R&T author David Dault has raised the interesting thread of “poaching” in this space (begins here). David originally brought up the idea of covers of songs, and debate ensued about if that was quite the right use of Michel de Certeau‘s study of the everyday practices of consumers and of ‘poaching’ as one of the tactics employed by the users of culture. This gives me an interesting theoretical space within which to raise some questions I’ve been mulling on since my Christmas post on John Fahey. What I’m wondering about, and I’m not sure de Certeau’s practice of ‘poaching’ fully helps us with, is white privilege and blues thievery.

This is the beginning of a new direction of writing for me, and it emerges from the claim that I think white men (like me) need to stop writing about the blues. Starting with Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning and extending through Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues to Elijah Wald’s Short History of the Blues, far too much writing on the blues has been done by white men. There are some important exceptions, including James Cone’s The Spirituals and The Blues and Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. More can be done by black scholars, and should be. What white scholars haven’t done, but desperately need to, is to write about white privilege and rock’s thievery of the blues. As young men, scholars such as Oliver and Palmer, and bands like the Yardbirds, engaged in something like ‘poaching’. That is, they took a cultural product and adapted it for their own pleasure and use, but in ways somewhat different from its public shape (either rooted in the public culture of the Delta or in the fraught public culture of the ‘race records’ like Paramount and so on). But they quickly and too often without attribution created their own massively popular products based on their poaching, becoming (one must say it) not only rich but divine as a result (Zeppelin and Jimmy Page particularly served as the template for the ‘Rock God’).

I have recently written in this space about my ‘discovery’ of the incredible guitar virtuoso John Fahey, typically referred to as a master of the “American Primitive” genre. I think I hate that term because of the inevitable condescension built into it (it is borrowed from the art world’s use of “primitive painting” to describe those artists who do not have ‘formal’ training). I don’t know what Fahey would have thought of that title. I prefer to think of him as deeply rooted in the blues, rooted so that he never really lost the threads of how they taught him to play the blues, never completely got out from under their mastery, nor really wanted to.  At least I hope that is so, because as I learn more about the complicated and largely exploitative relationship of white musicians to the blues musicians in the 1950s and 1960s, I find Fahey to have been one of the few who sought to maintain some integrity to his obvious debt his African-American teachers.  These included Skip James and Bukka White, personally, but more profoundly, from a distance, Charlie Patton whom Fahey studied for his thesis in UCLA’s Folklore program.  Fahey’s study of Patton remains the definitive study of the King of the Delta Blues, including transcriptions not only of all Patton’s lyrics, but his unique tunings and most of the music as well.

An interesting case study for opening up the question of poaching in relation to the issue of white privilege and blues thievery is the blues song “Jesus Makeup My Dyin’ Bed.” The song’s origins are unclear, but the first recording of the song was in 1927 by Blind Willie Johnson. Two years later, the famous Charlie Patton recorded a version of the song as “Jesus is a Dying-Bed Maker.” Joshua White, whose own blues story is incredible, recorded two versions: in the twenties he recorded “He’s a Dying Bed Maker (Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed) but in the thirties he recorded another version called “In My Time of Dying.”

Bob Dylan, recording his first album in New York City in 1961, recorded White’s second version, using only three of the five verses.  According to Stacey Williams’ liner notes on the album, Dylan had never even sung the song before recording it in the studio. I don’t know where he got it, but White had relocated to New York and become a fixture at the famous Cafe Society where John Hammond, the producer of Dylan’s first album, had important connections. It is not hard to follow the tracks of influence from Harlem jazz and blues clubs down to Greenwich Village where Cafe Society was located amidst the budding folk scene.  Interestingly, the album attribution only says, “traditional, arranged by Bob Dylan.”

Then, famously, Led Zeppelin picked up the song for their fifth album, Physical Graffiti. Zeppelin’s blues roots as a band are well-known and come from Jimmy Page’s time in the Yardbirds (whose first name was the Metropolitan Blues Quartet and who toured as a backing band for Mississippi bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson‘s European tour in the early 1960s). Like Dylan, Zeppelin’s attribution says, “Traditional, arranged/adapted Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham.  They have continued to play the song throughout their long career, including at their triumphant reunion concert at London’s O2 arena in November 1997.

Fahey, for his part, recorded Patton’s version of the  song in his 1950s unreleased Fonotone Recordings and later on his 1971 album, America but most of the original double album, including two beautiful versions of this song, were not released until the 1998 re-release of the album included all the original tracks.

So, what I’d like to do is pursue (and have help in pursuing) how to make sense of the what is happening in the poaching of an old gospel-blues song for use in the (white) rock repertoire.  (Yes, Jack White has poached this song as part of his career of blues thievery). Not one thing is going on, but there are (I’m arguing) spiritual and moral issues at at stake here, not least because of the deeply religious character of the blues themselves on their own terms (something Cone argues for using the provocative phrase ‘secular spirituals’ to describe the blues).

3 Comments »

1. 

   Hi there! I hope you don’t mind my wandering over from David’s entries to post here as well. It’s a very interesting question you raise, and I think there is a limited extent to which de Certeau is helpful here.

   It starts with his choice of word ‘poaching’ instead of ‘stealing’. It’s an important distinction. Anyone can steal anywhere anytime, more or less. I can rob you on the street, break into your house, drive off with your car. More historically, the baron can send his men and appropriate your cattle, your wife, etc. All of those are theft.

   Poaching is more specific: it takes place in a bounded *terrtory* and it is always something the weak or dispossessed do to the powerful (the proprietors of the territory). Drawing on the experience of my wife’s (living!) relatives of the Isle of Skye: if the laird or the people he authorises catch a fish from the stream that runs through the land where you live, it’s legal. But you might well call it theft, especially if you are hungry and the guy catching the fish ain’t. If you catch the fish on the land where you dwell, it’s poaching. Poaching pre-supposes that power relation: you live here, but you don’t own it.

   To that extent, if a crime has been committed when the white rock guys use blues songs, it is better treated as theft: the white guys *have been granted fishing rights*. And they do what they do in broad daylight with full sanction of the law.

   I think the metaphor itself – though not necessarily de Certeau’s deployment of it – can help think through the situation.

   The issue is how the space around the production and distribution of blues music has been territorialized around the very musicians who first began producing it, and how the fishing rights got granted. And here, I think your opening question – not about musicians, but about *white guys who write about the blues* (me, too, now) – is very much the pertinent one.

   Ascribing the term ‘traditional’ to a blues song is the key gesture. It suggests that the blues comes from a non-territorial space – a common grazing ground, if you will.

   And here is my question: when white guys write about the blues, to what extent do we (wrongly?) reinforce this notion of the blues as coming out of a ‘folk culture’ and that that is free for the picking?

   Coming full circle: if we start calling what the white guys are doing ‘poaching’, what does that do? Does it convert the apparent ‘commons’ of black blues production back into a territorial space? What are the implications of *that* gesture? I am not sure I like those, either.

   Just for thought: a few years ago, Noel Gallagher of History’s Most Over-rated Rock Band complained about Jay-Z headlining at Glastonbury. Glastonbury, he argued, is for guitar rock. Jay-Z, in turn, opened the show with ‘Wonderwall’ : going through the motions of guitar rock in a realm NG thought was his territory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xp_ge6RtP4 That, I would argue, comes close to poaching, even though it was done by a multi-millionaire.

   Comment by Alec — February 18, 2012 @ 8:10 am

2. 

   Chris, thanks for a post that lays out several challenges for scholarship that, as Alec’s comment above has already said, cuts to the quick of what white scholars (including me) are doing with the blues, but by extension, with any music arising from places and times on the short end of historical (and contemporary) power differentials whose benefits white scholars, as white persons in racially-saturated societies, have inherited and continue to inherit. One reason I am particularly interested in your challenge is that I have argued that scholarship in pop culture and religion can be read as spiritual exercises on the part of scholars, who often, if one reads closely, are bringing parts of themselves closer or holding them away for the purpose of some depth-negotiation with themselves. In other words, scholarship on pop culture is a site where psycho-social-spiritual dynamics are condensed and, often, interpretable. I would then be inclined to read carefully white scholarship on the blues in a postcolonial theological vein. And I would also be interested if anyone wanted to sponsor a project where scholars of popular culture went through exercise of psycho-social-spiritual archival through a set of critical and spiritual exercises, or were invited to re-read their own work in that way. I think theologians and in principle all religion scholars would be helped by a better understanding of why we write what we write, and by why what fascinates us, fascinates us.

   Comment by Tommy Beaudoin — February 19, 2012 @ 11:49 pm

3. 

   02 Arena gig = 2007, you might want to correct that.

   Comment by Ecron Muss — December 27, 2012 @ 8:35 pm

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