Postscript to Black Music Month

I wrote earlier that I might want to do separate posts on both 20 Feet From Stardom and Miss Sharon Jones!.

As it was, they were both movies that I was interested in and hadn't gotten too. What pushed me forward was a thread on 20 Feet From Stardom, focused on the appropriation aspects. 

https://twitter.com/sassycrass/status/1407875880618127364

Frequently, you have white musicians mimicking sounds they had heard from Black musicians. That was true with Elvis and The Rolling Stones and too many to count, actually. 

Beyond that, they were generally also being supported by Black musicians. The movie focuses on backing vocals, but session musicians also were often Black. Their contribution was crucial, but crediting them was never considered to be so.

For me the most appalling thing in the film was that Phil Specter had The Blossoms record "He's A Rebel" to get it out ahead of another label, but they were credited as the Crystals, who could not record as they were on tour. Then the Crystals needed to try and mimic that sound, causing a shift in vocalists.

Why not just release a Blossoms song?

Then, when The Blossoms recorded "He's Sure the Boy I Love", which was supposed to be theirs, it got attributed to the Crystals again. 

There can't have been a lot of value placed on the individuals by the labels. And it's not surprising to have Phil Specter be terrible, but it is really doing dirt to both bands.

The Blossoms had Darlene Love in the band, and I was familiar with her later work. It also sounded familiar though, and I realized that they had come up when I was going through different girl groups as part of daily songs celebrating Black women. 

I remembered that Cissy Houston was part of one group, The Sweet Inspirations, who sang their own music, and backup for Elvis, and then Cissy had solo songs too. 

The movie also taught me that many of these girl groups had preachers' daughters in them, and church singing was where they got their start. 

That was interesting information on its own, but then added to it backup singing and solo work, there is clearly a lot more to know. As I go back and review all of those musicians, that calls for some more research.

(Just in that list there were nineteen distinct groups, all with at least one song you could still find.)

The Twitter thread mentioned Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and how The Dap-Kings had toured with Amy Winehouse. That was why I remembered to watch Miss Sharon Jones!

That is one reason why I am writing about both films in a single post, but this is also a bridging post.

Miss Sharon Jones! had me thinking about death, and that correlated with some other reading, and that is where I am heading tomorrow.

But yesterday was about that irresistible urge to defend white people and explain away racism, and that was a definite feature of the Twitter thread. That wasn't posted by the author; that was in the replies she got.

This is where it comes back to the appropriation. The Rolling Stones made a lot of money incorporating grooves and dialects into their songs that were not from London. They also took Ike and Tina Turner on tour with them. That was a good opportunity for the Turners, but it doesn't undo the racist structure that emphasizes white profit over equality.

("Rocket 88" was also wrongly credited when it was released.)

I do not expect any one band to solve structural racism; that would be ludicrous. However, when there is a discussion about how racism diffuses culture, and how capitalism and racism support each other, how is it that the instinctive response becomes defending whiteness?

We need to get past that defensiveness, because it stops us from getting past anything else. That is the job of white people. 

I don't know how things look once we stop being defensive, but holding on to that definitely supports racism.

One thing I did was to post songs from several of the artists featured in 20 Feet From Stardom. That is a thing that I have the ability to do. They do have their own music out there, and we do not have to limit our support of them to when they are supporting bigger names.

In addition, one thing that came up in Miss Sharon Jones! was the financial needs of musicians, something I have long been aware of. 

One of the band members was trying to buy a house and had an issue getting approval because of the loan processor knowing about Sharon Jones' cancer, and questioning whether there would be income. 

The health insurance became more important than ever with a cancer diagnosis.

The label had to take out a loan to keep people insured and paid.

No one wanted to pressure Sharon and threaten her recovery (I was so touched with the caring shown in the film), but they also needed to live.

A society with greater financial equality and safety nets will not automatically eradicate racism. In fact, racism will make it really hard to reach that equality. We need to be able to aim for all of that, together.

And we can.

Related posts (there were about eight posts on Black Music Month this year, depending on what you count):

(first) https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/07/black-music-month-2021-overview.html

(most recent) https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/08/daily-songs-inspired-by-black-music.html