enough to make surreptitious trips across town on Saturday night could return to their privileged place in a segregated society on Sunday morning — the most segregated time of the week, according to Dr. Martin Luther King. It is pretty easy to condemn their passivity with the benefit of hindsight and the safety of the twenty-first century, but I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to get beaten up or lose their business license. Those who challenge the credibility of their interracial yearnings have a point, but the young men who played the white-boy blues and idolized the black musicians who had popularized it sincerely thought that they were the good guys in the struggle for desegregation. I couldn’t include a lot of white guilt in this narrative because it was hard to find any in the music lovers we interviewed. Unfortunately, the racial politics of Birmingham’s history leads to white voices being valued less and in some cases completely discredited. Yet white voices are still a part of the story and should carry the same weight as the heroes of desegregation in recounting the musical history of Birmingham.
Looking back over the transcripts of the interviews, I found out that within the community of interviewers and interviewees in this project I was known as “the Professor,” and my modus operandi was to focus the interviews around the topic of race. I admit that I am a history professor, and as with most, or all, history professors, what interests me most about the history of Birmingham is race. Not only did I orientate the oral histories toward African American music, bringing in the first interviews of black musicians, I also interrogated everyone else on the matter of race, often to the annoyance of those being pressed to talk about an issue that they considered had been dead and buried for many decades. Yet in my well-intentioned but naive efforts to make this a scholarly history of music in Birmingham that incorporated both the black and white experience lay the seeds of my defeat and the impossibility of ever producing a one-volume history of music in Birmingham that encompassed the experiences of two musical cultures. There was never going to be enough race in this project to satisfy academe.
The first problem was getting access to black musicians and gaining their consent to give interviews. This oral history project was originated, managed, and executed by whites. One of the main changes I made when I came to this project was to increase the number of people who went out and did the interviews. The first group of interviewers was largely adults — musicians or other members of the music business who were long-term residents of Birmingham. Under the direction of the hard-working Jon Van Wesel (who did the majority of the interviews), investigators Keith Harrelson, Gigi Boykin, Jay Dismukes, Brian Haynes, and Nancy Belcher went out and did the interviews. I exploited my position as professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to bring in students to this project, which created a younger group of interviewers, who were music lovers rather than musicians and who had much broader and more eclectic tastes in music: Courtney Burks, Alison Oden, Tonya Wise, Brandy Lepik, Rob Heinrich, John Gilchrist, and Caitlin Moore. My experiences directing the American Studies program at UAB, a public school with a large percentage (around 25 percent) of African American students, taught me that they know almost nothing about blues culture and care little for the history of black music, slavery, and civil rights. As budding doctors, lawyers, and engineers, they find little to attract them in this part of black heritage. While it was easy to convince my white students to take part in this oral history project, it proved almost impossible to recruit young African Americans. Although we in Birmingham live in an integrated city and enjoy life in an interracial society, the black and white communities are still largely self-segregated, and there remains some discomfort about white people coming in with clipboards and lots of questions. It was possible to reach out to the older generation of black musicians to tell their story, but finding out about modern African American music proved to be much more difficult. Hip-hop in the 1990s was a closed society in Birmingham. Because of the opposition of city government and the impossibly high insurance premiums, there were few hip-hop concerts, and the performances that did take place tended to be private and underground. Again there were significant incursions across racial lines, which muddied the waters of authenticity because hip-hop culture remains amazingly popular within the white suburbs, but one can hardly imagine the howls of protest that would have followed a history of hip-hop in Birmingham drawn largely from whites.
The other problem was that musicians look back on the segregated past with different viewpoints than other people, especially white liberal academics. It was easy enough to get African Americans to talk about the horrors of segregation. Here is a typical quote from Bruce Martin: “It was bad back then … people shouting at you as you walked down the street, throw a tin can full of pee at you … Lots of black women had to work, worked for whites, and get abused, you know. Go home and tell their man, nothing he could do about it. That’s where all those high yellahs come from! It was the Dirty South, not the Deep South, the Dirty South.” Bruce is a taxi driver and was in a good position to understand the reality of segregation. But a black musician sees segregation in starkly different terms than those in other occupations, and it turned out that the last place one was going to find outrage and disgust about segregation in Birmingham was in music venues and clubs, or in the recollections of musicians of both races who had made a good living during that period. How much the rules of racial deference in public continued in this era of good feelings toward African American musicians is hard to evaluate, as no side is eager to stress the power dynamic of these business relationships. Yet it is uncontestable that both sides were profiting from these relationships, which had always allowed African American musicians to work in places where many other blacks and whites were not allowed, and to get much higher returns for the work they did.
In fact, one could argue that many of the viewpoints expressed in these interviews go completely against the prevailing views of academic historians and what one would expect from downtrodden African Americans in what used to be America’s most segregated city. The first time I heard an elderly African American speak wistfully about the good old days of segregation and how much better life was back in the 1960s I was shocked, but I soon got used to it and understood that musicians interpret history differently than professors or politicians. If we see their music as a commercial endeavor rather than staking out black identity and articulating black resistance, this begins to make sense. The same economic forces that powered African American music into the mainstream of popular culture were never going to dwell on the injustices or the immorality of segregation. By choosing to record the experiences and viewpoints of musicians, rather than garbage collectors, taxi drivers or policemen, the final product was never going to meet the expectations of the academic community who were the peer reviewers of the scholarly narrative I hoped to publish. The binary racial politics of Birmingham were never going to be reflected in the mediated and mobile space that musical culture occupies in between the races. Leaning on a group of respondents who were pretty much politically incorrect to start with was enough to condemn their recollections as debased and unimportant within the contested cultural history of the Deep South.
The boundaries of racial politics are not permanently fixed in time, and racial signifiers also shift over time. Mike Butler has studied southern rockers in the postsegregation decades and found that the Confederate symbols these musicians proudly displayed no longer represented traditional southern racial ideologies, in which the flag was associated with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations, but the changing racial identities for white males in the South. Although this new construct of male southerners was not accepted by all males in the South, those involved in southern rock rejected the racist imagery of the flag in favor of a pride in regional imagery, while at the same time “openly and frequently paying homage to the blues musicians who influenced their own creative musical style.” In the 1960s and 1970s this was a rebellious posture that counteracted the accepted image of these musicians as “frightened racists.”14 While southern rock still carries with it the burden of southern racism, it has to be accepted that music has healing, redemptive properties, and this is especially true for a popular music that was the product of some elements of racial integration. As Mark Kemp wrote, “Southern rock offered an emotional process by which my generation could leave behind the burdens of guilt and disgrace, and go home again.”15
“We’ve got Newark, we’ve got Gary / Somebody told me we got L.A. And we’re working on Atlanta.”
Birmingham,
