They had a right to sing the blues: as blacks' social and economic circumstances have improved, their music has taken a nosedive. American culture at large has abetted the decline, and suffered from it

National Review, July 8, 1991 by Tom Bethell

If we use foreign taste as a fairly reliable listening post, Nashville may now be the most important center of American musical influence. Which seems reasonable to my ears. Country music never soars to the heights, but it doesn't descend to the depths either. Mostly it's fair-to-middling stuff-amiable without being soul-stirring. Reba McEntire and Waylon Jennings aim to please, and they never resort to aural ugliness as an attention-getting device. Country music, of course, is white.

Jazz is sometimes represented as a black art form, but it is more accurate to think of it as American. As with ragtime, its earliest practitioners were both black and white. But the best ones were black-to an overwhelming extent. How are we to explain this? It was not a superiority of musicianship. The mellifluous cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, the leading white jazzman of the "classical" period, was technically the superior of Louis Armstrong, but Louis was the greater player, for artistic reasons that are as hard to deny as they are to define.

No doubt a measure of adversity and tension with his environment is advantageous to the creative artist. Without it, he may get along perfectly well without the subterfuges of art. The blues contain much aesthetically coded protest, making the music seem to express private sorrow, not potential insurrection. The coding also enables us to enjoy the blues today purely as music, and it ensures that others will still be doing so a hundred years from now. Protest songs from the civil-rights movement face a less certain future. Mahalia Jackson was a great gospel singer in the 1940s and 50s. Artistically, she did not survive co-optation by the civil-rights movement.

If people are too comfortable, the creative juices are unlikely to flow. No doubt this is another reason why, so often, commercial success has been followed by artistic decline-for whites as well as blacks. A really big commercial success will bring with it a permanent change, possibly a disorienting one. Listen to Fats Domino, probably the most successful vocalist from New Orleans since World War II. His early records have a very appealing, lightly lilting quality. One can see why he became a big hit. Then came the golden discs and Las Vegas-forget it.

The level of adversity encountered by blacks in New Orleans was noticeable but not disabling. They were better off than most people in most centuries. Compared to most Irishmen in the nineteenth century, for example, most black musicians in New Orleans lived in comfort, even in the "Jim Crow" years. They had musical instruments, the leisure to learn how to play them, music teachers to patronize, social clubs they could join, and above all an economy productive enough to keep literally hundreds of them in work. Is a man oppressed if he can support himself and his family by going off to work every day-clarinet in hand (as George Lewis did in the 1920s)? Tell it to the ditch-digger. When I asked Lewis about segregation, incidentally, what still rankled with him was the memory of discrimination at the hands of light-skinned blacks-socalled "Creoles of color." They had their own social clubs, and sometimes George was hired to play at them.