Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

8 Sharings

8 Sharings We knew that probably the most powerful and potent weapon that people have literally no defense for is love, kindness. —Franklin McCain, ‘‘The South’s First Sit-in,’’ February 1, 1960 By God, maybe the South will save us all. Maybe the South contains the real American future. —Peter Schrag, ‘‘A Hesitant New South: Fragile Promise on the Last Frontier’’ The great tragedy was that southern blacks and whites had touched each other in so many ways over the centuries, but the artifice of history obscured the common bond of place, blood, and culture. Deeper than the casual contacts of workers, and more lasting than the occasional, yet genuine, kindnesses that occurred between black and white, the very essence of southern culture knew no racial boundaries. The amalgam produced a unique AfroEuropean culture in the South before the Civil War, and the strictures of racial segregation did little to reverse the connections. Thus the great tragedy produced a great irony: two peoples, forced to live separate lives, joined in countless ways to produce one culture. The human spirit triumphs over its folly. Few aspects of southern culture demonstrate this black-white amalgam better than southern music; the whole repertoire of it, from blues to rock ’n’ 239 240 Still Fighting the Civil War roll, reflects the numerous crossings between the two communities. The blues emerged from the Deep South at about the same time that states hardened the color line, though the music probably evolved much earlier. Charles Peabody, a Harvard archaeologist, wrote about the strange music he heard in Mississippi during an excavation of Indian mounds in the late nineteenth century . Unaccompanied and improvisational singing coupled with melody lines borrowed from white ballads characterized this new music. Instruments, especially the guitar, livened the tunes, and soon blacks throughout the South used the wail of the blues to express their feelings, tell a story, or just have fun. W. C. Handy introduced the blues to white audiences in Memphis, and it became immensely popular in the Beale Street bars and honky tonks before it spread to the North along with southern black migration during World War I. Jazz, kin to blues but different in its rhythms and complexity, had an even more diverse southern lineage. According to historian John Boles, jazz emerged as ‘‘a creative blending of African, Caribbean, and European; religious music, secular music; minstrelsy, ragtime, blues, and brass marching bands.’’ The blues came out of the cotton fields; jazz flourished in the cities of the Deep South in the 1890s, and in New Orleans most of all, where blacks put European instruments through syncopated paces, none better than trumpeter Charles ‘‘Buddy’’ Bolden. Within a generation, George Gershwin had adapted the rhythms of jazz for ‘‘serious’’ music, with his ‘‘Rhapsody in Blue’’ in 1924.1 White adaptations of black music were common, just as blacks borrowed from white culture, playing European instruments and using extant sacred and secular music to construct blues and jazz. Country-music star Hank Williams borrowed blues rhythms and movements that scandalized the country establishment but delighted a new generation of fans. Rock ’n’ roll demonstrated the most obvious cross-fertilization between black and white southern music. Sam Phillips owned a small recording studio in Memphis in the early 1950s. Although Phillips was white, he believed that so-called race music, rhythm and blues numbers recorded by black musicians, could find a white audience. In March 1951 he recorded Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats singing ‘‘Rocket 88,’’ perhaps the first rock ’n’ roll record ever made. Not too far away, in Tupelo, Mississippi, a young Elvis Presley listened to ‘‘race music’’ on his radio. When he moved to Memphis, Presley persuaded Phillips to record him. His first single, ‘‘That’s All Right Mama,’’ combined the styles Sharings 241 of black blues (the song was originally recorded by black blues artist Arthur ‘‘Big Boy’’ Crudup) and white country music, a mixture that would stamp rock ’n’ roll as a new and vital musical form.2 Just as the air waves carried ‘‘race music’’ into white homes, it also wafted the Grand Ole Opry and country music into countless black homes in the South, influencing such young blues artists as Ray Charles Robinson (Ray Charles) and Richard Penniman (‘‘Little Richard’’). Presley’s success opened the mass market for black blues performers such as Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, in...