A New and Concise History of Rock and R&Amp
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A New and Concise History of Rock and R&B through the Early 1990s Eric Charry Published by Wesleyan University Press Charry, Eric. A New and Concise History of Rock and R&B through the Early 1990s. Wesleyan University Press, 2020. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/74014. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/74014 [ Access provided at 1 Jun 2021 19:46 GMT from Wesleyan University ] Cross-cultural encounters are at the heart of rock and R&B, and so identifying their varied dynamics is fundamental. Is cross-cultural understanding possible? Yes, of 10 course. Otherwise, artists have failed, for part of their work is to convey their expe- WHEN CULTURES CROSS WHEN CULTURES riences, thoughts, and feelings. Or the fault may be ours, as listeners, not being able to hear and recognize this. People can appreciate the cultural expression of others on many levels, from amusement and entertainment to eye-opening understanding, empathy, and even life-changing integration into one’s own personal identity. Who are we, and how are we, as outside observers, to make judgments about how one person or group uses aspects of culture developed by another person or group? But what if we consider ourselves insiders and find outside understandings, interpretations, or usages objectionable? These are questions that demand much thought, especially with regard to the boundaries that distinguish insiders from outsiders, subtle degrees and shades of separation within these categories (e.g., what is our actual relationship to artistic production in our group), and whether economic gain or taking undue credit is involved. MARIAN ANDERSON AND BOB DYLAN Marian Anderson (1897–1993) was a gifted African American singer who grew up in a working-class South Philadelphia neighborhood in the early twentieth-century singing in her local church. Her repertory consisted of African American spirituals and European classical vocal works (particularly Handel, Schubert, and Brahms). While she grew up immersed in the language and culture of the spirituals, she had little access to that associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European (specifically German and Austrian) aristocracy, courts, and churches. Anderson did not have a formal voice teacher until high school. When she went to a music college to inquire about studying there, a white receptionist told her that they don’t take “colored people.” Reflecting back in her autobiography, she wrote, “True enough, my skin was different, but not my feelings” (1956: 38). Her United Baptist Church congregation raised funds to further her formal music education, including lessons with an Italian American voice teacher. Anderson was accepted to Yale University’s School of Music, but her outside funding did not materialize in time. In her late teens and early twenties, Anderson began touring colleges, churches, and concert halls, and she recorded on the Victor label. She studied French and Italian to help with her diction and found management, which eventually brought her $750 per concert (in the 1920s). In the early 1930s she went to study in London and Berlin, returning to Europe in 1933 for two years, concertizing extensively. She signed on to the prestigious artist management of Sol Hurok, and after a concert in Salzburg (the birthplace of Mozart), renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini famously told her, “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years” (Anderson 1956: 158). Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert in Washington, DC, was a major event in U.S. history. When Anderson was denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution (at the time an exclusionary lineage-based organization) on the basis of her race, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership, and the secretary of the interior offered Lincoln Memorial for a free outdoor concert. The event was radio broadcast to the nation, and seventy-five thousand people filled the space between the memorial and Washington Monument. She opened with “America” and sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and three African Amer- ican spirituals. Later that year Anderson sang at the White House for the Roosevelts and the king and queen of England. The previous year she earned $238,000, extraordinary for a concert singer at the time (Keiler 2000: 175). In 1955 she became the first African American to perform as a regular member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She sang at the inaugurations of presidents Eisenhower (1957) and Kennedy (1961) as well as at the 1963 March on Washington, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom that year. In a 2017 televised Kennedy Center celebration of the new Na- tional Museum of African American History and Culture, Mary J. Blige paid tribute to Anderson, singing “America.” African American spirituals, a product of the religious experience of an enslaved people, were initially brought to the concert hall by the historically black Fisk Univer- sity choir and their white choir director in the 1870s. Their concert style of singing and harmonies drew from European models, reflected in some of their earliest recordings in 1909–11 (Fisk Jubilee Singers 1997-d). Much later recordings from isolated black communities on the Georgia and Carolina sea islands provide a window into how some of these spirituals may have been sung before their merging with European aesthetics (Carawan 1967-d). Given the range of African American experience, both styles of performing spirituals should be considered as authentic expressions of that experience. After a trip to Israel, Anderson described the significance of spirituals to her: “I could see in Israel the geographic places that represented the reality [of INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORKS biblical references], and they stirred me deeply. I kept thinking that my people had 309 captured the essence of that reality and had gone beyond it to express in the spirituals the deepest necessities of their human predicament” (1956: 262). Anderson heard a range of singing styles in her early church experiences, but her focus was on that of the European classical tradition (or rather several national tradi- tions), with diction appropriate to the style, which she also applied to her interpreta- tion of spirituals. The term appropriation here does not really capture her relationship to a culture much different than the one she was born into, although Anderson did indeed reach out and make concerted efforts to use European culture to her advantage. (Note how the language of appropriation here has such a sinister aura.) The terms assimilation or acculturation are more typically used to describe how a marginalized minority culture uses the culture of a dominant majority population. The European classics were part of her U.S. cultural environment, dramatically opening up what can be considered as the scope of African American culture. Surely, Anderson was able to achieve cross-cultural understanding, not just in the way she was accepted as an artist, but in her authoritative grasp and expansion of a tradition whose ancestral heritage she was not born into. Bob Dylan, raised in a Jewish middle-class home in northern Minnesota, became enamored in his late teens with white Oklahoman Woody Guthrie, and he moved to New York City to visit the terminally ill Guthrie and soak up all that early 1960s Greenwich Village could offer. There Dylan became obsessed with a new reissue of the 1930s recordings of black Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson (in his midtwenties when recorded), finding an intense connection and inspiration with Johnson’s “code of language” (Dylan 2004: 287–88). By the time of his sixth album (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965), Dylan was a star and a major voice for his generation, particularly (but not only) white middle-class college-aged youth. Given the differences in sound and sentiment between mid-1960s folk rock and soul music, one might not expect a direct connection between his music and the growing black nationalist movement, which accelerated with the establishment of the Black Panther Party in 1966. In a passage titled “Huey Digs Bob Dylan,” party cofounder Bobby Seale (1970: 181–86) related a story about how in 1967 the other cofounder, Huey Newton, was constantly listening to Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” (from Highway 61 Revisited) while they were putting together early issues of their party newspaper, providing an impassioned and inspiring interpretation of the rele- INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORKS vance and insights of Dylan’s lyrics to their own situations. Many in their circle were 310 captivated by the song: “This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of the whole publishing operations of the Black Panther paper. This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security” (Seale 1970: 186). A photo of Newton in 1970 shows him holding up Dylan’s album for the camera (Shames and Seale 2016: 187). What can one make of this connection? Dylan’s first album Bob( Dylan, 1962) contained four cover versions of songs by African American bluesmen. How can one understand the admiration of Newton, Seale, and their circle for Dylan’s work? Did they hear and appreciate a familiar blues vision mirrored and reinterpreted for contemporary times in Dylan’s songwriting? Why didn’t they lay claims that Dylan was appropriating and profiting from their culture? (Two years earlier Dylan had seven songs in the pop Top 40, all originals, and two albums in the Top 10.) Clearly, it was not the mere act of reaching out to African American culture but rather what he did with it that mattered. Dylan, whose most direct early experience with African Americans was presumably through recordings, absorbed aspects of their cultural expression from those recordings.