Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe

PREFACE

ix Preface The centenary celebrations of W. C. Handy’s “discovery” of the blues in 20031 included considerable recognition of the influence of the classic African American music beyond America’s shores. Much attention was given particularly to the inspirational effects of the blues on British popular music, both in the official Year of the Blues website2 and in film documentaries such as Red, White and Blues, directed by Mike Figgis as one of the seven-part series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, broadcast on national television in the United States and in the United Kingdom.3 While the links between the blues and popular music in Europe are probably well-known in the United States, there is often little appreciation of the wider impact of black music. It is clear that African American musical influences were not just limited to those of the blues on popular music of the 1960s, nor just to Britain. From the time of slavery onwards, black music in one form or another, from minstrelsy, through to gospel song and jazz, was performed and heard across many parts of Europe—and beyond. In turn people of African and/or Afro-Caribbean origin often took music back across the Atlantic to the United States. It was in recognition of this significant transatlantic cultural exchange that a conference entitled “‘Overseas Blues’: European Perspectives on African American Music” was held at the University of Gloucestershire, supported by the European Blues Association, in July 2004.4 The speakers at the conference, from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany, included some of the major writers on the subject, such as Paul Oliver, Bob Groom, Rainer Lotz, Guido van Rijn, as well as younger scholars exploring the subject from a more contemporary perspective. Although the focus of the papers was essentially on Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, they ranged across disciplines, offering interpretations that were historical, musical, social, and philosophical. Together they covered the influence of black music, chronologically from the late nineteenth century through to the present, examining the European reception of the variety of musical forms, and considering the nature of the appeal of black music to European collectors, audiences, and musicians. Some (but not all) of the papers from the conference have been rewritten and expanded for this volume. While the central focus is on the blues, some chapters deal with other forms of black music, particularly jazz; and because the subject offered more than “European perspectives” and focused on more than a one-way flow of music, the title for the book has been changed to Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe. The collection begins with my own broad overview of the subject raising some of the issues and concerns to be addressed in more detail by other contributors from a personal historical perspective. The personal point of view continues with Paul Oliver’s insight into the appeal of the blues to British audiences of his generation. As one of the earliest writers on the topic, and now one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of African American music, Oliver is a prime example not only of the way in which black American culture took hold in Europe, but also how it became part of transatlantic culture. His influence is reflected in this collection in a variety of different ways—but especially in the endnote references in almost every chapter. Broad, general (one might say, universal) questions about the blues are explored by David Webster looking at the appeal of African American music, particularly the blues,for a white (European) audience in broad,philosophical terms. Points raised in these early chapters inform most of the remainder which deal with particular historical and geographical locations: Jeffrey Green challenges the assumption that people of African origin were only active in non–concert hall or “classical” music making, and looks at black composers who also went to the United States from Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Rainer Lotz provides an examination of, and begins x PREFACE to document, the largely unresearched subject of the impact of black music in early recordings both in the United States and in Europe, particularly Germany, and of German interest in black music prior to the First World War, while Catherine Parsonage looks at the mixed responses to jazz in Britain...