Adelt — Blues Music in the Sixties

Author: Ulrich Adelt
Title: Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White
Year: 2010
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Type: Academic book

Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White is a book by Ulrich Adelt, a scholar of American studies, published by Rutgers University Press in 2010. Its first sentence states its argument: “In the 1960s, the blues was reconfigured from black to white in its production and reception.” Yet for the new white players and listeners of the blues, in Adelt’s words, “blackness, in particular black masculinity, remained a marker of authenticity.” The decade left what he calls “a conservative blues culture,” and he finds it still in place.¹ He makes the argument through six case studies: B.B. King’s turn to white audiences, the blues at the Newport Folk Festival, Eric Clapton and the British blues, the American Folk Blues Festival in West Germany, Janis Joplin, and the magazine Living Blues.

When the book appeared, Adelt was an assistant professor of American Studies and African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of Wyoming.² He is now the university’s William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies, and his second book, Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies, followed in 2016.³

His opening question is “What was at stake for whom in being able to claim a right to play the blues or live the blues through consumption?”⁴ White fans cast their love of the blues as “an antiracist move,” he argues, yet “white performers, audiences, and cultural brokers helped to create a depoliticized and commercially charged blues culture.”⁵ The new audience wanted the music’s past. B.B. King, just as Black power was gathering force, prospered with music that “supported a nostalgic consumption of blackness,”⁶ and at the Newport Folk Festival authenticity meant, in Adelt’s words, “rural, acoustic black (and white) music for a young, urban and highly educated white audience.”⁷

Adelt takes Eric Clapton “as an exemplary figure for the British Blues Movement of the 1960s” and reads him through Norman Mailer’s idea of the “White Negro,” transplanted to “a particular British context.” The Black masculinity that Clapton and other British players reached for was, he argues, “a problematic construction.”⁸ He sets Clapton’s love of Black music beside his support, on stage in Birmingham in 1976, for Enoch Powell’s campaign against immigration, a remark that helped prompt the founding of Rock Against Racism. In Adelt’s reading the two grew from closely related ideas of race.⁹

Adelt reads the American Folk Blues Festival, which toured West Germany, against the country’s history of jazz under the Nazis and of Afro-Germans; seen that way, the blues there “appears as a strategy of denazification,” though the festival’s way of authenticating it, he argues, worked much like the others the book examines.¹⁰ Britain’s blues magazines of the 1960s, he finds, like Living Blues in America after them, treated Black performance as authentic and white performance as derivative.¹¹

By the early 1970s, Adelt writes, “the blues audience had shifted almost exclusively to whites,” though soul blues singers such as Bobby “Blue” Bland and Little Milton still found success “among African American audiences.”¹² Most had moved on to soul and funk; they “had left blues music behind,” he concludes, and “they did not return to it.”¹³ Reviewing the book in the Journal of American History, W. S. Tkweme called it “a thin volume” and found its concern to be “how white male racial essentialism continues to dominate the discourse of the blues.”¹⁴

Key contributions

• The thesis that the 1960s whitened the blues without loosening the hold of Black masculinity on ideas of its authenticity.
• Six case studies, of musicians, festivals and a magazine, read for the racial politics of that shift, with gender, class, nation, age and region beside race.
• A reading of Eric Clapton and the British blues through Norman Mailer’s “White Negro,” set beside Clapton’s 1976 endorsement of Enoch Powell.
• The transatlantic reach of white connoisseurship of the blues, from the American Folk Blues Festival in West Germany to Britain’s blues magazines.
• An account of how the blues lost most of its Black audience by the early 1970s, soul blues aside, and of the conservative blues culture the decade left behind.

See also

• Soul blues — the blues that kept its Black audience after the 1960s
• British blues — the British scene of Adelt’s chapter on Clapton
• Romancing the Folk — Benjamin Filene’s 2000 history of how cultural brokers shaped American roots music
• How Britain Got the Blues — Roberta Freund Schwartz’s 2007 history of how the blues reached Britain
• Just around Midnight — Jack Hamilton’s 2016 history of how rock and roll came to be heard as white
• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music