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And this afternoon we are delighted to welcome another brother who comes in that same vein and tradition. Dwight Andrews, musical director and arranger, is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and received his education at the University of Michigan and at the Yale Divinity School.

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His relationship with August Wilson and director Lord Richards both began with the Yale Repertory Theater and in the Broadway production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Since then, he has served as music director for Wilson's Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, both now on Broadway, and The Piano Lesson.

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From 1979 to 1986, Mr. Andrews was the resident musical director of the Yale Repertory Theater. Most recently, he was the recipient of an NACP Theater Award in 1987 for his musical direction of the Los Angeles Theater Center's production of "Ma Rainey." In addition to his activities in theater and dance, he is a PhD candidate in music theory

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at Yale and a Mellon doctoral fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I'm delighted to present now Dr. Andrews who will present the lecture on African American music, "What Song Shall We Sing?" [ Applause ]

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>> My dear friends here at Morehouse, to the faculty and the student body, to the distinguished clergy and friends and musicians, I'm honored to be here today to share with you a few additional thoughts on African American music. Some of you were probably

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here when I spoke here, I think about four or five weeks ago, on the issues of the media and the representation of young black men. So I'm delighted, doubly delighted, I guess, to have a second opportunity to talk about yet another aspect of African American music. Today I want to talk about what I think to be the essence and the nature of African American

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music, plural, what holds them together. And I want to, in a sense, raise a question for all of you. What song shall we sing today? Or perhaps more appropriately, what song are we singing today?

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Now as a music theorist and ethnomusicologist, it's always particularly hard to come to a predominantly black audience to talk about black music.

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Because all of you already feel that you know almost everything there is to know about black music. You've grown up with it. You've listened to it.

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You know who your favorite artists are. Many of you are musicians yourselves. So I'm going to try to approach this in a way which I hope will be fresh for you and interesting for you.

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Leroy Jones wrote a book about 20, almost 30 years ago now, called Blues People. And that book dealt with Jones's presupposition that if you look at black American music

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or African-American music, you can see the assimilation or the relationship of the black American to the mainstream American society by looking at the evolution of the music.

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His thought essentially was that the music and its many stylistic changes and evolutions directly reflected the nature or the status of the African American in America.

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That was a profound thought. And although Jones was not a musicologist, I think he provided some very, very important insights to how we look at black music.

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Most importantly, Jones wanted to keep the idea of racism and race in the paradigm of how we study or think about black music. Now, I've amended his presuppositions somewhat

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for the purpose of my work. So let me share it with you so that we can then go on to look at African-American music in general. First of all, I am not one who's going

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to suggest that in order to be a great demonstrator of black music that you have to be black. I am not going to try to stand up here and kind of recreate, in a sense, a reverse racist proposition

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that only black people, for example, can play the blues, or only black people know how to be great innovators in jazz. I'm not suggesting that at all. However, I do want to suggest that when

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we look and study black music, that we must keep always racism in the paradigm. Because from the very beginnings of what we know to be African-American music,

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from its folk beginnings, for example, in a sense, black music has always been a response to racism. If we look at the slave community and the music that comes out of that period in our history, a period that

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we sometimes reluctantly don't want to look at, we can see that in many ways the religious traditions, the secular music traditions, even the ideas of what we know to be the blues, in many ways were a

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response to the status of the black person in that society. In a sense, it would be impossible to have the blues had we not had racism to deal with. Marshall Stearns, the jazz historian,

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wrote many years ago that it's because of the peculiar status of black people in America, the ways in which we've been allowed to be a part of the society, and the ways in which we are

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constantly not allowed to fully participate in society, which becomes the basis for black music. I think this is essentially true. And I think it has many, many musical outpourings that we'll see in the rest of this talk. But we do want to keep racism in the paradigm. And what I hope to do today is to talk to you about the various ways in which this falls

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out in the music. Hopefully it will tease your intellect and at the end of this talk we'll have some questions and answers and perhaps a dialogue. We have yet, I think, created the volume or the text which accurately deals with the great impact

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and the great contribution of African American music to 20th century life, to 20th century art and letters. Most of you are already aware that most of the music you hear on the radio, all of the music

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that you hear in the movies, all of the music that you hear selling products, is in many ways based on African-American musical practices. In a sense, all of what we know to be popular music

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is in some ways an interpolation of African-American musical forms. But perhaps one of the ironies is that many of us, even as African Americans no longer see the historical connection

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of the African American in all that we see around us. African American music, as many of you know, had a tremendous influence on the artists even of Western Europe. Even in the beginnings of this century, people like Stravinsky and Debussy, Picasso,

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Messiaen, were all heavily influenced by and interested in African American musical forms. Anton Dvorak said that of the musics to come out of America, that it is the Negro song which is the most important and the most potent. But I want to talk specifically about African American music,

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how we understand it, how it functions, what it is, and what it tells us. I think first of all we have to deal with the history of the music, and I just want to give you a very quick overview, But I think you're going to find it kind of interesting when you then consider the musics that we listen to today.

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There are many important connections between African American music and African music as well as European music. Unfortunately, I think the most misunderstood aspects of African American music is its African retentions. I want to give you what I think to be the most significant components of those African retentions, And then I want to discuss how this falls out of the music.

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First of all, from the cultures of West Africa, we know that many of the traditional African cultures had what we call functional music.

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That is, we had music for virtually every aspect of daily living and life. We had music for work, i.e. the work songs. We had music for birthing.

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We had music to celebrate the harvest. We had music to put people in the ground. We had various types of music for very specific functions in traditional African cultures. Now, in spite of what many historians would have you believe, African American,

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African culture rather, was not destroyed in the slave passage. Rather, many of these African concepts were reconstituted or interpolated and were given new meaning by these new Africanized Americans. One of the most potent aspects of the African culture

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that we kept was this idea that music has power, that music itself has power. It's not simply an artistic expression of one person, one genius, for example, but rather it

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could be the collective expression in which people could interact with the gods. So that when I sang a specific song while I was working, I wasn't simply trying to while away the time.

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Rather, I was asking the gods to radically change that work experience through music. This is a very potent and powerful concept because we must begin with what makes the music

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conceptually so different. If, for example, this African concept of music as power is seen in the black church, for example, It helps us to understand the nature of the tradition

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of the tune and preacher. The preacher is not simply singing as an empty stylistic practice. Rather, he's maintaining, however subconsciously,

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that aspect that when you sing the words, it has more power. It is more potent. You see, one of the great tragedies,

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perhaps, in African American culture is that everything that we've contributed is always reduced to some type of stylistic performance practice, the tacit presumption is that it has no deeper meaning, no structural

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meaning, no philosophical basis. And what I want to do is I want to begin with the philosophical basis and then that will help me to understand the nature of the practice. You see, in a way, part of what racism has done to us is it has helped to shape how we study ourselves. And if you presuppose that there is no background, no fundamental structure, no reason for being

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that is deeper than the performance practice, then you're going to ultimately conclude that the music is simply vernacular, popular, undisciplined, untrained, etc., etc. What I think on the other hand is that the music is quite profound and powerful and that its function has to do with power itself.

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Now this idea of music as power is very interesting if we think about it in the African context, because it gives us some ideas of where African-American music comes from.

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Let's look at just a few. I've already mentioned the tuning preacher as but one. But if we think about it, if you think about the nature of the human voice

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as it is used in African-American culture, not just music, but in all aspects of the culture. The way in which the great preacher will manipulate his voice to get many timbres, many colors, almost in a musical sense.

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If you look at the way many of our African-American church singing traditions allow the singers to sing very bent tones, or tones you could glide up to tone or fall off of a tone, the way in which the moan has musical as well

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cultural meaning, the way in which a shout has specific musical meaning in the culture. Then what you begin to see is that rather than African American culture being fractured, it is actually very, very unified and has many, many components. This idea of the voice helps us to understand the nature of the beginnings of jazz, for

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example. Jazz is obviously the popularization of many folk practices, but in the early days of jazz, the young instrumentalists were imitating the way people sang.

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Then people started singing the way the instrumentalists were playing. This cross fertilization back and forth helps to account for the way in which jazz is a unique type of musical expression. Comes from the older concept that if you have a voice,

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you must use it in as many ways as possible because that would also reflect the amount of power that you have. Now in my, I'm writing a book right now in the history of jazz and I'm beginning with this power paradigm but even when we look at rhythm, I think this power idea comes into play. That is if we talk about the way in which a guy is swinging, when you hear a great jazz band,

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and that band is really swinging. Well, what are we trying to describe? Well, part of what we're trying to describe is the way in which that straight pulse,

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if you think about it in art music, the way in which that pulse is manipulated to give it different weight. It seems like the music is moving back and forth.

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You can get a swing if a guy goes, (imitates drum beat) It's very hard to imitate, very hard to notate. And it has to do because of the very, very subtle nuances

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of accent and weight within the beat. The beat is still going on, but I'm exuding my power by manipulating where I'm going to place the stress. So if you think about syncopation

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in African-American folk music, it's not simply a musical device, rather it's the manipulation of time, reinforcing the idea of one's individual power.

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I think this is a very, very interesting concept because it also helps us to see the way the music evolved. Let's look at the idea of language, for example. Call and response.

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Every book worth its salt on black music says, well, African-Americans have call and response. They like the drums and their music is very repetitive. Well, if you allow that to be the basis

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of your understanding of the music, then it seems to me you missed the point. Let's look at how call and response functions within African-American culture.

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If you come from one of those religious traditions where the congregation says amen when the preacher says something that touches your heart, you know that that is an aspect of call and response.

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The preacher doesn't have to give you a clue. You have been culturally acculturated to know when to say amen. And you also know that should the preacher say something that really affects you, you

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don't have to wait until the appropriate moment. You can just say, "Amen," or "My, my," or "Well, well," or as many sometimes in a church you might see the old lady in the back just tapping the back of the bench. It's not that she doesn't have any understanding of what's going on.

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She's making a musical contribution. participating in this dialogue. And if you think of the sermon as part of a musical experience, then you see that in church that call and response is a, in a sense, helping to what? To define a community. If the preacher lines out a

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hymn and allows you to respond to it, he in a sense is including you in that process. That's why when you go to a jazz club, if a saxophone player is playing something you really like, you can go ahead and say, "Get down." The protocol does not require you to wait and politely clap at the end, because the nature of the music

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making is that we are always participating throughout. This is very, very important because from the very, very beginning, African American music was a music of resistance. It was designed to help a powerless people, in one sense, create their own power. Create their own power. about the language. You've seen it in all of the books about black religion, the way

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in which the hymns that we sang or the spirituals that we created sometimes could be interpreted to have more than one meaning, both a spiritual meaning perhaps and an existential meaning that is used for slave revolts or for slave escapes. But it goes beyond that. If I as a slave can communicate with you as a slave and we can communicate in a language that

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the master thinks he understands but really doesn't understand our meaning, that gives us power, doesn't it? If we can talk in his very midst and he misunderstands, then that gives us power. We create a language, a slang, a vernacular, part of which, its function is to determine who's going to be in the group

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and who's going to be out of the group. And that way, rap music is, in a sense, a kind of very temporal explication of this much older practice.

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Think about it. In my day, when I was growing up, when we heard somebody who was playing very, very well, we said, man, he's really cool.

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And I wasn't referring to his body temperature. I was saying that he was playing very, very well. If you think about it, we even said, "He's really hot." But all of us within the culture meant

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that I was essentially meaning, well, he's very cool or he's very good. That is inverting the language so that only those within the culture could understand

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is a function of this music as power, using language as power. If you think about the slang that we use even today, the notion of he is bad, he's really bad.

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We're not describing someone who misbehaves, are we? We're talking about someone who must be very, very good at what they do, very, very expert. And this whole inversion,

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using meanings to have opposite meanings, is part of the tradition of using music as power. It also has to do with using language as a way to keep secrets

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from people that you don't want to know. If you look at the slang of rap music, and I'm not putting a value judgment on rap music, I'll save that for later, my comments on rap.

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But if you look at the language of rap music, unless you are a part of that culture, you will not understand what's going on. Somebody says it's deaf, or I had to diss her,

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and you're not part of the culture, in a sense, you are what? You're left out in the cold. And in a sense, part of what these young men and women

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are giving us through this language of rap music is they are redefining their own community on their own terms. It has much, much older roots, roots in African-American music. Now in many ways, it seems to me if we want to have a positive outcome, a positive understanding of African American music, we have to in some ways

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or another acknowledge the breadth of African American musical expression. And I want to in a sense raise an issue for all of you because I think this is one of the major concerns

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of not only students of the music but for all of us as participants in the culture. It seems like the more we assimilated into the mainstream culture, the more conflicted we became

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about what we were going to call our musical and cultural past. If you look at the way the early writers in the 20th century, the early black writers talked about black music or talked about their country or rural past or their slave past,

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it's clear to me at least that everyone was not interested in bringing a lot of those folk traditions up north. It seemed to me that a lot of that hooping and hollering and a lot of the moans that I've been referring to as having a discrete meaning in African American culture,

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were not necessarily regarded as positive values. And to be sure, as we started to participate in more mainstream denominations, as we started to sing the anthems, our composers started to arrange the anthems and to arrange the spirituals in a very kind

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of Western European classical way. This is not to say that this music does not have value, but once again I think it does reflect the nature of the African-American's synthesis or assimilation

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into the mainstream culture. I think we are very, very much split around what we want to hold up around African-American culture. That is, what is good culture and what is bad culture?

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I think we are as split upon it today when we deal with something like rap music as we were in 1920 when Elaine Locke was trying to deal with the blues. And that says something very, very powerful to me. It says that both in 1920 and in 1990, we have yet to fully acknowledge the integrity

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of our essential background and past, which has to do with that African past. It seems that in many ways, we continue even today to try to recreate our past

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so that it can be consonant with the way in which we'd like to see ourselves in the present. Though we lift up jazz today, it was not that long ago that in many black schools,

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you wouldn't have the greats like Duke Ellington as honored guests. That's also a part of our past. It wasn't that long ago when if you said,

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"I want to play the blues," people said, "Oh, you want to play "that old time darky music?" That was not seen as a positive.

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And it seems to me an interesting cycle because in all candor, it seems to me that a lot of what we grasp onto as value in our culture, we seem to not take the cue from our culture,

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but rather from the mainstream culture. That is to say, when the public decides that Duke Ellington is great, we say Duke Ellington is great.

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When the Presbyterian Church or the Episcopal Church decides that Duke Ellington can write sacred music for the church, then we can perform Duke Ellington in the church.

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Do you get where I'm headed? When we talk about the blues, many people like to bow their heads. My father said he used to hide his blues records.

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My grandmother, who was a classically trained pianist, would not allow gospel music in the house. Not in the house. This is also a part of our culture.

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And you see, unless we begin with some kind of unified idea about where it all begins, then we have no possibility to see about the unity of the outcome.

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We are forced in a sense to understand and to comprehend this music only along stylistic lines. And music has more essence than style. This is especially frightening today

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because you see most of our young people no longer study music as a matter of course. It is no accident that rap music over the last 10 or 15 years came at a time

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when public school education was no longer a part of the curriculum. So as black people no longer, young black children, no longer got a chance to play string instruments

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and learn how to read music as part of their elementary and junior high education, They created a new music with their own instruments. Their voice became the drum once again.

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The turntable became the rhythmic instrument. This says two things to me. It says something positive and something negative. It says something positive about the resiliency

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of African-American culture. You cannot take the song away from us. You can take the instruments, you can take the harmony, you can take the education.

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We will still sing because we understand that music has power. But what it says to me in a negative way is that we have not yet risen to the occasion to call into question the kinds of artistic experiences, the breadth of experiences

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that our children need if they are to carry our heritage forward. If rap music, for example, becomes the basic genre for our future generations, What will their future generations produce? In many ways, I think we need to shape

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the song of the future by what we do today. I think we can do it in a couple of very simple ways. First of all, I think our challenge is to learn how to embrace all of us.

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if this were Sunday, I'd probably preach about that. That is to embrace all of our many parts. We have still not done that. We are still very color conscious.

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We are still very status conscious. We are still very conscious of the idea that at one time, our forebearers were slaves. An even darker thought for many of us

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was that at some point in our history, our forebears were Africans. And I think that when we are honest and when we look in the mirror,

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too many of us have not been able to fully embrace that person that we see. You see it in popular culture all the time. Blue contact lenses.

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Blue contact lenses, what a strange idea. What do you think that says? Is it simply a matter of popular culture? I don't think so.

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It says that what God gave that person wasn't good enough. And that person had to try to fix it. And that says something to me that's very negative. You know, when we were in college,

00:29:57.100 - 00:30:05.980

we thought that all of the struggles that we were going through for racial equality, not just with white folk, but racial parity amongst ourselves, that we were going to fight that battle so

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that you young men wouldn't have to fight it. Well, young men, you are going to have to fight it because the battle clearly is not over. Watch, as I told you before, some of the rap music videos.

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Look at the images of the women in the videos. That tells the story. See how many shades there are. Not many.

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See how many people look like you, aside from the rappers. not many. We must learn to embrace all of our many traditions because all of our many traditions have integrity because they are us. And our integrity comes from what God gave us. The second aspect of what we need to do, I think, is we need a critical forum

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to look at our art and our letters. Frankly, whatever the newspapers tell us is what we we believe about who's hot in the arts. Too few of us read books, aside from the ones that we're assigned in class. Too few of us write and reflect what we feel so that it can be shared for posterity.

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We need a critical forum to discuss what we need in our communities, because believe me, art does inform and reflect our communities. If we're always, in a sense, being told what we think about our art, we can never use our art to its fullest potential.

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And the third aspect that I think we can achieve to, in a sense, get back to the roots of our music is to develop some discipline about ourselves. To develop discipline about ourselves. You see, I think it is true that nothing that you get that's of any value comes without

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paying a cost. And if we look at the music that our culture is creating these days, I think it's a fair question to ask how many people are paying the cost? How many people are studying, whatever the tradition, how many people are studying?

00:32:25.520 - 00:32:50.680

or rather how many people now are creating music simply for the marketplace. And the value in a sense is ascribed directly in relation to if it makes money. You see my friends, if our culture gets reduced purely to a commodity, you have no culture. It has been bought and sold.

00:32:50.680 - 00:33:11.740

And I believe that's what we are in the process of right now. I think in many ways we need to prepare ourselves not just for tomorrow but for today. By creating our own sense of value in our music, in our letters, in our art. By critiquing our own art for our own purposes.

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And by in a sense helping to shape that art by what we support. You see, as long as we're buying the videos, people will keep making the videos. As long as you're buying the music

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that basically represents you as nothing but a sex object, people will make that. Until we become critical of our own cultural artifacts, until we become critical,

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we can never hope to use this to its fullest potential. Now in a sense, what I've tried to describe to you is where all of these various practices come from historically.

00:33:57.280 - 00:34:08.840

But at the end, I tried to point to you some glimmer of the notion that a lot of those things which were true acts of resistance in their inception in the 19th century

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and the early part of the 20th century have in many ways been co-opted now by what we now call popular culture. I simply raise that as an issue or as a yellow light.

00:34:20.000 - 00:34:32.140

for you to think about and for you to judge for yourselves. Who are the great William Grant Stills of our decade? I don't know, of our time. Who are the great Florence Prices?

00:34:32.140 - 00:34:45.940

How many people know who Florence Price is? Florence Price was one of the very fine and important early black women composers of this century. William Grant Stills was a black composer, expertly trained

00:34:45.940 - 00:34:58.780

in both popular music traditions and classical musical traditions. The reason why we don't know them is because we have not shared with one another that this is also a part of our heritage.

00:34:58.780 - 00:35:23.160

I think we can, in a sense, serve our future by uncovering our true past, confronting it squarely, dealing with the faults and the weaknesses, but then moving past that to a fuller comprehension of the music, its essence, and ourselves and our essence. Thank you.

00:35:23.160 - 00:35:51.720

[applause] It goes without saying, there are questions. And we invite you to come to the mic to my left and raise your pointed specific questions. No dissertations or sermons.

00:35:51.720 - 00:36:09.560

Questions please. Hi. I would just like to make a question about the rap music. Do you think rap music projects positive or negative images

00:36:09.560 - 00:36:22.240

when you talk of it in general terms, or are you talking about it in more specific terms? Well, first of all, I think that rap music is not one thing. I think there are a lot of different types of rap artists.

00:36:22.240 - 00:36:32.560

I'm studying it a lot more now because I'm trying to understand it in the context of my historical study. I don't think rap is one thing, but many different things.

00:36:32.560 - 00:36:47.140

I have concerns about rap music ultimately in terms of its positive value only from the standpoint that as a part of popular culture and especially because rap comes to us through video a good deal as well.

00:36:47.140 - 00:37:02.860

I'm really concerned about the images that rap presents and what it presents to young people. I'm not quite sure that rap, although it does reflect, I think the anger and the frustration of a generation,

00:37:02.860 - 00:37:15.000

not just against white people or mainstream society, but against other generations. I think it, in a sense, posits some sexist notions that I don't think are ultimately positive

00:37:15.000 - 00:37:28.820

for our community and for our future. It posits a lot of popularizations of important historical black issues that I'm not sure are really fully presented, for example.

00:37:28.820 - 00:37:39.100

for example, in rap music. Let me give you a couple of examples. There are a lot of political rappers, pseudo-political rappers, some better than others.

00:37:39.100 - 00:37:51.060

But the way in which, for example, Malcolm X's name has become an icon in some rap music, it's little more than a rhyme in some of it. Not in all of it, but in some of it.

00:37:51.060 - 00:38:02.200

It's just another word. You, in a sense, patch in a bunch of historical martyrs. And I wonder if in a sense that really relays in a sense their importance to our culture

00:38:02.200 - 00:38:07.680

and to our future. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But that would be my answer.

00:38:07.680 - 00:38:16.560

I will say one other thing, though. I do think people need to listen to rap much more carefully, because I think if you want to understand where young people are, you need to hear that story.

00:38:16.560 - 00:38:29.320

And they have created a language that excludes many of us on purpose. And I think we need to understand it. >> Okay, just to reinstate what you've said before,

00:38:29.320 - 00:38:36.360

African-American music encompasses almost everything around us. >> Yes. >> So to bring about country western,

00:38:36.360 - 00:38:45.660

what influence does African-American music have on that? >> If you listen to country and western music, first of all, country and western, the music that we know as country

00:38:45.660 - 00:39:03.100

and western is much more a fiction created by record industry. They were trying to, in a sense, separate out the white artist who sang in a kind of folk southern tradition that used, in a sense, electric instruments and drums, et cetera, from the black artist.

00:39:03.100 - 00:39:22.100

In a way, many of the terms that we use for all of our musics are primarily artifacts of the industry. That is, you call the white ones, country and western, call the black ones R&B. They share many things in common, though, in terms of the harmonic language,

00:39:22.360 - 00:39:32.280

in terms of the way in which the vocalists sing, the many vocal practices. Charlie Pride, for example, very, very fine country and western singer.

00:39:32.280 - 00:39:41.740

In his early days of his career, they wouldn't allow his picture to be on the albums 'cause they didn't want white people to know that that country and western singer was black.

00:39:41.740 - 00:39:52.760

So in many ways, country and western, the function of country and western is much more title than anything, I think, specifically musical. Yeah, I have a couple of quick questions.

00:39:52.760 - 00:39:56.660

One is-- [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, if you want to talk to him. OK.

00:39:56.660 - 00:40:04.960

[INAUDIBLE] OK. I guess then I'm most curious about when I see rap videos on TV.

00:40:04.960 - 00:40:12.040

And I know you mentioned the types of women that they have in these videos. Who has control over that? Is it the choice of the rappers?

00:40:12.040 - 00:40:20.080

Is it the choice of a Tone Loc or the choice of a NWA to put these women in there? Or is it a choice of the distributors, the manufacturers of the videos?

00:40:20.080 - 00:40:38.320

It's usually a mutual consent. And the reason why I think you see these women with no clothes on and being shot always from their breasts or from their rear ends is because the media,

00:40:38.320 - 00:40:48.320

and especially cable, has understood that sex sells. And these videos, for example-- and MTV as a programmer, at one time, many of you will remember,

00:40:48.320 - 00:41:14.800

not play rap music, would not play it. But now because they've seen the way in which we seem to be titillated by this kind of almost soft porn, I think it's usually a mutual consent by the label, the artist, and then ultimately the programmer. Because believe me, the guy that runs MTV could keep out anything that he wanted to keep out. They do. That's why

00:41:14.800 - 00:41:32.600

you don't see people like George Clinton very much. >> Well, more specifically, I was speaking in reference to what you said about the women in a sense not looking like the rappers in terms of just what they look like, their physical appearances. Is that the control? Is it the rappers who choose those type of women?

00:41:32.600 - 00:41:54.900

>> Usually what happens is you take a song and then you get a director to develop a storyline around the song. Nowadays, many songs are based now around a visual image. And oftentimes these women are people, acquaintances and friends of the rap artists. But there are means of censorship along the way that is to help shape the thing. So I think in many

00:41:54.900 - 00:42:16.960

ways the rap artists do collude with the industry, which ends up presenting a negative image of black women. >> Do you believe artists like the Beatles and Presley became famous off of black music? There's no question that the Beatles, well the Beatles are good examples of people who

00:42:16.960 - 00:42:28.400

at least acknowledge their debt to African American music. Most white artists have not. But look about, think about it. The cycle, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole cycle to me.

00:42:28.400 - 00:42:39.840

It began very early. When people found out that they could sell black music and make money off of it, the whole story changed. Paul Whiteman, the arranger who hired a guy

00:42:39.840 - 00:42:51.160

named George Gershwin, who was a pianist, who wrote a piece named, called "Rhapsody in Blue." In 1927 or '28, Paul Whiteman, who had in a sense kind of synthesized

00:42:51.160 - 00:43:02.780

these black hot arrangements that he had and written them down, had 28 bands in the East Coast playing simultaneously, grossed over a million dollars in the late 1920s,

00:43:02.780 - 00:43:21.720

based on, he had white orchestras playing black music. Okay? Since that time, the cycle simply has continued. The idea that Elvis Presley, who was basically singing what black people had already been singing for at least a generation or two, becomes the millionaire

00:43:21.720 - 00:43:35.400

and the great innovator is absurd. And if you watch the Grammys, then you'll know how far we have come or gone, depending upon how you want to look at it. Ultimately, now we have white artists

00:43:35.400 - 00:43:42.960

who win the R&B category, which used to be the one category, if you didn't call it so, the one category that they left for us.

00:43:42.960 - 00:43:55.240

But now, in a sense, I think we have come full tilt. And ultimately, I think the industry designed this. It started in the '60s by having a guy like Jimi Hendrix, who people thought was some kind of anomaly

00:43:55.240 - 00:44:02.400

'cause he wasn't playing blues in the way they thought he should play it, and groups like the Average White Band who were playing black music.

00:44:02.400 - 00:44:27.200

And then if you look at the progression, more and more we've had white artists playing black music, Kenny G for example, Kenny G, who now is the most successful of all the pop music saxophonists. In a sense, he has capitalized on and has had an industry sympathetic to the idea of a white artist being the prime carrier of this music.

00:44:29.440 - 00:44:44.760

It's devastated us in a way because the irony is we are the innovators, but we have not yet. [BLANK_AUDIO]