Tag Archives: Louis Armstrong

The Louis Armstrong Fallacy

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This piece first appeared on Splice Today.
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The election of Barack Obama means that there is no more racism in the United States. The fact that some women have been elected to the Senate means that sexism is no longer a major factor in American life. Beyoncé’ is a superstar, so that means that women of color are celebrated in our culture, not denigrated.

Those arguments may sound fairly ridiculous, but if you spend any time taking about discrimination online, you’re bound to stumble across them or their equivalents. I think of it as the Louis Armstrong fallacy: “Louis Armstrong was successful, therefore Jim Crow doesn’t exist.”

Louis Armstrong is clarifying both because he’s universally revered and because he lived, and succeeded, during a time that was, by any measure, extremely racist. Armstrong started his career during the height of what historians have called the “nadir of American race relations.” In 1901, the year he was born in New Orleans, 105 people were lynched, and the last post-Reconstruction African-American congressman gave up his seat; there would not be another for 28 years. In 1912, when Armstrong dropped out of the Fisk School for boys and joined a quartet singing in the streets, Woodrow Wilson, a racist white Southerner, was elected President — the next year he resegregated the Federal government. In 1917, when Armstrong was sixteen and playing in New Orleans’ brass bands, whites rioted in East St. Louis, IL, killing between 40 and 220 African-Americans. In 1926, when Armstrong’s recording “Heebie Jeebies” became a sensation, the Supreme Court in Wyatt v. Adair ruled that racial discrimination in housing was Constitutional.

From the executive branch to the judicial branch, from south to north, America in the early decades of the 20th century was not just racist, but actively, in many ways, becoming more racist than it had been since at least the end of the Civil War. And yet, nonetheless, Louis Armstrong went from success to success. Even in the Depression, when jazz greats like Sidney Bechet had to hang up their horns, Armstrong flourished, celebrated and beloved.

So how is that possible? How does a society of lynching and segregation manage to turn around and give one black man riches and fame? The answer is in part that no one gave Armstrong anything. No system of oppression is ever total; music was one of the relatively few avenues in which some few black Americans were able, through sheer talent and grinding work, to force their racist society to acknowledge their genius, if not their humanity. Armstrong was arguably the most talented American musician ever, in any genre, and still, he was quite aware that the accolades he received were grudging. “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert,” Ebony reported him as saying in 1964. “These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro.” Though he was sometimes accused of being an Uncle Tom during the Civil Rights era because of his generally jovial demeanor and stage presence, Armstrong made no excuses for white America, and could be a harsh critic. During the 1957 struggle to integrate Little Rock Central High in Arkansas, Armstrong called Eisenhower “two-faced” and stated, ” “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.”

To use Armstrong to exonerate America of racism is obscene in part because Armstrong’s success was accomplished in the teeth of racism — the grandson of slaves, he grew up poor, and was often harassed and arrested by the police. Through sheer talent, he overcame America’s best efforts to thwart him. But that doesn’t mean that racism didn’t exist, anymore than Jane Austen’s novels mean that women had the same access to education as men did in England in the 1800s. The fact that some people, through luck, skill, and genius, manage to thrive despite oppression is a testament to the human spirit of those whose humanity is often denied. But the oppressors shouldn’t get the credit when, despite their best efforts, in some small way, the oppression fails.

John Hennings on How Country Music Got More Racist

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I really liked this comment John Hennings left last week about Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”, so I thought I’d highlight it here.

Noah, I agree in general with your points about this song, and I enjoyed this essay, but I think you got the title wrong. You correctly assert that country music got more racist, but you don’t explain how. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it was an unfortunate side effect of the polarization during the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what happened to country music, and I don’t think racism, per se, is the problem with the song.

You and my fellow commentators are right to point to country’s current vacuity as one source of the trouble. Country music is far from uniquely Southern and Western, but it is identifiably so. Like other forms of music from the poor, rural places, it is borne of hard times. Despite the current economic struggles, times aren’t as hard for most of us hillbillies as they were in Hank Snow’s day, so country music now has less to say. We’re also not as isolated, so country music is less distinctive.

The culture that made Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong the men they were is severely endangered. The Starbucks reference in “Accidental Racist” is a good indicator. Prosperity and progress have made the lives in the flyover states (regardless of color) more similar to those on Long Island or in Orange County than to those of Roy Acuff or DeFord Bailey. Many rural kids listen to pop, hip-hop and rock growing up. They don’t start voluntarily listening to country until they get jobs and families. Country music now talks about the responsible grown-up lifestyle more than other music, so we mature into people for whom country music speaks.

Had “Accidental Racist” been the integrated, honest modern equivalent of “Blue Yodel #9?, Paisley and LL Cool J would have commiserated over the petty politics of their homeowners’ association, or the difficulty of getting your children into the best schools. Those aren’t compelling issues, but they’re genuine.

In the South, we also listen to country because it is identity music. So are related forms like southern rock, gospel, blues, dirty south hip-hop, and gangstagrass. We associate country with our traditional culture — the slower pace of Southern life; the connection to the land; and the greater emphasis on family, community, hospitality, and faith. The attraction is even more powerful if none of those things describe our lives anymore. The irony of this nostalgia is that when we were children, the homogenization had already begun.

I grew up in classically (not to say stereotypically) rural Southern surroundings and circumstances. I love “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” maybe more than any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song. For me, that is saying a lot. The Ballad is about a homeless, black, blues guitarist and the white child who would scrounge money and defy his parents to hear him play. It could easily have happened in the racially mixed town I grew up in. In my mind’s eye, it did. It is an honest song that makes a statement about human equality. That statement may not be quite as organic or “accidental” as the statement in Blue Yodel #9, but it is nearly so, and it is neither preachy nor flat-footed. “Accidental Racist,” in contrast, seems more like the narrative of a frustrated suburbanite, awkwardly stumbling through race issues for which his primary preparatory life experiences were those very special episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

On second thought, maybe it is an honest song, after all.

I’ll add one more word of defense for Brad Paisley. When he and I were kids growing up, white and black Southerners considered the Confederate battle flag a symbol of the South and Southern culture. More defensively, it was a badge of our us-against-them attitude toward those who believed themselves our superiors. White supremacist groups actively re-branded the flag and made it a symbol of slavery and racism. Where I lived, that took effect a little before I graduated high school, much to our vocal lament. I don’t know if that was contemporaneous with the rest of our society. This was pre-internet; we were frequently behind y’all when it came to zeitgeist awareness.

Interestingly, with the notable exception of England, Southerners in many European countries also lead simpler, more agrarian, lifestyles than their more cosmopolitan countrymen. So when football teams from southern Italy or southern Germany play their northern rivals, you can expect some fan to fly the Confederate battle flag.

 

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How Country Music Got More Racist

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Brad Paisley’s new song “Accidental Racist” is a sodden, self-pitying slog. Over surging, hookless country radio gush, Paisley’s anonymous vocals blandly wail about how he’s caught between southern pride and southern blame because the folks at the Starbucks don’t appreciate his Confederate flag T-shirt.  “I’m a white man/living in the Southland/just like you I’m more than what you see/I’m proud of where I’m from/but not everything I’ve done,” he declaims, then mumbles about how Reconstruction was bad (for who, exactly?) and how we can’t rewrite history so we might as well celebrate the symbols of slavery?  Then LL Cool J comes on and starts to bargain: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” Hey, if you don’t judge my big schnozz, I’ll forget the Holocaust.  Can’t we all just get along?

Pretty much everybody has already weighed in on what a piece of shit this song is. But I think to really appreciate its badness fully, it might be helpful to listen to an earlier country music take on race.

 

That’s Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and the genre’s first major star, with Blue Yodel #9 from 1930. The piano player is Lil Hardin; the trumpeter is her husband, Louis Armstrong.

Rodgers doesn’t mention the Confederacy or race. Still, with Louis Armstrong standing beside him, the opening lyrics seem fairly pointed:

Standing on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm

Along came the police, he took me by the arm

It was down in Memphis, corner of Beale and Maine

He said, big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name,

I said, you’ll find my name on the tail of my shirt,

I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.

In “Accidental Racist,” Paisley sings ” I try to put myself in your shoes and that’s a good place to begin/it ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin”  — a couplet that seems half lament and half excuse.  Rodgers, on the other hand, and with much less fuss, demonstrates that hillbillies and black folk have plenty of common ground. A half century before hip hop, this is, after all, a song about police harassment.  Rodgers could be speaking for a young Louis Armstrong, out there on the streets of Memphis — though Armstrong didn’t usually yodel.

Armstrong gets to speak for himself, too — and, to no one’s surprise, his trumpet is considerably more eloquent than LL Cool J’s lyrics. The song, in fact, is a conversation, with Rodgers throwing out a line and Armstrong’s horn answering with its mix of jaunty assurance and melancholy. The two performers couldn’t be much more simpatico; both are completely comfortable with the blues and the raggy swing of Hardin’s piano accompaniment.

“Accidental Racist” is an ostentatious declaration of difference and tolerance; you’ve got your traditions, I’ve got mine, but we can still tolerate each other. Rodgers and Armstrong, though, aren’t tolerating each other’s differences, because they aren’t that different. Their musical traditions and influences, and even, the song suggests, their life experiences are congruent — almost as if they come from the same country.

That country is not the one that flies the Confederate flag.  Paisley builds his marginal Southern identity on the symbols of slavery, identifying with a tradition of oppression. Rodgers builds his on the experience of being a hobo and a drifter on the butt end of the law. Paisley declares his Southern individuality by perpetuating completely anonymous country radio dreck. Rodgers declares his by demonstrating his links with the quintessentially Southern music of Memphis. “Accidental Racist” sees the south as white and the north as black; Rodgers and Armstrong, though, know their home, and their music, is integrated.

We tend to think about race relations in terms of progress. Once, we were benighted, but slowly we have crawled into the light.  And it’s certainly true that things have gotten better in some ways since 1930; we’ve gotten rid of Jim Crow, we’ve elected a black President.  But Paisley’s crappy track is a reminder that later isn’t always better. Once upon a time, there was room for a rural white identity which defined itself not in opposition to, but in continuity with, the black experience. Paisley’s track is a depressing reminder of how thoroughly Lynyrd Skynrd has replaced Jimmie Rodgers for contemporary country — and of how thoroughly that is a change for the worse.
 

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The Art of Racism

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A version of this review first appeared at the Chicago Reader.
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“It was shocking that in a city bursting with parade enthusiasts and curious tourists, a pair of European women who stayed less than an hour were the only white faces in the crowd other than ours,” write Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen in their new book Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. (100-101) The two are describing their experiences at Mardi Gras, where they went to watch the Zulu parade, one of the few places in contemporary America where African-Americans will wear blackface as a matter of course. Taylor and Austen describe their own experiences at the parade in order to convey the manic strangness of carnival; to show why and how even blackface can be normal there. At the same time, though, by highlighting their presence at an all-black parade, they emphasize their whiteness — and, paradoxically, their adoption of blackness. The Mardi Gras description is, at least in part, about two white authors momentarily joining the black community. In that sense, the passage can itself be seen as a kind of literary blackface.

This is not to criticize Taylor and Austen. On the contrary, this very mild stumble — if it even rises to a stumble — serves mostly to throw into relief how very surefooted, thoughtful, and perceptive they are for the bulk of the book. This is no mean achievement, since black minstrelsy — the practice of blacks donning blackface and/or performing routines associated with minstrel shows — is surely one of the most charged and uncomfortable topics in American pop cultural history.

In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, blackface performances by whites perpetuated vicious racist stereotypes of happy, lazy, stupid chicken-eating, watermelon-slurping, vacuously-grinning darkies. And yet, as Taylor and Austen show, blacks themselves have been long time, and even enthusiastic participants in the minstrel tradition. From Louis Armstrong to Flavor Flav, minstrel clowning and tropes have been central to black American music and black American comedy.

What, then, did blacks get from minstrelsy? Was it an example of false consciousness, with African-Americans duped into adopting hurtful stereotypes as their own? Or were black entertainers forced to adopt minstrelsy to make a living in a white-controlled entertainment industry?

Such explanations have been staples of the longstanding black anti-minstrelsy tradition, from Richard Wright to Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled. But while Taylor and Austen have great respect for anti-minstrelsy’s commitments and aesthetic achievements, they mostly reject its conclusions. Black minstrelsy, they argue convincingly, was not, at least for the most part, the result of self-deception or coercion. No one, for example, forced the politically engaged Paul Robeson to record “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a minstrel type song which told blacks to labor cheerfully in the cotton-fields and “accept your destiny.” (208)

Instead, Taylor and Austen argue, blacks used minstrel traditions in a number of different ways. Sometimes, they deployed it as a critique— as Spike Lee does in Bamboozled. Sometimes, they adapted and subverted racist messages, as in Robeson’s version of “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” Robeson, Taylor and Austen argue, treats the song as a spiritual, in which blacks shoulder suffering, hardship and injustice on their way to the Promised Land. Rather than a justification of racism, in Robeson’s hands the minstrel song becomes a dream of liberation. In a similar vein, the great early-20th century black blackface performer Bert Williams injected pathos and nuance into his performances and songs, undermining the racism of minstrelsy by emphasizing the humanity of his characters.

While black minstrelsy could be used consciously to confront or undermine racial tropes, however, that does not seem to have historically been its main appeal to black performers and black audiences. On the contrary, in many cases, Taylor and Austen suggest, minstrelsy was enjoyed by blacks in much the same way it was enjoyed by whites — as low humor and nostalgic escapism. Southern hip hop performers who gesture towards minstrelsy with clowning about chicken or watermelon do so because they enjoy such humor…and aren’t going to be embarrassed about it just because various cultural arbiters say they should be. Similarly, Louis Armstrong sang “When Its Sleepy Time Down South” — with its evocation of the lazy “dear old Southland” — because a nostalgic vision of ease and plenty appealed to him and other blacks during the Great Depression, just as it appealed to whites. (211)

In minstrelsy, this paradise of laughter and ease is, of course, racialized. A world of blackface is a world in which, by definition, everyone is black. For whites, this world is in part an object of ridicule. But it is also, as Taylor and Austen argue (and with their trip to Mardi Gras, perhaps demonstrate) an object of yearning. To put on blackface is, for whites, to be free, crazy, funny, authentic, cool. And this is also, Taylor and Austen suggest, what it means, or can mean, to put on blackface for blacks. Thus, Zora Neale Hurston, who loathed white minstrelsy but used minstrel tropes extensively in her work, often spoke admiringly about black primitivism, naturalness, and spontaneity. “[T]he white man thinks in a written language,” she said, “and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.” (269)

Hurston’s investment in black minstrelsy and black folk traditions inspired her to create Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, built on her love of black people and black community. But her investment in minstrelsy also arguably inspired her to oppose integration, on the grounds that she didn’t want black primitivism and naturalness to be contaminated. Racial pride and racism for Hurston were two sides of the same mule bone.

Hurston’s habit of calling herself “your little pickaninny” in letters to a white benefactor is viscerally jarring. But her black minstrelsy is perhaps only a more exaggerated and painful form of a problem that confronts any minority cultural production within a racist society. Black music, theater, literature, entertainment, and comedy, from the days of black minstrelsy to the present, have been a glorious, seemingly limitless aesthetic treasure. But those riches have been created, and are in some sense dependent upon, the subcultural marginalization resulting from segregation and oppression. To celebrate black cultural achievement, whether Mardi Gras, or Hurston, or even Paul Robeson, is to celebrate in part the fruits of racism.

Nothing could make this clearer than black minstrelsy, a black art form built — with courage and cowardice, subversion and acquiescence — out of racism itself. Darkest America is, in this sense, not a story about an obscure and forgotten curiosity. Instead, it is a surprisingly graceful and erudite recuperation of what may be our most inspiring, most shameful, and most American art form.
 
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