A Racist Who Loved the Blues

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

                                                                                           Lee Atwater (1981)

This quote comes from an anonymous interview given by Republican campaign manager Lee Atwater, then a member of the Reagan administration, to a political scientist in 1981.  (You can find the entire interview here.) It describes the Republicans' Southern strategy, in which they used race-baiting to successfully persuade Southern Whites to vote against their economic self-interest and realigned political party membership in the South. It was originated by operatives for Richard Nixon, but Atwater was the best known practitioner of this strategy, which still strongly influences American politics.

Atwater became a rising star in 1980 by defeating a South Carolina Democratic Congressman in part by using fake telephone surveys that falsely implied that the Congressman was an NAACP member. He was known for his ruthless use of “dirty tricks,” including false rumors about his opponents' mental health or alleged criminal connections. He reached the height of his fame as manager of George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, where he approved the infamous Willie Horton ad, that played on White fears of Black criminals. Following the election, he became chairman of the Republican National Committee. He died of brain cancer in 1991 at the age of 40. After learning that he had terminal cancer, he claimed to have experienced a religious conversion and apologized for some of his behavior.

Atwater, a South Carolina native, was an accomplished rock guitarist and fan of the blues. His album, Red Hot and Blue, with B. B. King and several Memphis musicians, won a Grammy in 1991. Atwater always denied he was a racist, citing his personal relationships with blues artists as evidence. His biography raises interesting questions. Can you deliberately pursue policies that are harmful to African-Americans by using campaign tactics that appeal to White racism and still credibly claim that you are not a racist? In other words, can you repeatedly engage in racist behavior without developing racist attitudes? You would expect that Atwater would have experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance. If Atwater is to be believed—and given all the lies he told, there is no reason he should be—he must have been a master at compartmentalizing the different parts of his life.

All of this has come back to our attention because Atwater arranged a concert in Washington on January 21, 1989, the day after Bush's inauguration, featuring a number of blues and R&B artists. Among those I know to have participated were William Bell, Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Steve Cropper, Willie Dixon, Dr. John, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Eddie Floyd, Delbert McClinton, Sam Moore, Billy Preston, Percy Sledge, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Louis Walker and Ron Wood. 

The concert seems to have aroused considerable cognitive dissonance in the performers at least, but the consensus seemed to be that you don't turn down an opportunity to play for the President, no matter how much you dislike his politics. Willie Dixon engaged in some low-key subversion by wearing a “Jesse Jackson for President” button as he performed.

The concert, long believed to have been lost, has been rediscovered. According to an article in last Friday's New York Times, excerpts from the concert, A Celebration of Blues and Soul, will be shown on PBS sometime in March. A search of the WQED (Pittsburgh) website turned up no match. The entire concert is to be released on DVD on May 6. Both programs are said to have been almost completely stripped of their political context. If I get any further information about when the PBS program will air, I'll update this post.

This article is cross-posted from my jazz and blues blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

You may also be interested in reading:

Lasting Fame

Old-Fashioned Racism

Merry Christmas

It's hard to believe that this greatest of all R&B Christmas records, "White Christmas" by the Drifters, is 59 years old. It was recorded on February 4, 1954, and released in November of that year. It reached #2 on the R&B charts the following month.

The Drifters are (from left to right) Clyde McPhatter, Jimmy Oliver, Andrew Thrasher, Gerhart Thrasher and Bill Pinkney. I'll always be grateful to deejay Alan Freed, who came to New York in September, 1954, for getting me interested in rhythm and blues, which led me to a lifelong obsession with jazz and blues.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

"We Are America"

Jazz/R&B singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has produced a music video entitled "We Are America," calling for the either the prosecution or the release of the detainees who have been held without trial at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade.

In a statement accompanying the release of the video, Ms. Spalding reports that she became embarrassed about Gitmo while touring in Europe. When she returned home, she contacted several Congresspersons. She received an answer from one Senator who said she had no intention of doing anything about Guantanamo, but would "keep [her] comments in mind." Her recommendation? The people who see the video should write or call their Congresspersons.

It's difficult to abandon the cliches we've been taught as children, or to think of alternative ways of influencing the political system, even when it's clear that the old ways are completely ineffective.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

Lou Reed (1942-2013)

We caught Lou Reed at the Radio City Music Hall around the time his New York album came out (1989). His guest was Little Jimmy Scott. Here's everyone's favorite side from that album:

In case you didn't catch the last verse:

          Well Americans don't care much for anything,

          land and water the least

          And animal life is so low on the totem pole

          with human life not worth more than infected yeast

          Americans don't care too much for beauty

          They'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream

          They'll watch dead rats wash up on a beach

          and complain if they can't swim

          They say things are done for the majority

          Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear

          It's like my painter friend Donald said to me

          “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done”

Doin' the Reminiscence Bump

The reminiscence bump is not a dance step, but a characteristic of autobiographical memory—our recall of our own life history. While you might expect memories to fade gradually with time, previous studies of older adults show better recall for events during their youth, between the ages of 10 and 30. One way to test this is with popular music. In studies in which participants listen to hit songs from before they were born to the present, they are more likely to recognize and prefer songs from their teens and twenties, with the bump peaking at age 23.5. Reminiscence bumps have also been found for films, books, sports figures, current events and personal memories.

It won't be a surprise to music fans that we show a lifelong preference for the songs of our youth. The audience for oldies shows consists mostly of people who were in high school or college at the time the music was originally popular.

Several explanations have been suggested for the bump. One possibility is that we had many vivid first-time experiences during late adolescence and young adulthood, which were encoded in memory more strongly due to their emotional content. The first experience of a given type may also become a prototype, which is more easily recalled than other members of the category. It has also been suggested that hormonal and neurobiological changes play a role.

In a new study by Krumhansl and Zupnick, 62 Cornell University students with an average age of 20 were played clips from the two top hits of every year from 1955 to 2009 in random order. They were asked whether they recognized each song, whether they liked it, and to rate its quality. They indicated whether they had personal memories of each song, and if so when and with whom they heard it. Here are the results for recognition, quality, liking and personal memories.

These students are too young to test for the reminiscence bump. Their better recall for songs released after 2000 has a trivial alternative explanation—that more recent songs are better remembered. However, there were “cascading reminiscence bumps”—two earlier, smaller bumps, which are seen most clearly in the recognition and personal memories data. One occurs at from 1980-1984, about the time their parents were 20, and the other in the '60s, the decade when most of their parents were born.

The obvious explanation for the 1980-84 bump is that as children and adolescents, we are exposed to out parents' favorite music and wind up liking some of it. (My parents were fans of big band music. I didn't care much for big bands when I lived at home, but I've gradually come to like them much better—a sleeper effect?) The authors suggest that the '60s bump could reflect the musical taste of the students' grandparents. They also entertain the hypothesis that '60s music is generally better known and of higher quality than the music of other decades—a claim I regard as suspect.

Krumhansl and Zupnick also asked their participants what genres of music they listened to while growing up and now. Of course, their sample was neither large nor representative of college students generally, but here are the results.

Neither jazz nor blues did well—a problem for the future of both genres. I was prepared to see them overshadowed by pop, rock and hip-hop, but they also did worse than classical, country and soundtracks! (Of course, in recent years, the more popular soundtracks have been collections of recent hits, rather than original music composed for the film.)

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

You may also be interested in:

The Sight of Music

A Question of "Money"

It's no secret that '50s and '60s rhythm and blues artists were often ripped off by white record company owners, as well as by club owners, deejays, managers, and various other non-musicians making a profit from the music business. Unfortunately, black ownership of the means of production was not always a remedy for these abuses. Berry Gordy, Jr., was the owner of Motown, the most successful of the black-owned labels. From all that we know about how Gordy treated his artists, he is deserving of the title of “honorary white man.”

One way to cheat musicians was through manipulation of song copyrights. While musicians often wrote their songs, record executives sometimes required musicians to sign over part or all of the copyright to the songs to them or their cronies as a condition of allowing them to record. Barrett Strong, who recorded the 1959 R&B classic “Money (That's What I Want),”—ironically, a musical endorsement of materialism—is suing to have his name reinstated as one of the authors of the song. Mr. Gordy disputes his claims of authorship.

Barrett Strong claims that while working as a session musician for Motown, he developed the tune—a spinoff of one of the riffs in Ray Charles' “What'd I Say?”—and the lyric hook. A studio musician and a recording engineer confirm Strong's claim of authorship. Gordy liked the song and assigned staff writer Janie Bradford to help him with the lyrics. The copyright registration, filed in 1959, lists Strong, Bradford and Gordy as co-authors. The song was released went to #2 on the R&B charts in 1960 and also crossed over to the pop charts. It was one of Motown's first hits.

In 1962, Motown instructed the copyright office to remove Strong's name from the song, claiming that he was “erroneously listed” as a co-author. Under the law, he had three years to contest the change, but there was an important Catch-22. The copyright office has no obligation to inform authors of such changes, and he did not know about it.

There are some additional twists and turns to the story. For example, when the copyright was renewed in 1987, Strong's name was restored, but then removed the following year. (He didn't know about those changes either.)

The song has made a pile of what Mr. Strong wanted. It was covered by other artists, including the Beatles; it appeared on film soundtracks, in a Broadway play, and in television commercials. Strong was a one-hit wonder, retired from the music business, and spent most of his life working in an auto plant. In 2009, he suffered a stroke. Now 72, he lives in a retirement home and is unable to pay his rent or medical bills. He says he also wants to set the record straight and receive proper credit for his composition.

Legal experts say he has little chance of success due to the statute of limitations. If this story were to receive more publicity, I suppose there's always a chance that the multimillionaire Berry Gordy, Jr., could be publicly embarrassed into doing the right thing.

This article is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

You may also enjoy reading:

The Whitest Kids in Town

The Whitest Kids in Town

Book Review: Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock and Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia.

There was one important change that [producer] Tony [Mammarella] and I made in 1957. Up until that time, the dancers on Bandstand had one thing in common—they were all white. . . . So in 1957, we were charting new territory. I don't think of myself as a hero or a civil rights activist for integrating the show; it was simply the right thing to do.

                              Dick Clark, Dick Clark's American Bandstand (1997)

Dick Clark's daily television show, American Bandstand, was a major influence on American popular music from 1957 to 1963. Clark presided over rock and roll at a time when the pendulum swung back toward conformity. The music establishment regained control over the business, white performers reestablished dominance on the pop charts, and fans suffered through what most critics regard as a dark period lacking in creativity.

From 1952 to 1957, Bandstand, hosted by Bob Horn, was a local Philadelphia after school program featuring teenagers dancing in the studio to recorded music, with guest musicians lip-syncing their hits. There was an explicit whites-only policy regarding the kids in the studio. When Dick Clark took over as host in 1957, the program obtained a spot on the nationwide ABC network. In 1964, Clark moved the program to Los Angeles. It is agreed that after 1964, the high school dancers were completely integrated.  At issue is the period between 1957 and 1963 in Philadelphia.

When Delmont began his research, he accepted Clark's account, and set out to discover how integration had occurred so smoothly in the racially-contested environment of Philadelphia. Instead, he found that Clark's claim is false. The program remained segregated, for all practical purposes, from 1957 to 1963. He cites several types of evidence.

Delmont interviewed both white and black people who participated in American Bandstand as teenagers. All agreed that there was an unacknowledged whites-only policy and black dancers were few and far between. African-Americans reported that when they tried to gain admission, they were always excluded for some reason: they lacked a membership card, they didn't meet the dress code, the studio was full, etc. One (white) interviewee reported that blacks who tried to get in were “beat up in the parking lot.”

Several times, African-American teenagers tried to integrate the show. In October 1957, a small group of them, accompanied by a reporter from the Philadelphia Tribune (a black newspaper), tested the policy. They were admitted, but the following day it was business as usual. Several articles about Bandstand's segregation policy appeared in the nation's black press, but they lacked leverage to influence the policy.

Of course, whether African-American teenagers appeared on the program is an empirical question. However, Dick Clark Productions, Inc., controls all the existing footage of American Bandstand. Delmont was able to examine 130 video clips from their web archives. He also found several hundred still photos published by Clark and other sources. Among thousands of teens, he only found two black girls sitting in the bleachers in two still photos.

Why did American Bandstand follow a whites-only policy? Delmont attributes it primarily to the commercial aspirations of the local station, WFIL, the network, and the sponsors, who hoped to appeal to a white suburban audience. Clark may have learned an important lesson from observing the fate of New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who was committed to integration. In the Summer of 1957, Freed had a prime time show, The Big Beat, on ABC, the network Clark would join that Fall. During the closing credits of the program, one of his guests, black singer Frankie Lymon, in a moment of spontaneity, danced briefly with a white girl. There was an national uproar. Freed was told that if the show was to continue, he could only have white guests. When he refused the show was cancelled.

Delmont's website contains this link to an interview of the author by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now in 2012.

Delmont embeds the Bandstand story in a larger narrative about racial conflict in Philadelphia. Housing was rigidly segregated, and white residents formed associations to keep their neighborhoods “safe” from integration. When African-Americans moved into a previously white area, real estate speculators profited from “block busting.” They bought homes cheaply from fleeing whites and sold them at much higher prices to black families, whose real estate options were limited. De facto segregation in the public schools was maintained by carefully drawing district lines to conform to neighborhood racial patterns and by careful choice of the locations of new schools. All of this took place after the school board passed a resolution claiming that the Philadelphia public schools were integrated.

Why does all of this matter? From 1957 to 1963, American Bandstand was an important symbol of a national youth culture built around rock music—a culture that it implicitly defined as all-white. This is ironic given that the music itself was of a genre originated by African-Americans. Although Clark featured some black musicians as guests, he used his show to restore white artists, such as Philadelphia-based “teen idols” Frankie Avalon and Fabian, to a position of prominence on the pop charts. By coincidence, Clark happened to be part owner of some of the record labels and publishing houses whose music he featured.

Delmont takes no position on whether Dick Clark's claims about integration were deliberate lies or a classic example of self-serving memory failure. But his false statements raise a larger issue: How will the civil rights struggle of the '50s and '60s be remembered? Individuals and groups who were once a big part of the problem, such as white Christian churches, now claim to have been part of the solution. As late as 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of Martin Luther King as had a favorable one. Those of us who remember the real history of these years are going to have to document the validity of our memories—memories that are increasingly challenged by propaganda from corporations and individuals who would like to rewrite recent history.

This review is cross-posted from my music blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  Thanks to Gayle Morrow for calling this book to my attention.

Phil Spector: Actual Innocence?

I was never a big fan of Phil Spector's music, although I ultimately came to appreciate his work with the Righteous Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner. I was aware of Spector's reputation for egotism and erratic behavior long before he was charged with the murder of Lana Clarkson. I usually skip over newspaper reports of celebrity trials. For all these reasons, I didn't pay much attention to the Spector trials as they occurred. Since he had the best legal representation money could buy, I assumed he was guilty. But after seeing writer-director David Mamet's fictionalized reconstruction of his first trial, Phil Spector, and the documentary on which it was partially based, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, directed by Vikram Jayanti, I'm beginning to take seriously the possibility that he is actually innocent of the murder.

As you may know, actress Lana Clarkson was shot in the mouth with one of Spector's pistols while seated in his living room. After the fatal shot, Spector emerged from the room holding the gun and, according to his chauffeur, said, “I think I just killed someone.” At issue is whether Ms. Clarkson shot herself or whether Spector shot her.

I consider myself a member of the Sherlock Holmes school of criminal investigation. The physical evidence is by far the most important consideration. Eyewitness testimony can be biased or simply mistaken. Speculation about motives or states of mind is hopelessly subjective. Evidence of the defendant's past behavior is often irrelevant to the present case. What matters are the physical traces of behavior that can be preserved and analyzed. There are several problems with the case against Spector:

• First and foremost is the lack of blood on Spector's clothing. For Spector to have shot her, he must have been standing within two feet of her. When someone is shot in the mouth, a large volume of blood and brain tissue is expelled through the open mouth, totally saturating anything in its path. Yet Spector's white sport coat (and the rest of his clothing) is totally free of blood with the exception of what appear to be a couple of fingerprints, which could have occurred (by his account) after he picked up the gun. The prosecution seems to have had no convincing explanation for this lack of blood. It has been speculated that Ms. Clarkson was holding her hands in front of her face to ward off his attack, but if you place your hands in this defensive position, you'll see that there is plenty of opportunity for blood to escape around and between your hands and fingers.
  
  
• The angle of entry of the bullet is inconsistent with the prosecution case. The path of the bullet is slightly upward, which is consistent with the possibility that she shot herself. If Spector had been standing in front of her, as the prosecution claims, the path of the bullet would have been downward. I suppose he could have been kneeling, but no one is claiming that.
  
  
• The defense has offered a plausible explanation of the physical evidence which suggests that she shot herself by accident while she was drunk and fooling around with the gun. Spector claims that he entered the room, saw her with the gun in her mouth, and shouted something like, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” According to Mamet, the defense tested several participants, having them hold a similar gun in their mouths and startling them using the same language. In the majority of cases, they pulled the trigger while removing the guns from their mouths. Removing a gun from your mouth is an awkward movement. Try it and you'll see how your finger could accidentally press against the trigger as you pull the gun away from your face.
  
  

• Spector claims that the chauffeur misunderstood him and that what he actually said was, “I think I'd better call someone.” The chauffeur was a Brazilian immigrant whose command of English was not that good. Admittedly, if he didn't shoot her, picking up the gun was a stupid thing for Spector to do, but it could be attributed to  the shock of what (he claims) he just witnessed.

Mamet's argument is that most of the jurors ignored the physical evidence because they didn't like Spector, largely due pretrial publicity and his unusual appearance. Their dislike was exacerbated by the judge's controversial decision to allow five women to testify that Spector had previously threatened them with guns if they did not comply with his sexual advances. This was justified on the grounds that it established a pattern of behavior on Spector's part, but it is obviously weak evidence of his guilt in the Clarkson case. Mamet's screenplay also claims that his lawyer, Linda Kenney Baden, planned to have him tell his side of the story, rehearsed his testimony, but then changed her mind since his response to cross-examination was unpredictable. The documentary doesn't shed light on her legal strategy, since Spector was interviewed before the first trial.

The first trial ended in a hung jury. Two jurors held out for acquittal. This encouraged the prosecution to retry him. I'm not sure what happened during the second trial, but it seems likely that he had a less competent defense attorney. He was convicted and is serving a sentence of 19 years to life. In 19 years, he will be 88.

If you decide to watch one of these films, I actually recommend Mamet's account—on HBO this month—in spite of the fact that Al Pacino portrays Spector as more eccentric than he actually was, at least during Jayanti's interview. Here's a “Making of” feature.

The Jayanti documentary is primarily about his past life and contributions to popular music. It is available in full on You Tube.