"BLUES? IN DETROIT? You mean that they actually still play blues in Detroit?"
It’s understood that when Blacks started coming up here they brought their wives, and kids, and recipes, and churches, and do-rags, so there is no reason to assume that they didn’t bring their music - which, in non-religious circles, was blues.
"BLUES? IN DETROIT? You mean that they actually still play blues in Detroit?"
It’s understood that when Blacks started coming up here they brought their wives, and kids, and recipes, and churches, and do-rags, so there is no reason to assume that they didn’t bring their music - which, in non-religious circles, was blues. This makes sense. People don’t come out of a vacuum to a city, naked of culture and past. They bring along their old culture and modify it to the urban setting, adding and subtracting where appropriate. Characteristically the old culture resists change. The
guy from Macon (and even his children) is not so hasty in changing from a Southerner to an urbanite: he doggedly upsets white city planners by tossing beercans down housing project elevator shafts; he modestly thinks cunilingus is vulgar; and he keeps on planting collard greens in his backyard.
Yet he seems to have given up the blues, and 1, for one, would like to know why. This thinking about blues has been going on for some four years. My friend George West - Black, Southern, and recently discharged from the Navy - and I began