Big Chief Henry’s Indian String Band, 1920s

The two earliest distinctly American music forms – country music and the blues – are usually presumed to be a clear evolution of “white” and “black” musical traditions.

In other words, country music is presumed to find its ultimate origins in European music, while the blues are presumed to be rooted in African culture.

Regarding country music in particular, some people go even further, and attempt to pin its origins in specifically in the Protestant communities of 1700s Northern Ireland.

I’ve already written elsewhere and at length as to why this is a belief without foundation, so we’ll skip that argument for now.

Today, let’s throw another cat among the pigeons.

What if the blues didn’t originate in Africa at all?

Before anyone spits out their coffee, thinking it might be my intention to rob the blues from the early African-American musicians and singers who played and sang it, catch a breath and read on…

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Let’s travel back in time to 1920s America, after the First World War, but before the Great Wall Street Crash of ’29.

The recording industry was still in its infancy, but showing signs of the boom to come.

Ethno-musicologists began to traipse into the mountains, swamps, and other rural places of America in order to document and collect old-time American folk music before it could be drowned under the oncoming tidal wave of record industry-produced “popular music”.

This was the golden age of field recording, and it was the first time that many of America’s city dwellers got to hear “Old Time” or “Blues” records, instead of marching bands and la-la-la songbirds and nasal crooners.

It is an old truism that people tend to see and notice the things they are looking for in the first place.  I have often said that Buddhists do not tend to see the face of Jesus on burnt toast.

The same could be said of music history.  People hear what they are expecting to hear.

Some of these early field recorders (like Alan Lomax), were magpies, eager to record and collect just about anything.

Other early field recorders of American folk music came looking to “collect” specific things.

Recorders like Cecil Sharp were specifically looking for connections between Southern Appalachian ballads and traditional English folk songs, hoping to draw a line of cultural continuity between musical traditions largely disappeared from an industrialised England, and a living tradition still clinging-on in rural Appalachia.

These folk historians, field recorders, and music enthusiasts did not say “Let’s just record everything we hear, and let others figure out where it came from”.

Even the most enlightened and sympathetic musicologists carried certain presumptions about the origins of the music they were documenting in the 1920s – whether it was the music being played and sung by “white” mountain folks, or by African-Americans.

Most of these early recorders and collectors of “black music” in particular just presumed that African-American musical traditions could – and should – be traceable back along a river with its ultimate source in Africa.

So these early recorders and collectors of “negro music” tended to focus on collecting music which THEY perceived as being distinctly “African-American music”, BECAUSE THEY HAD NO OTHER REFERENCE POINT FOR IT.

This act of unconscious “curation on the hoof” is why old-time ballads were more often recorded in Appalachian homes, and the blues were more often recorded in the Deep South.

This is also how “old-time” or “hillbilly” music (later called “country” music) came to be seen solely as “white” music, with the blues seen solely as “black” music.

If early field recorders of American folk music had chosen to simply record EVERYTHING being sung by “black”, “white”, and “brown” folks, a different picture might have emerged – one in which the lines between musical genres were far more fluid and blurred, with multiple styles being sung and played by all ethnic groups.

America being America – a nation built on capitalism and a racial caste system – music soon became a marketable and controllable commodity, and musical forms had to be slotted into “racial” categories in order to be marketed to their “target audience”.

Under the American binary race system, the music of the rural hinterlands and heartlands had to be clearly divisible into a European tradition, and an African tradition.

But that’s not how music works, and has never been how music works.

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Let’s set aside for the time being the old-time ballads and blues laments which were being sung into a can for field recorders, and ask ourselves a question.

What would any of us – black, white, or other – sing or play into a microphone for a stranger who came asking for an old song today?

Would we sing the oldest one we knew?  Our favorite?  The one best suited to our own voice?  The one we remembered all the verses to?  The one our old fingers could pick on a banjo or guitar without stumbling?

As a child of the 60s and 70s, most of the songs I might be able to belt out today at a drunken karaoke night were written or performed by people like Sam Cooke, Waylon Jennings, or Simon and Garfunkel.

Does this say anything concrete about my ethnic background?

Of course, I have had access to far more musical variety than rural dwellers of the 1920s, but still.  Did the choice of music played and sung by people – even then – really say anything concrete about their ancestry?

So let’s leave aside “party pieces”, and ask what was actually happening on the ground during the 1920s – at county fairs, at medicine shows, in dancehalls and roadhouses…

What was being played and recorded in the 1920s by less self-conscious rural people when they felt unconstrained by ethnographers or researchers?

The answer would be mostly folk songs, ballads, gospel music, blues, rag and ragtime, swing, and early jazz.

And if we look back now – again with no agenda – and ask which ethnic groups were playing and recording all this music during the 1920s, what would the answer be?

The answer would be EVERYBODY.  Black, white, brown, or red.

Now, I can hear some people already saying “Okay, sure.  But you’re still talking about a mix of “black” and “white” musical traditions.  Blues music is still a “black” tradition, and country music is still a “white” tradition.”

Not so fast.

Ask yourself this.

Does the western swing music of Bob Wills or the yodelling of Jimmie Rodgers REALLY have any parallel in the ballad and folk traditions of the British Isles?

Can anyone, anywhere, actually demonstrate a clear similarity between southern blues and any traditional musical forms of West Africa?

Maybe, just maybe, the thing which nudged both African and European musical traditions into a distinctly “American” space was the 400-year-long influence of indigenous American music.

Chants.  Call and response.  Was the “chicka-ching” of indigenous dance the inspiration for swing?  And if it was, the very essence of jazz is “swing”…

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This is not the place to recount the decades in which Euro-Americans shared a common physical and cultural space with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes in North Carolina, East Tennessee, Mississippi and North Georgia.

The decades before “The Trail of Tears” and wider Indian removal to reservations.

This is also not the place to explain how the Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw (often as slaveholders), left an indelible cultural and genetic imprint on African-American peoples for centuries.

But this IS the place for asking why almost no one remembers that early blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf (born Chester Arthur Burnett) were part-descended from Choctaw people.

It is also a good place to mention that musicians like Howlin’ Wolf thoroughly idolised singers like Jimmie Rodgers.

#BeforeWeWereWhite  #history  #ethnomusicology  #swing  #jazz  #folk  #CountryMusic  #IndigenousMusic

Lisa Marie Presley in 1990, and members of her father’s Smith and Mansell family

Thinking about the untimely demise of Lisa Marie Presley has brought to mind all of the speculation found online over many years regarding the ethnic origins of her famous father.

Elvis has at various times been said to have had Cherokee, English, Choctaw, Jewish, German, Romani, Scottish, French, Dutch, or Danish roots.

This broad range of purported ethnicities reflects the difficulty in trying to untangle the genealogy of anyone with deep ancestry among the American underclasses.

A few people have pulled me up in the past regarding the use of the term “underclasses”, perhaps believing that the term carries some sort of value judgment.

This is not the case.

“Underclasses” refers to those people who, often through no fault of their own, struggled to gain a foothold in society – whether in terms of education, economic success, social acceptance, or access to the various levers of power.

One thing in American history was always a stone cold fact.

Being seen as anything outside “respectable white Christian” society was a ticket to nowhere.

The climb from “white trash”, “colored”, or “mulatto” into respectability was often a generations-long project.

The very first step in this project always began with religion.

Many evangelical Americans like to believe that America has always been a devout Christian nation, yet large swathes of its “white” underclasses share early roots among communities who practiced a myriad of religious faiths.   We are speaking primarily, but not exclusively, of indigenous and “black” communities here.

Think about it.

For people of color, a profession of Christian faith was the absolute bare minimum required in order to even be considered human.

For dirt-poor “white folks”, a profession of Christian faith cost no money, and instantly elevated a person into a position among “a more decent class of folks”.

The long – and not always successful – journey towards self-respect, education, and economic security could now begin…

The raw charisma and talent of Elvis Presley allowed him to leapfrog the generations it usually took most people of his background to reach “respectability”.

Maybe the jump from poor Mississippi underclass to international stardom was simply too much for a simple man to process.  Maybe trans-generational troubles caught-up with his daughter, too.

This is all just musing, because no one can be inside another person’s head.

But one thing is certain.

Having indigenous American, Romani Gypsy, African-American, Jewish, or any other “non-white” ancestry in early American history was not a good starting point for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #LisaMariePresley #ElvisPresley #RagsToRiches

Nancy Jane Edwards and husband Kennedy “Canada” Freeman, circa 1920, probably Clay County, Kentucky

I read it once somewhere that Steven Spielberg spent quite some time finding a suitable cast for Saving Private Ryan.

Spielberg was diligent enough in his research to note that the faces of American soldiers during WWII were more clearly “ethnic” than most members of the US military at the time of filming in 1997.

This would have been due to the huge waves of immigration to the USA which had taken place in the decades before the war, with Eastern Europeans and Italians in particular adding to the American mosaic.

Two or three generations of inter-ethnic mixing since then have blurred the old ethnic edges somewhat.

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But this same process has been ongoing, occurring again and again in the USA and the wider Americas, since the 1500s.

The actor Edward Norton learned this week that his 12th great-grandmother was Matoaka aka “Pocahontas“, a genealogical story which made headlines around the world.

And yet this is only so surprising because Pocahontas and Edward Norton both have “name recognition” in the American canon of celebrity.

I remarked on this aspect of US celebrity culture to a friend – it seems doubtful we’ll ever read about less famous “white” people pleased to be descended from “an African slave woman called Hulda” or a “Catawba washerwoman/sex slave called Sally”, even though the descendants of such couplings are almost innumerable in America…

I suppose part of the surprise regarding Edward Norton lies in the fact that any sharp edges of Powhatan ethnicity have been blurred to such an extent, that had he ever dared to claim indigenous ancestry, he would have been roundly dismissed or even jeered by the majority of Americans.

This levelling-out of ethnic appearance (DNA shuffle) has happened at different speeds in different places.  People “level-out” most quickly in urban environments, more slowly in rural settings, and even slower still in the most remote mountains, hills, hollers, and swamps.

So when we look at photos from 19th and early 20th century Appalachia, for example, and see clear signs of “non-white” ethnicity in the faces of her people, it would be wrong to think we have stumbled upon some mysterious “lost race”.

What we are seeing are the real faces of an earlier “Old Mix” multi-ethnic America, where only some strands looked like Tom Hanks or Grace Kelly.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #EdwardNorton #Pocahontas #StevenSpielberg #SavingPrivateRyan #AppalachianHistory

Hazel Dickens was a West Virginia girl, with deep roots in the mountains there.

During much of the 20th century, urban and suburban America mocked the “hillbillies” of Southern Appalachia, while simultaneously benefiting from cheap Appalachian coal.

And while much of the USA laughed or stared aghast at fare such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “Deliverance“, leather tough mountain women were trying to raise families left fatherless by black lung disease, and entire mountain communities were left with a “choice” between starvation poverty, or just poverty – earning a pittance while Big Business ripped the entire tops off the mountains for the enrichment of energy company shareholders.

A lot of mountain folks stood up against the rapacious coal companies, trusting in their unions to do right by them.

As if fighting the bought politicians and coal companies wasn’t hard enough, many mining families were soon introduced to the corruption of certain union bosses.

Bosses so corrupt that they would order murder hits on honest political opponents, AND THEIR FAMILIES, without blinking an eye.

So in the age of Nixon, Woodstock, Kent State, hippies, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, “laughable” mountain folks had to rely on the voices and songs of their own people.

Voices like that of Hazel Dickens, who only left this world in 2011.

If I were in the trenches, I’d take one woman like this over ten or two dozen January 6th wannabe American heroes.

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Clarksville, Pennsylvania is not too far from here
Coal miners were hoping for a brighter New Year
But for Jock Yablonski, his daughter, and wife
The New Year brought an ending to their precious lives

Well it’s cold blooded murder friends, I’m talking about
Now who’s gonna stand up and who’s gonna fight?
You better clean up that union, put it on solid ground
Get rid of that dirty trash, that keeps a working man down

Well death bells were ringing, Jock knew very well
That’s stolen union money, and Jock just had to tell
‘Cause he wouldn’t take part in their dirty plans
So he paid with his life to help all mining men

Well Jock Yablonski was a coal miner’s friend
He fought for the rights of the working man
He begged the law to protect him, but they turned him down
Now Jock, his wife and daughter all lay beneath the ground

Oh Lord the poor miner, will his fight never end?
They’ll abuse even murder him to further their plans
Oh where is his victory how will it stand?
It’ll stand when poor working men all join hands

Archibald Stansfield Belaney aka “Grey Owl”

Meet “Grey Owl“, born 18 Sep 1888.

A one time fur trapper for Canadian companies, he eventually came to understand the great damage being wrought upon the natural world by unregulated commercial exploitation of natural resources.

During his life, he wrote numerous books, becoming a renowned early spokesperson for the conservation movement.  He was particularly passionate in his arguments for the protection of the North American beaver [Castor canadensis].

Grey Owl had French-Canadian, Mohawk, Ojibwe, and Métis wives and consorts during his relatively short life, and was father to at least 5 children.  His much younger part-Algonquian, part Mohawk wife Anahareo should probably receive credit for first convincing Grey Owl of the evils of commercial fur-trapping.

Grey Owl died aged only 49, his health badly compromised by alcoholism brought on by his experiences during WWI.

After his death in 1938, it was revealed that he was in fact not half-Scottish, half-Apache as he had always claimed.

He was Archibald Stansfield Belaney, of Hastings in Sussex, England.

It is worth considering people like “Grey Owl“, when we argue about cultural and identity appropriation.

Perhaps the motivation of the impostor is more important than the actual identity they assume?

Many, many of us try on new skins as we move through life.  Because our identities usually change incrementally rather than dramatically, it is often only late in life that we recognise our younger self as a complete stranger.

Would the world have listened to a damaged “Archibald Belaney” as he railed against environmental destruction?

Almost certainly not.

So whose crime is bigger?

The crime committed by an impostor with a profound love of indigenous culture and the natural world?

Or the crime committed by people so culturally bankrupt that they can only accept truth when it comes from an “exotic” outside source?

An outsider onto whom we can project our secret dreams and longings for something better?

#BeforeWeWereWhite #CulturalAppropriation #impostors #NatureConservation