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308 Appendix II BLUES, JAZZ AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE: MUSICIANS AND CIVIL RIGHTS As was introduced in chapter 1, the powerful, evocative nature and sociological significance of blues and jazz were profound factors in the evolution of the self-image of African-Americans and had, through major Black musicians and some White ones, an increasing impact on their standing in the broader society and progress on Civil Rights. This appendix more fully presents my own vision on the subject, and it casts the net more broadly than the material in chapter 1, looking beyond the primary focus on Lonnie Johnson to wider developments in music and Civil Rights. The winding road to fully realizing democratic citizenship for all Americans was manifest in such significant detours as the 1896 Supreme Court decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. The Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional; but the ruling effectively affirmed African-Americans as unequal and further legitimized segregation. Jazz writer Charles Edward Smith connected blues music with the decision: “Blues had emerged from the welter of Negro folk music most forcefully by the 1890s, providing another Minority Opinion than that of Justice Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson . . . For it was the cry of a people, as well as a song or a way of singing it.”1 In the introduction to his powerful book Blues People (1963) Leroi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka) offered this keynote to his discussion of the evolution of Black folks/“Blues People”: “The one peculiar referent to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to ‘citizenship’ is his music. . . . I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes” in their development from slavery to citizens.2 In his fascinating memoir Treat It Gentle (1960—his original title was, “Where Did It Come From?”), Sidney Bechet gave us a look into the heart of that precise point, with elemental eloquence and folk wisdom: The slaves felt a trouble on them . . . The only thing they had that couldn’t be taken from them was their music. Their song, it was coming right up from the fields, settling itself in their feet and working right up, right up into their stomachs, into their spirit, into their fear, into their longing . . . It was like it had no end, nowhere even to wait for an end, nowhere to hope for a change in things. But it had a beginning, and that much they understood . . . it was a feeling in them, a memory that came from a long way back. It was like they were trying to work the music back to its beginning and then start it over again, start it over and build it to a place where it could stop somehow, Appendix II: Blues, Jazz and Their Significance: Musicians and Civil Rights 309 to a place where the music could put an end to itself and become another music, a new beginning that could begin them over again. There were chants and drums and voices—you could hear all that in it—and there was love and work and worry and waiting ; there was being tired, and the sun, and the overseers following behind them so they didn’t dare stop and look back. It was all in the music . . . All the music I play is from what was finding itself in my grandfather’s time . . . Because all the strains that went to make up the spirituals, they were still unformed, still waiting for the heart of ragtime to grab them up, mix in with them, bring them out of where only a few people could feel the music and need it, bring it out to where it could say what it had to say . . . Mostly there was this big change: a different feeling had got started. Go down Moses Way down to Egypt land; Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go . . . It was years they’d been singing that. And suddenly there was a different way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines. All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting music, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy music now. It was Free Day . . . Emancipation. And New Orleans just bust wide open.”3 Most African cultures were primarily oral, rather than written; and song and telling the stories of their people were key elements of those cultures. After being taken from...

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