Hello children, it looks like it’s time to destroy another SJW narrative.
In this week’s edition of “Larsen debunks modern mythology”, I’m going to look at American music—more specifically, the claim that American music is entirely a function of evil white people “stealing” various musical concepts from the black man—and inevitably in a watered down and lame form. After all, who would expect the inferior white man to be able to do anything artistic? They’re only capable of corrupting the music of the superior black man, yes?
</sarcasm>
Now, I’m certainly not going to deny that African music (Via the African diaspora) has been and continues to be a massive influence on American music—that’s plainly obvious. But as I discussed in my “cultural appropriation comes in all colors” article, this is to be expected when you have radically different races and cultures living right next to each other. And this is no exception—for while much of American music was influenced by black music, said black music was in turn influenced by white music (and rinse and repeat in an endless cycle over the centuries), and all in all American culture continues to predominantly be a synthesis (for better or for worse) of white and black.
And this isn’t idle conjecture—you can actually find documentation of this! I briefly mentioned this in the aforementioned article, but I feel like most of you didn’t quite get what I meant:
To keep things very simple and avoid turning this into a lengthy lecture on music theory…
In the 19th century there was a popular song titled “Worrall’s Spanish Fandango” (ironically written by an Englishman). With guitar strings tuned to an open G chord (D, G, D, G, B, D more specifically), this 1850 song uses a chord structure almost entirely like your standard 12 bar blues progression—but don’t take my word for it, listen for yourself.
A fairly simple piece, but enjoyable nonetheless. Now imagine that simple song being put into a basic songbook for beginners, the kind of songbook that was and still is often packaged with a guitar or any other instrument.
Combine the chord structures and modes of that song with the slow, thumping rhythms more suited to the drudgery of the labors of a sharecropper, and you’ve got yourself a blues, essentially. You can see this in how Spanish Fandango is excessively documented and recorded by several early blues musicians AS WELL AS bluegrass and country musicians, who would of course been living in essentially similar conditions to the black musicians.
A similar etymological link can be found in the song Sebastapol by the same guy (Worrall) as Spanish Fandango. At first it wouldn’t seem that this song sounds anything like a blues—and rhythmically and melodically, it isn’t. The open D tuning of the guitar that the piece requires, however, are very common in blues music today—indeed to this day Open G tuning is still called a “Spanish” tuning and Open D is called “Sebastopol tuning”. While the origins may be forgotten (ie: the exact reason why these two songs written to be played by middle class ladies in parlors became so popular with black sharecroppers), it seems pretty clear to me that these two songs written by a white Englishman were tremendously influential on the blues.
Need more? Blue notes or “worried notes” that are practically identical to what we know as the modern blues chord can be found in Scotch-Irish folk music (and actually many musical traditions from around the world which you can learn about in my other book that I have yet to start hocking as shamelessly as the sex book—but don’t you worry, I’ll be doing articles and videos on music theory sooner than later).
And while one could possibly argue that blacks played the songs better, the influence of white music upon them cannot be denied, just as the reverse can also not be denied.
So to reiterate yet again, when you force disparate people together, you’re going to get” cultural appropriation” no matter how hard you try. So either shut up or bring segregation back—the latter of which seems to be what society is leaning towards.