In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower
Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic
restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form the
blues. In Jim Crow s Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural
history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how
by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians
created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black
individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows,
collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the
early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black
working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter
W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy
by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of
individual escapism even hedonism and by celebrating the very
culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According
to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters
drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and
response forms, but they didn t merely sing of a folk past.
Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience.
Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed
the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class
blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great
Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a
new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought
overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The me -centered
mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became we
-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American
life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the
attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular
black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill
Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines,
and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to
deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the
stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left
little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow s
Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical
experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of
the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal
freedom to repressed citizens.
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