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Thursday, September 10, 2009
Opinion / Eric Mullis / News Can a white guy really sing the blues?
Posted By Eric Mullis on Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:58 PM
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…
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