In These Times That We Live: Looking for Tenure in All the Wrong Places; Whites and Black Country and the Lies We Continue to Live By PART 1

THIS IS THE FIRST OF A TWO-PARTER.

I WANT TO MENTION THAT I HAVE, AGAINST MY OWN BETTER JUDGEMENT. CONTINUED THIS AS A FREEBIE. I AM NOT CERTAIN YET, BUT I WILL PROBABLY ISSUE PART TWO FOR ONLY PAID SUSCRIBERS.

I HOPE YOU WILL JOIN UP WITH SOME CASH. I CAN SAY, IMMODESTLY, THAT I COME TO THE SUBJECT OF AMERICAN MUSIC WITH A KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING THAT YOU WILL FIND NOWHERE ELSE, INCLUDING SUBSTACK. UNLIKE MOST CONTEMPORARY CRITICS I AM UNAFRAID OF SPEAKING TRUTH TO MUSICAL POWER (I HATE THAT PHRASE, I HAVE TO ADMIT, BUT IF THE SHOE FITS…)

So….what are we up against here as we open a new front on America’s racial battlefield? Is country music just one more cultural innovation snatched from black folks and rebranded as white?

To answer all of your questions, we have one NPR star declaring that country music in its essence and its historical coverage is simply White Supremacist. And we have In These Times, a left publication which has done some perfectly good work in the political arena, declaring pretty much the same, that white America has stolen country music from black America. I disagree as a matter of cultural and historical accuracy; the shared musical history of black and white Southern Americans makes this into a much more complicated subject than media like In These Times or NPR media personalities are able to grasp from the comfort of their particular ideological and class-privileged pedestals.

One needs of course to acknowledge that here, as in virtually all sonic aspects of American life, black cultural habits of sound, language, speech and rhythm have entered into a white mainstream that has held it, simultaneously, at Jim Crow-length. But we also learn as we go (and if we actually listen to the music) that white creativity and expression carved out its own clear niche in this music, working from its own (Scotch Irish among others) ethnic traditions while absorbing all that was going on around it of the Southern kind.

The problem with not just academics but with some glib if well-meaning commentators is that they have not listened to the music that they proclaim themselves to be expert in; they have sampled it like a shiny buffet from which they have picked and chosen what seem to be the easiest-to-digest morsels of cultural flavor. And there is a Yale professor who has made a declaration about “the essential blackness of country music” without showing much indication of understanding or actual listening experience. Such is the fate of those who look for tenure in all the wrong places.

One commentator, in a Facebook exchange, denied that they had declared country music as reflecting “white supremacy.” So I will start with what was actually said (in an article from Rolling Stone Magazine), will then add some ideological seasoning to that argument from another publication, In These Times, and, finally, I will provide some odd and random samples of commentary that I have made on the subject; first, from Rolling Stone:

“The idea of what country music is has been carefully constructed to seem like it was always white,” she says. I ask her why people don’t know the history of country music. This is not her first rodeo: She’s got this answer down to a science. “White supremacy,” she tells me. “There is no other way to put it: It was constructed by numerous people as part of the white-supremacy movement.”

Ok; she might be wrong, but at least it is for all the wrong reasons. There is no denying the racist history of the USA, and in particular the South, nor is there any reason to ignore the fact that record companies in their early days were building separate audiences for white and black music, and were putting black players under the category of “race” music, as a kind of industrial segregation. But that shared culture that we have talked about, that paradoxical cultural integration in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, allowed white musicians in the South to create their own deep interpretations of this music as integrated into their own distinct musical and religious heritage. White (country) music of the South was as real as black country music, and so were its songs and instrumental styles. We need, yes, to look at black country music to see the complicated mix which made this all happen the way it did, but it is simply ridiculous to dismiss white players of the early days of country/hillbilly out of hand as existing simply by the power of White Supremacy. White country musicians, even as they felt the powerful influence of black musicians, developed their own and very clearly individual ways of playing and singing.
Though even more important, as the great music historian Tony Russell has informed me, is that there were parts of the South where white/black interaction was extremely rare – and in these parts the music developed by white musicians exists as indigenously self-referential and NOT part of specific black traditions. And even as things later developed, through the proliferation of the recording industry, and as a certain level of musical integration ensued, the influence went BOTH WAYS, from white to black and black to white.

Don’t believe me? Listen to the white country musicians in my collection of music called Turn Me Loose White Man, Or: Appropriating Culture; How to Listen to American Music 1900-1960. I am referring particularly to the pre-World War II era, that of so-called hillbilly music and even Western Swing, when the racial mix was complexly striking, and as real as the secret way in which Southern whites and blacks intermingled, in their version of after-hours, and performed together, worked with each other, listened to each other, and danced to each other’s music (and, yes, intermarried, at lease in a common law way, and bore each other’s children).

Yes, I know, this was not a level playing field, but this - this hillbilly black and white - was a brilliant countercultural mix of mountain modal form, ragtime essences, slow and fast-picked guitar and banjo, neo-jazz style of the early or Western Swing kind, old-time song from minstrelsy, black songsters (black singers who didn’t sing the blues primarily), professional songwriters, and religious confluence (the Holy Rollers, white and black, and the precursors to the White Regular Baptists; also the white and black quartets who sang hymns, professionally composed tunes, and minstrel church pieces, all rolled up into Sanctified Church emotional set pieces and studio-recorded testimony); a lot of it was sexually suggestive (and much more) verse; and lastly, of course, there was the blues; all in a not-so-subtle mix of black and white, of white and black. In a very real way this was a clear violation of the code of Jim Crow, something which led to the early country/rockabilly sound of the first true rock and roll (invented, yes, by a white man named Elvis Presley, though I will not debate that here, as I have already written about it extensively).

But, once again, those that I cite here, from public evidence, know nothing about those actual cross-streams of white and black country, an entertaining form of irony for observers like me, yes, but also a publicly harmful force of sheer and destructive ignorance. And please don’t write me letters (or emails) about the terrorist reality of black Southern life of those years - I am very aware of it all and have no fear of Critical Race Theory. I simply want to create an accurate historical record (no pun intended).

And while we’re on the subject, let us see what trickstery In These Times, good Progressives that they are, offered on this same subject; the headline on theit story was:

Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music

As they reported:

“The southern accent itself has, puzzlingly, taken on a second life as the voice of universal rurality. Why? Rurality clung on longer in the South than other places because of poverty―a poverty that was the result of the evils of slavery, the destruction of total war, and an ensuing era of brutal white supremacy and economic strife. The destitution of the former Confederacy served to preserve the use of instruments and melodies that were common in every corner of this country, until the tide of industrialization swept over these older music forms almost everywhere else, inadvertently isolating and enshrining the haunting songs of yesteryear in old Dixie.”

WTF? This is a crazy mixed up jumble of legend and conventional wisdom/disinformation, and shows no knowledge of or even a hint of everything I have said above about the complex mix of black and white country. It gives un no specifics on the songs, the blues, the songster repertoire (non-blues forms, as I said above), or the powerful effects of minstrelsy on ALL of country music. Nor does it show any real understanding of the interaction of white and black music and musicians. It is mostly demonstrably false; to say, as the author does, that:

“…the destitution of the former Confederacy served to preserve the use of instruments and melodies that were common in every corner of this country, until the tide of industrialization swept over these older music forms almost everywhere else, inadvertently isolating and enshrining the haunting songs of yesteryear in old Dixie…”

…is to not match up to any actual music that emerged in the post-Civil War years. Meaning: What songs? Yes there were some old-time plantation tunes, but there were just as many ragtime, blues, and neo-blues songs, religious hymns and sentimental family songs. But what did the “destitution of the former Confederacy” have to do with preserving “the use of instruments and melodies” of the Old South? Well, maybe they promoted a kind of White nationalist cultural pride and led to the singing of certain types of song. But these songs were no more dominating of the music than any other style I have cited, which includes songs that were distinctly from African American traditions. So maybe, as with that of Elvis, the music of the Old South contained the ironic seeds of Jim Crow’s self-destruction. As with Elvis, the music, integrated in the deepest and truest sense, was its own advocate for racial reality and even liberation. Let us continue; from In These Times:

“What were once called ​‘hillbilly’ records were re-marketed as ​“Country and Western.”

No; these were two distinct forms and styles of music. Country and Western was a product of post-War industrialism, the music of white oil roughnecks and other roustabouts, and a result of the industry’s homogenization of country song as it felt the broad influence of Tin Pan Alley-type (and other pop-song) songwriting styles, a little bit of jazz, plus the slickening of white country instrumental styles.

And, continues In These Times:

“The origins and formative musicians of what we now call the blues are entirely as rural and Southern as anything that’s ever come out of Nashville…”

Oh yeah? Please prove this, document for us the origin of the blues, show us how it overlapped with ragtime and merged with other song forms. But the writer won’t because he cannot. He hasn’t, I would wager, heard most of what he thinks he is referring to; if he knew more he would, for one thing, cite the extensive black musical history of Nashville, which he does not do because, I am willing to bet, he is completely unaware of it.

I am not going to go on much longer here. He also claims that Elvis plagiarized Big Mama Thornton (Hound Dog) without acknowledging it. Well, Elvis talked about his black antecedents regularly, and, anyway, Hound Dog was written by two white Jewish guys and produced by a Greek guy (Johnny Otis). And Elvis’ version was distinctively different.

end of part one. More soon