Sometimes they would just grab the reins, and turn a honky tonk song into a partying New Orleans funk number. I loved the concept, so how could I complain? But I always felt a little awkward playing that way, like a guy who puts on a ball gown in order to get into a lifeboat. “Yes, yes, women and children first. Entirely appropriate. Pleased to meet you, despite the circumstances. My name is- er- Persephone Jenkins.”
Years before that, I’d wrestled with my guilt about playing country music, since I wasn’t a redneck. Man, did I struggle with that. I didn’t want to just appear to be making fun of country. (I once overheard a conversation at a record store between two suburban assholes, regarding the X side project the Knitters. One of them said to the other, by way of explaining why this cool band was singing country songs, “they’re doing a parody of country music.” Believing that bullshit was the only way that douche could buy the album.)
But I spent years studying the idiom, and wrote a few songs, and learned a bunch of Bakersfield Telecaster licks, and Western swing stuff, and eventually I figured I didn’t have to feel weird about it any more.
Somewhere along the line, I decided my playing was too white, and I spent a week or two doing something the medical community refers to as “Freddie King Immersion.” I played every lick on this comp of his instrumental singles, and learned more about the blues in that two weeks than I’d learned in my whole life up to that point.
I’m still dining out today, so to speak, on what I learned from Freddie.
(As an aside, I’ll point out that I wasn’t “learning licks.” My goal was to see how Freddie moved around the fretboard, how he structured a solo, how he attacked each note, how he put a phrase together, and so forth. In short, how he managed to play guitar for three minutes and get it onto a jukebox. Even B.B. King, often considered the best blues lead guitar player ever, couldn’t do that as well as Freddie. If you doubt me, get a copy of a B.B. King instrumental album and compare it to similar work by Freddie. There’s no contest.)
So that was my toehold in the world of black music. When I could play (and think) more like a real black blues guitarist, and not just like a white rock player, my whole attitude about my playing changed.
Here’s where we shift from the fun part of this piece to the part where some people are going to be pissed off.
As a white guy, I have a lot of white friends. And as a white musician, I have a lot of white musician friends. If you look at my Facebook friends list, you’ll see what I mean. It’s like a bowl of grits. I’d love for this balance to shift a little, but I prefer to let it happen organically, rather than working to assemble a team of black friends so I can swell with pride about how many black friends I have. As a result of this seemingly enlightened attitude, my black friends list tends to remain stable, changing at a glacial pace.
I went to a jam session once with a band that was roughly 3/5 people of color. These cats were super nice, and it was a very warm experience. I took the opportunity to talk about race a little bit. A drummer mentioned that there was some frustration among non-white musicians in the local scene, some of whom felt they were being shut out by white players. This gave me pause, as I couldn’t recall ever hiring a musician for a gig who wasn’t white. It certainly wasn’t a conscious thing on my part; I’m no anti-racism hero, but I’ve definitely enjoyed the handful of times I’ve been hired on gigs with African-American players. Great musicians and lovely guys. So I was honest with him about this, and he was kind enough to not give me grief about it.
Apparently, on an online forum discussion about this issue, there was some defensiveness from some white musicians, with at least one player taking the position that the local scene had no problem related to race, and that there was no reason for any people of color to complain.
This brings me to my point about what I’m calling “white weirdness.” If I got publicly guilt-tripped over never hiring players of color, I wouldn’t enjoy that. I might even get a little defensive. But I’d also have to admit that I’d never made any effort to do so, and in fact had never really thought about it. I’d be hard pressed to even name any nonwhite musicians that I’d seen onstage with any regularity. The roots music scene I’ve been part of for decades is virtually all white, and as I type that sentence it looks pretty creepy to me. How can a “roots music scene” in a major metropolitan area be all white? The roots of American music sure aren’t.
On an online thread about whether white people should play and sing the blues, I put my two cents in. Much more than two cents, actually, as this is a topic that I’ve thought about a ton for years.
If anyone cares, here’s my position. I don’t have any problem with any African-American’s opinion about this issue. That’s number one. I’m inclined to play music I love, and not worry much about “cultural appropriation,” but this isn’t because I have disdain for the opposite perspective. I’m happy to discuss it with any black person any time, and I’m eager to hear them out. I may feel that a rule that doesn’t allow me (or anyone else) to play music they want to play runs counter to my ideas of what art is about, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care what others think about it. I figure that if I’m playing a style of music, and someone who has cultural ties to the style is bothered by me doing so, there’s a good chance I’m fucking it up. When I was in a group playing traditional honky-tonk style country music, a guy said to me, “Son, if you keep picking like that, you ain’t never gonna get well.” I took this as high praise, though it was grammatically a little confusing. I’ve also played blues guitar occasionally on gigs with African-American players, and they didn’t seem to have a problem with my playing.
But the point is, I’m open to negative opinions. I’ve worked hard on my playing, and I consider both country (white) culture and blues (black) culture deadly serious, even though they are a lot of fun. So I have no self-consciousness about dabbling in these styles, and I wouldn’t feel threatened by anyone bringing this stuff up. I feel secure about my playing and about my respect for these cultures, and I’m not afraid to discuss the issue, even with someone who doesn’t agree with me.
Some others see it differently. There was some resistance to the idea that white musicians should care at all about these things, and while some folks admitted they hated the “should whites play the blues” question, others took the position that it’s all American music, black and white, and that’s all there is to it.
This is a sticking point for me. I can come up with a long list of white musicians who played the blues beautifully, and a much longer list of white guys who played jazz well enough to make important contributions to the development of the form. And I can come up with a very short list of white singers who sing the blues in a way that makes me want to sit down and listen. With no effort, I think of Jack Teagarden. I’d have to put in some more effort to add others to the list.
But these lists of white musicians don’t refute my basic view, which is that blues music uses a language that was created by black Americans. Slaves began building it, and black musicians added to it over time. This blues language is defined by various elements, some of which are “between-the-cracks” notes, an approach to harmony that allows notes previously considered wrong to now become right, and the use of “roughened timbre,” which sounds highfalutin until you realize I’m talking about the kind of scratchy distorted voice Louis Armstrong used to sing even his corniest material. I maintain that none of this was influenced by white European art music, for the simple reason that none of it can be found there. Opera singers didn’t sound like Louis Armstrong or Charley Patton, and presumably would have been fired if they had. And some of the notes I’m talking about literally can’t even be played on the piano. I don’t know how much more clear it can get than that.
With jazz, the question of authorship is slightly more complicated, because the genre wasn’t even really a genre at first. It began as an interpretative approach, with much of the material and instrumentation coming from European sources. And while eventually jazz players came to depend on their own compositions much more heavily, even many of those are based on the chord progressions from popular songs. (And many of those songs were written by American Jewish writers, and many of those writers were emigrés from Europe who changed their names so that white people wouldn’t be confused.)
But the single component that makes jazz language new to the earth, and not derivative of white European art music, is the sense of time. Louis Armstrong didn’t invent this, but he might as well have, since his fluency with it was stronger and more influential than that of anyone before him. (You can hear recordings of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra before Louis joined their trumpet section. You won’t hear much that sounds to modern ears like black music. You can then listen to the way they sounded when Louis was in the band, and the way they sounded after he left. It’s not the same music any more.) Some theorists believe that the “swing” feel, which is a use of syncopation so layered and complex it can’t be notated, is a kind of adaptation of African polyrhythmic thinking where different meters are played simultaneously, so that it can fit into a more European or “white” 4/4 context. To put it in a more colloquial way, it’s a way of creating forward drive by relaxing. It’s a world away from the kind of rhythmic approach you hear in Bach or Mozart.
To boil it down: all of this amounts to a musical language, or two related languages (blues and jazz). Black people created it. Many many white people learned to speak it, and in some cases added to it. Country musicians borrowed this language every step of the way, and found ways to interpret it in their own voice. The result of that is endlessly appealing to me. And white jazz musicians (notably Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer early on, as well as Lennie Tristano and his disciples later, plus every white guy’s favorite example, pianist Bill Evans) brought ideas and sounds into it too. The history is richer for that.
So, I’m not trying, now or last year or ever, to discount the contributions of great white players and writers to this ongoing cultural story. (Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis did try to do that, in my estimation. They also more or less wrote a lot of the weirder black musicians out of the story, consigning Cecil Taylor, for example, to a footnote, and then adding insult to injury by bringing in Branford to mock him.) And I definitely feel that all of it is now American music, perhaps the best example of American whites and blacks working together to create something beautiful and lasting.
But why is it so hard for some white guys to acknowledge that black people created these things? It seems to me that American music is the only area where white guys are so touchy about this. Nobody has a problem with acknowledging that they’re cooking dishes from another culture, for example. Nobody argues that Julia Child was so great that we can stop referring to it as French Cuisine. I don’t want to call this weirdness about giving black people credit racism, though many people would, and I wouldn’t argue with them. I’ve preached to liberals ad nauseum about the danger of publicly shaming racists, but here I am doing the same thing. Because it just gets tiresome to read, again and again, that some recording by Benny Goodman was the most exciting six minutes in jazz history, or that Bill Evans had the best jazz piano trio ever, or that Keith Jarrett recorded the most beautiful and profound piano music ever, one evening in Germany. (That particular asininity has the distinction of being equally clueless about white European composers AND countless African-American masters like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington.) And I’m a fan of those players. I own enough Keith Jarrett to fill a Winnebago, and I’ve spent years tracking down and cataloguing whitebread pop sessions featuring a pre-fame Goodman playing eight hot bars in otherwise dreary recordings that make the Archies sound like The Rolling Stones.
I don’t know where all of this going. It could be that this kind of whitewashing of the Black American legacy is on its way out. I go to a lot of jam sessions in the DC area where white and black players are onstage together, happily collaborating, with nary a white rock guitar lick or rhythm to be heard all night. And hip hop music seems to have replaced rock as the lingua franca of American popular music. (I’m happy about this trend, though I wish it had happened during a period where hip hop was really running at full steam. With all due respect to Kendrick Lamar, I wish the hip hop Pulitzer had gone to somebody like Q-Tip, or DJ Premier, or De La Soul, back when those luminaries were creating the music that REALLY made white rock seem irrelevant.)
We shall see, I guess. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing and playing my “white” music, which is shot through with the musical language created by black Americans. If I can make a dollar out of it, I’m not handing a penny of that to any black people, I can tell you that, but lord, it feels good to say out loud how much my music owes to the hard work they put in, long before I was born. If you’re a white guy playing blues or jazz in a venue with an all-white band, and an all-white audience, I think you need to ask yourself— why is it so hard to even pay lip service to black people for having changed American popular music from what it used to be, a bunch of adenoidal white guys singing through a damn cone?
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