I went out to Find Your Muse Open Mic on Monday night and checked out a good number of talented musicians. One of them was a young white guy — maybe 17 or 18 years old — who wore something of a suit, a black leather hat and a pair of bright red converse shoes. His first song was a conventional ballad and was quite good.
His second song stood out because it was a blues. Not a blues form, but a blues in the sense that it was slow and its lyrics were depressing. In the refrain, he sang about “how much death he had seen” in a deep gravely voice, a voice that was surprising to hear welling up out of a white teenager with wavy blond hair and loud shoes. The crowd gave him a resounding round of applause when he finished the song.
What to make of a young white kid singing such a blue song about death? I suppose it depends on what kind of aesthetic ideal you have in mind when you see the performance.
Some folks think that a good musical performance needs to be authentic. That is, the singer needs to be singing about experiences that he or she has actually lived through. So, when Muddy Waters sang the blues he sang THE blues because he grew up in rural Mississippi during the height of the Great Depression. His songs express the experiences and emotions that he lived through.
So, unless the young white musician has really experienced a lot of death, then it’s not going to be authentic when he sings about “how much death he’s seen” and this will leave the listener who values authenticity with a bad taste in his mouth. “How dare that kid try to sing the blues!”
On the other hand, some folks seem to think that musical performance is a lot like acting. Even if the musician is “inauthentic”, he might be able to sell the performance if the audience buys the fiction that he’s presenting. In this case, the kid singing the blues isn’t really singing about himself, he’s just singing about death in general. He’s acting like he’s “seen a lot of death” even though he hasn’t.
The interesting thing to me is that we seem to value both of these aesthetic ideals. We love it when someone really “sings from the heart” and we also love it when a performer has the skill to create an experience for an audience, even if it’s not an authentic one.
So can a white kid sing the blues? I’ll leave it up to you to decide…
This article appears in Sep 8-15, 2009.
i’m not following you on this one e. i see what you’re saying about singing from experience and faking it, but i don’t see what being white has to do with singing the blues. jazz originated in america but that doesn’t mean a french musician can’t learn it or compose it. even though the blues originated within the African-American communities in the Deep South…(Wikipedia), its evolution in society and the growth of human intellect over time have allowed anyone from anywhere to experience the blues no matter what age/color they may be.
-chuckles
Chuckles,
I think you’re right. Race doesn’t really have anything to do with the blues (or jazz, or world-beat, or etc.) as a music genre.
What I’m wondering about is what kind of aesthetic ideals should inform our listening. Should we value authenticity or just performative skill? Does a good performance necessarily entail that the performer have to had experienced pain and sorrow if they’re going to sing the blues?
I invite you to listen to a TEN-YEAR-OLD Michael Jackson singing “Who’s Loving You”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1asX_sHRk
Then I’d ask you if you’re OK with black sopranos playing Carmen, Aida, or Mimi in La Boheme. Or does your knife of racism have a one-sided blade?
What a dope.
Musicmax,
race or racism doesn’t have anything to do with it.
The performance that got me thinking was given my a young guy…maybe 17 or 18. But he was singing like an old guy (imitating a gruff old-guy voice) and was singing about things that an old guy would likely sing about (old people have usually seen more friends and family die than young people have).
So, re-think it, let the racism bit go and get back to me if you still think I’m a dope…..
e.
Eric – I get what you’re saying and do wish you’d have just said it instead of bringing in the race of the performer. Not that big a deal though given the scope of what you are talking about. I agree that credibility can be important for a blues performer and have found myself guilty at times in the past of judging a blues performance from that paradigm. However, after seeing many very good blues musicians who didn’t fit the paradigm I realized that what I really sought and valued was emotion in the performance and the song-writing. Joshua James is an excellent example as he is not a “blues” musician but his songs and his performance communicate at an emotionally intense level that will move a blues listener to near tears.
Cheers…