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“As Usual, I'll Have to Take an IOU”: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Gift of Black Music and the Cultural Politics of Obligation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2017

NICK HEFFERNAN
NICK HEFFERNAN*
Affiliation:
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Email: nick.heffernan@nottingham.ac.uk.
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Abstract

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois described African American music as a “gift” to America, contesting the tendency to regard white interest in black culture as appropriation or theft. Yet this metaphor invoked the complex circuits of indebtedness and obligation that are intrinsic to gift exchange in anthropological accounts of the practice, challenging white recipients of the gift to make adequate response. This challenge is most systematically addressed in a sequence of films that tell stories about white enthusiasm for the blues. The Blues Brothers (1980), Crossroads (1986), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and Black Snake Moan (2006) depict the blues as a gift and explore how whites might appropriately acknowledge and reciprocate for receiving it in a culture distorted by racial inequalities. The films develop a distinct set of narrative conventions for handling the politics of racial obligation, vacillating between seeing black music as a transracial cultural resource on the one hand and as a racially defined, inalienable possession of African Americans on the other. Using these same conventions, Honeydripper (2007) invites us to see the process of cultural exchange from a different perspective in which the problematic status of the blues as racialized property is diminished.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2018 , pp. 1095 - 1121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

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4 Cole, J., “Fire Squad,” 2014 Forest Hills Drive (Dreamsville Records, 2014)Google Scholar; Azealia Banks interview, Hot97 Radio, 18 Dec. 2014. These are all versions of what Joel Rudinow defines as the “proprietary argument” about black music: “the blues … belongs to the African-American community,” and when whites “perform the blues they misappropriate the cultural heritage and intellectual property of African Americans.” Rudinow, Joel, “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52, 1 (Winter 1994), 127–37, 130Google Scholar.

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17 The brothers’ gleeful disruption of a neo-nazi political rally makes them a target of the Illinois police and the National Guard, suggesting a link between American law enforcement and white supremacy that upsets the film's more conservative viewers. Indeed, The Blues Brothers draws much opprobrium on right-wing Internet forums devoted to denunciation of “the most Anti-White movies.” See, for example, Vanguard News Network's movie discussion thread at www.vnnforum.com/ showthread.php?t=61861.

18 Charles was surely selected for this part due to his role in bringing black music into the pop mainstream in the 1950s and for his history of synthesizing disparate musical cultures with previously strong racial identifications. Of his audacious 1962 move into the purportedly “white” field of country music, Charles observed, “It was just one of those American things. I believe in mixed musical marriages, and there's no way to copyright a feeling or a rhythm or a style of singing” – a smart summation of what could be identified as The Blues Brothers’s position on race and music. Charles, Ray and Ritz, David, Brother Ray: Ray Charles's Own Story (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 173Google Scholar.

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26 The scene was initially filmed with black bluesman Shuggie Otis in the Steve Vai part, playing blues rather than classical music. According to Crossroads’s musical adviser Arlen Roth, “they cut it because they didn't want to portray a white man beating a black man.” See The 80s Movies Rewind, at www.fast-rewind.com/crossroads.htm. While the film's narrative moves towards a conclusive expiation of white guilt for acquiring the blues, its casting and scoring decisions were nonetheless influenced by such guilt.

27 Keil, Charles, Urban Blues (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 233Google Scholar. Keil questions the conventional view – both reaffirmed and gently teased by Crossroads – that the Mississippi delta is the birthplace and spiritual home of the blues, suggesting that this is a romanticized history constructed by white folklorists in search of cultural authenticity, racial purity and rural simplicity.

28 Baraka, Amiri, “The Great Music Robbery,” in Baraka, Amiri and Baraka, Amina, The Music (New York: Morrow, 1987), 328–32Google Scholar; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. City of Helena (E.D. Ark. 1999) (No. H-C-99-152); Santina, Don, “Reparations for the Blues,” Black Commentator, 128 (3 March 2005)Google Scholar, at www.blackcommentator.com/128/128_reparations_blues.html. On the legal argument for specific music-related claims in the reparations campaign see Greene, Kevin J., “‘Copynorms’: Black Cultural Production and the Debate over African-American Reparations,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, 25, 3 (2008), 1179–1229Google Scholar.

29 The blood metaphor features in several influential accounts of the blues that argue for exclusive racial ownership of the form. Self-styled “Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy asserted that the “art of writing blues … cannot be delegated outside of the blood,” while Amiri Baraka, insisting that “the materials of the blues were not available to the white American,” characterized the music as “a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood.” Handy, W. C., Father of the Blues (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1961), 231Google Scholar; Baraka, Amiri (as Jones, LeRoi), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963), 148Google Scholar. Aykroyd's spoof biographical notes to the first Blues Brothers album (the phenomenal success of which persuaded Universal to bankroll the first film) have the young Jake and Elwood Blues engaging in a blood-brothers bonding ritual by slicing their fingers with a string taken from blues legend Elmore James's guitar. The Blues Brothers, Briefcase Full of Blues (Atlantic SD 19217, 1978)Google Scholar.

30 Black Snake Moan DVD special features.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Sayles consciously set the film prior to the rock ’n’ roll revolution and the emergence of the modern civil rights movement, events that would drive these two worlds closer together than ever before. Thus he exempts Honeydripper from having to address the political, economic and cultural implications of contemporary musical crossover, despite professing a strong interest in the interracial dynamics of rock ’n’ roll. See Andrew O'Hehir's interview with Sayles, “Beyond the Multiplex,” Salon, 3 Jan. 2008, at www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/ review/btm/2008/01/ 03/sayles.

35 H.Con.Res 13 (108th): “Recognizing the Importance of Blues Music,” 27 Jan. 2003.

36 Tagg, Philip, “Open Letter about ‘Black Music,’ ‘Afro-American Music’ and ‘European Music,’” Popular Music, 8, 3 (1989), 285–98, 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilroy, Paul, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 15Google Scholar.

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38 Mauss, The Gift, 31.

39 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 287, 293.

40 Barlow, William, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 346Google Scholar.

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