Saturday, August 17, 2024
Mayall--the blues and race
["He was that old?! "british blues pioneer John Mayall dies at 90 at california home."]
By Anonymous Anonymous
saturday, august 17, 2024 at 12:56:00 a.m. edt
Had a few of Mayall's early lp's but they never really grabbed me. He was the classic White guy playin' the blues but never really quite hit it. Just about every major White blues guitarist passed through his band at some point, even Clapton, and every one showed him up in the talent department.
Nobody likes to admit it, because it's not pc, but the blues was created by black musicians using White folk, classical, and gospel musical forms. I remember reading an article about a White musician who spent years in africa trying to find musical forms that would have developed into the blues in America. He couldn't find anything that would have even remotely led to its development. Reality is, without White music as a starting point for black musicians, the blues would never have been created.
So these blacks who say White men can't play the blues because it's cultural appropriation, then take away every White classical and folk influence from the blues and see what they have left.
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5 comments:
The lies pertaining to the constant reinvention of who created what music,inventions or the United States of America,I can only paraphrase the old Johnny Paycheck song,in describing media's attitude about it all:"Take the past and shove it,we don't want it here no more."
--GRA
jerry pdx
Negroes will, of course, just claim that they invented classical music anyways.
jerry pdx
Speaking of cultural appropriation and all that...I spotted this book about Zheng He, an ancient Chinese mariner who, according to this author, sailed to Europe and "ignited" the Renaissance.
https://www.amazon.com/1434-Magnificent-Chinese-Ignited-Renaissance/dp/0061492183
Oh...so it was the Chinese that started the Renaissance in Europe...Wait, I thought it was the negro that did that...or was it the Arabs during the Islamic invasion era? You'd think listening to these pseudo historians that Whitey has never invented a blessed thing.
If the White man was so "non inventive" in ancient history then why is he at the forefront of almost every innovation in the modern era?
Watch any vintage documentary of native life in Africa- their "music" is repetitive drumming and shouting. Which is what they've reverted to. Melody, harmony, the blending of different instruments = Western culture. Destroyed on purpose.
-RM
jerry pdx
When I posted this, I forgot to mention one of my pet peeves re this subject. Namely, the idea that White musicians that were influenced by the blues always produced something that was "lesser" than what traditional blues artists did. That wasn't always true. In my opinion, the music produced by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who et al was just as good in it's own way and very often, much better. Just because it had the "pop" music label doesn't mean it was inconsequential music. White songwriters came up with their own brilliant songs with innovative melodic structures, rhythm patterns and lyrics. Besides that, if you look at their catalogues, most of their best songs weren't even "blues" songs but original music not "derived" from black influences. Elvis is often accused cultural appropriation because he swung his hips on Ed Sullivan (as if blacks have a copyright on that also, lol) and recorded blues songs in his early recording career. Take a look at the list of Elvis songs and you notice that his influences were all over the musical map. Sure he recorded material by black artists but he mostly recorded songs from country, popular music, white gospel, folk and bluegrass sources. His often operatic style of singing was rooted in White classical traditions and was not remotely an exclusively 'black' style singer as people like to say. It's all pc nonsense designed to make it sound like Whites have created nothing in music and stole everything from the negro.
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