>Maybe Louis P has explored the link between white blues musicians and black
>economic progress in the US economy. Maybe there's not much to explain, but
>whites who "broke the color line" - Booker T and the MGs clearly did have an
>impact in the 60s in getting white kids to think about race. Problem is, I
>suspect they forgot about it once they all started listening to Kenny G etc.
>
>jason
Of course the problem is that too few ever listened to Hendrix.
Consider the following by Jennifer Jordan in her "Cultural Nationalism in the 60s:
"The blues even todayg is a music which has become increasingly removed from its creative source, a music much loved by middle class white youth who are evidently more blue than black youth or who perhaps are merely nostalgic for a time when black people were a little less threatening and the white man was the unquestioned master of his and our fate. I cannot accept Fanon's definition of the blues asa 'type of jazz howl hiccupeed by a poor misfortunate Negro,' 'trapped hatred of the white man.' We know that John Lee Hooker has more spirit than this description implies, that the blues is more than some self pitying lament. However as much as we might John Lee, the plantation drudgery and the particular type of depredations that his particular Mississippi vistied upon him no longer exist; and the present cannot reproduce his duplicate. Since culture does nto remain static, the only way that the blues can remain vital is for it be transformed by the present. Yet when [Jimmi] Hendrix played it the only way that a young man of the 1960s could, given his place in history, the majority of Black people rejected him and his music. So maybe the blues will have to disappear or live on in our literature. There is no choice really. To try to hold on to it or to any cultural material which is no longer organic is to try to stop time." p. 32
In Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr. Greenwood Press, 1986.