WEEK 04: Appropriation and African American Music

The next three weeks look at the backstory to remix culture in music and the topic of the development of modern American pop music in general. Three intertwining themes will be making their appearance along the way:

1. Cultural Appropriation in an unequal racist society
2. The commodification of music, turning it from a shared, lived experience into a consumer product
3. The evolution of technology and how that has affected the appropriation of music, the commodification of music, etc

This and the following lesson discuss both appropriation within African American music, and the appropriation of African American music (by white artists, publishers, promoters, the public, etc). It might be helpful to keep in mind the timelines, as I discuss both how appropriation typically operated in African American music (which at first was folk music, and thus belonged to no one individual), how white people appropriated African American creations in the socially unequal period under discussion, how technology affected appropriation and commodification, and more.

Click the image below to open it full size.

American culture's African American roots

The degree to which the popular culture of the United States has been impacted by African Americans has been neglected by historians of culture and certainly by the general public until relatively recently. Many people are aware today that American culture – music, comedy, language – are heavily indebted to African Americans, but they may be less aware of how this has always been the case, or of how little aware of this many white Americans have been until recently (or in some cases still are).

The degree to which American culture in general has been shaped by African American elements has become increasingly clear in the last 100 years as black people have gradually seen their status in American society and their visibility in mainstream American culture increase. Gradually, many white Americans have become more conscious of and more open about their appropriations from black culture. Like everything that has been experienced by black people in what Malcolm X called “the American Nightmare,” the progress toward black Americans having control of their own representation in mainstream culture and full recognition for their contribution to the greatness of American culture has been agonizingly and shamefully slow, and this is not over even now.

The black dominance in American music, which should always have been recognized, has only become obvious with the worldwide success of hip hop and the rise of black-owned record labels. As the 21st century advances, black creators are taking a larger role in the creation of American films and television as well, though here they are still moving in from the margins.

As a white man who was born an American, and now lives on the margins of the U.S. here in Canada, I have come to see my country of birth increasingly from an African American perspective. The "true" Americans were of course the indigenous people, but the typical image of an American in the world is probably a white guy like me, from the European settler culture that created the American government and economy - and the mass media. It's interesting to explore the idea that the face of true or heroic "America" might more accurately be thought of as black in complexion. The novelist Ralph Elison wrote an interesting essay published just after the success of the Civil Rights movement, speculating on the positive or admirable aspects of American identity that might not exist without Black Americans:

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from  deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the "outsider.” Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black. (Ralph Ellison, "What America would Be Like Without Blacks," 1970)

An idea that might relate to this is that the American myth of an underdog, working their way up from nothing, a victim of oppression, fighting for freedom and eventually triumphing against adversity and injustice is better exemplified in some ways by Black Americans than by the white Americans that often claim this position. Some of the original white settlers, the Puritans in New England, for instance, were indeed originally such underdogs, fleeing religious persecution in England and struggling against adversity in a new untamed world. Eventually, the underdog became the oppressor, however, or at least the person in the privileged position of power.

Minstrel Shows, Travesty, and the Politics of (Self-)Representation

From the very beginning white people wanted something from African American people (apart from their unpaid labour and servitude), and working class white Americans built the earliest pop culture America had on their fantasies and perverse misunderstandings of what African American culture was like. These were the minstrel shows, in which white performers put on blackface, and – under the pretense that they were now "black" – created popular variety shows that featured songs and comedy routines. These shows were in many ways the basis of the popular American culture that was to come, and they were an early and extreme form of white appropriaton of black identity and culture. The Minstrel Shows are discussed in the first episode of Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series Jazz (2001):

These shows were the most popular form of entertainment in the United States for around 80 years. The tradition continued into the modern era and blackface routines can be seen in many movies from the first half of the 20th century. The first successful non-silent film, The Jazz Singer (1927) is about a white Jewish cantor who blacks up to sing bluesy jazzy pop, for instance.

Sometimes people in the 21st century fail to see the issues with white people appropriating creations of African American origin, for instance twerking or box braids. In this TedX talk from 2021 Dwan Reece discusses the minstrel shows and how this history, largely forgotten or not dwelled upon, is still too fresh a wound:

"What is the appeal of darkening one's skin in order to impersonate someone of a different race?" It may seem like a rhetorical question, but some have tried to answer it. Frederick Douglass, quoted by Reece, was an important American writer and activist in 19th century America: an escaped slave, he became something like an 1800s version of MLK. In 1848, he described the minstrel performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”

There does indeed seem to be a connection between lower class white society and the appeal of the minstrel shows. In one of the first books to try to psychoanalyze the evolution of this form of cultural appropriation based on historical research, Eric Lott suggested that the shows were motivated basically by two things: (1) an unacknowledged deep desire by white people to "be black for awhie" (or at least have the irresponsible non-uptight lives they imagined black people having), and (2) a desire to make fun of and look down on someone lower in the social hierarchy than themselves. Lott provocatively, perhaps shockingly, called his book Love and Theft (1993) to draw attention to this then still largely unacknowledged longing of white people for what they perceived as elements of blackness: "It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure." As Ellison said, in the passage quoted earlier, white settlers in America actually struggled with a lack of clear identity, and one of the ways a white "American" identity was forged was both negatively as "not black (or not non-white)" and through an unacknowleged plundering of the life and identity of that non-white Other.

Though grossly privileged compared to people of colour, white peope in those days were paradoxically not really free in various senses. They were expected to conform to a very puritanical and "normie" set of social personas, and to dehumanize themselves in various ways in order to "be superior" to the non-white humans on earth. The uptight white people of those days apparently often longed to be fully alive and human but were afraid of it, wanted to deny it; they both desired and feared their own inner humanity, body and soul, their actual shared “identity” with black people. So they travestied black identity, because they could. I think when you practice travesty of this kind, dehumanizing “the other,” it is yourself that is dehumanized.

Travesty as appropriation

Minstrel shows are one very dramatic example of the form of cultural appropriation known as travesty, when someone dresses up like a member of a culture or social class to which they don’t really belong. For instance, when men dress as women for the sake of humour (as opposed to authentic transvestism) they are practising travesty. This kind of travesty can be seen in much British sketch comedy as well as in American and Canadian series such as The Kids in the Hall (a skit show that was highly popular in the late 1980s and 1990s).

Technically, anytime someone dresses up as someone with a different position in society, a different gender or sexuality, or a different ethnicity, it is travesty. The purpose is not always humour. Sometimes it is simply to play at being someone else, to show you can play someone else - this other identity is an identity you can also have. It used to be common in American movies to have popular white actors portray people who were indigenous, Mexican, Asian, etc, for instance, or to have a “brownish” actor like Omar Sharif play everything from a Russian to a Turk to a South American revolutionary. Some of these were intended to be humorous, others just to make people from other cultures more “relatable” to white audiences, and to give the audiences the (white) celebrities they would pay to see up on the screen. There was an unacknowledged assumption that everyone else's identity was there to be appropriated by whites, who could represent non-white people, either seriously or for humorous fun.

Travesty is most usually intended to be humorous, partly because of the incongruity of seeing the man dressed as a woman or the white person as black, etc, and partly because travesties are often satirical in some way. When members of a male comedy team dress as women, the caricatures they perform are often more funny because of the incongruity (and the nervousness it causes some people) of someone who is obviously a man in drag. But once in the mask of the other person, the member of the privileged group (the man, the white person) can also sometimes criticize or show the limitations of the larger culture they are actually a part of, and partly detach from their own participation in that privileged mainstream culture.

The Minstrel Shows were arguably the most deeply offensive and destructive form of travesty in American history. Yet the people who performed In them, like the members of male comedy teams who dress up as women, would no doubt have said they were “just having some fun” and that the results were a positive celebration of life, laughter, and song, much loved by their audience. Perhaps some of them would even have said they were presenting a “positive” portrayal of African Americans, or at any rate a portrayal that the white audiences “loved," to use Eric Lott's painful but suggestive word.

I think in most examples of this kind of “fun” travesty at least three things are going on:

1. The identity being travestied is being denigrated and mocked; the actor is in a way drawing attention to the fact that he is not the person he is portraying, but someone "above" that person, who can in a sense "own" (appropriate) the position of that person
2. The self-representation of the people with that identity in culture is being taken away from them by someone with a privileged identity [THE POLITICS OF SELF-REPRESENTATION]
3. The imagined “fun” or even "empowering" side of that identity is being explored by those who don’t really have it and don’t have to live with the rest of the implications of having that identity

For instance, when a man in the Monty Python comedy troupe dresses as a woman, he is allowing himself to play with and enjoy the identity of being a woman, perhaps even truly exploring his own “feminine side” on some level, in the best cases maybe even learning something about what it’s actually like to be a woman.

But he is also taking away a woman’s right to represent herself in culture (the only real women who appear in episodes of the (very funny and absurdist, and often subversive) British series Monty Python's Flying Circus, for instance, are young, shapely sex objects; the comic portraits of women are mostly done by men in drag). The man in drag for humorous effect is (mis-)representing women through his warped view as a man of what being a woman is like.

I tend to think that the white performers who blacked up were excited by what they saw as the paradoxical “freedom” of African Americans (even though most of them were slaves!) – freedom to be sensual, freedom to move their bodies, freedom to be half-naked, freedom to say what they think, freedom to acknowledge reality, freedom to express their deep hurt and longing, freedom to not care about ambition or status (because they were mostly out of the question), freedom from the constraints of the highly uptight white society of the day with its inhuman ideals and social structures. Black people may have been seen as more in touch with reality, more honest, more immediate in their feelings, more real. Also more fun, more funny, more sensual, sexier. Some of these qualities are at the heart of the humour and songs in the minstrel tradition.

We may never know to what extent the real elements of typical African American culture in the 19th century are reflected in the distorted mirror of the minstrel shows; we have more records of white appropriations of African American culture and identity, than direct records of these from African Americans. In addition, African American identity itself seems to have been influenced by the white representations of it in books and on the stage.

Minstrelsy seems to me to provide a particularly painful example of cultural appropriation and I hope it helps make clear why cultural appropriation is now so heavily frowned upon and such a tender point, in America in particular. For a hundred years, the true experience and personality of African Americans were unavailable to the white American public (unless they actually knew and spent quality time with black people among themselves, which was rare). Instead, their “understanding” of African Americans came largely from these caricatures by white people. Some would say that this situation continues in milder forms among some white Americans even to the present day.

The Politics of (Self-)Representation

Today people talk about this in terms of identity politics or the politics of (self-)representation. The idea is that whether we like it or not, you have an identity that is socially and culturally defined by some of our differences. You are a man or a woman (well, that's breaking down), white, black, Asian, indigenous, straight, queer, disabled, trans. We might be working toward a world where these identities are not considered so decisive anymore and/or are more universally respected and appreciated, but in the meantime who has the power to represent a given social identity is important. Typically, those with a privileged identity in society have the cultural power to represent those who are marginalized, as we can clearly see in the minstrel shows, but as you also might notice in the portrayal of “Indians” in westerns, women as men’s sex objects in ads, and on and on and on.

In terms of the politics of self-representation, the Minstrel Shows were one more way in which black people were exploited by white people in America. It wasn’t as obviously cruel as slavery, perhaps, but it was initially close to a kind of “cultural slavery,” echoes of which can still be seen today in the white male-dominated culture industry of the United States (though it seems to be genuinely changing now!).

I don’t want to end this discussion of these Minstrel Shows – the most popular form of entertainment in the United States before movies – without pointing out again how even at the level of the Minstrel Shows, which were obviously disgusting abuses of power and privilege, American popular culture owes much to African Americans.

As the (white) independent scholar and mixologist (in the cocktail sense) David Wondrich  put it in his lively 2003 book Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924:

The music of the minstrel show, as codified by [the earliest minstrels], was the first recognized, fully documented eruption of American music. Although many have tried and oft, none has yet found a way […] to escape the plain fact that all that is American in American music, and all that is good, traces its bloodlines through the minstrel show—an institution through which white America stole, plundered, colonized; raped, prostituted, and pimped; contaminated and diluted; misinterpreted and misunderstood; ridiculed, patronized, bucked, scorned and—in some strange way—passionately loved the music and the culture of black America. (p. 24)

The popular culture of America, its songs, language, and humour, and the things we still love about it today, would simply not have developed in the way they have without African Americans, and the long-unquestioned appropriation of their identity by white people.

Appropriation in Blues and Jazz

Blues starts out in the mid- to late 1800s as an organic folk creation of African Americans. Songs have their origins in the cotton fields and taverns, though church music also has some influence, and it is even possible that the “Irish” sentimentalism imported by Stephen Foster into his minstral songs may have in turn trickled back into some of the African American creation.

In those days, amateur musicians would trade lyrics, music, and ideas around fairly freely. No one was wholly responsible for any particular song. No one owned any song or could claim sole authorship of it. At first, nothing was written down or published and there was not yet sound recording. Folk music like this was transmitted in performance alone. Each performance was a unique re-creation.

Like other folk music, the early blues was a musical practice that seems very alien to our present commercialized world of music as recorded products. In much folk music creation

• Authorship and ownership are not clear-cut or considered that important
• Every performance is unique; little is published or recorded; songs are not “fixed” in an “original” or “authorized” version
• In some cases – including blues and jazz – what you do with the material is what’s important; not who created the original or who “owns” the song now

In an episode that has been much commented on, the legendary blues performer Muddy Waters was interviewed by musicologist Alan Lomax about how his song “Country Blues” came about. The response given by Waters was analyzed by Siva Vaidhyanathan in his groundbreaking book Copyrights and Copywrongs (2001; perhaps the earliest full-fledged study of remix culture in the broader sense). Vaidhyanathan’s discussion is largely repeated in Jonathan Lethem’s clever and diverse article about appropriation, “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007):

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked.

In other words, appropriation is normal and organic in music created by real people, as opposed to commodity music created by professionals.

Jazz: the first remix music?

Jazz is generally considered to have arisen out of the “creole” culture of New Orleans, where many black musicians had traditionally been trained to play European music. Ragtime – a parallel creation and influence on jazz – was essentially an adaptation of European light classical piano music and John Philip Sousa’s incredibly popular patriotic American marches with African polyrhythms and “swing” and playful ornamentation. Ragtime jazz was largely written and performed by African Americans. It was the first music created by African Americans to be consumed by a broader white audience. The mix of European instrumentation and song structures with African American elements and blues conventions led to jazz, which incorporated many elements of the blues, and often involved the adaptation of blues songs for bands and orchestras.

As live jazz progressed at the beginning of the 20th century, the free appropriative methods of blues became part of the culture. One of the most common practices in “classical” jazz is improvisation on “standards” – popular songs that survive the test of time and become part of the jazz repertoire, for instance  “Bye Bye Blackbird” or “Stormy Weather.” A jazz artist will add “swing,” syncopation, “blue notes” (notes that bend up or down from the standard pitch imitating the emotions of a human voice), playful or virtuoso ornamentation; and sometimes they play their instrument in a way that imitates the expressive characteristics of the human voice (including its imperfections. especially in joy or sorrow).

Around the same time jazz was emerging as an art form, the most popular music in mainstream white America was a form of upbeat and stirring patriotic march that we associate today with the composer and bandleader John Phillip Sousa. Sousa’s marches are still heard in parades, in the American military, or at football games sometimes even in the 21st century, and they were among the first popular music that was recorded. Here is part of an old wax cylinder recording (forerunner of the vinyl record) of “Stars and Stripes Forever” with members of Sousa's band playing:

Ragtime, the first jazz heard by white people, took the elements of Sousa’s marches, among other Euro-American creations, and added swing and blues to them, as in this demonstration by Jellyroll Morton, recorded later in 1930:

In Ken Burns’s Jazz (2001), Wynton Marsalis talks about Buddie Bolden, one of the very first jazz musicians, and demonstrates early jazz technique with Sousa’s march:

A main formula in instrumental jazz is to improvise in these and other ways on such well-known themes, often taking them very far away from the pop originals.

Here’s an excerpt showing a couple of street musicians in Kensington Market (Toronto) performing improvised jazz appropriations on Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of You” (you won’t probably recognize the original until near the end of the excerpt when they quote the melody more literally):

If you’d like a more commerical example, check out this performance of Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit” by Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman (thanks to the student – whose name I don’t know – who suggested Mehldau to me as someone doing jazz on the pop music of recent years).

The appropriation of blues and jazz songs through publication: turning music into a product

James Weldon Johnson, one of the earliest black literary figures in the Harlem Renaissance after World War I, wrote about how blues tunes and lyric motifs were latched onto and turned into commercial hits by white arrangers and publishers in the Jazz Age. In his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), he writes:

The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, “jes’ grew.” Some of these earliest songs were taken down by white men, the words slightly altered or changed, and published under the names of the arrangers. They sprang into immediate popularity and earned small fortunes. […]

Later there came along a number of colored men who were able to transcribe the old songs and write original ones. […] I remember that we appropriated about the last one of the old “jes’ grew” songs. It was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.

By “unprintable,” Johnson means the words were dirty. The white appropriaters cleaned up these songs and turned them into popular hits for white audiences. The songs had developed in this organic “Jes’ Grew” collaborative way over decades in some cases, but then got standardized, typically “vanillized,” and published for sale, with credit often given to white arrangers or publishers. This was a form of exploitation that continued up into the 1960s, with rock and roll.

Jes' Grew®

A brief aside on "jes' grew" - the expression used by Johnson above. It was popular in America at that time, among both black and white Americans. Its origins were the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. This novel by a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was full of racist stereotypes that reinforced imagined black identities throughout American society, even among black Americans, but it was intended to show the humanity of black people and the inhumanity of slavery, and it is credited with being an important force in turning white Americans against the injustice of slavery. It was the best-selling novel of the 19th century in America, and the only book that sold better was The Bible. Many people have suggested it directly contributed to the Civil War and the eventual emancipation of slaves.

The character Topsy in the book was a little black slave girl. She personifies a candid innocence and liveliness. When a white woman asks her what she thinks of God, Topsy says she doesn't know anything about any God. The woman is shocked and pushes Topsy, asking her who she thinks made her if she doesn’t accept that there is a God. Topsy responds, quite sensibly, that she “expects [she] jes’ grew” (actually her phrasing is slightly different in the book, but this is the phrase that became popular). The idea that we jes' grew is of course closer to the modern evolutionary understanding of human origins than religious creation stories are.

In this class, I follow James Weldon Johnson's use of the term to describe creative processes that happen spontaneously, organically, and without too much intention or too many ulterior motives. Most music in human history, and most appropriation in human music, strikes me as probably having happened in this way, rather than being the premeditated work of a single genius, corporate power broker, or dedicated "influencer," as we might imagine today. As Johnson says, the blues and jazz "just happened" and the way they originally developed was not controlled or commodified in terms of ownership or products. The concept of ownership is alien to processes that "jes' grew." I like to think that music (and the other arts) are moving back in this direction, in the technology-enabled democratization of the 21st century.

Sound recording and jazz

Phonograph records and jazz came of age at roughly the same time, in the early years of the twentieth century, and both sort of “hit” in the 1910s. In the miniseries Jazz, Ken Burns tells the story of the famous cornet-player Freddie Keppard, a major sensation in the emerging jazz scene (or “jass” as it was originally called):

Interestingly, Keppard chose not to be recorded because he was afraid of having his stuff appropriated. Unfortunately, the appropriative technology of recording marched forward without him. In the early days of jazz, both black and white musicians were developing the genre, but it was the white ones who had greater access to capital, technology, and the large and more affluent white audience, many of whom were racist. This is not to say that black musicians didn't sometimes profit from recordings too, and black performers and songwriters definitely found a new source of prosperity because of jazz's popularity. It is also not to say that white musicians took advantage of black musicians. It's just to point out in a society with a large white majority, where a large portion of those white people were racist, there were many opportunities where white people had unfair advantages and got disproportionate recognition.

Cultural Appropriation in the form of vanillization

I found a surprisingly early recognition of this development in an early “fan” magazine, the sophisticated, even rather avant-garde magazine Shadowland, which covered the world of modern dance, theatre, motion pictures, music, and photography from 1919 to 1923. Only a couple of years after the first recording of jazz ever made, this author was talking about its evolution in a way that – for all the stereotypes and glib ambivalent irony – seems to recognize how the genre was appropriated and adopted/adapted:

Jazz—no one knows the derivation of the word—had its origin in the African jungles. Savage, monstrously masculine, primitively passionate, it formed an integral part of the negro’s character just as certain as did his plaintive folk songs that sprang from the cotton plantations and his flashing era of ragtime. With curiously sensual wriggles of the body he danced it. With tom-toms, human bones and various other noise-making devices he played it. Gradually it crept out of Africa. It made its way via the slave ships to New Orleans, where it definitely established a foothold; stole triumphantly north to Chicago, finding access to shadowy retreats in the so-called black belt, and made its way into the gaudy resorts of New York’s tenderloin.

The negro had done his part. It remained for the white man to take up the burden and capitalize it for the benefit of a jaded world. The latter, with his keener commercial sense, his greater lust for life, his insatiable greed for novelty and excitement, made it a supreme melodic atrocity, a fascinating grotesquerie of noise, a prehistoric combination of innocence and vice. (Lewis Raymond Reid, “The Evolution of Jazz,” Shadowland, Nov. 1919)

Consequently, in the 1920s – which came to be called “The Jazz Age” – Caucasian performers often flourished even more than the black innovators. For instance, the (almost unbelievably named!) band leader Paul Whiteman was crowned “The King of Jazz” in the predominantly white media – rather than Louis Armstrong or any of the other black musicians who were well-known only to some white audiences. Whiteman claimed he wanted to “make a lady of jass,” and his generally pretty and mellow recordings are largely weak in the bluesy and wilder aspects of jazz. Some would say he "vanillized" jazz in making it tamer for his white audience. The hipper white people and most of the black audience probably preferred the more edgy jazz being created by blacks.

Jazz did ultimately bring added legitimacy to African American culture in white American minds (and certainly for white Europeans, who loved it) and it also moved a segment of the white population into closer alliance with and understanding (or at least "love") of the black population.

Appropriation in r&b, rock and roll, electric blues

Mid-twentieth century pop history offers a number of further examples of white musicians appropriating black styles and songs and capitalizing on them. White-owned music publishers picked up the rights to black songs, white-owned record companies recorded black artists, and white musicians adopted elements of African American style and popularized them with segregated or racist white audiences, sometimes making fortunes.

A number of record labels, notably Chess Records, were white-owned and -controlled but featured a stable of black musicians. Because of the general social climate of the day, these musicians were frequently undereducated and had no legal representation, and were thus more frequently exploited in various ways. (White musicians were often exploited as well.)

• Musicians were often paid in liquor, or were paid a one-time fee for performing on a recording, if at all
• Black artists in particular were frequently not paid their back royalties and and kept ignorant of sales information
• They were often offered unfair contracts which still looked better than their other alternatives to making a living
• The authorship of songs was sometimes mis-represented, so that white promoters could cash in on the sales and royalties

The last thing, mis-attribution of authorship, was not so much about the white people stealing creative credit for a song, as about them stealing royalties by being assigned authorship. But it could have both effects, obscuring the true origin of the creative work.

The hotter records featuring black musicians were actually called "Race Records" in the 1950s, and to explore and buy those records, you needed to go to stores that specialized in "Race Music." These stores were largely run by and for a black clientele, in the black part of town, so the only the most adventurous white listeners might know about the music or seek it out. Some black artists managed to get mainstream record deals and be featured on white-run radio stations, but it was the exception to the rule, as I understand it.

Chuck Berry, Chess Records, and Alan Freed

Here’s a not untypical story of how a black artist’s music was appropriated and marketed to mixed audiences in the 1950s.

• Black musician Chuck Berry wants to break into the mainstream (white) market, and brings his version of a traditional country song “Ida Red” to Leonard Chess. Berry calls his version “Ida May.”
• Chess suggests a bigger beat, new lyrics, and a new title, “Maybellene.”
• Chess records Berry doing the new version and takes it to New York radio disc jockey Alan Freed.
• Freed plays it on the air and it becomes a hit.
• Rock and roll is officially born (this is one of many stories of “the first rock and roll record”).
• In the 1950s, some record companies assigned co-composer credits to disc jockeys and others who helped “break” a record, a form of “payola” via composer royalties. This accounts for disk jockey Alan Freed receiving co-writer credit for “Maybellene.” Russ Fratto, who had been lending money to Chess, also received credit. The Freed and Fratto credits were later withdrawn.

Although this was not a racially motivated misrepresentation, it nevertheless involved falsification of the origins of the song in black creativity. Chess may deserve some credit, as he helped adapt and arrange what Chuck Berry brought to him. On another level, the original song "Ida Red" that Berry adapted into his "Ida Red" before Chess turned it into "Maybelline" was a "jes' grew" song - a traditional song whose true original "author" - if that is really a meaningful concept here - is not known.

Cover records: vanillization

When a black r&b or rock and roll tune started to become popular in the subculture, white labels would generally put out cover versions of the song by white artists who could be marketed to the white-dominant mainstream audience more easily. Black artists made little profit, white artists and labels cashed in.

Compare Little Richard’s original version of “Tutti Frutti”:

with Pat Boone’s "vanilla" version:

The “British Invasion” (1960s)

In the 1960s, English rock musicians like the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and many others were discovered by American listeners – largely because of the Beatles – and became a smash hit with American teenagers.

Many of these UK groups had been listening closely to African American roots blues and electric blues – black genres that ironically most white Americans didn’t have direct experience of – and the young British musicians were emulating the styles and methods of these African American artists quite consciously. They also often created songs that incorporated motifs and music from the work of these black artists, following the practice common in blues and jazz of appropriating freely from the stew-pot of 20th century African American creativity (much of the material was anonymous in origin, unpublished, out of copyright, etc).

Some American audiences assumed that the styles and methods of the British artists were original with these musicians, not recognizing the native roots of the music they were now able to appreciate in its new, white-faced British format.

Because of the political situation in America – the Civil Rights movement was just now having an effect and many white Americans still lived in isolation from any of their black fellow citizens, and in some cases looked down on them or were afraid of them – the white British artists were able to achieve fame and fortune while their black influencers and sources remained obscure and in comparative poverty.

In a few cases, the British artists were actually sued for plagiarism. Although they were arguably just trying to imitate the practices of their heroes, the fact that they were white gave them commercial advantages they didn't always recognize or worry about. So even if the plagiarism was debatable, it would have been a good gesture on their part to acknowledge the influence, and perhaps even give writing credit and royalties in some cases. The Rolling Stones are generally thought to have been better in this regard, while Led Zeppelin have often been taken to task for failing to give credit (and royalties) where credit was due.

For instance, as Wikipedia notes, “In December 1972, Arc Music, owner of the publishing rights to Howlin’ Wolf’s songs, sued Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement on ‘The Lemon Song.’ The parties settled out of court. Though the amount was not disclosed, Wolf received a check for $45,123 from Arc Music immediately following the suit, and subsequent releases included a co-songwriter credit for him.”

Summary

One can no doubt overstate the reliance of all American popular music on black creators, but certainly African Americans invented the Blues (and Blues is at the root of many popular music genres); there would have been no Jazz or Ragtime without them - they were the innovators; and R&B, rock and roll, and rock music generally are heavily indebted to their innovations (r&b, electric blues). Some musicologists consider jazz to be the only uniquely American world-class form of popular music. It is a mashup of "Western" music, African American folk music, and African elements and it was mostly invented by black artists.

African Americans obviously invented hip hop, arguably the most popular form of American music in the early 21st century. Many scholars would say that jazz, blues, and hip hop are the only purely American musical forms to have made an impact in the world. Certainly, without them American music would be a far different thing.

Johnny Otis, a white R&B singer and music promoter, made a succinct statement in a 1974 interview:

Black  artists have always been the ones in America to innovate and create and breathe life into new forms. Jazz grew out of black America and there’s no question about that. However, Paul Whiteman became the king of jazz. Swing music grew out of black America, created by black artists Count Basie, Duke Ellington. Benny Goodman was crowned king of swing. In the case of rock and roll, Elvis Presley – and in this case, not without some justification because he brought a lot of originality with him – became  king. Not the true kings of rock and roll – Fats  Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry … What happens is black people – the  artists – continue  to develop these things and create them and get ripped off, and the glory and the money goes to white artists. This pressure is constantly on them, to find something that whitey can’t rip off.

The moral wrongness or “human rights” aspect of cultural appropriation in an unequal society can be witnessed clearly in this history, in the unfair ways in which the political inequality in racist America allowed white people to control and capitalize on what were rightly African American creations in four crucial ways:

1. Objectification - black people were used as symbols and objects of aesthetic pleasure in ways that denied their shared humanity; this was not reciprocal
2. Monetary gains - whites were in a position to capitalize on black creations and market them to white audiences
3. In terms of status and recognition,  as white people often got the credit for black creations
4. In terms of the politics of (self-)representation,  as white people long controlled how black people were portrayed in mainstream American culture and therefore could shape what was considered “black identity” by other whites – and possibly even to some extent by some blacks themselves

It is inaccurate to say that American popular music was simply invented by black Americans and white people stole it. The truth seems to be that for the most part "American" popular music evolved in a “dialogue” and "exchange" between creators whose origins were in Africa and Europe. Musicians and amateurs from these two very different backgrounds created “American” music. Not exactly together, a lot of time, but still in a complex interaction. It was not, tragically, a hand-in-hand collaboration in an empty new world, but a series of thefts, forced assimilations, borrowings, inspirations, and appropriations on stolen land, with some real collaboration along the way too. The music we know and love today owes its existence to creators of many colours, but it would hard to overstate the African contribution.

Imagine if black slaves had been declared free in 1776, and white Europeans, black Africans, and indigenous native populations had all worked together to form a new kind of human society in the wide open spaces of America. Alas, that did not happen. And if we are looking for who to blame, I’m afraid it is those who had the power and will to appropriate (the sense of entitlement and superiority, the technology, the drive, the capitalist worldview): the Euro-Americans, the white men.

I didn't do this personally; but I'm sorry for it. Let's not do any more of that.

That's why cultural appropriation is still - or finally - an issue today.