[Dixielandjazz] Whites saved the blues

[Rob McCallum]

Hello all,

IMHO this is the most intelligent thing that Stanley Crouch has ever
written.  Usually I find him to be an over bearing, over general windbag who
doesn't think objectively in the least and doesn't know nearly as much about
jazz as he thinks he does.  I suppose that's the way with 99% of the so
called jazz "critics."

All the best,
Rob McCallum


----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Beebe <jbeebe at centurytel.net>
To: DJML <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 12:19 PM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Whites saved the blues


Stanley Crouch is a black writer, national rep.  Level-headed and outspoken.
Listen to what he has to say:  (Charlie Hooks)

This was passed on to me from Charlie Hooks.  Stanley crouch is not one of
my favorites but I have to say that he makes good sense here.




Whites saved the blues

                Stanley Crouch


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |

The complaints made about PBS showing of Martin Scorsese's "The Blues" raise
some ongoing questions about how our culture is handled and just who is most
serious about the handling. Whenever there is mass media documentation of
anything we consider "black," those who do the documenting are almost sure
to be white. Those outraged are almost sure to be black.

Last spring, when I attended a blues conference in Oxford, Miss., one of
those expected moments arrived. On one panel, white researchers started
hemming and hawing about whether they had overstepped their bounds by going
out and finding blues singers and interviewing them.

We should all be glad that enough white people became interested enough all
those decades ago to begin a blues craze. Whether scholars or merely curious
blues enthusiasts, they got up off their rusty dusties and found the
musicians, interviewed them, got some of them recording contracts and
brought these people into a world where, often late in life, they could be
appreciated as performers and artists.

Those who provided the material should be celebrated and appreciated. They
could have stayed home and listened to Pat Boone.

After that panel, I talked to a rather haughty and cynical Negro who taught
political science. He was full of the bitter pus that had come of a special
wound, of being considered second-rate and never having been able to prove
otherwise. This man took the position that when the initial blues research
was done in the 1930s, black people could not get the grants that the white
people got. Therefore, black people were left out the cultural finds brought
forward by men like Alan Lomax, who found and recorded, for instance,
Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton. He produced invaluable material about how
black country music and early jazz came into being. I wasn't interested in
hearing it because one of the wonders of the Negro community is that it has
produced so many remarkable artists while sustaining a basic disinterest in
pure artistic expression as opposed to entertainment. It was that way then,
and it is that way now.


In fact, in 35 years, black studies, which began with all kinds of screams
about studying and preserving black culture, has done next to nothing
regarding the arts.

"Not much, brother, not much," Cornel West said to me. "The emphasis has
been history and political science, very little involvement in the arts."

Consequently, had Scorsese wanted to get some more black involvement in "The
Blues," he would have largely wasted his time searching for blues scholars
in black studies departments.

There are plenty of problems with "The Blues," but it becomes quite clear
that the middle-class white kids who filled up the blues festivals and
coffeehouses depicted in the series were looking for something humanly
authentic. They found it in black blues singers. And they usually treated
them like the cultural treasures that they were.

_______________________________________________
Dixielandjazz mailing list
Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz