‘1619,’ Episode 3: The Birth of American Music

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro, today on The Daily.

[1] From the New York Times Magazine, I'm Nicole Hannah -Jones.

[2] This is 1619.

[3] This week, Wesley Morris, on the Birth of American Music.

[4] Last fall, I am at my friend's house.

[5] We are making dinner.

[6] I'm chopping vegetables.

[7] And I asked my friend Brett, who was cooking with me, can you put on some music?

[8] And he said, what do you want to listen to?

[9] And I said, have you ever heard of Yot Rock?

[10] And he said, what?

[11] I said, Yacht Rock, have you ever heard of this?

[12] And he goes, no, I have not.

[13] So he finds the Yacht Rock station in Pandora, which I don't know why or how he's still a Pandora guy.

[14] With all due respect to Pandora, he is one.

[15] And he finds the Yot Rock station.

[16] At some point, Bright has to go run an arrow.

[17] And I think I might have sent him on one.

[18] I don't remember.

[19] But he's gone.

[20] So I'm alone.

[21] Just me with the vegetables.

[22] And Yad Rock.

[23] It gives me plenty of time to really think about the songs I'm hearing.

[24] We're talking about music made between the years of, I don't know, I would say like 1975 to about 1983.

[25] Things like Aces, how long.

[26] Seals and Croft doing summer breeze I'm hearing things like by Robbie Dupree and the Doobie Brothers What a Fool believes It is like our soft, raucous period in American popular music The joke of Yat Rock is that whoever invented it and whoever's making a playlist out of these songs is basically saying that they're inconsequential and that what's in them doesn't matter But what I know I'm hearing is something bigger and deeper than that.

[27] Every song has something about it that is similar to the other songs.

[28] I'm hearing things like Rosanna by Toto.

[29] Which seems perfectly banal has a really good beat.

[30] This sort of builds to its chorus.

[31] Then at the end, I'm hearing...

[32] do -op harmonies of the 50s and 60s.

[33] And I have to sing.

[34] There is something jazz like in the syncopated music of something like Steely Dan.

[35] Here in somebody like Michael McDonald, ah, that is like a gospel breakdown.

[36] What I am hearing in all of these songs is basically blackness.

[37] And the song in which I am hearing the deepest and strongest and most powerfully, at least to me, stand.

[38] in that kitchen, shopping those vegetables, was when Kenny Loggins, this is it, comes up.

[39] There's been times in my life.

[40] I've been wondering why.

[41] It's got a kind of loosely disco -like rhythm to it.

[42] There's a lot of percussion sort of going back and forth and around.

[43] Sure.

[44] Kenny Loggins is basically sing whispering the verses in this song.

[45] Doing this very light, coo.

[46] And then in the pre -chorus, Kenny Loggins disappears, and who shows up?

[47] Michael McDonald, giving Kenny Loggins plenty of time to gather himself.

[48] When he sings the word miracle, he doesn't sing, miracle.

[49] He goes, Miracle!

[50] Like, he is scraping the bottom of a pan to get all of the good bits off of it before you pour the gravy in.

[51] Scraping the pan is the blackest thing you can do as a singer.

[52] And here is Kenny Loggins as this white artist doing it.

[53] And then the gravy comes.

[54] He is like at the top of the church at this point.

[55] He is like elevated himself to the rafters.

[56] There's like no more.

[57] He is like at the roof trying to clear a way to get to heaven.

[58] But there's just church roof in the way.

[59] He's not the greatest singer.

[60] But there's a kind of gumption and nerve to the singing of this song that cannot be denied.

[61] A tip of the hat to him.

[62] I just had to stand there, and I just, I actually cracked up.

[63] I had, I just put down the knife, and I cracked up.

[64] And it felt so pleasurable.

[65] And then I sort of thinking about all these other singers I love.

[66] I'm thinking about Amy Whitehouse.

[67] I'm thinking about Annie Lennox.

[68] Thinking about George Michael.

[69] I think about Chris Stapleton, who practices a kind of mussely blues that gets written off his country because he's a big white guy in a hat.

[70] And one of the many phases in which David Bowie really wanted to make R &B and soul music, this is the sound not just of Black America, but the sound of America.

[71] It is deeply American, almost especially when it's sung by British people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Amy Winehouse.

[72] And it fills me with pride.

[73] Like, I know that there is something irresistible and ultimately inevitable about black music being a part of American popular music.

[74] But it also reminds me that there's a history to this.

[75] A very painful history.

[76] And in the most perversely ironic way, it's this historical pain that is responsible for this music.

[77] Some of the oldest recordings we have of black American music are from the 1930s.

[78] And there are songs that would have been sung by Americans born into slavery there's this one called Old Ship of Zion you can hear in it these four men their voices are moving in and out of each other and it's beautiful and it's all so sad you can feel that in your bones and then there would be music that was completely the opposite like Old Coomdog for instance you can hear the playfulness in this song and you've got this banjo this great African instrument that becomes the bedrock of American music in so many ways and that thing is dancing.

[79] And then you have someone like Billy McCray.

[80] And oh my God, you can hear in his singing what we would now call something like the live long day.

[81] Years and years of hard work and unimaginable sorrow.

[82] You can also hear, in all of this music, this undeniable sound of hope.

[83] All of these melodies and cadences and emotions are things that would have been passed down generation after generation.

[84] It's what you would have heard on a plantation.

[85] It's what you would have heard walking by a plantation.

[86] It's what you would have heard passing a black person doing his job, entertaining himself doing the drudgery of work, the way a guy named Thomas Darry.

[87] Hartmouth Rice did, sometime around the 1830s.

[88] As the story goes, T .D. Rice, a white man, this anonymous nobody actor trying to make ends meet.

[89] One day, he's touring with a troop in Cincinnati, or maybe it was Pittsburgh, we don't really know.

[90] But the myth basically goes, T .D. Race happened upon an old black man cleaning a horse in a stable.

[91] The man was doing his job on property owned by a white man named Crow.

[92] He heard the tune this old black man was singing.

[93] He saw the way this man moved his body as he was cleaning this horse.

[94] Now, we don't know what tune this old man would have been singing.

[95] Whatever race here, tears coming out of this man's mouth is captivating to him.

[96] And what he sees is an opportunity.

[97] Because showbiz, in the 1830s, looked like this.

[98] Italian operas, British plays, entertainment imported from Europe.

[99] All the people performing this stuff would have been white.

[100] The audiences would have been white.

[101] After all, it's 1830.

[102] Slavery is in full effect.

[103] And when it came to entertainment, there was nothing new.

[104] Nothing truly American.

[105] And so when Tini Rice hears this black man singing this song and moving his body in this particular way, ding!

[106] A light bulb goes off.

[107] And he takes that light bulb and runs all the way to the theater.

[108] He figures out a way to melt down some cork, lets it cool, presumably takes a rag, or maybe even his hand if it's cool enough.

[109] and then he paints his face black.

[110] He goes out on stage, but instead of doing his regular act, he's got this horse groomers tune, except now he's given the tune lyrics.

[111] Come listen all you gals and boys, I'm just from tuckahoe.

[112] I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow.

[113] Wheel about and turn about and do just so.

[114] Every time I wheel about to jump, Jim Crow.

[115] And the lyrics give the horse groomer a name.

[116] And the name is Jim Crow.

[117] So the crowd goes crazy.

[118] They go so bananas, the man gets 20 encores.

[119] This is the first time a paying audience is basically electrified by a white man with a black face.

[120] This is the night that Jim Crow was allegedly introduced to America, this mascot of American racism.

[121] And this is a lot of American racism.

[122] what America really wanted, which was its own original art form.

[123] That is not an Italian opera and isn't some British guy coming over and despying all over them.

[124] And here is Thomas Dartmouth Rice giving it to them.

[125] This is the night that American popular culture was born.

[126] To Kill a Mockingbird is the most successful American play in Broadway history, says 60 Minutes.

[127] Rolling Stone gives it five stars, calling it a landmark production of an American classic.

[128] To Kill a Mockingbird is All Rise.

[129] One of the greatest plays in history raves NPR.

[130] The New York Post says it will change how you see the world.

[131] This is what great theater is for.

[132] All Rise for Harperlees to Kill a Mockingbird.

[133] A new play by Aaron Sorkin.

[134] This is a phenomenon, says New York Magazine.

[135] On Broadway at the Schubert Theater, get tickets at Telecharge .com.

[136] Oh, boy.

[137] I mean, you know how it goes.

[138] This sensational thing happens, and then everybody wants to get on the bandwagon and do their own.

[139] So you have other minstrel acts who come along and try to do what Thomas Dartmouth Rice is doing, a song and a dance and a black face on their white skin.

[140] And then from these solo acts, you have basically bands forming.

[141] Some folks like the size.

[142] Some folks do.

[143] Some folks do.

[144] And the bands have all the instruments that you would have in a band that you'd recognize now.

[145] There's a banjo and a fiddle and some tambourines and percussion in the form of bones, which would come from a pig sometimes.

[146] That is the formation of what will become the minstrel troop.

[147] And the place that minstrelsy took hold was in the north, places like Philadelphia and New York, in Boston, where you'd have these theaters dedicated.

[148] to minstrel acts, where minstrel acts would just move into a theater and do their act night after night after night after night after night after night.

[149] And a lot of these performers have never been meaningfully south to have a meaningful relationship with black people.

[150] And so they just made stuff up based on what they thought black people were like.

[151] They were able to draw on things that were coming to America from other parts of Europe, like the polka.

[152] And so you had, over the course of the formation of this culture, an inherent mixing.

[153] You had some amazing mix of an imagined blackness, real actual Irish melodies, and Polish music with what we would now call gospel, but spiritual harmonies, interlaced together with this African banjo.

[154] Basically, welding into a fusion, that becomes the thing that everybody wants to try to do.

[155] The whole thing just sweeps the nation, and for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit.

[156] Can we say that?

[157] Oh, very much so.

[158] I think so.

[159] And so for the rest of the 19th century, this is the shit.

[160] This is America.

[161] his primary form of entertainment.

[162] People are going crazy for black -based minstrels.

[163] You have little boys going to bed and dreaming about how they can become part of this minstrel show.

[164] Some of those people having these dreams go on to become people like Stephen Foster.

[165] I came from Alabama with my band to Anthony.

[166] Stephen Foster, the man widely credited as being the father of American music.

[167] Some of his songs, some of his most famous songs, songs you know, songs you love, songs you still sing.

[168] Songs your children, if you have them, they still sing.

[169] Some of those songs were written for blackface performers.

[170] And if you listen to something like Camptown Races, you can hear in it all of its minstrel properties.

[171] I go back home with a pocketful of can.

[172] Oh, Duda Day.

[173] The song, of course, is written.

[174] in so -called Negro dialect.

[175] I mean, instead of saying going, you're saying gwyne.

[176] Like instead of saying, oh, F, for of, you get a lot of D .E. for Duh.

[177] This is a white person imagining how a black person would sing this song.

[178] And that was a Gold Rush era hit.

[179] This is the I Want to Hold Your Hand of 1851.

[180] Part of the problem that we still live with now is that it was so much the heart and soul of American culture that it wasn't that it became not racist.

[181] It just was a thing that you did.

[182] If you wanted to be an entertainer at any point after 1830, you in all likelihood were at least going to try to be a blackface minstrel even if you were black.

[183] after the Civil War ends and there's an opportunity for black people to perform they have to do what the nation wants and what the nation wants at that point is blackface and now giving you noise in tempo F .B. Miller and Scatman Corrupt.

[184] So black people blacked up and performed as black people who weren't actually black.

[185] You're the laziest man I ever did see what's wrong with you in now?

[186] By the time you have black people painting their face is black to perform as black people, the only question you can really ask at this point is what the hell is going on?

[187] Why is this happening?

[188] Wolf was so captivating about seeing black people represented this way.

[189] Why would a white audience have clamored for it so much?

[190] I think one of the things that it offered was an opportunity to feel good about a thing that actually felt really bad at the time.

[191] People were really torn about whether to continue with slavery or whether to abolish it.

[192] The minstrel show didn't really give you an answer, but it provided a platform by which you could either escape from actually having to think about that question that really was tearing the nation apart, or depending on which show you would wind up seeing, it fully engaged you in the lightest possible way about enslaved people and how you didn't really have to feel so bad for them because they like being enslaved.

[193] You got to laugh at a thing that you actually felt so anguished about.

[194] You get to watch these black people who are really a source of national agony outside the theater become fools inside the theater.

[195] And in sitting in that theater, watching these white men in black face make fools of black people, a white audience could feel culture.

[196] They could feel civilized.

[197] They could feel superior to the people they were.

[198] watching be made fun of.

[199] And in a crazy way, watching them to humanize what really have been an opportunity for a white audience to feel so much better about their own humanity.

[200] By the time you get to the 20th century, minstrelsy is still with us.

[201] It is the basis upon which American movies are built.

[202] This country's first movie blockbuster, D .W. Griffiths, the birth of a nation, full of white men, villainously in blackface.

[203] I am privileged to say a few words to you.

[204] An America's first talking motion picture.

[205] In this most modern and novel manner.

[206] The jazz singer.

[207] About a Jewish man. Who feels most himself, not as a Jewish man, struggling with his Jewish identity and pleasing his cantor father.

[208] No, no. Maybe, I'm coming.

[209] Oh, God, I hope I'm not late.

[210] It's when he blacks his face up and performs Mammy as a Negro.

[211] Some of America's favorite stars did numbers in Blackface.

[212] Judy Garland performed in Blackface.

[213] Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire both performed in Blackface I'd rather see a minstrosho than any other show White Christmas has a whole number Most famous number in White Christmas involves a blackface tune But at the same time There's the beginnings of a recording industry And you had black artists who had access to recording studios.

[214] Out of these recordings, you have people like muddy waters.

[215] Well, now, low down finger, too, I just can't stand.

[216] I don't leave her way she do.

[217] She's going to miss me. Inventing and perfecting blues of rhythm, blues ideas, blues expression, the expression of...

[218] Oh, you're going to miss me. Child, what I'll be.

[219] of a fully human black self in American popular art. He had a kind of confidence that most people would never have heard coming from a black person before.

[220] And this is just the beginning.

[221] You have the advent of a place like Blue Note Records where lots of amazing.

[222] jazz was created and then released into the world.

[223] People like Sidney Bichet, and then Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

[224] You have black musicians thinking about how to move not only music forward, but American culture forward, thinking about how these instruments can do other things besides make what we think of as Western European classical music.

[225] taking music to a place that nobody had ever tried to previously take it people who just kept pushing it forward and beyond and then you have the development of the single most important movement black people have ever had artistically and that is the advent of Motown Records Motown is the most powerful mass -produced expression of black glamour, of black self -confidence, of black self -reliance.

[226] Its project was to get black producers, black musicians, black singers, to take, quote, white, quote Western, musical ideas of orchestration, strings and horns and straightforward harmonies and you marry them to a black weekend where on Saturday night you're at a juke joint having a good time with rhythm and blues music guitar and drum and bass sex basically and then you go home slightly hungover and you wake up and you go to church on Sunday morning where there's a whole other musical experience involving handclaps and different harmonic arrangements and call and response.

[227] A lot of feeling, a lot of oomph, a lot of gratitude.

[228] You have the combination of these three different areas of musical expression happening at the same time in just about every single Motown record.

[229] Whether it's the four tops doing Reach Out, I'll Be There, or Martha and the Vendell is doing Heatwave on something like Heatwave you can hear hands slapping the tambourine like it actually is Sunday morning Then when everything is firing it's just the most exciting romantic sound you're ever going to hear and at the center of it is what can only be described as a refulgent tasteful blackness here you have have in Motown, a force that is actively combating these ideas of black people as being inherently inferior.

[230] Motown is the antidote to American minstrelsy.

[231] That's what I was thinking about standing there in that kitchen, chopping those vegetables.

[232] It's the thing that made me laugh was just how all that history is just very silently coursing through this music.

[233] It might not even be aware that it's even there.

[234] It's so thoroughly atomized into American culture.

[235] It's going to show up in ways that even people making the art can't quite put their finger on.

[236] What you're hearing in black music that's so appealing to so many people of all races across time is possibility, struggle, it is strife, it is humor, it is sex, It is confidence.

[237] And that's ironic.

[238] Because this is the sound of a people who for decades and centuries have been denied freedom.

[239] And yet, what you respond to in black music is the ultimate expression of a belief in that freedom.

[240] The belief that the struggle is worth it, that the pain begets joy, and that that joy you're experiencing is not only contagious, It's necessary and urgent and irresistible.

[241] Black music is American music because as Americans, we say we believe in freedom and that's what we tell the world.

[242] And the power of black music is that it's the ultimate expression of that belief in American freedom.

[243] For the next few weeks, you'll be hearing 1619 here on the daily every Saturday or also releasing 1619.

[244] as a standalone series with new episodes published on Fridays.

[245] You can subscribe to the series by searching for 1619, wherever you listen.

[246] That's it for the daily.

[247] See you on Monday.

[248] To Kill a Mockingbird has not played to a single empty seat.

[249] Report 60 Minutes.

[250] It's the most successful American play in Broadway history.

[251] Rolling Stone gives it five stars, calling it unmissable and unforgettable.

[252] All rise for the miracle that is Mockingbird on Broadway.

[253] It's a New York Times critics pick.

[254] Jesse Green calls it a mockingbird for our moment.

[255] Beautiful, elegiac, satisfying, even exhilarating.

[256] Harper Lees to Kill a Mockingbird.

[257] A new play by Aaron Sorkin.

[258] A New York Times Critics Pick.

[259] Tickets at Telecharge .com.