It’s a White Thing

In 1966, I spent an afternoon at the home of the Mississippi bluesman Skip James. I'd had no idea he now lived in Philadelphia, Pa., where I happened to run into a young white harmonica player who happened to know him. But I'd been listening to his grim, eerie and powerful music for the past year in my college dormitory. James had cut 26 songs in 1931, mostly ignored by record buyers at the time, but treasured by white collectors in the '50s and '60s, despite the lousy sound quality. When James, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Son House were young men, few people outside Mississippi even knew their names; today, if a Mount Rushmore rose up in the Delta flatlands, they'd be on it. James had been tracked down, "rediscovered" and newly recorded just two years before I met him, and made a triumphant appearance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival; he would die, at the age of 67, in 1969.

The harmonica player took me to a liquor store—you had to bring a pint of gin but hide it from James's wife—then to a row house in unofficially segregated North Philadelphia, with lace curtains in the windows and an upright piano in the parlor. James was at first stiff and ungenial, but he warmed up as we passed the gin and he began to play. Then—without warning—he began to teach me one of his easier pieces: "Hard Time Killing Floor." He'd play a lick and pass me the Guild guitar I'd seen on one of his record covers; I'd play it back, and he'd shout "No!" I wished the earth would swallow me up: I was being yelled at by Skip James. But eventually I got it: in his Mississippi accent, he'd been crying "Now!" to encourage me.

James was supposedly contemptuous of his young white fans, but if he was simply tolerating us in his home, I now understood why: he was justly proud of his music and wanted it to be carried on. As he told the writer Peter Guralnick around that time, his aim was "to confront you with something that may perhaps go down in your hearing and may be in history after I'm gone." At last—I hadn't expected this, either—James led us in the Sunday-school anthem "Jesus Loves Me." I didn't know then that he'd been ordained as a Baptist minister—nor that he'd previously worked as a whorehouse piano player and, as he told another visitor, shot at least one man. Then we sat down to eat the gumbo his wife, Lorenza, had been cooking. I already knew I'd be telling this story all my life.

But after reading two new books, Marybeth Hamilton's "In Search of the Blues" and UC San Diego professor Camille F. Forbes's "Introducing Bert Williams," I wonder if I've ever understood the story. Both books deal with the vexed relationships between black performers and their white audiences, and both quote Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask," his still-terrifying 1896 poem about the black experience: "We wear the mask that grins and lies/… We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries/To thee from tortured souls arise."

Forbes's book is a biography of Broadway's first black star, for whom Dunbar once co-wrote songs: in context, the poem inevitably evokes an image of Williams, a light-skinned Bahamian who always performed (often to whites-only audiences) in a grinning mask of burnt cork. Hamilton, a University of London historian, argues that the blues as whites have imagined it—a pure and primal musical utterance originating in the deep backcountry of the South—is less a creation of black musicians than of white esthetes. Folklorists and record collectors, she suggests, preferred blues performers to be downtrodden, decrepit and obscure—much as Broadway audiences needed Bert Williams to black up and talk in plantation dialect. Hamilton's reference to Dunbar suggests a barely suppressed resentment of white condescension; she quotes the singer-guitarist Lonnie Johnson, who asked an interviewer in the 1960s, "Are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?"

So was James wearing a mask for me? Was I one more privileged, gawking white boy wearing the bluejeans of a field hand? And who, by the way, found it noteworthy that a bluesman had "lace curtains" and a "parlor"? Had I "met" him at all? In a culture like ours, is such a thing even possible? Ever since there were black Americans, whites have tended to hear in their music an authenticity presumably unavailable to the overcivilized. To untangle the strands of romanticism, racism, guilt and dread behind this would take us all day and into tomorrow, but you can see it in whites' odd mixture of reverence for and condescension toward musicians from Louis Armstrong to Jay-Z. Rows of cotton pickers chanting "field hollers," R&B saxophonists honking and squealing atop the bar in a gin mill, rappers with gold chains and automatic weapons—such images belong to America's musical and racial mythology of suffering, violence and passionate abandon. The 19th-century minstrel shows, first performed by whites in blackface, formalized—even ritualized—a range of uneasy attitudes, from contempt to envious fascination, with genteelly Africanized music and low comedy. But when blacks themselves took up stage minstrelsy—after all, weren't they the real real deal?—the ambiguities became far more pointed, and a hint of subversion qualified the subservience. Out of this tradition came the comedian Bert Williams. And, arguably, every black performer since who's faced the assumptions and fantasies of a white audience.