Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  Prior to the emergence of rhythm & blues, rural blues featured vocals and guitar, with added harmonica on occasion, and urban blues featured vocals backed by guitar, piano, bass, and drums. In contrast, as discussed in the previous chapter, classic rhythm & blues was characterized by impassioned, blues-drenched, vernacular-laden vocals backed by a combo consisting of electrified and amplified instruments, including honking saxophones, wailing guitars, and bubbling basses. The “impassioned, blues-drenched, vernacular-laden vocals,” “honking saxophones,” and “wailing guitars” blaring over the equally unbridled and often awry rhythm sections of the classic rhythm & blues combos eventually took on many meanings, perhaps none more telling than the one ascribed to the music by eminent musicologist Arnold Shaw. “Psychologically,” he asserted, classic rhythm & blues “was an expression of a people enjoying a new sense of freedom, hemmed in though that freedom was by ghettos” (xvi). He went further, “R&B discs helped blacks establish a new identity—the kind that led a little old lady [i.e., Rosa Parks—who was actually only 43 at the time and ultimately lived to reach the ripe old age of 92] to refuse to yield her seat to a white in an Alabama bus; that led to the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and that resulted in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation” (xvi).[17]

  Tapping into African Americans’ “new sense of freedom” and “new identity” as expressed through rhythm & blues many white youth in the 1950s were inspired to develop their own new identities and reevaluate their relationships with mainstream American music, culture, and values. Whether they made the connection between African Americans’ “new sense of freedom” and “new identit[ies]” and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement or not, many white youth in the 1950s were increasingly attracted to the exhilarating and, from their point of view, unusually exotic and erotic sounds of rhythm & blues. However, as rhythm & blues evolved into rock & roll in the mid-1950s, according to Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock & Roll (1999), “rock & roll represented not only an implicit social commitment but the explicit embrace of a black subculture which had never previously risen to the surface” of white America (22). This means, then, that some white youth indeed did connect rhythm & blues and its rock & roll offshoot with the Civil Rights Movement, and for many of them a commitment to rock & roll surreptitiously signified a commitment to civil rights and social justice.[18]

  While bearing in mind the musical origins of rock & roll, it is also important to accent the social, political, and cultural world rock & roll emerged in. It may be difficult for many of my readers to grasp just how deeply conservative the Cold War world was, but a lot of rock & roll’s rebelliousness will be lost without understanding the kind of closed-mindedness, hysteria, and undisguised hatred this period engendered. Anything not sanctioned by the established order was deemed part of the “communist plot” to destroy America.[19]

  Hence, first rhythm & blues, and then rock & roll were regularly derided as “un-American noise” created for the sole purpose of brainwashing white youth and bringing America to its knees. It is interesting to reflect on mainstream America’s perception of the power of black popular music during the post-war period. While black people have long been viewed as socially, politically, and culturally inconsequential and impotent in the broader sweep of America’s master narrative, their music has been consistently conceived of as possessing special, almost black magical powers. Similar to rap, the “more attractive R&B became to white youth, the more controversial it became,” contended Glenn Altschuler in All Shook Up: How Rock & Roll Changed America (2003, 19). “White teenagers were listening,” he continued, “but as they did a furor erupted over R&B. Good enough for blacks, apparently, the music seemed downright dangerous as it crossed the color-line” (18).

  When it crossed the color-line rhythm & blues was whitened and lightened and ultimately became “rock & roll,” and for many in mainstream and “mature” America rock & roll was nothing more than a metaphor for African American desegregation and integration. As a consequence, rock & roll initially elicited unambiguous anti-black racist responses seemingly from all quarters of the country. For example, in the New York Times in 1956, noted psychiatrist Francis Braceland asserted that rock & roll was essentially a “cannibalistic and tribalistic” form of music that appealed to white youths’ immaturity, social uncertainty, base passions, and brewing spirit of rebelliousness (8). Because white youth were, in the most unprecedented manner imaginable in Cold War America, emulating African Americans’ newfound social assertiveness and musical expressiveness, he concluded that rock & roll was basically a “communicable disease” inexplicably infecting white youth with its supposedly vulgar and vice-laden cultural, social, and highly-sexual views and values.

  Another critic who was particularly concerned about the African American musical roots of rock & roll, the Right Reverend John Carroll, speaking to the Teachers Institute of the Archdiocese of Boston in 1956 exclaimed that “[r]ock & roll inflames and excites youth like jungle tom-toms. . . . The suggestive lyrics are, of course, a matter for law enforcement” (32). Moreover, in their best-selling book, U.S.A. Confidential (1952), journalists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer also made several unveiled anti-black racist references to rock & roll’s African American roots, directly linking the increase in white juvenile delinquency,

  with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background. Many music shops purvey dope; assignations are made in them. White girls are recruited for colored lovers. . . . We know that many platter-spinners are hopheads [i.e., drug addicts]. Many others are Reds, left-wingers, or hecklers of social convention. . . . Through disc jockeys, kids get to know colored and other musicians; they frequent places the radio oracles plug, which is done with design . . . to hook juves [i.e., juveniles] and guarantee a new generation subservient to the Mafia. (37–38)

  Lait and Mortimer’s criticisms reveal that many of the very same vices that are currently hurled at rap music were already in play in the 1950s. Notice here how rock & roll, like rap, was allegedly connected to, and supposedly promoted gibberish (“hot jive”), promiscuity (“ritualistic orgies” and “assignations”), miscegenation (“[w]hite girls are recruited for colored lovers”), drug abuse (“weed-smoking,” “dope,” and “hopheads”), and violence and criminality (“the Mafia”). Unwittingly, Lait and Mortimer give credence to my contention that black popular music has always been and remains more than merely music. As one of the few mediums through which African Americans have had to more or less fully express themselves, it may be the case that they have imbued their music with more energy, ideals, and allegories than most other aspects of African American life and culture. Even though many African Americans and the white youth who are attracted to black popular music have had a longstanding tendency to see it simply as music in a socially, politically, and culturally neutral sense, the protectors of the established order in America have consistently viewed black popular music as a threat and serious challenge to their conventional conservative views and values.

  Black popular music, for whatever else it might represent, has been and remains “political” in light of the fact that it has consistently conveyed African American perspectives—conservative, liberal, radical and, occasionally, revolutionary perspectives—on major social, political, and cultural issues. Although the U.S. has long imperiously claimed that it is the most democratic country in the world, the very fact of African Americans freely and fully expressing themselves has always been and remains extremely controversial. No matter what black popular music might symbolize to others, for African Americans, especially working-class and working-poor black folk, it has long been one of the few mediums through which to document, dissent, and express their distinct thoughts and views on the most pressing social, political, and cultural problems confronting African America. In this sense, to reiterate, black popular music at any given moment in African American history
invariably tells us a great deal about African Americans’ inner-thoughts and inner-worlds at the specific historical moment in question.

  However, when the fact that black popular music, for the most part, has consistently served as the soundtrack for virtually every major event in U.S. history—from the Civil War through to the Civil Rights Movement (and beyond)—it can be conceived of as not merely the soundtrack for African American historical events and popular movements, but also the soundtrack for mainstream American culture, politics, and society. This contention is even more pronounced in the decades leading up to the incremental integration of African Americans into mainstream American society. For instance, as with contemporary white hip hoppers, white rock & rollers in the 1950s were hardly the first group of white youth to utilize black popular music and black popular culture as avenues to express their angst and dissent. As I discussed in detail in Hip Hop’s Amnesia, during the 1920s countless white youth—calling themselves the “Lost Generation”—appropriated jazz and new “Jazz Age” (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s term) styles of speaking, dancing, dressing, flirting, smoking, and drinking to define and express themselves in an increasingly indifferent, urban, and industrialized society.

  By the 1930s the Jazz Age gave way to the big band and swing era, and along with its new sense of syncopated music, fashion, and socializing, similar to their Jazz Age predecessors, the “swing kids” of the 1930s understood their commitment to swing to be a form of rebellion against the establishment. Like the white rock & rollers and white hip hoppers who would faithfully follow in their footsteps, the swing kids of the 1930s conspicuously appropriated black popular culture-influenced forms of fashion, language, dance, aesthetics, and other African American elements in their efforts to defy the prevailing cultural conventions and socially sanctioned views and values of their epoch.[20]

  In the 1940s bebop and jump blues provided a new generation of white youth—most notably the Beat Generation—with a platform to dissent and distance themselves from their parents and the prevailing conservative culture and segregationist social policies of the time.[21] Hence, long before rock & roll in the 1950s, white parents were increasingly exasperated and consistently concerned about how the obviously black music, dance steps, clothes, language, and behavior that their children were enthusiastically embracing was corrupting them and ruining their relationship with the much-vaunted lily-white morals and values of mainstream America. As Peter Guralnick (1999, 18) coyly contended: “If rock & roll had had no other value it would have been enough merely to dent the smug middle-class consciousness of that time and throw into confusion some of the deadening rigidity of that world. For that was what it unmistakably did.”

  Far from out of the ordinary, then, white rock & rollers in the 1950s tapped into the tradition of white youth appropriation of black popular music and black popular culture that had consistently, albeit ironically, found that black popular music and black popular culture offered the most effective vehicles for verbalizing white youths’ discontent and estrangement. With all of this in mind, there can be little doubt that white rock & rollers fascination with, first, rhythm & blues and then what ultimately evolved into rock & roll was part and parcel of the tradition of white youth appropriation of black popular music and black popular culture. Moreover, their attraction to post-World War II black popular music and black popular culture noticeably encompassed many of the same rebellious tendencies and, truth be told, subtle anti-black racist fantasies that characterized previous white youths’ enthusiastic appropriations of black popular music and black popular culture. Candidly writing about he and his friends’ youthful fascination with the blues, which he acknowledged as the foundation of both rhythm & blues and rock & roll, Guralnick gushed:

  There are lots of reasons, of course, why blues should attract a white audience of some proportions. There is, to begin with, the question of color. Most of us had never known a Negro. That didn’t stop us, however, from constructing a whole elaborate mythology and modeling ourselves in speech and dress and manner along the lines of what we thought a Negro would be. Norman Mailer has expressed this attraction well in “The White Negro.” It was, really, the whole hipster pose. . . . Blues offered the perfect vehicle for our romanticism. What’s more, it offered boundless opportunities for embroidery due to its exotic nature, the vagueness of its associations, and certain characteristics associated with the music itself. For one thing it was an undeniably personal music; whatever the autobiographical truth of the words, each singer undoubtedly conveyed something of himself in his song. Then, too, the lyrics in addition to being poetically abstract, were often vague and difficult to understand; the singer made a habit of slurring syllables or dropping off the end of a verse, and the quality of the recording, often from a distance of thirty-five years, added to the aura of obscurity. The life of the singer, too, was shrouded in mystery. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes, Jaybird Coleman, Funny Paper Smith, and Bogus Blind Ben Covington: bizarre names from a distant past about whom literally no facts were known. We were explorers in an uncharted land. (22–23)

  While Guralnick’s deep respect for the blues is obvious, he and his friends’ subtle anti-black racism is also equally obvious. For instance, notice that he and his friends begin their explorations of African American music, not with a focus on the overall quality and core characteristics of the music, but precisely where almost all Eurocentric engagements of African American life and culture begin—with “the question of color.” From the African American point of view, this is odd, indeed.

  Completely flying in the face of white liberals’ claims to “color-blindness” that would rise to prominence in the “politically correct” last quarter of the twentieth century, Guralnick highlights white America and, even more, liberal white America’s preoccupation with race and skin color when and where they come to African Americans and their culture. In other words, from a Eurocentric point of view, whites are raceless and blacks are the epitome of race (that is to say, whatever whites decide “race” is at that specific historical, cultural, social, and political moment). Hence, when it is all said and done, for many, if not most whites, African Americans are always already over-determined by their race, and since “race” is whatever whites say it is at any given moment, African Americans are whoever and, literally, whatever whites say they are at any given moment.

  Interestingly, even though Guralnick and his friends “had never known a Negro,” that extremely telling fact in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement did not stop them “from constructing a whole elaborate mythology” surrounding “what [they] thought a Negro would be.” Acknowledging their romanticization and exotification of African Americans, as well as African American music and culture, Guralnick and his gang—obviously inadvertently, albeit injuriously nonetheless; let’s face it: unconscious racism is just as wounding and dehumanizing as conscious racism—continued the longstanding tradition of white appreciation and white celebration of black music while simultaneously disregarding black humanity—actual real, flesh and blood black folk. The “bizarre[ly] name[d]” blues musicians and their lives “shrouded in mystery” may not have been so “bizarre” or “mysterious” had Guralnick and his crew simply took the time to cross the “color-line” and to learn about and, even more, befriend African Americans during one of the most turbulent periods in their peculiar history.

  By the middle of the twentieth century African Americans had produced several highly competent historians who had published watershed work. If Guralnick and his guys sincerely wished to know more about African Americans they could have easily acquired a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903b), The Gift of Black Folk (1924) or Black Folk, Then and Now (1939), or Carter G. Woodson’s The Negro in Our History (1922), or John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947) the same way they eagerly sought out extremely obscure blues, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll records by African American artists. What is at issue here
is the simple fact that the longstanding tradition of white youth appropriation of black popular music and black popular culture has regularly involved privileging African American music over African American history, African American art over African American ideals, and African American athleticism over African American intellectualism.

  As African Americans moved further and further away from their rural roots, their music seemed to sonically move further and further away from its roots in the blues. And the more black popular music was electrified and amplified, and laced with exciting lyrics about (ostensibly black) life in the city, the more the music seemed to appeal to the unpredictable and often prickly sensibilities of suburban white youth. For the most part, according to David Szatmary in Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock & Roll (2010), the “white teens who bought R&B records favored a few showmen who delivered the most frenetic, hard-driving version of an already spirited rhythm & blues that became known as rock & roll” (16). However, very similar to rap music, white youth “especially idolized young R&B performers with whom they could identify.” Hence, the very same kind of black youthfulness, black hipness, and black sensuousness that would come to characterize Motown’s brand of rhythm & blues—if not rhythm & blues in general—in the 1960s was at the heart of white youths’ initial attraction to rock & roll in the 1950s.

  As Szatmary importantly shared, by 1955 “Muddy Waters had turned forty, Howlin’ Wolf was forty-six, Sonny Boy Williamson was fifty-six, John Lee Hooker was thirty-five, B.B. King was thirty, and Elmore James was thirty-seven” (16). Even though each of the aforementioned obviously pioneered and laid the musical foundation for what is now known as “rock & roll,” it was a later group of much younger African American performers who actually popularized and further developed the new, more “frenetic” and “hard-driving version” of rhythm & blues that morphed into rock & roll. A short list of the young African American rock & rollers who white youth strongly identified with in the 1950s should surely include: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Peggy Jones (a.k.a., “Lady Bo”), Fats Domino, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Big Mama Thornton, Ike Turner, Larry Williams, Etta James, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Ruth Brown, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, Chubby Checker, LaVern Baker, the Coasters, the Drifters, the Platters, the Chantels, the Chords, the Crystals, the Five Satins, the Flamingos, the Chiffons, the Penguins, the Ronettes, the Shirelles, and Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers.[22]