Faking It

When Did Rock'n'Roll Become "Authentic"?

In our book, Faking It, we posit that early rock’n’roll was a reaction against authenticity, and that authenticity only crept into the genre at the inception of folk rock, since folk music was all about authenticity.

My friend Elijah Wald has dug up some quotations that appear to contravene this theory. Most convincingly, in my opinion, is a comment from Billboard in 1963: “Surfing music has to sound untrained with a certain rough flavor to appeal to the teenagers. As in the case of true c.&w., when the music gets too good, and too polished, it isn’t considered the real thing.”

And Columbia producer Mitch Miller, back in 1958, told Dwight MacDonald for a New Yorker piece, “The kids don’t want recognized stars doing their music. They don’t want real professionals. They want faceless young people doing it in order to retain the feeling that it’s their own.”

The requirement that music be unpolished and be performed by the salt of the earth can be traced back to the aesthetics of folk and country music, and was part and parcel of these music’s appeal as far back as the 1920s. But it was also part of the appeal of R&B and rock’n’roll as well. In this sense, authenticity was always important to rock’n’roll, and we were, in some respects, wrong.

Yet at the same time, rock’n’roll moved away from the pure authenticity of country and folk musics: it introduced a strong element of ridiculousness, it emphasized sex and fashion, and its vocal style was far more mannered and perverse than the plain, unadorned singing of folk and country. Rock’n’roll set out to be wild and undisciplined, and as such had to break free from the God’s-honest-truth aesthetic of country and folk. In this sense, rock’n’roll was deliberately inauthentic music.

Why was this remnant of authenticity so important to a group of young men and women who sought complete freedom from the outmoded tastes of their parents, and whose resistance to Hollywood-style marketing was essentially nil?

Because rock’n’roll was rebelling not only against the aesthetics of country music, but against pop music’s aesthetics too--both represented authority. Rebelling against country meant adherence to the ephemeral, the emphasis of desire over faith, the elevation of youth over wisdom, the employment of mannerism rather than sincerity. Rebelling against pop meant stripping the instrumentation down to the bare essentials, playing in a rudimentary style, and retaining all the rough, manly edges that pop had tried to smooth away.

Of course, that didn’t last very long. The biggest rock’n’roll stars were adding strings to their records by 1958, and by 1960, the need for an authentically “dirty” sound in rock’n’roll had been relegated to subgenres like rockabilly and surf music. The large majority of rock’n’roll hits of the pre-folk-rock era were completely divorced from the rough-edged aesthetic.

In our book, we carefully differentiate between personal authenticity (sincerity) and cultural authenticity (being true to tradition). Rock’n’roll roundly rejected personal authenticity. But it retained in some measure the aesthetic of cultural authenticity that was so important to its forebears, the aesthetic of primitivism: “when the music gets too good, and too polished, it isn’t considered the real thing.”

- Yuval

Funk's Death Trip

Here's an article I wrote for Pop Matters called "Funk's Death Trip." Check it out and let me know what you think.

- Yuval

Darkest America

The most popular black American entertainment of the 1890s—among both blacks and whites—was most likely a theatrical extravaganza entitled Darkest America. As one black newspaper described it, Darkest America’s “delineation of Negro life, carrying the race through all their historical phases from the plantation, into the reconstruction days and finally painting our people as they are today, cultured and accomplished in social graces, holds the mirror faithfully up to nature.” In other words, according to this black newspaper, Darkest America was an authentic portrait of black America.

Yet Darkest America was a minstrel show. The performers, even though they were black, wore blackface. A photograph of an 1898 performance shows two of them playing banjos, with xylophones by their sides. One has big white circles painted around his mouth and eyes and grins widely; his collar, tie, and checkered jacket are all several sizes too large; he wears fake bare feet much bigger than his head.

It is difficult for us today to look at this photograph—it induces a cultural nausea comparable to that produced by Nazi cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Yet none of the published descriptions of Darkest America paint the show as racist caricature. In fact, they go out of their way to emphasize the differences between Darkest America and white minstrel shows. “If you . . . have formed your own ideas of Colored folks from the stage Negro and Darktown sketches, you will be instructed and amused,” wrote the St. Louis Dispatch. The performers “would [at times] lapse into the real Negro eccentricities, which are only burlesqued in the attempted imitations so common to the burnt cork drama,” commented the Miners Journal of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. In other words, because they were black, these performers were truer to real life than were white minstrel shows.

White minstrel shows, unlike black ones, did not normally center around plantation life—the minstrel show was a vehicle for parodying almost any stereotype whatsoever, white or black. In fact, a great number of the surviving minstrel skits are loosely based on Shakespeare plays, and not only Othello either. Shakespeare’s characters would be exaggerated in obvious ways, the actors wearing burnt cork and speaking a so-called Negro dialect generously peppered with malapropisms and pretentious nonsense; in these skits the blackface performers would be almost entirely unconnected with the customs and habits of blacks.

Darkest America was thus a refreshing change of pace. Although it went through a number of changes through the years, at one point the show opened with a scene of “a crack colored military company in camp [performing] funny scenes in camp life,” according to one newspaper. It included a “watermelon scene [which] was funny enough to make an Indian laugh,” according to a second. It featured, according to a third, “corn husking scenes in the barn, [and] massing singing and the wild antics of the dance in perfect time with the music[:] a perfect reproduction of the actions of the people they represented both on festival occasions and in a measure at Sunday wood’s meetings.” There’s that authenticity claim again.

Were the performers “signifying” on minstrel traditions when they were enacting watermelon and corn-husking scenes, wearing huge bare feet with painted grins on their faces? Blacks who performed in or saw black minstrel shows left several written accounts of them, and not one of them mentions any kind of signifying whatsoever. Was it too early in American history for these stereotypes to be recognized for the disgusting slander that they constituted? Hardly—distinguished black Americans had registered their disgust for America’s most popular form of entertainment ever since the 1850s.

In fact, we can make no excuses for these performers. These African Americans took pride in deliberately replicating what to us represents the most nauseating of all racial stereotypes, and their African American audiences ate it up. And to all concerned, both black and white, this minstrel show was the most authentic presentation of actual black American life available.

Black minstrelsy had grown out of white minstrelsy. The first all-black minstrel troupe was organized around 1865, right at the conclusion of the Civil War, by a black man, Charles Hicks. This postdated the first white minstrel show by 22 years, and the reason for the delay was likely the fact of slavery.

The black minstrel shows soon came to eclipse white minstrel shows in popularity. Perhaps the most elaborate was Black America, an 1895 theatrical extravaganza that took place in Brooklyn. This show featured a “Negro Village” with real log cabins, haywagons, mules, chickens, and 500 blacks, “genuinely southern negroes” brought “direct from the fields.” Of course, as did many white minstrel entertainers, the show advertised its authenticity—this was real blackness on display. The players were not advertised as “entertainers,” but as “participants.”

While this was the culmination of the black minstrel show—the ultimate proof of plantation life on display for white Northerners and homesick blacks uprooted from the South—these shows continued to tour the South, playing for both white and black audiences, for another thirty years.

What should we make of the fact that the most “authentic” representation of black American life was a minstrel show that indulged in the most disgusting caricatures, and that it was widely accepted by both blacks and whites as “authentic” (and entertaining)?

Maybe it gets back to what I posted a few months ago, quoting Leon Wieseltier: the quest for authenticity is always reactionary. If you’re looking for real black folks, you’re more likely to approve caricatures of conventional ideas about black folks than you are to approve anything that varies from those conventional ideas. There's no such thing as a theatrical entertainment that portrays people as they are in real life, and approximations are no better (or worse) than wild exaggerations. In fact, they're frequently exactly the same.

- Yuval

Some Files to Accompany My Last Two Posts

Bert Williams, "Nobody"
Haydn, Piano Sonata in c major Hob. XVI:50, 1: Allegro (Lang Lang, piano)
Haydn, Piano Sonata in c major Hob. XVI:50, 2: Adagio (Lang Lang, piano)
Haydn, Piano Sonata in c major Hob. XVI:50, 3: Allegro molto (Lang Lang, piano)
Bach, Sinfonia no. 5 in Eb major BWV791 (Peter Serkin, piano)
Mozart, Gigue in G major K. 574 (Richard Goode, piano)
Skip James, "I'm So Glad"

Mozart and Self-Expression

We devote quite a bit of space in Faking It to the concept of music as self-expression. There's an exchange between Robert L. Marshall and Charles Rosen in the December 6, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books that readers might find illuminating. Mozart wrote that he could express his "thoughts and feelings" not in words but "by means of sounds, for I am a musician." Rosen notes that "Mozart writes not about the expression of his personality or his biography, which is the way that some critics would like to interpret self-expression, but about the expression of his 'thoughts and feelings,' as he says. No doubt the music does express his personality and is influenced by his life; but this was not a specific intention of Mozart, as it would be for some later artists."

What does this have to do with pop music? We tend to call music that deliberately expresses the personality or biography of the artist more authentic than music that doesn't, so that the music of Lightnin' Hopkins or Nirvana is more authentic than that of KISS or ABBA; and Hugh and I go to quite some lengths in the book to describe the pitfalls of that approach, specifically focusing on autobiographical or semi-autobiographical artists such as Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Neil Young, and John Lydon. But could we rescue the term "authenticity" from its many paradoxes if we were satisfied instead with Mozart's rather more simple demand--that music reflect the artist's "thoughts and feelings" in order to be personally authentic?

Since taking my hiatus from this blog I have been listening more to Bach, Mozart, and Haydn than to any other music, and perhaps this is simply because it communicates thoughts and feelings more directly than today's pop. And that could be because prior to the nineteenth century music was never concerned with the artist's biography or personality. It is all too easy when listening to Beethoven or Schnittke or Tchaikovsky to connect the music with life of the composer, and it's impossible to escape this connection when listening to most blues, country, folk, or rock; but when listening to eighteenth-century composers, the connection rarely if ever comes to mind. Yet that doesn't make the music any less authentic--or less personal. In fact, the eighteenth-century composers could serve as models for today's pop musicians, who focus so much attention on words, videos, and other extra-musical factors that the load of communication borne by the music alone is relatively light, and the thoughts and feelings expressed by the music alone, set aside from the words and images, tend to be far less interesting, complex, and compelling than those of the eighteenth-century composers. It might be good to explore all the various implications of Mozart's words:

"I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician."

At the moment, this credo strikes me as one of the most authentic a musician can aspire to.

(I will try to post some MP3s soon.)

- Yuval

Blues and minstrelsy

I apologize for not having posted in the last six months. I've been working on a variety of other projects. I wrote a long piece on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, which popmatters.com was supposed to publish last month--maybe they'll publish it this month or next. And I've been working with Jake Austen on a proposal for a new book tentatively titled Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop.

I just came across an article David Gates wrote for Newsweek which connects black minstrelsy to the kinds of questions about white blues fans and authenticity that Hugh and I explored in Faking It. Fans of our book might enjoy reading "It's a White Thing."

A few comments on Gates's piece, most of them trivial, some perhaps not so. In general, I like it a lot.

There's no need for scare quotes around "rediscovered"--Skip James was indeed rediscovered, plain and simple. There's good news for Skip James fans--A Cappella Books, the imprint of Chicago Review Press of which I'm the editor, has reissued Stephen Calt's biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil. Calt recently told me, a propos of Gates's piece, that the entire time he knew James he never bought him an alcoholic beverage; but I'm sure Gates is telling the truth here. The parallels between Gates's experience with James and my experience with Jack Owens, as described in Faking It, are numerous but hardly surprising.

Gates writes, "when blacks themselves took up stage minstrelsy—after all, weren't they the real real deal?—the ambiguities became far more pointed, and a hint of subversion qualified the subservience. Out of this tradition came the comedian Bert Williams." True enough--though I wonder whether the "hint of subversion" was really there before Bert Williams. This is going to take a lot of investigation, which I want to do if a publisher expresses interest in our book. My impression is that the "hint of subversion" was really Williams's doing, and that the black minstrel show, as exemplified by troupes such as the Georgia Minstrels, Darkest America, and Black America, was not subversive. In all my reading on these minstrel troupes, I haven't found one mention of subversion--or signifying--of any kind, even when they played to a purely black audience.

This brings me to a major point. Gates assumes that doing minstrel shtick was "painful" for Bert Williams. But blacks had been doing this shtick non-stop for forty years prior to Williams, and it had represented the only road to success for black entertainers. Considering this, why wouldn't doing minstrel shtick be like water off a duck's back to black entertainers by this point? (See, for example, my post on "Underneath the Harlem Moon" below.) Take the example of Dave Chappelle. After doing his blackface minstrel number in 2005, he felt so incredibly pained that he performed the hajj (the journey to Mecca, only he didn't quite make it--see this interview with him in Time magazine), and shortly thereafter quit Chappelle's Show altogether. That's because doing blackface minstrelsy these days is opprobrious in the extreme. But back in the early twentieth century, it was very common, and I doubt Bert Williams's "pain" can compare to Dave Chappelle's. Gates approvingly quotes Marybeth Hamilton on white blues fans, who engaged in "a faintly colonialist romance with black suffering, an eroticization of African-American despair." But by describing Bert Williams's brilliant career as a series of painful compromises with the spectre of minstrelsy, Gates is doing exactly the same thing. I believe that Williams enjoyed black minstrelsy, even if not as much as his black audience had for the last forty years; but he brought something brand new to the genre--signifying--and did so with great enthusiasm and care. There's nothing painful about that--wouldn't Williams have been proud of his momentous accomplishments? Then again, I haven't yet read Camille Forbes's book, and maybe I'm wrong.

- Yuval

Slave Songs

It was recently brought to my attention that Beacon Press has put up on their website 18 MP3 files identified as “sounds of slavery.” These are tracks recorded mostly by John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s which the authors of a book, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, have identified as characteristic of the sounds that the slaves made. (I assume Beacon is posting the MP3 files on their website so that they don’t have to go to the expense of creating a CD to insert into the paperback edition of the book.)

I enjoy listening to these tracks, but if anyone thinks that they represent the authentic sounds of slavery, I’d hope they’d think again. A number of slave narratives describe fiddle music, for example. Slaves held dances and performed for their masters’ dances. But there’s no dance or fiddle music here. (The book itself gives a more rounded picture of the sound-world of the slaves.) The Lomaxes were looking for the most authentic black music they could find, and if they heard any black fiddle music, it probably didn't strike them as black enough. In general, John Lomax preferred unaccompanied singing because it struck him as more African.

On a related note, it seems that only one old blues song makes direct reference to slavery: “Feather Bed” by Cannon’s Jug Stompers. It’s impossible to understand the words from simply listening to the song, but the first few lines seem to run, “I remember the time just before the war, colored man used to hunt about chips and straw. But now, bless God, old master’s dead--colored man plum fool about the feather bed.” (Thanks to Steve Calt for the transcription.)

I prefer another, less direct reference: Bessie Tucker’s “Mean Old Master Blues,” the song that to my mind best captures the slave experience.

- Yuval

Is the Quest for Authenticity Reactionary?

My poker buddy Mark Weinberg turned me onto this quote from New Republic cultural honcho Leon Wieseltier:

"Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.

"Authenticity is a reactionary ideal. And speaking strictly, it is an anti-ideal. It says: what has been is what must be. It is the idolatry of origins."

While I think Wieseltier is mostly right, he's wrong about a few things. First, provenance does inform substance. You cannot divorce substance from provenance, or else you end up with free-floating substance--an idea that has its attractions (remember the New Criticism?), but involves decontextualizing things from their origins. Second, authenticity is a conservative ideal, but not a reactionary one. The real reactionaries out there may pay lip service to authenticity, but their ideologies usually depend on deliberately manufactured untruths--or inauthenticities, to coin a word. Reactionaries are motivated by ideals, and, as Wieseltier rightly points out, authenticity is an anti-ideal.

I would modify Wieseltier's thought as follows:

Authenticity is only one of several standards by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics, and should not be the beginning and end of any such appraisal. It is at heart a conservative notion, one opposed to ideology, for it says: what has been, or what really is, is what should be. It is the idolatry of origins.

Any thoughts?

- Yuval

Back-to-School Authenticity Contest!

When I was in high school (1977-1981), being "authentic" was important if you wanted to be a rebel (or especially a punk) but it was hardly a requirement for success. I became senior class president when a friend of mine who called himself Rat Rondell formed a barbershop quartet (the Rondells) and wrote a song about me called "Groovy Yuvie" ("He's got the eyes, he's got the lips, he's got the . . . Groovy Yuvie, Groovy Yuvie"). After the performance I came out in a green satin "Beatles Forever!" jacket and actually took the microphone off the stand (which nobody else seemed to have thought of) in order to give my rousing speech ("No more car washes in the rain!"). Everybody could tell it was all an act, but I beat seven much more authentic candidates anyway.

I guess things have changed. Check out this story that the AP filed yesterday on authenticity in college admissions--and campuses. (Thanks to Bret Gladstone for pointing this one out.) High schoolers these days seem to be learning from Neil Young and Bob Dylan how to fake incompetence for authenticity's sake. And from Willie Dixon that the best piece is the one with the mistake in it (see Mark Rubin's comment on my faking-incompetence post here).

Right now my kids get awarded medals in school for attendance, honor roll, and--my favorite--citizenship (can illegal immigrant children get on the "citizenship" roll?). If things keep going this way, in ten years time kids in elementary school will be receiving medals for authenticity too. It's a great way to make everyone feel special, isn't it?

- Yuval

Tourism and Authenticity

When I took my family to Chiapas recently--as tourists, of course--I found myself looking for its authentic music. Yes, I’d just cowritten a whole book questioning the wisdom of such a quest, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was in a new place and I wanted to hear the age-old music of that place, unadulterated--not something devised for tourists or heavily influenced by today’s pop. What could be more natural than that?

Well, I only heard two kinds of Chiapanecan music.

The first was a marimba band. In Comitan, the town we stayed in, the municipal marimba band--which, if I remember correctly, consists of eight marimba players, four saxophonists, two trumpeters, a bassist, a drummer, two percussionists, a guitarist, and a singer--plays every Sunday and Thursday night in the town square. The music clearly owes something to Perez Prado and to cumbia, but the marimbas are a local thing--only in Chiapas and neighboring Oaxaca and Guatemala, as far as I know, is marimba music so prominent. It’s a tremendously vibrant tradition. Dozens of people were dancing, and the kids all take marimba lessons. In the CD stores were literally hundreds of marimba CDs by dozens of Chiapanecan bands with long names. I picked up a few, and a few old LPs too.

The second was a musician from a Mexican folkloric group who had painted his face and wore an outlandish costume with some Mayan and Aztec elements. He played a fife with a drum on the end, which he hit with a stick. His folkloric group was far from authentic--they clearly had some anachronistic elements, and there was a lot of theater in what they did. But his music sounded quite close to some of the music on a couple of terrific CDs of authentic Mayan music. One I bought in Chiapas, and documents a Mayan music festival in 2005, and the other one came from Smithsonian Folkways--it’s called Modern Maya--and was recorded in the early 1970s. Many of the songs on these CDs boast an inimitable rhythm--the beats are so uneven as to preclude accurate notation--and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the music is pre-Colombian in origin. Some of it sounds completely unlike any music I’ve ever heard.

The two traditions have nothing at all in common. This reflects the reality of Chiapas--the Mayans there speak primarily their own languages instead of Spanish, wear clothes that they fashion themselves, and stick doggedly to their own traditions. It might appear at first glance that this is all for the benefit of the tourists (who were surprisingly few, and even more surprisingly non-gringo), but my trips to Mayan villages confirmed the solidity of their traditions.

So does this mean I’m a complete hypocrite? Why do I get so much enjoyment from authentic Chiapanecan music? Why was I searching for it in the first place? Were my criteria for authenticity justified--or even justifiable? Was I fetishizing the Chiapanecans as exotic, or “other,” by looking for the unadulterated products of their cultures?

I’m not sure I’m ready to answer these questions yet. But I will say this--it’s in our nature, in our bones, to search for the authentic. We just can’t give it up. No matter how hard we try to get away from it, it will always come up.

And when we find authentic music, it will reward us if we let it. I’m posting below some authentic Chiapanecan music which I love, and which I hope you love too.

I should add one more thought first. I didn’t hear any truly inauthentic Chiapanecan music when I was there. But perhaps if I were to hear, for example, Chiapanecan rock or jazz or disco it would reward me just as much as this more authentic stuff. Maybe my touristic authenticity bent blinded me to some amazing Chiapanecan delights. The sad thing is that it’ll probably take another several thousand dollars for me to go back to Chiapas and find out.

First, three marimba bands, in chronological order:

Marimba Orquesta Reyna Frailescana de los Hnos. Garcia: Mi compadre
La Marimba Orquesta de los Hnos. Hernandez Villegas: La carcacha
Marimba Orquesta la Reyna Tuxtleca: Mesa que mas aplauda (el za za za)

Now, from Smithsonian Folkways’ Modern Maya: The Indian Music of Chiapas, Mexico:

Song of peace, Chalchiuitan
New year's prayer, Chalchiuitan
Good Friday service and Carneval, Tila

And from XV Festival Maya Zoque (2005), a Tseltal group called Bapus from San Juan Cancuc, performing a song they call simply San Juan.

- Yuval

Iggy on Authenticity

From an intensely interesting interview by Bret Gladstone that appeared in Pitchfork yesterday:

Pitchfork: People seem very concerned with what's "authentic," but nobody seems to know what that actually means.

Iggy Pop: Yeah, I know. When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial. These were highly artificial groups. The Sex Pistols, these guys took pains to tell people that it was all a con: "Don't listen to us."

Pitchfork: Dylan was a bit like that too . . .

Iggy Pop: Same deal.

- Yuval

Northern Attitude

I’ve been thinking about how various UK bands deal with their northern identity and how the media treats them. The Beatles made it trendy to have a northern accent - prior to that, northern accents were rare in UK popular music apart from the folksy approach of singers such as Gracie Fields and George Formby. From then on, it was far easier to be seen as a serious rock (or pop) act but to retain a strong northern identity.

In recent decades, northern accents and ‘attitude’ have often been perceived (or self-consciously deployed) as signifiers of something grittier and ‘more real’ within UK music (to some degree the same is true of the American Deep South, though it is not an exact parallel). There are too many examples (and possible counter-examples) to list the entire history, but here are a few.

The Fall, despite being intensely artistic and obscure in many respects, embody ‘northern attitude’ in other ways. Mark E. Smith is famously rude and difficult, has stayed close to his roots in Manchester, and likes to treat music as ‘just a job’ like any other. This dour approach embodies a deliberate proletarianism, as opposed to the perceived snobbery of the South-East and London. He is clearly wary of being seduced by the music business, and he has dealt more or less effectively with this by remaining as self-consciously Mancunian as possible. A more corruptible figure might have had greater financial success, but the respect in which he is held revolves largely around the feeling that he has remained uncorrupted, and his northern attitude is in this respect a badge of honour. 

Oasis strike me as having profited by displaying a rather cartoonish version of their northernness. During the Britpop period, the press hyped the rivalry between Oasis and Blur. Oasis portrayed themselves (and were accepted by the press) as a hard-working, basic rock band who were taking rock music back to its roots. By contrast Blur (the Londoners) were seen as arty and effete. The media focussed on Oasis’s aggressive posturing and blokey appeal, simultaneously valorising and patronising the band. The fact that Oasis went on to play some of the largest concerts ever in the UK at Knebworth and elsewhere is testament to the fact the public related to the band, perceiving in them something down-to-earth and real.

Today we have the Arctic Monkeys, from Sheffield, probably the best young band in the UK. The interesting thing about the Arctic Monkeys is that they hardly play up their northernness at all. They sing and speak in strong Sheffield accents, and were initially truculent about attending awards ceremonies, but there is little self-conscious mythologising of their northern roots (in sharp contrast to Oasis). In truth, they are simply a brilliant band that happen to come from Sheffield, but the North-South divide has come to be such a strong part of the mythology of UK music that it is almost impossible for the media to talk about the Arctic Monkeys without resorting to the old cliches of northern attitude.

- Hugh

Underneath the Harlem Moon

This post has very little to do with authenticity, I’m afraid. It’s more about race, irony, and the way a song’s meaning changes over time. In that sense, it resembles the exploration of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Nobody’s Dirty Business” and “Frankie” to which we devoted the second chapter of our book. It’s an attempt to take a particular song and look at how its meanings have changed over time.

The song is “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” Mack Gordon’s first hit, in 1932. Gordon was a Polish Jew, originally named Morris Gitler, who had come to the United States in 1908 at the age of four. Now he was 28, and having appeared in vaudeville, he decided to pen a minstrel number. His lyrics were pure racist malarkey:

            If you're crying for dear old Southland,
            Candy yams and lovin' Sams and 'Ginia hams and such,
            If you're sighin' for your dear old Southland,
            Sunny skies and mammy's pies you idolize so much,
            You don't have to cry so very hard:
            The South is in your own back yard.

            Creole babies walk along with rhythm in their thighs,
            Rhythm in their feet and in their lips and in their eyes.
            Where do high-browns find the kind of love that satisfies?
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

            There's no fields of cotton, pickin' cotton is taboo;
            They don't live in cabins like old folks used to do:
            Their cabin is a penthouse up on Lenox Avenue,
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

            They just live on dancing,
            They're never blue or forlorn.
            'Tain't no sin to laugh and grin,
            That's why darkies were born.
   
            They shout “Hallelujah!” ev'ry time they're feeling low,
            Ev'ry sheik is dressed up like a "jo ja" [Georgia] gigolo;
            You may call it madness but they call it "hi de ho,"
            Underneath the Harlem moon.

Joe Rines, a white Boston bandleader, popularized the song, and it became a huge hit, with at least eight different versions from different bands.

Thirty-eight years later, Randy Newman recorded a lovely version of the song on his second album, 12 Songs. It closed side one, preceding, on the other side, “Yellow Man,” which is equally racist malarkey, and a satirical version of “My Old Kentucky Home,” a Stephen Foster minstrel number. Newman’s point was unmistakable: he was singing racist and demeaning songs in order to perturb his listeners. It worked. Everyone who listened to “Underneath the Harlem Moon” got uncomfortable. As Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train, “Here [Newman] was, a struggling singer whose only possible audience would be urbane, liberal rock ’n’ roll fans, and he was unveiling . . . the charms of racism.” (Newman would go on to write many even richer evocations of American racism, among them “Sail Away,” “Rednecks,” and “Short People.”)

OK, so here’s a terribly racist song from the early 1930s, written and performed by whites, and demeaning blacks. There’s nothing so terribly new and shocking about that, is there? I could name dozens of other examples.

But what should we make of the fact that half of the people who performed “Underneath the Harlem Moon” in the 1930s were black?

The Washboard Rhythm Kings did it. So did Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra, with Katherine Handy (W. C. Handy’s daughter) on vocals. Ethel Waters performed it in the movies. The Brown Sisters did too. Even Billie Holiday wrote, in Lady Sings the Blues (page 65), that she used it to audition for a spot in a Philadelphia theater. It appears that black people liked this song.

The mind reels. How is this possible? Their performances of the song sound full of unfeigned enthusiasm and joy. Did they completely overlook the racism of its lyrics?

Let’s consider a few examples. First, Katherine Handy's version. It’s pretty straight, lyrically--she only makes a couple of minor changes, including “laugh and grin” to “guzzle down gin.” And she swings the melody pretty nicely.

Let’s take the Brown Sisters' version next. This trio never released any records, and they were clearly heavily influenced by the Boswell Sisters. This is, in fact, their only recorded performance, from the mid-1930s film Harlem Review. It’s a terrific version, but at the end they add: “Ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones!” Are they completely negating the racial aspect of the song by removing their skin? You tell me.

Lastly, let’s listen to Ethel Waters's version, from a fairly appalling 21-minute film called Rufus Jones for President (you can download the whole film) starring Sammy Davis, Jr. as a seven-year-old whose mother, played by Waters, dreams he gets elected president. First off, Waters changes the third person plural to the first person plural throughout. Then she changes “darkies” to “we schwartzes.” “You may call it madness” becomes “white folks call it madness.” And then she really goes to town, supplying brand new--and brilliant--lyrics for the last half of the song. It’s an incredible act of reclamation, changing racism to triumph. And it dates from 1933, only a year after the song’s debut.

Here are Ethel Waters’s additional lyrics:

            Once we wore bandannas, now we wear Parisian hats,
            Once we were barefoot now we wear shoes and spats,
            Once we were Republican but now we’re Democrats
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

            We don’t pick no cotton, pickin’ cotton is taboo.
            All we pick is numbers, and that includes you white folks too,
            ’Cause if we hit, we pay our rent on any avenue
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

We just thrive on dancin’;
Why be blue and forlorn?
We just laugh, grin, let the landlord in--
That’s why house rent parties were born!

            We also drink our gin, puff our reefers, when we’re feelin’ low,
            Then we’re ready to step out and take care of any so-and-so.
            Don’t stop for law or no traffic when we’re rarin’ to go,
            Underneath our Harlem moon.

Are we getting closer to answering our original question--how could black people like this song? The answer, I think, has four parts.

First, they didn’t necessarily like the song--perhaps they were singing it because it was so popular with the white audience. That might explain the Fletcher Henderson, Washboard Rhythm Kings, and Ethel Waters versions--all of them played for whites. It might explain Billie Holiday’s audition--she says she chose the song because it was “real popular.” But it doesn’t explain the Brown Sisters’ choice of that song--Harlem Review was strictly a race movie, made by blacks and shown to blacks.

Second, the song was a celebration of Harlem, however couched in racist metaphors and analogies; and blacks had good reason to celebrate Harlem, the locus of the Harlem Renaissance, in those days. This was something black entertainers could relate to.

Third, blacks were so inured to minstrel imagery by this point that it may have been like water rolling off their backs. Remember that many of the most popular minstrel troupes of the 1920s were black, not just blackface. Nowadays the song’s blatant racist imagery strikes everyone who comes across it as unspeakably awful. Ben Ratliff is horrified by it when he writes about Henderson’s version in his excellent guide to the 100 most important jazz records; Rolling Stone, reviewing 12 Songs, wrote of it that “every line contains some of the most blatant racial typing ever set down in song.” But back in 1932 it was simply par for the course.

Lastly, and most importantly, these artists weren’t just performing straight versions of the song, like the white folks were. They were jazzing it up, and in doing so, they were signifying. Ethel Waters did it best, but even Katherine Handy was doing it a little bit.

And that points out another, broader difference between how whites and blacks have approached racism in music. White folks use a distant kind of irony, and there’s no better example than Newman. They make white racism seductive, thereby problematizing it. Blacks, on the other hand, tend to keep things close to home, and there’s no better example than Ethel Waters. Their versions of white racism are often fierce and defiant.

I want to look briefly at a couple of more contemporary examples: CocoRosie’s “Jesus Loves Me” and damali ayo’s “White Noise” (ayo wrote the piece, based on the questions white folks asked her; it’s performed by Madeleine Sandford). Both are straightforward presentations of white racism.

Just like Newman, CocoRosie makes racism pretty--there’s no essential difference between this song and Newman’s version of “Underneath the Harlem Moon.” These songs make my skin crawl, but they’re meant to.

But I have to confess I find Ethel Waters’s version of "Harlem Moon" more effective than Randy Newman’s, and ayo’s piece more effective than CocoRosie’s. Both Waters and ayo reclaim racist words as their own, making them strangely triumphant in the process.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to Will Friedwald for the Ethel Waters track, Marcus Boon for the CocoRosie track, and damali ayo for her track.

Here Come the Indians postscript

I forgot to post a link to an article I wrote summarizing, in a humorous vein, the whole Indians-in-pop-music discussion: it appeared in The Guardian on July 6.

Prior to that, Elijah Wald e-mailed me the following instructive comment on the saga of Peter LaFarge. I think he (and Alexie) deserve the last word on the subject.

A lot of interesting and new information there. As I mentioned to you when we spoke about this, the AIM always considered LaFarge a fake Indian, though I had always understood that he was half-Indian. But there was certainly a division between the Indian movement's treatment of him and of Buffy St. Marie, who was widely accepted as a true musical spokesperson. There were a lot of fake or exaggerated Indian claims around the NY scene--Patrick Sky was "Indian" enough to be trotted out at times, for example--which led Phil Ochs to joke that he had recently cut himself shaving and discovered some Indian blood, so was titling his next album "Screw You, White Man." The most intelligent comment I've ever read on this stuff was, not surprisingly, in Sherman Alexie's "Reservation Blues," where a couple of full-blooded rez women confront a couple of white-looking women who strut their Indian heritage with the question, "Have you ever wished that you weren't Indian? Because that's the real test."

- Yuval

Faked Incompetence

Camille Saint-Saens wrote Le carnaval des animaux in 1886, but it wasn’t published until 1922, the year after his death; he felt it would tarnish his reputation as a “serious” composer. He was right: it did. I consider it the best thing he ever wrote, though I do have a soft spot for his Third Symphony too. At any rate, the eleventh movement of the Carnaval is entitled “Pianistes” (the recording posted here features Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire on pianos and a group of nine other players including Gidon Kremer on violin). In the score, Saint-Saens put asterisks by the “1er piano” and “2d piano” indications, and footnoted them as follows: “Les exécutants devront imiter le jeu d’un débutant et sa gaucherie” (or, in English, “The pianists should imitate the hesitant style and awkwardness of a beginner”). In other words, Saint-Saens was asking them to fake incompetence. (In this wonderful recording, the rest of the orchestra follows suit.)

In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s brilliant biography of Neil Young, Young asks Nils Lofgren to play piano on the After the Gold Rush sessions. “I can’t play piano,” Lofgren says. Young responds, “Perfect. That’s the sound I was looking for.” This happens over and over again--Young wants incompetence. Real incompetence is, of course, best, but how real is it if he deliberately tries to have his musicians (and himself) be as incompetent? Incompetence makes it sound realer, Young thinks. About Tonight’s the Night, Young comments, “They didn’t even know the song--what could be better?”

Bob Dylan has always done the same thing. He prefers the first take, mistakes and all, to a more polished performance. Again, he’s not necessarily faking his incompetence, but leaving mistakes in on purpose when it’s easy to take them out amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Compare this to Elvis Presley’s method in 1956, doing take after take after take of every song until it was exactly the way he wanted it. The music sounded no less spontaneous and full of energy for all that.

If you have any suggestions for other instances of faked incompetence, please leave a comment below.

Oh, and please excuse the hiatus between this and the last few entries--I’ve been in Florida and Chiapas (Mexico), without access to computers or recorded music. I hope to post something about Chiapanecan music soon.

- Yuval

Here Come the Indians, Part Four

This is the fourth and last post about American Indians in pop music. See below for the first three.

The only hit song about Indian life that avoids romanticization or hyperbole--the only one that feels truly real to me--is “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” performed by Johnny Cash in 1964, which reached number three on the Billboard country charts. (Bob Dylan also covered it in 1970, and Clint Eastwood prominently featured Ira Hayes in his film Letters from Iwo Jima.)

But trying to figure out anything about Peter LaFarge, who wrote the song, from information available on the Internet is a frustrating task. Everywhere you turn, you find contradictions about his birth, parentage, heritage, and manner of death. Nothing seems certain except that Peter LaFarge was the greatest Indian songwriter of all.

And then even that seems uncertain.

Here’s what everyone seems to agree on, more or less, though some details are probably untrue. Peter LaFarge left his Southwestern home at the age of sixteen and became a rodeo rider and folk singer. He sang and hung out with Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, and Cisco Houston in the 1950s. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and studied acting at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. An intensely charismatic figure, he moved to New York City, where he recorded an album for Columbia, “Ira Hayes” and Other Ballads, and five for Folkways: Iron Mountain and Other Songs, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, Sings of the Cowboys, Sings Women Blues, and his best and last record, On the Warpath. I’m posting two songs from this record, a terrific protest song called “War Whoop” and the comic “If I Could Not Be an Indian,” which brings to mind “Arrah Wanna” (see my first post on this subject).

But his greatest achievement was Johnny Cash’s 1964 album Bitter Tears, for which he wrote five of its eight songs. Here’s “Drums,” about the U.S. government’s re-education of Indian children. Cash, who at the time thought he had some Cherokee blood in him, got flack for this album. A lot of radio stations wouldn’t play it, but it went to number two on Billboard’s country charts anyway.

While in Greenwich Village, Peter acted as an unofficial babysitter for Bob Dylan, at Sid Gleason’s urging, keeping an eye on him so that he wouldn’t do drugs. Dylan said of LaFarge, “We were pretty tight for a while. We had the same girlfriend. Actually, Peter is one of the unsung heroes of the day. His style was just a little bit too erratic. But it wasn’t his fault, he was always hurting and having to overcome it. . . . When I think of a guitar poet or protest singer, I always think of Peter, but he was a love song writer too.”

Near the end of his life he lived with Danish singer Inger Nielsen and their daughter, and was signed to MGM in the wake of the success of Bitter Tears. But he died on October 27, 1965, officially of a stroke, and unofficially either of a drug overdose or as a suicide. He was 34 years old.

According to Gordon Friesen, the FBI was hounding Peter before his death--he had just organized the Federation for American Indian Rights. They raided his apartment, tore up his papers, put handcuffs on him, and dragged him to Bellevue in his pyjamas, where they pressured the hospital to declare him insane. Bellevue refused, much to their credit.

Journalist Seymour Krim summed up the man best. “Pete was a man drowning day by day in contradictions. He wanted to be a hundred marvelous shimmering things in the air, but in the end he was forced back to his bones like all of us. There was something fantastically, challengingly beautiful as well as doomed about Peter’s bid to become his own impossible hero. Pete was beautiful to the eye and ear in many ways--shoulders, torso, teeth, straight arrow bearing, his voice strong, modulated, like the scent of flowers on the wind. Pete’s words were those of a gifted amateur, but one you never stopped rooting for because of the dark, sweet, authentic presence of the man himself. In a much more disturbing sense he was a life-actor, glowing star of his own sidewalk drama, and he anticipated by at least 10 years the combined street theaters of cruelty and absurdity. Pete was important because he was so wrapped up in his bandana myth that he became it totally, frighteningly, something that is easier to accept now than when he was alive and you were nervously waiting for what would unfurl next. He lives in my mind like a wronged prince.”

And Johnny Cash wrote in his autobiography, “Peter was a genuine intellectual, but he was also very earthy, very proud of his Hopi heritage, and very aware of the wrongs done to his people and other Native Americans. The history he knew so well wasn’t known at all by most white Americans in the early 1960s--though that would certainly change in the coming years--so to some extent, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. I felt lucky to be hearing it. Peter was great. He wasn’t careful with the Thorazine though.”

Lastly, there’s a nice two-minute video at Sandra Schulman's website devoted to him.

Throughout his career, Peter represented himself as an American Indian. He said he was Hopi, raised by the Tewa people, or Pima, like Ira Hayes. He said that he had been adopted by the writer Oliver LaFarge at the age of nine (Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and his book, Laughing Boy, is a sympathetic account of the Navajos). Accounts on the Internet, ranging from allmusic.com to Wikipedia to the Smithsonian Institution to the website that bears his name, all call him a Native American or American Indian.

But in reality, he was born to and raised by Oliver LaFarge and his wife, the heiress Wanden Mathews LaFarge, in their Santa Fe home. His parents divorced in 1935, when he was four years old, and his mother married a rancher in Fountain, Colorado, where he spent his formative years, and where he changed his name from Oliver Albee to Pete. His mother tells the whole story here.

In other words, Peter LaFarge was not an American Indian. Most accounts claim that his father was of mixed French and Indian descent, but that’s not true--Oliver LaFarge was from an aristocratic New York family, descended from Commodore Perry of the War of 1812 fame, and went to Harvard; he became interested in Indians as a student of anthropology. Oliver spent a lot of time with American Indians; Peter, on the other hand, spent practically none.

In 1964, Peter LaFarge said, “Of the new songwriters I’m the oldest and most evil with my past. I have no lies to tell about my past and sometimes it strangles me like a black dog putting his foot down on my throat.” I guess liars always issue the strongest claims about their truth-telling.

What does all this say about authenticity? Does the fact that Peter LaFarge was a fake Indian mean that his songs are fake too? In fact, his songs are extremely well-researched. LaFarge was the first songwriter to not only lament the fate of the Indians but record their bitterness and their willingness to fight. Compared to all the other pop songs about Indians I’ve featured, these stand out as the least fake, to my ears. Especially since--until today, when I received final confirmation that Peter LaFarge had no Indian blood--they had always seemed to come from an American Indian himself.

Pretending that he was an Indian was absolutely essential to LaFarge’s ability to get across his message. In other words, in this case, faking it was the key to making it all seem real.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to Sandra Schulman for clearing up my last doubts about Peter LaFarge's Indian heritage.

P.P.S. I just spoke with Peter's brother, John Pen LaFarge, who told me several things of interest. First, there was a LaFarge family tradition that they had a small amount of Narragansett blood, which would, in Peter's case, have amounted to 1/128th of his genetic make-up; despite considerable genealogical research, nothing has come up proving this either way. Second, John very much doubts the truth of Gordon Friesen's account of Pete's harassment by the FBI. Third, he believes that Pete's death was probably caused by a combination of alcohol and pills, and was not a suicide--he seemed very happy at that point in his life.

P.P.P.S. Povy LaFarge Bigbee, Pete's sister, has written me, clearing up some of the mysteries about Pete's life. Here are some excerpts from her e-mail.

"Pete was born in Manhattan and, like me, lived with our parents in their apartment until they separated about 1934, after which we lived in the apartment with mother. By 1940 Pete had had so many serious ear infections that his hearing was threatened so on her doctor's advice mother sent him to a school outside Tucson. The place had kindly people and nice horses, but in order to have him with us and us all under one roof, mother moved us to Fountain, Colorado where she rented a large house with a barn and pens and a corral and a roping arena and a big yard. She also bought a ranch.

"This leads me to introduce my mother as a serious influence in Pete's life, partly because I am tired of having her dismissed as 'an heiress.' A lot of people I know have inherited money, thus becoming heirs, but this particular 'heiress' spoke Italian, French, Russian and Spanish; had translated Dante in the original vulgate when she was 15; could read Farsee; was a long distance swimmer (and swam a mile a day well into her 80's) and had rescued six people in the '38 Hurricane; was the first woman ever elected mayor of a Colorado town; established clinics especially for children with ear, eye and throat problems on the Jicarilla Reservation and in Fountain. She oversaw her investments with talent and preciseness at a time when women did no such thing. I forgot to mention that she was a talented ballerina, good enough to have been invited by Pavlova to join her troupe in Paris '25. . . .

"A lasting friendship was created between my parents and the Dozier family of Santa Clara Pueblo, a friendship that survived the divorce. Several Doziers rode with my parents when they rode horseback across the Navajo Reservation in '29. A particular friend in Santa Clara was Vidal Gutierrez, Chief of the Winter People. It was Uncle Vidal who gave us our Indian names; although Pete's was ceremonial, mine is my real name. I find statements about Pete being adopted at 9 or being a Hopi to be ridiculous. Santa Clara is our pueblo and of the 19 pueblos in New Mexico it is one of the Eight Northern Pueblos. The Hopis are not.

"You who were born after WWII can have little understanding of how difficult travel was until about 1956. Daddy was not demobilized until about '47 and then he and Consuelo lived in Santa Fe. It was a long way to Santa Fe from Fountain. Of course we read Daddy's books and wrote letters to him, but it was mother who spoke about her memories of the Navajos and the Jicarilla Apaches from the time we were little children. By the time Pete was 16 and 17 he could travel to Santa Fe and he stayed with Daddy and Consuelo.

"He met and made friends with various Native Americans who were in New York City when he was. Sorry, no FBI. Mother visited him in Belleview once, but it was fortunately a brief stay."