Hey friends,
This past weekend, the NY Times ran an essay of mine about Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter album. You can read it here. I started writing this piece almost a year ago when the record first came out. The Times was going to run it then, but they yanked it at the last second. So framing it around the Grammys became a way for me to get it in the paper. Honestly, I don’t give a shit about the Grammys. Watching it was incredibly weird. (So much plastic surgery! So much Will Smith! So many millionaires and billionaires asking us for money! Thank God for Charlie XCX!). I frankly felt a little uncomfortable being a part of the ecosystem that promotes this kind of shit. But I do care a lot about music and it was exciting to have a chance to explore a view of the evolution of American music that I don’t think many people are exposed to. I’m very proud of the piece!
Writing journalism over the past few years has not been much like I imagined it would be. I came to journalism, really, as a rube. I never went to school for it. I don’t have any formal training in it. And I didn’t come up in a newsroom. Opinionating is, of course, different than straight journalism. What I have figured out, though, is that there are ways to get ideas out in the world and sometimes you have to package them in a piece about the Grammys.
One of my main motivators in writing this was as a reaction to the conversation around Cowboy Carter when it first came out. It is an old, boring conversation, and for the sake of simplicity, I’ll boil it down to a handful of questions: Is country music black or white? Do black people get to play country music? Did white people steal black music? I don’t have answers to these questions because I don’t agree with the questions. Never get in an argument when you don’t agree with the basis of the argument!
If I had an overarching goal with writing this essay, it was to illustrate the somewhat lofty idea that music has its own soul and that soul exists beyond race politics in America. And also that people of many different cultures built instruments that created sounds that are now intricately woven into the fabric of music we sometimes call country or rock and roll or hip hop. I love music and I believe we should honor these people. A whole lot of them were not white or black and none of them existed as only as an idea of the race they were born into. They were people and, like us, they were located within the sweep of history and they were affected by things outside of their control.
Doing the work of researching music history has not only joyfully complicated my understanding of history, but it has deepened my love of playing guitar and singing. I got into it, like most teenagers, mostly to meet girls. Now playing is perhaps my most consistent spiritual practice. I frankly can’t imagine my life without it.
The piece in the Times is about half the length of my original draft. Much of what got cut was the history of Native Americans influence on American music. Below are a few paragraphs on that. I'd suggest, if you are interested, in reading the full article first and then coming back to this which is kind of supplemental, but will definitely deepen your understanding of the essay. What is written below is some of my favorite stuff, especially the Howlin’ Wolf quote.
Thanks for reading,
Michael
And so, a bit more history…
American music owes as much to Native Americans as it does to Europeans and Africans. The rhythm of folk, country and rock-and-roll is tribal. Slap your hands together four times in even intervals and count each slap—one, two, three, four. If you can do this repeatedly, starting
back at one once you hit four, then you might be a rock-and-roll drummer. At the very least, you can clap along to nearly every song on the radio. 4/4 time is the backbeat of American music. While African polyrhythms—playing two or more rhythms on top of each other—are utilized widely in jazz music and a bit in the blues, they are much rarer in country, rock, and folk. The backbeat of rock and roll—arguably the most American of all music—has some roots in the drumming of pre-Christian European pagans, but most distinctly and more directly, it comes from the American continent’s indigenous people. Native Americans were banging a four on the floor rhythm on buffalo hide drums for thousands of years before Europeans landed.
Native Americans also influenced the blues. Charlie Patton, a foundational Delta-blues singer and guitarist, lived on an Indian reservation and was likely Choctaw. Along with being known as an incredible showman—throwing his guitar in the air as he played, tapping out polyrhythms on the instrument’s face even as he worked complicated melodies out on the strings—he also taught guitar to Son House, Pops Staples, and Howlin’ Wolf. As Howlin’ Wolf put it, “Charlie Patton was an Indian. And he was the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
One of the most affecting moments in the revelatory documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, shows the Tuscarora/Taino musician Pure Fé listening to a Charlie Patton record and playfully singing along with Native melodies. “That’s where it went,” she says, her face full of wonderment. “That’s where the traditional (Native) music went.” She gestures toward the sound flowing from the record’s speakers, “It went like this.” Seminal rock guitar players with Native blood who followed in Charlie Patton’s footsteps include Link Wray—the only man in history to have an instrumental song banned from the radio for inciting juvenile delinquency—Robbie Robertson of The Band, Jesse Ed Davis, and none other than, Jimi Hendrix, whose sister, Janie Hendrix, once claimed “He was proud of being Native, and being African American and being Scottish. It’s part of your legacy. It’s part of your heritage. It’s part of who you are and what you want to reflect and represent.”
Woody Guthrie, arguably the single most influential folk musician in American history, grew up listening to Native music. Born in Oklahoma only five years after the former Indian Territory achieved statehood, his repertoire was most strongly influenced by the Scot Irish based balladry his mother sang and that he later cribbed from Carter Family albums. But his particular way of singing and his unique phrasing owe an incredible debt to the music of what were then called The Five Civilized Tribes—The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—Native American slave holders who had sided with the South in the Civil War. As Guthrie explains on a 1949 recording at Fuld Hall in New Jersey, later released on an album called The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie In Performance 1949, “My Dad would sing sort of an Indian-Negro mixed up chants. I mean, he’d go to work chanting some Indian dialect, counting or cussing or something…” On the recording Guthrie performs a few brief seconds of a chant, hewing surprisingly close to the singing style that would become his signature, a way of elongating and shortening the vowels of words while shifting very sparingly between notes, issuing lyrics in a stream-like staccato. Guthrie was known more for the content of his songs than for his singing, but his vocal style would famously be aped by a young Bob Dylan who has gone on to influence pretty much every singer who has come after him.
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