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(More customer reviews)Jim Crow's Counterculture is the sort of book you read once, wait a few weeks and then read again. Aspects of it linger in your mind to be reexamined. Take this passage -
"Black southerners during Jim Crow were forced to be deferential, yet bluesmen projected powerful braggadocio. Black men were often emasculated or condemned as rapacious beasts, yet the bluesmen openly celebrated their sexuality."
There is not much distance between the stance the bluesman used to rebel against Jim Crow and the bravado shown by modern rappers. In each case, the musician is redefining himself with a limited yet rebellious path. The economic situation faced by an early blues sharecropper and that of a young man coming of age in the projects is not radically different. In both cases, powerful forces combine to limit their choices and deter them from success. Using specific songs to illustrate wider points R.A. Lawson has produced a readable overview of life under Jim Crow and the protest inherent in the music of the times. Focusing on the bluesman instead of the blueswoman, he shows how the men had to walk a careful line while still expressing their communities frustrations and dreams. Again, from Lawson -
"So many of the cultural traits imposed on or ascribed to African Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley were inverted or signified on in the blues. If the blues celebrated nihilism, it was nihilism in the face of what was, to the black southern mind, a corrupt and valueless social arrangement"
Taking the reader from the beginning of Jim Crow through the period of WW2, where the bluesman may sing against the Japanese but not the white Germans, R.A. Lawson lays his case clearly and well. Jim Crow's Counterculture should be required reading for those interested in studying the post slavery African American experience.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (Making the Modern South)
In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form--the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism--even hedonism--and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship.By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.
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