We’re bigger than the books say we are
By Kevin Belford
For the St. Louis American
The blues was the path that American music followed. Jazz went on to beget big band music, and the blues continued underneath mainstream radar until it was rediscovered and tossed with country music and became rock and roll.
Experimentation never stopped. American music evolved, and St. Louis has always been an important part of the continuum. The blues music of St. Louis in the 1930s was the most popular blues at the time and some of the most creative, adding to the basic piano or guitar blues song a trombone or violin and even the only use of a celesta in a blues song.
Popular opinion and the definition of the word “blues” has been limited over the years as later generations selectively sought out the roots of the music that they preferred. 1960s rock guitarists went for the recordings of the early guitar blues, ignoring the female vocalists and piano players that are the biggest part of the early blues.
The categorical terms “blues” and “jazz” became ideals – words that mean more than the thing they express. The romantic concept of the blues is: born bad to the bone in a cotton field and reared in a roadhouse moaning a low-down ache of rejection and abandonment.
You can’t help but love the blues. It’s all about “me.” And when it does get around to mentioning you, it’s only to say how badly you treated me. The ideals remain today, even though jazz has dwindled to background music in restaurants and the blues are just about any guitar rock.
The blues and jazz ideals romanticized the myth of a Southern birth of the music, and St. Louis’ contributions were minimized and appropriated. One iconic legend of the blues is the crossroads in Mississippi where one goes to cut a deal with the devil. It is commonly attributed to Robert Johnson, but East St. Louisan Peetie Wheatstraw had already been to the crossroads, made a deal with the devil, married Statan’s daughter and became the high sheriff of hell – all before Robert Johnson was old enough to cross the road by himself.
The nicknames “blues” and “jazz” started as slang, became descriptions and then were idealized. We assume the myth to have some basis in fact, but since the blues category runs from a chain gang chant to Duke Ellington, and jazz contains everything from ragtime to Miles Davis, it is impossible to say that either came from any single source.
But categories are the way that humans think, the “File Under X” method. Today, with the internet and personal music devices, categorizing is no longer a tool of commercial interests. It’s a personal matter now; it’s your mixtape or Ipod playlist.
Sorting and preferences of music has evolved into a more democratic method, with digital audio files that can be “tagged” by listeners and sorted on demand to find similar music based on personal likes. A user can submit favorite songs or artists and, based on the attributes of that music, sample millions of other user’s submissions; a likely personal category can be identified. The Music Genome Project and Pandora.org are internet projects that attempt to do this.
More accurate than marketing categories, this qualitative survey opinion system has been used for other consumer projects and internet sites like Flickr, Amazon and YouTube. We now define the categories ourselves, and we can call our personal categories whatever – “blues” or “purples” or “fo’ schnizzle.”
The antique classifications and categories of music are generalizations, not precise definitions, and that is the misunderstanding of the evolution of American music and also why no one really understands how St. Louis fits into the picture. The key is American style mixing and evolving, not labels or preferences.
St. Louis, humble to a fault, has allowed the mischaracterization of her contributions and accepted the minimized view of her creativity and progressiveness. This inferiority complex has not only short-changed past artists, but it also affects current creative class.
The worst result of this situation is the opinion that an artist must leave the city to make it. That psychological hurdle is a factor on young artists when they think about their futures.
Recognition of our contributions and our prominent place in the evolution of American music can only come from an accurate assessment of history. St. Louis and her cultural treasures are nationally significant. They are what the city needs to build upon to inspire and encourage the next generation.