I’m reading a strange and often incoherent book by Nick Tosches called Where dead voices gather. For all it’s jumping about and disconnected tangents, it’s actually a fascinating take on the minstrelsy of the 1800s and early 1900s, and the transition from minstrelsy and vaudeville to the country and blues are central to what is often called “American roots music”.
In and amongst all his ramblings I just got to this great quote:
As to the true origin of the cakewalk, it is believed to have begun at about the same time as minstrelsy, around 1840, with slaves parodying the formal dances of their masters. These burlesques came to be mimicked [by whites] in minstrel shows. After the Civil War, when blacks entered minstrelsy, they assumed parts in the minstrels’ cakewalk. As Terry Waldo puts it in his book This Is Ragtime: “By the time the ragtime era began in 1896, the cakewalk was being performed by blacks imitating whites who were imitating blacks who were imitating whites.” I’m sure the gist of this wonderful little observation can, with not much squinting, be applied to the whole of popular culture.
Ah, what wonderful stuff. It reminds me of this excellent essay, “When wrong is right”, written by Ed Ward as a companion piece to the PBS documentary on John Lennon’s jukebox. In it Ward argues that one of the great strengths of the Beatles’ music was that they tried to copy the American R&B they loved and failed. In failing, however, they created new combinations and opened new doors:
This is what makes artists artists: they take little bits of things from here and there and put them together in unexpected combinations that seem new and original. Some of them are pretty obvious: one of Little Richard’s trademarks is the “Ooooo!” he interjects into a lot of his hit songs. Richard got it from the world of gospel, where it’s a standard of Alex Bradford, among others. The Beatles grabbed this little trick for themselves, and it’s all over their first recordings: girls went wild when Lennon and McCartney stepped up to a single microphone, shook their mop tops, and went “Ooooo!”.
Makes me want to go off and butcher a good song or two… :-)
Just to insert one of my little obsessions: that description of “they take little bits of things from here and there and put them together in unexpected combinations that seem new and original” is also a good summary of evolutionary bricolage.
Indeed, and the connection here to Dawkins’ concept of “memes” could certainly be expanded upon. In culture, however, you do (at some level) have intelligent designers – musicians, writers, directors, labels, A&R people are (often? usually?) trying to “succeed”, and so their changes aren’t random. The weird thing is how often the important developments have a certain aspect of randomness, or at least unexpectedness, about them. Sometimes people know they’ve really done something special, but quite often they’re totally surprised by the impact they had. And sometimes it can take quite a quite for that impact to be understood. I’m sure that a lot of the musicians that recorded in the 20s and 30s didn’t expect their work to still be selling and culturally important 3/4 of a century later, regardless of their hopes that it would sell well in their time and bring them some fame.