The preceding case studies illustrate the interaction between organic intellectuals such as Paul Oliver and LeRoi Jones with the academy through print-based media in the 1960s. These interactions took place during the formation and stabilisation of the blues community following the revivalist practices of the ‘Blues Boom’. Further, these interactions illustrate both the emergence of blues scholarship (Oliver, 1960) and the concretisation of blues narratives and canon, as well as the creation of blues intellectuals and critical thinkers. Largely absent from the discourse at this early stage of development are the voices of the musicians themselves, except for as interview subjects. This is perhaps as it should be; the primary concern of musicians is, after all, making music. The attribution of meaning and value by a secondary audience of scholars and critics such as the staff of
Living Blues magazine however has real consequences for the musicians in question. Consulted on this topic, African American blues musicians frequently offered the opinion that the instrumental ability of white blues players was less important than vocal performance. David “Honeyboy”
Edwards indicated that “A lot of these white boys play the blues real good. Ain’t but one thing about most of them though: most can’t sing a thing,” (Edwards & Frank, 1997) a sentiment echoed by Lee Conley Bradley (aka Big Bill Broonzy) “[white players] couldn’t sing the blues. They could say the blues words…but not the real Mississippi Blues” (Broonzy & Bruynoghe, 1955). This emphasis on the voice is understandable in the context of comparatively low literacy rates amongst the first
generation of blues players (Oliver, 1983). Many black performers appeared less concerned with ethnicity than members of the emerging scholarly secondary audience. In many cases, the musicians appeared publically to welcome the incursion of white protégés and enthusiasts, and in many instances thanked white performers for “…keeping the music alive,” and ‘…open[ing] a lot of doors,’ (B. B. King & Conforti, 1969) to a new, young, majority white audience.
93
The essentialist appropriation vs. universalist cultural exchange arguments continued through the second blues revival of the 1990s and were typified by Lawrence Hoffman’s guest editorial in Guitar Player Magazine “At the Crossroads,” which argued that it was “…absurd to think that the lifeblood of blues could ever be extended by anyone who, in essence, could never be more than a convincing, expressive copyist” (Hoffman, 1990 ). The article provoked “mountains of vituperative abuse,” from readers who asserted their right to play the blues based on past suffering or various iterations of the cultural exchange argument (Garon, 1995). In the same year, Ebony magazine asked “Are Blacks Giving Away The Blues?” and featured quotations from musicians such as B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, concerned not that white players were usurping their position on stage, but that black audiences were deserting the music and being replaced by crowds that were “95 percent…white and yuppie-ish, clap[ping] arrythmically” (Whitaker, 1990). A pained response from “…a black musician who is capable of playing any style” indicated that “Whites see the blues as entertainment; for us it is a way of life” (Spight, 1990).
Digital spaces
The following section provides a description of blogs, and the rise of digital magazines – particularly the publication of Living Blues in this format. Featured analysis of the interaction between musician Corey Harris, and Adam Gussow is offered. Harris is an African American musician whose blog post “Blues is Black Music! Can White Men Play the Blues?” (Harris, 2015b) invited much commentary, as well as a featured response from Gussow who is himself a very successful blues performer, white, and a university professor at University of Mississippi. Gussow has written extensively on the blues (Gussow, 1998, 2002, 2007). Harris is cast in the role of an organic (and problematically polemic) intellectual in the mould of Stokely Carmichael and LeRoi Jones. Gussow represents the current development of the traditional intellectual.
Digital context
In the two decades between 1993 and 2013, use of the internet increased from 0.51 per 100 in the UK and 2.27 per 100 in the US to 89.84 per 100 in the UK and 84.2 per 100 in the US (World
94
Development Indicators, 2015). Internet users are individuals who have used the internet (from any location) over the preceding 12 months. For these figures (fig. 6 below), these users accessed the internet via a computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistant, games machine, digital TV or similar devices. The steepest growth in use occurred between 1996 and 2006. During this period, search company Google was incorporated (1998); social media site Facebook was launched in 2004; video-streaming service YouTube came online in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006, and micro- blogging site Twitter began offering its services in 2006. Each of these sites offer services which, for many users, define their experience of and access to the internet and computer-mediated
communications.
Figure 6: UK and US interrnet usage 1990-2014
The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory defines a blog as “A frequently updated Web site consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first” (Walker, 2005). Kozinets (2010, p. 189) adds that a blog should ideally be frequently updated, and is a “potential site of online community and culture”. Web logs were originally link- driven sites that emerged at the same time as the worldwide web itself during the 1990s. Named by Peter Merholz, the original blogs were a loose collection of hyperlinks, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays (Blood, 2000). At the beginning of 1999, there were approximately 23 blogs listed on the internet. By the end of that year, and following the introduction of software which
0 20 40 60 80 100
Internet Users 1990-2014
United Kingdom GBR Internet users (per 100 people) IT.NET.USER.P2 United States USA Internet users (per 100 people) IT.NET.USER.P2
95
allowed authors to easily produce blogs without the need for any programming knowledge, there were hundreds.
Blogs re-cast the relationship between producers and consumers (see ch.2), expanding the range of voices in the public sphere, and facilitating the creation of on-line social networks. As such, blogs are part of a significant technical shift from “…a culture dominated by mass media, using one-to-many communication, to one where participatory media, using many-to-many communication is becoming the norm” (Rettberg, 2008:31). In other words, blogs allow their authors to bypass the potential constrictions of peer-review in publishing and address an audience directly. In this way, blogs re- shape the potential for participatory communication and social connectivity (Kreiss, 2009, p. 18) by uniquely combining forms of oral and print communications and in so doing, re-working the distinction between dialogue and communication (Peters, 1999). Rettberg (2008) notes that blogging is grounded in different standards of authority than the professional press, as blog-writers (bloggers) prize personal authenticity, narrative subjectivity and conversational participation over the credibility of institutions, objectivity, and finished news products. Additionally, whilst the audience for a given blog may be limited to “…fifteen close friends, or…fifteen people who are genuinely interested in what you are writing about” (p57), a writer may capitalise on their celebrity in another sphere of activity such as performance or academia to drive audiences toward their content. This is certainly the case with musician, broadcaster and on-line guitar teacher Corey Harris, whose polemically-titled blog “Blues is Black Music!” generated over 250 responses from commentators, including a lengthy open letter from Professor Adam Gussow, when published in May 2015.
Corey Harris vs. Adam Gussow (2015)
On May 10th 2015, blues musician and activist Corey Harris published the essay Can White People Play The Blues? on his internet blog “Blues is Black Music!” (Harris, 2015b). Leaving aside
problematic notions of what constitutes ‘Black Music’ (Tagg, 1987), Harris presented a short essay (2,765 words) which generated much discussion in several blues-dedicated spaces across social
96
media. It is the velocity of commentary and the ability of contributors to join the discussion via digital means which marks the difference between the previous case studies and this particular exchange of views. Like L. R. Jones (1963), Murray (1978), and part of the central argument of this thesis, Harris recognises the blues as a diachronic project whose defining synchronic moments have passed; “The blues of the thirties, forties and fifties, the way it was played and sung – can never be recreated…blues is still relevant, but now more as a reference point within other styles of black music that it spawned and not as a predominant style” (Harris, 2015b). However, Harris stresses cultural appropriation and the proprietary argument, and configures the blues as a racial and culturally experiential project which necessarily excludes non-black performers from producing music of any serious worth in the field. It is this latter point that is most consistently stressed, to the point where Harris’ potentially universalist message that white performers should create music that references blues without attempting to mean the blues in the same way as black performers is lost beneath a polemic concerning authenticity.
In terms of transitivity (i.e. what the speaker says - see ch.2), Harris’ language echoes many of the arguments given in the cultural appropriation case studies in this chapter. The essay is particularly concerned with race, and authenticity. For example, Harris suggests the inability of white
performers to sing the blues “…[m]any white singers have embarrassed themselves by serving up cheap imitations of what they think Black vocals should sound like,” with the same inflection, skill or validity as a black performer – also invoking the experiential access argument. Interestingly, Harris does not stress that the performer needs to be African American – only that they should be black. automatically more valid than that of a white practitioner born and raised in the Southern United States in 1958 (Gussow), which makes a tacit claim for race memory as well as indicating the subjective importance of non-musical signification for an audience. Specifically in terms of
signification, Harris emphasises that “[a] white singer can never sing the same songs as a Black singer and have the songs keep the same meaning.”
97
The modality – who is saying what and how – is that Harris is an African American guitar player who has presence in the performance field as an organic authority on the subject. At the time of writing, Harris has released 17 solo albums, and made contributions to several other projects including Martin Scorsese’s series of documentaries (Scorsese et al., 2003). Born in 1969 in Denver, Colorado, Harris’ recorded output was initially very focused on blues; 1995’s Between Midnight and Day
interpreted songs originally recorded by Charley Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and others. Writer Tony Russell has described these efforts as “occasionally pallid” (Russell, 1997, p. 117). Since 2005’s Daily Bread album, Harris has increasingly included a reggae influence in his work – which itself might be interpreted as appropriation. Despite being awarded an honorary doctorate in 2007, Harris is not formally attached to an institution. Despite this, and perhaps ironically, Harris is an active teacher on the sonic junction website, offering lessons in blues guitar technique to subscribed learners – some of whom, presumably, are white. This is discussed in greater detail in chapter 5. Within hours of the essay being posted, several hundred responses had been received. These broadly fall into four categories.
1) It's racist to hold such positions as Harris’; 2) Suffering is universal and whites suffer, too;
3) Ability is beyond racial barriers; many white players are great musicians;
4) Blues was once the expression of black cultural life, but now it is the expression of white as well as black feeling.
The most significant of these responses came from writer and performer Adam Gussow. Again of significance to this study is that the Open Letter To Corey Harris (Gussow, 2015) was posted not only on Harris’ blog, but on Gussow’s own Harmonica teaching website, as well as via Facebook. Broadly occupying position 4 above, Gussow focusses on the notion that Harris’ arguments represent “…an oversimplification made for polemical purposes,” and emphasises that “the arguments that [Harris] make[s]….have all been made before; they’re almost all half-truths.” Gussow then specifically attacks Harris’ modality – “...to the extent that you think you’re uttering the final word on the blues, from a position of high and mighty righteousness, you’re fooling yourself.”
98
Where Harris concentrates on race and authenticity in his essay, Gussow’s counter argument draws on geography and inter-racial co-operation. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Gussow is a white male (now resident in Mississippi) who served his blues apprenticeship as a street-performer with African American guitarist and singer Sterling Magee as ‘Satan and Adam’. The inter-racial duo found international fame when included in the music documentary Rattle and Hum (1988), and the material from their four albums Harlem Blues (1991), Mother Mojo (1993), Living on the River (1996) and Back in the Game (2011) are very much in the acoustic blues guitar/harmonica/vocal tradition typified by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (1959).
Gussow emphasises that from the outset, the blues was a multi-racial project, citing the early examples of Jimmie Rodgers, Roscoe Holcomb, Marion Harris and Elvis Presley. The open letter is not entirely forgiving of white performers however, making mention of a “…fair number of talentless, minstrelesque white blues players on contemporary blues radio” (Gussow, 2015), implicating the gatekeepers of a blues scene in the US who seem to exclude black performers such as Harris from festival line-ups and other public performance opportunities. However, Gussow emphasises that this mixed-race “mainstream” audience is also Harris’ audience, rather than the soul-blues performers such as O.B. Buchana, Miss Jody and Bobby Rush mentioned in chapter 2 who have a predominantly black American following. In other words – if Harris believes that blues is black music, why does he omit mention of contemporary blues performers who play for a predominantly black audience – or actively seek this audience for himself? Gussow goes on to emphasise dynamism and diachronism in the development of the blues, citing the Senegambian roots of the music and the Arabian and European trade routes that carried the music to the United States. He reinforces his own modality as a teacher and performer by indicating that his own blues harmonica tutorial site has subscribers from 175 countries around the world as illustrated by Google analytics17 – and stating that at this point, the blues is “way, way beyond the black/white thing.”
99
Here, in line with the arguments of this thesis, computer-mediated communications appear to be implicit in the perpetuation and dissemination of blues music and blues culture. As with Harris’ involvement with the Sonic Junction tutorial site, this is discussed in greater detail in chapter 5.
On May 24th, Harris responded with another article – Can Black People Write About the Blues? (Harris, 2015a). Citing Lawrence Hoffman’s 1990 editorial in Guitar Player magazine, which explicitly stated that white blues was a feeble shadow of the ‘real’ music played by black performers
(Hoffman, 1990 ), Harris continued to draw heavily on themes of race and authenticity to support his cultural appropriation argument. Of interest and significance is Harris’ direct engagement with the critics of his previous essay, including Gussow. Of particular interest is Harris’ direct engagement with commentators via computer-mediated communications. The following exchange is indicative:
antidote42 (May 25, 2015 at 6:50 PM)
I'm a white woman and have read through both blogs, have seen your facebook posts, and was a member of sonic junction and attempted some of the slide pieces you teach.
I'm wondering why you teach your versions of black prewar blues- and one lesson is singing pointers- to non-blacks?
Harriet
Corey Harris (May 25, 2015 at 7:13 PM)
Greetings and thanks for your comment. I teach to encourage students to be themselves while learning music they love. Many play very well but are challenged by singing. I teach that they must find their own voice and not just imitate. antidote42 (May 26, 2015 at 5:15 AM)
No. My question was the broader WHY do you teach/encourage non-blacks to sing black blues - in their own voice or not. What is your reasoning and goal there. This assumes that some are going to want to perform, and maybe your versions no less, and may further take opportunities away from black performers, contribute to a more non-black marketplace.
Why in the world would you do that? Corey Harris (June 8, 2015 at 10:26 AM)
100
I see your line of reasoning here. I teach because there are not many opportunities for me to make a living in music. What takes opportunities away from Black performers is historic racism, not Black people giving music lessons online. What contributes to a "more non-Black marketplace" is white control of the industry, since Black people have no real power in the industry and don't call the shots.
This direct engagement from one of Harris’ own students appears to highlight the weakness in Harris’ argument – and illustrate the point made by Gussow in his open letter. Whilst Harris is keen to emphasise black ‘ownership’ of blues music and blues culture and decry the influence of non- black performers on the music, he also appears to be actively encouraging the uptake of the music by white performers by teaching performance techniques. Also of interest is that during his response, Harris identifies many of his critics by race – “What was most interesting to me is the range of reactions of those (mostly white) people who were clearly offended by the mere question.” It is unclear how Harris was able to identify the race of his respondents. Similarly, when challenged concerning his own adoption of reggae music as a non-Jamaican, his response that “…even though Jamaicans have and continue to define the art form, it does not only speak to Jamaican or West Indian reality, but to the reality of Afrikan people around the world,” which is at least the application of a double-standard, or at worst, outright hypocrisy.