It’s (not) only rock n roll – my ‘race story’. #130. 19/09/2023

Out of Many, One people

Welcome. A lighter start after the summer break, with my attempt to share the beginning of my ‘race story’ and how it has shaped me. So why not share with us your ‘race story’? Or even your rock n roll story.

It’s (not) only rock n roll – my ‘race story’.

Our ‘race story’ is relating how we first became aware of our ‘race’ – primarily our own story, within an awareness that we live in a world of racial diversity. It is a good way of initiating discussion about race since everyone is on equal ground. Ethnic minority people are not putting themselves up for inspection by normative, ‘non racial’ white people; nor are white people being expected to necessarily line themselves behind a shameful narrative of white domination and exploitation. All of us simply offer our own stories to others for them, and us, to make of it what we will.

So here is the beginning of my ‘race story’. As a geography enthusiast I was aware of racial diversity early on. In my year in primary school in quintessentially suburban Pinner there were two dark-skinned boys – I would guess south Indian. One of them, Frankie Abraham, features in the picture I still have somewhere of our (highly unsuccessful) football team. But it wasn’t until my mid-teens in the mid-fifties that I became aware of cultural differences and how my white background was placed amidst diversity. This was generated by the rise of rock n roll. I listened to both white and black performers – though, of course, all American. But as the months rolled on my friends and I increasingly identified the music and its sources that spoke most powerfully to us (aided by copies of the American music trade magazine ’Billboard’ which a friend’s aunt sent to him). Despite the appallingly meagre coverage of rock music on the radio at the time we traced the sources of good music. It was largely from small independent labels – Sun in Memphis for white rock n roll, but pre-eminently Chess/Checker in Chicago for a roster of black artists, with the magisterial Chuck Berry at the forefront, but behind him a line of more obscure rhythm and blues performers: Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Howling Wolf.

This was not my music. It came from an entirely different background but its potency across cultures was evidenced by the appearance in the early sixties of white Britons, most obviously the Rolling Stones, copying, developing and then hugely profiting from the music.

I was a suburban, cerebral white English adolescent finding my soul fed by very urban, visceral black American music. How did this ‘cross racial’ relationship shape me?

1. By valuing the unvalued.

‘A sense of the excitement and surprise of men living in the world – of enslaved and politically weak men successfully imposing their values upon a powerful society through song and dance’ (Ralph Ellison, quoted in Charles Keil’s ‘Urban Blues’, 1966, p 44). What Ellison notes – the unexpected emergence from disregarded places of a powerful, formative cultural force – is part of our cultural history. Charles Keil goes on to identify the major role of marginalised peoples. ‘Marginality was certainly a motivating factor for Marx, Freud and Einstein (and for Durkheim, Proust and Levi-Strauss in France), men who grappled with conflicting Jewish and German ways of life at an early age and whose minds were consequently shaped into a sceptical and enquiring mode of thought ideally suited to the foundations of the ideas that have shaped and continue to shape our [twentieth] century’ (p 195).

A similar process is noted on the rise of jazz by the trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis: ‘That’s how it always is. Cinderella, the one you keep out, and you push down and you kick, that’s the one with the moral authority, with the gift. That’s as old as night and day, as old as dust’ (quoted in Paul Alexander’s ‘Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Growing Religion’, 2009, p 36). In making the connection of the rise of black American music with Pentecostalism Paul Alexander is aware of how it illuminates the rise of Pentecostalism as a faith of the poor, but also connects directly with the life of the first Christians. ‘Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God’ Paul wrote to the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:26-28). So too the Lord’s insistence that his choice of Israel was also a reversal of the world’s valuaton: ‘It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples’ (Deut 7:7).

Written into scripture is the way God reverses the world’s values. Rock n roll, like Pentecostalism emerged from disregarded communities (broadly speaking, from both southern whites and urban blacks). It reinforces the far too widely neglected calling of the church to attend to and respect ‘what is low and despised in the world’.

2. By recognising our alienation.

One of the earliest records to make a strong impression on me was Muddy Waters’ ‘Louisiana Blues’, with its poignant, melancholic interplay of slide guitar and harmonica, the longing for a home forever lost, sung in a voice as though dug from the earth. Waters (aka McKinley Morganfield) was in the post-war stream of black Americans migrating from the rural south to seek jobs in the industrialised north – paralleled by the similar migration of people from the Caribbean to Britain. His longing to be back in the South was set within the even greater foundational dislocation of enslavement and transportation from Africa. It spoke of a rupture, an unhealable separation; the music of an historically alienated people.

‘From the time I grew up the only thing I found out about how to live and what to do in the big world – because your parents aren’t going to tell you, they don’t know – was from the music I listened to. I grew up with Rhythm and Blues records, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, country blues-type things, and I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that what those people were telling me was the truth’; thus Frank Zappa, founder of the rock group Mothers of Invention (Guardian 14/10/1968). The affinity Zappa found with the music, rather than with his parents, stemmed from an alienation nothing like as profound as that of Waters, but nonetheless significant: that between an older generation who had experienced war, economic depression and a pressing need to focus on the serious management of their lives, over against a new generation nurtured in an environment of material comfort and international peace, yet with little sense of emotional richness or inner meaning.

It is this sense of deficit identified by a letter from a psychiatric nurse printed in the end-notes of the English edition of Charlie Gillett’s classic book on the origins of rock n roll, 'The Sound of the City’ (1970): 'My work is helping people to deal with their feelings, but you can damn well bet it never would have happened without the radio and the records to let me in on the feeling sounds - my first awareness of my feelings and the larger world outside the WASP [white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant] monster’. Bruce Springsteen sang about the same sense of discovery in similar but more joyful terms; ‘We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever did in school’.

Yet the potency of music made in a small recording studio in 1950s Chicago had a wider resonance that adolescent rebellion. The music journalist Steve Turner’s original and thoughtful ‘Hungry for Heaven: Rock and Roll and the Search for Redemption’ (1988) picked up the issue brilliantly. ‘There was, I could see, a search for redemption in the best of rock ‘n’ roll. . . (Religion) promised to restore Man to his rightful state, most often articulated as union with God. . . . By heaven I mean the perfect Edenic state from which we fell and for which I believe all people have a hunger, and which perhaps is the origin of nostalgia – the deep feeling that there was once a Golden Age to which we can return. . . I’ve seen an uncomfortableness with this world, a vision of something transcendent, towards which we should be aiming” (pp 7-9).

In that sense the acute sense of dislocation and alienation sensed by black Americans who had been part of the great post-war northern migration connected with white teenagers who grew up under conditions different (materially easier, psychically harder) from their parents; but then beyond them connected with the human condition per se.

‘Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9) the Lord tells the migrating children of Israel. Rock n roll emerged from that feeling of being a foreigner, albeit sharing that in community with others. It expressed a sense of alienation, of knowing how it feels, that is the back-drop to the experience of God’s people, and which enables us to empathise and connect with the experience of all people.

3. By appreciating context.

The music I enjoyed came from a marginalised or peripheral community; from a context very different to my own. It was not (at least in its origins) music made by or designed to appeal to a national or international audience of varied backgrounds and tastes. It was originally created for a specific community of people by people from that community. The rest of us who listened to it could only do so by unconsciously re-positioning ourselves to have a sense of what life was like in that community.

The well-worked themes of mainstream popular music – ‘moon/June/spoon’ – were generalised, unspecific, unlocated. The themes of Chuck Berry - the master-lyricist of rock n roll – were ‘wooden shacks/across the tracks/Cadillacs’. (The greater incidence of proper nouns indicated a significant difference). The records came from specific places: Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, with specific flavours. A simple line from Berry – ‘my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall’ -  from his lachrymose ‘Memphis’ about a father’s frustrated attempt to make phone contact with his separated daughter, opens up a world of fractured families and domestic disorganisation that invites the listener in. To enjoy the music meant an imaginative leap into a different world. Appreciating that context meant giving loving attention to it. For me it was a first taste of the instinctive mental and emotional moves needed in living in a multi-cultural society.

With his unerring sense of what the moment requires Bob Dylan’s portentously titled recent book ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’ avoids discussion of abstract theory and instead creates imaginary contexts related to the very wide variety of songs he covers.

Sometimes the phrase ‘having to read between the lines’ is used negatively about texts that fail to speak directly into the experience of the reader, especially if they are women. Yet ‘reading between the lines’ is what happens when we encounter the products of another culture; we are required to sub-consciously position ourselves within that culture and in so doing we are enriched by exercising our imaginative faculties. It is no coincidence that a large proportion of Booker nominated novelists are women or from ethnic minorities. Like the Jewish frontier-crossers mentioned by Charles Keil in #1 above they have had a lifetime of having to imagine themselves into other contexts. It is a skill we all need to develop in a multi-cultural world.

So, that’s my story. I’m thankful for the music I still love. And I thank God for the way it inducted me into the riches, the delights and the sadness of his multi-cultural world.

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It is with deep sadness to report the death of Bishop Karowei Dorgu, the Bishop of Southwark, age 65. He was a true ‘reverse missionary’ - a medical doctor who came to Britain from Nigeria intentionally to support and strengthen the the Christian faith in Britain. I only met him briefly on a few occasions but was always struck by his warmth, his humility and his straightforward love for God and for people. We send our love to his wife, Mosun, and his family.

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Trigger warning: the following has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It is simply something I wrote that has not been used elsewhere, so I give it an airing here.

Footballers and Need.

In my garden late on Saturday afternoon, I heard a roar from the Spurs ground just up the road. Richarlison had equalised. A few minutes later, an even greater roar as a last minute goal gave Spurs victory, through a Richarlison assist. A Brazilian international, Richarlison had been in the press saying that he needed psychological help. Spurs recently appointed manager, the Greek Australian Ange Postecoglou, supported Richarlison’s acknowledgement of need, saying that he would be given all the help he needed, adding that ‘no one has a perfect life. . . I am sure every player in our dressing room is dealing with something’.

Meanwhile in Manchester, United suffered a disastrous home defeat, lacking the services of one of their most expensive signings, Jadon Sancho, who had been excluded from the squad after complaining about unfair treatment from his manager, Erik ten Hag. In contrast to the bearded avuncular Postecoglu’s affirmation of solidarity and his humane understanding of the pressures on high-profile, especially young, players, the approach of the grim-faced, shaven-headed ten Hag’s seemed impersonal, unfeeling and functional.

Football managers, like humanity itself, can not be divided into goodies and baddies. Contrasting the attitudes and outcomes of Postecoglou’s and ten Hag’s approaches can be no more than a parable, never the basis for a fixed principle. Nonetheless it is worth pondering that Postecoglou’s person-centred leadership at Spurs has so far been unusually successful, whilst ten Hag’s rigidity seems set to continue the erratic results that have marked the club since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement ten years ago.

When the Psalmist complained to God about the unfair treatment he was receiving (‘You have put me in the depths of the Pit’ 88:6), he was not banished into the wilderness. Rather ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust’ (Psalm 103:13,14).

In whatever sphere we exercise authority, we have to learn to to work with that ‘dustiness’, that unsatisfactory fallibility, which is part of the created nature of all people. Even world-class footballers.