Friday, February 22, 2008 ... 3:48 PM
The white boy and the country blues
I'm happy to see that after several months of silence, Yuval Taylor has resurrected his blog Faking It with a response to this Newsweek article by David Gates about white kids' self-satisfying, myth-making fandom of the old country blues, and that fandom's relationship to, or underpinnings of, blackface minstrelsy.
Gates concludes that white fandom of Delta blues boils down to: "a voyeuristic vampirism, feeding itself on another's delicious pain."
And he says that like it's a bad thing. But doesn't that "vampirism" account for a big part of the allure of experiencing any art?--heightening and intensifying and exploring or even briefly escaping our emotions by sucking like a lozenge on an exaggerated representation of someone else's emotions? I think that fetishising the misery you may hear in the country blues is not so unlike swooning to the exaltation of, say, "Ode to Joy." (Gates's implied argument that the experience of performing a country blues song is more miserable than the experience of creating happier music is awfully presumptive, and Yuval points out that the presumption is its own form of romanticizing the suffering of black Americans.) The already bottomless tangle of black/white American race relations gives this particular instance of vampirism its fangs, but I wonder if the desire to imbibe the pain encoded in art can't be extricated from racism far enough that it can be understood, even in the case of the country blues, as not a bad thing.
'Course, I'm a youngish white guy who grew up more or less middle-class, and I love the country blues. The weirder and more mysterious (though not necessarily more pained) the better. So maybe my reaction is the reflex defensiveness of a vampire shown his reflection.
So I'm thinking harder about it.
I first came to the blues when I was 14 and my piano teacher taught me the I-IV-V progression and the E-blues scale. That year, a friend from school grew excited about Robert Johnson after an HBO viewing of -- oh yes -- Crossroads (that ultimate self-satisfying myth-making paternalist Orientalization of the blues and general Mississippi blackness), and my friend got hold of the Complete boxed set of cassette tapes. I remember, before having watched the movie myself, sitting with him in his basement, browsing the lyrics booklet for interesting-looking songs, then fast-forwarding the tape to find them. I remember hearing, for the first time, "Come On In My Kitchen." Looking at the lyrics. The hair on my neck raising at the sound of that bottleneck guitar. The keening verses and the crackle of the masters. I'd never heard anything like it. I felt as though I had put my ear to a wall on the other side of which was another fucking world, a shadowy, mysterious, fever dream distortion of my world. The sensation was of black thick crude oil bubbling up from my unconscious. And I remember that very night that my friend and I flipped past the Allman Brothers on MTV Unplugged, playing "Come On In My Kitchen" -- a coincidence that engraved the whole experience with the finality of revelation. We might've watched Crossroads that weekend, or the next weekend, and I guess I liked it, but the truth is I hardly remember it, while I still remember the exact fucking moment I heard the vocal/bottleneck doubled opening of "Come On In My Kitchen." It's still my favorite Robert Johnson song. My friend outgrew the country blues pretty quickly. I never did.
I know that to suggest that my introduction to country blues occurred in a vacuum is ridiculous. I was 14, and white, it was the 1980s, I had watched hours of TV every day, including re-rums of Gimme a Break and Good Times, all those Tom & Jerry cartoons with the big-legged Mammy chasing old Tom-cat out of the kitchen with a broom. I was acculturated as hell, I admit it. And as I grew a little older and started looking into the music on my own I certainly flirted with the specious idea of "authenticity" in blues. But I can tell you that my initial fetishising of the mystery in the sound of the country blues, still its most magnetic feature to me, was not racial.
Now, pastoral -- OK, yeah. My parents came from the country, central Illinois, a flatland of cornfields and small town streets that grew so still and spooky in limpid moonlight that I was afraid to shut my eyes or to open them. I spent whole summers out there, like Ishmael at sea, and attended funerals there in the winter, and I think that, since I first felt it with "Come On In My Kitchen," I've been looking for more music that returns me to my childhood impression that mystery and magic and weird dangers skulked in the poker-faced cornrows and along the lakeshores at night. This Grimms' Americana is, of course, not a new idea, but that only cements my feeling that it truly exists, even if it never existed -- part of the fabric of American memory, if not my own memory.
Now, European romanticizing of the pastoral predates American racism by, what, thousands of years, right? Along with the blues, Native American culture, hillybilly music, and lately in indie "folk" rock Eastern European gypsy music, just extend similar Orientalization of the rural (prelapsarian) "other." The African-American pastoral is uniquely thorny, poisoned and tangled at the very root, because its seed is, of course, slavery.
Though that at 14 I recognized Robert Johnson's music as rural suggests some cultural associations, again I don't believe that the blackness of the singer influenced my experience of the blues until much later.
Brendan
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Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"
MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
Faking It
Honey, Where You Been So Long?
whiskey-girl
Porchlight
Charlotte-related
Emily A. Benton
Laurie Koster's Charlotte & Area Events
Evening Muse
Neighborhood Theatre
OTHER THAN MUSIC
Rusty Barnes
Mixed Animal
Cans and Jars
Night Train
Cat and Girl
Tom Drury
Ian Frazier
Film Freak Central
November 9, 2007
Eilen Jewell
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 16, 2007:
Carrie Rodriguez w/ Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
June 2, 2007:
Mt. Airy Fiddlers Convention
***review!***
July 10, 2005:
Chris Scruggs
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
July 8, 2005:
Tim Easton
The Evening Muse, Charlotte, NC
***review!***
February 19, 2005:
Neko Case and The Sadies w/ Visqueen
Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
***review!***
September 17, 2004:
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings w/ Old Crow Medicine Show
Theater At Lime Kiln, Lexington, VA
***review!***
August 17, 2004:
Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
August 7 & 8, 2004:
Newport Folk Festival
Newport, R.I.
***review!***
July 11, 2004:
Cowboy Junkies
Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA
***review!***
Various Artists:
Friends of Old Time Music: the folks arrival 1961-1965 (at HickoryWind.org)
Neko Case:
Live From Austin TX DVD (at HickoryWing.org)
Old Crow Medicine Show:
Big Iron World
Sampson Pittman:
"Highway 61 Blues"
Baby Boy Warren:
"Stop Breakin Down"
Nina Nastasia:
The Blackened Air
Ryan Adams:
Jacksonville City Nights
Robert Wilkins:
"Rolling Stone"
Neko Case:
Furnace Room Lullaby
Etta Baker:
One Dime Blues
Steve Earle:
The Revolution Starts Now
Grey DeLisle:
The Graceful Ghost
