pejorative in some quarters, but positive in others. The young musicians of the New Wave had criticized the aesthetic and pretensions of 1970s rock ’n’ roll much more effectively than any parent or minister had done in the 1950s. In turn professional musicians with a decade or two of experience on the road laughed at the amateurism and pretensions of the New Wave. The direction the oral history took depended on who was asked, and this in turn reflected the musical knowledge and tastes of the people arranging the interviews. Even a small city like Birmingham produces too many musicians to include everyone in an oral history, so there was never any intention, or commitment, to provide an inclusive and complete history, although this was the standard often expected of it.
“Birmingham: Greatest City in Alabama / You can go across this entire land, but there ain’t no place like Birmingham.”
When I joined the project in the mid-1990s, it had stalled in its efforts to create a taxonomy of popular rock bands because there was far too much information to be easily digested and too many discrepancies in the information gathered in the interviews. The context of the project was always the baby-boomers’ understanding of what popular music was and what it stood for — the 1960s idea that music meant much more than entertainment and that loyalty to one band was a virtue for both musicians and their audience. In the 1960s you stayed with a band for life, but thirty years later one chopped and changed between different bands, and there were so many highly mobile musicians, and so many bands, that it was virtually impossible to keep track of them. There were so many different versions of who was in the band, what instrument they played, when they played, who they replaced, and even how to spell their names. I fear that the last issue will never be satisfactorily solved because it is difficult to read people’s handwriting, even when it is in capital letters. I want to apologize in advance to everyone whose names we misspelled and whose true role in the band was overlooked. I want to thank my friends in the Birmingham Record Collectors club, especially Johnny Powell and Charlie Bailey, for all the help they gave me in uncovering the history of sixties bands and locating the surviving musicians. The flow chart of the formation and progress of rock bands that the pioneers of this project had envisaged grew so large and complex that it had to be discarded.
A native of Louisiana, Beam knew little of Birmingham’s troubled past as America’s most segregated city and brought with him no local pride or loyalties. He was interested in southern music and not the New South. What he learned about Birmingham’s history came from the stories about the good/bad old days he heard from members of bands, and most of all, from the music they played, which was largely unapologetic about the city’s racial politics. Like my friend Aaron, I am an outsider in Alabama and an alien onlooker with no personal investment in interpreting its history. As a professional historian I came to this project well aware of the city’s racial past and the global impact of the fight against segregation. What I saw in the growing number of interviews of musicians was a means to examine the history of the city through its music. Birmingham is a creation of the New South and a splendid example of a New South city, not only in its first incarnation, but also in its postsegregation experience. Birmingham was coming under the influence of urbanization (even gentrification), increased Latino immigration, reverse immigration from African American communities in the North, a new demographic that included a more educated workforce, and the challenging of the politics and social norms, which were often as much Old South as New South. A musical history of the city of Birmingham might be able to supplement and even inform the many political and social interpretations of its history. What I envisaged as the final product of this project was a scholarly book based on these interviews that would provide a narrative of the city’s musical culture. As this covered over a hundred years, it would have to be an overview rather than a detailed account, but it could act as a foundation for further investigation.
I therefore successfully lobbied to broaden the outlook of the project to include more musicians, more sorts of music and more of the history of the city. The project was enlarged to cover a much longer time period (as far back as anyone living in Birmingham in the 1990s could remember), a much broader definition of what counted as rock ’n’ roll, and as many other musical genres as could be practically investigated. I knew that Birmingham had a widely acclaimed jazz heritage, and when I thought about the city’s music, it was Erskine Hawkins’s “Tuxedo Junction” rather than Randy Newman’s “Birmingham” or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” that immediately came to mind. I was also aware that many of Birmingham’s jazz greats were coming to the end of their lives and thus there was no time to waste in getting their stories down on paper. In the first few years of my management of the project, Birmingham lost the Lowe brothers, Sammy and J. L., who had played a significant role in creating Birmingham’s jazz heritage and were active in keeping it alive.
As someone whose musical education began in London in the 1960s, I came to Birmingham with a grounding in the history of the blues (more than a lot of native Alabamians, both black and white) and a belief in the blues myth of racial purity and expression. My generation was profoundly touched by the blues and probably bought into the myths of the blues more than any other group of affluent Europeans. What better place to learn about it than a major urban center in the Deep South with a historically large African American population? Before coming to the city, I had never heard or read about a blues player from Birmingham, but it seemed to me that a city usually ignored in the history of the blues ought to have some “real” blues music in its past. My own journey of exploration in this project was to go fearlessly and naively into the uncharted waters of African American culture and get to the heart of what I believed was the southernness in southern music.
The first problem was that there were hardly any blues players from the golden age of the 1920s and 1940s still alive in Alabama and ready to talk. Much of the blues history I heard had been passed down from enthusiastic, middle-class whites who recounted the stories told to them years before by bluesmen, or friends of bluesmen. The history I was hearing was secondhand, and probably fashioned to suit white sensibilities and molded by the blues myth. The Alabama native Johnny Shines had been a friend of the legendary Robert Johnson and was full of interesting stories about the great man and their life on the road. I pounced on these stories, but I could not help wondering, as I heard them told and retold, how much they represented the reality of bluesmen versus their mythical life as enshrined in their songs. During the 1990s a blues joint in an industrial suburb of Birmingham called Gip’s Place emerged into public consciousness (Henry Gipson opened his place back in 1952, he says), and quickly lost its best-kept-secret status to become extremely popular. Gip’s Place soon made the national media, the AAA’s Alabama Journey magazine, and the Travel Channel. This was the so-called authentic blues in my own backyard. The music came to me not on vinyl or MP3 but in video clips sent to me via cell phones by my friends and students. It sounded very good, but it made me wonder if the music I heard was an authentic voice of the African American past in Alabama or an entertainment directed to a white audience of college kids, tourists, and hipsters that had to conform to their expectations, and the widely held stereotypes of the blues and its players. Gip’s Place now has its own Facebook page and sells a line of merchandise. Was Gip’s the real thing, or was it another commodification of a music already heavily commodified in television commercials and in franchised blues clubs like the House of Blues?
Birmingham had its own black business and entertainment district during segregation, places deemed sites of authentic black cultural production, just like Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chattanooga. In her engaging history of Bessie Smith, the “Blues Empress” of black Chattanooga, Michelle Scott describes how the process of rural to urban migration (Bessie Smith’s family came from Alabama), industrialization, and the creation of a black working class provided the context for the rise of a blues culture and the creation of African American entertainment stars. Chattanooga worked just like Birmingham in supporting a segregated entertainment in a clearly delineated district that offered street performers, tent shows, music halls, bars, and rent parties in private residences in addition to retail and hospitality businesses. Along with historians Robin Kelley and Tera Hunter, Scott argues that black recreational spaces served as alternative sites of networking, economic enhancement, and protest. They allowed African Americans
