Only Rock and Roll

The minstrel, in his black-and-white domain, has had a poor time of it lately. The Black and White Minstrel Show, a stalwart of the BBC’s Saturday night schedule for twenty years, is talked of now almost exclusively in terms of moral wrongness, as if white men blacking up were merely an exercise in racial mockery and not the remnant of a cross-cultural theatrical form with intertwining roots in mid-nineteenth-century Southern society. Nevertheless, by the time of its final broadcast in 1978, the Black and White Minstrel Show was ready to fade away, not only on account of what seemed increasingly dubious representations in a country with a growing black population (though few among it came from the United States, where the minstrel show had flourished) but also because its burlesque manner had been superseded by an updated minstrelsy, which is more popular today than ever.

Rock and roll performers, like certain jazz crooners before them, dispensed with the stark device of blackface and depended instead on black voice. The American originator, obviously, was Elvis Presley, whose first single, “That’s All Right”, released in 1954, was a cover version of a song by the black singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (he also recorded Crudup’s “My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine”). In Britain, lagging behind the US here as in most areas of innovation, the vocal twists and shouts associated with blues and gospel, the guitar pulses, the performers’ beseeching gestures, were most successfully absorbed by the young Rolling Stones. They would eventually steer their music into a style that can be called indigenous, with the African American just one among several ancestors; but in common with other groups that formed at about the same time and thrived in the light shed by the Stones’ success – the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Animals, Manfred Mann, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – the Stones started out trying to sound black, vocally and instrumentally. None of them had visited the US at the time of the group’s first releases, never mind the still-segregated South, and it seems probable they had met few black Americans. Besotted by both the blues and its frisky nephew, rhythm and blues, British groups isolated the music from its cultural and geographical territories, which oddly enough permitted it to prosper, freed from historic guilt and inverted deference. Mick Jagger, a distinctive singer with a number of transgressive extras in his gimmick bag – epicene ugly-beautiful looks for one thing, appealing delinquent attitude for another – became the Al Jolson of the teenybop era.  (...)

The sudden easy availability of long-playing records by the likes of Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins opened a door into broader areas of black culture. A visit to the local library yielded a copy of Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning. From there, it was a short move to James Baldwin, whose crossover work The Fire Next Time was being read throughout the US just as “Johnny B. Goode” was appearing on Ready Steady Go!. The reader of Baldwin was unlikely to remain ignorant of Martin Luther King. It became possible, as it had not been before, for R&B enthusiasts from Dartford to Dundee to understand that when Muddy Waters sighed “Oh yeah-ah-ah-ah . . . . Ever’thing’s gonna be alright this morning”, he was not putting on the agony but making a statement about his life. The words of the Stones’ first No 1 hit, “It’s All Over Now” (1964), a country-and-western song by the black singer Bobby Womack, are bluntly literal and not susceptible to double meaning; but it was indeed all over for a certain way of attending to pop music, and, with that, of seeing the world. And the first pressing of the first Rolling Stones 45 rpm disc had much to do with it.

With Brian Jones in control of the balance, the early Stones were a cohesive R&B band with forward thrust and an attractive all-over rudeness in delivery (mistaken, at the time, for being “anti-establishment”). Keith Richards’s attack on “Carol” isn’t Chuck Berry’s, but it’s not bad for someone still in his teens. No matter how good they would become, though, they could never be the real thing. And no matter who they first thought they were singing to, they found their act overtaken by listeners for whom looks and image were as important as rhythm. Whereas the old-timers were on first-name terms with the blues (“Come on in now, Muddy, my husband’s just now left”; “Hey, Bo Diddley . . .” etc), the Stones – Jagger in particular – reserved their possessive feelings for the camera.

Both the Beatles and the Stones had a behind-the-scenes member in the form of the manager: Brian Epstein coddled the Beatles, while Andrew Loog Oldham shaped the anti-Beatles: scruffy cockneys (or mockneys, as Philip Norman says), where the Merseysiders were spruce; scowling, where they smiled; uncouth, ununiformed, apparently untameable. One group played before the Queen; the other appeared in front of the judges (Mick, Keith and Brian were all busted for drugs in 1967, and Brian again a year later; he was fired from the Stones some months before his death in July 1969). In The John Lennon Letters, Hunter Davies writes that John was forbidden to disclose in correspondence with fans that he was married to Cynthia Powell. The Stones, meanwhile, provided the rib for a gorgeous new being to mate with their own unearthly selves: the rock chick – Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Marsha Hunt. While Paul McCartney yearned for trouble-free yesterdays, Mick drawled suggestively through “Brown Sugar”, a song supposedly about his love for Hunt, though it could as easily have come from his liking for Blind Boy Fuller: “I got me a brownskin woman; / Tell me, Momma, where you get your sugar from” (“My Brownskin Sugar Plum”, 1935).

by James Campbell, TLS |  Read more: