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Who Owns the Blues?: Contesting the Fixity of Race and Nation in Discourses on the 1960S British Blues Boom Kaiya Smith Blackburn 2016

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Who Owns the Blues?: Contesting the Fixity of Race and Nation in Discourses on the 1960S British Blues Boom Kaiya Smith Blackburn 2016 Smith Blackburn 1 WHO OWNS THE BLUES?: 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, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, and T-Bone Walker (among others) – emerge as the bearers of authentic tradition, from which British blues rock “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 The Rolling Stones 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
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