City.” In the postsegregation era it has a majority African American population, a local government run largely by African Americans, and a large and affluent black middle class. In her book about black identity in the postsegregated South, Zandria Robinson defines two distinct urban Souths: the historic urban South, which has experienced increased African American population growth but maintains many of the old black/white binary populations and power arrangements, and a new urban South, characterized by an increasing racial and ethnic diversity. She then enhances her definition of the new urban South to encompass the idea of a “Soul City,” in which cities like Birmingham “carry on the musical and political legacy of the civil rights movement even as they attempt to reconcile the racial and socioeconomic realities of the post-soul era.” Like Jackson, Mississippi; Greenville, South Carolina; and Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina, Birmingham has little of the Old South’s Confederate heritage or the glitz and sophistication of the fashionable cities of the New South, like Atlanta.16
“Soul” is a perfect way to locate a time, a place and racial identity, and Robinson expertly joins the components of the music and its southern black experience. She explains how the music of soul artists like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding “recast southerners as instrumental in the political and cultural struggles of African American communities.”17 But soul music as a signifier of black southernness is not without paradox. This blackest of post–rock ’n’ roll African American music was also the most integrated of southern music up to that point. Ironically the first meaningful racial musical interaction in the postsegregation South ended up articulating black pride and power. If you had to condense soul music into one brand, it would have to be Stax Records in Memphis, and here we see white and black musicians working together — it is difficult to think of the Stax sound without thinking of Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, who came to the Stax rhythm section from the Mar-keys, the first integrated band to play in black circuit in the early 1960s. How come a soul classic like “The Dark End of the Street” was written by a two country boys from Vernon, Alabama, and LaGrange, Georgia? If I were to find a consensus in all the interviews of white music lovers active in Birmingham in the 1970s about the genre of music that appealed to them the most, it would have to be soul. Even though this was the heyday of southern rock in Birmingham, it was soul bands that reached the high points of that “ecstatic commonality” (in the words of Ellen Willis) which drew us all to the rock performance in the first place. Soul touched white music lovers in Birmingham in ways that would be unimaginable in a politically correct world. Birmingham’s garage bands were probably unique in how quickly they incorporated horn sections into the lineup of three guitars and a drum set: and horns mean soul.
By pointing to the popularity of soul music in Birmingham I do not want to understate the amount of white anxiety in postsegregation Birmingham. I agree with Madhu Dubey that the move back to authenticity in the popular culture of the 1970s, and the amazing popularity of folk and roots music, was a response to the empowerment of African Americans in a new New South, a Nuevo South in which the old binary code of black and white that had served the South so well was upturned by a new and more complex formula.18 Music plays the same role in defining both white and black culture in the South, acting as a performative and ideological glue that holds identity together. In her book on rock ’n’ roll culture in Liverpool, Sara Cohen argues that music is a “shared code” that gives “a strong sense of allegiance and identity.”19 It also helps define a time and a place. Reaching for authenticity in music meant going back to a time when the races knew where they stood, and stayed in their place; and if there is one thing that defines southerners, it is that they know their place. But times have changed, and we now live in a Chocolate City that has overcome its tragic past and looks forward to a prosperous multiracial future.
Yet neither the New South nor the new New South has lived up to its expectations and realized the identity politics of its boosters. The history of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham remains a critical part of its identity and the justification of its rise as a Chocolate City. But as Diane McWhorter has pointed out, reconciliation has become an industry in Birmingham. The fifty-year anniversary of the historic events of 1963 was an orgy of self-congratulation and self-promotion, tempered only by the continuation of poverty of many of its citizens and the uncontested tradition of bad government. If you ask white people what it was like to live in Birmingham in the 1960s under the leadership of Bull Connor, they will tell you about the hopeless corruption and inefficiency of a comically inept government. If you ask anybody in Birmingham right now about city government, they will tell you more or less the same thing. While Dr. King’s “dream” is much closer to becoming a reality in Alabama, it is still a work in progress. Hip-hop artists have taken up the role of documenting the lives of the poor and disenfranchised in today’s “Dirty South.” In her study of hip-hop in Memphis, Zandria Robinson profiles the artist Erykah Badu, who sings about a Dirty South of poverty, drug trafficking, and violence. Robinson calls this protest music “post-soul blues,” which seems an appropriate term for the postsegregated South.20
The city of Birmingham continues to live in the past, unable to shed its historic stigma of racial hatred and to find an alternative to defining itself in terms of African American resistance. City government has enshrined its famous musicians as well as its civil rights leaders in its efforts to build a more acceptable and comforting past. Building monuments to musicians who grabbed the first chance to get out of Birmingham, and sometimes denied ever coming from the city, has more than a touch of irony. I don’t disagree with those African American musicians who told me that the Motown sound was really Birmingham music (and musicians) transplanted to Detroit — but what does that say about the city they left behind?
“Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll”
After it became evident that it would be impossible to produce a one-volume history of music in Birmingham that was politically correct and adequately covered all the music made in the city since its inception, the question remained what to do with the pile of interviews we had amassed — over a hundred by the end of the 1990s. There was so much good material about punk, postpunk, and all the many varieties of the New Wave that it seemed possible to assemble a history of rock music in Birmingham from the 1950s to the millennium that would cover all the different declensions of rock and show how it had developed or perhaps regressed — a sense of progression and change is central to the ideology of rock ’n’ roll. This was still an ambitious goal, but it would provide an opportunity to address some beleaguered issues in rock music, such as gender and virtuosity, and also cover some of the transformative effects that new technology had on the music industry.
It came as quite a surprise to me that a city as conservative as Birmingham should have had such a lively punk scene, but on reflection, the very fact of its tradition of conservatism was only going to encourage rebellious youth. Although the city was far from supportive of the New Wave, it did allow it to exist, in much the same way that gay bars survived in the 1970s and 1980s. What punk represented was part of the fabric of rock ’n’ roll — the challenge to keep it the music of rebellion. As Michael Azerrad noted, rock ’n’ roll in the 1980s was seen as a force for change, not just a commodity.21 Just like the folkies and worried white supremacists, rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts’ desire to return to simpler (but more subversive times) reflected discontent with the status quo.
Punk aimed to “break a few rules,” in the words of Ian Dury, and of the many rules punk rockers broke, the gender rules were probably the most influential. The popular music business has been a male domain from the beginning, and it was female musicians like Bessie Smith who challenged male dominance and articulated a new sexuality in their work. Birmingham can claim one of the most outspoken female blues artists in Lucille Bogan, and it is unfortunate that her music and influence are not better recognized. While country music was traditionally open to females, its louder and more energetic cousin rockabilly was dominated by males and the popularity of this music in Birmingham marked the beginning of rock ’n’ roll in Alabama. There were a few notable instances of female rockabilly stars coming from Birmingham, but regretfully I was never able to locate the survivors or find anyone who remembered
