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American Freedom, American Culture, American Greatness

© Barney Quick

I consider the writing of my articles for this site a weekly celebration. When I deliver arcane details to you about sax honkers, soul shouters, guitar slingers, and wild-eyed record producers, promoters and disc jockeys, I’m sending out greeting cards about a magic we’re blessed to have available to us. For the past fifty years, these figures have provided us with the kind of unbridled feeling only free people can express.

This glorious music has its immediate antecedents in a conflict – World War II – of a magnitude that we may soon see again. Of course, its historical roots lie in circumstances in which freedom was totally absent. That is a lot of the music’s charm: the exuberance that comes from discovering what can be done with freedom. It is the sound of the full range of humanity being claimed by those for whom it was long suppressed.

Britain and the United States were the first two countries in history to recognize that slavery was a yoke they had to throw off. These societies took a long look at their spiritual underpinnings and realized that this evil institution was incongruous with what they valued. And, as we know, the United States had broken free of the less vile but still burdensome grip of British colonialism a few decades earlier.

With freedom came prosperity. The two have been shown to go hand in hand many times in many societies in the years since. And with prosperity came innovation, both technological and artistic. The newest citizens on the new continent, American blacks, developed new musical forms – spirituals, ragtime, stride piano, jazz, blues, swing, jump and boogie-woogie – at an astonishing rate.

The world lapped it up. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Will Marion Cook, Louis Armstrong, Sydney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Elllington and Charlie Parker each in turn became the darlings of Europe. Young Brits, beginning with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and continuing through John Lennon, Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, made American rhythm and blues the basis for yet an even newer concoction which they sent back to us and for which we gladly opened our wallets.

And still that hot American sound evolved. Funk, disco and hip-hop have reigned supreme at home, elsewhere in the West, and, indeed, in lands as far-flung as you can find.

Magic music is made by blessed people. Free people tend to have a lot of fun. We have had fifty years of it in the form of r&b and fifty more in the form of the musics that spawned it. It is now time to be grateful for this unique heritage. A lot of colorful and courageous people made all that music possible.

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