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- Title
Black, Brown, and White: Thoughts on Psychoanalysis, the Blues, and Marginality.
- Authors
AUERBACH, JOHN S.
- Abstract
So it was also through People's Songs, with its emphasis on racially integrated concerts, that Broonzy began his slow shift from a commercial blues musician playing mainly to African Americans to a folk blues musician playing the style of music with which he had started his career to an audience that was mainly white, often sharing the bill with, who else, Pete Seeger, in the process making more money this way than he had ever earned as a star of the Chicago scene. As cultural irony would have it, Broonzy of the late 1940s and early 1950s was no longer the star of the Chicago blues scene that he once was, but he made more money performing folk blues for white audiences than he had ever made performing commercial blues and r&b for black ones. But at From Spirituals to Swing, Broonzy's job was to play folk blues or country blues, from his background in rural Arkansas and Mississippi, not the sophisticated sounds of the urban Chicago scene of which he was a central figure. As a result of this shift in his music, it is likely that most white blues fans know mainly Broonzy's later folk recordings (e.g., among others, Trouble in Mind, which contains a recording of "Black, Brown, and White", and Big Bill Broonzy Sings Folk Songs, both records reissued on Smithsonian Folkways and both records, in their time, clearly marketed to white progressives and bohemians), and they might know "Key to the Highway", an eight-bar blues recorded in 1942 and covered in 1970 by Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominoes' Layla and Assorted Other Love Songs.
- Subjects
CONSCIENCE; BLACK people; FATHERS; AMERICAN Jews; AFRICAN American music; PSYCHOANALYSIS; POOR people; MIDI (Standard)
- Publication
CounterPunch, 2021, p1
- ISSN
1086-2323
- Publication type
Article