Book Review: Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music In The Segregation Era

Back in February of this year, I reviewed a triple disc set released by Document Records called Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music In The Segregation Era. Quite the mouthful for a record title actually, but it was an important distinction the producer/compiler Paul Oliver was trying to make.

You see the word “broadcasting” has an older, deeper meaning than the one we currently associate with it:

…there was a time-honoured method of sowing seeds. The sowers carried wide-mouthed sacks filled with seeds… As they walked over the fertile soil of the newly tilled fields, they would dip their free hands into the sacks to scoop up a quantity of the contents. With a swing of their arms in a broad arc they would "scatter the good seeds on the land"—a technique which was called broadcasting… the term lives on in the transmission of sounds on the radio. (Oliver, Paul: Broadcasting The Blues Routledge, 2005 p vii)

Broadcasting means more than just getting airtime on the radio; it also means getting the word out there about the people and the music. It's not difficult to imagine how hard it was for black people to get their music out to a wider audience during the segregation era in the States, especially in the South. Oh sure, there were the jazz clubs in some cities, but that was only for a small minority of audience, music, and musicians.

Besides, that's not the music we're talking about here. Jazz had been given a veneer of acceptability due to the many mainstream white acts that were incorporating elements of it into popular music; the big band sound of the forties and the crooners like Frank Sinatra. All of their music and arrangements were lifted from jazz.

No, what we're talking about is the music of the back porches and the delta, the stuff that a white person wouldn't hear on their local radio show. If you were really brave, you might sneak across the tracks into a "coloured persons" bar and listen in. But those people would have been few and far between, with names like Elvis, Ronnie Hawkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They incorporated the music they heard in the black churches and clubs into their own country traditions and began "broadcasting" the music to white people.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the recently published What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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