REGGAE’S BLUES | Jamaica’s Abandonment of Its Indigenous Art Form

J.P. | August 4th, 2020

Do you know the current top ten selling blues records? No. Don’t feel bad if you don’t. I suspect most people, even the most ardent music lover, have no idea what they are. The good thing is that this information is readily available online. So, please, do me a quick favor. Go online, if you can, and type “Billboard blues chart” in any reliable search engine (e.g., Google Chrome, Microsoft Safari, or Firefox) and see what you find. Whether you happen to be reading this article at the time it has been posted (circa August 2020) or, perhaps, at a time in the foreseeable future, I am certain you will see the same thing. Most of the top selling blues artists, according to Billboard, whose data is very reliable, are white men. And if I were to take this point even further, given the week of the particular chart you happen to view, some of the artists are dead white men. And let me take it one step further—and this will be the last step, I promise—by pointing out that some of these dead white musicians, such as blues “legend” Rory Gallagher, were not born in nor ever lived in the place where the blues was created: the Deep South of the United States of America. 

Now is there anything necessarily wrong with this? Probably not. Some would argue that at least the blues, as a genre of music, is not dead. The faithful are still buying records and attending concerts. But even so, something still seems wrong about the whole situation. The blues was created not only as a means of making music but even more so as an artform, a way of giving expression to the shared meanings formed in a specific culture. So, yes, we may have a number of white musicians (either dead and/or alive) making and selling blues music, but are they making art?

“The blues was created not only as a means of making music but even more so as an art form, a way of giving expression to the shared meanings formed in a specific culture.”

Can they make the kind of art that is born out of the experiences of African Americans in the American Deep South? These are the experiences, both the joys and pains of life, that shaped the rhythms, melodies, and, ultimately, stories of the great blues artists. For example, artists like W.C. Handy (widely recognized as the father of the blues), born in Florence, Alabama; Bessie Smith (a.k.a., the “Empress of the Blues”), born in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Muddy Waters, born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; Howlin’ Wolf, born in White Station, Mississippi; Lightnin’ Hopkins, born in Centerville, Texas; and B. B. King, born on a cotton plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi. Such names are no longer listed on a Top 10 chart, and some never were, but they still serve, even today, as the most sublime communicators of the blues idiom. But they are no longer the primary representatives—the face(s)—of the blues. Why?

Renowned poet and social activist Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones) has a fascinating account of the decline of African American music and culture in his book Blues People. In one particular section he discusses why African Americans abandoned the blues. According to Baraka, during the civil rights era, as they were fighting to assimilate to American culture, African Americans abandoned various indigenous cultural art forms that were viewed as primitive. In one place he states that they no longer wanted to exhibit “Negro traits.” So, for instance, in the Black churches, primarily mainline Protestant denominations, some of which were at the forefront of the Black liberation movement, there were some congregations that no longer allowed the singing of Negro spirituals. Rather, these congregations were expected to appreciate the allegedly superior (and refined) sounds of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Handel, whose works were performed by a choir of Black persons exhibiting all the mannerisms of the genteel upper-class. In a similar fashion, “refined Afro-Americans,” as Baraka calls them, did not want to hear the blues, holding the view that it reminded them of slavery and their less civilized brothers and sisters. 

“…during the civil rights era, as they were fighting to assimilate to American culture, African Americans abandoned various indigenous cultural art forms that were viewed as primitive.”

At the same time this was going on, another phenomenon was taking place. Technological advances in media allowed the blues to reach larger audiences. No longer restricted to hidden juke joints and rural speakeasies in the South, the blues was now being heard in urban settings, even among an eager audience of Northern whites. With this lager audience came the negative effect of the artist’s having to make music, and only music—that is, a product that could be bought and sold, a commodity—rather than using the music as a medium of cultural expression, psychospiritual healing, and truth telling, that is, art. And when the blues becomes more about selling records than about making art, well, that’s when a musician, even a capable white musician, can sell a lot of blues records…but is it really the blues, you know, the real down and dirty blues?

Do you know the current top ten selling reggae records in the U.S.? Well, just as I requested earlier, take a few moments and go online to find out what they are. Sure, there are reggae legends like Steel Pulse and Marcia Griffiths who are still going strong, and there are newer artists like Koffee who are making their mark. But, again, much like the blues chart, something else is going on. You have a number of musicians listed on the chart who are not from Trench Town (the birthplace of reggae music), not from Jamaica, not from the West Indies—they’re not even Black—and yet they are slowly becoming the face(s) of reggae music. I have often heard reggae aficionados bemoaning the fact that reggae music is dead. But my question is, who let it die? Like the African Americans who rejected the blues during the mid-twentieth century, did refined Jamaicans, at some time, maybe not even knowingly, abandon reggae? Was it seen as too affiliated with Rastafarianism? Was the message of the music too rebellious? Did the untamed rhythms remind “refined Jamaicans” of their primitive past? Did the patois that filled the music’s lyrics stray too far from the Queen’s English? Maybe this is why reggae is now consumed, via record sales and concert attendance, for the most part, by people outside of Jamaica. And maybe this is why, if things keep going the way they are, reggae songs will be performed mostly by musicians outside of Jamaica, by people who don’t even look like Jamaicans, if it hasn’t reached that point already. That is a terrible loss not only to the music but the entire culture as well. 

It’s the kind of loss that should have reggae singing the blues.