WHAT OTHER KNOWLEDGE OF MUSIC AND HISTORY HELPS YOU TO UNDERSTAND THESE SONGS?

This is pretty definitely the music of freedom, because there is nothing like this in slave music. First of all, all slave music is really antiphonal in a human sense, that is call and response, there is no solo in slave music. There is none, zilch, nada--no solo in slave music. I read these and I said, "Well, it's acculturation. What freedmen, freed men and women, had done is they had acculturated into the individual consciousness, of post-Emancipation European culture. The individual is in the center of the universe. The individual speaks. The individual assumes that you're interested in the individual's troubles, worries, woes, and they dominate this music. So that's good if you're a scholar trying to write a book because that's a point of change. Slaves have acculturated. They now have mobility. They now have literacy. They hear more different kinds of music. They can see more different kinds of music. They have a variety of different situations. Life is more expansive for them. We always focus on the difficulties blacks have, but they also have great opportunities and compared to slavery. And they move around and they're all over the country, and they get different kinds of jobs, and they can even go to school. And they begin the blues tells us, since its the most ubiquitous African American music we know in this period, the blues tells us, that they begin to take on the kind of consciousness that is typical of the society, the larger society in which they were living, and to which they were not acculturated in slavery, but to which they seem to be becoming acculturated now.

So there's another half to the story if you know what European American music sounded like in the nineteenth century. And the other half of the story, if you know what African music sounded like, the other half of the story is that at a time when slaves were--they're not slaves anymore--when African Americans were open to a larger variety of cultural materials than ever before, at a time when they could have lost their music, or diluted it, or just contributed to a larger stream of music. They wouldn't have lost it, but they would have contributed to Euro-American music, then seen it meld-pick up the melding and go their way, with this new consciousness. They didn't. Even as they're stepping into the culture with the consciousness-this consciousness of the "I," the individual, the importance of "me," they are stepping back and reaffirming African music, or African American music. This music is NOT Euro-American it's the kind of music that changes Euro-American music forever-in the boundaries of the United States and in all of South American as well, in Mexico and the Caribbean.

And if you really want to know what it tells you about the time period you've got to learn something about the time period. And maybe these blues are uh, were written in a period of depression, in fact they were. 1939 was a period of deep depression. Let's leave the prison out. Let's say, cause you can get the same blues in the streets of Chicago, or Kansas City. Prisons have their, well, that's another story. I was just going to say that prisons have their value in freezing things. Especially in the pre-television days. Because prisoners were isolated from the larger culture, they kept a lot of older culture longer. That's why Lomax chose prisons, that's why a lot of folklorists chose prisons, because there's a time-frame-freeze in prisons. But you would hear this in the thirties everywhere. And uh, So you might be right if you knew nothing about the thirties, you could--you could say two things and they'd both be right: one is that times were bad and the other is that blacks were in bad shape. And they were both right. They were always in bad shape-that is, blacks more than other Americans--were in lower socioeconomic levels-and they were particularly hard hit by the thirties. And there's a lot of black music by people who were nowhere near prisons. Blacks sing an enormous amount in the thirties, for instance, about the New Deal. There's a huge, well huge is too strong, there's a significant number of blues about the New Deal, about Roosevelt, about the WPA, about the AAA. They sing about, you know the alphabet soup of institutions, because they benefit from them, or they want to benefit from them. So you can learn a lot of history from the blues without knowing any background. And then if you read about the period, that period, you know, you'll understand more. You may not know what the WPA Works Projects Administrations is, but you'll read a book on the New Deal, and you will learn and you will understand that blues a little better. Some of the blues for instance say, "I won't go." "I won't go," and they even talk, about being betrayed by institutions, "I was in an orphanage, and I'm going to die in a poor man's home." And so they talk about the way institutions have betrayed them. And how they don't trusts them and then they say, "I ain't going down there." You get that too. And you can figure that out without a lot of work. Read some books on the period.

Documents only will tell you as much as a document will tell you. For instance, when I wrote about black slavery, if I had just gone in there and done a study of spirituals, just spirituals-you could write a great book about that. And that's all I looked at. And then I generalized about black culture from the spirituals, I would have been making a very big mistake, because blacks were more than their spirituals. They used their spirituals for certain things. They said certain things through their spirituals, but if you want to hear the whole story about what blacks in slavery were saying you have to look at their folktales and their work songs and the like. I'm not sure of America--if you just studied television today-if you wanted to figure out America today, and just studied television, and didn't look at other aspects of American society-you'd get a skewed picture of American society--a very skewed picture. So we should read these documents and listen to the voices, but by themselves they're not going to be enough to tell you about the larger picture. You need documents from all the sources--we should always remember that.