Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  Truth be told, the black pioneers/white popularizers paradigm of early rock & roll was essentially built on, not only the obvious ingenuity that classic rhythm & blues artists brought to post-war popular music, but also on the systematic exclusion of African Americans from positions of power in the American music industry—which, once again, is one of the many reasons that Berry Gordy and Motown was such a game-changing venture. American apartheid, what is commonly called “segregation,” demanded that the color-line Du Bois wrote so agonizingly yet eloquently about in The Souls of Black Folk be applied to, and upheld in American popular music. In every aspect of American life and culture U.S. government-sanctioned segregation separated whites from non-whites, especially blacks. But, by the mid-1950s rhythm & blues artists sought to, however subtly and sonically, challenge the American music industry’s distinct brand of musical racism and sonic segregation, which unmistakably relegated black music, including black sacred song (i.e., the spirituals and gospel), to a “separate and unequal” status.

  Consequently, prior to rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll, black music very rarely “crossed-over” into the white world on its own terms. As a matter of fact, the peculiar prickly practices and mechanisms that have historically upheld and institutionalized the “separate and unequal” status of black popular music and musicians has, indeed, transmuted since the emergence of rhythm & blues, but yet remains firmly entrenched in the twenty-first century American music industry. In order to critically understand rhythm & blues’ evolution into rock & roll we need to seriously consider the fact that African American musicians’ success or failure has always hinged on more than merely musical talent and a pop chart-friendly, memorable melody. The relative success or failure of any African American artist is simultaneously musical and extra-musical, and primarily predicated on a number of variables that range from personal preference and individual taste to black population migrations, the scarcity of bare necessities, incessant underemployment, economic depressions, recurring economic recessions, technological innovations, exclusionary corporate configurations, organizational memberships, and government investigations. In contending with all of these factors, and the ways in which they were heightened in the period immediately after the end of World War II, a branch of rhythm & blues evolved into a pop chart-friendly form of rhythm & blues that came to be called “rock & roll.”[2]

  The major point I wish to drive home here is that rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll was influenced by the prevailing socio-economic and political climate at the moment of its emergence in much the same manner that African Americans’ enslavement led to the invention of the spirituals and the innumerable betrayals of the Reconstruction era led to the birth of the blues. This means, then, that the origins and early evolution of rock & roll, however surreptitiously, inherited many of the both musical and extra-musical elements of rhythm & blues, and no amount of revisionist whitewashing can change this simple fact into fiction. Whether the mostly white male rock historians are willing to concede it or not, it should be stated in the clearest and most unconvoluted terms we can find: African American music and the African American musicians who collectively created it ingeniously established and innovatively extended an incredibly creative tradition, against seemingly insurmountable odds, that has historically exerted a disproportionate influence on American popular music, including rockabilly, rock & roll, country, bluegrass, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano, and Hawaiian.

  When African Americans’ distinct contributions to the origins and evolution of rock & roll are either erased or attributed to white rock & rollers who came later and who, for the most part, copiously copied black rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll styles, then and there rock history mirrors conventional whitewashed interpretations of U.S. history, culture, politics, and society. Moreover, without unambiguously understanding how deeply early rock & roll was identified with African American music, life, and culture contemporary rock critics and fans cannot possibly fathom how rebellious and outright offensive early white rock & rollers’ music was to much of adult white America during rock & roll’s golden age (circa 1954 to 1964). Writing directly about the “rock & roll controversy” and all of its racial undercurrents in The Death of Rhythm & Blues (1988), Nelson George explained:

  By applying the term “rock & roll” to what he played, a phrase that often appeared in black music as a euphemism for fucking, [legendary white disc jockey Alan] Freed tried, with some initial success, to disguise the blackness of the music. In the 1950s, “rhythm & blues,” like “Negro,” meant blacks. Calling it rock & roll didn’t fool everybody, as Freed would ultimately find out, but it definitely dulled the racial identification and made the young white consumers of Cold War America feel more comfortable. If rhythm & blues was ghetto music, rock & roll, at least in name, was perceived to be “universal music” (a key term in the history of black music’s purchase by whites). That term made it acceptable for whites to play the music removing the aura of inaccessibility. . . . This is not to downplay the impact white covers of black material had on white teens and their attitude toward the music, but the term “rock & roll”—perhaps the perfect emblem of white Negroism—was in itself powerful enough to create a sensibility of its own. (67)

  We need to understand why the real roots of rock & roll needed to be disguised in order for the music to be seen as “universal.” Why was it necessary to “disguise the blackness of the music?” How has more than half a century of “disguis[ing] the blackness” of rock & roll ultimately robbed African Americans of yet another one of their major contributions to U.S. history and culture? Also, how has the hidden black history of rock & roll altered our perception of it as one of the major soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement? Indeed, the politics of black popular music during the Civil Rights Movement are even more intriguing and revealing when we take into consideration its origins in, and evolution from gospel to rhythm & blues, and then rhythm & blues to arguably the most famous and unquestionably the first great rhythm & blues-derived music: rock & roll.

  When and where we are a willing to acknowledge that the Civil Rights Movement actually had multiple major soundtracks (i.e., gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll), then and there it more clearly emerges as an ideal site to explore the multiple messages of the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic of the movement. Much like the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement had both an intra-cultural and black America-centered soundtrack in rhythm & blues, and what could be seen as a more or less integrationist and white folk-friendly soundtrack in rock & roll. Obviously the argument here is not that each and every form of rock & roll (or, later, “classic rock”) conforms to rhythm & blues in relationship to the Civil Rights Movement. On the contrary, the main argument here is that there are enough similarities between rhythm & blues and rock & roll, especially early rhythm & blues-based rock & roll, to make a case for critically engaging them as inter-racial arenas where black and white youths, among others, put forward messages and advanced ideals that were not only informed by the Civil Rights Movement, but ultimately influenced most of the major movements of the 1960s: from the Chicano Movement (El Movimiento) and Anti-War Movement to the Women’s Liberation Movement and Lesbian & Gay Liberation Movement.

  An issue of “inaccessibility” continues to keep white fans from fully embracing the sonic experimentalism and social commentary of many forms of contemporary black popular music beyond commercial rap or “radio rap,” especially message rap, neo-soul, and spoken-word. Much like rhythm & blues during the Civil Rights Movement era this music is perceived as “ghetto music” or, especially with respect to neo-soul, mocked as “baby-making music.” Just as classic rhythm & blues was more than the dances it helped to popularize during the Civil Rights Movement (e.g., the Twist, the Monkey, the Jerk, the Pony, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, the Duckwalk, the Camel Walk, the Funky Chicken, the Swim, and the Dog), rock & roll was more than merely post-war white youths’ fascination
with black popular music and black popular culture.

  Through embracing rock & roll music and culture, scores of mostly suburban white youth, even if most often unwittingly, challenged their parents and grandparents’ “American” family traditions and social conventions predicated on racial segregation. Building on what the pioneers of rhythm & blues put into play, early rock & rollers created a form of musical protest that was cultural coded, making rock & roll music and rock & roll protest mean one thing to white adults and almost wholly another thing to black and white rock & roll youth. Consequently, this chapter will explore early rhythm & blues-based rock & roll as a major soundtrack for the Civil Rights Movement, and especially its, even if only implicit, emphasis on desegregation, integration, and youth activism. The emphasis here will be on the ways in which rock & roll’s relationship with the Civil Rights Movement, even if often unwittingly and often unacknowledged, builds on, and in many ways goes beyond gospel and rhythm & blues’ relationship with the Civil Rights Movement in the sense that it was able to capture and convey the movement’s integrationist ethos and integrationist impulse in ways that gospel and rhythm & blues did not. But, in order to understand the initial lyrical and musical overlap between rhythm & blues and rock & roll, and certainly rhythm & blues’ evolution into rock & roll, we must critically consider the ways in which the blues was foundational for both rhythm & blues and rock & roll.

  The Rhythms and the Blues that Evolved into Rhythm & Blues and Ultimately Rock & Roll

  One of the hallmarks of classical African griots, priests, praise singers, and dirge singers was their ability to express profoundly personal emotions and offer them up in a way that deeply resonated with their respective communities. They possessed an aesthetic alchemy that enabled them to translate individual experience—their own and others’—into collective music and communal expressions. Similar to contemporary African singer-songwriters—for example, Miriam Makeba, Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, Youssou N’Dour, Angélique Kidjo, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Salif Keita, Cheikh Lô, Baaba Maal, and Césaria Évora—classical African singers took seemingly simple lyrics and loaded them with intense and animated emotion, cultural codes, multiple metaphors, indigenous figures of speech, folk philosophy, political ideology, and religious references.[3]

  The spirituals and the blues built on and went beyond the classical African lyrical tradition by incorporating proverbs, double entendres, and allegories that grew out of the African American experience during enslavement, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction. As discussed in chapter 3, during enslavement the spirituals represented African American sacred music, while work songs and field hollers symbolized African American secular music.[4] It is important to observe that each of the aforementioned musics contained improvisational elements that enabled them to be formulated and reformulated according to the spiritual, psychological, and physical needs of the enslaved—much like every major form of African American music that followed in their wake, including gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll.

  The deep double entendres of early African American spirituals, field hollers, work songs, and party songs frequently masked the complexity and hidden meanings of the music. Early African American music was usually draped in seemingly “primitive” lyrics and “simple” melodies—that is to say, of course, purportedly “primitive” lyrics and “simple” melodies when compared with European and European American lyrics and melodies, and not traditional African lyrics and melodies. However, when the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of the enslaved are scrutinized they reveal music of profound spiritual substance and exceptional insight that often escaped the understanding of outsiders—especially anti-African, enslaving, and colonizing “outsiders.”

  Like all other major African American musical forms, work songs and spirituals mean more to those who have some working-knowledge of the lives and struggles of the people who produced them. Hence, the body of lyrical literature and beautiful “sorrow songs” that have been handed down to us speak volumes about the ingenuity and intelligence of an alleged “illiterate,” “unintelligent,” and “primitive” people. That these songs continue to be movingly sung (and, at times, seemingly employed in African American Christian-styled séances) to this day, indeed, says something about the humble humanity and innovative artistry of the people who produced them.[5]

  The multiple meanings and multiple purposes of African American music was sonically intensified and socially amplified with the emergence of the blues at the end of the nineteenth century. The blues was the first major African American musical form produced in the post-enslavement period. Which is to say, the blues was conceptually conceived and birthed during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years, roughly between 1865 and 1900. Where work songs, field hollers, and the spirituals could be considered primarily communal music that expressed life lived in the face of the hard labor, harsh realities, and the other innumerable horrors African American enslavement entailed, the blues encapsulated the experiences and emotions of individual African Americans who were “freed from the bonds of slavery” but still bound by the Black Codes, the Klu Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, lynching, the peonage system, the share-cropping system, and the convict-lease system. In other words, their lives remained bound by what is currently more commonly called “American apartheid.”[6]

  The blues developed into a dynamic musical and cultural aesthetic form that harbored an ingenious improvisational element that mutated and translated contingent on the artist, audience, environment, occasion, and venue. Consequently, blues music and blues musicians have an extremely fluid or, rather, jazz-like rapport that is incessantly altered by any number of the aforementioned elements (i.e., the artist, audience, environment, occasion, or venue). It is ironic that the very post-enslavement racism, poverty, and anti-black racist violence that blocked African Americans from untold educational, economic, and political opportunities ended up providing them with the wherewithal to create a majestic musical form and cultural aesthetic that continues to reverberate around the world, especially via rhythm & blues and rock & roll.

  Although women have been recurringly erased from the history of the blues, as with most other major African American musical forms, they undoubtedly played a pivotal role in its origins and evolution. Most blues scholars concede that there is no empirical evidence that provides us with clear-cut proof of when, where, why, and by whom the blues was invented, but musical and historical artifacts reveal that women were deeply involved as both singers and instrumentalists from its inception. What we do know with some certainty is that African American women were the first to record and popularize the blues.

  As has been recounted in almost every major book about the blues, Mamie Smith’s version of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 was the first identifiable—at least by modern and postmodern sonic sensibilities—blues recording. The song was so popular that it sold more than 75,000 copies within the first month of its release—no small feat in 1920. The success of “Crazy Blues” sent shock waves through both black and white America. It represented something new. It announced the emergence of a “New Negro” identity to America and, even more, a new expression of black womanhood that was free from the conservatism of the “cult of True womanhood” that plagued both white and black middle-class women in the first quarter of the twentieth century.[7]

  We should take care here to note that the blues was given its first popular expression by African American women. Even though it eventually (and incorrectly) came to be seen as a marker—if not for some folk a maker—of black masculinity, similar to the origins and early evolution of rhythm & blues and rock & roll, at its heart the blues is a transgender and transgenerational art form that initially served as a soundtrack for turn of the twentieth century African American socio-political movements and a new epoch in U.S. history and culture. In other words, according to Francis Davis in The History of the Blues (1995), the blues “provides a kind of soundtrack to the gradual urbani
zation of a once largely rural people” (46).

  The blues is the music of a people on the move. It is the sound African Americans created to capture their tribulation-filled transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, from the South to the North, from agricultural labor to industrial labor. The blues, therefore, was what it sounded like to live at the crossroads, somewhere between heaven and hell, spirituality and sexuality, life and death, slavery and freedom, Africa and America, and the oldness and the newness of the African American experience.[8]

  I am often amazed by the myriad ways the blues resembles rhythm & blues and rock & roll or, rather, I should more accurately say, vice versa. Rhythm & blues and early rock & roll sonically and socially represented African American life and culture during the immediate post-war period, where initially the blues represented African American life and culture at the turn of the twentieth century. The major difference between blues music, the blues aesthetic, and blues culture and rhythm & blues and rock & roll music and culture revolves around the incredible breakthroughs in post-war politics, technology, and telecommunications that took place in the middle of the twentieth century. However, even in light of the aforementioned “breakthroughs,” many of the same themes prevalent in turn of the twentieth century blues continued to dominate at the emergence of both rhythm & blues and rock & roll discourse, so much so that any serious scholar or student of black popular music and black popular culture should solemnly question exactly how life was or, perhaps, was not in any significant way qualitatively different for working-class and poor black people in the immediate post-war period between 1945 and 1965.