Black Sinatras, White Panthers: Race, Genre and Performance in Detroit Black Pop and Rock, 1960-1970
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Black Sinatras, White Panthers: Race, Genre and Performance in Detroit Black Pop and Rock, 1960-1970 by Mark MacAulay Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia November 2010 © Copyright by Mark MacAulay, 2010 DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY The undersigned hereby certify that they have read and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance a thesis entitled “Black Sinatras, White Panthers: Race, Genre and Performance in Detroit Black Pop and Rock, 1960-1970” by Mark MacAulay in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Dated: November 19, 2010 Supervisor: _________________________________ Readers: _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ ii DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY DATE: November 19, 2010 AUTHOR: Mark MacAulay TITLE: Black Sinatras, White Panthers: Race, Genre and Performance in Detroit Black Pop and Rock, 1960-1970 DEPARTMENT OR SCHOOL: Department of History DEGREE: MA CONVOCATION: May YEAR: 2011 Permission is herewith granted to Dalhousie University to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions. I understand that my thesis will be electronically available to the public. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author‟s written permission. The author attests that permission has been obtained for the use of any copyrighted material appearing in the thesis (other than the brief excerpts requiring only proper acknowledgement in scholarly writing), and that all such use is clearly acknowledged. _______________________________ Signature of Author iii Table of Contents Abstract v Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Whose Hit Parade? Race Politics and Genre in Postwar American Music 15 Chapter Three: Black Sinatra at the Copacabana Marvin Gaye, Motown Records, and the Performance of Black Pop 64 Chapter Four: “I May Be a White Boy but I Can Be Bad Too” White Negroes, Superstuds, and the Blackface Roots of the MC5‟s Rock 115 Chapter Five: Conclusion 161 Bibliography 167 iv Abstract This paper explores several narratives of race and racialized music production in postwar American popular musics, to study the ways in which race has played an intrinsic role in structuring not only contemporary expectations of popular music-making, but also the frameworks by which we continue to study American popular musics today. The first section of the essay provides a critical analysis of the concept of musical genre, and argues that race has always played a significant role in forming the vocabulary by which we discuss American popular genres. The next sections discuss two case studies from Detroit‟s music cultures of the 1960s – black pop star Marvin Gaye and the white hard rock group the MC5 – to illustrate how entrenched expectations of racialized performance served to inform contemporary and current critiques of these groups; these case studies also reveal the inadequacy of some standard musico-racial narratives in interpreting the racialized dimensions of these artists‟ performances. Ultimately, the findings of this analysis promote a search for more nuanced understandings of racialized sounds in American popular musics, and beg more careful critiques into some of the conventional wisdom that has traditionally guided our understandings of race and its relationship to popular culture. v Chapter One Introduction It mattered less that there had been a long, reciprocal, process of theft, borrowing and synthesis between these nominally “black” and “white” musical streams than that these categorical divisions had assumed a notional validity in American minds and race-conscious ears. After all, everyone knew that Elvis and Jerry Lee [Lewis] sounded black, while the Mills Brothers and Lena Horne sang white. - Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding1 Said Beatle John Lennon recently: “We can sing more colored than the Africans.” - Ebony, November 19652 The first comprehensive attempt to tell the story of rock-„n‟-roll was, in large measure, a quest to map its genealogy: to place its pioneers, its stars (past and present) and even many of its also-rans somewhere amidst a musical family tree that would render legible rock-„n‟-roll‟s infinitely complicated historical development. Conceived in 1966 by a masters‟ student of journalism seeking a thesis topic, and eventually expanding to the size of a dissertation, Charlie Gillett‟s The Sound of the City was published in 1970 as the first book-length study to explore the origins and mutations of perhaps the most insistently hybridized musical style in American history. Gillett‟s publisher, Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, chose for the book‟s jacket the image of the first rock-„n‟-roll family tree, drawn up based on the author‟s own research – a nefariously sprawling network of hundreds of names tied together by a cat‟s cradle of relational lines that could trace the heritage of the “British Beat Music” of the Beatles all the way back to “Harmony Group” 1 Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 120. 2 Louie Robinson, “Rock „N‟ Roll Becomes Respectable,” Ebony, November 1965, 54. 1 sounds of the Mills Brothers, some decades before.3 Across dozens of styles, labeled according to region, era, genre, or sometimes even a performer‟s attitude, Gillett spun a chaotic web of mutual musical influence that bespoke a long and complex process of borrow and exchange – across races and across national boundaries – culminating in the emergence of rock-„n‟-roll. Among these many and disparate styles that occupied Gillett‟s history were several taxonomic oddities: “white blues,” for instance, and another intriguing entry called “country-soul.” Oddities, that is, in the sense that according to the conventional wisdom of the recording industry, the blues had historically been defined by not being white. Soul, likewise, was the domain of black performers; what was it doing in this uncomfortable matrimony with working-class white country music? Gillett‟s genealogy would form the backbone of many genre studies in the years after its publication, but more significantly it was the clearest representation, at the end of the American Sixties, of the convoluted and cross-racial exchanges that had marked American popular music as far back as the “Harmony Groups” like the Mills Brothers of the 1930s, and indeed much further beyond. The recording industry had always insisted on “categorical divisions,” in the words of music scholar Brian Ward, that held black and white-produced musics to be racially distinct based on nominally racialized sounds; cultural producers in the mainstream music marketplace, however, had never been as bound by these divisions as the racialized rhetoric of the industry had implied.4 In the same year that The Sound of the City was issued, cultural critic Albert Murray published his quintessential study of black American experience, The Omni 3 See Charlie Gillet, The Sound of the City (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970). 4 Ward, 120. 2 Americans, in which that author declared in no uncertain terms that American culture was, and had long been, “incontestably mulatto” – a term that has since fallen into disuse for obvious reasons, though a theoretical position that remains highly useful for interpreting discussions of race and culture.5 The Omni Americans was one of the most significant contemporary works to push for an understanding of American culture according to a model of racial hybridity; American blacks and whites occupied radically different subject positions in mainstream society, of course, but the cultural offerings of each group, nominally marked “black” or “white,” had long ceased to exist in autonomous isolation. Even the “blackest” of African-American musical forms, such as the gospel sounds of the black church that would come to define a good deal of black musicianship in the twentieth century, were an intriguing combination of African, African-American and putatively white (i.e., Western European) traditions. What had begun, in the antebellum and postbellum periods, as folk spirituals in the fields of the American South became musically codified and informed by Western European harmonic notions sometime around the turn of the century, giving rise to a style of gospel vocal harmony that would, however, continue to be coded “black” according to the logic of an emergent recording industry despite its multicultural development.6 Thus, while styles like country-soul may have suggested a Frankenstein grafting of an historically white style onto the musical language of one historically coded black, in truth the boundaries between these two genre labels were more easily traversed than most mainstream music 5 Albert Murray, The Omni Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 22. 6 For an illuminating discussion of gospel‟s cross-racial development, see Stuart L. Goosman, Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm & Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 3-4. 3 consumers probably suspected – consumers who had grown up with descriptors like “Race” and “Pop” to denote almost exclusively black and white musics, respectively.