{"id":1243,"date":"2020-08-16T10:33:33","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T15:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=1243"},"modified":"2022-11-07T19:36:59","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T00:36:59","slug":"how-rock-became-white-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/08\/how-rock-became-white-1\/","title":{"rendered":"How rock became white (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 1: And they crowned the white man king…<\/h4>\n

O<\/span>f the many images associated with the birth of rock and roll, one of the most famous is of a Black man playing a guitar: the legendary Chuck Berry duck-walking across a California stage<\/a>. Alongside Berry, other African American pioneers including Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ray Charles, came to define the birth of this new genre. Yet less than 15 years later, Jimmy Hendrix would stand out as the exception that proves the rule\u2014in the words of one prominent obituary, \u201ca black man in the alien world of rock.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> As music critic Stereo Williams has written<\/a>: \u201cMusic that at one point in the 1950s seemed to herald the deterioration of racial boundaries, gender norms and cultural segregation had, by the 1970s, become re-defined as a white-dominated, male-dominated, multi-million dollar industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Chuck Berry in 1964 playing Santa Monica, CA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I should note up front that the story of how female artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe<\/a>, Big Maybelle<\/a>, or Ruth Brown<\/a>, as well as the gender-bending, mid-1950s drag performances of Little Richard, were written out of the history books could fill another article all together. But in this series, I\u2019m going to focus mainly on the racial dynamics of rock and roll and take up the gender dynamics in a future article.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t only in the complexion of the genre that you find inequality. By the beginning of the 1970s, rock and roll had made a generation of white men unfathomably famous and rich by playing music that had largely originated within the Black community, while thousands of Black artists had lived and died, been cheated and stolen from, and then largely forgotten. Towering artists of rock and roll\u2019s early years like Big Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur \u201cBig Boy\u201d Crudup, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Lloyd Price, LaVerne Baker, as well as later Black rockers, like Shuggie Otis, Buddy Miles, Authur Lee, or Eddie Hazel, who didn\u2019t fit the mold of what critics increasingly thought rock should look and sound like, slowly faded from the story.<\/p>\n

The goal of this article, in addition to perhaps uncovering some brilliant and overlooked music, is to explain how and why this happened, and in the process, I hope, look at some of the limitations of what has become the default framework for understanding this process: cultural appropriation.<\/p>\n