>>> andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> 11/19/2007
12:57 PM >>>
I guess when white folk took up fiddles and banjos to play English-Irish-Scots jigs, reels, and ballads, black folk just shut their ears.
Which is nonsense, musicologists who trace influence have observed that lots of blues songs are basically taken over from the Child Ballads, something recognized by Harry Smith, whose Anthology of American Folk Music discriminately mixes blues, gospel, zydeco, folk, country -- to show that it is a seamless whole.
Btw, European-American classical music wasn't snooty about folk either, quite the contrary, from Beethoven through Liszt, Dvorak and Brahms to Brittan, Copeland, and the Gershwins, appropriation of folk music is a constant theme in classical music.
The whole attempt to find some ethnically pure music (like the idiotic debate about whether jazz is "black") is futile and destructive. White men can't play the blues? Tell it to Johnny Winter (and Muddy Waters, who worked with him), Roy Buchanan, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton. Jazz is black music? What do Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Lennie Tristano, Joe Lovano play, then? Rock is white music? Who's that Hendrix fella and what is he doing with that guitar? What's Living Colour and Vernon Reid? None of these people shut their ears. Hendrix could bluesify an old English drinking song (To Anacreon in Heaven)that some superpower had appropriated as a national anthem with different words, blast it as rock throw feed-back distorted meg-amps, and make a brilliant work of art and political statement. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie made up bebop by taking the chords of a 1930 show tune by the some Jewish guys (the Gershwin's I Got Rhythm), throwing way the melody, and improvising on the chords with a sound from blues, music theory from European classical music, and speed from bluegrass and English-Irish folk.
Those interested in racist-culturist garbage about the inferiority of certain groups (like, on the left, Southern whites) won't be affected by facts, but they remain facts anyway.
In the end, the classifications are just marketing devices and good musicians listen to everything they can and steal and transform it all. As Duke Ellington said when some dumbell asked if he played "jazz" or "swing," "There are two kinds of music: good music, and bad music."
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> >No, don't forget the European influence on this
> stuff.
> >I don't know how to quantify this stuff, but the
> >influence of European folk music is not
> negligeable.
^^^^^^^^ CB: Yea, it's more a kind of proportional influence. There is European and white influence in blues, jazz, rock'n roll, r and b, but it is a "minority" influence. The major influence is Black. This is significant because in just about everything else in American culture the major influence is white. Popular music is different than most of the rest of US culture, (except maybe sports culture) in having major Black influence in the blues, jazz, ragtime, rocknroll, soul, Spirituals and Gospel genres.
Also, there is a differentiating dynamic in an oppressed group making itself distinct from its oppressor group. So, in many ways Black music is explicitly, purposefully, definitively and consciously "not-white". Blues and jazz as played by Black people was not just not white because Blacks were forbidden to be like whites, but because it was a way for Black people to be different from whites ideally, in the sense of Black is beautiful, we want to be different from whites. It is in many ways specifically developed in antagonism to white musical forms. It is national liberationist music. You dig ?
^^^^
^^^^^^^^^
> >
> >
> >
> It wouldn't be folk music. More like Bach, via
> church music.
>
> Joanna
>
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