The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [81]
Through the twentieth century, American popular musics cross-pollinated. Country music itself emerged in a mixture of black and white Appalachian and southern styles. Syncretic forms like rockabilly, or gospel, or the melding of country and swing in Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys also appeared. And finally, there is rock’n’roll. The rock of Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley is both an eclectic and a traditional style—innovative by combining elements of the blues and country in a fresh way, traditional by paying strict attention to the structures that emerge from these traditions. Early rock combined the syncretic-traditional styles of black and white southern popular musics—jump blues, gospel, rockabilly—into something that both captured and pushed forward the traditions of American popular song.
Salt of the Earth
Both The Beatles and The Stones emerged as aficionados of this music and of the streams that led into it. Keith and Mick first bonded as young record collectors: always obsessively focused on the obscure blues record they didn’t have yet. Like a lot of kids in a lot of eras since the dawn of recorded sound, they were archivists, buffs. And they often deployed a rhetoric of traditional purity (though this was a rejection of the culture around them): they wanted the record by the purest, the simplest, the most bluesy blues artist.
They peeled back from the eclectic surface of popular rock music to the sources of its form in blues, country, and gospel. And they admired the American black artists whom they regarded as the most authentic purveyors of the eclectic style of rhythm and blues, or what would come to be called soul music. Both the early Beatles and the early Stones were essentially cover bands, always on the alert for the latest American black music that they could perform for their British or European audiences.
The Beatles were particularly excellent at this. They took American black pop music—“Twist and Shout,” let’s say—and stripped it down, cleaned it up, and emphasized the big beat at its heart. The early Beatles records are about the best non-black or non-American appropriations of American black pop music ever made: incredibly clear and propulsive, and sung with a delightful tunefulness. Nor do I think they should be condemned at all for this: they always paid explicit tribute to their sources, and both the music they took and the music they made were worthy of celebration.
If we got into the business of condemning out of hand white appropriations of black styles, we’d have to condemn many of the greatest popular musicians of the twentieth century: Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Duane Allman, and so on. No race owns art, even the art it originates, and if white artists sometimes exploited this art and its artists, or made fortunes on styles they didn’t invent, they just as often revived the careers of artists they venerated, paid them substantial royalties, and introduced them to new audiences. Many of The Rolling Stones’ heroes and sources have toured with them over the decades.
As innovative and excellent as The Beatles and Stones were as purveyors of the traditional forms of American music, they understood from early on that it was precisely from these traditions that they drew their power and popularity. The traditional forms of American popular music, and especially African-American music, have essentially been the sources of the world’s popular music through a whole century, into the eras of disco and hip hop. Their combination of simplicity and sophistication, the emotional