Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe

1. “Why I Sing the Blues”: AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE TRANSATLANTIC WORLD

3 As everyone knows, blues, and then rhythm & blues, provided the inspiration not just for early rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, but later for much of the explosion of British popular music in the 1960s and its spread to the European continent. The impact African American music had on specifically British popular culture was celebrated in the widely shown television documentary Red, White and Blues, directed by Mike Figgis as one of the seven-part series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues made to celebrate the “centenary” of the blues in 2003.2 In the course of the documentary well-known British performers including Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Eric Burdon, Tom Jones, and others reflected upon the influence that black American music had on their own development. So much has the blues become a part of British musical culture that the Observer Sunday newspaper could run an ad as the lead up to its monthly edition on music marking “100 years of the Blues” (or as it described it, “Celebrating a century of sorrow”) inviting readers to fill in missing lyrics with the lines which began, of course, “I woke up this morning. . . .”3 1 AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE TRANSATLANTIC WORLD1 —NEIL A. WYNN “Why I Sing the Blues” 4 NEIL A. WYNN Although little mention was made of wider European interest in the blues in Scorsese’s documentary series and accompanying publication, African American music and culture has long had an audience beyond the English Channel.4 Even today, European interest in the blues remains high—it is reported that 70 percent of blues record sales are in Europe, and there are several companies on the continent producing recordings of jazz and blues; and many programs and series devoted to the blues are regularly aired on radio stations.5 Blues performers are often to be found touring in Europe from Sweden to Croatia, Russia to Spain, and beyond, and the many blues magazines and web sites attest to the wide range of interest in black music in all its forms across the continent.6 Europeans did not just listen to or play black music—they were among some of the first to write scholarly works dealing with it. According to one of the leading authorities on the blues, the Englishman Paul Oliver, the first jazz critic in the world was probably the Belgian writer Robert Goffin, who published reviews in 1920 and established the first jazz magazine, Music, in 1921.7 Another Belgian, Yannick Bruynoghe, was one of the earliest biographers of the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy (and the biography was illustrated by Paul Oliver8 ); Bruynoghe, Oliver, George Adins, Jacques Demêtre, Marcel Chauvard, and Albert McCarthy all engaged in field trips to the United States that led to the “discovery” of unknown black blues artists in the 1950s and 1960s. A Frenchman Serge Tonneau published R & B Panorama, described by one writer as “The first blues periodical in Europe (and probably in the world) . . .” in 1960.9 Academic interest remains as strong as ever. “Europe’s largest public research archive on jazz” can be found at the Jazz-Institut in Darmstadt, Germany, another large jazz/blues archive exists in Eisenach, Germany, and a further significant resource is housed at the Institute of Jazz Research in Graz, Austria. Not only did the University of Gloucestershire host the conference in 2004 which produced this book, but in 2006 the university signed an agreement with the European Blues Association (based in Cheltenham) to act as custodian to a major part of the Paul Oliver Collection of African American Music and Related Traditions for use in teaching and research.10 The conference held in Gloucestershire made me think about the subject of the blues, and reminded me of the reasons I had become interested in American, and especially African American, history and culture in the first 5 AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE TRANSATLANTIC WORLD place. By way of introduction to this collection I want to use my personal perspective to examine some of the reasons for the spread and influence of African American culture in western Europe particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, but also in the twentieth century as a whole. Firstly, I want to look at the way I was influenced by African American music and culture as a teenager . Secondly, in doing this I want to locate my journey...