|
Arthur Kempton,
author of
Boogaloo:
The Quintessance of American Popular Music
___________________________________
"Boogaloo" is a term author Arthur Kempton suggests as an alternative to
what was conventionally described as soul music, and a word to distinguish
black popular music from jazz. Boogaloo encompassed three generations
of signal personalities, from Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel
Music, to Sam Cooke, Motown's Berry Gordy, Stax Record's Al Bell, and to
the ascendency of hip-hop entrepreneurs Shug Knight and Russell Simmons.
Their interconnections and influence on the art and commerce of black
American popular music is the theme of his book, Boogaloo: The Quintessance
of American Popular Music.
In the book, Kempton reveals the tensions between the sacred and the profane
at the heart of "soul music," and the complex centrality of "Aframericans"
in the evolution of our mass musical culture. What that culture is
all about, who owns it, and who gets paid are issues addressed in his narrative,
which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a "comprehensive analysis of African-American
popular music" and a "deep and gorgeous meditation on its aesthetics and
business."
Kempton talks with us in a August, 2003 Jerry Jazz Musician interview.
JJM
What is "boogaloo," and how did it get to be the term used to
describe much of African American popular music?
AK Boogaloo was both a hit record and a dance.
It was a hit record in 1965 by a rather minor Chicago clownish lounge act
called Tom and Jerrio, and it was a coast-to-coast dance sensation among
the black youth at the time. Later on -- in the late sixties -- some people
began referring to "boogaloo" as an alternative term for what was then
conventionally described as soul music. It was a word that distinguished
black popular music from jazz, and has been used by many ever since. It was
also used by the Latin fusion musicians of the late sixties, who named their
particular genre of music after dance styles. So, Latin Boogaloo became a
style of salsa in the late sixties. Soul music, in its original incarnation,
referred to a particular style of rhythm and blues -- a term coined by Jerry
Wexler when he was working for Billboard magazine. Boogaloo is basically
just a term that refers to rhythm and blues and soul music.
JJM Your study of boogaloo reveals much about American
culture. The book traces a path from Thomas Dorsey to Sam Cooke to Berry
Gordy of Motown to Stax Records to George Clinton to Shug Knight, over a
seventy-five year period. I am curious about the bookend personalities, Dorsey
and Knight. They have anything at all in common?
AK None really that I have thought about.
The music business and the relationship of these various characters in the
music business is a theme that extends across the entire book. So, if they
have anything in common at all, it is in the fact that Dorsey was a student
of his game -- the music business -- before there were any rules, and Shug
Knight is as also a student of his game. Both men, to some degree, were masters
of certain aspects of the business environments of their respective eras,
but as characters, I don't feel they have a lot in common. Dorsey was
legitimately a breakthrough artist with a significant amount of social
importance, given the effect of his work. It would be hard to say the same
thing for Shug Knight, who is not an artist at all, but rather an entrepreneur
of sorts.
JJM When did singing become a socially approved
pastime among black men?
AK I would say it dates all the way back
to the post-civil war South. During that period most of the barbers in the
South were black men, and in fact the origin of the barber shop quartet comes
from there. Then, as a part of the sacred music context in the post-civil
war South, gospel quartets and other male singing groups came together. It
became a socially respectable form of male recreation in established black
society during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and extending into
the twentieth.
| JJM Thomas Dorsey wrote for and performed with blues
singer Ma Rainey. What made him turn from Ma Rainey to writing songs of hope
and faith?
AK Above and beyond everything else, apart
from his extraordinary love of performance, Dorsey was a songwriter. One
of the things that is easy to forget is that religious music was an extremely
important strand of commercial music in the twenties, particularly in the
black American context, and Dorsey straddled both worlds. He led a life in
which he was knee deep in the commercial music world, training blues musicians
and arranging music for Ma Rainey and Hank Williams recordings. At the same
time, he married a woman who was a wardrobe mistress for Ma Rainey -- a
respectable southern girl who had a life in church. Dorsey's career was always
fed by a series of creative crisis and nervous breakdowns. He always kept
a foot in respectable black society, and that always involved the church.
Because songwriting was his paramount interest, writing church music was
an outlet for him to make it in the music business.
The great thing about Dorsey and a key to his contribution was that he
distinguished between sacred and secular music. After he was exclusively
writing church music and had become a major figure in the Afro-Christian
world, he never disavowed anything he had done in the field of popular music
-- even a salacious double entendre record like "It's Tight Like That," which
was a great hit party record of its era. He spent several years performing
as Georgia Tom with Tampa Red, while at the same time writing and performing
religious music. |
"I began to write songs, not the blues and double meaning songs
that we played for the Saturday night parties, but songs of hope and faith...This
was the turning point of my life."
- Thomas Dorsey
*
Peace
in the Valley |
JJM
In fact, you write of Dorsey, "You couldn't help but think of
churches as just another theatrical workplace where he catered for a particular
clientele the menu he had chosen from his varied bill of faire." How did
Dorsey's work impact the experience of attending church?
AK It was extraordinarily significant in
the development of black church music, and also in the socialization of the
urban black church. When Thomas Dorsey broke into the black church world
in Chicago, the music being performed in the mainstream black churches of
the North were for the most part choral European masterworks. You had this
whole compilation of conservatory-trained black composers and musicians who
couldn't get jobs anywhere other than in these big churches. And what these
conservatories did was train people to sing Bach, basically. This was what
was considered to be respectable in the Sunday worship service. At the same
time, as migrants pushed up from the South, they were hungry for music they
were familiar with. For the most part, they were shunted aside. What Dorsey
did was make the profane respectable in the highest black churches, first
in Chicago and then all over the country. By doing so, he opened them up
in a serious way to this new population they were still trying to figure
out how to serve. In that way he helped churches maintain their relevance
for the up-South migrants who were beginning to constitute more and more
of their congregation.
JJM Did white audiences accept gospel music?
AK White audiences didn't hear it. The black
church music white audiences were exposed to, for the most part, were Negro
spirituals that the Fisk Singers or the Tuskeegee Choir performed while on
tour. The Negro spirituals were white America's idea of black church music.
But for the most part, this was a strand of commercial black music that was
not exposed to white audiences.
JJM Mahalia Jackson changed that, didn't she?
AK She did to some extent yes. It's
interesting that you mention Mahalia because one of her big hits in 1949,
"I Will Move
on Up a Little Higher," sold a million copies, yet white people never
heard it. So, white people became conscious of Mahalia Jackson in the fifties
when she was signed to Columbia Records and she became, to some extent, middle
America's idea of black church music.
photo Michael
Ochs Archives
Sam Cooke
*
"The church mothers still loved him as they would a son who had
gone away and made them proud, and whenever he came home, he always delighted
them by making plain that no matter how high he rose, he would never be above
them"
- Arthur Kempton |
JJM
You describe Sam Cooke as the "sort of adolescent who was rarely overlooked
by adults in the business of being interested in young people." What was
his cultural appeal?
AK Some of his appeal had to do with the
emergence of the youth market -- which began in the early and middle sixties
-- when a whole generation of white kids no longer listened to the music
that their parents listened to, and became attracted to the black music they
were hearing on the radio. What has tended to be consistently true in pop
music is that when there is no music being made by white kids for the consumption
of other white kids, black music has always filled the vacuum, as it does
even today. So, Sam Cooke, who was a big star in the gospel world as the
lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, and who was movie star handsome, was actually
credited with bringing young adolescent black females to Soul Stirrers
performances at a time when youth were not generally attending church. What
he did that was so critically important in terms of commodifying black popular
music was "crack the code" on how a black male singer could safely reside
in the romantic imaginations of white teenage girls. This had to do with
his vocal qualities, the material he presented to them, his clean-cut good
looks and the way they were marketed to a white audience.
JJM
You say that his audience identified in his voice "hope and uplift"
and that white adolescents heard it as being "winsome and youthful" as well.
AK What I was suggesting is that hope and
uplift were identifiable in his voice by gospel audiences who heard him.
He was a different kind of a gospel singer than any of the other stars in
that business. In a sense, he was a modernist in a field that was becoming
increasingly antique as the golden age of gospel music began to fade into
what became soul music. His lightness of tone was understood by white teenagers
as being winsome. Part of what Sam Cooke presented as an image -- both vocally
and visually -- was that of a black person with whom white adolescents who
normally did not come into contact with black people could safely associate
with. In a more fraught context, he played the romantic lead to young white
females, which obviously in the middle fifties was extremely dangerous. The
fact that he was able to pull that off is what I mean when I say he "cracked
the code." That was the cross-over code. It was the holy grail, basically,
for every laborer in the vineyard of black popular music. |
| JJM He was successful quelling the anxieties about
integrated audiences.
AK Yes. One of the things I do in the book
is contrast Cooke with Jackie Wilson, who was a contemporary in some respects
with a kind of parallel career, but who exuded sexuality in a way that made
him very threatening to white audiences and catnip to black female audiences.
But Jackie Wilson could not have had the career that Sam Cooke had in that
respect because he simply would have gotten arrested.
JJM I was doing an interview with Jazz
Modernism author Alfred Appel recently, and he was talking about how
Louis Armstrong used scat singing and singing in code to his black audience
to make it clear to the white audience that he wasn't trying to sing romantically
to white females. It is possible that Wilson, in the pop music field, may
have threatened the white audience, whereas Sam Cooke did not.
AK That is absolutely right. This is a burden
that every black male performer in any popular art form in this country has
had to negotiate. Denzel Washington had to just as Sidney Poitier did before
him. Sam Cooke figured out how to do it in music. |
Peace
in the Valley
*
Wonderful
World |
JJM
Following the chapter on Sam Cooke, you write extensively about Motown,
a label whose sound appeared to have been crafted to appeal to a clean-cut
white audience. How did Berry Gordy discover the formula for mass-producing
black music that whites bought?
AK I wouldn't necessarily say the Motown
sound was consciously developed to appeal to a white audience, but Berry
Gordy was the great pioneer, the mass commodifier of black culture. A lot
of what he did had to do with the quality of what he produced. It is interesting
for me to see people's reactions to my portrayal of Gordy and Motown in the
book. One reviewer, for example, said I liked Stax Records more than I liked
Motown. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I am a huge admirer
of Berry Gordy. I believe he is a twentieth century industrialist as great
in his way as Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller was in theirs. He did set out
to sell his music to a young white audience, and did so without compromising
the music, but by figuring out the market place. For example, one of the
things Gordy did was mix those records so they sounded good on car radios.
So, I don't think it was particularly an issue of trying to make music for
white people, but of understanding that the music he was making and the way
he was making it could be sold to white people. Some of that had to do with
Motown establishing its foothold in the early sixties, right before the so-called
British Invasion when there wasn't much music being made by young white people
for young white people. His commercial consciousness was extraordinarily
well attuned to the general American culture, and part of that had to do
with Gordy's own aspirations. After all, he was a man who got a crush on
Doris Day after seeing her in the movies. He always had a very clear sense
of where the culture in this country was headed, and possessed an extraordinarily
shrewd attunement how to market the music he was producing.
Berry Gordy
*
"What Gordy knew about music was as circumscribed as his gift was
particular: the two-minute-forty-five second song. His metier was 'a
verse, another verse, a bridge, a chorus, back to the verse, one more chorus
and out.'"
- Arthur Kempton |
JJM How did the British pop invasion change the
economics of boogaloo, and how did Gordy react to that?
AK The Beatles upped the ante for everyone,
particularly in terms of the value of publishing, which was of paramount
interest to Gordy, as it was to Dorsey and Cooke before him. They all realized
that the "real estate" in the music business was in publishing. The Beatles
and the British Invasion expanded the value of the market significantly.
The value of "crossing over" became evident, with the possibility of selling
three times as many copies of the same record to white people as black people
simply on the basis of the numbers involved. By 1968, Gordy was selling seventy
percent of his records to white people. It is a tribute to the strength of
his product that Motown was essentially the only home grown American music
that for several years withstood the British Invasion. As I said before,
there wasn't a lot of music produced by white people that white kids wanted
to buy. When the British Invasion came in and changed that, Gordy got bigger.
This had to do with the extraordinary quality that Motown produced. From
my point of view, there has never been anything like it before or since.
One of the things that Gordy understood is that while other people were selling
records, he was building a brand, and he built Motown into one of the three
most recognized American brands in the world, right up there with Coca Cola
and McDonalds. |
| JJM How did the televising of the civil
rights movement impact the way white consumers bought music?
AK For those of us around to witness this
period, the civil rights movement unfolded as a daily ongoing drama on the
six o'clock news. It introduced a whole generation of white American
youth to an image of southern black Americans that, for the most part, was
quite heroic and noble. I suspect that in certain parts of this country,
outside of what they heard on the radio, it was the first time that white
kids had any exposure to black Americans at all. This opened them up to the
possibilities of understanding those who they may have previously regarded
as alien, and understanding the basic humanity involved in their struggle.
Because the black music coming out of Motown, Stax and others of the era
was mostly relationship-based in terms of its lyrical content, it entered
the emotional lives of white youth in ways that dovetailed with what they
saw on television. There was a kind of symbiotic effect on the psychology
of the white youth of the mid-sixties who were simultaneously exposed to
the civil rights movement on television, and to the black music of the era
-- particularly Motown -- on the radio. |
photo by Bill Hudson
Birmingham, 1963
*
The Freedom Singers sing
Get
on Board, Children |
*
Tracks
of My Tears, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
My
Girl, by the Temptations
Baby
I Need Your Loving, by the Four Tops |
JJM What effect did the songs of Motown have on
how men viewed love?
AK From my point of view it had a very real
effect on my emotional landscape as well as many of those I knew at the time.
Since sixty percent of the people who bought records at that time were female,
so much of the lyrical content had to do with men basically trying to apologize
to women in affectionate terms. The basis of the music had to do with
relationships, which is very different, it seems to me, from today. The emotional
content taught the adolescent males of that era something about feelings,
loss, and things they otherwise might have had difficulty addressing.
JJM Yes, at one point in the book you wrote,
"Males in emotional disarray featured prominently on the soundtrack of black
adolescent lives. This had a tenderizing effect on a generation of man children
as conversant as today's is with the player's code that affirms as its cardinal
precept that 'all bitches are whores.'" A little bit different message being
communicated.
AK That is about right. That player's code
coexisted with a popular music that really was about feelings at some level,
so there was more of an emotional balance. I don't think that balance exists
today. I don't hear much that is about relationships and emotional content
in the music today. |
| JJM Concerning Stax Records, you describe
Al Bell's marketing of the Memphis based label as "sociological." What do
you mean by that?
AK I think this is in reference to what he
called the "Mississippi River culture." Bell understood that it was the children
of the migrant generation who were inhabiting American cities in the South
and Midwest. He was making music in Memphis, which in a sense is the capital
city of Mississippi, and his precept was that he could sell those records
by moving through St. Louis, up the River and into Chicago, expanding his
market that way. One of the things that Bell understood is that in order
to cross a record over into the white market you had to establish a black
market first. While he was a great admirer of Berry Gordy, the nature of
the music Stax was producing was an inherently Southern flavor, and he understood
the way to sell it was to move it through certain markets in a certain sequence,
and he did very well at that.
JJM
Who best exemplified the sound of Stax?
AK From my point of view, Otis Retting became
emblematic of the sound of Stax. There was a group called the Soul Children
who were a particular creation of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, who in many
respects best exemplified the sound of Stax, but Otis Redding became emblematic
of it. In some respects the consistent element in that sound was the house
band, which sort of underpinned all of those artists. |
*
Hold
On, I'm Comin', by Sam and Dave
Knock
on Wood, by Eddie Floyd
Respect
Yourself, by the Staple Singers
Soul
Limbo, by Booker T. and the MG's |
JJM It is a bit ironic that the Stax house
band was made up mostly of white musicians, and their music was geared primarily
for the black audience, and the reverse could be said for Motown.
AK To some degree, yes, although I would
say that Motown was an uncompromised black music, so I would never say that
Motown was made for whites. In terms of those musicians, there is a place
in which the music that is native to white Southerners and black Southerners
meets. For instance, there are stories about how when Ray Charles was a kid
in Florida, all that he had to listen to on the radio was the Grand Ol Opry.
The same was true of Isaac Hayes when he was growing up in Tennessee. Those
white kids that played in the Stax house band grew up playing country music
on the one hand, while on the other they stood outside black nightclubs trying
to get in to listen to that music as well. It is true that the Dixie Flyers,
the house band in Muscle Shoals -- which was another major recording center
for black music in the South -- was also pretty much white. So, yes, it is
kind of ironic in one sense, but not necessarily an aberration.
Pain
in My Heart
*
photo Stax Museum of American
Soul Music
"Music was our natural resource, it was our gold, our magnesium,
it was our oil, with [it] we would be able to build our economic
base."
- Al Bell |
JJM
You speculate that had Otis Redding lived he would have been a pop
star of giant magnitude. Why?
AK In some ways, Redding stepped into the
vacuum that Sam Cooke left. In 1967 and 1968, he was hugely popular with
a young white audience. To some extent, the rawer sounds of Memphis were
more appealing to the white youth of that period, some of whom began to look
at Motown as formulaic and as a bit of a factory. Redding had an extremely
appealing persona. He was coming along at a time when the youth's exposure
to the civil rights movement -- therefore to the Southern Negro -- was at
its height. He was emblematic of that. My sense is that his career was moving
to a place where, arguably, he would have been more popular among the white
audience in another five years than among a black audience.
JJM And like Cooke, he was a symbol of racial
conciliation.
AK Yes, that is right.
JJM
You wrote that Al Bell of Stax was a "sucker for urban outlaw mystique."
Was Stax Records the model for modern day hip-hop labels?
AK In some ways, perhaps. The Stax story
is sort of a parable of the way that the big conglomerates began to relate
to smaller independent black enterprises, and it reveals the way CBS Records
pioneered the business of predatory partnerships with smaller labels. On
one hand, the demise of Stax had to do with the overreaching of its management,
but on the other hand, its fall can be tied to it being the first example
of a big record company taking apart an independent, thriving, identifiably
black record company. That is relevant to the modern music business of today
because all of the hip-hop entrepreneurs are partners with conglomerates.
They all got into in the music business under the auspices of the five or
six multinational conglomerates, resulting in what I call "sharecropping
in wonderland." This, by the way, is in contrast with how Berry Gordy
operated, who never had partners, which was another of his great achievements.
Al Bell relied a great deal on Johnny Bailor, who was a gangster from New
York, basically, and who became the head of promotion at Stax. Bailor's
relationship with Bell eventually became the instrument of his undoing. Bell
in some respects was a naïve, preacherly, and ideological man who came
to understand the value of what guys like Bailor could do for him in a predatory
business. So, in that sense I think you are right, that what happened to
Stax presaged, in some ways, the way the contemporary music business is run. |
JJM How did hip-hop become boogaloo's
predominant form?
AK That began to happen in 1979, and took
hold in the early eighties. The music of the classic boogaloo era ran from
1961 to 1977, when it simply petered out. As a result, there was this new
energy percolating pretty much unmediated from the urban black street. Combine
this with a variety of other things going on in the culture and by 1990,
hip-hop had come to dominate the radio. So-called R&B became a vestigial
and degraded form. A lot of it had to do with what got played on the radio
and with the economics of the business. One of the things that should not
be underestimated about hip-hop is how cheap it is to produce, and how high
the profit margins are. Instead of having to spend six figures on a record
in the studio, it is a music that can essentially be made in the basement
of somebody's home, so it is a much more economical way of making and getting
a product to the marketplace. I think most of that process had to do with
what was going on in the culture.
| JJM You mentioned something earlier
about how the major multinational conglomerates who distribute music -- the
Sony's and the WEA's of the world -- are connected with the distribution
of hip-hop. Some do it willingly, others do so at the peril of how society
views the art, therefore the business relationship is scrutinized. What also happened as a result
of the economics of producing hip-hop is that there was a real growth in
the number of independent labels unrestrained by societal boundaries, and whose music became very popular. This presented a business challenge to
the multinationals who wanted to cash in on the market, but understood by
doing so would potentially alienate a society who consumes their other goods.
The music from the era of Stax and Motown did not pose socially challenging problems or
communicate politically incorrect messages multinationals had to run from. Today, other factors come into play.
AK There have certainly been instances where
big companies have had to back off of relationships they had with some of
these producers -- particularly in the late eighties and early nineties --
but there is so much money involved that the big corporations can't back
away from it. I just think the hip-hop business is a lot like drug money
-- not in terms of its moral import -- but in terms of the amount of money
that can be made with a relatively small investment, and how quickly it can
be made. My sense is that the corporations really can't back off. When the
gangsta-rap thing went through periods when it was too hot for certain
corporations to handle, somebody else always picked it up.
JJM Interscope is a good example of that.
AK Yes, and who does Interscope belong to?
Universal. There is a huge amount of money at stake. What I find interesting
about the business side of it is that the hip-hop entrepreneurs know they
must eventually get into business with the conglomerates because there is
no other way to do succeed. The smartest of all of these guys is Russell
Simmons, who understood that Def Jam is in the lifestyle business. He makes
a lot of money selling clothes. Puffy Combs is probably making more money
on clothes than on music.
JJM I know we are entering a part of the
conversation where we are sounding like moldy figs. Echoes of my father's
voice scolding me about the music I listened to in the sixties are everywhere
as I say this, but my sense is that the music today's youth culture is exposed
to leaves them melody-starved.
AK I agree, it is melody-starved. One of
the things I always question is what music do young listeners fall in love
to? The music of the seventies was the exclusive province of the sound engineers,
and it is very interesting from a sociological perspective to see where the
music went once the street kids got a hold of the technology. I don't believe
there is anything emotionally satisfying about the music. What interests
me about it is what it says about the culture, because I happen to think
that black urban youth -- being less insulated than middle class whites --
are the canaries in the coal mine of American culture. What you see and what
you hear in this music you can pretty much guarantee is going to permeate
the whole culture.
There have only been two times in my lifetime when music has percolated up
from the street, unmediated into the mainstream. The first was the doo-wop
era of the late fifties, which one could argue prepared a generation of white
kids in big American cities for the civil rights movement. They discovered
music that they loved and became interested in the people behind the voices
they heard on the radio. Hip-hop is the second instance, and I wonder, without
having an answer, what it is preparing this generation of white kids for.
Because I don't think suburban white kids who buy hip-hop -- particularly
gangsta rap -- have any interest in knowing who the people behind the voices
are. It is a theme park, and it goes along with the video games where kids
can pretend to be thugs and gangsters without ever leaving their rooms, which
is an interesting social phenomenon. |
Suge Knight
*
"In [the boardrooms of New York and Los Angeles], Knight was thought
of the way Sonny Liston and Don King once were by mobsters in St. Louis and
Cleveland: as a strong-arm Negro who kept unruly street Negroes from disrupting
white folks' business with the street."
- Arthur Kempton
___________
Russell Simmons
*
"Simmons was not just the first but the best and brightest of the
original class of young black bootstrapping hip-hop entrepreneurs who began
to emerge atthe end of the the 1970s. He parlayed stewardship of his
brother's rap group into the premier hip-hop label of the 1980s, then
successfully diversified into television and film production. He bundled
hip-hop with hard rock. Over a decade he established Def Jam as one
of the global youth market's top-shelf entertainment brands."
- Arthur Kempton |
________________________________
Boogaloo:
The Quintessance of American Popular Music
by
Arthur Kempton
About Arthur Kempton
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
AK Willie Mays. I was born in 1949, and my
father was a New York Giants fan. I was introduced to the greatness of Mays
when I was five or six years old, and he so strikingly epitomized the vivid
artist that my young eyes had seen. I spent much of my childhood living and
dying by what Mays did in the box score.
JJM So you viewed Mays as an artist.
AK Yes, as I understood that term when I
was six or seven. I developed other heroes, particularly musical heroes.
Bessie Smith was very important to me when I was ten years old. I used to
write her lyrics on my schoolbooks. To some degree, my sense of aesthetics
was formed by Lester Young.
*
Arthur Kempton was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and received a B.A.
in English from Harvard. He has been a radio disk jockey, deputy
superintendent of Boston's public school system, and an educational consultant.
A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he lives
in Brooklyn, New York.
_______________________________
Arthur Kempton products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on August 27, 2003
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Dixie Hummingbirds biographer Jerry Zolten.
*
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
|
