Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White

Conclusion

When Republican George H. W. Bush was inaugurated as the forty-first U.S. president in January of 1989, the festivities ended with a nearly four-hour-long rhythm and blues show at the Washington Convention Center. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater conceived the concert, which featured seasoned blues musicians like Willie Dixon, Albert Collins, Koko Taylor, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Atwater himself, and even, during a brief jam session, the newly elected president playing an electric guitar inscribed “the prez.” The New York Times reported that the evening, despite its title “Celebration for Young Americans,” featured music “not widely popular among young whites or blacks” and that the crowd was reminiscent of a “country-club prom, with tuxedos and strapless dresses and little gold or pearl earrings (on the women, that is).”1 There he was, Lee Atwater, wearing sunglasses and playing the blues for the Republican Party of the United States. The employment of blues music at Bush’s inaugural gala dramatically illustrates the strengthening of a conservative blues formation after the 1960s. As I have argued throughout this book, the 1960s saw a reconfiguration of the blues from black to white in its production and reception while remaining deeply connected with constructions of an authentic blackness (as in the marketing of black audiences on B. B. King’s records to white consumers). At the American Folk Blues Festival and in the British Blues Movement, the music crossed national boundaries, and at the Newport Folk Festival and in the psychedelic rock of Janis Joplin and Cream, the blues and other forms of black music were featured as agents of cross-racial communication and civil rights. However, in the long run the increased whitening of the blues led not to a more flexible, but rather to a more rigid conceptualization of the genre and a commercially driven, nostalgic celebration of an invented past informed by essentialist notions of race and gender. 135 Conclusion It’s me who’s payin’ my dues So please, man, don’t tell me about the blues. —Buddy Guy ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ There is an important connection between the racial politics of blues music in the 1960s and blacks’ struggle for civil rights in the United States. In the years I have focused on—roughly 1955 to 1975—the conceptualization of blues music underwent significant changes, which were directly related to the crucial events of the period’s civil rights movement: school integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, lunch-counter sit-ins and marches, the Watts riots, the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, to name just a few. Meanwhile, whites began embracing a safe and nostalgic notion of blackness that blacks themselves were increasingly rejecting. One can argue that in the more than three decades since 1975, the changes that have occurred in the conceptualization of blues music and in the civil rights struggle have been much less powerful. As post–civil rights generations faced the continued oppression of African Americans, blues music remained an emblem of the white attempt to reinvent a benign past and put blacks in their place. The intricacies of more subtle but pervasive parameters of black oppression since 1975 and how they were reflected in blues music are worth investigating. The attempts to revive the blues in the 1960s and the shift to largely white audiences with the simultaneous reification of black masculinity as a mark of authenticity had a lasting impact on the practice and reception of the blues in the decades that followed. In the 1970s, older African American electric blues artists like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker continued to play before largely white audiences and still had moderately successful albums. White blues-rock artists like Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, George Thorogood, and ZZ Top and blues-influenced white southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd sold millions of records and cemented the notion that the blues was the legitimate domain of white males.2 With the shift from blues to rock, more traditional forms of the genre became less popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but the 1990s saw a full-fledged, commercially driven blues revival, which to some degree has continued, involving some of the same now-aging white audiences who had first embraced the blues in the 1960s. The shift from vinyl records to CDs in the 1990s fueled sales...