Billy Branch steps out

[Bruce Steinberg <bruces@xxxxxxx>]

        Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 11:05:57 -0500
        From: Cathi Norton <canorton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
        
        Yeah, but helicopters didn't turn out so well for SRV.
        
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And Buddy Guy could've just as easily been in the same helicopter
coming back from co-headlining the gig with Stevie Ray that night.

Fortunately, it was just his fate that he wasn't.  Death is an
equal opportunity employer.

I'm sorry if Billy Branch is angry, but historical white
co-option of black music -- from Paul Whiteman's jazz, to Pat
Boone's pop, to Vanilla Ice's rap -- is not exactly news or a
late-breaking musicological insight.  Twenty-five years ago,
Muddy vented to a mostly white crowd at Stanford, "I had to come
to you behind the Stones!"  I understand, but we get it already.

And as far as "authenticity" goes, we've been hearing the same
tired old can-a-blue-man-play-the-whites stuff since Bloomfield
and Clapton first came up.  If Russian music says enough to Billy
that he wants to try it, more power to him -- who's to say he
~wouldn't~ get over?  Anyone who's ever heard black jazz
clarinetist Don Byron play Jewish klezmer music as soulfully as
Mickey Katz knows it can easily cut both ways -- and should.

One might as well ask why any black musicians ever dared to pick
up axes invented by Euro-honkies with names like Richter and
Sax in the first place.  The world's a better place for Sonny Boy
and Little Walter not worrying about capturing the essential
oom-pah-pah ~gestalt~ of the (dig it) ~Marine... Band...~ 
harmonica.

I went to see B.B. King at his first-time gig at the original
Fillmore in SF back in 1967, probably his first mostly-white
audience ever.  I talked with him afterwards, and he was so
enthusiastic and cordial, he invited me over to see him play the
following night with Big Mama Thornton at the Continental Club in
Oakland, an old-school ghetto blues joint if there ever was one.
I still have the priceless photos.

He played his ass off for both kinds of audiences, as he has for
almost three decades since, and besides his being an international
ambassador of American music, one could buy a lot of harps with
just his pinky ring.  With the right attitude (and talent), black
+ white + blue = green.

I think Branch railing against music-business racism at a mostly
white event that has appreciatively invited him to talk about
blues harp is not only counterproductive and way out of line, but
pretty tedious.  His slot could've presumably been filled by Lee
Oskar or Jerry Pourtnoy (or maybe even Bob Dylan :), but wasn't.
I'd say that as both a sociologist and motivational speaker,
Billy Branch is a great harp player.

My first introduction to Maxwell Street in Chicago -- where
Little Walter and others had first plugged cab mikes into guitar
amps on the sidewalk -- was back in 1969 when our band truck blew
a clutch on the north side and had to be towed to a garage on the
south side.

I'll never forget the white tow-truck driver, as nonchalantly and
amiably as a tour guide, pointing out all the pawnshops and
stores, and telling me -- a blue-eyed, Jewish harp player -- that
we were in the heart of "Jewtown," a local Chicago term of
endearment for which none of the "Chicago -- The Blues -- Today!"
liner notes had prepared me.

Yeah, Billy, life's a bitch.  Get over it -- and put it into the
music.  B*