In the mediated spaces of the blues music business, blacks were also given the opportunity of mimicking whites. As minstrelsy became the popular music of the industrialized West in the late nineteenth century, African American performers were allowed onto the bandwagon and were able to get their share of the revenue streaming in from the minstrel shows. Some of the largest and most profitable minstrel shows that entertained thousands of whites in Birmingham were African American productions. In putting on the same blackface as the white performers, blacks got to see African American identity through white eyes. As Hale points out, these professional musicians had “in effect to play whites.” The creation of these “miscegenated styles paradoxically subverted white spectators’ expectations and declared black musical freedom to match white methods and survey the full measure of musical sources.”11 In this way, blacks imitating whites imitating blacks became another American tradition carried forward by rock ’n’ roll.
To my mind, the story of minstrelsy effectively challenges the concept of distinct racial musical traditions, as well as historians’ commitment to narratives of difference. It also provides us with a different take on the birth of rock ’n’ roll and the amount of white guilt to be assigned to the co-opters and exploiters of black culture. The white teenagers who played in garage bands in Birmingham acknowledged their debt to black musicians and freely admitted, like Jim Dickinson, that they played the blues like white boys. But they made it their music too, despite coming from the wrong side of history and the color bar. There has been a friendly takeover of blues music in the twentieth century. The blues is the foundation music of white players in Birmingham and has been for many years. It is white boys’ music played exclusively for white audiences. Teenagers learning how to play electric guitar naturally lean toward blues rhythms and progressions because it’s easy, and it actually sounds better if you don’t have clear amplification and intonation. Martin Stokes has written about the musical construction of self and place: “Music is part of modern life and our understanding of it, articulating our knowledge of other things, and ourselves in relation to them.” Yet he argues that “people will use music to locate themselves in idiosyncratic ways,” and this surely covers white teenage Alabamians who think of the blues as their own.12
“At the Dark End of the Street”
For all the similarities between the musical experiences of Birmingham and Memphis, two very important differences stood out: the relative successes and failures of recording studios and the differing attitudes toward race. Both of these differences can be used to explain why Memphis is regarded as a music city and Birmingham isn’t. If only Sam Phillips had moved to Birmingham rather than Memphis! If only those famous studios in Muscle Shoals had been established in Birmingham rather than out in the sticks! Alas, this did not happen, so Birmingham remained a backwater in American popular music. The creation of a successful recording business is founded not, as popularly believed, on great local music, but on commercial considerations such as infrastructure, geographic location, and marketing networks. There was every reason to believe that Atlanta would have become the recording center of the South rather than Memphis or Nashville. In the 1920s it was the recording center of the South — there were no studios in Memphis or Nashville at this time — but it lost this lead in the 1940s, never to regain it, and the musical development and reputation of the city of the New South suffered accordingly.13
The story of the rise of Muscle Shoals’ recording studios has been told and retold, but I am not going to apologize for including it in this book because it plays such an important part as a comparison with Birmingham. Many of the players who made Muscle Shoals famous came from Birmingham or would have willingly moved there if there were equal opportunities. The rise of Muscle Shoals as a recording center reveals the importance of racial integration in rock music and explains why Birmingham never made it into the urban version of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Only a few miles up the road, Muscle Shoals provides the perfect comparison with Birmingham and proves that racial tolerance plays a vital part in a dynamic music scene. If there is one scholarly conclusion to be taken from these interviews it is that Birmingham’s racial tension suffocated its musical aspirations in the rock ’n’ roll era.
White Alabamians who loved black music and respected black musicians felt privileged in a segregated society because their musical tastes allowed them to mark the difference between them and their schoolmates and parents who condemned black music as “trash” and “animalistic.” The garage bands who played blues and R&B could say later that their music placed them apart from the rest of white Alabama, and this is true, but an interracial musical culture does not necessarily create interracial harmony or equality; it might suggest interracial harmony, but it does not actively produce it. As my colleague Odessa Woolfolk pointed out, if you didn’t march you couldn’t claim to be part of, or even a friend of, the movement for civil rights. The young white men who played black music lived the same divided lives as their schoolmates and parents, keeping the races separated and making a distinction between the African Americans who brought them up and served them, and those who were demonstrating for civil rights downtown. In remembering the dark days of 1963 there does appear to be a collective myopia in white Birmingham; the dramatic events unfurling in downtown Birmingham managed to attract the attention of people all over the world, but the news failed to go “over the mountain” to the more affluent suburbs of Birmingham.
Music marked out white identity in Birmingham just as it did for black self-awareness, but it also gave white blues and R&B fans the means to take sides without getting involved in violent confrontation. Many of our white respondents admitted that their love of black music had to be kept secret in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern communications technology provided the means for whites to cross the color bar in secret, and even those brave or enthusiastic enough to make surreptitious trips across town on Saturday night could return to their privileged place in a segregated society on Sunday morning — the most segregated time of the week, according to Dr. Martin Luther King. It is pretty easy to condemn their passivity with the benefit of hindsight and the safety of the twenty-first century, but I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to get beaten up or lose their business license. Those who challenge the credibility of their interracial yearnings have a point, but the young men who played the white-boy blues and idolized the black musicians who had popularized it sincerely thought that they were the good guys in the struggle for desegregation. I couldn’t include a lot of white guilt in this narrative because it was hard to find any in the music lovers we interviewed. Unfortunately, the racial politics of Birmingham’s history leads to white voices being valued less and in some cases completely discredited. Yet white voices are still a part of the story and should carry the same weight as the heroes of desegregation in recounting the musical history of Birmingham.
Looking back over the transcripts of the interviews, I found out that within the community of interviewers and interviewees in this project I was known as “the Professor,” and my modus operandi was to focus the interviews around the topic of race. I admit that I am a history professor, and as with most, or all, history professors, what interests me most about the history of Birmingham is race. Not only did I orientate the oral histories toward African American music, bringing in the first interviews of black musicians, I also interrogated everyone else on the matter of race, often to the annoyance of those being pressed to talk about an issue that they