“The only way To be black is To be like beyoncé? Bullshit!”
If it hadn’t been for the Carolina ChoColate drops, the string band tradition could well have died with Joe thompson. You wonder how something once at the heart of the american experience, certainly the premier form of musical entertainment in the South from emancipation to the recording industry’s birth, could have been eradicated from history so entirely.
“oh Jesus, how long do you have?” says Giddens, before launching into an explanation so detailed, she has to rearrange another appointment just to do this complex issue justice.
“it goes back to the beginnings of entertainment in the United States,” she begins. “before there was much else going on, there were dances. english people brought to the americas english countr y dances, which themselves were french, and they brought dance masters. but they needed musicians, and musicians were servants, and servants were often slaves. that led to black string bands playing on the plantations for the balls and also for their own folks, and the banjo is developing as this is happening. it is the underpinning of home-made american music. Until the 1900s, the black string band was an integral part of rural life.”
bands would play whatever they were called to play. howard ‘louie bluie’ armstrong of string band the tennessee Chocolate drops likened his group to a jukebox; they would play Chinese music for a Chinese party, highland flings for the descendants of Scots and so on. With nothing recorded, different styles were mixing naturally. then came the Great Migration of the early 20th centur y, with blues and jazz taking the place of the fiddle and banjo as Southern black families moved to northern cities and shook off the old, rural associations. With the concurrent birth of the recording industry, the blues became defined as race music while string bands were marketed and sold to the white rural classes as hillbilly music.
Giddens says early recording scouts like ralph Peer would set up recording sessions for black blues singers on one day and white hillbillies the next, leaving the black string bands on the street. once-fluid styles became ossified. “then in the 1920s came a determined effort, especially from henry ford – who was a noted racist – to have a pushback against the ‘jungle music’ of blues and jazz, despite blues and jazz actually being Creole,” Giddens says. “hillbilly is promoted as the pure white music, even though half the string bands are black. there are fiddle contests that black people aren’t allowed to enter, and they’re the best fiddle players. You have henry ford putting up posters of white people with the message: ‘don’t you want to go back to the days of the old barn dance?’ to which i’d say, ‘Yeah, and the band would have been black.’ this is how people maintain power. they convince others they know how it was and then they hold onto the myth. it is how the black string band tradition has been so successfully erased.”
The ironY iS that the Carolina ChoColate drops, and subsequently Giddens in her solo career, have played predominantly to white audiences. “it drives me crazy,” she says. “i’m not the only black person dealing with it – Wynton Marsalis has been talking about this for years – but the largest black audience i played to outside a school was at Sing Sing penitentiary in new York. that realisation was depressing enough to mess me up for the next two years. i’m so glad we did it, i have never had a crowd like i did that day, but i had a roomful of people reacting to the music as black people – and they’re all in prison.”
that was during the campaign for Freedom Highway, Giddens’ 2017 album of songs about civil rights, slavery and young black men shot by the police. “i felt like shouting, What else do you want?” she says, still sounding exasperated over two years later. “but it’s not