Black Folk’s Folk.
I learned what Black music is from my Black parents. They grew up in segregated cities, Detroit and Queens respectfully, in a time when segregated “race” radio stations were still common, although not always called out in that way. From them, I learned that Black music has always been central to Black life. My mother would clean on weekends, swaying and sweeping to everything from Anita Baker to Zapp. She was my introduction to Hip-Hop as she is a huge Salt & Peppa and Mary J Blige fan — giving me a bias towards rap centered around women till this day. My father, a drummer at our church, made sure we knew the foundations of Black music; gospel, blues and jazz; but could have fun with the avant-garde. We often explored P Funk’s Mother Ships and, behind his back, I would venture to Prince’s Erotic City. I knew from an early age that Black music was expansive and vibrant — a pool that could be shallow at one step and yet, reach depths beyond what I could comprehend in the next. I learned that Black music is, for and by Black folks.
However, being young and growing up on an Air Force base in Omaha, Nebraska — the world around me sounded very different from the world my parents worked to maintain in our home. This world was filled with white music. The opposite of everything I was fed at home and that alone made it rare and novel. I was especially drawn to the pop/folk moment we had in the late 90s with Counting Crows, Blues Traveler, Lisa Loeb — all were hugely popular, moody, and very white. It wasn’t until I was introduced to Tracy Chapman that I even knew folk music could be Black.
It was the 1996 GRAMMYs and Tracy was performing her hit record “Give Me One Reason” with Eric Clapton — it would go on to sweep all the major categories of the night along with her album New Beginning. She was dark, sultry, very clearly Black and yet folky. What I was seeing in Tracy Chapman was a Black artist that was happy dancing on the lines in both Black and white worlds, forcing the world to draw new ones. She wasn’t Black music enough for Black folks nor was she white music enough to be simply labeled folk music. To this day, my parents don’t play Tracy Chapman but her appearance unlocked something for me and I looked for more folk of color to engulf. Artists like Labi Siffre, Joan Armatrading, Macy Gray, Meshelle Ndegeocello, Hootie and the Blowfish, Eagle Eye Cherry, Amos Lee, Sam Cooke and so on.
It’s not hard to hear how a folk song builds on gospel, blues, rock music and I hope we have at the very least established that those three Black music genres, created by American Blackness, are the building blocks of modern music. What I couldn’t make sense of was why it was so hard to recall a Black Folk artist that parallels Bob Dylan or Joni Michelle? Especially once I was smacked in the face by the vocals of Odetta.
Folk’s most popular moment (open to argument) came in the 60s during a highly politically charged moment in American history and American music. At this time singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were the voice of a white progressive collective. So you would imagine if Bob Dylan was a fan of someone, the world would be. Bob Dylan once said that it was hearing Odetta for the first time that turned him onto folk singing, and yet.
For Black Americans, till this day, Martin Luther King is closer to mythology than person — he keeps a watchful eye over many grandmothers’ living rooms. Odetta sang alongside him at the March on Washington; he referred to her as The Queen of American Folk Music. It’s hard to overstate how important and influential Odetta’s voice was to folk music during its most important and influential years.
So why isn’t Odetta next to Dylan and Joni on the Folk Music Rushmore? Despite the collective awareness, politics and political issues ranged. We often look back over this time as one unified fight against racism and a war. Good white people and peaceful Black people came together to fix America. And to keep that story intact we just smooth over how divided we were in our search for progress.
Long before Odetta sang over The Mall, music in America was being segregated with intention and discipline. Country, or at the time Hillbilly Music was being manufactured like kraft cheese singles, and sold to white Americans as “their” music. And while it’s easy to see how this music was never neatly white, nor was it neatly country, marketing is going to do what it always does and simplify the complex for the purposes of consuming.
And by the 60s, Folk music was white, Soul music was Black. To be a Black Folk artist not only meant that you were going to a place you weren’t welcome but you were abandoning a home you were supposed to be grateful to have at all.
Black people have told ourselves “Blackness” is at its best when it’s free to imagine a past exclusive of “white music” — what does it mean to us if we acknowledge that we left some of our greatest voices behind to tell an uncompromising version of our own history? Perhaps it’s too hard to look back and unlearn what folk is, for Black folks just as much as it is for white folks. I like to think we don’t have to be stuck in the past for very long, because folk music has become less foreign to mainstream Blackness than ever before — and my hope is that those artists are leaving an impact too large to be unwritten.
When Beyonce performs a country song at the CMAs backed by one of the best selling Country Groups of all time (made up of 3 white women) no amount of online backlash can undo it — the performance speaks for itself, it happened and it was marvelous.
