That’s Alright Mama: How Southern Blacks Invented Rock and Roll

• In Event: With, in, and Beyond: Curriculum Studies of Southern Place Outside the Boundaries of Region

Abstract

Like fading portraits, historical events often become distorted, marred or forgotten with the passage of time. This is especially the case when the combined images and narratives of cultural icons have eclipsed the historical presence of the very people that have created the genres from which the vastly more popular artists drew their inspiration. This paper seeks to recapture these lost images by exploring the development of modern rock from the savannahs of West Africa (Oliver, 1970), to the call and response chants and field hollers of African-American slaves, (Crawford, 2001) and how these images were (dis)placed during the height of the classic rock era. Particular attention is given to the impact of African-American gospel and blues on the most influential figures in rock including Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles (Palmer, 1992).

The purpose of this essay is to maintain a sense of cultural historicity that recaptures fading images and narratives of the African American roots of rock music for present and future students of culture of the American south. The theoretical framework for this inquiry is critical historical studies which explores “connections between cultural form and socio-economic context and promote a refl¬exive awareness of the researcher’s own position in the history of global capitalist society (Goswami, Postome, Sartori & Sewell 2013).Critical reflexive ethnography, “highlights the importance of writing in ordinary language. Such narrative experimentation aims to replace the old scientific ethnographic realist narrative style with a more reflexive realist narrative style (which creates) a more engaging, useful, public storytelling genre”(Foley 2010, p. 469). Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials include recordings, interview transcripts, archival video performances, journal articles. The results and warranted conclusions drive at African-Americanized historicity of rock-and-roll that reinvigorates an understanding of Southern place through counternarratived dominant view of Southern gentlemen and ladies. Overall, this paper’s conclusions give salience to the musical heritage of cultural icons that has often remained unknown or forgotten either inadvertently or in some cases, deliberately, as a manifestation of the phenomena of cultural reproduction of White cultural imperialism (Young, 1990, Hamm & Smandych (2005).

References

Foley, D. (2002). Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.Volume 15, Issue 4.

Goswami,M. Postome,M. Sartori, A. & Sewell,W. (2013). Critical Historical Studies. Chicago, IL. University of Chicago Press.

Hamm, B. & Smandych, R.C. (2005). Cultural imperialism: essays on the political economy of cultural domination. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Oliver,P.(1970). Savannah syncopators. New York, NY: Stein and Day Publishers

Palmer, R, (1992). Deep blues: A musical and cultural history of the Mississippi delta. New York: Penguin Press

Young, R. (1990). White mythologies: Writing history and the west. New York, NY: Routledge.

Yurchenco, H.(1995) “Blues fallin’ down like hail” Recorded blues, 1920s-1940s.American music, Vol. 13, no. 4 . pp. 448-469.

Author

• Robert Lewis Lake, Georgia Southern University