part of Mississippi: Marvin Sease, Johnny Taylor, O.B. Buchana, Donnie Ray, Vick Allen, Ms. Jody, Lamont Hadley:

http://www.mississippibluesfest.com/news/

You?re not a part of that scene. You don?t have any audience among that particular crowd of black blues lovers. They're just not interested in your particular version of the blues. That must hurt! Choosing as you do to perform a repertoire that draws on older styles, you?ve consigned yourself to a life in limbo--making pilgrimages to Africa, communing with musicians there, spreading your separatist Afrocentric gospel, voicing your pain and sense of cultural outrage in blog posts like this and on the occasional conference panel, even while your living depends to a significant extent on playing clubs and festivals and teaching blues musicianship at events in which white promoters, white audiences, and white musicians dominate. You?re competing with white blues players and acts for gigs. I don?t blame you for being pissed off that white folks are competing with you, telling the blues story in their own way, picking the big-stage acts for mainstream blues festivals, and putting a fair number of talentless, minstrelesque white blues players on contemporary blues radio. But there IS another, all-black blues scene where your claim ?blues is BLACK music? makes a whole lot more sense?and it?s not your world. So you live in this blues world, the ?mainstream? world, and yet you rage against it.

Meanwhile, people in 175 countries around the world visit my website every year, seeking to learn how to play blues harmonica. That?s not a misprint; that?s Google analytics. EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD is in love with the blues and wants to learn how to make those sounds. We're way, way beyond the black/white thing, my friend. From a global perspective, it ain't just about the white boys anymore. It's about Cal/Indian harpist Aki Kumar. It's about Chicago guitarist Shoji Naito and his "Blues Harp Tracks" website. You could, if you chose to, celebrate that fact. You could chalk it up to the Senegambian DNA encoded in the music?the stuff that was put there by the Arab trade routes, the raids (by blacks, whites, and Arabs), and by the Sengambian ability to absorb influences while retaining core values. Celebrating the power and depth of the blues, you could seek to celebrate both the African cultural sources and African-American struggles that lie behind the collective achievement of the music in its heroic mid-20th century phase. You could seek to educate, rather than preach. You could do good work without jihad.

But you prefer jihad. AND you prefer to make your living in a mainstream blues scene dominated by white people. That?s certainly your right. But it?s a surefire recipe for alienation.

I'm intrigued by the IMpurity of the contemporary blues scene. I groove to the paradoxes. I'd respect you more if you were willing to entertain them. But doing so would interfere with the purity of your ideological position. Ideological purity isn't something intrinsic to the blues. Blues--real blues--has more of a sense of irony than that. As Kalamu ya Salaam once said, "life is not about good vs. evil, but about good and evil eaten off the same plate." I?m sure you know Salaam from your time in New Orleans. You?re trying to make the blues into good vs. evil. That?s one sort of feeling that animates the blues?we?ve all been filled with simmering rage at a lover, or the world, at one point or another?but it?s only one feeling. It?s not the whole story.

I'm currently reading the published version of BLUES ALL DAY LONG, Wayne Goins's long and remarkable biography of Jimmy Rogers, Muddy's guitarist. Wayne, a black Chicagoan, grew up in and with the blues; his father was a friend of Little Walter's. In ideological terms, Wayne sits at the opposite extreme from you. He?s an amazingly gifted jazz/blues guitarist as well as professor of music, and he has no ideology?at least no ideology that seeks to parse the blues into black and white. He's more interested in capturing the whole arc of Rogers long and epic black blues life--an arc that took Rogers from an entirely black musical environment into a place where his supporting cast was almost entirely white musicians, including harp players like BBQ Bob Maglinte and Steve Guyger . Goins has interviewed everybody; he starts the book with a long monologue by Kim Wilson, another white blues player whose life and art rebuts the title of your essay. What comes across in Goins?s biography is Rogers?s sense of exactly what he was questing for, musically, along with the irony that it was white blues musician/producers, including Rod Piazza and Wilson, who ultimately helped him record the music he was hearing in his head and gain the public recognition he deserved. Shouting ?Blues is BLACK music? does an injustice to the many non-African American blues players (including a fair number of Japanese guys, by the way) who have helped older black blues players realize their dreams.

Goins?s book is the counterstatement to your jihad. It's about how blues culture actually works, in our time; it's about a long swath of history that we're still sorting out. It's about the excitement felt by young (black) men in the mid-to-late 1940s trying to come up with a new sound; and it's about the excitement felt by an older Rogers and his younger white disciples as he began to come back on line and his "old" sound caught the fancy of the white blues imagination in the late 70s and early 80s.

When I invited you to the 2004 ?Living Blues? symposium at the University of Mississippi, I made a point of gifting you with a piece of artwork that was as dear to me as any piece of artwork I?ve ever owned: the ?Mother Mojo? necklace that Sterling ?Mr. Satan? Magee had given me. It hurt to give that away; I gave it away precisely because it hurt to do so. I respected your artistry greatly and wanted to acknowledge that in a public forum, without jive. It was a gift to me from my own blues master, an American treasure in his own right. I passed it along to you. I trust that you?ve still got it. I hope you find what you?re seeking, with or without the help of my gift.

Life?and blues?is not about good vs. evil. It?s about good and evil eaten off the same plate.

-Adam Gussow

[Mike Billo]

Bravo, Adam. Well said

[frankie]

There's a lot to agree with in both Harris's and Gussow's position, I suppose, but in general, I have a seriously bad attitude. When it comes to the vast majority of 'professional' musicians of ANY ethnic stripe purporting to play 'blues,' I'm with Yank (speaking to Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie, over his dinner):

"I wouldn't hire you to work in my yard."

I'm not saying there aren't good ones - there are. But the best ones seem, as always, to be under the radar.

And no, I'm not going to post a list of guys I like or don't like.

[dj]

Being an engineer by training and by trade, I can't help but feel that half the world's problems would be solved if people would just crisply define the question they're trying to answer and the terms they're using in the answer. 

So if your definition of the blues is that it's a specific musical form with a customary set of scales, melodic forms, harmonic progressions, and performance conventions, then it's self-evident that anyone schooled in that style can play the blues. 

If, on the other hand, you define the blues as the cultural expression of a given group of people at a given moment, then it's just as self-evident that only that group of people at that moment can play the blues.

I also happen to think that anyone playing or singing any form of music is by definition expressing the specific culture and moment in history that that exists in.  So when I'm sitting on my back porch making my feeble attempts to play and sing the blues, I'm faithfully and authentically expressing late 20th/early 21st middle class American culture, and nothing else.  And that's just fine with me.   

Dang!  I've just taken all the fun out of the argument!  Oh, well, we can always sit and argue about where the blues came from, since the specific answers to that question are lost in the mists of time.   

And by the way, frankie, I'm not afraid to name names:  I just can't stand the way Lawrence Welk sang and played the blues.   

[sustaireblues]

I don't know dj.

Old Lawrence did a pretty dang good job of giving me "the blues" everytime my parents had him on the box.

[Kokomo O]

Your parents watched Lawrence Welk? That show was strictly my grandmother's province. He was too whitebread even for my amusical mother.

[Mike Billo]

  I've gone to YouTube and searched for videos of, either of Lawrence Welk's guitarists, Neal Levang or Buddy Merrill. It's embarrassing to realize that, as a teenager,  I thought of these guys as no-talent hacks

   What a moron I was.
   Glad I'm such a fount of wisdom today