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WHO OWNS THE ?: CONTESTING THE FIXITY OF RACE AND NATION IN DISCOURSES ON THE 1960S BRITISH BLUES BOOM KAIYA SMITH BLACKBURN 2016

Music is always in constant flux, music is the perennial undocumented immigrant; it has always moved beyond borders without the required paperwork. -Ignacio Corona & Alejandro L. Madrid

In their 2000 publication, Music and the Racial Imagination, Ronald Radano and Phillip

Bohlman maintain that “As a key signifier of difference, music for America … historically conjures racial meaning. As a matter of course, so too has musicology, in its various guises,

“grown up” in this racial house” (1). In their introduction to this collection of essays, covering various intersections between “racial” and musical identities, Radano and Bohlman evaluate the mythologies of race and absolutist racial division within American society. They draw particular attention to the ways in which certain conceptions of music uphold such mythologies, as they strategically interrogate the employment of music as evidence of essential racial difference.

Formed in tandem with racial ideologies, they hold that “Music participates in many of the aesthetic and discursive constructions of race, and [that] race provides one of the necessary elements in the construction of music” (Radano and Bohlman 8). Critiquing the rigid racial and nation-based characterizations of certain musical forms, Radano and Bohlman thus seek to disentangle music cultures from such homogenized categories and acknowledge what Ignacio

Corona and Alejandro Madrid describe as “the constant flow of cultural units beyond the boundaries of [race and] the nation-State and the dialogic (or “multilogic”) construction of meaning that results from these crossings” (Corona and Madrid 5). The critical work of Radano and Bohlman, specifically their attention paid to the racial reification of music in musicological Smith Blackburn 2

practice, provides a foundation for the present investigation concerning the historiographical and musicological discourses surrounding the 1960s British Blues Boom.

These discourses, dating from the mid-twentieth century British blues publications through to contemporary scholarship on the history of the blues and its transatlantic developments, present the pervasive tendency to, as Ulrich Adelt demonstrates, “maintain and justify a clear distinction between an authenticated black and a derivative white performance”

(10) of the blues. Scholars including Paul Oliver, Bob Groom, Rupert Till, and Leighton Grist exhibit various modes of racial and national essentialism as they evaluate the reception of

“African American” blues in Britain between the 1950s-60s. Instead of acknowledging the racial hybridity of the blues’ “origins,” as well as the transnational/racial syncretism of early British blues compositions, the overarching musicological narratives presented by these scholars configure this transnational encounter as the transmission of an essentially African American

(particularly masculine and Southern) song-form onto a British cultural tabula rasa. In this discussion, I interrogate the racial and national fixity of the blues, drawing attention to the genre’s interracial origins which have long been obfuscated by the myth of the originary black,

Southern, self-accompanied bluesman. Further, I question the “imitative” status of British blues, drawing attention to the ways in which the early manifestations of the blues in Britain consisted of syncretism, collaboration, and musical communication between British and African American individuals, and how this resulted in a British blues sound that is less a faulted copy of an

“authentic” black blues, and more of a syncretic blues development. Flowing through this discussion is the central postnational proposition that due to the nature of the blues itself, its interracial origins, and its transatlantic developments (beyond just those in Britain), the African

American racial and nationalist essentialism associated with the blues belies the genre’s complex Smith Blackburn 3

fluidity in favour of a convenient racial myth. I argue that the blues was not simply forged in the black ring shout and field hollers, to then be imitated by an uninitiated British public, but rather that the 1960s British blues boom was but one stage in the development of a racially-dynamic, transnational, and autonomous genre1.

At the outset of Postnational Musical Identities (2008), Corona and Madrid hold that although a certain musical form “may be produced under very specific circumstances that grant it particular local significance, [it can then be] … consumed under completely different conditions that … redefine its meaning” and therefore it is important that scholars address “the transnational fluxes and postnational dissemination and reception of music” (5). It is with this in mind that I contest the purported African American “ownership” of the blues genre which many scholars hold to be self-evident. As Schwartz recounts, “Paul Oliver held that ‘only the American Black, whether purple-black or so light skinned as to be indistinguishable from his sun-tanned white neighbour, can sing the blues’” (232). This racial essentialism persists due to the historiographical tendency to place blues origins in the locality of the working-class, agrarian, black communities of the Southern U.S.: in the field hollers, the porch steps, and the juke joints.

It is from this origin story that African American performers popular in England – such as John

Lee Hooker, , Sonny Boy Williamson, and T-Bone Walker (among others) – emerge as the bearers of authentic tradition, from which British “imitations” have drawn.

1 It is important to note at the outset of this discussion that I do not wish to distill all of the racial and national essentialism associated with the blues as an ‘African American art’ into the singular discourse of scholarship. This essentialism existed and continues to exist on many levels of discourse. It exists in the ways in which the blues has been marketed by radio and recording industries, it coloured the reception of the blues in Britain, and it most importantly takes hold in the comments made by British blues musicians themselves as they venerate African American bluesmen as the gatekeepers of the real blues. With this paper, I simply aim to evaluate this essentialist rhetoric as it has persisted in scholarly writing. Smith Blackburn 4

Within this framework, the “authentic” African American “original” blues is opposed to a derivative British version, which thus anchors this musicological narrative in an antiquated

European model of Self and (African) Other. Kofi Agawu maintains that the diametric opposition between African (and African-derived) cultures and the “West,” “… [has] less to do with the comparative method, as such than with an inherited tradition of European representations of others” (118). To resist this inherited tradition Agawu holds that musicological scholarship should consist of,

A little reflection on the complex processes of meaning formation, [which] undermines our confidence that differences are self-evident or natural. They are in fact propped up by other textual constructions and motivated in ways that are not (necessarily) immediately apparent. (121)

The essentialist narrative – exhibited by Oliver – situates the blues under the racial-national category of “African American” and renders the British blues boom an exploitation of that essence, upholding the mythical racial polarity of British “Self” and African American “Other” so denounced by Agawu.

In his 2007 article entitled “The Blues Is the Truth,” Leighton Grist too presents this narrative tendency when he claims that,

The blues itself was (and is) … largely the music of black American lower class. We must nevertheless be aware of suggesting … an equivalence between the experience of the black American lower class after slavery and that of the British working class after World War II. (210)

Not only are the interracial origins of the blues denied by the positions held by Oliver and Grist, but the collaborations and synchronicity between British musicians and touring African

American bluesmen too are obfuscated, in an effort to maintain an essential racial binary. As this discussion unfolds, I intend to contest these musicological fixations, revealing their tendency to obfuscate intersectionality, uphold essential notions of difference, and even victimize African Smith Blackburn 5

American blues composers and performers as passive individuals who have had their talents excavated. In line with Agawu, I contest the absolute difference between the blues of Muddy

Waters and that of in an effort to disentangle this genre from its incessantly reinforced centre (U.S.) / periphery (Britain) model. Since, “If differencing has produced such distorted, ideologically one-sided, and politically disadvantageous representation … why not eliminate it altogether and substitute a carefully defined sameness?” (Agawu 124).

A brief historical overview of the presence of African-American-associated music in

Britain from the late nineteenth century through to the blues boom of the 1950s-70s will serve as a springboard from which an in depth analysis of scholarly discourse can emerge. It is important to sketch the musical interactions between British and African American parties both predating and during the blues explosion in order to arrive at an understanding of this transnational encounter which, in its attention to nuance, supplants the hegemonic narratives here interrogated.

Music associated with African American culture, whether it was composed and performed by black individuals or was imitative of them, has occupied an enduring presence in Britain. Long before the arrival of the earliest blues phonograph recordings of artists such as Robert Johnson and , the British public had already been exposed to music associated with

African American culture. The Fisk Jubilee Singers toured Britain extensively in 1873 (Schwartz

1), blackface minstrel troupes2 were “quickly taken up in England after [their] introduction in

London in the 1830s” (Pickering 1), and jazz tours were conducted by artists such as the Original

Dixieland Jazz Band and Duke Ellington in the first three decades of the twentieth century

(Schwartz 2). To turn-of-the-century Britons, black music was a cultural-sonic embodiment of

2 The Ethiopian Serenaders have been noted as one of the most well-received and influential troupes of this time period (Terry and Wynn 11). Smith Blackburn 6

emerging alternative worldviews, ostensibly opposed to the legacy of calculated self-repression descending from Enlightenment ideology, and was thus met with a combination of “fear, fascination, and envy” (Schwartz 4).

The 1920s jazz craze consisted of the distribution of American records on British soil, and as a generation of collectors was born, a jazz intelligentsia espousing scholarship on black music in such publications as Melody Maker (est. 1926) and the later Jazz Journal (est. 1946) evolved. This folkloric interest in music associated with African Americans developed out of a combination of factors. Firstly, the relative scarcity of physical recordings, both in the jazz and early blues eras, funnelled musical information into a select group of astute collectors, creating a specialized community of individuals claiming the most intellectual capital on the subject.

Secondly, this interest likely derived from an intellectual impetus – inherited from a legacy of

European Romantic-Era folkloric study beginning with Johann Gottfried Herder and his contemporaries – to examine the alterative, “underdeveloped” Other, as the untainted bearer of artistic authenticity. Importantly, it was this scholarly activity on jazz and later on the blues by veteran writers such as Paul Oliver, Bob Groom, Bob Brunning, and Samuel Charters, that initiated the essentialist rhetoric perpetuated by contemporary blues musicology3. These early publications, particularly those occupying the “purist” or “conservative” perspective, held the blues to be essentially African American, and thus only authentically performed by such individuals, and only improperly imitated by British players. As Schwartz writes,

The notion of authenticity occupies a central position in British debates about the worth, appropriating and commodification of African American music … [I]n critical discourse in Britain the idea of authenticity mostly evaluated extramusical relationships to an

3 On this, Adelt writes that for Britons in the 1960s “blackness, in particular black masculinity, remained a marker of authenticity … [and] essentialist notions about race remained largely unchallenged … Thus marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present” (1). Smith Blackburn 7

idealized notion of reality: how it was imagined the music of rural African Americans ought to sound. (40)

The conservative blues scholars of this era, disseminating their racialized critiques of authenticity through the medium of Blues Unlimited (est. 1963) among other publications, therefore consolidated the racial and national brandings now fixed to the blues4, allowing little room for fluidity. Radano and Bohlman describe this scholarly fixation as the belief in the myth that “music grows organically from the soil of a particular nation and is ipso facto more natural, more authentic, because it is nourished by sources to which no other nation has access” (29). On this strict adherence to racial and national precepts, Adelt observes how,

British magazines featured exclusively African American blues artists … and, despite their proximity to the British blues revival, displayed a negative attitude toward white blues artists. … For instance, Blues Unlimited described ’s Yardbirds as ‘appalling and amateurish’ … and concluded, ‘these fellows were not just pale imitators – they were bad.’ (117)

In regards to the specific reception history of the blues in Britain, its most pervasive period began after the second World War when “nearly all Britons first encountered the blues on records, and musicians who took up the music learned both technique and repertoire from discs”

(Schwartz xi). Due to the Musician’s Union ban held between 1935-1957, which discouraged (if not outright prohibited) non-British touring acts from performing in the UK, large-scale blues tours could not be executed until the latter half of the century. Luckily, through the dissemination of recordings, significant interest in the blues had already been cultivated particularly among

4 As previously stated, this racial and national essentialism attached to the blues emerged not solely out of scholarly writing, concert reviews, and periodicals. It evolved out of a complex of discourses of race and racial meaning on various levels (in scholarship, as well as in the record label and radio marketing of the blues, and in the ways in which blues performers of all races discussed the genre). As David Brackett explains, “The early blues offers an example of how categories and public conceptions of certain genres often imply a tight and unwavering connection, a one-to-one mapping between musical styles and demographic groupings” (135). However, the conservative blues culture was largely consolidated on this level of intelligentsia scholarship, and has had a pervasive effect on contemporary thought on the blues (Adelt 1). Smith Blackburn 8

British countercultural youth. In the early 1960s, artists by then veritably famous in Britain, including Sonny Boy Williamson, , T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, and , toured the UK with near constant positive reception5. One of the most significant cross-European

African American blues tours began in 1962 when “promoters and Fritz Rau launched the American Negro Folk Blues Festival package tour, hoping to capitalize on the rising European interest in American ” (Schwartz 145). Importantly, during these tour performances, African American bluesmen were showcased with native British backings bands, and it was during festivals like these that “music crossed national boundaries” (Adelt 135). The hired British musicians had fervently studied blues recordings, in order to prove their artistic merit to the bluesmen and their audiences. Although some traveling blues players like Sonny

Boy Williamson vehemently criticized the British backing bands and upheld the presumed racial/national confines of blues authenticity6, other artists vocally contested the racial absolutism of the blues. One of the more famous of these contestations was made by Little

Walter in an interview with Max Jones where he claimed, “‘I was expecting to hear the same thing as I hear from the hillbillies back home … I thought that white boys couldn’t play the blues but … them boys was as pure in the blues as many a Negro group back home” (Schwartz 152).

These largely interracial blues performances exhibited not merely a transference of performance practice from one racial group to another, but consisted of notable interracial and

5 Notably, Muddy Waters was not particularly well-received in his first American Folk Blues Festival performances as he presented a highly aestheticized, electric, style which contradicted many Britons’ understanding of the rural, acoustic, downtrodden authenticity of African American blues. However, Waters still received positive attention through his recordings and under various other performance settings. 6 As Schwartz recounts, “the most frequently cited comment about British R&B is Sonny Boy William’s quip, ‘those cats in England want to play the blues so bad. And that’s how they play ‘em – so bad’ … Tom McGuinness recalls, ‘[Sonny Boy] would turn round to the band, and say ‘this one’s in E’ and he would deliberately start playing in C, or anything but E. Then he’d stop and say to the audience, ‘you see, these white boys can’t play the blues!’’” (151). Smith Blackburn 9

international exchanges; and out of these exchanges emerged the syncretic British blues rock genre. As Heike Raphael-Hernandez writes in Blackening Europe (2004),

Often the European “product” [(be it musical or otherwise)] is the complex result of African American7 aspects traveling to Europe, meeting there with already existing black influences8, and with these factors influencing some “white” aspects. (3)

Now venerated British blues bands often began their careers in the early sixties as hired rhythm sections for African American blues performers on British tours or in studio9, as was the case for

Eric Clapton and the early Yardbirds. For many British musicians, this was a chance to collaborate with the artists they had for so long emulated from a distance: as “members of the

Yardbirds recalled, ‘Playing with Sonny Boy helped the band a great deal …’” (Schwartz 150).

Importantly, these transnational and interracial musical experiences were predicated not solely on the process of imitation. Many African American bluesmen encouraged British players to engage with the blues originally so as to allow the genre to evolve dynamically. A recorded instance of this active encouragement is documented by Schwartz:

Bill Wyman recalls that during the recording of Howlin’ Wolf’s album The Sessions …: “we were trying to do “Red Rooster” … the way Wolf did it. Wolf’s trying to teach Eric Clapton to play the slide and he’s not quite getting it properly, so Eric says, ‘Well, Wolf, it’s your song … why don’t you do it and then we’ll cut the track and it will be perfect.’ And Wolf says, ‘No, man, no, no. You’ve got to do it, because when I’m gone somebody’s got to carry it on.’” (235)

7 However, this quote does differ from my ultimate proposition, as I claim that the blues characteristics embodied in the performances of African American bluesmen stem not from purely African American origins, but from an interracial matrix of European American and African American influences. 8 Read, the already deeply rooted presence of black music in Britain from the , blackface minstrelsy, and jazz. 9 As Schwartz writes, “Some visiting bluesmen, like Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson, both harmonica players, required supporting groups and were genuinely surprised … when the young French, German, or English groups knew their records by heart and could provide the backing they wanted” (233). Smith Blackburn 10

Clapton was unable to faultlessly imitate Wolf’s slide guitar playing, and yet instead of recording the part himself or requesting another British player (particularly one more capable of impersonating the style) to fill in for Clapton, Wolf insisted that Clapton’s unique approach to slide playing make the final cut. This move toward hybrid evolution motivated the next stage of the blues in Britain.

From these encounters with the blues, and from the growing popularity of blues recordings by Wolf and his contemporaries, emerged the compositional eruption of the 1960s

British blues boom. Such foundational bands of this era included , ,

Blues Incorporated (which later sprouted The Rolling Stones), and . Importantly, as Schwartz writes in “Putting the Blues in British Blues Rock” (2012),

Though most bands continued to play cover versions of American blues, they began to create arrangements that altered or recontextualized their models. Guitarist Ian Anderson commented, ‘What we are all doing is taking traditional material and rewriting it in our own way – which is exactly what the old men10 did themselves.’ (143)

What Schwartz illuminates here is the process of syncretisation which characterizes the majority of compositions from this era. British blues musicians had been “ultimately creating original blues-based material and incorporating the most accessible characteristics into a new approach to ” (Schwartz 138) as they made “deliberate alterations” to the tempo, lyrics, and vocal timbres of the blues they had initially encountered (Schwartz 141). Bands like Cream not only varied their playing of the blues, but actively syncretised blues aesthetics associated with African

American culture, with “white European classical music and British humour” (Adelt 65).

In light of the creative miscegenation exhibited in British blues rock, the logic of Paul Oliver and blues historian Lawrence Hoffman is highly misleading. The former scholar maintains that

10 Notably, we see here the prevalence of the gender- and geography-specific myth of blues origins. Smith Blackburn 11

“‘Blues today11, as played in the teenage clubs in dusty suburbs, is … a borrowed music with its principal source of inspiration lying in the modern ‘’ of the Negro clubs of

Chicago’” and that “young Britons had ‘taken its assertive, unsentimental, vigorous music as their own’” (Schwartz 233). The latter claims that the blues is essentially the “‘musical expression of the triumphant survival of the black race in America’” (Adelt 133) and that “white blues musicians were merely copyists and killing the language of the blues” (Ibid.). These claims distill into the oversimplified caricature of black-imitation, obfuscating the syncretism of the music, and relying heavily on the fictional racial and nationalist orientation of the blues.

Blues music has historically been associated with the working-class descendants of

African slaves living in rural communities in the American South, as well as with those black musicians who migrated north to Chicago to cultivate a new, amplified sound. Here I want to make clear that I am not contesting this association: the blues remains a significant emblem of

African American history and culture, and has frequently been sampled by contemporary African

American rap and hip-hop artists as a signaling gesture to the foundations of black musical expression. The racial and national ties to the blues are strong and visceral, and this I do not question. What I am pushing against is the essentialist move in music scholarship to lock the blues into this race- and nation-specific model, when such notions of the blues’ essential blackness, authenticity, and self-expressivity have emerged out of a complex discursive network of racial meaning-construction. As Radano and Bohlman write, “Particularly problematic is ethnomusicology’s investment in rather fixed concepts of ethnicity, culture, and subjectivity” (4) when such categories like ‘African American music,’ in our case, “were never racially pure, but,

11 Read, the 1960s-70s. Smith Blackburn 12

more typically, relationally determined” (20). At this point in the discussion, I thus turn to the specific musicological habits in blues writing concerning race, nation, and the transnational transmission of the blues. These habits include the adherence to a racial and national essentialism of the blues, as we have seen, as well as the centering of historical-musicological analysis around the concepts of “revival,” “theft,” and “foundationalism.”

Corona and Madrid identify the “fetishization of geography that seems to be effectively present in the production, marketing, and consumption of contemporary popular music” (18) and this fetish of the purported origins or locality of the blues dominates musicological work on the

British blues boom, as has been shown. In regards to the earliest European blues writers,

Schwartz claims that these researchers “were so preoccupied with identifying the ‘real’ or

‘authentic’ blues that they either neglected the contemporary idiom [in Europe] or decried it as a diluted version of a previously vital, earthy music” (228). African American populations, as the forebears of the blues tradition, were thus effectively reduced to an earth-bound, primitive, romanticized model of blues authenticity which “whites could not replicate” (Schwartz 231). The idea that the blues “belongs to that older and larger black cultural paradigm that grew out of the peculiar mix of isolation and interdependence that first took hold in plantation slavery” and is “a clear descendent of the field hollers and sorrow songs” (Warnes 273) dominates the work of

Oliver and his contemporaries. Further, it flows into contemporary conceptions of blues history, despite the tendency of this thinking to obscure the blues’ interracial origins and transnational developments. As Oliver claims in “Blue-Eyed Blues: The Impact of Blues on European Popular

Culture” (1976), the “blues [is] an expression of the black experience” (228) and its “form, … vocal style, [and] guitar technique were first observed over seventy years ago in rural black communities of Mississippi” (227). This mode of thinking permeates the contemporary writing Smith Blackburn 13

of Rupert Till, when he claims, in his 2007 article, that the blues is essentially a “black musical form [that] migrated into white culture, in the United States and then in England” (184) and that all European and American popular music is indebted to a racialized artistic vitality

“originat[ing] in blues or rhythm & blues” (183). Notably, the concept of “migration” employed by Till reinforces the centre / periphery model and suggests that the blues in white culture had been “dislocated” as “Migration … suggests the antithesis of origin, for in music’s transmission it is necessarily decentered, displaced from that which is first and authentically ‘real’” (Radano and Bohlman 30).

As has previously been discussed, this narrative of racial and national essentialism reifies the blues under the boundaries of a specific demographic and, in so doing, obscures the genre’s intersectionality in origin and in its interracial developments in Europe. The blues evolved in

Britain through the active engagement of both African American and British individuals with the genre in the form of live collaboration on stage and in studio, as well as in the form of active syncretisation in composition. To claim that the blues belongs only to a romanticized fantasy of

African American culture perpetuates the racial binary between European and African American cultures, and reinforces the notion that the blues is authentically black and can only be imitated by other demographics12. Perhaps more importantly, this mode of thinking, in characteristic

European folkloric manner, reifies African American culture into an idealized image of untainted, self-expressive, beacon of artistic authenticity13. This mode of thought in particular

12 On the issue of musicological work reinforcing racial division, Terry and Wynn in Transatlantic Roots Music (2012) reference Karl Hagstorm Miller who “argues that folklorists ‘helped to naturalize segregation by insisting that important aspects of African American or white folk culture were those that showed no sign of cultural miscegenation,’ thus ‘forming the basis of the musical colour line’” (8). 13 On this phenomenon of reification, Brackett explains that “even as the homological relation to African American music created a sense of ownership, it reified African American music as well, freezing this newly authenticated music into a kind of primitivistic frame” (131). Smith Blackburn 14

coloured various levels of discourse occurring during the 1960s British blues boom: Schwartz explains that the tours conducted by Leadbelly were so successful in Britain due to their appeal to the “extravagantly romanticized expectations about southern black life” (34) which coloured nearly all factions of the British concert-going public14. Wynn, in his introduction to Cross the

Water Blues (2007), describes how this racial and national essentialism presents itself specifically in interviews with British artists such as the Rolling Stones where the blues was understood as “‘primal,’ said Stones guitarist ” and having its origins traceable

“back to the music of black slaves and … [ultimately] back to Africa” (14). The same can be said of Eric Clapton whose “interview statements and … music itself reveal the solidification of a conservative or preservative blues ideology that rested on essentialist notions of race”15 (Adelt

77).

Not surprisingly, this fixed understanding of the blues too resonates in prevalent

American music historiography. Samuel L. Floyd Jr. describes that “bluesmen brought [their] new music to the twentieth century … [which] took its most significant features from the calls, cries and hollers of field slaves” and is a “manifestation of some of the primary features of

African and African American song expression” (74). Touring African American bluesmen themselves also often strictly upheld the racial and national essentialism associated with the blues, despite its discriminatory connotations: Leadbelly contended that “‘Never a white man

14 It has been argued on several accounts that this particular romanticized reception of the blues and blackness in general developed out of the ideological foundations laid by blackface minstrelsy, a largely popular form of entertainment in Britain spanning the 1830s through to the late 1970s. Shows including the Black and White Minstrel Show and the Kentucky Minstrels portrayed African Americans as artistically vital, yet intellectually premature, and essentially corporeal. As Michael Pickering argues, blackface “impersonation popularized and amplified the historically limited knowledge of the ‘negro’ [in Britain] and in so doing helped to crystalize particular stunted characterizations and recognitions of black people and the cultural practices associated with them” (2). 15 Guitarist for Fleetwood Mac, Danny Kirwan, upheld a similar position claiming that “‘The blues is a black man’s language … something that stems from the black nature of man’ … ‘the blues are a natural way of life to the American Negro’” (Schwartz 232). Smith Blackburn 15

could sing the blues’” (Oliver 228); and when discussing Elvis Presley, called

“ … a steal from the old original blues” (Birnbaum 60) which he witnessed evolving in his African American community. Therefore, the prevalence of this racial and national fixity of the blues to the confining ‘African American’ category is widespread, appearing on myriad levels of discourse, beyond just that of British blues scholarship. However, as I have previously suggested, this narrative of fixation derives not from historical fact, but rather from a legacy of “colonial fantasies” of the African American Other (Adelt 61), racial stereotypes, and mythical constructions of essential difference between ‘black and white,’ which all constitute the racial imagination associated with the blues. More in tune with historical reality is the notion that “music is a domain that different races … can potentially share … [and thus] contains common syncretic practices” (Radano and Bohlman 8).

Idealized as one of the forefathers of the country blues, Robert Johnson presents a revealing entrance point into the discussion of the blues’ hybrid origins. With only two extant photographs of the bluesman, Johnson embodies the romanticized non-commercial, bucolic, originary, country blues aesthetic. As Wynn writes, The Rolling Stones often recorded versions of various blues compositions, “from the ‘pure’ blues of Robert Johnson, through to the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters” (6), where the former was treated as an untainted wellspring of the blues from which Waters had strayed. However, despite his mythologized rural authenticity, it has been recorded that Johnson learned a significant bulk of his material from mass-mediated popular recordings, which contradicts his “pure,” folk status. As Terry and Wynn explain,

Distinctions between folk and popular music are often artificial, imposed by intellectuals rather than the people who perform the music. Miller quotes Johnny Shines, a friend of … Robert Johnson who, Shines insisted would play ‘ANYTHING that he heard … popular songs, ballads, blues, anything.’ (3)

Smith Blackburn 16

Johnson’s repertoire thus consisted not only of songs necessarily deriving from the “calls, cries and hollers of field slaves,” as Floyd stresses, but rather from a complex of sources, one of which being the popular recordings to which he and many other early blues performers had been exposed. Importantly, those popular recordings, first released in large scale during the 1910s -

1920s by artists including , Mammie Smith, and Sophie Tucker16, are significantly interracial.

Brackett resolves that,

… the ‘blues,’ as it developed and circulated in the first two decades of the twentieth century, was a product of performances, publications, and recordings by black and white professional musicians working primarily in vaudeville, minstrelsy, and travelling circuses. (133)

Out of this “matrix of black and white interactions” (Brackett 134) emerged blues, “coon,” and minstrel songs from which the country bluesmen, endowed with their originary status, drew much of their material. As Mike Rugel writes in his “Uncensored History of the Blues” blog for the Museum,

Son House [, for instance] recorded “Am I Right or Wrong” … in 1942 … [which was] based on a song called “There Are Others Who Don’t Think That Way” by Shepard Edmonds, popular around the turn of the century when Edmonds was with the minstrel company called Isham’s Octoroons. (unpag.)

Therefore, the repertoire of blues performers (endowed with an originary status) at least in part stems from mass-mediated minstrel, coon, classic blues, and vaudevillian compositions. The coon songs and early classic blues recordings, featuring the women listed above and also artists such as and Marion Harris, were patently interracial and international with performers hailing from European (Sophie Tucker), European-American (Marion Harris), and

African-American (Bessie Smith, , and Ma Rainey) backgrounds. Whether or not

16 A Ukrainian-born, American singer. Smith Blackburn 17

the performers of this material were African American, the coon, minstrel, and blues material was centered around a performance of blackness. In this environment many European-American performers were “coached by blacks on how to perform material largely written by white people in styles created by white people who thought they were mimicking black people” (Brackett

139). The very sonic characteristics musicologists and blues historians ascribe to the blues have evolved, not organically out of an African American demographic per se, but rather out of a complex discursive terrain on which conceptions of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ were negotiated.

Whites imitating what were imagined to be valid characteristics of blackness, blacks fulfilling that imagined conception of their identity, blacks then asserting a racially pure cultural identity in the blues, and whites asserting the same in hillbilly music (or contemporary ‘country’), are just some manifestations of the ongoing theatre of racial-identity construction.

Returning to Robert Johnson, what I have sought to elucidate is the fact that though country blues artists like him have been historically endowed with originary blues status, often their own compositions included versions or covers of popular blues material which had both predated their country blues, and was markedly interracial, international, and female. For instance, the blues/jazz composition “I Ain’t Got Nobody” first recorded in 1925 by Bessie

Smith, was composed ten years earlier by the black-face minstrel compositional duo Roger A.

Graham (a European American) and Spencer Williams (an African American). The song was later popularized by the white jazz singer and comb player, Red Mackenzie, as well as by black artists Buck and Bubbles17. Further, “St. Louis Blues,” while composed by African-American writer W. C. Handy, was recorded primarily by white singer Marion Harris in 1920, before Louis

17 Full name being John William Sublett (1902-1986). Smith Blackburn 18

Armstrong and Bessie Smith created their version in 1925. Finally, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s

“Bad Luck Blues” recorded in 1926 was a cover of the recording of the song made three years earlier by former minstrel performer Ma Rainey for Paramount.

In spite of this interracial and inter-gender creative miscegenation in early blues history, the historiographical reformulation of the blues into a romantic tale of African-American male origin reigns. This has been corroborated by Brackett when he argues that,

… the retroactive definition of the blues as a tradition has focused overwhelmingly on self-accompanied, guitar-playing male singers from Jefferson to … Patton to Skip James to Robert Johnson, whose mode of playing the blues is then understood as preceding that of the female artists who recorded before them, even though the move towards a more “folk”- oriented blues had already begun with the female artists such as Bessie Smith and Ida Cox. (187)

However, nowhere here do I aim to prove that the blues is in any way predominantly a European

American form due to these interracial origins and the phenomenon of black-imitation. My claim here is that, – in line with the anti-essentialist rhetoric surveyed by Radano, Bohlman, and

Brackett – the racial divide between ‘white’ and ‘black’ in American society has long been upheld by assumptions which can no longer hold their weight. Emerging out of such an entangled matrix of co-dependent, interracial interactions, the blues – just as much as country music18, and the very ontologies of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ – denies itself the luxury of a homogeneous racial characterization.

Here, I have attempted to identify the racial, gender, and national heterogeneity of the blues’ origins in an effort to supplant the essentialist definition of the blues as an African

American, rural, male form of expression. With this, I contradict the historiographic narrative of

18 Adelt recounts that scholar Rebecca Thomas “situates country music within the context of race and argues that country became a symbol of whiteness despite its interracial history prior to its commercialization in the 1920s and 1930s … African American influences on country were downplayed in a successful attempt to ascertain its respectability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (115). Smith Blackburn 19

the British blues boom which situates the blues under the homogenous category of ‘African

American’ and endows British blues compositions with derivative, imitative status. Such narratives have been upheld by early blues scholars in Britain, through to such contemporary work on the British reception of the blues as Dave Allen’s “Feeling Bad This Morning: Why the

British Blues” (2007) where he maintains this racialized original/derivative historiographic model. He writes, “I am sure that part of the connection between British blues of the 1960s and its original black American styles is through the structural form, rhythms and excitement of familiar rock ‘n’ roll” (153, my emphasis). However dominant these narratives may be, scholarship focusing on the heterogeneous origins of the blues has made some headway.

Birnbaum’s Before Elvis: The Prehistory of R&R (2013), for example, reveals that “the consensus continues to be that the blues is of rural provenance, an outgrowth of earlier folk forms such as spirituals, work songs, and field hollers,” yet “the evidence for this is tenuous”

(81). Further, in line what I have been arguing, Birnbaum stresses that,

… rock ‘n’ roll has largely been viewed as a bolt from the blue … created through white appropriation of music that had previously been played only by and for blacks. But the roots of rock can be tracked all the way back to the minstrel and “coon” songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were written and performed by whites and blacks alike. (vii)

The presumption of the blues’ homogenous origins thus obfuscates the intersectionality of nineteenth and twentieth century blues history, and further belies the genre’s racial and national fluidity as it developed on the British Isles in this transnational context. Akin to Adelt’s critique, I hold that the blues was already an interracial genre before its introduction to Britain, and continued in that heterogeneous fashion as it developed overseas.

The next critique of scholarship therefore concerns the rhetoric of “theft” and “revival” present in this vein of musicology, and will focus primarily on the infantilizing and primitivistic Smith Blackburn 20

views of African American artists espoused by this mode of thinking. Beginning with the rhetoric of “theft,” many scholars on the British blues employ the concept of “foundationalism,” maintaining that ‘African American blues’ functions as the foundation or blueprint of all blues rock and rock & roll produced in America and Britain. This narrative obviously strengthens the original/derivative binary despite the international interactions, and interracial origins of the blues. While the British blues rock of , The Rolling Stones, and Fleetwood Mac may share key stylistic and formal features with the blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and

Sonnyboy Williamson, – such as a twelve-bar structure, a I-IV-V harmonic progression, and a rough vocal timbre – the claim that the “foundation” of their music is an African-American art form suffers from internal problematics. Firstly, it reinstates absolute racial difference between

British and African American performers, creating a mythical fault line between them. It further denies the fact that British blues rock is a syncretic form, evolving out of interracial interactions and is not merely the outgrowth of a static pre-existing musical culture. Lastly, in neo-colonial folkloristic fashion, it colours African American culture again with unintellectual artistic virility, suggesting that “‘the one and only source that can ever revitalize [British pop is] … the flux of native Afro-’” (Oliver, quoted by Schwartz 147).

A prominent example of foundationalism in the historical musicology of the British blues is presented in Rupert Till’s “The Blues Blueprint: The Blues in the Music of , The

Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin” (2007). Till here argues that “within blues a blueprint developed for pop and rock musicians in England, that has become integrated into Western popular music in general and British pop music in particular” and that “Musicians like Charlie

Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly … [etc.] created this blueprint” (183). Till pays no attention to the classic blues and popular styles which contributed to the “blueprint” “created” by Smith Blackburn 21

the bluesmen listed. More importantly, his rhetoric endows ‘African American blues’ with an originary and markedly static status as the “template that adopted and developed” (184). This thinking obfuscates the interracial interaction at the American Folk Blues

Festival, and the fact that British blues rock figures prominently as a syncretic art form (i.e. not merely an adoption of a black art). Moreover, Till’s rhetoric of “adoption” and “development” fits into a colonial model of resource extraction where the artistically vital, yet passive African

American group is seen as exploited by a capable and dominating British musical culture. In his attempt to give credit to an imagined African American male blues well-spring, Till instead reinstates an antiquated racial hierarchy and fashions African American bluesmen into a passive community which has been repeatedly exploited by whites. Interestingly, this thinking displays minimal growth or diversion from Paul Oliver’s 1976 foundationalist arguments:

This is not to say that the influence of blues had disappeared; on the contrary, it has been absorbed into pop music until the form, the techniques and the expression of the blues have become part of the norm. Blues has given – or rather, has been sucked dry – of all it can offer to pop music. (Oliver 238)

Predominant themes of “theft” in this musicological field too present an imagined

African American community as passive, infantile, and inexorably exploited. The narrative of

“theft” presumes that the blues, – rendered essentially African American – in its transatlantic development in Britain, was dishonorably stolen from the hands of the black community. This mode of thinking does not solely exist in scholarship of the British blues but colours many levels of discourse regarding ‘black music’ and its continuation in ‘white society.’ As Baruti Kopano and Tamara Brown write in Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African

American Popular Culture (2014),

Instead of seeing white musicians’ imitation of black musical and cultural styles as flattering, black jazz genius Thelonius Monk charged that white bands had ‘carried off Smith Blackburn 22

the healthiest child of Negro music, and starved it of its spirit [emphasis added] until its parents no longer recognized it.’ (7)

Kopano and Brown’s text both surveys and procures this polemical attitude, paying little critical attention both to the assumption of African American “ownership” of jazz, blues, R & B, and soul, and to the moments of interracial collaboration that contradict the convenient “theft” narrative. Despite the deception and prejudice it incurs, the “theft” narrative presents itself prominently in British blues rock scholarship. In Till’s article, he claims that “The characteristic

“Wooh” often sung by the Beatles … was taken from soul band the Isley Brothers” (187) and that the band’s “backbeat drum sound was taken from rhythm & blues and music”

(188). In the same breath, he writes that “Led Zeppelin in particular became hugely successful with a style that overtly and consciously took from blues music” (Till 189). Till’s rhetoric seems entirely akin to those of the previous scholarly generation, as Schwartz explains that the initial

“commercial success of British blues artists raised accusations [among the British blues intelligentsia] that white musicians were appropriating traditional black material to the detriment of its original creators” (235). Paul Oliver himself held fast to the position that “both and rock sold the blues down the river” (232).

In both the contemporary and previous writing on the blues, the “theft” narrative functions as an attempt to right the wrong of British appropriation; to give credit and voice to a depraved African American artistic community. However well-intentioned, this rhetoric in form and content mirrors what Dienke Hondius describes as “racial paternalism [which] has the assumption of not only superiority but also care: caring for the infant, domesticizing or taming the animal” (5). Such “romantic racialism attaches positive qualities to blackness and black Smith Blackburn 23

people, as just those qualities that whites are lacking, missing, and unable to achieve19” (Hondius

184) and in effect coats African American communities with an aura of primitive artistic capability, and yet significant weakness. Adelt reveals how this rhetoric functions primarily in the Chicago blues publication Living Blues (est. 1970) where “In Jim O’Neal’s words, the

[magazine’s] staff wanted ‘to show that blues was still a living tradition in the African American community, to give credit to the blues artists whose work was the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll, and to give voice to the blues artists to tell their own stories’” (125, my emphasis). This patronizing rhetoric assumes that African American blues performers of the 1970s and onward were incapable of having an avenue of expression of their own, or an ability to stake a claim of ownership over the blues genre. On the contrary, African American blues performers historically have been fervently vocal about their commitment and intimate relationship to the blues, as I have discussed, and have also had African American print resources at their disposal including

The Chicago Defender (est. 1905).

What can be gathered from this discussion is that Jim O’Neal, Rupert Till, and Paul

Oliver’s words exhibit overtones of patronization and paternalism. In his 2007 article, Dave

Allen too subscribes to this rhetorical tradition when he claims that “the British blues scene has been vital in sustaining and giving life to the form” (143). He dramatically stresses that

“Crucially, an influential but apparently dying musical genre was revived through the efforts of young white musicians and their followers – particularly in its new home, Britain” (Allen 153).

Here, the blues associated with African Americans is “sustained” and “revived” by British players, as if the former community was incapable of sustaining it alone20. These authors, in their

19 Recall the words of Paul Oliver presented on Page 20. 20 One cannot help but compare these rhetorical moves to those of Ry Cooder and Director Wim Wenders in the documentary covering the Buena Vista Social Club (1999) phenomenon. In both instances, a talented veteran non- Smith Blackburn 24

surveys of British blues history, employ the themes of “theft” and “revival,” and often depict

African American bluesmen as wrongfully divested of wealth and copyright21. To be clear, I acknowledge that certain elements of the blues made their way into British blues rock, and I also acknowledge that were it not for British blues rock commodification, many African American blues performers may not have enjoyed fame. However, I find it irresponsible to employ such themes as “theft” and “revival,” for they perpetuate the essentialist racial division and prejudice I have been critiquing. The narrative of “theft” obfuscates any interracial and international collaboration and co-evolution between African American and British blues players. It holds fast to the position held by Oliver and Hoffman that British blues functions merely as an exercise in imitation. Most disturbingly, themes like “theft” and “revival” reinstate an essential racial binary between an originary American black and derivative British white performance style, positioning the former in a weak and infantile position compared to the vicious, neo-colonial capability of the latter. In short, this rhetoric obscures historical truth, and perpetuates racial mythology.

With this section of the discussion I have surveyed musicological tropes of this field including “foundationalism,” “theft,” and “revivalism” in an effort to reveal the ways in which the British blues boom has been historically configured in a racially hierarchical context. I have pinpointed these scholarly tendencies in particular due to their obfuscation of the intersectionality and syncretism discussed in the earlier pages of this essay. In contradiction to this scholarship, I maintain that the blues genre was already highly interracial and syncretic

white community of musicians have their life’s work revived and brought to light only by the benevolence of white uplift (i.e. Ry Cooder’s production of the Buena Vista Social Club album and his organized tours). 21 For example, Rupert Till quotes mournfully regretting his loss of copyrights as he claims that he “‘was being railroaded … Leonard [Chess] knowing full well [he’d] sign the darn thing anyway’” (196). Further he writes that “makes it clear that Arc made a lot of money for its owners and that the black artists making the music saw little of the income from their recordings” (Till 196). Smith Blackburn 25

before its introduction to Britain, and that once it arrived in Britain, many individuals of African

American and British descent communicated, interacted, and collectively evolved the genre.

Finally, I hold that the resulting product of this evolution has been a highly syncretic British blues rock. Thinking of this genre as fundamentally indebted to a black art not only fallaciously essentializes the blues’ origins, but discriminates against black blues performers of the 1960s, and perpetuates divisive racial rhetoric while obfuscating intersectionality. The blues genre, I argue, is autonomous in the sense that it moves fluidly and independently beyond such categories as “race” and the “nation state,” and therefore the employment of these fixed identity markers only distances our musicological understanding of how the blues works.

To conclude, it is important to briefly elucidate how the very nature of the blues engenders this autonomous movement, and how its uniqueness as a genre has allowed such racially and nationally varied development beyond just that of America and Britain, but throughout continental Europe as well. Many of the scholars discussed above, – including

Schwartz, Wynn, Grist, Groom, and Allen – have presented convincing cases of the blues’ inherent adaptability as a genre. They, among others, have argued that the blues is a genre predicated upon personal, individual expression; that it is both harmonically simple (often following a twelve-bar form centered around a I-IV-V harmonic progression) and yet provides space for virtuosic display; that it is economically accessible (as its principal instruments of harmonica, acoustic/electric guitar, upright bass, and drums are relatively inexpensive22); and finally that the genre exhibits compositional plasticity and encourages “collage style song- writing” (Till 192) where composers draw lyrics, styles, and chord progressions from an extant

22 Here I am describing the instrumentation largely associated with the country and Chicago blues genres (which were most popular during the British blues boom), rather than the classic blues which often includes more lush orchestration, and piano. Smith Blackburn 26

repertoire. Each of these elements contribute to the genre’s overall propensity for adaptation beyond the community of its “original” creators. On the first and second elements, Allen cites

Bob Brunning,

… to explain the [blues’] attraction, [as] Brunning acknowledges the ‘deceptively easy structure’ of the blues and suggests that it ‘… has allowed musicians everywhere to express their feelings through the songs, which return again and again to the themes of oppression, sadness, poverty and emotional deprivation.’ (145)

In a similar light, Grist identifies the blues as an “‘oral-formulaic’ folk tradition of use and reuse, appropriation and variation” (208) which suggests that the genre itself is uniquely conducive to exportation.

In the case of British blues musicians, these often young art students gravitated toward the blues in part because of the genre’s accessible form, and its emphasis on personal expression.

Compositions like “Everyday I Have the Blues” popularized by Memphis Slim and B.B. King, or

“Call Me When You Need Me” popularized by T-Bone Walker and Shakey Jake Harris, exhibit the kind of personal outpouring of sorrow that characterizes the genre. The former reads,

Everyday Everyday I have the blues … Nobody loves me Nobody seems to care … Speaking of bad luck people, You know I’ve had my share. (Slim 1-2, 7-8, 11-12)

In this highly adaptable twelve-bar blues authored by Pinetop Sparks, the speaker expresses his or her sorrow in a markedly non-specific manner. Here there are few references to epoch, location23, or political orientation. The speaker simply releases a personal articulation of sorrow,

23 Of course, many blues compositions like Son House’s “Scary Delta Blues” make specific reference to the Mississippi Delta and other locations associated with the American South, however these location markers function as peripheral ornamentation in comparison to the overwhelming prevalence of non-specific expressions of strife, hardship, and lost love. Smith Blackburn 27

and the cathartic vocalization of the song itself arouses consolation. Young British musicians could gravitate to this practice; expressing their personal frustrations through the generalized lyrics and accessible form unique to the blues.

Perhaps the most important factor contributing to the blues’ propensity for adaptation and cross-demographic interaction is its compositional plasticity, which allowed for rapid and efficient compositional activity in the early years of the British blues boom. This compositional fluidity and its accompanying lack of certified authorship, likely evolved out of the genre’s straddling of folk and popular music-dissemination. Country blues musicians historically have adapted popular classic blues, coon, and minstrel songs – as has been seen – and from those early adaptations developed further variations among country blues players. Over time, the traces of copyright and authorship muddled and became secondary to performance practice. As Schwartz writes,

The nature of communal composition, by which lyric couplets, melodic and accompaniment patterns are freely co-opted to create new songs, was well understood, and some British artists believed such uncredited borrowing was the “traditional” manner of writing songs … Moreover, determining authorial credit of many blues songs was – and still is – difficult. (234)

Here and in other areas of How Britain Got the Blues (2007), Schwartz emphasizes how the compositional work of British bands such as the Yardbirds or The Rolling Stones is very much a part of the constantly evolving song-writing tapestry of the blues genre. In agreement, Till writes that “It is very clear that the [Yardbirds] are a blues band, growing out of the blues explosion and playing largely blues music at first, and this collage-style song-writing technique is a traditional Smith Blackburn 28

blues one” (192) 24. Likewise, John Milward in his 2013 publication explains how it was often that “songwriters would create a hit song from a tune in the public domain,” in particular,

[The] Stones had studied the masters25, and recognized how new blues songs could be fashioned from familiar components. In the case of “The Last Time,” they made a gospel song into rock and roll with a memorable guitar lick, driving drums, and a sing along chorus. (51)

According to Keith Richards, the composition of “The Last Time” (1965) consisted primarily of

“‘re-adapting a traditional gospel song that had been sung by the Staple Singers’” (Ibid.).

Therefore the compositional borrowing and overlapping so characteristic of the blues genre in its nascent stages, continues into the British blues boom; the boom functioning as one stage in the overall dynamic development of the genre26. To summarize with the words of Schwartz,

Like most singers in the blues tradition, British musicians adopted the basic formulae of themes, verses, motives, and harmonies ‘to form a unique comment on the body of tradition and a unique presentation of the personal and communal identity.’ (245)

With this essay, I have sought to refute some of the pervasive tendencies within the historical musicology of the British blues boom, and of blues history more generally. Having been bombarded with the prevalent centre (African American) / periphery (British) model of the blues, the essentialist and mythical blues origin stories, and the exhausted narratives of “theft” throughout my scholarly career, some inevitable contestation was bound to erupt. This discussion

24 I am therefore not in complete disagreement with the entirety of Till’s article. I do not refute his arguments in favour of the compositional plasticity of the blues. 25 Notably, this term attaches an essentialist originary status to the African American bluesmen which made up the Stones’ listening repertoire. 26 While I hold that the compositional activity of the British blues musicians functions as part of the overall development of the blues, I do recognize the ethical problematics of British bands profiting substantially from songs that share in large part with the earlier recordings of African American bluesmen and women, when the latter performers enjoyed no such financial remuneration. This is an important ethical debate discussed in Milward’s Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped R&R, and Rock Saved the Blues (2013), Bob Groom’s “Whose ‘Rock Island Line’?: Originality in the Composition of Blues and British Skiffle” (2007), and James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk’s The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (2009). My intention here is to offer an alternative reading of the British blues boom as a continuation of a compositionally plastic and dynamic genre, in stead of an essentially unethical theft of an African American art form. However, I recognize the validity and credence of some arguments against the unethical use of blues material under these circumstances. Smith Blackburn 29

has addressed the racial essentialism of the blues’ origin story, revealing the multi-gendered, interracial, and at times international atmosphere out of which the now recognizable blues genre was forged. In general, the notion of “origin,” or “originary demographic,” or “original location” proves unhelpful in a historically accurate and non-reductive understanding of the blues. As a genre which evolved out of an array of dynamic and heterogeneous factors, and functions as a compositionally plastic art form predicated upon variation, such fixities of race or nation only inhibit a holistic understanding of the blues. I have argued that the blues defies the rigid classification of “African American” in its interracial beginnings, and in its international and interracial developments overseas. Moreover, I hold that Britain, at the time of the first blues introductions in the 1950s through to the 1970s, was far from a cultural tabula rasa, but was rather a culture already steeped in a legacy of popular entertainment associated with African

American culture. Its interaction with the blues was thus always already coloured by racial and creative miscegenation. Moreover, the American Folk Blues Festival tours and studio sessions, in particular, saw communication and collaboration between African American and British blues players (which have been figured as two polarized groups), which lead to a British blues rock product that is highly syncretic. Artists like B.B. King, , Lonnie Donnegan, Chuck

Berry, and Keith Richards, in their defiance of the racial categorization of sound, are further examples of the blues’ resistance to categories of race and nation. Finally, and most importantly, this discussion has attempted to reveal how the essentialization of race in blues musicology and its associated rhetoric of “theft,” “original authenticity,” and its centre/periphery model, carries with it the inheritance of divisive and hierarchical racial ideology. A reading of the blues which strays from convenient racial binaries and nationalist orientations, – to which the work of David

Brackett, Ulrich Adelt, and more generally, Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman strives – could Smith Blackburn 30

allow scholars of the blues to, “… recognize cultural formations as glocal phenomena where global and local motivations coexist and avoid ‘reinstituting fictitious cultural units [and] ignoring racial, ethnic, and sexual difference because it disrupts the national fantasy’” (Corona and Madrid 3). This is what I too strive to achieve since the fantasy, while convenient, only silences the voices of truth.

Smith Blackburn 31

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