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13 1 Being Black Twice Crossover Politics in B. B. King’s Music of the Late 1960s What did I do to be so black and blue? –Harry Brooks, Andy Razaf, and Fats Waller in a song popularized by Louis Armstrong On July 29, 1969, Rolling Stone magazine ran an ad for Live and Well, the latest recording of the blues singer and guitarist B. B. King, as well as for his appearance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on six different dates. “Pop! goes the King,” the ad proclaimed in big letters.1 For many readers of the magazine, this might have been the first encounter with one of the authenticated originators of blues music, which had been transformed and popularized by musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Johnny Winter. But what exactly did “going pop” and playing at the Mecca of the growing white counterculture mean for a black blues performer like B. B. King, whose career had been on a downhill slide since his massive chart successes among black audiences in the 1950s and who was now about to cross over? B. B. King’s crossover success, symbolized by his six-date engagement at the Fillmore, works well to introduce some of the major shifts in blues culture that occurred in the 1960s. Young white audiences developed a strong interest in a music that blacks had largely abandoned. As a result, white rock psychedelia became an integral part of the marketing and consumption of the blues. At the same time, black masculinity remained pivotal for claims to blues authenticity and became even more pronounced than it had been when blues audiences had been mostly black. Despite tendencies in King’s music to escape a narrow classi fication in terms of race and despite its cross-racial appeal, the formation of a conservative blues culture in the 1960s demanded an unambiguous racialization . In the case of B. B. King and many other black performers, this resulted in playing black music for white audiences. King’s story can help to explain the astoundingly clean shift from black to white audiences of blues music over the ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ course of the 1960s, a shift that had far-reaching consequences for how we understand the genre today. The Shifting Audience Scholarship on the blues has largely failed to discuss the audiences for the music. Almost exclusively written by white men, blues studies oftentimes focus on an imagined time when the blues was purely black and ignore its politics of racialization including the significant shift in terms of race that occurred in the 1960s. Although most blues studies take it for granted that real blues music is played by black performers for black audiences and because there are very few firsthand accounts of these audiences, they largely remain the vociferous but ultimately silent backdrop on a few live blues albums recorded before 1965. To get a notion of the audiences B. B. King had before he crossed over, I examined the coverage of the blues in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender between 1955 and 1975. In addition, I interviewed a number of older black blues audience members on the South Side of Chicago.2 Broadly speaking, one striking difference between white and black audiences is the latter’s much looser understanding of the term blues. In 1956, the Chicago Defender described modern black music as “jazz, Rock ’N Roll, blues or whatever one chooses to call the style.”3 With the rising popularity of soul music, Aretha Franklin appeared as “Queen of the Blues” and Otis Redding as a “blues star” in the newspaper. When asked about blues performers, older black audiences I spoke with mentioned not only B. B. King and Muddy Waters, but also a number of singers and musicians that white histories of black music classify as big band jazz (Joe Williams), pop (Nat King Cole), and soul (Wilson Pickett).4 Yet, regardless of classifications of musical styles, the civil rights movement brought about a move toward more upbeat and polished sounds of gospel-fueled and soulful celebrations of black power. Sherman Kane, a contractor who grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, remembers the blues as “fading out” at the time.5 Mary C. Browne, who was born in Alabama and moved to Chicago in 1940 to work as a nurse, recalls how “Caucasian people wanted to come to our places but we couldn’t go to theirs. They wanted to take our...

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