Chapter 8                    Blues White audience

Blues White Audience

When the blues lost it’s Black audience in the 1960s, the blues suffered an even greater loss. Black audiences no longer judged what was authentic or not regarding the music. Before the 1960s, except for occasional exceptions, it would have been absurd for a White blues musician to be appreciated by a Black audience.

Authenticity is something that is not inherent in things or people: it is ascribed to things or people by “experts”, and is therefore negotiable. The paradox is that people who ascribe authenticy to something or someone believe that person or thing to be inherently authoritative. For instance, the Bible is inherently authoritative to fundamentalist Protestants.

Up to about 1955, the interpretive community who did the ascribing for the blues was primarily Black musicians and audiences. Authenticity was not an issue because there were no White blues singers or players of any significance.

When the blues revival occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, it brought in a new group of experts who would ascribe on the basis of a new espertise. Most were liberal White people who were only too willing to say that blues was a Black art form. But no matter how much those privileged, rebellious youth might have wanted to identify with Black blues performers, the new White audience was an audience that Black blues musicians couldn’t really speak to about shared experiences.

Previously, the blues was authentic in that it was an enacting of certain Black experiences in the United States in this century, just as spirituals had been an enactment of certain Black experiences in the 19th century. Gospel songs are enactments of another kind of Black experience, but that enactment, too, is aunthentic only for a Black audience. It makes sense only when it’s enacted for a Black interpretive community. When enacted for a White audience, it becomes chiefly a form of escape that is acquisitive and exploitative.

It was inevitable that the blues would be

 “grayed” and that there would be certain White blues musicians who would arise and speak to this new White audience. In the 1980s, for example, the actor John Belushi took on the persona of a blues “brother” in the film The Blues Brothers.

O público branco do blues surgiu após o renascimento do blues em torno dos anos 50 e 60. Eles eram em sua maioria pessoas brancas e liberais, e pra eles as músicas do bues não passavam de meras letras, pois os artistas negros não podiam falar de experiências compartilhadas com eles.                                          

Seria inevitável o fim do blues naquela época, se não fossem pelos novos artistas brancos de blues, que podiam falar com o público branco. Essa mudança no blues para se adaptar ao novo público impediu o esquecimento do blues naquela época.                                                                                                                        

                                                                                           Guilherme Fernando