A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race And The Soul Of America. Craig Werner

cross-racial musical dialogue. In 1828, a white man named Thomas “Daddy” Rice saw a black man performing a strange but compelling song and dance on a street in Charleston, South Carolina. Rice bought the man’s song, dance, cart, and clothes for fifty dollars. Within a decade, Rice had parlayed his imitation of the original into a lucrative show business career, creating a sensation in New York, touring London, and scattering the cultural landscape with land mines that continue to go off on a weekly basis. Already well known as an “Ethiopian Delineator” when he met the black man who would make his fortune, Rice participated in one of the most popular forms of nineteenth-century American popular culture. Groups such as “The Six Original Ethiopian Serenaders” painted themselves in blackface and presented grotesque cartoons of black life. Advertisements for the “Congo Melodists” promised authentic renditions of the “Nubian Jungle Dance,” the “Virginia Jungle Dance,” and the “African Fling.”

      Audiences lacking direct contact with African Americans typically confused the parody with the real thing. Visions of comic dandies, childlike Uncles, and sex-crazed ape-men erased the complex black humanity of Frederick Douglass and the grandfathers of the Delta bluesmen. Ida B. Wells and the grandmothers of Mahalia Jackson and Ella Baker were reduced to coal-black Mammies and high yella Jezebels. The situation got so far out of hand that black performers were forced to don blackface and alter their speech because they failed to accord with the “reality” defined by white minstrels. No surprise that many blacks recoiled in anger and disgust from any imitation of black culture by white performers.

      The economic impact of minstrelsy was even worse. Rice’s ability to parlay the fifty dollars he paid his source into a fortune wouldn’t have surprised many of the black musicians of the fifties or sixties. The long-standing segregation of the record charts encouraged white artists to release sanitized “cover” versions of black hits. Pat Boone became a star on the basis of mummified covers of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” the Charms’ “Two Hearts,” and the Flamingos’ “I’ll Be Home.” His hit versions of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” make a significant contribution to American humor.

      On many occasions, the black/white minstrel dynamic amounted to something like pure theft. One of the most notorious cases concerned the Beach Boys’ rip-off of Chuck Berry. Riding a wave of hits that began with “Surfer Girl,” the Beach Boys (whose business affairs were run by the Wilson brothers’ father, Murry) released “Surfin’ USA.” The song’s infectious rhythms, sweet harmonies, and celebration of teenage fun as American myth established the group as uncontested rulers of surf music. The only problem was—despite a record label crediting the song to Brian Wilson—it’s Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” note for note. It took a lawsuit to get Berry songwriting royalties and credit as Brian Wilson’s “collaborator.”