Re: [Harp-L] "Race, Gender, & the Blues"

[David Fertig <drfertig@xxxxxxxxx>]

Really challenging topic which I've thought alot about.  Race in America and the playing of blues by, in many respects,  descendants of slave owners, while there seems to be commercial exclusion/minimization of blues played by black musicians, descendants and heirs of the blues tradition.   Like Nazis playing jewish folk music?  Well, No.  For the most part. At the risk of seeming really sappy:  The issue is love.  


Playing improvisational harp (or any instrument) is a series of 
immediate choices, you can be honest or just try to sound like it.    


What's in your heart is revealed by your actions and sounds.   Too may redneck stars-and-bars fans play blues-style music, and neglect its roots and reason, but that's usually quite apparent (and to me, mighty disturbing, if not disgusting.)  

And I am certain that many players (of any race) really get "it," i.e., the soulfulness and history of the blues idiom, perhaps having lived and learned in a way to enable them to dig deep into their own sense of "the blues"  and tell thoughtful truth by their vulnerable honesty, focus, tone and attitude.  I wish I could say I was there....but only sometimes.

And a few black performers - as well as lots and lots and lots of white (and other-skin-hued) performers - treat blues as a quaint antique to be gussied up and minstreled.

Yeah, that's awfully judgmental.  Who's to say in a specific instance?  The listener, I suppose.  While Sugar Blue might accurately decry the lack of black players in festivals, I've seen for a long time a lack  - but now growing resurgence - of black players in local blues-based bands and jams.   

SO in one sense, it's ironic, with whites culture-flucking their former slaves, and with others just celebrating an historic and amazing art form that moves them as humans in a continuing and evolving culture.   

In another sense,  it's generational, so many black musicians and listeners I've spoken with have disdained playing their grandparents old-timey music, opting for their own era's forms.  Which of course evolved from the musical fabric of their/our societies, including blues.  

LIke jazz, "classical" european orchestral music, reggae, opera, zydeco, and every other regional musical idiom, once it's out in the ether it's everyone's, like it or not, and its orthodoxy, purity and quality in playing are completely subjective.  

And worthy of debate as mediums of cultural exchange, especially when one's culture is continually  "flucked" for profits.   So, reach out, evolve ourselves as the music evolves among us.  And help raise awareness of the origins of the blues - in racism, genocide, slavery, rape and cultural exploitation, to which the victims responded with an irrepressible form of honest soulful expression.

-Dave "needs an editor" Fertig
ps: I may have american-irish ancestors who owned slaves, but they were probably just miners and sharecroppers; my jewish ancestors were slaves, and some of their descendants have now enslaved palestinians.   SO it goes, but not without notice.