Are whites taking or are blacks giving away the blues? - popularity of blues music among whites

Ebony, Sept, 1997 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

B. B. King agrees."in general, when I'm signing autographs for kids, it's rare to meet a Black one who doesn't want it for his mother, grandmother or grandfather. But the Whites usually ask for themselves."

How can we turn this situation around?

The only solution to reclaiming our blues heritage, King and others believe, is to educate the youth.

"I don't want them to like it," King says. "They can like it if they want to, but they should know about it. I just want our kids to know about it."

It saddens King that more young people don't know their musical roots. He says blues is the granddaddy to rap, and just as grandchildren carry their grandparents blood, rap and hip-hop carry the genes of the blues. "I don't altogether blame them," King continues, "I blame us for not making a better effort to let them know their roots."

If blues is to survive, it must be heard. "Our Black radio stations need to play our music," Guy says. King adds, "We did a survey and found that out of the thousands of radio stations across the United States, only 28 featured blues."

Chicago is a rarity among the handful, King says, because it has stations that play the blues. Jacque Haselrig, program director of 1390 AM in Chicago, says the station has several slots for blues, especially on Saturdays and on "Blue Monday" when blues are played throughout the day. "We play good down-home blues," she says. "I think we've thrown away our heritage, that which makes us who we are, by not embracing the blues and by not continuing to embrace them [the blues singers]."

Another Chicago station, V103, started a Sunday evening blues slot, the "Blues Cafe." Jamillah Muhammad, assistant program director, says the station felt a responsibility to fill the void.

King says many young Blacks are into radio, BET, MTV and VH1. "They don't play the blues and that's one of the reasons they don't know about us," he says.

Another reason many Blacks don't know about the blues cuts a little closer to the bone. Some experts say that Blacks are ashamed of the blues, which reminds them too much of sharecropping and shanties, cornbread and corn whiskey, and Saturday night juke joints.

So, they say, Blacks left the blues in the South, abandoned them in Southern fields, scattered like old washtubs by the side of a dusty road. In the flight to freedom up North, the blues were too much baggage, left behind with a note that we would send for them later.

"They look down on the blues like they're looking at a pile of garbage," says Koko Taylor. "Then when the Whites come along, they love it; they're paying for it. And then our people are the first to say they took our music. Nah, they didn't take it. We gave it to them."

Siegel says people tend to choose their forms of music like the clothes that they wear -- by what's in style. "We all have the tendency to choose our music based on our self-image," he says. "People tend to choose forms of music based on what's hip and what isn't hip -- which really falls into a sociopolitical realm and has nothing to do with the music itself."