The first problem was getting access to black musicians and gaining their consent to give interviews. This oral history project was originated, managed, and executed by whites. One of the main changes I made when I came to this project was to increase the number of people who went out and did the interviews. The first group of interviewers was largely adults — musicians or other members of the music business who were long-term residents of Birmingham. Under the direction of the hard-working Jon Van Wesel (who did the majority of the interviews), investigators Keith Harrelson, Gigi Boykin, Jay Dismukes, Brian Haynes, and Nancy Belcher went out and did the interviews. I exploited my position as professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to bring in students to this project, which created a younger group of interviewers, who were music lovers rather than musicians and who had much broader and more eclectic tastes in music: Courtney Burks, Alison Oden, Tonya Wise, Brandy Lepik, Rob Heinrich, John Gilchrist, and Caitlin Moore. My experiences directing the American Studies program at UAB, a public school with a large percentage (around 25 percent) of African American students, taught me that they know almost nothing about blues culture and care little for the history of black music, slavery, and civil rights. As budding doctors, lawyers, and engineers, they find little to attract them in this part of black heritage. While it was easy to convince my white students to take part in this oral history project, it proved almost impossible to recruit young African Americans. Although we in Birmingham live in an integrated city and enjoy life in an interracial society, the black and white communities are still largely self-segregated, and there remains some discomfort about white people coming in with clipboards and lots of questions. It was possible to reach out to the older generation of black musicians to tell their story, but finding out about modern African American music proved to be much more difficult. Hip-hop in the 1990s was a closed society in Birmingham. Because of the opposition of city government and the impossibly high insurance premiums, there were few hip-hop concerts, and the performances that did take place tended to be private and underground. Again there were significant incursions across racial lines, which muddied the waters of authenticity because hip-hop culture remains amazingly popular within the white suburbs, but one can hardly imagine the howls of protest that would have followed a history of hip-hop in Birmingham drawn largely from whites.
The other problem was that musicians look back on the segregated past with different viewpoints than other people, especially white liberal academics. It was easy enough to get African Americans to talk about the horrors of segregation. Here is a typical quote from Bruce Martin: “It was bad back then … people shouting at you as you walked down the street, throw a tin can full of pee at you … Lots of black women had to work, worked for whites, and get abused, you know. Go home and tell their man, nothing he could do about it. That’s where all those high yellahs come from! It was the Dirty South, not the Deep South, the Dirty South.” Bruce is a taxi driver and was in a good position to understand the reality of segregation. But a black musician sees segregation in starkly different terms than those in other occupations, and it turned out that the last place one was going to find outrage and disgust about segregation in Birmingham was in music venues and clubs, or in the recollections of musicians of both races who had made a good living during that period. How much the rules of racial deference in public continued in this era of good feelings toward African American musicians is hard to evaluate, as no side is eager to stress the power dynamic of these business relationships. Yet it is uncontestable that both sides were profiting from these relationships, which had always allowed African American musicians to work in places where many other blacks and whites were not allowed, and to get much higher returns for the work they did.
In fact, one could argue that many of the viewpoints expressed in these interviews go completely against the prevailing views of academic historians and what one would expect from downtrodden African Americans in what used to be America’s most segregated city. The first time I heard an elderly African American speak wistfully about the good old days of segregation and how much better life was back in the 1960s I was shocked, but I soon got used to it and understood that musicians interpret history differently than professors or politicians. If we see their music as a commercial endeavor rather than staking out black identity and articulating black resistance, this begins to make sense. The same economic forces that powered African American music into the mainstream of popular culture were never going to dwell on the injustices or the immorality of segregation. By choosing to record the experiences and viewpoints of musicians, rather than garbage collectors, taxi drivers or policemen, the final product was never going to meet the expectations of the academic community who were the peer reviewers of the scholarly narrative I hoped to publish. The binary racial politics of Birmingham were never going to be reflected in the mediated and mobile space that musical culture occupies in between the races. Leaning on a group of respondents who were pretty much politically incorrect to start with was enough to condemn their recollections as debased and unimportant within the contested cultural history of the Deep South.
The boundaries of racial politics are not permanently fixed in time, and racial signifiers also shift over time. Mike Butler has studied southern rockers in the postsegregation decades and found that the Confederate symbols these musicians proudly displayed no longer represented traditional southern racial ideologies, in which the flag was associated with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations, but the changing racial identities for white males in the South. Although this new construct of male southerners was not accepted by all males in the South, those involved in southern rock rejected the racist imagery of the flag in favor of a pride in regional imagery, while at the same time “openly and frequently paying homage to the blues musicians who influenced their own creative musical style.” In the 1960s and 1970s this was a rebellious posture that counteracted the accepted image of these musicians as “frightened racists.”14 While southern rock still carries with it the burden of southern racism, it has to be accepted that music has healing, redemptive properties, and this is especially true for a popular music that was the product of some elements of racial integration. As Mark Kemp wrote, “Southern rock offered an emotional process by which my generation could leave behind the burdens of guilt and disgrace, and go home again.”15
“We’ve got Newark, we’ve got Gary / Somebody told me we got L.A. And we’re working on Atlanta.”
Birmingham, Alabama, is what George Clinton would call a “Chocolate City.” In the postsegregation era it has a majority African American population, a local government run largely by African Americans, and a large and affluent black middle class. In her book about black identity in the postsegregated South, Zandria Robinson defines two distinct urban Souths: the historic urban South, which has experienced increased African American population growth but maintains many of the old black/white binary populations and power arrangements, and a new urban South, characterized by an increasing racial and ethnic diversity. She then enhances her definition of the new urban South to encompass the idea of a “Soul City,” in which cities like Birmingham “carry on the musical and political legacy of the civil rights movement even as they attempt to reconcile the racial and socioeconomic realities of the post-soul era.” Like Jackson, Mississippi; Greenville, South Carolina; and Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina, Birmingham has little of the Old South’s Confederate heritage or the glitz and sophistication of the fashionable cities of the New South, like Atlanta.16
“Soul” is a perfect way to locate a time, a place and racial identity, and Robinson expertly joins the components of the music and its southern black experience. She explains how the music of soul artists like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding “recast southerners as instrumental in the political and cultural struggles of African American communities.”17 But soul music as a signifier of black southernness is not without paradox. This blackest of post–rock ’n’ roll African American music was also the most integrated of southern music up to that point. Ironically the first meaningful racial musical interaction in the postsegregation South ended up articulating black pride and power. If you had to condense soul music into one brand, it would