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inetist Don Byron. Byron is an eclectic musical omnivore who in addition to jazz has digested classical, klezmer, ragtime, and salsa music. As an undergraduate student at the New England Conservatory, Byron joined the Klezmer Conservatory Band, about which he says: I immediately responded to the mischief in the music, where the clarinet would play the most out thing he could think of . . . [and] as time went by, I developed my own voice in that language.30 So the question now seems to have become one of fashioning a personal and artistic identity and developing or ‹nding one’s own voice particularly in culturally unfamiliar idiolects and discourses. Finding and developing one’s own artistic voice is not easy even in familiar cultural spaces using one’s native language and idiolect. Often one is confronted by the rigid orthodoxies of one’s own tradition. Consider the experience of folk singer Rosalie Sorrells. I had accepted the idea that you should keep yourself out of the performance when you sang folk songs: “The song—not the singer.” But at the [1966] Newport Festival . . . it became clear to me that you take it all in, turn it over and over until you ‹nd your own voice, and you take your place in the chain. The music does not need to be protected.31 As the interviewer David Whiteis explains, Sorrells was surprised at the resistance she and her colleagues often had to overcome in order to introduce new original material of their own composition. Sorrells again: Jean Ritchie wrote a whole lot of great songs about where she came from [in rural Kentucky], marvelous songs, and when she put them out she said they were written by an uncle of hers (because she got so much shit for writing her own songs)! I take it now, when I look back on it, as a control-freak thing. Purists are usually people who haven’t touched life very much.32 Or consider the similar reaction of the folk music establishment to the journey of Bob Dylan, as described here by Greil Marcus. He ‹rst made himself known to more than a few in the early 1960s, in New York City, as the self-proclaimed heir to Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie. . . . As the familiar standards of the folk music revival faded from his repertoire, he became . . . the voice of the civil rights movement; then he became the voice of his times and the conscience of his generation. . . . All of this was suspended in the air—and, for thouFake It Till You Feel It 143 sands who had followed Dylan’s progress as a con‹rmation of their own, dashed to the ground—when in July 1965 the folk singer who once dressed only in fraying cotton appeared onstage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar in his hands and a high-style leather jacket on his back (“a sellout jacket”). . . . [T]he result was an uproar: a torrent of shouts, curses, refusal, damnation, and perhaps most of all confusion.33 In some cases a perceived “betrayal of the cultural cause” is denounced; in other cases defenses of cultural space are erected against trespass by inauthentic interlopers; in some cases a Platonic-seeming quest is undertaken for cultural essences whereby to mark off the “real thing” from the inauthentic imitation and/or dilution. What is essential to all such critical positions is concern with the delineation and defense of cultural boundaries or thresholds and only incidentally, if at all, with the artist’s “authenticity of voice.” But always and inevitably the artist faces the profound challenges of self-knowledge and self-acceptance essential to the attainment of mature and responsible adulthood. All cultural transmission—literate, oral, whatever—involves imitation. So every new generation of culture in any tradition will be deeply imitative and derivative. It’s worth noting that, although the Butter‹eld band is everybody’s ‹rst and favorite example of a “white blues band,” it was always racially mixed. The classi‹cation “white” ›ows from the fact that the bandleader, who sang lead vocal and played one of the lead solo instruments (harmonica), was a white man. But let us not forget that Paul Butter‹eld got to be bandleader in large part because he commanded respect as a player. You don’t get Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm section if you can’t play. And Butter‹eld earned respect as a player in a way typical of oral musical traditions...

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