BRAVO: Blues Racial Awareness and Vision Organizing week
Aug. 25 to Sept. 1:
A time at the end of summer to look into the history of the blues, find out how greed and racism are impacting the music, and envision a new future of peace, justice and fun.
Yes, people of all ethnic groups can play and enjoy the blues. I'm blessed to play the piano. But blues is an art form rooted in the black community. Cut off the roots and the tree will die. And without strong Black kings and queens to lead us into the future, this beloved American music is in great danger.
So where are the Black sons and daughters of this blues Father who is passing on the spark of life? From the lineups of many so-called blues festivals today, one might think they don't exist. They exist all right, in Chicago and across the country, but only a handful manage to get promoted while the music business continues to churn out phony acts and imitators.
Too many dreams have been deferred. Feelings came to a head this past week in a dialog following racially insensitive remarks by Bruce Iglauer, CEO of the successful blues and roots label Alligator Records, in the Chicago Reader.
But one man alone did not build up this complicated System that is keeping good blues artists down. As in the New Jim Crow mass incarceration system, many forces are at work. This week, please look at some of the history this blog, duplicated in my Facebook Notes, and in the BLOG section of my website www.barrelhousebonni.com
Ask yourself these questions:
1. What are the racial and economic dynamics keeping good African American blues men and women from promotion and success?
2. What do we want to see instead? Can we get a critical mass in consensus?
3. How can blues business people, media, musicians and fans act to change things from the way things are to the way we want them to be?
Please post your comments (respectful, and focusing on the System rather than personalities) on this BRAVO Week entry.. Knowledge is power, and truth speaks louder than all the lies that have built up over the past 50 years.
I'll report the results here and in Facebook Notes and other blogs. BRAVO to you for taking time to think about this.
posted by Bonni @ 5:37 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
THANKS, Bonni! This is vital, important work of cultural preservation.
I remember as a jr hi student browsing the record collection at our public library in Aurora, IL, and discovering Mississippi prison worksongs (collected by the Lomax family). Their depth & anguish & humor & hope & authenticity blew me away—a part of America that I'd not yet been exposed to.
And at Oberlin College we heard authentic folk musicians like "Mississippi John Hurt," who not only presumably got a decent check for his campus-wide assembly gig, but also in the smaller sets in some black homes around town: we could share with each other as fellow human beings on the same planet.
Later I came to Chicago and discovered Maxwell Street: those pick-up bands on dusty street corners, with little battery-powered amplifiers, all with a genuine sound so often imitated but never replicated. Where is all that now? Checkerboard Lounge perhaps? I dunno—I've been gone from Chicago 16 years.
Let's work together to protect & advance this genuine Americana, black folks' gift to the world!
-DHF
Columbia, Missouri
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