Blues music, as the name implies, aims to invoke a subdued, melancholy response from its listeners. B.B. King once referred to it as “the one form that’s followed our path from slavery to freedom.”(5) Standing out amid violence and legal tumult which plagued the African-American community in the early half of the twentieth century, blues music was viewed as a source of familiarity and consistency; one of the very few tenets of their culture that they had been able to cling to without encroachment from the white community. Needless to say, it would not be long before this blissful outlook dissipated and their traditional music became commercialized; bought and sold as a commodity by outsiders who, in essence, stole a product they had never before claimed, particularly as they feared it would sully their “pure” reputations as white celebrities. An extreme example of this dramatic shift is Elvis Presley’s word-for-word copy of “Tutti Frutti,” a song released and relatively undistinguished a year earlier by black artist Little Richard.
While not all examples of such appropriation are this extreme, they work against the favor of artists like Elvis who not only used the music for their own fame but also uprooted and essentially tossed away its historical significance. There’s a reason Elvis is known as “The King of Rock ‘n Roll” and not “The King of the Blues” – the genre that he altered to an extent that voided its cultural background. Interestingly, not all African Americans were totally displeased with this growing phenomenon of bars and melodies from their songs being lifted and manipulated. Legendary musician B.B. King, who served as a mentor to Eric Clapton, took it upon himself to work to win over white audiences and view increasingly white performance venues as a new opportunity rather than with resentment. His “authenticity as an agent of black culture remained unquestioned and the disinterest of black audiences became a non-issue,”(6) due in part to Clapton’s quite public affinity for the genre as a result of his troubled upbringing; what he compared as an inner poverty and lack of fulfillment to the material, financial, and cultural struggles that his fellow blues musicians cited as a source of grief.
Next page: “Reparations, Today, and the Future”
Footnotes
(5) Adelt, Ulrich. Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011, 20.
(6) Ibid., 29.