Are Blacks giving away the blues? White fans keep the music and its artists going strong

Ebony, Oct, 1990 by Charles Whitaker

Are BLACKS Giving Away The BLUES?

NORTHWESTERN University's Pick-Staiger Concert Hall - a plush, 1,300-seat marvel of acoustic engineering - resounds with the gutsy wails of blues master B.B. King. In this citadel of classical music, located on the university's Evanston, Ill., campus, a worked-up throng of listeners, 95 percent of them White and yuppie-ish, clap arrhythmically as, ironically, King sings of the Black man and woman, the pain and the pleasures, the loving and the leaving that are mainstays of the blues idiom.

Upscale Whites, like the ones packed into Pick-Staiger, have become the principal supporters of King and the vast majority of the Black artists who make a living playing and singing the blues.

Peek into almost any of the country's popular blues clubs and you'll find them filled with Whites, young and old, who display a passionate affection for the music. At the outdoor blues festivals that have become a summer staple in cities like Chicago, Jackson, Miss., and St. Louis, only a few Black faces can be spotted in the overflowing crowds.

It is one of the ironies of modern music that the blues - an art form originated and still performed largely by African-Americans - today draws an amazingly small pool of Black fans.

Even King, one of the best-known blues artists in the country, has noticed an appreciable drop in the number of Blacks attending his concerts. "I'd say that 70 to 80 percent of the people in most of the audiences are White," he says. "At some of the colleges, there might not hardly be any Blacks at all."

Are Blacks giving away the blues and, subsequently, relinquishing part of a rich musical heritage? Artists like Grammy-winning blues singer and guitarist John Lee Hooker think so. "Black people today don't seem that interested in the blues," he says. "They want to get away from it. They think the blues is a downer, something left over from slavery times."

Since the late 1960s, when Motown Records changed the sound of popular music, Blacks have marched - or danced - to a beat slightly different than that of the blues. As musical styles continued to evolve, giving rise to forms as varied as rock, reggae and rap, Blacks drifted further and further from the blues, not recognizing the direct link between contemporary music and its antecedents, namely jazz and blues.

"A lot of Black people today don't know that the blues is where the music they listen to today comes from," says Lincoln McGraw Beauchamp, cofounder of The Chicago Blues Artists Coalition, an advocacy group dedicated to the preservation of the blues and to preventing the exploitation of blues artists. "If you study the blues and you listen to rap and Michael Jackson and all of this kind of stuff, you learn that what they're doing today can be traced right back."

Still, the earthy, unadorned quality of the blues does not always sit well on ears accustomed to the slick production of contemporary music. "Most Black people think the blues aren't sophisticated enough," says singer Etta James whose repertoire runs the gamut from pop to blues.

But James, like many, feels that there are a lot of Blacks who are closet blues fans. "They're the same people who will have a Saturday night fish fry," says James, "invite their mama over, play all the B.B. King, T-Bone Walker and Howlin' Wolf they can get their hands on, but shut all the doors and windows up tight `cause they don't want anybody to know."

Blues artists also acknowledge that their music can be a hard sell to young people who associate it with pain and strife. But they also point out that the blues is just as often about good times and the perseverance of the Black American spirit. "The blues is about life," says B.B. King. "Yeah it's about heartache and hurt, but it's about joys and happiness and all the things that happen in life. It's about truth. That's why people like it when they give it a chance."

Making it all the more difficult for the blues to attract younger Black fans is the fact that blues artists get little or no exposure on popular radio stations. A few breakthrough artists like singer/ guitarist Robert Cray, one of the new breed of young blues performers, have managed to crack the barrier and get limited air play on Top 40 stations. But the albums of most blues artists mainly are relegated to small, esoteric college radio stations.

Yet, it is largely because of those small college stations that blues music is enjoying its current renaissance. "If you look at the audiences for most blues shows, they are made up of a lot of college-educated White people who were introduced to the music by their school stations," says the 35-year-old Cray, who was drawn to the blues in college, a time when he was introduced to the music of artists like Buddy Guy and Elmore James.

White rock groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who were greatly influenced by Muddy Waters and a host of other blues artists, have also contributed to the growing popularity of the blues among young Whites. High profile White groupies like actor Dan Aykroyd, one of the stars of the 1979 hit movie, The Blues Brothers, have helped some blues artists gain national exposure by showcasing them on television and on national concert tours.