Trouble, trouble, trouble
In case you hadn't noticed, the mainstream blues world came undone last week. The daughter of a legendary black Mississippi-born bluesman went ballistic over the Confederate flag with which one of the most popular contemporary white blues players, Louisiana-born, had associated himself for a period of time by way of a famous sit-com muscle car.
The Blues Foundation responded to Mercy Morganfield's attack by stripping Kenny Wayne Shepherd of his Blues Music Award nomination in the "blues rock artist" category.
So I wrote an op ed about the episode. I published it on Medium.com and shared it widely on social media. It has drawn far more attention than anything else I've shared in that venue.
I've already gotten one piece of hatemail in the form of a Facebook PM from somebody I don't know, and who will go unnamed:
"Go fuck your self," he wrote, "and when you have some time away from perpetuating this bullshit racial divisions why don’t you come take my confederate flag YOU fuckin PUSSY."
On the other hand, Mercy Morganfield herself gave my op ed a clap--Medium's version of "like."
My goal wasn't to draw curses or claps, nor was it to perpetuate "bullshit racial divisions." I personally view contemporary blues culture as a generous and receptive Big Tent: a place where, ideally, we can all come together in fellowship and create something larger than the sum of our parts.
That ethos has guided my own musical journey from the very beginning. Much of my own blues playing, from Nat Riddles and Sterling Magee through my work with Brandon Bailey and my new trio with Rod Patterson, has taken place in interracial contexts where the point was always to see each other as fellow humans and then get on with the business of making good music.
But honesty also forces me to acknowledge that not everybody see the contemporary blues world that way. Some, in fact, see it as a place where racism thrives--or, less cantankerously, as a place where the overwhelming numerical superiority of white fans and administrators (including on the Blues Foundation board) sometimes leads to outcomes that leads African American blues people feeling...well, shut out. Overpowered, underappreciated, not fully heard. This blues, too, deserves to be acknowledged.
My goal with my Medium essay was to take advantage of the fact that I'm not just a blues player and scholar, but a professor of Southern Studies at Ole Miss who regularly teaches a unit on the Confederate battle flag. Like historian John Coski, whose book, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem, I use in my teaching, I have no particular feelings for the flag. I certainly don't embrace it, but neither do I viscerally detest it--although I understand, or think I do, why many Americans feel so strongly about it.
Back in the early 1980s, of course, a whole lot of Americans were crazy about a couple of Southern good ol' boys and their bright orange car. The Dukes of Hazzard, for better or worse, are a part of this story.
