Saturday, January 30, 2010

Darius Rucker: Country Music for Blacks, Whites and All of Us

He is mainstream–articulate, bright, clean and a nice-looking guy. Vice President Biden called that combination “storybook”. He doesn’t use Negro dialect, as Senator Harry Reid envisioned. You forget, after a while, that he’s even black, as Chris Matthews noticed while trying to contain a thrill running down his leg.

His audience is largely white, but their enthusiasm is palpable and unrestrained. His words tell stories of their hopes and dreams, of the difficulties they face making ends meet, of love and family. After a while he puts down his guitar–wait, you say you didn’t know the President played guitar?

I’m not talking about Barack Obama–I’m talking about Darius Rucker, also of Hootie and the Blowfish, the Country Music Association’s New Artist of the Year for 2009.

Charley Pride

But country music–that’s for racist rednecks with rifles in their pickups and a pinch of chaw between cheek and gum, right? Not necessarily. It wasn’t that long ago–1988–that a song by an African-American, Charley Pride, was last in the Top 20 on the country charts. Pride had thirty-six number one hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs Chart in the early to mid-seventies.

Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman

The cross-fertilization of black and white music in America is a story that’s usually told from the opposite perspective; how white kids of succeeding generations form bands that slavishly imitate the sounds of black music that they love, going back from the white rappers of today, who are even more annoying than their black counterparts, to the Austin High Gang, a group of young Chicago musicians including Bud Freeman who’d sneak out of their bedrooms at night and into jazz clubs in the 1920s.

Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter

But the admiration is mutual; the blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers–a white man–was heard by anyone with a radio or a phonograph in the early years of the twentieth century. Listen to any collection by Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a black man, and you’ll hear songs–some written by Ledbetter himself, such as “Irene, Goodnight”–that wouldn’t sound out of place at a garden club ice cream social.

Bud Freeman

In part, the willingness of black musicians to play white music was a virtue made out of economic necessity; if you’re an entertainer in a small town, the more songs you know, the more gigs you can play. But it reflects something deeper as well; in the south, where blacks and whites grow up in small towns together, not divided by economically disparate suburbs as is largely the case in the north and east, you get to know each other from talking to each other, and you end up sounding alike.

Randy Moss

Thus Pride, who grew up in Sledge, Mississippi (population, 529), spoke a black-white patois, not an inward-looking dialect of an all-black community. When Randy Moss, the temperamental wide-receiver (I know–I repeat myself) of the New England Patriots deigns to address reporters at a post-game press conference, you could close your eyes and think you were hearing the white owner of a feed and grain store in his native West Virginia. Moss was born in Rand, West Virginia, which is so small it isn’t even an incorporated municipality.

Nelson Goodman: What the hell is he doing in this post?

The aesthetic philosopher Nelson Goodman, in trying to explain how we understand paintings, once pointed out that every painting of a haystack looks more like another painting than a haystack. Perhaps we will someday reach the point where every person in America will be viewed more as simply another person than a member of any race.

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