The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

10. Popular Culture

10 popular culture Even amid all the conflict over race, there existed in South Carolina and throughout the South an ongoing and deep cultural exchange that included food, music, religion, and even the taboo arena of sex. White southerners enjoying the taste of succulent boiled peanuts in the summer, sweet potatoes in the fall and winter, and rice year round seldom recognized that these and other foods had come with the slave population from Africa. Country and bluegrass music fans rarely recognized that the banjo, whose music they took for granted, was originally an African instrument that blacks working for the railroad took to the mountain regions of the South.(Bluegrass musicians themselves generally are proudly aware of their borrowed instrument ’s source.) Many of the gospel songs sung in church, especially in small towns and the countryside,were the same in both white and black churches.Thomas Dorsey, who wrote popular gospel hymns such as “Peace in the Valley” that were sung in many white churches, was an African American who started out as a blues musician. Although a distant second to New Orleans, Charleston, with its Jenkins Orphanage Band that toured Europe,produced some first-rate jazz musicians. Jazz itself was never recognized by the New York and Boston gatekeepers of what constituted art until after jazz musicians won recognition and acclaim in Paris and elsewhere in Europe and the music crossed back over the Atlantic. And in mid-twentieth-century South Carolina, as elsewhere in the South, both black and white church attendance was higher than in the country as a whole. For whites it meant a religion that taught brotherhood in a culture that taught separation. Blacks absorbed in church the prophetic demand for justice and also a message of forgiveness. For all, the church projected an underlying Southern 500. The Darlington International Raceway was built in 1950. The 1.36-mile track hosted the Southern 500 every Labor Day. The final Southern 500 was held in 2004 as NASCAR’s fan base and national headquarters moved outside its native region. History of South Carolina Slide Collection, F-60; image courtesy of the Darlington County Historical Commission The Jenkins Orphanage Band is shown in this picture from 1900 in their discarded Citadel cadet uniforms. The band raised money for the black orphanage by performing throughout the United States and Europe. History of South Carolina Slide Collection, G-33; image courtesy of the South Carolina State Museum message of love. In the years ahead the moral message received by the overwhelmingly Protestant population in South Carolina would ease the transition into a biracial society that continues to evolve. By far the most sensitive issue of all involved sexual relations and racial identity, as demonstrated in defining who was white and who was black at the 1895 state constitutional convention. Arguing against defining anyone with one-sixteenth or more black blood as nonwhite—on the grounds it would disqualify too many people identified as whites—George Tillman prevailed over his younger brother Ben. Many of these underlying cultural elements would come into play in 1950 at Charlie’s Place, a nightclub in Myrtle Beach owned and operated by Charlie Fitzgerald, a husky, six-foot-three black man whose skin color denoted some white ancestry. The story of what happened at Charlie’s Place at midcentury remains little recognized, yet it reflects a defining part of South Carolina ’s cultural heritage. The whole story was uncovered through oral history interviews by New York writer Frank Beacham, a native of Honea Path, South Carolina, whose grandfather had been mayor and plant superintendent there during the 1934 textile strike. Many of the nation’s top musicians—Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne,Count Basie,Billy Eckstine,Billie Holiday,and other names among the “race music” artists of the 1940s and 1950s—made stops at Charlie’s Place. Music that mixed jazz and blues with black gospel,with a provocative beat and sometimes raunchy lyrics, was taboo on radio stations in the state, one of which proclaimed with pride that it played no “jungle” music. Unknown to their parents, however, many music-loving white teenagers listened late at night,sometimes to a radio tucked under a pillow,to Nashville’s 50,000-watt WLAC, which played the “devil’s music” under its new name, rhythm and blues. On trips to Myrtle Beach, some of...