American Music: a Guide for Music Karen

“You need to play American music” said the lady in the video I just watched. Some Puerto Ricans were playing Puerto Rican music which is, I suppose, as American as any other music made in the United States. This lady objected though, opposing it to something called ‘American music’ which I assume is what ‘real’ Americans listen to. This is something I can say a bit about having had a campus radio show where I played a great deal of ‘Americana’ and got to be a bit of an expert. When I think of what music is ‘American’ it is true that, like Music Karen, I do not really think about the Hispanic tradition. Lovely Cumbias or lush, melodic Tropicalia are sounds and styles I associate with Columbia and Brazil not the U.S. This, though, is a quirk of mine and a limit of my musical education for, of course, Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds are absolutely part of the great river of song that is America. For me American music is Blues, except that it is also Jazz, Bluegrass, Country and Appalachian folk. Even Phillip Glass is American music though in another way altogether. On the other hand, in spite of its grounding in rock, Radiohead is absolutely European music. So is Elliot Carter though he composed in the U.S. almost his entire life. Samuel Barber is an utterly European composer though I just listened to a Nick Cave song that was as American as apple pie though the singer is Australian.   Clearly ‘American’ music is not an easy category to define let alone enforce on barbeques in the park. Still, if Music Karen wants to know what makes music American music I do have a few suggestions that revolve as much around themes and images as they do anything else.

One caveat though: if Music Karen is thinking about ‘American music’ in terms of race she will be sorely disappointed. The only ‘white’ music in the U.S. is European concert music. All other genres, even the whitest of white country and western, are grounded in African musical forms and traditions (with much Native American input). One need only point to the strumming patterns of Mother Maybelle Carter or consider the influence of blues on the ‘Blue Yodeler’ Jimmie Rogers. An exception to this might be the Anglo-Celtic ballads sung in Appalachia but if one listens to the intonation and ornamentation of singers like Dellie Norton or Almeda Riddle, with all their dipping and weaving, one suspects that this sound differs markedly from their counterparts in the English border country. Plus, if they are accompanied, it is often with the (very West African) banjo. Music Karen, one must assume, is soaked in the romantic harmonies of Brahms or perhaps the counterpoint of Bach or William Byrd. But, of course, she isn’t. Music Karen knows what American music is and it is not classical music but…

But what? We have to give up on racial categories here alas for American music is a mélange of things impossible to fully untangle. To help Music Karen out I will try a different tack. One thing American music is about is movement; restless movement, excited movement, movement home or movement away from home. This is why the presence of a train makes for an American song. We are on our way to somewhere good or somewhere bad but whichever one we are pilgrims on life’s way. As in the song ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ we live in a world of “sickness, toil and danger”. There is no peace or rest this side of transcendence, the “bright morning” when we all “fly away”. Of course the excitement of the road is another angle from which I can reconfigure the same sentiment. The countless songs about cars and trains attest to this and so we have another quintessential song like ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathon Ritchman. If you are an African American though the roads, the crossroads in particular, are places of terror. Supernatural terror but also the simple natural terror of being a black man alone on the road in a country where your life is not worth a dime. Robert Johnson expresses this fact in his frenetic ‘Crossroad Blues’.

I think there is no more American song than ‘Ain’t no Grave’ by Pentecostal preacher Brother Claude Ely. A certain Gladys Presley took her son to his revival shows and the lesson was well learned: music comes from the lower half of the body whether sacred or secular. One of the complaints about ‘American music’ is that it is gaudy and aggressively over-sexualized. I suppose this is valid but behind this fact are all the generations of ecstatic gospel singing which channeled erotic energy to reach the divine. Here I recommend you listen to the various recordings of the spiritual ‘Jesus Gonna Make my Dyin’ Bed’ by Josh White, Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson. Then compare these to Led Zeppelin’s version of the same song where the ‘sacred raunchiness’ is ramped up to 11. Clearly, like many English bands, they wanted a more authentically American sound than most American ones and achieved it brilliantly.  Is a rock concert a Pentecostal service or is it merely LIKE one? It is absolutely the former. I do not even think it is so in a secularized sense for people go to rock concerts precisely for the transcendent communal experience of being merged in an adoring crowd. Abandon and a giddy confusion of the bodily and spiritual is a distinctly American mode of worship and one marker of a great American song.

Speaking of Blind Willie Johnson (whose music now hurtles through space on the Voyager probe) let me point out that if any three minutes of music ever justified the existence of a nation that music is his wordless chant “Dark was the Night Cold was the Ground”. American music is not only brash and sexy, but raw and deep. The Blues can be sly or raunchy or funny or angry or mean or violent. Think of ‘32/20 Blues’ by Robert Johnson, a song about that strange American fetish the gun, which, by the way, makes a very good case for not letting people own one! Listen to Johnson sing ‘All my Love’s in Vain’ though, and that, like ‘Dark was the Night’ utters all the sorrow of the world. American music is egalitarian; the roughest, dirtiest drunken slacker will tell you the transcendent truth and lay human reality bare. That is the contract we have with the singer; whatever his mischief and mayhem, whatever his botched efforts or half hearted performance of art or life he WILL, every so often utter the voice of humanity and perhaps even the voice of God. Gillian Welch sings of a red clay halo and American music has, and must have to be American, a red clay halo and the smell of dirt. There was a gospel singer (not the greatest perhaps but a powerful one regardless) named Reverend Edward Clayborn. The music I reach for when I tire of complexity and polish is clay-born indeed and not the least bit prim or concerned with appearances. America does, of course produce such music, tons of it, for every nation produces music unworthy of itself (listen to German pop sometime!). When I hear deeply un-American music from Americans or deeply un-American  music SOLD as American music (often music tainted with false patriotic sentiment) I have to say I am always a bit saddened.  With that though, I leave off.