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Episode 7 out today, we’re talking about Black-face Minstrelsy

Transcript under the cut

Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

I’m sorry I haven’t been around since November of uhhhh 2020 but fuckin hell guys schools tough. In the time since youve last heard me I successfully completed submitted and graduated from my masters in History and Jewish studies, I’ve moved home, opting not to do a PHD at the moment cause shit’s just expensive as hell and I need to make some money before I do that, and am now looking for work to fuckin fund that shit which has been giving me real grief. As Of writing this little intro I have submitted around 180 job applications, done about 5 or 6 exams for said jobs, not had one interview and man lemme tell ya living in a small shitass town in the middle of nowhere not able to afford a car or bus ticket is what hell is made outta. Just wanna make sure yall know I haven’t disappeared offa the face of the earth. For any of you wondering my thesis project was on the Historical Jewish Music Performance during the Covid-19 Pandemic. So It looked at you might be able to use Historical Klezmer music to help deal with some of the emotional issues that come part and parcel with Covid-19. Maybe I’ll do an episode on it eventually. But yeah, if y’all were wondering why I’ve been gone for so fukin long, it’s cause I was doing all that.

Going forward, I’m going to aim to put out a new episode roughly once a month. This whole doing two a month thing was fucking crazy and i mean may have worked well during the early parts of the pandemic but man trying to work on finding a job right now is a full time job in itself and once i have one i’ll need to work on this around job aps, which im sure as many of your know is like having a full time job in and of itself. I am the only person working on this podcast currently so that means i do all the research, editing, recording, sound editing, and promotion for it which is an awful lot to be doing by oneself. Hell the scripts alone or these things are roughly about 7000 words each and that’s without all the production end of it. And Not just that but the fucking fact that ive graduated means that I do not have access to the wealth of academic databases that I used to so i’m not limited to free ones which do not have nearly the breadth of articles as I want but still enough that allows me to scrape by just barely. As soon as I get a job I’ll be getting a Jstor subscription to help with that but for now the 200$ a year sub is too much. So shits gonna be slow going for a while unless one of yall wants to hire me. So hopefully, brain and will-power willing, i’ll be able to get you some new tunes and some new knowledge roughly once a month or so.

Last thing I wanted to say before we get back into it is that I’ve put up the logo for the podcast on my redbubble. So if you wanna help fund that jstor subscription to help me make these episodes a little faster, or just wanna show support for this podcast you can head on over to redbubble and search up “just a music podcast” where you can get the logo on stickers, tshirts, waterbottles, notebooks, just about anything i can stick the ding dang thing on. In terms of setting up a donation system like a patreon, I’d fucking love to but I wanna make sure yall are getting some consistent free product first before I start askin for a lil assistance.

With that all being said, let’s get back into it.

While y’all aren’t gonna get a violent content warning this episode you’re sure gonna hear a lot of bullshit because this week we’re talking about the Minstrel show, one of America’s greatest tragedies of entertainment. I wanna preface the episode with an explanation. I feel like my prefaces are turning into into somewhat of a tradition. I will not be using the N-word at all in any context, also for it’s other derivatives, it will be on a case by case basis but will be avoided unless I have to make a direct quote from another academic because it seems sorta backwards to educate against oppression by using the language of the oppressor. But yeah today’s episode is kinda the history of blackface, American classics, and the good reasons why people tend to get up in arms about them. BUT WITH THAT LET’S GET IN IT CAUSE TODAY’S EPISODE HAS A LOT FO HISTORY TO IT AND IS REALLY IMPORTANT. 

Ok so a minstrel show, who was involved, what was it, where did they happen, when did they happen, when did they stop happening, WHY did they happen? Well we’re gonna mix the order because, to begin with it, might be pertinent for you guys to know what a minstrel show is, or was, cause they don’t happen anymore! The idea of the minstrel show was usually a comedy of sorts performed on stage mainly for white audiences. It would usually be performed by a troupe with multiple participants up on stage with an audience who sat and watched. The troupe could be mixed but very often it was usually a white person in black face who would play the lead character or the featured character in that night’s set. The show would be comprised of songs first and foremost but also banter in between them and jokes. Essentially, if you’re some person going to a minstrel show in like 1870 ur looking to have a good ol’ time. 

It is theorized that the minstrel show was conceptualized shortly after Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice’s performance of his song “Jump Jim Crow” on September 22nd 1830. By 1832 Rice had shot to stardom in New York. The song and dance routine was meant to mimic an old, crippled slave calleeeeddddddd………. Jim Crow, which we did talk about in a previous episode but since it’s been like a year and a bit here’s a clip of the song.

By the 1840s the idea of a minstrel show where “comedy” like this dominated. Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels, the first blackface troupe, debuted at New York's Bowery Amphitheatre in 1843. And from there the tradition took off. From Hanna Glomska and Janet Begnoche at Princeton University : During the 1840s the show was divided into two parts. The first concentrated largely upon the urban black dandy, the second on the southern plantation slave. Both featured stereotyped caricatures rather than genuine depictions of blacks, and were usually demeaning. In the 1850s music used in these performances shifted to songs maybe partially taken from plantation songs and were increasingly written by white people. Music of the "genteel" tradition now prevailed in the first section, where popular and sentimental ballads of the day and polished minstrel songs supplanted the older, “blacker” tunes. The middle part consisted of the "olio," a potpourri of dancing and musical virtuosity, with parodies of Italian operas sections, stage plays, and visiting European singing groups. The high point of the show was the concluding section, the "walk-around." This was an ensemble finale in which members of the troupe in various combinations participated in song, instrumental and choral music and dance. 

Two things you’re going to want to not here the first is that yeah I mentioned that Daddy Rice first performed and gained renown in New York. If you were thinking that Minstrel shows were an entirely southern phenomenon my friend you’re gonna be sadly mistaken. In a text by Minstrel Show expert (how fucking weird a title is that) Dale Cockrell he writes that not only were minstrel shows more popular in the northern states but people could be found hooting and hollering at them just as much as one might at a modern football game. This was not just a passing fancy in the united states either as Minstrel shows travelled up to Canada and even to western europe to display their antics. Interestingly too, after the American civil war there were some areas in the south entirely where Minstrel shows were actually banned despite the shows disparaging attitudes towards black people. 

The structure of the show would then change again after the American Civil war which would launch more demand for music and performance reminiscing of the times before the abolition of slavery which many of the new songs in minstrel shows of this era were about. In the 1850s we also see the emergence of a third skit  largely dedicated to poking fun at life on a plantation. So as a summary From Mcgill University “The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit.” all surrounding a central tenant of making fun of black people. The Black elements in the show would also pick up again because this is when we would start to see freed black people then sometimes show up in minstrelsy groups. 

“But Laura!!” I hear you squeal from the wings “There were so many black people around  before the civil war! Why could they have just performed? It might have been exploitative but at least they could have been making money off these things?! They were just lazy weren’t they?!” Short answer to all of that is “No.” Long answer is for a hell of a long time in the United States it was entirely illegal for black people to be performers in various capacities. In the Pre-Civil war era it was largely unheard of for black people to be performers for white audiences in any way shape or form. This would soften a little bit of course after the civil war which is why we see black performers sometimes popping up in minstrel troops but black people not being able to perform for white audiences or in whites only venues would stay largely a social rule until the mid 1960s. We’ll see this later when we talk about jazz and definitely rock and Motown performers who in some cases might be allowed to perform in a hotel lounge eventually but then not be able to stay in the same hotel because it was designated as whites only. It’s fucking miserable my guys. These troupes also didn’t include women until around the 1890s owing to the issue of women also being largely barred from performance due it being known as a rowdy profession for prrrrostitutes and strrrrrumpets

So yes, after the Civil war we have a resurgence of blackface minstrelsy which unfortunately lasts for a hot minute pretty much entirely dropping off by 1919 as civil rights works became more popular and people shifted their attention to new exploitative forms of entertainment like the circus. This isn’t to say of course that the relics of minstrelsy completely vanished. For example many of the songs and jokes used would get repurposed for vaudeville shows which would carry on till the 1930s and of course become eventually reminisced about in movies like White Christmas. We even see relics of it last into media that I’m sure many of you will be familiar with from your childhood, which we’ll talk about later. But for the most part, like any genre of music, it does definitely get passed up by new genres emerging around the 1900s such as Jazz and tin pan alley music like rags and what have you (which if u dont know what they are dont u even worry cause man we’re gonna get to them in another episode). 

So now we know the history but what about the content of the show, what actually makes a minstrel show so blatantly offensive? WELL BUCKLE UP BUCKAROOS CAUSE WE’RE GETTIN IN IT TO WIN IT.

Well we have the stock characters. The people on stage in a minstrel show were often meant to represent different stock characters that would be present in most minstrel shows. Of course these characters didn’t 100% exist at first but became more solidified over time. I’m gonna describe some characters here but for some of you aren’t going to know some of the language so before I get into it: a “coon” was a derogatory way to refer to a black person (also sometimes used to refer to raccoons), a “dandy” is the stereotypically fashionable man in the mid late 1800s. I would like to thank Professor J Stanley Lemons of Rhode Island University for this description:

“THE MINSTREL SHOW WAS AMERICA'S FIRST NATIONAL, POPULAR ENTER- tainment form, and from it came two of the classic stereotyped characters of blacks.' One was Zip Coon and the other was Jim Crow. Zip Coon was a preposterous, citified dandy. In the minstrel shows he was easily recognized in his bright, loud, exaggerated clothes: swallow-tail coat with wide lapels, gaudy shirts, striped pants, spats, and top hat. He was a high- stepping strutter with a mismatched vocabulary. He put on airs, acted elegant, but was betrayed by his pompous speech filled with malapropisms (malapropisms being words mistakenly used in place of other words that sound familiar). Jim Crow represented the slow-thinking, slow-moving country and plantation black person. He wore tatters and rags and a battered hat. He spent his time sleepin', fishin', huntin' 'possums, or shufflin' along slower than molasses in January, except when stealing chickens or dancing on the levee. Of course, these minstrel characters did not exhaust the stereo- types. Equally common was the image of the Negro as servant and maid. There was Old Uncle Tom or Uncle Remus, Aunt Jemima or Mandy the maid, Preacher Brown and Deacon Jones, Rastus and Sambo, and the ol' mammy.”

So let’s break some of this down a little. First, we get Zip Coon which by the description we learn is a black person that has taken it upon himself to dress in the way those do when livin in the city. This man is meant to be a sort of caricature, but of what? This goes back to the ideas of race and how non-black people perceived black people during this era. Due to racial ideologies and social attitudes at the time, the majority of viewing audiences especially within the American spherec still weren’ necessarily primed to see black people as human and when they were they were seen as a SEVERELY different kind of human, underdeveloped mentally and culturally. Though the idea of people of different races being considered subhuman has unfortunately come up at various points throughout history, these ideas were then exacerbated by the institution of slavery which were also enshrined in the creation of the American constitution. From the ACLU or the American Civil Liberties Union: “Forty of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Under the Constitution, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a free person.” When slaves were then freed and white people had to wrestle with the concept of black people actual being fully formed human beings, they still got the shaft. This can be best emblemized In the 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney dismissed the humanity of those of African descent saying that black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States". The 3/5s compromise, as it’s known, remained active in the American constitution until July 9, 1868 when the 14th amendment was written into the constitution stating that all black people should be counted as full citizens. Which btw, as a bonus not so fun fact for this episode, because nothing has ever been actually removed from the constitution entirely, the 3/5s compromise is still 100% viewable in legal copies of the constitution, it’s article 1 section 2. If you’re white, imagine having to read that as a black person in America, knowing that’s in there, if you’re black and listening to this, i know theres nothign i can do as a white ass canadian to make any of it better, but i just wanna say I’m so fucking sorry. 

The caricature Zip Coon represents then is of the comical subhuman black person “trying to act white” by dressing in “white people clothes” however poorly, and taking on more intellectual speech patterns (often associated with white people because who else is getting higher educations in America at this time than white people.) This sota relegation to caricature behaviour ramps up to the nth degree after the abolition of slavery to try and keep freed slaves and other black Americans as socially marginalized as possible by disempowering them by keeping their perception in society as inept as possible.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Jim Crow whom I mentioned in my episode on slave and gospel music. As many of you may also already know, Jim Crow also became the name associated with the era of severe mistreatment and written and unwritten rules governing which parts of society black americans could engage with which started soon after the civil war and lasted roughly 100 years until 1968. From the description, Jim Crow fits a similar sort of racial stereotype aimed disempowering black people, which is to say uneducated, lazy, backwoodsy sort of folk who do not know jack from shit. 

“But LAURA, what’s with all these familial connections?” you ask bewildered “ Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima? Obviously if they gave them fun familial connections that must mean that they loved and respected black people enough in order to consider them family!” Well no, not really. You see, during the era of slavery, some slaves were employed in and around houses as wet nurses/nannys, butlers, cleaners and other household staff to ensure the smooth operation of a large plantation house. Of course as many people do, those who owned these large estates and properties would eventually have their own kids. These kids would often come to form some familial bonds with the black enslaved people who were charged of taking care of them for much of their youth, leading children to refer to them as uncle, aunt, or mammy. The names themselves also then came to stand for certain caricatures of uneducated, unthreatening, black people. 

For example, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture: The Mammy stereotype developed as an offensive racial caricature constructed during slavery and popularized primarily through minstrel shows. Enslaved black women were highly skilled domestic workers, working in the homes of white families and caretakers for their children. The trope painted a picture of a domestic worker who had undying loyalty to their slaveholders, as caregivers and counsel. This image ultimately sought to legitimize the institution of slavery. The Mammy stereotype gained increased popularity after the Civil War and into the 1900s. Considered a trusted figure in white imaginations, mammies represented contentment and served as nostalgia for whites concerned about racial equality.”

"Uncle Tom," written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, featured the title character as a “large, broad-chested, powerfully made man … whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence.” He forfeits his own chance at escaping bondage and loses his life to ensure the freedom of other slaves. The stereotype of Uncle Tom is innately submissive, obedient and in constant desire of white approval. 

These caricatures also grew in absurdity towards the later part of the 1800s and early 1900s when commercial artists started making some god-awful art of black people to use on product packaging or as mascots for brands. These images would often feature exaggerated features such as super large red lips, red eyes or under eyes, massive ears and noses, and in the case in which children were depicted they might be dressed or posed in ways making them appear like animals, which man, can you get much fucking worse?

I’m sure any of you who’ve ever gone to like an estate sale or like some tacky old person yard sale in the states has seen a mammy figure of some variety typically characterized as a fat black woman, with massive red lips and a kinda frumpy house dress. If not, do you remember Aunt Jemima? She got turned into the famous aunt Jemima that we know on pancake syrup. So as a bonus, if you happened to hear about the hubbub of removing Aunt Jemima as both the name and face of a brand in the states, this is some of the history behind that decision. (It also goes to show how long the shadows of this type of racism are cause that change was only officially completed in fucking 2021) Uncle Ben? The old dude with the rice? Same situation. We as white people (and I’m saying we cause while I haven’t actively created a fuckin caricature of some black guy to use in the selling of… I dunno, canned beans… I’ve still been complicit in the consumption of products with this imagery or that have used this imagery, at some point in my short pitiful life) we have used and continue to use these stereotypes because not only were they comforting to us but they also actively worked to keep our association of black people in places where it would remain the most nonthreatening to us. 

So we have the characters, but WENT ON DURING THESE FUKIN SHOWS? Well you had all these characters you see, which we’ve established for the most part were just white guys in black face often times with exaggerated features that black people were stereotyped to have, dressed up as these preposterous stereotypes of black people in the white conscious (dumb and slow or dumb and metropolitan, the dumb was pretty non negotiable here guys), telling stories, singing songs, and cracking jokes. “BUT LAURA,” you chime in with great fervor “aside from the imagery, that actually doesn’t sound too too bad! They were just having a bit of fun!” Which I mean 1. Did you not listen to what i’ve been saying for the past like 10 minutes but also 2.the fucked up-ed-ness of it doesn’t stop at the portrayals of these characters, it bleeds into the audio as well. As previously mentioned jump jim crow is very emblematic of what we’re gonna get into. 

Before we get into the music though I wanna briefly elaborate on some of the other components of the show. And truth be told it was some miserable shit. In the later part of the 1850s the songs and performances took a darker turn and where some of the humor previously employed in the shows had been about divisions in class and sometimes even poking fun at the upper classes (in a way that was still palatable by them of course), they now pretty much exclusively dealt with and were intended to depict black people as either slaves yearning to return to their masters, or as care free unintelligent folk trying and failing miserably to integrate into white society. This also frequently included issues of misogyny, and anti-equality politics more generally. As an example, from Mcgill University, “When one character joked, ‘Jim, I tink de ladies oughter vote,’ another replied, ‘No, Mr. Johnson, ladies am supposed to care berry little about polytick, and yet de majority ob em am strongly ‘tached to parties.’” We have the parties, both black men, both speakin in this dialect that is meant to betray them as uneducated, speaking about a subject that neither of them are supposed to know much about cause politics is very much a white dominated thing during this time, and disparaging women as well! LEgit using an oppressed group of people to further objectify and oppress other people! TALK ABOUT FUN FOR THE WHOLE FUKIN FAMILY!

This all kinda sets the tone for the type of music that one would hear in a minstrel show. The Music of the minstrel show in terms of it’s technical background took after the folk music tradition that was becoming more solidified in the United states: lyrics were in english or badly accented english in patterns reminiscent of and english folk song and the instruments might consister of banjo, violins, drums, tambourines, ad whatever else the troupe might be able to get their hands on at the time. The songs featured in minstrel shows were typically called ethiopian songs as black people were often referred to as ethiopians regardless of where the hell they were from. This is partially due tot he fac that during this time Ethiopia was one of the only African-controlled nation states at the time, so there being an abundance of people of colour and few white folk there. People who composed these songs then were called composers of ethiopian music (which I imagine might make things a little difficult if youre a scholar actually tryign o study actual ethiopian music.)

For the rest of this section I’m gonna be focussing on one dude specifically. A Mr.Stephen Collins Foster. Now of course Foster wasn’t the only dude out here writing racist ass music for minstrel shows, but I’m choosing to focus on him because his impact on minstrel music as well as the broader notion of American culture is probably the most recognizable for people growing up in North America and I would argue the rest of the world.

So, who was this man? Stephen Collins Foster was a white American man born on the 4th of July 1826 in’ Larenceville (which honestly just like ur saying the name Lawrence with an almost East Coast Canadian accent, OH YA KNOW LARENCE DOWN THE WAY THERE BUD”) Pennsylvania. 2 things here, how fucking fitting that this dude was born on the 4th of July and would then more onto become known as America’s First Composer like he popped outta the pussy like I’m gonna write racist music that will go down as some of the most well known shit in American history. Secondly you’ll notice that this dude was born in fucking Pennsylvania, you can get farther north if you try but not by to too much. Contrary to what most people might think, Pennsylvania did definitely have slavery in it, however, it wouldn’t have been super popular during the time that Foster was alive due to it being considered (very rightly so) inhuman and unholy by the various religious factions (Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists) that would have dominated Pennsylvania during the time as well as the large swaths of Germans, Dutch, and Swiss immigrants who came to call Pennsylvania their home. This is all to say that Stephen Foster didn’t necessarily grow up in a super pro-slavery state.

So what the hell did this man write? Uh, well, everything, man wrote fuckin everything. If you think of most old American Folk songs that you would have learned about in school or heard just it the North American zeitgeist, in Cartoons (like looney toons and shit,) there’s a good chance that he’s the one who wrote them. . Even as a young kid growing up in Canada I personally remember hearing these songs in saturday morning cartoons. Foster was only 18 when his first song “Open Thy Lattice, Love” was published in 1844. From there he wrote prolifically with some of his massive hits being Oh! Susanna in 1847, De Camptown Races in 1850, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair in 1854, Old Folks at Home (AKA Swanee River) in 1851, My Old Kentucky Home in 1853, and Beautiful Dreamer which was presumably written sometime before he died in 1864. All in all he’s known to have composed 200 and some songs serving as both the composer and the lyricist in most if not all.

When I say hit songs it’s kinda important to put that into scale (and I love a scale comparison) because when we think of something being a hit now we’re likely to think of how many plays a song gets via a streaming service such as itunes, spotify, or youtube. Some of us might also think of when we would hear about albums going gold or platinum depending on sales of actual physical DISCS (god I miss physical media ownership, would love to have a job to purchase CDs directly from bands). Well obviously this shit didn’t exist in the mid 1800s, hell the record player doesn’t even really get invented for another 10 years and change after Collins dies, so what are we talking about when we’re talking about hits, or big songs in general? We’re talking about how many copies of the actual sheet music were sold. 130,000 sales of a song doesn’t seem like much to us now given the millions of plays songs can get within days of release but in the 1850s it was an awful lot. Hell the population of New Fucking York was only around 96000 in 1850! Also we have to consider that for every person who was buying there were likely a small handful of people who enjoyed in who otherwise didn’t buy it because they couldn’t play music, or couldn’t read sheet music. When we talk about copies sold of a specific song during this time period and before we’re generally talking about the written sheets that were purchased and then played at parties or small gatherings of people for everyone to enjoy (if you played well enough of course, otherise no music or friends for u, ya fool.)

We’re only gonna be lookin at 2 of them today cause lord knows if we went through his whole fukin library we’d be here for 87 years and frankly I don’t think my voice would hold out for that long and a couple of you might think of hunting me down for sport. That being said if you want to look up any of the ones that I mentioned ur more than welcome because, again, these songs were wildly popular and you’ll have no trouble finding them. So instead of talking about the songs first and then playing them like I usually do, because i‘ve already set up a bunch of the background, we’re gonna just get straight into some songs. To keep any discernible form of organization we’re gonna go in chronological order. Here’s the first one

Oh susanna!

Ok so the lyrics I scraped from a PDF of the original sheet music that’s being hosted on the library of congress website, god forbid they have them in an easily available cut and paste format or anything. I am gonna try and read the contained verses to the best of my ability without the shitty accent, but I’m going to paste the link to the library of congress sheet music in the transcript of this episode for those who are interested in what the dialectal version looks like. So the first stanza is roughly

“I came from Alabama

with a banjo on my knee

I’m going to Louisiana

my true love for to see

It rained all night the day I left

The weather was bone dry

The sun so hot I froze to death

Susanna don’t you cry”

The we get the chorus which a lot of you will recognize of course:

“Oh susanna! Oh don’t you cry for me

I’ve come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee”

And the second verse:

“I jumped aboard the telegraph

And traveled down the river

The electric fluid magnified

And killed 500 n-word

The bullgine bust,

the horse ran off,

I really thought I’d die;

I shut my eyes to hold my breath

Susanna, don’t you cry.”

Immediately we are struck with the accented English which is meant to portray an overly ignorant black man who is incapable of speaking “proper” English. This is done in two ways. The first is through the use of the written dialectal speech shortening and misspelling many words in order to get a certain pronunciation from the singer (who, again, was just some white dude putting on black face and performing a caricature) but also just in the fuckin content itself. “It rained all night the day I let the weather was bone dry” and “the sun so hot I froze to death” are very much meant to show how stupid this guy is, buddy can’t get turns of phrase right, doesn’t know shit.

So then we get to the second verse which is really just… whew bud. I actually wanna just quickly define some words in here cause this song was written what 180 years ago? So from what I can tell because I haven’t had any fukin contradiction to it in the texts I’ve read but the telegraph is likely a telegraph pole. Telegraph poles functioned much like telephone poles that we have now but back then they would have been transmitting electronic pulses for things like morse code to communicate faster over long distances, kinda like an old timey text. And a Bullgine is legit just a slang term used in those days for the word engine, so that one’s ezpz limin squeezy.

This verse continues on with the same shitty dialectal elements and general stupidity but also just murder black folk cause why the hell not, that’s funny right? While researching this episode I came across more than one source that called this easily one of the most racist things Collins ever wrote which I mean, in terms of outright “lol the death of hundreds of black people makes for funny jokes for my song” absolutely, but I might argue that like showing the plantations as sights of happiness for slaves might be a little worse just because of the insidious implications but then that might also just be me. But yes, overall, just as an example, this is absolutely a song that was acceptable at a minstrel show.

“BUT LAURA ITS JUST A FUNNY JOKE,THATS WHAT’S WRONG WITH PEOPLE LIKE YOU, YOU CAN’T TAKE A JOKE” here’s the thing buddy boy, IF we took the joke out of the context, we didn’t have the rest of the song, we didn’t have the cultural understanding that goes with it, we didn’t have the slur, just had it as a standalone joke, not written in an intentionally racist dialect, then sure, yeah it would just funny mix ups and turns of phrase, lord knows I’m guilty of fucking up turns of phrase all the time (for example, it’s become somewhat standard in my family to say “well I don’t wanna rub my own shoulders” instead of well I don’t wanna pat my own back”). BUT because the joke is written the way that it is, with all the racist context, during the time-period it is, with the rest of the song being what it is, it’s fucking racist!

Also, just on the note of jokes. Jokes are incredibly insidious when it comes to spreading shitty ideology. Not only do they function as a signal to other shitty people that “hey we tolerate the possibility of this idea and it’s ok to make other uncomfortable so long as it makes you laugh” way, but also when people call them out on it they can fall back on the “it’s just a joke man, liberals can’t take a joke, why you gotta be so butthurt about it.” There seems to have finally been a mass wakeup of academics to the idea that the alt-right is pretty damn good at spreading their ideology through the use of memes, irony and satire. So just as a quick rundown on that if you have access the guardian there’s an article which im gonna link in the transcript for this episode which briefly goes over the issue. If you want a more in depth read on the situation and especially how things like that affect the current political landscape we are in maybe think about picking up a copy of Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination by Professor Alexandra Minna Stern.

We’re going to compare this with one of Collins’ later songs called My Old Kentucky Home. Now this song specifically is the second largest reason that I wanted to choose Stephen Foster Collins’ as our case study because unlike many other composers of Minstrel music, Collins’ supposedly started feeling empathy for enslaved black persons in America and supposedly his music changed to reflect this changing attitude. I’m not going to make a definitive opinion on it in this podcast for two reasons that we’re going to get into after we discuss some of the controversy so without further ado, here’s a clip of My Old Kentucky Home

I’m gonna speak some of the lyrics for those who didnt get them, the song is remarkably short so im gonna go through most of it just so yall get the picture:

“ Verse 1:

The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,

‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay;

The corn-top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom,

While the birds make music all the day.

The young folks roll on the little cabin floor,

All merry, all happy and bright;

By ‘n’ by Hard Times comes a-knocking at the door,

Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Chorus:

Weep no more my lady

Oh! weep no more today!

We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,

For the Old Kentucky Home far away.

Verse 2:

They hunt no more for the possum and the coon,

On meadow, the hill and the shore,

They sing no more by the glimmer of the moon,

On the bench by the old cabin door.

The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,

With sorrow, where all was delight,

The time has come when the darkies have to part,

Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Just for context, darkies is a word that was used durign the time as a more polite way to refer to black individuals.

So, my old kentucky home was published (not necessarily written but published) in 1853 only 6 years after Oh! Susanna. Immediately upon listening to it you can hear the difference in tone as well as vocabulary. It’s more somber and plaintive than Oh, susanna. It’s neither particularly funny nor would it lend itself particularly well to a comedic interpretation. You might even say that this song represents a different type of music altogether which is actually a perspective some scholars take referring to songs of this nature as “plantation melodies” because, if it wasn’t clear, this song is a sad nostalgic nod to plantation life which, as previously mentioned, would be typically in the third act of the Minstrel Show. This, however, didn’t stop contemporaries of Foster from like super enjoying it tho.

To borrow the words of one of Foster’s friends, a man named Robert P Nevin “the art in [Foster’s] hands teemed with a nobler significance. It dealt, in its simplicity, with universal sympathies, and taught us all to feel with the slaves the lowly joys and sorrows it celebrated.” and if this dude’s word doesn’t convince ya, we even have MR Frederick Douglas, yes THE abolitionist, writer, statesman and like a million other things Frederick Douglas said of Stephen Foster “it would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs; those songs that constitute our national music, and without which we have no national music. They are heart songs and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. “Lucy Neal,” “Old Kentucky Home,” and “Uncle Ned” can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken

the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish”

And so they might have for the time, from what we can fuckin tell, even though the lyrics are super fucking sypathetic and nostalgic for plantation life, many people did, at the time, take it as trying to promote the rights of slaves, and evetually former slaves.

The debate then doesn’t come from the reception of his work during his time, then, so much as his motivation for doing it as well as how people received it after his death. It’s one thing if buddy woke up one day and went “hmm i’ve been a racist sack of shit for far too long, it’s time to be friends with, learn about, and lift up the struggles of my fellow black Americans cause lord knows they’ve been going through it for some time now.” It’s another to be like “hmmm, my music isn’t being received as well as it used to because i guess being so overtly racist in words isn’t as fashionable as it used to be, so lets change it to make it more palatable” which SURPRISE SURPRISE, there’s some fucking evidence for!

This evidence comes directly from a letter foster wrote to fellow ethiopian song performer Edwin P Christy. See back then it still wasn’t uncommon for people to commission songs from composers and then just throw your name on it to make yourself seem more impressive, especially if you were of an affluent nature, cause god forbid artists actually be able to claim ownership for their work in a meaningful way for another liek what 120 years. Which is kinda what christy did. He commissioned the song Old Folks At Home, (AKA Swanee River) in 1852 and promptly slapped his name all over it like tryna let ur roommates know that those leftovers in the fridge are definitely yours, which he did for, and hold onto ur britches here cause the the cost will absolutely pants you, he signed over the rights of this thing for 5 dollars.

Which actually is funny to think about, 5 dollars in 1853 is about 180 bucks now. Imagine you went up to fuckin, i dunno, doja cat, and went hey girl i know ur really fucking busy but could u compose me a song i could actually claim to be mine? A real slapper, a real jam of a tune? All for slightly under 200 bucks? Thanks babe. Fuckin wild man.

Anyhow, Christy commissioned this song and then not too long after received a letter from foster himself which said multiple things but the thesis of the thing was and I quote “I had the intention of omitting my name on my Ethiopian songs, owing to the prejudice against them by some, which might injure my reputation as a writer of another style of music, but I find that by my efforts I have done a great deal to build up a taste for Ethiopian songs among refined people, by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order. Therefore I have concluded to reinstate my name on my songs and to pursue the Ethiopian business without fear or shame, at the same time that I will wish to establish my name as the best Ethiopian song-writer.”

And continue writing for minstrel shows he sure fuckin did, as historican Emily Bingham describes in her paper "Let's Buy It!"Tourism and the My Old Kentucky Home Campaign in Jim Crow Kentucky “people focused on the song's first verse and chorus, and because of ongoing minstrel stereotyping and the racial tenor of Jim Crow America, most whites heard a lament for a happy home embedded in a glamorous portrait of life on the plantation.”

So herein lies the problem. A dubiously intentioned man, with dubiously intentioned music, played for dubiously intentioned people, who then used it to racist ends. Besides the academic debate tho there are people who we should consider when we talk about the salvaging of these types of historical musics, and that is black americans who are still affected by very antiblack stereotypes because even though the stereotypes have changed slightly they are absolutely still used in ways that hinder the way black people are perceived in modern society.

“BUT LAURA,” you cry from the vent (you should really get out of there, can’t imagine it’s very comfortable being crammed in a heating vent) “This is just another example of people being too woke and getting butthurt about something.” And man 1. Regardless of when people are mad at something if there is a large portion of the population who goes “hey can u stop doing this dick thing to us,” maybe we should stop and listen and maybe stop being a dick to them 2. The pushback to this song has been going on for a hot fucking minute yall. Part of the reason i wanted to bring up my old kentucky home is because it seems to be at the center for constant debate whether it’s status symbol a TrEaSurEd AmERiCaN foLKsOnG should supercede the opinions and feelings of many Black Americans because even though the song was supposedly antislavery during the time it was written, reading the lyrics, even after replacing the word “darkies” with “people” it still comes off as a sort of nostalgic reminiscing of the GOoD Ol PlAnTaTion DaYs which is only reinforced when we see the song being used to mark historical significance which is precisely what it’s fucking BEING USED FOR.

In terms its use as a state song, My Old Ketucky Home has been used as the state song of Kentucky since 1928. In the 1950s, some broadcasting companies (namely CBS and NBC) started thinking “hey mybe if we’re gonna be using this song we should remove the word darkies, it is in fact 100 years after the fucking civil war, maybe we shouldn’t still be using these words” (to which I would say about FUCKING time.) And I mean hey it might have been a step forward in the status of this song if there hadn’t been blowback by uhhhh the fucking state rep of Kentucky at the time Frank Chelf who straight up got so angy about this that he proposed a fucking bill, that PROHIBITED THE UNAUTHORIZED CHANGING OF SONG LYRICS, WITH THE THREAT OF FELONY CHARGES AND JAIL TIME FOR REPEAT OFFENDERS. This of course, in 1950s fashion, was introduced with much posturing about pride as well as a healthy fucking dose of mccarthyism with him trying to say that the politics of the few do not override the enjoyment of the many and that if people tried to censor it it would be like the soviets dictating culture ( as if dictating how culture should be enjoyed is not exactly what he was doing.) The offending word was only officially taken out of the state song when (and yeah this is gonna sound bizarre) but a visiting japanese youth group sang the song for the state legislature without omitting it and everyone was subsequently so fuckign embarassed that THE NEXT FUCKING DAY there was a bill introduced to censor it out. This all happened more recently than you might think in fucking 1986.

Now, we could try our hardest to argue plausible deniability for these songs if they were only used for these sorts of events and people were genuinely trying their hardest to make the songs as less offensive as possible and people understood it for it’s possible intention of being an abolitionist song but that’s not really the case here is it. For example, the daughters of confederacy, a neo confederate group originally composed of female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers (now a group numbering 15000 people in 2021, which, yuck), notoriously standing for many of the principals that confederates fought for, use My Old Kentucky Home as part of that brand of Southern Pride well known to anyone with half a fucking brain as 3 prejudices in a trenchcoat masquerading as patriotism. They actually included it in an official songbook of theirs. This was published in 1901.

In another historical case in 1914 black children at Boston Public Schools had the lyrics of My Old Kentucky Home as well as a number of other Minstrel show tunes jeered at them by white kids following the use of a book called “Forty Best Songs” after these songs had been sung by students. In response to the outcry of mostly black parents as well as The Pastor of the First African M. E. Church of Boston, and action by the NAACP, the book was soon pulled from shelves prompting a nation wide discussion on Foster’s work, it’s place in american culture, and what could be done about it.

I will make quick note and say while I don’t typically advocate for pulling books because libraries are excellent places for education, the idea of it taking it off the shelves seems at least somewhat appropriate given that it is actively praising that type of language, “best” is in the title of the book. Imall for having problematic books, its part of how we learn from things from looking at our mistakes, and learning where to go from there. The thing is typically when we have these books we typically have two situations that play out in either #1 We have a disclaimer somewhere in the book either in the preface or #2 we have a cultural understanding of the book as a historical source for information. For example, being a student myself who studied a lot of holocaust history and the culture surrounding it, a few years ago I found it prudent to purchase a copy of Mein Kampf. For those listening do not know this text, it’s one of Adolf Hitler’s fundamental texts and in it is all sorts of disgusting antisemitism and jsut all sorts of nasty prejudice one could imagine. Though there is not preface in my copy of the book condemning it’s contents, we have a cultural understanding at this point that if you have a copy of Mein Kampf you’re either academically interested in the fields which concern this book, someone who accidentally has a copy, or a wild fucking asshole who bought it in support of it’s message. 40 Best Songs, the anthology of songs that contained those songs, however, had neither.

Back to the subject matter at hand, all in all, the minstrel shows and minstrel songs don’t tend to age well. I tend to view them in the same way as the whole statue of fucking colonizers, murderers and other people we tend to celebrate the atrocities of for some fucking reason. If people are so insistent on it being a very important part of history then it should be able to be properly learned about in a museum or in history classes in school (but maybe not like the history classes yall get in america cause holy shit man, having read some of yalls textbooks is like glimpsing an rpg being slowly locked, loaded and launched into an orphanage, just destroying potential future generations ability to exist meaningfully in the world), not in public spaces where its a slap the affected minorities in the face to remind them hey not too long go you were property and a lot of people in this country still think ur so unimportant that a piece of metal in the shape of an asshole or song is more important than making you feel comfortable in the country you happen to live in.

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like or maybe in the case of this week something you don’t like. If you haven’t there’s always next time where I honestly dont know what im gonna do next, I’m toying with a couple ideas of either going back and doing sea shanties or murder ballads, or continuing on to do tin pan alley/rag time/and big band. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Here’s the articles and things I said I would link in the transcript:

Oh Susanna! Sheet Music

Alt-Right Humor and Fascism

Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate

And the Music I used for this week’s episode:

Jump Jim Crow

Oh! Susanna

My Old Kentucky Home

#music #podcast #just a music podcast #race #history #black face #black face minstrelsy #music history

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Episode 6 out today!

We’re talking about Blues music

Transcript under the cut

And boi unless you’ve had that talk with ur kids about systemic racism you might wanna let them sit this one out because we’re gonna be touching on a bunch of terrible racist shit this week Because we’re gonna be talking about the Blues and various different type of blues musics. I’m actually really excited to talk about it too because blues, as you guys will find out in the future is kinda the basis for a lot of other, what one might consider more modern, genres of American popular musics. So this one’s gonna be important for ur earholes and ur brainholes. Just like last time I will be airing a sensitive content warning for some graphic descriptions of violence and I will put the time stamps in the description for y’all for when that starts and ends.

First though, I wanna issue an apology for being away so long, I tend to work on this podcast in my free time, and currently I’ve had none of that what so ever. It just so happened that October worked out this year that it was thanksgiving and my birthday and then a bunch of big projects due then Halloween and now I’m working on my fucking thesis proposal, I’m actually recording this episode at 1:35 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, so needless to say all this in combination with trying to deal with my depression hasn’t been a cake walk but we’re making it work. I will likely run up against a similar time issue during the first couple weeks of December because that’s when all my final papers are due. After that thought I should have smooth sailing for about a month. I wanted to make sure I had an episode out this week because as I think… well everyone… is aware the American election took place this week and understandably people were stressed as shit about that. So I think we could all use a little music right now.

Ok so Like all fuckin things we need to know where blues came from. Now blues is actually a lot older than a lot of people are gonna be expecting, like really damn old. Like pretty much everything in academia (and I mean EVERYTHING, at least in the humanities), the dates are contested, but it seems that the blues, or at least what began as the blues, started in and around the 1860s. For those who didn’t listen to last week’s episode on slave songs, spirituals, and gospel, or just those who don’t know their American history too too well, the 1860s marks a very important time for black people, many of which at that time had been enslaved, because in 1865 the thirteenth amendment was amended into the American constitution. For those who aren’t aware, the thirteenth amendment as stated by the national archives of the United States of America reads as such: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Now this of course was fantastic news of course! And for some people, this might be where you think oppression in the Americas ends for Black people but you would be incredibly wrong! Because this is the period where we see the start of a phenomenon referred to as sharecropping. Sharecropping or crop sharing as it’s known otherwise is considered part of what we historians sometimes refer to as the Jim Crow economy of the American South after the civil war. But what is Jim crow economy, what did it come from, why is it bad, why is sharecropping bad, how does any of this relate to the blues? Well lucky for u lil turnips imma tell ya.

Jim Crow culture is something that I imagine most North Americans will have even the most basic knowledge of but for those that don’t the name Jim Crow as applied to economy, laws, and any other part of American culture during these time periods refers to sets of crazy fucking racist laws written and unwritten that kept black people subjugated under the whims of the government as well as their fellow white countrymen. The term Jim crow itself is reference to a song often featured in the supremely racist minstrel shows of the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s referred to as “Jump Jim Crow” in which a white man in black-face sings in a parody centric dialect about the life of a charicaturishly uneducated back-woodsy Black man named, you fuckin guessed it, Jim Crow. The significance of the Crow being that it was a pejorative term for black individuals which can actually dated back to the early mid 1700s. Now I wanna preface the excerpt of it with the fact that I’m uncomfortable listening to this, I understand if others are too. The thing is that acknowledging these uncomfortable things and knowing about them is necessary in order to understand the type of historical impact that they had. “So laura, you must obviously support statues being raised to commemorate things like slavery and secessionism!” Absolutely not. Where statues and monuments exist to praise the efforts of individuals, the listening to and learning about songs in a teaching context like this very podcast are meant to educate. Statues commemorating culture surrounding one of the worst atrocities to have taken place on American soil should never have been erected in the first place let alone celebrated. One is meant to celebrate while the other is to educate because one is a historical primary source that lets us think critically about the history, the other is a tertiary celebration. The purpose of listening to a clip like this is then to educate and understand a piece of actually history, not to replicate and enjoy. The version of the song that I have is sung without the charicaturish accent but uses the original words but with all that in mind here’s a bit of Jump Jim Crow:

In terms of laws I’m sure just about everyone knows separate drinking fountains and schools but this really permeated pretty much every sphere of life for Black peoples especially those in the south. I say especially those in the south but not exclusively those in the south because racial segregation, although not as supported by law but more socially, also existed in the Northern States as well as in Canada. Anecdotally, my mother grew up in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio, she remembers going into Cleveland when she was a kid when Cleveland was still a very racially segregated city, Black peoples lived in, shopped in, and attended schools in certain areas of the city and white people in other’s. My grandmother who was also raised in the area even remembers Black people having separate lunch counters if any at all in some of the larger department stores in the area.

It might also be handy when I mention the south to actually talk about what the south and particularly the deep south is for y’all outside of America. So when we talk about the south we are talking about a geographically bounded area just not the area that one might think of by looking at a map because where you might be thinking like ah just take the country and cut it in half, and the bottom half is the south that wouldn’t be correct. So, from the United States Census Bureau itself the south we’re talking about is Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Now some who live in the surrounding areas such as Kansas might also consider themselves as being from the “south” somewhat culturally but those states previously listed as the official ones. When we talk about the DEEP SOUTH however, that range closes a little more, and that would mainly just include Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and sometimes Texas and Florida due to their involvement as part of the confederate states of America, meaning states that were on the south side of the civil war.

Also briefly just so we’re clear, again this is for those people who didn’t receive the best education on Slavery and the Civil War in general but to be clear, the civil war was fought over primarily states rights to use and perpetuate slavery. The common narrative you hear a lot in protests by those on the right, who would like to uphold the institutions set out by their forefathers in the creation of the abominable act, is that the civil war was primarily fought over states rights. What they then so often forget to elaborate is that those rights were perceived as the right to govern themselves independently so that they may still be able to employ slave labour in the operation of their economies and also to expand further westward to continue and be able to use slavery out in those areas as well.

The reason that we hear about these Jim Crow laws particularly in the South is because where the Northern states and Canada did have (and still continues to have) some violent racist issues, the Jim Crow south was specifically really bad. And I mean fucking abominable. Though Black people were free from being directly owned, society at large and all it’s trappings found new ways to oppress them. This started with Black Codes which were individual state law codes that dictated where Black peoples could move, for how long they could stay, restricted their rights to vote (or made it extremely difficult to vote via poll taxes, literacy tests, etc), as well as where they could work, and in some cases even if their children could be taken away from them on the basis labour needs. So I really can’t drive home the point enough of how much life sucked for Black peoples under Jim Crow laws and economy in the southern states, to call it any less than abominable would seem to understate it in a major way. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws hadn’t started to be rolled into large southern cities yet so many Black peoples were inclined to move into them because life was actually slightly easier for a short while. White people being offended and upset at this, because “how dare a black person just try to live their lives in my good white pure Christian neighborhood,” then fully supported Jim crow laws being rolled out to remove them from areas where white people would normally interact with them. This included but was not limited to, barring them from public parks entirely, having entirely different theaters at one point and then segregated theaters after a while with separate entrances based on your race, restaurants, bus and train stations, water fountains, restrooms, most building entrances in general, elevators, amusement park ticket windows, public schools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, elderly care homes and even fucking cemeteries. Of course being treated as diseased subhuman parasites is never enough for the racism machine that is the public conscious at this time so there was also a lot of violence both systematic and grassroots that accompanied this era.

And here’s where I’m going to have to issue a sensitive content warning because I’m about to describe some truly heinous shit in a whole second. So by violence, I mean very public and very culturally accepted violence, similar to what we’re seeing more and more of in the states again. As many will know now in the light of the many many many police shootings of unarmed, unthreatening black people in the states, the police traditionally haven’t been on the side of black citizens. This is due to a number of reasons, for one, on the most basic of levels the police serve to protect the interests of those in power, in our case that means the property and lives of middle to upper class (mostly) white Americans. The natural extension of this is that many police forces in the states, especially in Southern states started out as slave catching forces bringing back runaway enslaved people to their owners. So as time progressed and Black peoples became a “free” population this still meant protecting mainly middle to upper class white people from the “threat” of black people. This was enforced in a number of ways, such as arresting black individuals found breaking these rules, framing black people for crimes committed by others and arresting them for population suppression, and turning a blind eye to the grassroots violence perpetrated by non-black citizens, which very often were white citizens. An example of just straight up police brutality can be found in the case of Isaac Woodard JR. who was viciously beaten by police only hours after being honorably discharged from the fucking military on February 12 1946. The bus driver driving Woodard and some of his fellow soldiers called the police after Woodard asked the bus driver if there might be time for him to use the restroom as they approached a rest stop. When the police arrived, the bus driver accused Woodard of drinking in the back of the bus and he was hauled off, dragged into an alley and beaten with nighsticks. That night he was thrown in the town jail, by morning he had been beaten so severely he was left permanently blind in both eyes.

And that grassroots violence is just as nasty, really fucking nasty. The violence could be perpetrated for things as small as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, entering a white neighbourhood, “talking back to” the wrong person. Since black men have always been are still to some degree subject to the stereotype that they are all sex incensed monsters, being left alone in a room with a white woman could be enough to incite violence against them. In the Mississippi delta during the season where share cropping debts were settled up, there was a sharp uptick in violence against and killings of black people. If you were white, because let’s be real here some white people definitely were on the side of their oppressed countrymen, you could be hung on the basis of being an N-word lover, which could range from being found to being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a person of colour, to just being fucking friends with them. The violence was often varied too, where kidnapping and hanging someone either with or without brutalizing them first (also known as a lynching) is the form most commonly associated with Jim Crow era violence less extreme but still horrible harassment could perpetuate in any form. Mississippi had the highest amount of lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581. You might think that is a low number but first, similarily to when we were talking about slavery in the last episode, 1 lynching is too fucking many, and secondly these are only the ones that were officially recorded. Since lynchings didn’t always happen in broad daylight and since law enforcement really didn’t care about Black individuals, there were almost certainly more that happened that just never were recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. 79% of lynching happened in the South. So as I said before though, lynching was not the only form though, beatings were also entirely all too common forms of violence perpetrated against blackf people to make them scared and thus more compliant. A good example of this is the case of Emmet Till a 14 year old boy who made the mistake of playfully flirting with a white woman, who was beaten nearly to death, had one of his eyes gouged out, was then shot in the head, and tied to some cotton mill equipment before his body was thrown in a river. This wasn’t even that long ago, the beating happened on the 28th of August 1955.

THE next parts are also gonna be not great but there wont be anymore descriptions of graphic violence, so I’m calling an end to the sensitive content warning. So the then how does sharecropping play into all this and what does it have to do with the blues (we’re getting there babes I promise.) So as I explained previously, sharecropping was a part of the Jim Crow economic era. It was part of the era of reconstruction meaning the period of rebuilding after the civil war. How it worked was that let’s say for a second, come with me into the theater of the mind for a second, take a seat, close your eyes, take a deep breath, Ok so lets imagine for a second you’re a farmer in the south, the civil war has kinda left you in a spot, if you’re black, you’re starting off without an awful lot, you don’t have any generational wealth you don’t have property likely aside from maybe a relatively small plot of land (but this was uncommon,) you probably didn’t have much if any equipment because that would have been way too expensive, and the land you may have had may have been of shitty quality. So what could you do to earn yourself a living?! Well you would go to a landowner, and ask him rather kindly if you might be able to work the land they lived on in exchange for some of the profits of the crops that you would produce. The landowner would provide you with the tools, seed, housing, land, store credits at local shops in order to subsist offa for food and other supplies and sometimes a mule in order to help you work the land seeing as motorized machinery was still few and far between in the united states at this point. The issue of this system is that how much you receive for you labour, the cut that you actually get from selling crops, that you grew with ur own backbreaking labour, is more or less decided by your landowner. And as I mentioned last episode, those who’ve ever had to rely on the benevolence of a boss for any period of time knows that this shit ain’t gonna cut it. So often you would end up underpaid, underfed, and in a debt hole that lasted as long as you did. If it sounds like legal slavery that’s kinda because it was. You would basically remain in indentured servitude to the landowner for as long as you were a part of this system. Like don’t get me wrong there were people who managed to not be a part of it but it was an incredibly largescale problem.

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a black phenomenon either, white tenants of sharecroppers existed and in incredibly large numbers as well. By 1900, 36 percent of all white farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by comparison, 85 percent of all black farmers in 1900 did not own the land they farmed). This all sucks for various reasons but like partially because there was this whole other plan proposed that after the war, all the land that had been seized from slave owners would have been divvied up to the newly freed slave populations. It was colloquially known as the 40 acres and a mule plan but yeah unfortunately never happened cause fuckin president Andrew Johnson was like ”WELL AKSHULLY SWEATY I THINK THE LAND SHOULD GO BACK TO SLAVE OWNERS BECAUSE UHHHHHH” AND THEN IT DID AND THEN WE ENDED UP WITH SHARE CROPPING. But anyway that’s sharecropping. And of course I could go onto describe how all of this still affects black people in the united states and how the effects of systematic racism are still being felt generations later but… we’re gonna save that for a different episode. FOR NOW THOUGH, WHY IS THIS ALL IMPORTANT, WHY DID I TAKE ROUGHLY 3000 WORDS TO TELL YOU GUYS ABOUT THE HORRORS OF RECONSTRUCTION ERA SOUTH!? Well because we’re talking about the blues, and what does it mean when you have the blues, it means that you’re sad as hell, given all that I’ve just described to you is it no wonder that the blues emerged as the soundtrack to the lives these people lived?

So then what is blues? Well as I mentioned last time, blues sort of develops out of the field holler/spiritual tradition. A fair amount of field hollers, a type of work song that enslaved peoples would sing in fields while they were doing their work, were about regular ass things for regular ass peoples; this dude stole my girl, im gonna find me a girl to love, life sucks and im gonna sing about it, life doesn’t suck so much but I’m still gonna sing about it. Blues then tended to explore more themes related to the sadder points of those stories but in similar ways and styles. So where did blues come from specifically, what makes it a different genre than a field holler or a spiritual, and that’s a great question so let’s get in it.

Let’s say for a second you went through a real shitty period in your life, you significant other named steve dumped you, your pet armadillo, also named steve, died, ur mom (also coincidentally named steve) has taken away your showering privileges, you’ve forgotten how to speak ur native language and to top it all off you just burnt your gotdamn mac and cheese. You spiral into a deep situational depression that lasts quite a little while. During this time you listen to one album on repeat just over and over again, you know it all inside out and backwards and diagonal, you know every instrumental part by heart, you’ve got the lyrics tattooed on your ass, the whole 9 yards. And then you start working your way out of it, slowly but steadily the days start getting brighter, you move out of your abusive mother’s house, you find a new partner or get comfortable being single, you appropriately morn the loss of ur pet armadillo, hell you even learn to make a better mac and cheese, things aren’t all fixed, and life isn’t breezes and cakes but it is ever so slightly easier than it was before, at least you have ur freedom right? BUT NOW, everytime you listen to one of those songs from that album it mentally brings you back to the way things used to be and it’s not great. Well that’s kinda what happened with blues music but, ya know, infinitely worse. Essentially, black people wanted a new sound to accompany this new life and so they fuckin made it and it’s great.

The similarities of blues to field hollers and spirituals are relatively easy enough to hear if you know where to look which isn’t really surprising given that blues is the evolution of it. For example the basic structure stayed pretty similar, simple rhyming schemes, simple harmonies, melismatic vocal structures in places, and many times the lyrics were often very similar to those forms before them. But it goes even further than that! Most of the early blues melodies were directly derived from their spiritual predecessors. So for some comparison here’s some songs, first one is gonna be a field holler, next one is gonna be a spiritual, and then the last one is gonna be a blues song mmk? And here we go:

AND ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT WAIT, JUST CAUSE IM FUCKIN, OOO BABE, OK, SO WHEN I WAS RESARCHING THIS FUCKING EPISODE I WAS TRYING TO FIND GOOD AUDIO CLIPS TO USE, AND LEMME TELL YA MAN YOU WOULDN’T THINK SPIRITUALS WOULD FUCKIN EXIST OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY OF FUCKING CONGRESS CAUSE APPARENTLY THEY HAVE A GODDAMN STRANGLEHOLD ON ALL BLACK SPIRITUALS EVER RECORDED BY THE LOMAX’S. The thing is is that fuckin copyright at least in the states is supposed to run out 75 years after the death of the recorder or fucking owner of the rights, which it certainly has been for Alan Fucking Lomax BUT NOOOOOOO, I HAVE TO NEARLY PURCHASE A GODDAMN CD IN ORDER TO GET YOU GUYS A FUCKING ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF MUSIC THAT CAME OUT LIKE 100 YEARS AGO. To be clear I refuse to buy anything for this podcast other than my recording equipment, but man researching this podcast is big joab hours, god just keeps fuckin testing me. Just slap my ass and call me a pickle, ok, rage is over, time for songs:

These freed populations wanted a new music, a music that fit their current situation better, that didn’t rely on the imagery of the past in order to get across the situation they were in. And so that’s what blues did, it was a new sound for a new era and even more importantly it was a sound entirely their own. Whereas field hollers and various other types of music sung by enslaved peoples were by definition their invention, many of them still borrowed heavily from the dominant cultures of their oppressors, and so in creating blues what they had was something they could 100% call their own. Even if they didn’t own the land they worked/lived on, and had few rights to the crops they sewed and reaped, they did have blues, and that’s something beautiful.

But when does it become a thing, like when does blues start becoming a thing? And that’s a hard part. Like any cultural phenomenon it’s hard to fuckin say, there’s some accounts that say 1865 like the fuckin second the civil war ended, then there’s some that attribute it to the 1920s. Most of the sources I’ve looked at put it around 1890-1910. It originates unsurprisingly in and around the Mississippi Delta Region and East Texas where you have a lot of farmland and thus a lot of poor folks just trying to scratch out a living for themselves. AND SO THE BLUES BECOMES A THING AND IT’S COOL AS HELL AND IT DEVELOPS IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS! And I’m sorry that I’m not gonna get enough time to do every subgenre of blues, but we’re gonna look at 3 of the big regions or subgenres of blues.

So blues first of all have all those things that I mentioned before simple rhyming schemes, like ABAB or ABCC, simple harmonies, Call and response is definitely a thing that still happens in this specific style, but then they also have blues notes, for those who missed the last episode, blues notes are notes within a standard scale that are “bent” (or at least that’s how they were initially described.) These notes are lowered by a semitone making the overall colour of the sound a bit darker and more… emotional, sad? Like we ascribe emotions to the way things sound and that might be western centric, I’m actually gonna have to look into it later, but for western listeners we’re gonna read the emotion in these tones as sad. So the notes specifically are lowered the 3rd 5th and 7th degrees of a regular scale. I’m going to play you guys an example of blues scale in just a second but the guy playing the example is using the pentatonic version of the scale meaning only 5 notes of it.

In terms of instruments the most standard you’re going to find in any blues band is at it’s most basic one guitar and a person singing. You could even make an argument that just singing could be blues if you’re using a blues scale but usually there will at least a guitar and one dude singing. The rest of the intstruments are gonna depend on the region you’re playing from. So remember the moaning thing I mentioned last time? The moaning style vocals? Not pioneered by but made popular by a man that went by Blind Lemon Jefferson? This one:

Well he falls under the Mississippi/Texas type of blues which we’re gonna call texasippi. It differs from other types of blues in the united states for a couple reasons but one of them is that moaning style of vocals, in other parts of the country the style where the blues vocals function similarly to other styles of singing, clean and clear, no moaning. Another cool thing that texasippi blues also does is they incorporate a lot of metal into the way they play their guitars. Not like the heavy screamy kind that’s come to be MY fave, but like actual metal objects! How they incorporate this is through the strings of the guitar specifically causing a little extra twangy buzzing when the strings resonate but also a sort of pleasing screech when they’re shifted up and down the strings like this:

but what did they use to make this sound? Well just about anything small enough and metal you could thread between the strings or held against them while playing, this coulda been bottle caps, pocket knives, silverware. Remember, we’re still talking about a type of music that was very much being played by people without very much or no money, so you’re using what you can to make it. Nowadays you can purchase wee cylanders made of glass or metal that go over ur fingers that you press up against the strings to create the desired effect. In addition to this, something that’s pretty regional to the blues in this area is the harmonica. I’m assuming most of you know about the harmonica and have heard it but for those who don’t, the harmonica is a squanky reed instrument that you play with your mouth. I would tell you the physics of how it works but fuck if I ever studied physics. Basically when you blow in it, it vibrates the reed and makes a note depending on the holes you blow into, and when you suck air in it, it makes other sounds! They can be very very large or very very small thus changing how low or high the sound is respectively. They were invented somewhere in the early 1800s in Germany we think and they sound something like this:

How were harmonicas introduced into blues music? Well turns out, much like some of the other instruments we’ll see in a hot minute, harmonicas were often carried by soldiers during the American civil war, even President Abraham Lincoln himself was reported to have carried a harmonica with him in his coat pocket and would play it as he “found it comforting.” Thing about the harmonica was that it was relatively easy to make and it was extremely cheap to buy in comparison to other instruments at the time, even better was that you really didn’t need lessons to figure out how to make it sound good. So during the reconstruction period, as industrialization rapidized in America, and harmonicas became more available, and previous soldiers reminisced about the songs they heard played in their camps during the civil war, more and more people started picking up the harmonica. And so poor southern americans were able to incorporate the instrument into this new music they were developing like this:

Also I would big time recommend just watching the video for that song, dudes just sittin there legit just suckin on his harmonica at some point, that’s what I fucking call dedication bud. The cool part about blues from the texasippi way is then during the great migration, the phenomenon that I mentioned last episode, where black southerners just start heading northwards, is that the blues travels with them too. Just briefly on the great migration, remember all the shitty stuff I discussed earlier, the lack of work, sharecropping, lynching and what have you? That’s why the great migration takes place. Basically black people all around the south are going jesus fucking christ shit sucks let’s get out of here and find somewhere better to be, and so they do, and about 6 MILLION Black Americans head north to where it’s… better. I mean there’s definitely still racism and all sorts of jim crow era laws and practices up north but it is still some degree better than the south. So this great migration is how texasippi blues music then comes to be transplanted into Chicago, and turns into Chicago blues.

“BUT LAURA” YOU SAY, UR HANDS CLENCHED INTO FISTS AT UR SIDES, “IF TEXASIPPI BLUES IS THE SAME AS THE ONES IN CHICAGO THEN HOW’RE THEY DIFFERENT!?” YOU CRY WITH TEARS FORMING AT THE SIDES OF YOUR EYES. And you’re right b, they are the same so why are they different? Well ya gotta remember that time does funny stuff to music similarly as it does with language and just abut anything else, things change over time, AND, things get invented over time. And time as we’re moving into now is like 30s and 40s era. So in the case of Chicago blues we get the additives of the piano, which has been around for some time but people are now just being able to put into their blues music due to becoming more financially stable, BUT WE ALSO GET THE COOL NEW INVENTION OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR. Now there is some speculation over the invention of most things throughout history, for example, y’all might be familiar of Thomas Edison not actually inventing the lightbulb and being a bit of a dick about things, so when I talk about inventors of things, unless otherwise stated, please take it with some amount of a grain of salt. So Paul H Tutmarc may have been the first person to invent the first electric guitar when he managed, by some feat of science, which I will not explain because science is for wizards and freeks and while I am both of those I am not at all qualified or able to explain it, but essentially he managed to electrify a Hawaiian guitar! He supposedly invented this sometime in the 1930s. Here’s an example of what that sounds like:

Very Spongebobby… spongeboblike…spongebobesque… so EITHERWAY the electric guitar, as well as the electric bass is invented and so those are then infused into Chicago blues. In some cases you will also get the addition of drums and saxophone, but it is the electrified elements as well as the piano that really characterize the biggest difference between Chicago blues and texasippi blues. Overall, it sounds like this:

Something you also probably heard in there was just the level of intensity, the volume or what I’m gonna call the perceived volume, is louder. Whereas the songs of the texasippi blues is a little softer, quieter, very much just dude and his guitar volume, Chicago blues is gonna sound a little louder and a little more intense at most times. This is due to blues clubs becoming a big thing during this time period. And why shouldn’t they? In diaspora communities, that is communities consisting of people from a similar ethnic or national background, you often get patterns of similar settlement. So in our case, when Black Americans started moving northward, they would often settle in similar communities or move into similar communities based off of their ethnicity. Afterall you wanna be able to live in places where people understand your experience. There’s also the element of racism of course, homeowners associations making it hard for Black folk to move into white neighbourhoods and of course school segregation which didn’t end until the 1954. So while in some cases there was def an element of wanting to feel safe in a community of people who understand you, there’s also a big ol element of racism as there pretty much always is when we talk about anything. Seriously ur gonna be surprised at how far reaching and fucking just convoluted and stupid racism is, especially when we get into like Europeans being racist against other Europeans. So since we have all these people moving up north they need to be entertained, we all need entertainment after-all, but lo and behold! They can’t go to white clubs in a lot of cases because fucking racism (unless you are a performer in which case sometimes you can go to white clubs but only to perform, I’m gonna get more into that when we have our jazz episode.) So we start having blues clubs and because they’re a club and there’s drinking and talking and what not, often these songs tend to be a little louder or more rowdy to compensate.

On the other end of the country we also have my favorite flavour of blues which is the New Orleans blues. I’m definitely 100 percent biased when I say this but why does everything in New Orleans just sound better? If I had to guess it’s the multiculturalism and thus people bringing in tonnes of different ideas, but it’s hard to quantify awesome so we’re just gonna leave it there. BUT YEAH so we have texasippi blues that travels down the river (cause things rarely travel up a river) and hits New Orleans. But again, if we’re talking about the same style of blues then what makes it different? A lot hunny, a lot. So as we talked about in our last episode there’s a lot of different cultural elements at play in Louisianna culminating in some cool ass musical styles and changes. It’s also absolutely something we’re gonna talk about when we go back and do the Jazz episode cause lord knows New Orleans jazz is just as fuckin hot and dangerous (like serious lemme just go fuckin hangout with you guys down there, that’s all I want, musical tour of louisianna) I will say though that the line between jazz and blues does tend to get a little blurry though when we’re talking about New Orleans Blues so just hold onto ur femurs there yall and strap in.

So New orleans blues is different from other types of blues again by incorporating horns and piano into the music, most notably this will be the trumpet cause trumpets after the civil war just kinda leached out into the general public and since people got used to them in that capacity they became sorta naturally engrained into the soundscape of the music of the area. “but laura doesn’t Chicago also have horns?!” and ur right man they absolutely do, but there’s even more. So where texasippi blues relies on a rather standard rhythms in most cases, the New Orleans Blues scene takes from some of that different heritage and combines Caribbean inspired or based rhythms. We can find a good example of the inspiration for those rhythms in another genre of music that was popular at the same time, Calypso. Calypso is a genre of music which we will look more in depth in the future but just really generally for now it is popular in the Caribbean as well as certain parts, South America (particularly Venezuela), Mexico, and of course New Orleans during this time. It is usually up-beat and relies a lot on emphasizing the offbeat, and these are all things that we hear being incorporated into New Orleans blues during the time. So when we hear blues from New Orleans, one of the things we can usually use to tell the difference is merely just the upbeat tempo of things and slightly more rhythmically complex manner in which it existed. In fact Blues in New Orleans was so fuckin different it actually started what we know of as R&B or rhythm and blues which sounds like this:

Just a quick detour, I fuckin love like, blues and jazz names. The Man I played just there was Roy Brown but man the names really take off on occasion my personal favorite being Guitar Slim Jr., but we also got Fats domino (sometimes just known as fats, or the fat man), we god fuckin Professor Longhair, we got a dude who just goes by the name sugar boy, like… guys…. What happened to nicknames like that, I wanna walk around and when people see me comin at a distance they just point and go oh lord here comes swamp papa, like, that’s livin man, I dunno what to tell you but that’s absolutely livin.

Anyhow, what ur gonna notice, or maybe you didn’t notice but I’m gonna tell you and you can go back and notice is that blues, (along with jazz but we’re gonna get to that) as it goes on and evolves starts sounding a lot like early rock and roll music, and that doesn’t happen by coincidence. Also you’re probably noticing that blues at least as far as it goes for the Chicago variety and the New Orleans variety we talked about, sound a hell of a lot like Jazz and again we’ll get more into the specifics later. The thing is when we talk about invention, whether it be music, or physical things, or even sometimes schools of thought and ideas is that things get borrowed and changed and moulded into something else by other people. Hell the phenomenon of something being invented in multiple different places at the same time is so common enough that it even has a name, it’s called multiple discovery. Generally people in North America prefer a more black and white “this thing was developed at this time and this place by this person because definitive reason definitive reason definitive reason.” Because we have this weird sense of individuality and crediting individuals with discovery as opposed to a group or the society itself as maybe it should more rightly be. This means that in our endless want to categorize and systematize and ize all these things, particularly things like music, it gets sorta difficult to discern what is what and why and how. Of course we’ve already seen this with spirituals and gospel, and now we’ve seen it with blues/jazz/and early rock.

I just wanted to bring it up sooner than later because, especially as we move into more modern north American Genres, and honestly genres from various other places throughout the world. I wanted to bring this up now before we go any further in this podcast because as we get into more modern genres and hell maybe even with this episode I imagine I might get some rather angry mail from elitests who will smash their foreheads on the keyboard in absolute blind fuckin dismay and rage accusing me of putting the wrong genre lables on the wrong songs. The thing is though, like most art, or definitions in life, things are salient. Just because music fits one genre doesn’t mean it only fits within that genre, in the case of the Rhythm and Blues song by Roy brown that I played earlier, while it is definitely Rhythm and Blues there’s also gonna be other people who strongly consider that Rock and Roll. And that’s alright! Music doesn’t have to rigidly fit into one genre, we give things genre titles or group things into genres to help more easily understand their histories and identify other things that sound like it! All music is going to have variation, and in the case of rhythm and blues, a style of blues that very much informs early rock, you’re going to have cross roads like that. So instead of getting defensive, maybe take some time to think about how cool it is that music exists on an ever evolving spectrum.

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next time where we’re actually gonna do something a little different. Next time we’re gonna look at the Minstrel show which I’m subtitling right now, “why we don’t wear black face.” In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

List of Music: Jump Jim Crow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIXWRG09Qk

Belton Sutherland's field holler (1978) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPJwt14d5E&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=2

Wash Dennis & Charlie Sims - Lead Me To The Rock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmPqmLovNms&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=4

Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEw0ek2BhJE

Blind Lemon Jefferson – Black Snake Moan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU&feature=emb_logo

Red River Valley -Traditional - Harmonica solo by Kyong H. Lee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKM4bn4kS-0

Sonny Boy Williamson - Keep it to Yourself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtRxJDb3vlw

Paul Tutmarc performs - My Tane - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUOms5y6cmI

Buddy Guy - First Time I Met The Blues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1jruvTBleY

Roy Brown - Mighty Mighty Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhp8jMykAVg

Technical Clip I used: PianoPig (on youtube) - Minor Pentatonic vs Blues Scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

#music #music podcast #podcast #just a music podcast #music history

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Lmao so I lied last time, I’m in the middle of writing my thesis proposal and need a little extra time for the next episode, i also had to contend with canadian thanksgiving as well as my birthday so i just haven’t had time for proper good research recently outside of school. I’m sorry it’s been so long y’all, but it’ll still likely be another week. BUT WHEN IT FINALLY HAPPENS I PROMISE IT’LL BE SOMETHING GOOD.

#JUST A MUSIC PODCAST #music #music podcast #podcast

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Now, before I start this weeks episode I wanna make a disclaimer. As you ma have heard last week, this week I want to cover slave and gospel music. And you might think to yourself, well Laura you’ve described yourself as whiter than sour cream on rice, and that’s why you didn’t want to do an episode on North American Native Musics! What’s so different about this topic!? And y’all ur right, ur right as hell, I’m still whiter than sour cream on rice, potentially even moreso now as it’s getting darker earlier and cooler outside any bit of summer sun I had is just *slurp* gone babe. The difference though is that I’m actually able to find information about slave and gospel musics and not just that but there are a lot of sources on these musics written by people for whom these musics are part of their heritage! So where with native musics I got like a lot of sources written by white people for the primary curiosity of white people, I’m actually going to be able to use sources by black people for everyone which will be able to provide us a more accurate less white washed version of how this music came to be which btw. I would also like to issue a sensitive content warning, we’re going to eb talking about some hard topics this week, themes include sexual and non sexual violence as well as just all manner of unpleasantness in general, I will issue the warning again before I actually go into any sensitive descriptions.

Also just in general my allergies have decided to kick my ass today, ive been sneezing like I’ve been runnin full speed through a perfume department just for shits and gigs and my nose is leakier than colander so forgive me if my vocal quality dips to lows not yet experienced yet by human beings!

SLAVERY when we talk about slave musics we have to talk about slavery, and this might make some of y’all uncomfortable as well it should. Slavery, as I’m gonna talk about in a whole minute, is one of the most abominable power structures we can think of, it’s something that there’s really no comparison for because it’s very much hell on earth. And for some of us listening, you may have family that directly participated in the slave trade or in the practice of owning slaves. Personally I’m not all too sure about my family’s involvement but knowing that I would have had white family members in the American south during the appropriate time, and that some of them did fight for the south during the civil war, there is a distinct possibility that they participated. And is it uncomfortable? Absolutely! Does it mean that I get my back up about it? Absolutely not! I know what they did is wrong, I take no pride in it, and I personally try and educate myself in the struggles that black people still face and try to help in any way that I can whether it be something like this in telling people about things like systemic racism or more physical things like helping to participate in demonstrations. But even if they didn’t there is still an almost certainty that they supported it and benefitted from the institution of slavery.

Benefitting from slavery and the systems that it created is still something that as a white person listening to this (and as the white person writing this) we still benefit from which is another uncomfortable fact for many of us. Even those of us who like to think of ourselves of paragons of equality and “don’t see race” still benefit from it. That is not to say that each of us get a payout or something from some fuckin white person allowance or something every month with an attachment that says like thanks for being whiter than a snowstorm on the moon. What I mean is that we, as white people, will have more opportunity and face less prejudice in life, especially in north America, as we proceed with our lives. This means that we aren’t going to be passed over for a job because, we won’t be turned down for a scholarship, we won’t be unfairly targeted by law enforcement, we won’t have our homes devalued because we live in them, on the basis of our skin colour. For sure a lot of us may still struggle despite having this advantage, I come from a family that didn’t have and still doesn’t have money, it can seem like a slap in the face to say we have any privilege at all, but that doesn’t make it any less true. In fact, for many of those things, if you are white, you actually stand at some advantage because of the stereotypes that still exist about white people. It is for these reasons that things like affirmative action and the black lives matter movement exist, because black people, and really people of colour in general, still are treated as lesser in North America and many other parts of the world.

The thing is I don’t know how to tell you to deal with the uncomfortableness that all of this might inspire. It’s a hard thing to reckon. Especially if you’re still struggling economically, socially, etc, but I can certainly tell you the answer is not to get ur back up about it and blame the oppressed because they’re struggling too. Best I can tell you is that we’re stronger together than apart, we live in societies for a reason, it is easier to live amongst people with the help of others than it is without, and if we make that society better for others we’re also making it better for ourselves. So maybe try there, how can you better help or understand others. Because even understanding can make a world of difference.

So slavery and slave music, most of us have some idea of what slavery is, for any listeners in the states it might be a real shit understanding of it depending on the state that you primarily were educated in growing up, so for you and for people who maybe grew up in places in the word where they didn’t get a full education on it, we’re gonna cover some basic history. So slavery is a form of forced labour that has existed for thousands of years. What I’m talking about with slave music in this episode, however, is about the music that was created by African Americans in the southern United states. We’re going to start in the year 1619 (a full 157 years before the establishment of America as a country proper) with the arrival of 20 some odd African captives who arrived in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Though we don’t know much of the particulars of their situation once they landed, we do know that they were very likely put to work in tobacco fields that had recently been established there. From 1670-1715 however the main transport of slaves was not in fact African peoples but native americans. Anywhere between 24k-51k from what we now call the Carolinas ALONE (north and south) were stolen and shipped to the newly established colonies of what we refer to as New England.

The importation of African people’s as slaves took off the late 1600s and continued to grow until roughly 1775 when the trade started to wane, spiking once again from around 1801-1825 before trailing off . Now the numbers I’m going to list in this section are going to seem particularly small when you hear them since we have all grown up in a world where knowing that 7 some odd BILLION of us exist world wide. Thing is, well… first off, no amount of people should be enslaved, ever, so any number above 0 is too many but also we have to look at these numbers in context of the populations living around them as well. We also have to keep in mind that even if slave traders were bringing in less people into the country, people who had been brought over started having kids and of course as birth control wasn’t a thing back then other than… ya know, getting kicked in the dick real hard or something… that this continued to happen. Eventually it became an official law in 1662 that all children born into bondage (on the basis of the mother’s position) were to also be used for slave labour as they grew. So when I say that 144 and a half thousand African people’s were brought in as slaves into America from 1751 to 1775 we have to remember that the population of the united states was only 2.5 million in 1776. And again, with birth rates being what they were and with slavery being generation, these populations ballooned so much so in fact that in a census given in 1790 it showed that south Carolina roughly 43% of the entire population of South Carolina were enslaved African peoples. 43 fucking percent. This isn’t to even mention the total number of enslaved African peoples brought to the Americas during this time which ranged anywhere from 6-8 MILLION FUCKING PEOPLE. I’m sorry this shit gets me so heated it’s just infuriating.

So what did enslaved peoples do then? Farming was the largest of the occupations that enslaved people did, from hoeing to watering to sewing to harvesting, enslaved peoples had a hand in all of it. Anywhere from vast plantations to smaller farms could have employed enslaved people in the production of goods. Specifically Tobacco, Cotton, Rice, and Indigo were of particular interest as cash crops but enslaved peoples could literally be employed in the farming of any crops such as yams, peanuts, okra, watermelon and the like. Secondarily, many enslaved peoples were employed as service workers inside the plantation owner’s house as domestic servants, cooks, maids, butlers, et all. Inside cities enslaved life was slightly different because… well… aint no farms in a city, man. But here slaves could be forced to work any number of jobs from smithing to dock workers to servers in restaurants. What we’re lookin at is what my Ma would call dog work, hard slogging jobs that no one actually WANTS to do but someone HAS to do them, and so the economy of the Americas used people who most literally could not say no, they used enslaved peoples.

SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING BEGINS

So forced work already sucks but we’re stuck in capitalist nightmare hell where you have to work or starve, my old man works a 70 hour work week on a factory floor. How is slavery any different from a modern work environment. And here’s where I’m gonna issue some that sensitive content warning again because why was slavery so bad has some pretty unfortunate answers. So enslavement sucks for a number for reasons, first there’s the obvious being forced from your home to a foreign land in despicable conditions to be worked to death by people who don’t care about you and knowing that you will very likely never be free of it and never return to your home. But then there’s the particulars of treatment, for starters the journey over was not comfortable, slaves were carted over to north America on cramped ships, often shackled to the walls with rough iron manacles that left their limbs raw and bleeding and infected. If you didn’t succumb to disease or any of the other mortal pitfalls of the journey you would then be brought to market and sold to the highest bidder having your name and heritage stripped from you in any way possible. You would be torn from your family, parents from children and couples form one another, just on the basis of whether or not someone wanted to purchase just you, or you and others in your family. From there your life kinda depended on how benevolent your owners were. And as anyone who has ever had to rely on the benevolence of their boss knows that aint a situation you wanna be in. For many this meant working for people who would beat them severely for small transgressions, the most familiar being a whip with barbed ends or knots tied into the ends of heavy rope so as to cut the skin leaving scars that you can definitely find pictures of online.

Since enslaved people were not widely considered human at the time by many people, treatment could be essentially whatever it was that the owner wanted to do with them. This includes also sexual activities. It was not uncommon for slave owners to rape their female enslaved peoples resulting in a lot of children that occupied a weird place in the society they grew up in. These women were often referred to as fancy ladies and were more often lighter skinned enslaved women and children. And When I say children I mean it, one particular record had a girl of 13 being bought by her master to be used as a sexual outlet by her oppressor because the depths of racism and depravity knows know bounds! Eventually entire brothels would be set up in some places by oppressors who would earn all the profits from the forced sexual labour their enslaved female workers provided. 3rd president of the united states, Thomas Jefferson, actually was specifically known to have sexually abused one of the enslaved women under his ownership at the time a lady by the name of Sally Hemings. His great great great great great great grandson Shannon LaNier has created art about the situation which I would highly recommend looking up.

great, aside from working dawn till dusk doing backbreaking farmwork among their other jobs, slaves weren’t really paid, they were given meager food often whatever their owners themselves wouldn’t eat, scraps and hard to consume vegetables. Meager resources in order to live because enslaved people really didn’t have property to themselves, the houses they lived in were owned by THEIR oppressors. They had no right to healthcare, education, or religious instruction they were forced to abandon much of their culture for a new culture, forced to take on English or French names depending on who their oppressors were and forced to learn new languages imposed on them by their owners. The point is there are horror stories, there are stories upon stories I could tell you from individual tales of children being ripped away from their parents and sold to different plantations, to slaves being shot and killed for things like standing up to their overseer over issues of abuse, to any number of violent and non violent oppression but really it all amounts to the same thing. Slavery is one of the worst things to have happened in the Americas.

SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING FINISHED

Of course the emancipation proclamation was signed in 1862 in which Abraham Lincoln basically was like “yo slavery is bad, all people are people get over it”, but obviously aggression and systematic oppression towards black Americans didn’t stop there. As the share cropping era really birthed the blues though I’ll be covering it more during the blues episode.

In the wake of all this, music was something enslaved peoples could actually do, and were actually encouraged to do. So what are we talking about when we talk about slave musics? Well we’re actually talking about a couple different genres most specifically we’re talking field hollers, spirituals, and gospel. Now this is gonna get a little pithy to explain mainly because all of these musics are so deeply connected to one another. For example field hollers in many cases were made into spirituals so a lot of them have the same name words and or melody, and technically all gospels are technically spirituals by nature of their subject but we’re gonna get into it and hopefully WITH SOME LUCK, y’all will know more about it coming out of this than you will going into it.

We’re gonna start with the field holler which probably doesn’t sound like what you think it’s gonna sound like. Now I dunno how many people had parents growing up who would get mad at you when you were being too loud but I imagine it’s a pretty universal experience. What might not be a universal experience was the reprimand “Stop Hollering, you’re so loud!” Well it might come as a surprise to those who did hear it that that’s not at all the type of hollerin we’re gonna be talking about, because aside from the volume similarity, a field holler or field call was much different. Field hollers were a type of work song. Generally speaking a work song is pretty much what it sounds like they’re songs that are sung or played when working. I actually originally thought of putting sea shanties and field hollers in an episode together but decided against it as the music of enslavement properly deserved it’s own episode out of respect. In the book Looking Up At Down, The Emergence of Blues Culture William Barlow describes these songs:

“Work songs were generally encouraged by the slave owners, who saw them as means of increasing the slaves’ work output and maintaining their morale. For the slaves, however, the nature of their work was punishment, not self-fulfillment. As Frederick Douglass explained, their use of work songs was linked to their resignation or resistance to forced labor:

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave is not liked by masters or overseers. . . .This may account for the almost constant singing heard in the southern states. . . .I have often been utterly astonished, since I came north, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slaves represent the sorrows of his life; and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least such is my experience.

The composing of work songs, like most African-American folk music, was done spontaneously and collectively; it usually expressed an immediate concern or referred to an event in the lives of the slaves.”

Field hollers were, specifically, songs sung over fields sometimes by one person but often by multiple people. They could be about all sorts of things but often revolved around folk tales, work, some were codes for escape, and of course religion. “But Laura you told me earlier that enslaved peoples had no right to religion, now you’re saying they were religious? You dirty filthy lying lier who lies!”. And you’re right I did the thing is, is that no one was under any obligation to provide church services or teach any religion to enslaved peoples, however, their owners usually did anyway. Why? Well we’re gonna get to that in a hot minute but before I do let’s get into more of what a field holler or field call sounds like.

So what do they sound like then? Well first off they were usually pretty slow, again youre doing this while you work you can’t necessarily be jumpin all over the place and doing crazy fuckin vocal acrobatics because in reality you’re out there hoing or harvesting, and farming is hard heavy work, especially given the hours at which enslaved peoples were expected to work. Like don’t get me wrong they could be slowed down or sped up depending on the task at hand, but for the most part they would be steady and evenly paced. So they were usually slow and kinda followed a rhythm at which one would work. Since field work was done in… well… fields… with ones…. Hands, instruments weren’t really a thing in the music strictly performed in the field but in their homes an enslaved person might had makeshift instruments. Like I described last time when we were talking about other North American folk musics (because yes field hollers/call, and spirituals can also fall under the category of north American folk musics) we’re talking about music that enslaved people could make with the limited resources that were available to them, in order to make the music they wanted to hear which in the field was nothing. So it was pretty much all vocal when one was in the field. The vocal style was something that in music we call melismatic. For those who aren’t familiar with musical terms a melisma is when a group of notes is sung to one syllable of text often in quick succession. Now unfortunately I’ve been having a hard time finding field hollers specifically recorded but I do have an excellent example of melisma from an incredibly talented black performer lined up for you so let’s take a listen for a second. You’re gonna wanna listen to specifically how he sings “well” in the very beginning, as well as the words “need” and “indeed” during the chorus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnI_LuCJ4Ek

So those are melismas! Field calls also have what was referred to was a rip-saw tooth melody profile, that is a steep rise followed by a gentle sloping down of the tune and then another sudden rise then a gentle sloping down through the whole song. It’s so named for the teeth on a rip saw which do the same thing. The cool part about this vocal style is that scholars still seem to be out on where it entirely came from there’s some theories that it could have been just a regional thing established during that time with enslaved people specifically, but then there’s also theories that it comes from a line of griot singers from west Africa stemming from an originally Islamic heritage tradition which to me would make sense because as y’all will here when we get to musics of the middle east and particularly Islamic and Persian musics, they do melisma on a whole nother level and it’s fucking incredible but BACK TO THE MATTER AT HAND.

Field Hollers also have something that we discussed last week, call and response. So for those who don’t remember, call and response is a kind of musical style where the lead singer or head singer will sing a word or phrase and those around them will respond in kind, either repeating that same word or passage or vocalizing in response. Now what I didn’t tell yall last week is that call and response as it relates to the traditions of enslaved peoples come strictly from African musical forms. It’s found in mainly sub Saharan African traditional musics, in ritual and festival musics and it’s something that the diaspora was able to keep as part of their tradition. And although I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of the sub Saharan African countries or ethnic groups that have call and response as part of their musical tradition I did manage to find one frommm Tlokweng, Botswana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=yeHzZyy_zCI&feature=emb_logo

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/music-in-global-america/musical-traditions-of-sub-saharan-africa

So what does a field holler sound like when we consider all of the parts of this put together? Well unfortunately again, since we’re looking at music that is so dang old and of course written by an oppressed racial minority, it’s hard to find musical examples from the time to actually show you guys. I will say that the Lomax’s a family of early ethnomusicologists did do a fair sampling of them which you can find at the library of congress that I will link but given their form I was unable to download them and therefor couldn’t stick em in the podcast THAT BEING SAID! I did find a really good field holler that was recorded at the Mississippi state penitentiary in 1947:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjv0MYIFYsg

So back to the religious aspect. Religion was mainly heaped on enslaved populations for 2 reasons, for 1 there was always this narrative of like these beings are savage we need to give them religion to make them more like us! Which first of all that’s just wrong but also to throwback to episode 1 that’s also just fucking ethnocentrism and that’s just not right. But the second reason why is essentially because it made them easier to control. We’re talking a real life application of Karl Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the people” type shit. For the majority of slave owners nothing was more scary than their slaves rebelling, especially on larger plantations where, depending on the location, there could have been upwards of 40 or 50 enslaved people working for them. As such, religion was used as a sort of means to pacify these enslaved peoples. For example, the idea of heaven was used as a means of something to strive for, something to hope for, that if the enslaved people worked hard their entire lives, didn’t complain, and didn’t cause trouble, that they would reap the benefits of it when they one day passed. Stories like exodus were deliberately downplayed or not at all taught in certain circumstances in the early days, to keep them from finding inspiration in it to run away or rise up against their oppressors. That’s not to say that enslaved peoples never rioted or tried to change the status quo in any specific way because they certainly did, but religion was used as a preventative measure to try and keep that to a minimum. Since enslaved people obviously weren’t going to be allowed into the churches of their oppressors, they would often meet in outdoor gatherings or centrally in someone’s house for prayer.

That isn’t to say that all field hollers were spiritual, as I stated before there were many that were also just kinda about normal life stuff. One of the readings I came across actually went into great depth about a field holler tradition centered around this man named Jody who was apparently gonna get my girl… like an asshole. But the paper went in depth about how the name originally just started as Joe and the song was originally about Joe de Grinder, that’s spelled Joe De as in D and E and then Grinder,that eventually turned into Jody, a mythical scoundrel who went around trying get with other men’s women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPHozTQuEcI

and this isn’t uncommon, In fact like I would say the majority of field hollers I found were about things like this man stole my girl, im gonna find a woman on the bayou, man life sucks and im gonna sing about it, man life doesn’t suck so much but im still gonna sing about it. Just regular ass songs for regular ass folk. SONG THEMES that we’re actually gonna hear eventually turn into blues in a lot of cases…

Due to the religious bent to some of them, however, some of the most famous American spirituals come out of the field holler tradition! Which is where we’re now going to switch over to spirituals and gospel because spirituals and gospel, well they’re two sides of the same coin. I’m going to explain both of them more in depth but to start just remember from before that all gospel songs are spirituals but not every spiritual song is considered gospel. So what is a spiritual and what does it sound like?

Spirituals come out of this tradition of field hollers and extreme religiosity that was foisted upon enslaved African peoples. The songs were popular in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s. That isn’t of course to say that spirituals don’t still exist in the world today and that people aren’t making them but this is where the tradition began. As the genre mostly has to do with various forms of Christianity, it’s not hard to guess that the title of the genre derives from Christianity itself. Specifically from Ephesians 5:19 which says: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

Now, much like a lot of field hollers, spirituals are typically sung in a call and response format as well, with a leader improvising a line of text and a group of singers responding in unison. The vocal style is pretty open, leaving space for a lot of interpretation but they use a lot of slides and turns. For those who don’t know what those are, slides and turns are both methods of getting from one note to the next. Both of them are types of ornamentation which is just a fancy way of saying methods of how to play the notes that give them character. A slide is pretty much what it sounds like it’s when you slide from one note to the next instead of kinda cautiously going from one to the next like this. A turn is a little bit more difficult to explain so a turn is when you have a note and another note slightly higher than it, in between both those notes you’re gonna have the turn you’re gonna sing the note above your starting note, then the starting note then the note underneath it, then the starting note again and then the higher note that you’re trying to get to. And It’s gonna sound like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpKHT-pgCI

Spirituals were also sometimes used as codified protest songs; protest against the whole damn institution of slavery, protest against your specific oppressor, or just protest about work. I’d gather for many of us, we were taught what the underground railroad was in school but for those who weren’t, the underground railroad wasn’t actually a train underground, although that would be cool… wait that’s just a subway, nvm not cool, anyone who’s been on a subway, at least toronto’s subway system knows they’re not cool, but the underground railroad was cool. Essentially what it was was a hidden network of either enslaved African americans who had escaped, had managed to free themselves otherwise, and a limited amount of other peoples who would help escaped enslaved people flee to freedom often in the northern united states or Canada. As the underground railroad became more popular in the mid 1800s a lot of spirituals would be used as codes or have encoded words in them that would either act as directions or plans for how slaves might escape their plantations and flee for good. One well known spiritual used for this was Go down, Moses used by Harriet Tubman to identify herself to other enslaved people who might want to flee North. Just briefly for those who don’t know who Harriet Tubman is she became a famous abolitionist, born into slavery who then escaped and aided dozens of other enslaved people. So her song, go down moses sounds something like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRW680IPzbE

As for content spirituals are, well spiritual, surprise surprise, which means they have a lot to do with Christianity. The tinge of these songs though tend to skew toward sadness, though and were even sometimes known as sorrow songs. Which again, this isn’t surprising seeing the hell these people lived through on the daily sometimes you gotta sing out your praises to your god mournfully. In the case of Go down moses there it’s about the crying to be let go of the bonds of slavery comparing it to Moses freeing the Hebrews in Egypt. That doesn’t mean that all spirituals are necessarily sad though. Happy more upbeat spirituals are often referred to as jubilees or camp meeting songs named such after the places and occasions they were enjoyed at. Given that spirituals make up the largest portion of the body of music that is called American folk, I would hazard to guess that anybody who grew up in north America knows at least one spiritual whether or not you knew it was one. If you didn’t know Go Down Moses, you still might know Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljup8cIRzIk

if any of you play video games you might remember In Bioshock Infinite, a video game that borrows a lot of historical abolitionist cultural relics, the song that characterizes the city of Columbia, that greets you when you first arrive there is a spiritual called Will the Circle Be Unbroken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GccfFkbzjrc

and if that doesn’t work for ya what about Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O977l4bkv-U

Now laura, you might be saying to urself, you’ve mentioned now a couple of times now that Music by oppressed minority groups tends not to get as popular as stuff produced by the majority SO HOW ABOUT SPIRITUALS BITCH, WE GOTCHA, HOW DID THEY BECOME THE LARGEST COMPONENT OF NORTH AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC, BLACK PEOPLE WEREN’T THAT OPPRESSED WERE THEY HMMM???? YOU LYING LIER WHO LIES!? And like ok slow down there, yes I did say that that and there is some truth to it but there are some ways that minority musics can become popular. Music of minorities tends not to do that well unless the minority population becomes large as hell and very pervasive, the majority takes interest in their musical form because music is pretty good at crossing cultural barriers, or it gets white washed for mass consumption and that second and third part are kinda what happened to spirituals.

From the Library of Congress : The publication of collections of spirituals in the 1860s started to arouse a broader interested in spirituals. In the 1870s, the creation of the Jubilee Singers, a chorus consisting of former slaves from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, sparked an international interest in the musical form. So there was some growing interest in America at the time, why this is? Not entirely sure, maybe it was a matter of the uncommon spectacle of seeing black performers, maybe white Christians were taken by this display of Christianity, maybe it’s cause white people in American history just kinda love to steal art made by minorities and turn it into their own thing so as to divorce it from the person of colour origin, maybe it’s cause spirituals hit slap harder than mohammed ali, frankly I don’t know, I couldn’t actually find an article on this specifically. Either way, after a while, white composers, such as Harry T. Burleigh, did come on the scene and started rearranging spirituals in ways more associated with western art music traditions. This is why some of those above examples I gave you sounded maybe less like what we would expect from a spiritual and more like a piece of Western art music.

But how is gospel related to this, what is gospel, what does gospel sound like, why am I asking you all these questions? Well spirituals are kinda like gospel’s Momma; spirituals came before and helped enslaved peoples deal with the shitty situations they were in and gospels came afterward. When I was looking this up there were definitely a lot of different guesses and kinda half assertions as to when we can say gospel really started, some will say the second the American Civil war ended, some will say in the late 1800s there was one definitely not very academic source that I found that said like the 1970s which is way off but if we wanna look at the development of the modern Gospel we really gotta look at a man named Thomas A Dorsey and the 1940s.

So Thomas A Dorsey, referred to today as the father of Gospel Music was born on Canada day (or the 1st of July for non Canadians) 1899 in Villa Rica, in the state of Georgia. He was born to a sharecropping family (which I will explain more about in next week’s episode don’t you worry), his father being both a farmer and local minister also taught black children at a one room schoolhouse where Thomas would accompany him for lessons. Growing up he was always big into music (which like hell yeah I feel ya man) and was lucky enough to have access to an organ his family somehow managed to have despite being broker than a vase in a bouncy house full of blitzed 7 year olds. Thomas was still young enough in his time that in his youth he would have heard many spirituals growing up, even some sung by previously enslaved people as well as moaning as a style of singing which became really characteristic of the blues like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Being involved in the protestant church due to his family ties he also heard tonnes of protetant hymns growing up as well shape note singing or sacred harp music, a type of religious music established by white protestants in New England that does some really funky stuff with ascribing syllables and shapes to notes, and where all parts of their choir sit or stand in sections making a square and facing one another. I’ll probably do an episode on it one day but it sounds like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPOo4dOuPbQ

After a big move to Atlanta, He dropped out of school after the 4th grade at just 12 years old and starting attending shows and eventually selling concessions at a nearby theater. At some point he taught himself how to read sheep music, In 1919 he moved to Chicago by himself and in 1920 he copywrited his first song called “if you don’t believe I’m leaving you can count the days I’m gone”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvcizW8PLMU

now you’ll listen to that and go laura that isn’t gospel and you’re right man that isn’t! Dude started his career in early Jazz and blues music. He didn’t even start writing religious music for another two years after a fateful encounter after hearing someone play at the national Baptist Convention in 1921. Dorsey was excited by what he was hearing, improvising in rhythms, allowing singers to really pour their hearts out musically, he was so inspired he decided that that was indeed what he was gonna do with his life. So in 1922 he copyrights his first religious song which I couldn’t find a clip of. Unfortunately there wasn’t as much money to be made in It so he continued to work on blues while growing his religiosity, all the while climbing to become on of Chicago’s top blues composers and eventually a music arranger at paramount records at 24 years old. I’m 24 years old and I’m just fuckin laying here drinking flat room temp rootbeer and making a podcast episode, dudes out here fuckin killing it, #goals.

By 1928 however dude was depressed as hell and contemplating suicide, talk about a mood shift, eh. He…uh… found faith again in 1928 when he was at church, and the minister preaching I guess pulled a live serpent from his throat apparently prompting his immediate recovery…. So you can…. Take that as you will…. I fucking wish depression worked that way just like man it’s really bad this week lemme just find a preacher and get him to stick his hand down my throat nbd. But regardless of what actually happened, Dorsey was more revved than ever to composer religious musics. After going back to blues for some times because money he made a big splash at the national Baptist convention in 1930 when singer willie mae ford smith sang his song If you see My Saviour. Which sounds like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6AEcX9YK90

The crowd was so fucking pumped they asked her to sing it twice more and Dorsey was able to sell 4000 copies of his song. After this he formed a choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church at which the pastor was really open to his style and Dorsey and the church’s musical director Theodore Frye trained their first gospel blues choir! This was the first time that the clapping and stamping that you see in a lot of gospel performances actually started because previously black churches sought acclaim from performing western classical art music like Beethoven and Mozart which, if you’ve ever performed it, you know is nothing to…. Have fun to, at least not in the stampy clappy way. In addition to the gospels he wrote as originals Dorsey also started rearranging spirituals to fit this new genre that he INVENTED. Though a lot of his music wasn’t so well received at first because of it’s bluesy influence and liveliness, many African Americans were now moving into more northern states as part of the great migration in which 6 million African Americans moved from the rural south to the cities in the north and brought their taste for blues with them prompting the flourishing of Dorsey’s music.

So we have the dude that single handily invented an entire genre of music but how does gospel actually sound, sure we got some bits and bites of what it sounded like before he started training his choir but how does it sound afterwards. Well many gospel songs do keep within the tradition of call and response, but the response tends to be a little more organized functioning on a four part harmony meaning that there are sopranos, altos tenors and bases and all sing notes that compliment one another in the choir. Blues notes, notes that lower the 3rd 5th and 7th notes of a regular scale, were also added into the mix. I’m going to play you guys an example of blues scale in just a second but the guy playing the example is using the pentatonic version of the scale meaning only 5 notes of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

Gospel songs also tend to be more high energy than spirituals, like you can stamp and clap to slow music but the upbeat pace of gospel was why stamping and clapping was brought onto the scene, gospel, even in it’s more somber moments tends to be a rip roarin good time; something that you can’t help but move to, allowing for a kind of ecstatic prayer where one is encouraged to engage with their god through music. Altogether, it sounds something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvG_YWSRjD4

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’re actually gonna kick it down a few notches with the blues baby, just in time for midterm projects… yaaaay. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Songs from this week’s episode:

Ray Charles – I Got a Woman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnI_LuCJ4Ek

Tlokweng Botswana – Traditional Dance Troupe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=yeHzZyy_zCI&feature=emb_logo

Rosie and Levee – Camp Holler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjv0MYIFYsg

Irvin "Gar Mouth" Lowry – Joe De Grinder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPHozTQuEcI

Avantasia – Master of the Pendulum (the song I sang to demonstrate slides)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8zHwhLEecw

Paul Robeson – Go Down, Moses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRW680IPzbE

The Plantation Singers – Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljup8cIRzIk

Dr. Bernice Johnson Readon – Will The Circle Be Unbroken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GccfFkbzjrc

William Warfield – Nobody Knows De Trouble I’ve seen (Arr. Harry T. Burleigh)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O977l4bkv-U

Blind Lemon Jefferson – Black Snake Moan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Acapella Hymn Shape Note Singing Fasola – Amazing Grace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPOo4dOuPbQ

Thomas A. Dorsey – If You Don’t Believe I’m Leaving (Count The Days I’m Gone)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvcizW8PLMU

Thomas A. Dorsey – If You See My Saviour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6AEcX9YK90

Jubilee Gospel Singers – How I Got Over

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvG_YWSRjD4

Technical Clips I used:

PianoPig (on youtube) - Minor Pentatonic vs Blues Scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

Scott Paddock (on youtube) – How To Play A Turn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpKHT-pgCI&t=4s

#music #music history #music podcast #podcast #Comedy PodCast #comedy #just a music podcast #slaves #slavery #gospel #spiritual #spirituals #violence #sexual violence #tw: violence #tw: sexual violence #TW: rape

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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The transcript has been updated with links! sorry about that!

Could you please link the songs that you play to each episode in which you play them? If you can't put a clip in for rights reasons, can you at least list title and artist? Thanks, enjoying the podcast.

Absolutely! At the bottom of the transcripts there should be a list already given of the songs in the order in which i play them. In the latest episode the list is simply the title of the youtube video from which I pulled them. Episode 3 I figured didn’t need them because I used only 2 songs and stated both their titles and their artists in the episode. That being said I can certainly go back and get the youtube links for them.

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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#Anonymous

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Folk music! What a fucking blanket of a genre title isn’t it? We got 1960s folk in america, we got different folk genres in terms of mixed genres like folk metal, we got folk music as sort of an interchangeable term for ethnic musics, it’s all fuckin folk from here on out folks! But what is folk music where does it come from, what are we talking about when we talk about folk music? Well that’s what we’re going to talk about this week to kick off our North American music genre analysis with North American folk musics! Truth be told I did wanna start out with an episode on North American Native musics but as I’m whiter than sour cream on rice and there isn’t as much scholarship on it as I would like to confidently do a whole episode on it without input from actual native peoples. That all being said, if anyone listening is native and would like to give me some input on their musics, I would be more than happy to cover it.

But for now folk. North American folk musics. You notice I mention musics, it’s because north American folk music can be defined as a lot of things. So what are we talking about when we talk about the genre of folk musics. Well that’s gonna change depending on who you ask from what I explained before, we have some kind of mish mosh, multiple definition, popular idea of what folk music is and that’s not surprising given how that definition has grown and changed over time. Some of you will be surprised to hear that when we talk about north American folk music’s we’re actually talking about A BUNCH of different musical genres, not just one. Sure we have what people would usually associate with North American folk, the very Appalachian sounding bluegrass, country and then of course western, but we also have native musics (which again, I promise I will talk about at some point), and Maritime Canadian folk musics, we have cajun and creole musics, we have a bunch of racist shit too unfortunately but like legit we have so much stuff to talk about this episode I might have to break it up into two episodes.

Like all other musics, it all started from somewhere… I know, that’s the take of the century isn’t it. I mean it would be so much cooler if all folk music started cause some little gnome hopped out of the ground and was like imma invent music, but like that gnome would also be incredibly racist so I dunno, gnome theory sucks. So where did North American folk music come from? Well that’s a matter of looking at the mostly euro populations that colonized North America and this will change depending on the regions that we’re looking at. So WE need a SHORT HISTORY of the beginning of exploration.

So, there’s some debate as to who we should credit with the “discovery” of north america, cause on one hand we have the Viking settlements in eastern Canada in the year 1000, there’s some speculation that there were even other visitors before then, and of course we have the populations of native people’s who have lived here for forever, but in terms of the European colonial pattern we’re looking for, for our needs we’re looking at Christopher Columbus. So as y’all know Christopher Columbus, Portuguese adventurer, getting permission from Queen Isabella of Castille in 1492 set sail across the Atlantic to try and find a passage to India to get some of them good ass spices everyone was raving about. Though he didn’t find India he managed to find the Caribbean also known as Central America. Now I know in the news for a little bit with the ever increasing prevalence of the Black Lives Matter movement y’all been hearing about people tearing down Christopher Columbus statues in the news and there is a very good reason for that.

So as I’ve already told you Chris didn’t discover North america but he also was, and this is gonna be a massive understatement, but the dude was a massive asshole, like take the biggest asshole you can imagine and times that by about 10. It’s estimated that his colonization of the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of over 8 million people, or or about the entire population of Switzerland. You can’t even use the product of his time excuse because even Queen Isabella, the person in charge of the Spanish Inquisition, which famously saw hte torture and death of tonnes of people under the guise of religious purity, was even like yo dude you need to slow down. I will talk about him more once we reach central American music genres but just for now yeah he existed, yeah he kinda started the wave of north American exploration, but he was also an absolute asshat and there should never have been a statue let alone a day to commemorate the shitheel of a man.

So we get the start of this wave of immigration into what will become northern South america, Central America, and southern north America by Portuguese populations who mainly speak, well, Portuguese, bringing music from the Iberian peninsula. But we’re more concerned with what’s happening up north and for that we’re gonna have to look at later waves of immigration that started with Roanoake starting in the 1520s.

So the start of British colonization started with Roanoake and Newfoundland (which, yes, for our non canadian listeners it’s pronounced newfinland not new found land like the name would suggest, which to be fair would also be cool, I’ll welcome the Fins in my land anytime, they do fantastic music). One of these settlements was infinitely more successful than the other with Newfoundland becoming what we know now to be the east most province of Canada and while Roanoake is still there it failed so hard that a population of 112 people disappeared without a trace. Like legit we still don’t know what precisely happened to them. Some assume they integrated into the local native populations, some assume they were all murdered, some assume cannibals, essentially it was a bad time for all involved.

What this means for newfoundland though and other English colonies is that musically we hear a very British folk song base to the music that’s being established here, with newfoundland being very much established as a fishing colony the musical style echoes that. Since we’re talking about the Kingdom of England more broadly this meant that there was an absolute tonne of Irish and Scottish influence to the music. This is why when you listen to the folk musics of Newfoundland (established in 1583), Virginia (established in 1607), and Parts of the Carolinas (established in 1712), you hear it sounds very similar to that of their colonial forefathers. This means that there was commonly a lot of fiddle, flute, English guitar, a string instrument with a long handle, rounded body and ten strings that was a version of a Renaissance cittern, simple stringed banjos; zithers, which were flat, shallow boxes with strings running the length of the body that were plucked by the fingers and and hammered dulcimers, various shaped (like trapezoidal and peanut shaped) sound boxes with strings across them that were hit with small hammers, Much like this!

So we have all these people coming into the area, and with that too you’re also going to get jigs and reels too. Jigs and reels are both types of dance music widely enjoyed across the British Isles but are most associated with Scottish and Irish dancing musics. The difference between the two is mostly the time signature as the instruments used to play both of them are roughly the same, that being said Scottish musics tend to have more pipes and irish does traditionally use a type of handdrum which are both excellent. Jigs are in compound duple time meaning that there are 12 8th notes in a bar of music and reels are played in simple time like 2/2 (two half notes per bar) or 4/4 (4 quarter notes in a bar). They sound like this.

Its important to note here too that when we talk about all of these peoples from the British Isles that we don’t unintentionally assume that they were all nice and cozy with one another. Many of the Scottish and Irish parties, often referred to simply as the scotch irish or scotts irish came to america as a form of Religious punishmen because they didn’t precisely fit in with the church of England, some of my ancestors were scotts-irish and came to what would eventually become America because they were Quakers.

It is from these traditions that the music then evolves into something different over time and actually we’re gonna take a quick detour into linguistics for a second because it will be particularly helpful in demonstrating my point and y’all will be able to hear something way cool. So for those who are not aware, linguistics is the study of, well, language. (big brain moment right?) But what does that mean? Whereas when you take English, Igbo, Japanese, Arabic, or any other established language in an academic setting (so like learning in school when you’re growing up) the emphasis is on spelling, grammar, how to write and speak your language in the way that it has been determined is the best way to speak it (which isn’t always ACTUALLY the best way to speak it but we’ll get into that in a second.) Linguistics is the study of pretty much every other component of the language. So linguists study the phonemes or the sounds that comprise the word and how they change based on the dialect that a person is speaking (a dialect being a regional difference of a language such as how someone from Scotland speaks English and how I as a Canadian speak English), they study how languages become standard languages and why (spoiler alert there’s a lot of elitism involved), they study meaning and why we put certain words in the order that we do (for Example in English we put adjectives (or the words that describe things) in very specific order being quantity, quality, size, age shape, color, proper adjective and purpose or qualifier so describing a thing could be a shitty old triangular purple metal pair of shoes, but if you were like the triangular purples old shitty pair of shoes you would lose your gourd.)

But why does linguistics matter? Well language actually acts a lot like music in the ways that it travels and changes over time which makes sense doesn’t it? When a people move around and interact with other cultures or are even just are separated from a larger group, over time their language will change! One change that is easy for us to see in our life-time is in word usage, for example, you use different phrases and slang that your parents and your grandparents didn’t use. The same goes for accents this means that your accent is going to be different than your parents and their parents. In some cases this will smooth it out or ramp it up, it will accentuate features, or drop features entirely. And actually this is where I’m going to give you over to a linguist to better explain this because where I do know about some linguistic shift they will definitely explain it better.

Why this is important is BECAUSE music functions similarly in terms of drift. Though musical drift doesn’t happen as FAST as language because language you use everyday with incredibly intensity and music you do not, it does still happen. Even more helpful in the tracing of language is how and where it moves over time. Because language is contingent on people speaking it and music is also contingent on those who play it, you can track how music and language changes and who it interacts with based on the stylistic attributes and or instruments that it acquires over time. If we wanna think about this in a real practical sense come with me into the theater of ur brainhole for a second. Imagine for a second there is a group of people who live in lets say India in like the 500s C.E for some reason or another they’re pushed out of India and into the west where they met like Turks and hung out with them for a couple hundred years. So they pick up some Turkish words, incorporate some of their musical elements and then move farther west. Then they meet the Greeks! The Greeks are pretty rad, they got some good shit going for them, so they stay for another couple hundred years! Again, they pick up some Greek words, some Greek musical elements. After that let’s say some of the people from this group were captured and held as indentured workers in a country forcing them to integrate into the culture of the majority but another portion of the population was fortunate enough to be able to get away and keep moving west into the Balkans where they also picked up a bunch of words and musical elements. You see where I’m going with this? Cultures are all contingent on how often or how little they come in contact with other cultures, this goes for music, this goes for language, hell this pretty much goes for all sorts of art. For the sake of our example I used the Roma who also just serve as a crazy good example for this because we didn’t really even know their history until one scholar was “like hey they got some Indian words in here” and launched a whole study into it which is rad as hell but we’re gonna save that for another episode. BUT YES CULTURE IS CONTINGENT ON THE INTERACTION OR LACK OF INTERACTION WITH OTHER CULTURES, THIS IS A THING AND WE’RE GONNA BE TALKING ABOUT IT A LOT.

SO we were with settlers from the British Isles and they came to north america and then their music changed!

In Canada and Louisianna we also have the addition of the French colonies which make our music a little different. In Canada those colonies would be Acadia in what is now the province of Nova Scotia (established in 1604), Montreal (established in 1642), Quebec (established in 1608), and Trois Riviers (established in 1634) along the Saint Lawrence River with the voyageurs or courier de bois who were fur traders dealing primarily in beaver. In the southern US it’s the colony of Louisianna in the states which is much larger than what is currently the state of Louisianna. All of these colonies together formed one mega colony commonly referred to as New France. Differences between the musics performed by French colonists vs. English colonists was, well first of all the language, obviously French colonists sang more often in French, due to them being… French. But there were also differences in content too. In Canada especially many settlements were originally set up with the intention of converting native populations to Christianity which is a form of cultural genocide by the way. Thus, Jesuit populations often brough a lot of religious music into the area. Sometimes it would be mixed with musical and cultural traditions of the native populations but often it would just be very Christian. An example from the area I grew up in would be the Huron carol which blends native cultural heritage from the area with Christianity. It sounds something like this.

As French populations began intermarrying into native populations this became a more common sonic combination to hear. In Canada we also have a larger amount of music based on or around or deriving from sea shanties due to the fishing populations that settles in East originally as fishing colonies. As I plan to do a whole episode on sea shanties one day I don’t want to go too much into them but quickly speaking sea shanties tend to be broken down into categories based on the task they were performed around. So there were three principal types of shanties: short-haul shanties, which were simple songs sung for short tasks where only a little work was needed, halyard shanties, for jobs such as hoisting sail, in which a certain rhythm was required to signal when it was time to exert effort and when it was time to rest (often referred to as a pull and relax rhythm), and windlass shanties, which synchronized footsteps. I find them incredibly infectious, which is probably intentional because they’re meant to kinda keep spirits up as well as set a pace for work, but I’ll try and sell ya more on that when the time comes. In the meantime you can content yourself with singing drunken sailor to yourself, probably one of the most well known shanties.

French Canadian music also has some very fun additions to it that come from the body itself, like ur own dang body. The first one is a singing technique but also song style. It’s technically a form of non-lexical vocable which is a fancy way of saying “sounds that comes from ur mouth in music that aren’t necessarily words.” In fact sometimes it’s also just referred to as French Canadian mouth music. This specific one I’m talking about kinda, lord how do you describe this, it’s like a scatting but much slower, less bombastic, and more rhythmic. I’m gonna fuck up the pronunciation because, again, even though I have a French Canadian background and had to take it from grade 4 to grade 9 in school I remember it about as well as one might remember an event they’ve never been to, that is to say not at all. The form is called a turlutte (ter-lute) which uses a lot of D, T, and M sounds to kinda fit the sound that ur looking for in a song. It sounds something like this!

French Canadian music also has the real fun addition of podorythmie or foot rhythms which are complex rhythms that people keep with their feet. For those who don’t know what a rhythm is, it is defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern sound so lets say that you start clapping, and each clap is spaced exactly by one second, now on the first and third claps you clap a little harder, that would be a rhythm. Rhythms can be incredibly simple like that one or they can be really complex and the ones that you will hear in French Canadian music are of the more complex variety. Usually if the person performing them is also playing an instrument they’ll often sit in a chair with a little wood box or hard surface underneath which they will use to tap their feet on. Sometimes they will wear special hard bottomed shoes made with leather or wood to do this in order to accentuate the sound. Less commonly people can also stand while performing a podorythmie turning it into a kind of dance. Here’s my favorite example of what that sounds like.

Some of this style was eventually transported to Louisianna when the Acadians were eventually pushed out of Canada by the English in 1755, many of them ended up actually settling in Louisiana forming the ethnically Cajun population, Cajun deriving from the word Acadian. Not to say that life wasn’t hard for damn near everybody who wasn’t nobility in the 1700s, but the dramatic shift for Acadians made it particularly hard for a long time. People had trouble adjusting to their new way of life at first, coming from a mostly trading based economy to agrarian based was hard on the population, not to mention the massive change in climate that came with moving all the way from what would now be modern nova scotia all the way down to Louisiana. To give a real succinct idea of where exactly they were moving imma quote Loyola university in New Orleans that have done a really good succinct history on the Cajuns of Louisianna ”Few Acadians stayed in the port of arrival, New Orleans. Some settled in the regions south and northwest of New Orleans and along the Teche, Lafourche and Vermilion Bayous. Far more went further west to the marshes and prairies of south central Louisiana. They became hunters and trappers and farmers. It is a popular misconception that most Cajuns live on the bayous and in the marshes, poling their pirogues and hunting alligators. Far more became farmers in the grand triangular prairie that stretches from Lafayette north to Ville Platte and west to Lake Charles.” Like shit man, my giant canadian ass if forced to live in Louisiana would probably catch fire as soon as I got there let alone back then with no air conditioning and what have you. Their music also then changed to reflect their new way of life, not that the music was about catching fire in a corn field (although that would fucking slap), music was written and sung about hard times and hard livin’.

From the same Loyola University document: The music these people brought was simple. It was made by singing, humming, and rhythmic clapping and stamping. Instruments were brought to the colony, with a violinist's death recorded in 1782. Early instrumental music was played primarily on violins, singularily or in pairs. One violin played lead and the second a backing rhythm. A simple rhythm instrument was created out of bent metal bars from hay or rice rakes: the triangle or 'tit fer, meaning little iron. Musicians wrote original songs telling of their life in the new world. The song J'ai passe devant ta porte tells of the suddenness of death from accident and disease. The singer tells of passing by his beloved's door and hearing no answer to his call. Going inside he sees the candles burning around his love's corpse.

In the south they would have been influenced by other settlers in the area, more scotts and irish of course but also eventually African descended peoples. Some were brought as slaves during the French and Spanish colonial period or brought in by settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. Under Spanish rule, slaves were allowed to buy their freedom (which I cannot emphasize entirely how fucking difficult that would have been), leading to an early population of free Blacks in southern Louisiana. People of African descent also came from the Caribbean, including the colonized French-speaking islands. During the revolution in Haiti between 1789 and 1791, French-speaking Haitians who fled the violence often chose the Louisiana coast as a destination due to having a familiar linguistic population and ease of access. These populations would become to be known as creole. The term Creole comes originally from the Spanish criollo, for a child born of Spanish parents in the New World. The French borrowed it as Creole. Creole could refer to anyone of European parentage born in Louisiana. Over two centuries it began to be used to mean a person of mixed foreign and local parentage. One use today is to refer to someone entirely or partly of African descent.

Now, it’s incredibly important that we don’t discount the influence of slaves and former slaves in the creation and dissemination of creole musics because they are absolutely integral to the process. Creole songs originated in the French and Spanish slave plantations in Louisianna and thus contain tonnes of African musical elements from the instruments they used to the syncopated rhythms. For example, original instruments you would have heard could have been percussion instruments made out of gourds, known as shak-shak which would be shaken to create a rhythm, the mouth harp, a type of metal instrument that one holds in place in the mouth and plucks with their finger opening and closing their mouth hole to create different pitches and textures of sound, the bamboula, tambou, or tombou lay lay which are types of drums; and as I mentioned before, a type of banjo known as a banza might have been played if someone could fashion one. Because that in essence is what we’re talking about, when we talk about Creole music we’re talking about music slaves could make with the limited resources that were available to them, in order to make the music they wanted to hear. This is why overtime we also see the addition of the washboard as an instrument because it was something that would have been available to them. A washboard for those who don’t know is most literally a board, usually made out of ridged wood or metal that one would put into a source of water, either a basin or a river, and methodically rub the dirt and stains out of your dirty clothes as well as you could with soap if you could access it, believe me it’s about as fun as it sounds.

So what was this music they were playing? What did it sounds like? Well as I already mentioned there was a lot of African influence to the music. One of the most prominent features of this influence is the syncopated rhythm. A syncopated rhythm is a rhythm that is built so that the strong beats eventually become the weak beats. So if we continue our example from before, where we clap harder on the first beat and third beat, a syncopated rhythm would move to become the opposite of it on the 2nd and 4th beats or the off beats, like this. Don’t be worried if that’s something you can’t do yourself, I still find it hard to switch between.

As no type of culture exists independently of time or location though, the type of music they played was also influenced by the culture of their oppressors. While there was music that existed independently that slaves brought from their Native African groups such as the Bamboula, Calinda, Congo, Carabine and Juba, over time, a lot of their music also began to incorporate French and Spanish influence. A type of French dance called a quadrille for example was worked into the repertoire, a Spanish dance called the contradanza or the habanera actually became some of the first written music to incorporate the aforementioned African rhythms. Even the language used in these musics grew and changed. For the slaves, and even free black folk coming from the Caribbean, they would bring with them what is now known as patois, a language that is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and African languages. So when we think of what creole music is, it really then is a patchwork of different cultures mainly driven and compounded by the efforts of African slaves.

Now I will say before I play this example here that it is difficult when looking for early musics belonging to oppressed peoples because 1. It wasn’t written down for the most part, at least not in the way it would have been originally performed, 2. Pieces that were written down, recorded, or coopted were often done by white people looking to profit off of African music (which we’ll see way too fucking much of as we continue our north American music excursion), which seems like a rather disingenuous way to present it to you, and 3. Because music recording as far as actually recording audio didn’t exist until 1860. So if we’re looking for songs from the periods that they were written or invented we still have to find people who are alive that remember them. Even as I was researching this I was trying to look for recordings that would make it easier to hear the differences between the dance genres I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of albums or popular bands dedicated to these types of genres, so instead I’m going to play a clip of a bamboula rhythm being played by some students at the Asheh Cultural Arts Center's Kuumba Institute in New Orleans, and then a clip of another group performing a Calinda.

From where we’re currently standing in the year 2020 there is still Creole and Cajun distinct musics but they also created a fusion genre which has become it’s own thing, this genre is called Zydeco. Zydeco developed out of both the Cajun and Creole though (hard core purists will insist that it is a mostly creole development) which then further changed when German Immigrants started moving into the area. The accordion, which was invented in Vienna about 1828, was brought to Louisiana by the German immigrants many of whom lived adjacent to or among the Cajuns. Though it arrived in Louisiana as early as 1884, it was not immediately incorporated into Cajun music. This is because where fiddles were tuned differently than the accordions coming into the country. What I mean by that is that some instruments have pitches they’re better at playing naturally. So for example, you’re standard run of the mill trumpet, like if u look up a trumpet on google, well they’re most suited to play in the key of B flat because the sound that you get when you blow into one without putting any of your fingers on the buttons is B flat. For the accordions that were coming with the Germans, they were tuned to the keys of A and F, so it wasn’t till much later in 1925 that accordions tuned to C and D started appearing and thus started to be better incorporated into the music around it. The guitar was also added pretty late coming in in around 1920ish. The word Zydeco itself is actually derived from the title of a French song Les haricots sont pas sale or The snap beans are not salty! You can hear in the French if you put a little punchiness into it, the transition between the les and haricot sounds like a Z (yes I’m a Canadian that says Zee, I blame it on my American mother, plus it just sounds better, zed sounds like a bee flew into a hard surface). So because of the Z sound it became abbreviated to zarico and through time morphed into Zydeco! We got BEAN music.

And how does this bean music sound, well I personally think it sounds pretty fucking rad, kinda like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

fun fact about that one, I’ve known this song for roughly 5 years I knew it I definitely just thought these dudes were scattin, like WHOA BA BA WHOA BA BA WHA BA PA BYE BYE DOO DOO, I did not realize until roughly 2 years until after I heard it that it had lyrics…

Now you may have noticed I haven’t touched on Appalachian folk music yet and I’ve done it very strategically for 2 reasons. One is just simply because if I had put it any earlier yall would have been like HUEHUEHUE I HAVE HEARD ALL I NEED and then absconded into the night like a raccoon after finding half a cheeseburger in the trash. The second was because Appalachian folk music and next week’s episode are gonna be pretty instrumental in the episode after that, so to keep it popping freesh in ur brain bits I figured I’d stick it at the end of the episode.

So appalaichan music turns out is actually a really tricky genre of music, if we wanna go by the United States Library of Congress introduction to Appalaichan music: The term "Appalachian music" is in truth an artificial category, created and defined by a small group of scholars in the early twentieth century, but bearing only a limited relationship to the actual musical activity of people living in the Appalachian mountains. Since the region is not only geographically, but also ethnically and musically diverse (and has been since the early days of European settlement there), music of the Appalachian mountains is as difficult to define as is American music in general. I should also probably say before we get too far that like the Appalachian mountains (which first of all that I pronounce incorrectly because it’s pronounces with a CHian not Shan) but the appalachian mountains are the mountain range that run through a lot of the eastern United States, so like Appalachian Mountains extend 1,500 miles (or 2414 km for everyone else) from Maine to Georgia. They pass through 18 states and encompass the Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, the Berkshires of Connecticut, New York's Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The region known as the Southern Highlands, or Upland South, covers most of West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In colonial times, this area was known as the "Back Country."

It was in these areas that Cherokee and Algonquin people already existed but then colonists would come from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and eventually from other parts of Europe came the Germans, French Huguenots, Polish, and Czechians. So we’ve already looked at the influence from the British Isles before (the jigs and reels and English folk music) but these would evolve into Square dances with a little help from French influences as well. A square dance for those who don’t know is a dance usually with 8 sets of partners who perform steps that are either established and vary based on song or thencaller which then the dancers perform. But just as we saw with instruments and musics being carried by free or escaped slaves to different parts of the southern united states and being integrated into the musical cannon of the area, the same thing happened in this area by the other people settling here as well. For example, the hammered dulcimer I told y’all about earlier (which if you haven’t seen one I would recommend lookin one up they can come in really fun shapes, ) but yeah those same hammered dulcimers were not an invention of the British isles carried over by those settlers but it is almost a direct descendant of a German instrument (the Germans btw came in a couple different waves the first big one being in 1670) so this instrument they brought was called the Scheitholt. Even African American instruments entered the scene in around the 1840s just in time for minstrel shows to start travelling around the country which I will be doing an episode on by the way because you can’t talk about American music without talking about the fucking disaster that is minstrel shows. It was these same free black peoples that also really popularized the call and response type of vocals which is pretty much just what it sounds like. The main singer will call out a line of lyrics sometimes as a holler, sometimes more musically, and other singers will answer it by doing it right back at them. This can be found in all sorts of music but just for the kicks of it here’s an example of it in gospel music.

But we’re gonna back track a little bit back to the Germans because we really haven’t talked about them enough and have left out one of their biggest influences on developing Appalachian folk music which is yodelling. If you’re from the states you’ll probably know yodelling from that kid that got famous a couple years ago and was in a Walmart commercial or something but for those of you who don’t know or people who do know that kid and are just curious about the mechanics of yodelling: The main components of a human singing voice are the head voice and the chest voice which I CAN and will demonstrate but to explain first, the head voice and chest voice are the two registers humans typically have. There’s also falsetto which is slightly different as it is kinda a pushing of the voice to a place it isn’t really supposed to be but I digress. So the head voice is where we get all our higher notes where the chest voice is where we get all out low notes. This is mainly due to the resonators we are using in creating these sounds as well as how tense or thick or thin and how long or short your vocal chords are. Resonators are simply just the air passages and open spaces in your body that sound resonates through. So for head voice you’re pushing the sound up and into the head using like ur nasal passages and all ur skull space for the sound to vibrate through which are all really small so you get a higher often sharper sound and chest voice mainly resonates in the chest (or ur LUNGS) which is a lot more space and so more low and rumbly. You can tell the difference between the two by putting a hand on ur chest while you’re singing, start with your lowest note you can comfortably reach and just start ascending, eventually you will feel your chest vibrate less and less and should be able to feel the switch into head voice. I’ll just give you a quick demonstration as to how different they are. Please bear in mind I am a natural soprano so my low range isn’t incredibly low but here it goes so the head voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time” and again the same line but in chest voice “as I don’t do remembering, can’t give this song a ghost of past, I wander, I ponder, why there is weight in time.”

So if you tried it yourself you’ll notice that there’s a little, what vocalists call, break between where ur chest register is and where ur head voice is, it happens for everyone don’t worry. What yodelling does then is fluctuates between the head and the chest voice really fast and most importantly smoothly like this:

ahh shit man, the sounds of my ancestors, you can almost smell the leiderhosen, taste the octoberfest, YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THE SCHUPLATTING. But yes so Germans brought this with them from their homelands along with their accordions and it established itself the Appalachian folk tradition. Now it’ll probably interest you to know that yodelling isn’t a genre without purpose, as I’d like to do a whole episode on it though at some point I don’t wanna spoil too much but it is good for communicating across mountain ranges because of how it echoes and the types of inflection you can put into it. This makes it easier to understand why it survived the shift from the mountains in Germany all the way to the mountains of America. The Germans also brought something else with them, but it wasn’t just Germans, the Polish, and Czechian influences also brought it with them too! And what is it that they brought? The waltz of course! The waltz is a type of dance that focusses on a ¾ time signature, and has one heavy beat on the front and two lighter beats after. For any of you who’ve ever seen the musical Oliver, this is precisely the type of song Oom Pah Pah is.

So these collections of music and the things they developed into can be called Appalachian folk musics. It’s hard to pin down precisely what Appalachian music then sounds like at times because of all the different influences depending on place that you were living in, if you had to pick out a few things though you would head that firstly you get a lot of stringed instruments like guitars, fiddles and banjos. Secondly the themes were often similar and reflected day to day life living in the region such as mining or logging, there’s the fun little genre of murder ballads which I wanna do a whole episode on some day, and after the civil war we also get the addition of a lot of war songs. Thirdly this music would vary depending on purpose but would definitely include dances, campfire songs. So Imma play you a few samples then, first we just have a good old mountain song

if these sound familiar to other genres of music like bluegrass and country that’s because Appalachian folk music was the predecessor for both genres but those I’m gonna save for their own episode sometime in the future. It might be a part of the north American genre business it might be just another nebulous episode I do in the future at some point. But for now at least you know the history of some of the biggest Genres of American folk music. BUT WHAT ABOUT FOLK MUSIC TODAY, LAURA, WHAT ABOUT MUMFORD AND SONS, HOZIER, FUIMADANE, AND KORPIKLAAN? And I know, they’re ALL fantastic acts and I’ll get to people like them eventually, but for now at least you know where it all started.

So with that, hat’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’ll be getting heavy with slave and gospel music. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical question or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

Bye!

1. Over the Hills and Far Away - 17th Century English Traditional - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MR7VihPm2E

2. Woodsong Wanderlust Solo Hammered Dulcimer by Joshua Messick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAvzVdOJJY&list=RDfD0rNyjDAa0&index=13

3. Out on the Ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynKDggMtMww

4. Rakish Paddy & Braes of Busby (Reels) Uilleann pipes Chris McMullan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0umOtiKyUc

5. A Quick Lesson on Southern Linguistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqY6ftqGq0

6. Huron Carol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPeEvUl06Y

7. La Bolduc - Reel Turluté https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

8. Le Lys Vert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASW3Cejl5oc

9. J'ai passe devant ta porte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtchvhughFw

10.New Orleans Kuumba camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItRuHjjGMhg

11. Calinda (Stickfight) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaM0PI3T1s8

12. Bye, Bye Boozoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPztofSd5Y

13. Call and Response in Gospel Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMgNTwZW5gY

14. Underthing Solstice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anMKMu9Tpoc

15. Yodelling Franzl Lang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhqikWnQCU

16. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – Ost – Maggie is Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fn1Pw-LxU8&

17. Ola Belle Reed High on the Mountain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsRRY5k5Psg

18. Traditional Tennessee Square Dance Caller Gerald Young of Pulaski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-DWvegcL8

#podcast #just a music podcast #music #music history #comedy #comedy podcast #learn urself a thing #folk #folk music #american folk music #canadian folk music

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justamusicpodcast · 4 years

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Today on this week’s docket we got the politics of music. Some of yall are already running for the hills, or ready to throw shit at me like a bunch of apes, frankly, I don’t blame you I used to be like you, “MUSIC ISN’T POLITICAL, IT’S POETRY, IT’S FEELINGS, THAT SHIT AINT POLITICAL” AND BABY I KNOW I KNOW SHHH but what if I told you it is, WHAT IF I COULD SHOW YOU THE POLITICAL NATURE OF MUSIC and not only that, but show you why it’s important. Music, like all things, is very much connected to what is going on in society, no form of art exists in a vacuum, meaning no art is disconnected from what is surrounding it, that includes the person, the includes the time, that includes the fucking country, its crazy what we can see stratified if we dare to look and listen. Let’s take a look!

So as I mentioned last week during our intro and our quick dive into western classical art musics, many classical musicians were employed by the church, and by other rich patrons. You see for most of our recent history, music, at least music that was considered a high art, was something that was consumed mostly by these layers of society: the church, and wealthy elites. Musical genres that existed independent of these layers of society often either weren’t considered proper music or just disregarded as vulgar due to their place of origin, or amongst the lower classes. So already we’re facing historical class divides within what becomes popular so to speak and famous. But like there’s so much more to it than that.

You see the patronage of the church means music by and for the church. Similarly, patronage of the RICH AND FAMOUS means music for, well, the rich and famous. This is why when we talk about most music in the Gregorian era, hell why the Gregorian era is even named the Gregorian ERA is because these are the forces that be that influence music at this time, at least the music that gets to be part of the official canon. Johann Sebastian Bach most famously wrote music for the church his entire life. Brandenburg concertos? Wrote them as the Kapellmeister or the choir master/music director in Köthen Germany. Remember Mozart? How he was hired by the royal court of Salburg at 17 years old? He wrote music for royalty which would’ve needed to be new enough that it was interesting to show that Austria was a leading culture worth following but not so bombastic as to offend the senses of the nobility. All music that full under patronage, that is, the practice of being hired by a singular person or entity, will almost always have to conform to the ideals and standards which are then set for them.

This is true in even todays standards when you look at cultural productions particularly in very developed nations. We buy and sell and praise and value things typically that are also valued by the upper classes. I’m not talking about going out and buying Jeb Bush’s debating boots, but I am talking about trends (and this is easily observed in fashion) that exist because someone powerful wore them first. Think of how fashion trends set by or perpetuated by people like the Kardashians, or Doja Cat, or essentially any other pop icon. People knowing or unknowingly imitate these styles based on them being perpetuated by upper class or famous peoples. The same works in reverse to. If you’re someone who tries to go against what’s popular for the sake of not wanting to be lumped in with popular groups then you’re going to try and emulate styles that are different than those that are popular. And what are these styles driven by? Well… politics and the social attitudes that govern them and this is because aesthetics are largely driven by class.

It is not controversial or unheard of to say that in modern westernized society that we function a lot on the basis of want. We want this we want that we want to look like something we want this because XYZ. I would like to make a distinction that needs are not wants, food is not a want cause u need that to survive. Getting an 800 dollar steak at a place and then posting it on twitter and Instagram, however, is definitely more of a want. What drives those wants is things that we perceive as better; you drive a Ducatti because you think it is a better vehicle, you buy Gucci because you think it is more well made clothing, you buy fuckin, I dunno some sourdough starter from a Shawoman in Siberia because you think it’s better. But why do you think something is better? In some cases, yes there is a definite difference, a product made to last longer or a service that objectively improves ur life is probably better than a product that breaks within a week or a service that actually makes your life worse. But a lot of times what is actually perceived as better falls to class and class is driven by politics. Who gets to be upper class, why, how did they get there, why do they hold so much power?

Politics also informs aesthetics in other ways though too which we will be primarily talking about today. In specifics with music, music allows an avenue to explore/display/and interpret politics in a very unique way because where not all people are going to be able to afford to participate in politics in other ways, music and art in general are openly available activities that damn near everybody can participate in. Art is also an excellent conduit for politics because where a person might not be able to express themselves on a topic adequately in an academic paper or before a senate art can help express those otherwise inexpressible things. My favorite part about art in general though and particularly music is that anyone of any class can make it, because even if you cant afford proper instruments the human body is a pretty amazing instrument in itself and can be used in tonnes of ways to do that.

But how do politics inform aesthetics? Simply by our reactions and perceptions of the politics around us. When a person makes a black lives matter tshirt they are committing to carrying that political sentiment and aesthetic with them. It is informed by the politics of race. When you’re part of the queer community (yes I use the word queer, we’re reclaiming it, and I personally use it because I hate having to explain constantly what pansexuality and non binaryness is) so when ur part of the queer community and you cut your hair real short and dye it blue and get tattoos and piercings as is very common in a lot of the community you’re making a statement informed by the politics of sex and gender. When you write a country song that’s all about a guy who just comes home from work and goes to the honky tonk bar to boot scoot boogie, you’re making a political statement as to your support of the average human being. Essentially all forms of art are heavily dependent on the person who is creating it. This person or group of peoples will be informed by politics in their life. For some people, like in our first example, it’s going to be very pertinent to them and overtly political in a way that makes a statement against politics that are taking place around them but for others like I our second example it is going to be much more subtle.

Before we get into that though, I wanna let you know that there’s something I really want for you guys to take away from today’s episode aside from music just being political. The things you say the things you do, the things we create, anything we make has a connotation to it, words have connotation to them, so when we speak them into existence, when we attribute sentiments to ourselves, we must always be careful in the ways that we word them because we to, even in our most basest of interactions, have the power to influence and be influenced by ideas, all of which have an effect on other people. Words have meaning, actions have consequences, even if you didn’t necessarily intend them. It can be as complex as coming out in support of a political argument or as simple as just the way you word simple statements. For example, things I will openly politically support and say on this podcast: I believe in gay rights, trans rights, marriage equality, I believe in free healthcare, I believe in a living wage for all people’s regardless of your job, I believe that everyone should have access to free post secondary educational institutions of their choice, etc, etc, there are other things I definitely do believe in but I’m not going to go into because I think you guys get the idea. The thing is this is easy to identify, this is easy to see as a political statements (even though maybe they shouldn’t be) because they are things that we hear debated all the time within the realms of politics.

Where it gets harder for some people to understand, by no fault of their own, is when people make generalized seemingly non political statements, or take stands on things you wouldn’t necessarily consider political, or invoke concepts that people don’t inherently think as political. For many of us, especially in areas with really bad public schooling (myself included) we aren’t necessarily taught critical thinking, that is how to properly analyze things that people say. This is dangerous because it leads to large portions of populations who might listen to people like politicians without actually really understanding what they say. Even more dangerous is a lack of understanding of historical events as historical events often can inform us of how a situation might play out based on what has happened in the past. This can lead down the path of repeating historical mistakes if we are not careful. For example, something that I hear constantly in relation to things that I study is: “Jews and Muslims have been fighting for thousands of years” with the add-on to that statement usually being “so why should we care about Israeli Palestinian tension?” These types of statements are then important because they colour the way we view history and the way we view current society. In this case specifically, these people are actually wrong, Jews and Muslims actually lived in peace for quite a while in the Ottoman empire, and the incredibly violent tension between the two groups is actually a relatively recent thing, this is important to know because it changes the situation form a thousands year old incurable problem to something more current that still would be very hard to solve but at least has some historical precedence for doing.

The really important part of this though is when someone makes a statement trying to play down the politicalness of a statement. To give you guys a musical example, I did a project a few years ago on the Neo-Folk band called Rome. For those of you who don’t know the genre of neo-folk, it is unfortunately rife with alt-right shitheels and white supremacists. As I’m going to talk about the genre more broadly when I get to the episode on music that hurts people, I’m not gonna go any further into it. The point is the band that I did the project on is actually known as one of the few that doesn’t take that side, having written on various things that are considered more socially liberal such as the socialist side of the Spanish Civil War (in their album Flowers from Exile), and the French Resistance (in their album Nos Chants Perdue). The issue is that Jerome Reuter, the one man band, frequently denies that the band takes any political stance at all. The thing is when you go out of your way to make an album or make art, or make a statement, you are promoting a narrative even if you aren’t intending for it to be a political statement. This is because, unless you are openly condemning the ideology or the concept that you’re talking about, open discussion about a topic, especially when examining it artistically or academically, provides a platform to introduce it to others who may not have heard about it, but also gives artistic or academic legitimacy to a problem. Essentially when you talk about something in a legitimizing way, it causes more people to think it is a rational stream of thought. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, for example, if you platform is something like “I think broccoli is good,” that’s not a terrible statement, broccoli is delicious and healthy and just p great veg overall, (thanks broccoli) so that’s not a platform that if someone thinks about it and starts believing in it is going to cause someone any harm.

The harm in giving things a platform unwittingly is when it can cause harm to other people. Conspiracies and ideology that is meant to hurt other people are examples where legitimizing a topic is dangerous. For example, to continue the example that I had before with the band Rome, they recently released an album called “Le Ceneri Di Heliodoro” Jerome Reuter explains that the album is supposed to be an honest reflection of what he sees is going on in Europe right now. If any of you listeners know the political climate of Europe right now you know that it’s leaning more right wing in a lot of areas. Reuter reflects this in the album by using themes usually associated with right wing ideology, specifically references to the Roman legion (a period in history that some alt right folks champion as the peak in human civilization) and toxic nationalisms. Although it is excellent to have this sort of reflection especially many many years from now, in the moment it presents an issue because it does not outright condemn the harmful nationalisms and alt right behaviours but legitimizes them by giving them a platform. If you didn’t know that Mr. Reuter is usually left leaning, this presents a problem because by a cursory listen, and without knowing Mr. Reuter’s own politics, you could easily assume that this is an album for the alt-right. The last thing you want to do is provide a platform and legitimize alt-right white supremacists and fascists because it helps them recruit others which in turn harms people due to the ideology that accompanies these factions.

The thing is, is that you don’t need to be a famous person when influencing other people. These types of interactions can and do happen on a day to day basis, when you talk to your friends, when you talk to your family, when you talk to your children, when you talk to anyone, you hold some amount of power, no matter how small, to influence and provide platforms for things that are right and things that are wrong, things that can help people, and things that can harm people, I only hope that in your daily interactions that you choose decisions that help people, not hurt.

So anyhow back to music. How do we process politicalnessin music then? From what you guys have heard now you might have guessed a couple of the ways but let’s take a look at the actual methods that someone like I would use when looking at an artist, a genre, or a song.

In academia we do this thing where we kinda “who what where when why and how” the literature that we are reading. Who wrote it, what is it that they wrote, where did they write it, when did they write it, why did they write it, and how is it written. These sorts of things can tell us a lot about a particular piece of writing. For example, let’s say a peasant living in the Russian empire in the late 1800s writes a memoir. We would ask who is this person (what was their social standing in the community, how does this effect their perspective on what’s going on, etc.), what is it that they wrote, well the wrote a memoir (why did they write that, why not a novel, what is the intentionality behind it, etc), where did they write it (a person’s perspective about the situation is gonna be different if they live in ass blast nowhere in the middle of sibera vs 20km outside of Moscow), when did they write it (what does it tell us about the time, what can we deduce the time is like from what they write and how much of what they write is influenced by the time, if it is a political writing this is really critical for showing us what was going on during this time and how it might have effected people), why did they write it (legit why? Do they wanna let future generations know what’s up, do they wanna make sure their story is told, how do those influence how the memoir should be read, what details will be highlighted or left out on that basis, and how was this written (not only what materials were used but like, did they need someone to help them, was it collaborative, was it originally published as a paper, was it a banned source at first, was it a piece of propaganda, was it sponsored by someone.) Well you can do the same thing with music. AND YOU SHOULD DO THE SAME THING WITH MUSIC IF YOU WANNA LIKE REALLY GET TO THE CRUX OF IT BUT LIKE THAT’S UP TO YOU I’M NOT GONNA FORCE YOU, but it does really help illuminate why certain things are the way they are. But even if your not gonna do that personally, and that’s ok, we’re gonna do it a little bit today.

We’re gonna start off with a real easy one and get a little harder so out first one is going to be Greenday. Now for those of you who aren’t really familiar with the pop punk scene of the late 90’s and early-mid 2000s, Greenday is a pop punk band that was incredibly popular from the late 90s to the early-mid 2000s, woaow so descriptive, right? The reason I’m using them as our first example and not, say, the Ramones or the Misfits or some other punk band is because most of us that are alive now will know about the events of 9/11 and have at least heard about George W. Bush, we’re getting to a point socially where many young people may not know the political events related to the Ramones or Misfits. So following our original formula of who what where when why how we’ll start with the who. Who is Greenday? So as stated Greenday is an American pop punk band, they were formed in 1987 under the name Sweet Children before renaming themselves Greenday in 1989. The band is currently composed of Billie Joe Armstrong, the bands lead singer, songwriter and lead guitarist, Michael Ryan Pritchard known by his stage name Mike Dirnt, their bassist, backing and occasionally lead vocals, and Frank Edwin Wright III, known by his stage name Tré Cool. Previous members include John Kiffmeyer, Jason White, Raj Punjabi, and Sean Hughes.

Billie Joe Armstrong was born and raised in California to a Jazzmusician/truck driver for Safeway and a waitress, he has 5 older siblings. From his background we can assume that he lived in a working class household probably on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, massively influencing his own politics and the music he produces. Mike Dirnt also came from a struggling family with a mother that abused drugs, and a divorce which profoundly changed him as a person his family struggled with money most of his young life. Tres Cool was born in Frankfurt, at the time part of West Germany, although I couldn’t find as much about his early life as the other two, the fact that he was born in Western Germany and thus had post war German heritage likely had an impact on his personal politics. His father being a veteran of the Vietnam war would have also informed personal opinions and politics.

What? What did they do? Well they formed a pop punk band called Greenday, but what is pop punk? Pop is just a short for popular which is just music that is popular, this sounds remedial as hell but there are genuinely people out there that think pop is something with rigid bounds and attributes but it's just popular music. Punk on the other hand is bounded and has an incredibly rich history. Punk emerged as a genre in England in the 60s, as an answer to the boredom that came with hippie culture and a feeling that the complaints that came out of that era had not been fully heard. As such many of these bands were formed by revolutionary movements and radical policy that they hoped to see or had seen in the world during the time. Of course as punk was a more intense and outspoken genre it started very much as an underground movement gathering like minded people also disillusioned by the system that they lived in. Performances were small, often held in small clubs or people’s houses as many bands started off as garage bands also giving the name garage rock in some circles (though there are some people who would argue it’s entirely different but we can get more into those semantics at a DIFFERENT TIME). From the beginning, punk was associated with fringe leftist elements attracting the LGBT community and all sorts of others who just didn’t seem to fit into the rest of society at large. I don’t wanna give too much more away because I wanna do a full episode on punk when I start into north American genres

Where? Well where is a little hard to separate from when because where you are where you are and when you are often very dependent on each other cause time and space and ask a physicist cause I haven’t taken science in 8 years and never took physics cause math is for wizards and con-men and I am NEITHER. But yes so Greenday was founded in America, particularly the California part of America in the left bottom quadrant of the big ol mass that is America in approximately 1989. This is important because this means that in playing highly political music they are most likely to be influenced by the politics in the area that surrounds them, I.E. America. Knowing the country of political influence makes it easier then for us as listeners understand the references made in the song or songs. The years a band is active then also is important because it gives us an idea of the era that a band is referring to and helps us pinpoint specific events more easily.

Why? Well for why we need a specific song, or songs, or album or something more concrete. For our purposes I’ll be using their American Idiot album which was released in 2003 after the reelection of George W. Bush. For those of you who were not born before 9/11 or were too young to remember the events of what went down with it and the success of George W. Bush’s re-election, we’re gonna have a mini history lesson. On Tuesday September 11th 2001, there was a series of terrorist attacks by known terrorist group al-Qaeda that resulted in the death of nearly 3000 people with an additional 25k of people being injured either on a short term or long term basis. The current standing president, George W. Bush responded to this series of attacks by launching a series of invasions to countries that he thought were responsible. The public was pretty divided on this course of action, some people were overjoyed at the prospect of potentially getting back at the people who had attacked America, others, including myself were and are not so enthused with the situation.

Though there are many problems with the war in the middle east ranging from invading countries that bore no responsibility for the events of 9/11, to the astounding amount of civilian casualties from things like drone strikes or bungled military actions, the biggest issue for a lot of people was the impossible nature of the task at hand, waging a war on an ideology. You see, in fighting an ideology you’re fighting something that has really hazy boundaries, who counts in the ideology? When do you know when the war is over? These sorts of hazy boundaries essentially let the antagonizing force do whatever they please in pursuit of their hazy end goal. This is actually why I have to keep switching tenses when talking about this war, because even though it started in 2001, it is still continuing 19 years later in 2020. So for many of us the cost of war emotionally, physically, and in literal human lives, didn’t make sense, in the grand scheme of what Bush wanted to accomplish.

The cultural divide that then existed between Americans on these actions was then quite severe. For a lot of people on the left it seemed that these actions towards the middle East were driven by a nationalist, Christian, uneducated and unempathetic population. And that is precisely the political climate which spawned the album American Idiot. It is an ode to what many people were feeling at the time, that the president was an idiot, that those who followed him were also idiots, and that the media pandered to this nationalistic “redneck agenda.” Seeing what’s going on right now in 2020 amidst the people who refuse to wear masks even though there is a deadly pandemic about and people pushing back against a movement calling for basic ass human rights for black people, y’all might be able to understand. And yes, although the title song from the album does showcase this in a way that is hard to deny, I prefer the slightly longer ballad Jesus of Suburbia for it’s imagery and use of motif. Though the song fits into the album’s continuous narrative following a young man using various imageries and making up a fake persona to try and get over his ex, it still manages to encapsulate the unsettled left leaning politics that the overall album is going for.

Now what we’re going to do is something called closed text analysis, that is to look at a piece of work in isolation, interpreting what is written based on what we know from those other factors we discussed earlier. And He starts:

I'm the son of rage and love The Jesus of Suburbia The bible of none of the above On a steady diet of Soda Pop and Ritalin No one ever died for my Sins in hell As far as I can tell At least the ones that I got away with

And there's nothing wrong with me This is how I'm supposed to be In a land of make believe That don't believe in me

Already that’s a lot man, that’s a hell of a lot to deal with . So let’s dissect this! He’s the Jesus of suburbia, in the larger scale of the album this is the persona the narrator has decided for himself but in the context of what we’re talking about what does it mean! Well immediately we’re confronted with this sort of fucked up idea about Jesus, not of Nazareth but Suburbia, a man of the people, outcast and martyred for rebelling against the crowd. And he acknowledges that this is exactly how he’s supposed to be, there’s a self awareness of being the stereotype. The addition of the Ritalin in here is a nice little nod to show the age and generation he’s referring to. Ritalin, for those you don’t know, is a drug commonly used to treat ADHD. As the diagnosis really came into more popular understanding in the 80s and 90’s so did the knowledge of Ritalin. For those who don’t remember or weren’t born during this time period, ADHD and Ritalin were both controverscial for a very long time (and still is to some small degree) for multiple reasons but mainly because it seemed to a lot of people that all of a sudden EVERYONE’S child was diagnosed with it and thus prescribed Ritalin. So this choice of lyrics is sort of short hand for this is the era in which I grew up in. I love this as a lead in because it doesn’t pull any punches but also establishes one of the many problems in the society in the time we’re dealing with, a perverted idea of religion which will continue onto the next verse.

Get my television fix Sitting on my crucifix The living room in my private womb While the Moms and Brads are away

To fall in love and fall in debt To alcohol and cigarettes And Mary Jane To keep me insane Doing someone else's cocaine

Again we see the deferring to this problematic way of referring to religion, well why is it problematic, we’ll talk about that in a second. Get my television fix is an excellent metaphor for the dependence of the population he’s talking about on mass media for a mind numbing sort of quality it has as a drug, it holds them hostage in a way. The living room and the tv having birthed this persona into the world, while his mother and boyfriend “fall in love and fall in debt” playing on this idea of consumerist culture that keeps them all in line with the brainwashing from the TV that they saw in their youth. The drugs and alcohol keeping him from realizing what’s going on.

I would also love to point out that the style of music in the background is emulating a do-wop sort of thing, very emblematic of rock and roll music in the 50s, an era that a lot of middle and upper class people think of as the “golden age of America”. To take this sort of style and turn it more punk then, distorting it and adding these lyrics of criticism over it, punctuates the sort of fuck you to America that the song is going for.

At the center of the earth In the parking lot Of the 7-11 where I was taught The motto was just a lie

It says home is where your heart is But what a shame Cause everyone's heart Doesn't beat the same It's beating out of time

Seems pretty straight forward, the things he was taught don’t equate the things he now knows from seeing society differently. For many punks, and even non punks, anybody who’s ever lived in a potentially problematic household really, this is a relatable sentiment. Your family turning against you for having different opinions or feelings. And while this is true no matter the era you study, to say that similar things happen between families with opinions of President Bush during the beginning of the war in the Middle East would be an understatement.

Jimmy has grown disillusioned with the culture he lives in but also the culture that subculture he seems to have fallen into emblemized by the next set of lyrics.

City of the dead At the end of another lost highway Signs misleading to nowhere City of the damned Lost children with dirty faces today No one really seems to care

There’s no clear way out of the life that’s been laid out for him and no one really seems to care to find one, he feels like he’s stuck where he is.

I read the graffiti In the bathroom stall Like the holy scriptures of a shopping mall And so it seemed to confess

It didn't say much But it only confirmed that The center of the earth Is the end of the world And I could really care less

Again we get appeals to the issue of hyper commodification of American society in the elevation of the scriptures of the shopping mall, the center of the world being the end of the world likely referring to America being the harbinger of war. So we get a repeat of the city of the damned verse which ends in an chorus of I don’t cares.

I could finish this entire song, really I could but in the interest of talking about some other songs, I’ll talk about this last verse here:

Everyone's so full of shit Born and raised by hypocrites Hearts recycled but never saved From the cradle to the grave We are the kids of war and peace From Anaheim to the Middle East We are the stories and disciples of The Jesus of suburbia

And what an excellent verse to leave off on here. Everyone is so full of shit mingled with the overall themes of this song, and the previous verses really just means like the culture that you’re raised in has done it wrong, you preach love and acceptance and then spin it to hate on others. We commit war crimes in the name of god but also in the name of the greatness of this nation, how can your really say it’s so great? Hearts recycled but never saved, the values being taught to those over and over but no one really ever practices them or breaks out this weary cultural malaise. We are the kids of war and peace from Anaheim to the middle east, we are the stories and disciples of the Jesus of suburbia, it doesn’t matter where you are because everyone is a victim of this culture.

So we can agree at this point, a pretty politically charged song. BUT LAURA THAT DOESN’T PROVE JACK SHIT, YOU PICKED A POLITICAL SONG, THAT DOESN’T COUNT, YOU’RE A FRAUD AND SHEISTER AND NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE YOU. Well hold on there for a second man, what if we chose a song that wasn’t overtly political, from a genre that no one typically thinks of as overtly political? Would that make you happy? Well let’s try one.

Lana Del Ray, now, I don’t typically listen to Lana, which may be a mistake, who knows. Before I start into Lana Del Ray’s music I would like to pause here for a moment and acknowledge that even if we’re going to look at her music from a feminist perspective it is still a white feminist perspective. The black feminist perspective also listed in the same paper is one that I will be using eventually in a future episode. I would also feel wrong especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and ongoing protests in the states for basic human right for black people, if I didn’t the fact that she has dated a member of law enforcement in the past and has also been on blast for appropriating native headwear. I am not trying to laud her in anyway, but am using her music specifically because the paper that I’m pulling the information that I am about to tell you from also uses her as a specific example because she is popular enough for many young people to know who she is.

SO TO CONTINUE For those who don’t know Lana Del Ray is an American pop singer who kinda specializes in what some scholars have decided to call “sad girl” music. But to say that in itself doesn’t tell us much about her style or why she does what she does so let us try the who what were when why that we did before.

Lana Del Ray (aka Elizabeth Woolridge Grant) was born in 1985 and raised in New York state, being raised primarily in upstate New York. She came from a relatively middle class family with her father being a doman entrepeneure and her mother being a school teacher. Having attended catholic school most of her youth she was eventually sent to boarding school at around 15 years old to as Wikipedia says (which is where I’m getting most of my basic basic basic info from guys, there’s not many academic papers out there on Lana Del Ray yet, sorry to tell ya) “solve a budding drinking problem.” It is reported that she had a really hard time making friends while away as she was always a little bit different from others by frequently being preoccupied with the inevitability of death and human mortality in general. Frankly, I can’t blame her on that one, shit is scary. But what does this all mean when put together? Here is a girl who is born into a religious family and apparently is even a cantor at her church in her youth. I’m sure most people listening would know that Christianity does have a pretty fleshed out idea of what the afterlife is supposed to be like and they will not hesitate to tell you about it should u ask. So we can conclude that for some reason, this picture of the afterlife that she was meant to believe in in her youth didn’t really jive with her on some level and it became a bit of an obsession for her.

It was after graduating from this boarding school that her career in music started to form away from the church taking various gigs under different names. She then went to university where she majored in philosophy particularly metaphysics because in her words “it bridged the gap between god and science.” For those who don’t know what metaphysics is, it is defined by the studying of the origin of reality itself, the immortal soul, and the existence of a supreme being, which for many people comes down to God. All of this culminates in the way that Lana Del Ray handles topics of death love and relationships.

So that’s the who, the what is pop music but it’s more than just pop music. As I’ve explained previously, pop music doesn’t really mean much of anything as far as a genre lable goes. Pop is just a shortened version of the word popular. So what we’re looking for then is the true genre of the artist or the aesthetic that they’re trying to convey. With a lot of pop music that can be hard to find because songs tend to bounce between multiple genres in an attempt to appeal with what the most current aesthetics are popular. The really cool part about pop music then is it can embody a tonne of different styles and genres. If we strictly look at her genre type then we get something sort of a classical or sometimes called baroque style pop which is a genre of pop music that emerged I believe sometime in the mid 60s or so which combines western classical art music elements into a sort of poppy sound using soft rock and electronic elements. In the case of Lana Del Ray then her musical genre doesn’t really serve as the political device in her music, it’s an aesthetic choice. As her music is sort of meant to invoke an American 50s-60s sort of artistic aesthetic to it, it’s not surprising she would choose a genre style that would emulate that.

So we have to look into more of the what then, what else goes into her music to make it authentically hers? And for that we’re going to have to backtrack to something I said before, the element of sad girl music. Now I wanna preface this by saying it’s not exactly a widely studied musical phenomenon at this point because the sad girl aesthetic as we understand it hasn’t been around for more than let’s say a decade at most. In fact I was only able to find one peer reviewed article on it and a handful of other smaller not necessarily academic sources. That being said, the author does a very good job at providing us the context we need to understand why the sad girl aesthetic is inherently political. Before we get into it though, for those who haven’t listened to her, let’s do that first!

So the paper I’m going to be using here to discuss this phenomenon is called “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls: Affect, Race, (Dis)Possession, and Protest” by Heather Mooney who is a PhD candidate from Boston University. Just a note, when looking into any subject it’s best you look for information published by scholars at accredited institutions. That means look for journals that publish the work of professors, PhD students, and other official type researchers. Its also best to figure out who funds the journal your reading because some are definitely better than others and some might be biased based on who they’re funded by. This has been your academic PSA. ANYHOO In her abstract Mooney explains how both identities discussed affect resistant identities in online spaces. So what is the sad girl aesthetic? Why is it important to music and people in general but also why is it political.

Sad girl aesthetic is born as a sort of a reactionary movement to the idea of the can-do girl. The can-do girl being of course the idea that girls are strong and can do anything boys can do etc, essentially whatever comes to your mind when you think most broadly of girl power is the can do girl. Why did it need a reactionary movement? Well, like most things that tend to occur in a capitalist society the idea of girl power quickly became monetized, having biting sayings on tshirts, entire clothing lines spawned from this idea of powerful capable women, white women especially being the target market. The issue with this is that the capitalizing of the aesthetic fails to bring into account any of the flaws that it has and where girls feeling more confident and powerful is great the movement doesn’t necessarily address issues of sexism and patriarchal suppression that the movement originally spawned from. The sad girl then stands as a form of protest to this commercialization and lack of critical thinking into those issues. So politically speaking the sad girl movement is a movement primarily effecting women and how they wish to be seen. Mooney claims that Lana Del Ray herself is very much a keystone in the popularizing of this genre stating that:

“Del Rey’s traction marks a turn in popular culture. As opposed to the “flexible, individualized, resilient, self-driven, and self-made . . . narrative of the successful new young woman who is self-inventing, ambitious, and confident” Del Rey’s (white) Sad Girl serenades sadness and ambivalence. Grrrl power and empowerment ballads are not part of Del Rey’s Sad Girl imaginary. While Del Rey is (hetero)sexually agentic and desirous, her music refuses the normative expectations of the “empowered” can-do girl. Arguably, the traction of Del Rey and the Sad Girl suggests a collective disaffection of – and resistance to- the can do girl.”

The sad girl aesthetic does more than just protest against a capitalist idea of what girls are supposed to be however, it also serves as a means of trying to round out certain types of feminism. Feminism, of course, is a movement that prizes the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of sexes. That’s straight from dictionary.com, it’s the simplest and best definition we have on it. Unfortunately, like many things in this world, when the idea of feminism first started, it mainly had to do with white and middle to upper class women. Fortunately, feminism, particularly intersectional feminism, has now come to stand for the struggles of not only the original groups that it fought for but also the struggles of poor women, women of colours, immigrants, and women from all different ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. Feminism can be tricky as any social change movement as it needs to change in accordance to the society around it, challenging new problems it comes across. In the case of modern feminisms, and particularly in the idea of the can-do girl, it presented a very one sided idea of what it was to be a person who identified as a woman comprised of mostly it’s beautiful and wonderful and amazing to be a woman and nothing can get in our way. While this seems a great message to convey especially to young girls, it doesn’t allow for the ups and downs of being human.

To quote another part of her paper:

“Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip: feminism doesn’t need to advocate for how awesome and fun being a girl is. Feminism needs to acknowledge that being a girl in the world right now is one of the hardest things there is—it is unimaginably painful—and that our pain doesn’t need to be discarded in the name of empowerment. It can be used as a material, a weight. . . to jam that machinery.”

In this way by choosing the sad girl aesthetic for her music, Lana Del Ray is making a political statement with or without consciously knowing she’s done it.

I hope these examples demonstrate the point that I want to make sure you guys get in this weeks episode which is that aesthetics are always going to be political because aesthetics are developed in societies, and societies shape and are shaped by politics. You’ve now heard about it in punk as a genre and Lana Del Ray’s sad-girl inspired music, but the reason I need you guys to get this post is because looking at the politics of the music is something that will be a regular point when examining genres going forward, it is consistent across all musics, and to fully understand why music sounds the way it sounds, why the lyrics are what they are, and it’s being performed in the genre that it is, we need to understand the politics, and thus the aesthetics of the time.

So with that, hat’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next week where we’ll be starting into our north American music genres series with Folk music. In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical question or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

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EPISODE 3 OUT TODAY: HOW MUSIC IS POLITICAL!

wanna learn a thing? I'll learn ya a thing. Music and politics are inherantly linked and theres nothing you can do about it! Wanna find out how? Maybe give this episode a listen.

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