Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  It would seem that working-class and poor black people, the exiles and outcasts of both “mainstream” and middle-class white and black America, have consistently created the major African American musical forms—again, including gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll. Therefore, the class-based character of African American music should not be overlooked. Art, especially popular music, has long been one of the few avenues open to working-class and underclass African Americans. It has often appeared to be the only medium through which poor black folk could get upper-class and middle-class white and black America to recognize the humble humanity, the tragedy, and the comedy of the life-worlds and life-struggles of the black masses.[9]

  Because the blues was the music that initially painted a sonic portrait of turn of the twentieth century minstrel, medicine, tent, and vaudeville shows, as well as both urban and rural black nightlife (including Jim Crowed juke joints, brothels, dancehalls, clubs, and bars), it was shunned by the emerging and extremely uppity African American middle-class. At the turn of the twentieth century the black bourgeoisie preferred the solemn singing of the spirituals or the refined sounds of ragtime over the blues. Even though ragtime began as a form of red-light district dance music, whose origins have been traced back to African Americans in St. Louis and New Orleans circa 1897, it ultimately achieved widespread respectability and popularity among whites when it became available as sheet music for the piano.[10]

  In its “purest” form ragtime is not improvised, which not only made it appear to many to be America’s equivalent to European classical music, but its general lack of any form of improvisation clearly distinguished it from early jazz. Undoubtedly an influence on the early development of jazz, ragtime was primarily a vehicle for solo pianists, although several banjoists, such as Vess Ossman and Fred Van Eps, made numerous recordings. Among the three most renowned ragtime composers, Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb, two were African American, Joplin and Scott respectively. The African American middle-class, as to be expected, reveled in the fact that Scott Joplin was universally crowned the “King of Ragtime” and, even more, they delighted in the fact that his “piano rags” were repeatedly offered up as the American equivalent of minuets by Mozart, mazurkas by Chopin, or waltzes by Brahms. Great pride was also taken when European classical composers, such as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and Ferruccio Busoni, acknowledged the influence of ragtime music.[11]

  Where the spirituals and ragtime initially sonically represented African American “hyper-religiosity” and African American “hyper-sexuality,” respectively, because European Americans became enamored with these black musical forms the black middle-class apishly followed suit. The blues, on the other hand, was supposedly everything that the spirituals and ragtime were not: The spirituals and ragtime were sophisticated. The blues was unsophisticated. The spirituals and ragtime represented African American “high culture.” The blues represented African American “low culture.” The spirituals and ragtime were performed in prestigious churches and majestic concert halls. The blues was performed in juke joints and brothels—but, the breakaway success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 challenged and eventually changed the national perception and cultural reception of the blues.

  After a prolonged period of gestation, the blues had finally arrived on the national scene, sensuously feminine and fully formed, flamboyant and colorful, with flowing robes, satins, and sequins—not in dirty denim overalls, brogan boots, and a snaggle-toothed smile (à la a number of classic blues men). The early American music industry clearly comprehended that there was money to be made from this dark and mysterious music that seemed simultaneously ancient and futuristic. In many ways the blues harked back and heaved forward all at once: back to the “slavery days” and the “failures of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction,” and forward to the jazz of the New Negro Movement, the rhythm & blues of the Civil Rights Movement, the soul music of the Black Power Movement, the myriad musics (e.g., soul, funk, and disco) of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement and, of course, the rap and neo-soul music of the Hip Hop Movement.

  Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was a boon to both the blues and the then fledgingly American music industry. The success of “Crazy Blues” demonstrated the trans-cultural and trans-class characteristics of the blues, if not early black popular music and early black popular culture. In other words, although the blues was created by a particular race, black folk, and a specific class within the African American community, working-class and underclass black folk, the lyrics, music, and overall aesthetic nonetheless hit a national nerve that transcended race and class as the 1920s progressed. In many ways the blues provided the first major model for what has come to be called “black popular music” and “black popular culture.” In addition, and more specifically, the early cross-over success of the blues undoubtedly provided a paradigm for the cross-over success of rhythm & blues disguised as rock & roll.

  To this day, African American expressive culture is, however unwittingly, rooted in blues music, the blues aesthetic, and blues culture. What Mamie Smith and other classic blues artists actually popularized were the sights, sounds, and sorrows of an emerging African American post-enslavement and post-Reconstruction worldview.[12] By adding a dance rhythm to the blues, post-war blues (i.e., rhythm & blues) revealed itself to be part of the evolution of pre-war blues (i.e., classic blues). But, in order for rhythm & blues to “cross-over” and evolve into rock & roll it would have to be whitened and lightened.

  The Black Roots of White Rock: From Rhythm & Blues to Rock & Roll

  Similar to rap in the 1980s, as rhythm & blues grew in popularity among white youth in the 1950s it was increasingly imbued with their musical and extra-musical meanings. In the segregated social world of 1950s America, almost anything emerging from or unambiguously associated with black America was looked at in a negative light. As a consequence, as with the blues backlash and the jazz controversy in the 1920s and 1930s, there was an uproar over rhythm & blues’ influence on white youth in the 1940s and 1950s. Presaging the resistance to rap in the 1980s and 1990s, white adults in the 1940s and 1950s became increasingly concerned about what they perceived to be the complete disregard for traditional American values surrounding authority, sobriety, chastity, and family in rhythm & blues. For most white adults, rhythm & blues promoted violence, delinquency, promiscuity, drugs, and heavy drinking.[13]

  Even after legendary white disc jockey Alan Freed’s, among others’, efforts to whiten and lighten rhythm & blues for the pop music market resistance increased and intensified. Part of the unpleasantness surrounding rhythm & blues and its whitened and lightened offspring, which Freed dubbed “rock & roll,” was the simple but long overlooked fact that, as Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock & Roll (1975), most of “the first rock & roll styles were variations on black forms that had taken shape before the white audience moved in” (166). That is to say, although rock & roll, classic rock, and contemporary rock are most often understood to be “white music” within the context of contemporary American popular music and popular culture, like so much within the American social and cultural world, rock’s origins and early evolution owes a great deal to African American life and culture.[14]

  Those of us living in Obama’s America and its immediate aftermath are quite aware of how fashionable it has become to tout how multicultural America historically has been and currently continues to be. Similar to jazz, rock & roll is frequently raised up as a prime example of America’s distinct multiculturalism. Indeed, at its inception rock & roll was deeply multicultural. However, any serious analysis of rock & roll’s core characteristics should strive to equitably and accurately allocate its various early influences, many of which are undeniably indebted to black popular music. As a matter of fact none other than Charlie Gillett asserted in his classic, The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock & Roll (1996): “The roots of rock & roll are mainly to be found in rhythm & blues music, a term which,
like the later expression rock & roll, was coined to provide a convenient catch-all description for several distinct musical styles. Some of the styles of rhythm & blues shared musical features” but, he stressed, “all of them were produced for the Negro market” (121).

  The origins of rock & roll have been regularly described as a combination of rhythm & blues and country & western. Unquestionably, rhythm & blues and country & western were the primary musical genres that factored into rock & roll’s genesis, but rock & roll drew from more than rhythm & blues and country & western. It also borrowed from all of the musics that rhythm & blues and country & western adapted, most importantly gospel, blues, folk, jazz, and jump blues. As Robert Palmer went even further to point out in “The Church of the Sonic Guitar” (1991), rock & roll also appropriated elements of Caribbean and Latin American music:

  The cliché is that rock & roll was a melding of country music and blues, and if you are talking about, say, Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley, the description, though simplistic, does fit. But the black inner-city vocal group sound [i.e., the doo-wop sound] . . . had little to do with either blues or country in their purer forms. The Bo Diddley beat . . . was Afro-Cuban in derivation. The most durable . . . bass riff in Fifties rock & roll . . . had been pinched . . . from a Cuban son record. The screaming, athletic saxophone playing . . . was straight out of Forties big band swing. . . . Traditional Mexican rhythms entered the rock & roll arena through Chicano artists. . . . Rock & roll proved an All-American, multi-ethnic hybrid, its sources and developing sub-styles too various to be explained away by “blues plus country” or any other reductionist formula. (652; see also Palmer 1995, 1996)

  As important as it is to acknowledge rock & roll’s wide range of influences, then, it is equally important to observe that African Americans contributed more musical building blocks to rock’s foundation than any other cultural group. Moreover, African American musicians provided the models for the majority of the early rock & rollers (e.g., Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, the Crows, Ike Turner, LaVern Baker, Jackie Brenston, the Penguins, the Coasters, the Platters, Big Mama Thornton, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley). Hence, going back to the rhythm & blues plus country & western equals rock & roll equation (i.e., R&B + C&W = R&R), in Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2011) Reebee Garofalo critically asserted that “one might infer the R&B and

  C&W contributed equally to the new genre” (82). But, “such an inference invariably undervalues the African American contribution.” Garofalo continued:

  When rock & roll erupted full-blown in the national pop market in 1956, it presented itself as an integrated phenomenon with performers such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley sharing the stage equally with artists like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. Accordingly, Steve Perry painted the early history of rock & roll in racially glowing terms: “From 1955-1958, the roster of popular rock & rollers was more racially equal than at any time before or since. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Coasters, the Platters, Fats Domino, Lloyd Price—major stars all, and on a rough par with the likes of Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly.” But this only happened after it had begun to expand to disruptive proportions among mainstream fans. (82)

  Here we have come back to Greil Marcus’s contention that “[m]ost of the first rock & roll styles were variations on black forms that had taken shape before the white audience moved in.” Without in any way disparaging the seminal contributions of white rock & roll legends such as Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley, it is important to understand that part of what made them so controversial within the context of 1950s America is the fact that they were white men who played vanilla versions of what sounded to most folk like rhythm & blues by another name. In other words, they were seemingly proponents of musical integration in the midst of an African American-led movement aimed at social integration (i.e., the Civil Rights Movement). Whether consciously or unconsciously, early white rock & rollers’ challenges to musical segregation were taken by many to be challenges to social segregation.[15]

  Without acknowledging how profoundly early rock & roll was identified with African American music, particularly rhythm & blues, many contemporary rock critics and fans unwittingly fail to concede what many of the most rabid racists of the Civil Rights Movement era openly acknowledged. It is hard to understand how racists can concede what many self-described white “liberals,” white “progressives,” and white “allies” fail to take into serious consideration. This is one of the reasons that even as we acknowledge and identify the influences on early rock & roll we should never lose sight of the fact that at its core it is primarily a synthesis of African American music, among other African diasporan musics. In fact, the majority of the musics that make up rock & roll’s sonic DNA are either African American (e.g., gospel, blues, jazz, jump blues, doo-wop, and rhythm & blues) or African diasporan (e.g., rumba, son, among other Cuban and Caribbean musics).

  Again, as much as we are open to acknowledging rock & roll’s multicultural origins, it is important to observe the centrality of African Americans during its most formative phase. Without placing African Americans front and center in our discussions concerning the origins and early evolution of rock & roll, then rock history looks like little more than yet another whitewashed version of American history where African American contributions are appropriated and attributed to yet another set of white “founding fathers” (again, for example, folk like Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and, of course, Elvis Presley). In this sense, as Garofalo emphasized, “in the well-intentioned and largely accurate celebration of rock & roll’s mongrel character, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that most of its formative influences, as well as almost all of its early innovators, were African American. Among the artists who could have been considered rock & roll musicians prior to 1955, there was only one white act that made a national impact—Bill Haley & His Comets” (83).[16]

  Before it was whitened and lightened and renamed “rock & roll” by Alan Freed, rhythm & blues articulated how African Americans lived, loved, laughed, cried and died, first and foremost, to each other and, eventually, to the wider world. It was, as Arnold Shaw perceptively put it in Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm & Blues (1978), the sound of a newfound freedom, a “liberated music, which in its pristine form represented a break with white, mainstream pop. Developing from black sources, it embodied the fervor of gospel music, the throbbing vigor of boogie-woogie, the jump beat of swing, and the gutsiness and sexuality of life in the black ghetto” (xvii).

  Encapsulating the full range of mid-twentieth century African American emotions and expressions, spirituality and sexuality, and politics and aesthetics, classic rhythm & blues represents a defining musical moment and an audible emblem of how intensely African American culture and politics changed during the first two decades of the post-war period (circa 1945 to 1965). By synthesizing so many different strands of previous black popular musics with white pop and country & western, as it developed classic rhythm & blues boldly demonstrated that African Americans did not, at least sonically speaking, recognize the color-line and ultimately unrepentantly refused to be confined to the crude category of “race records,” which was the term that had been used to designate black popular music since the classic blues era of the 1920s. All of which is to say, in several senses even before the inauguration of rock & roll classic rhythm & blues represented African Americans’ rejection of not only pre-World War II musical categories, but also pre-World War II race relations and cultural conventions.

  With its remarkable synthesis of gospels’ jubilation, big beats, hand-clapping, tambourine-banging, and call and response; the blues’ hoarse-voiced vulnerableness, impassioned uneasiness, and anguish-filled tales of wickedness and woe; jazz’s emphasis on improvisation, syncopation, and elation; and jump blues’ electrification, amplificati
on, and unrestrained celebration, rhythm & blues unapologetically announced a new, even more emboldened spirit in black America between 1945 and 1965. To be sure, black America still had the blues between 1945 and 1965, but in the immediate aftermath of World War II blacks believed they had reasons to be optimistic. Hence, their new post-war blues decidedly and defiantly had a dance beat. It was sung in a way that recalled gospel and jazz vocal stylings just as much as the blues vocal tradition. Indeed, rhythm & blues was blues undergirded by the hip new vernacular-inflected rhymes and dynamic double-time rhythms of black America in the post-war period.

  If country blues was bad luck music and city blues was the electrified and amplified sound of migration and urbanization, then classic rhythm & blues was the music of momentary freedom and a night full of fun. If country blues was rural song and city blues was urban song, then classic rhythm & blues was unmistakably inner-city song, the swelling and sweaty sound of African American ghettos in every major city in America. If rural blues symbolized individual expression and yearning, and urban blues a longing for rural life and romance, then classic rhythm & blues was the collective sound of a people discovering happiness and newfound joy whenever and wherever possible in their new inhospitable homes-away-from-home. If country blues musicians howled and city blues musicians crooned, then classic rhythm & blues artists shouted, yelled, screamed and cried, in the process deconstructing and reconstructing conventional notions of both “rhythm” and “blues.”