I grew up in a fairly well integrated community and my parents were conscientious about making sure that some of my early playmates were black kids so that I never really learned to see much of a distinction between white and black families. But my first real foray into genuine black culture didn’t come until I was fifteen years old and was visiting one of my older brothers at his home in Washington DC. He and his wife took me to see a B.B. King concert near the Washington Zoo. We were virtually the only white people in the audience and it was definitely a much different experience from when I later saw King perform for largely white audiences. The only way I can describe it is that it was like being in church.
Not my church, mind you, which was a staid Episcopalian affair serving the upper crust of Princeton society. No, more like the black churches you see depicted in many movies, where everyone is dressed to the nines and there’s singing and dancing and an overwhelming sense of joy.
King and his audience bantered back and forth all night with lots of call and response. The music was fantastic, but the experience was wonderful and something that changed me for the better. I never forgot what it was like to be in that environment and feel the excitement and the solidarity in that audience.
I didn’t go into that experience raw, exactly, because my other brother had been playing me B.B. King albums for years already. I still can almost recite King’s performance at the Cook County jail. I went into it a fan of his music, and I came out of it a fan of the people and the culture.
B.B. King meant a lot to me, and I told many people over the last fifteen years that he should first on their list of performers to see before he got too old to tour.
I’ll miss him, but I’m not sad. How could I be sad about B.B. King?
Yes, it’s interesting cultural history. Riley B. lost his Black audience when it defected to soul and R&B; but then he gained a white audience. His proteges are mostly white — Clapton and Richards, e.g. Jimi did credit him as an influence, but he really didn’t play the same style at all, and Jimi’s audience was mostly white anyway. People still play the blues, but as a major cultural phenomenon it’s been absorbed into rock.
I don’t think “cultural phenomena” means what you think it means. I am not a rock fan. I consider it, in the American way, to be white music. Whatever blues influences it manifested, rock was never a cultural phenomena for most blacks. It’s actually quite the opposite because most of the millions made went to mostly white rockers while most of the artists who inspired the commercially distributed products were lucky if they got tens of thousands.
That being said, black music is home for me in ways that are as close to the spiritual as I think I’ll ever get. The blues as cultural phenomena have not been “absorbed” into rock. Like the slave work songs and spirituals that grew into the blues and jazz, the blues have grown into hip hip and rap. And that culture and its musical phenomena – the one that the RW likes to take pot shots at – continues on living the Life (and the lives) that music reflects.
Two of my friends and I saw BB King at a small club in south Orange County, December 1996. The audience was mostly white, mostly boomer, and (probably) mostly conservative, but it was still one of the most gloriously fun shows I’ve ever attended. My friends and I had started our first band, a (terrible but fun) amateur blues band earlier that year, so we loved every minute of our time with the King that night.
In the early 1970s, the music of B. B. King was rattling through the heads of a lot of young white people. Elvis opened the door for white Southerners in a populist sort of way. Soul moved white Southerners to listening to black artists. B. B. King transformed their understanding of black music and culture and allowed it to get inside their heads.
The solace and richness of the culture. It was the age of Nixon and after three assassinations after all, a time in which a lot of Southern whites could relate to the black experience instead of holding it at a distance.
I was at that concert with you. Bobby Bland opened.
It was free too. Government Subsidized Blues… Or more free stuff for poor people.
In reality the audience was mostly Black, but also pretty much middle class. Not in any way rich but probably with a secure job and modest pension. Maybe a government job but maybe not.
There was a time when that was very possible for most Americans, when the Park Service could afford free concerts, and the government governed in the public interest.
http://youtu.be/svoPEQHzR7s