1
Eric Clapton
“Stormy Monday”
2
Is a White Musician
Playing the Blues
Wrong?
II
3
Paul Taylor: “…So Black and Blue: Response to
All I want to do is hear him
Rudinow” play. Race, size, color,
Taylor’s Central
Argument
nothing
matters when a
guy’s got it, and Eric’s got it.
I’m qualified to sing the
blues because of what’s
happened to me; but I still
don’t think I’ll ever do it as
well as a black man.
Buddy
Buddy Guy
Guy
Eric
Eric Clapton
Clapton
4
Paul Taylor: “…So Black and Blue: Response to
Rudinow”
Taylor’s Central Argument
• “For [Buddy] Guy the blues is colorblind, while [Eric] Clapton is
convinced that his performances suffer somehow because he
is white. Who is right?” (417)
 Rudinow argues we should prefer Guy’s view to views like
Clapton’s—that the blues is something one can learn,
rather than something essentially dependant on race
membership.
 But Rudinow misunderstands the nature of the blues: he
misses important nuances of the racialist discourse.
5
Recall Rudinow
“Black Blues Authenticity Thesis” (BBA) – that “white blues”
performances are unacceptably derived from the original sources of
the blues, and so cannot count as authentic blues performances.
• Proprietary Argument: One can be a participant in an authentic
blues performance only if one belongs to the community whose
members stand in some sort of ownership relation to the blues
idiom—the black community.
 Objection: The notion of ownership is an “elaborate red
herring”—how a community is meant to own a style of
music is unclear.
• Experiential Access Argument: One can be a participant in an
authentic blues performance only if one knows what it is like to
live as a black person in America, and one can only know this if
one has lived as a black person in America. Otherwise, one will
not be authentically expressing the requisite emotion.
6
Recall Rudinow (cont’d)
 Objection 1: The Experiential Access Argument seems to
require some sort of myth of “ethnic memory”—that “mere
membership in the ethnic group confers special access to
the lived experience of ancestors and other former
members.” (418)
 Objection 2: Discounting the myth of ethnic memory, the
Experiential Access Argument can be reformulated as
involving secret cultural codes—but this obscures “what is
crucially and universally human about [the] central themes”
of the blues. (418)
 Objection 3: This reformulation seems to allow for authentic
white performances if the performer is properly initiated into
the blues community.
7
Recall Rudinow (cont’d)
While Rudinow’s objections to the BBA, as he states it, are solid,
his characterization of the BBA itself is not.
• “[Rudinow] paints much too simplistic a picture of the blues idiom
as a racialized cultural space and of the subjectivities [sociallyconstituted beings] that occupy it.” (418)
• Rudinow characterizes the BBA as being centrally about the
performers, but the BBA’s claim may be characterized more
centrally about the audience, and only derivatively about
performers.
8
Dewey’s Theory of Situations
Artworks are “experiences that art objects participate in and
occasion, distinguished from other kinds of experiences principally
in that they intensify and clarify certain features common to those
experiences.” (418)
• Experiences are made up of situations that take on meanings in
relations to their surrounding situations.
• Artworks unify these situations in the perceiver’s consciousness
by connected feelings.
9
Reformulating the BBA
We can characterize the BBA as a claim about the capacity of the
audience:
• BBA1: “Candidate blues performances in which white performers
participate cannot work in the experience of the BBA-adherent
listener in a way generating the feeling that marks blues
performances proper.” (419)
 On the Deweyan approach, even if a listener cannot tell if a
performer is white, such a performance may fail to produce
the “authentic blue performance feeling”—the experience
may be stunted.
10
Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)
• BBA2: “The candidate performances fail because the blues is a
racial project, and moral deference is owed to black contributions
to this project.” (419)
 The moral dimension arises from the blues being a racial
project: a “cultural space within which the meaning of race
is articulated.” (419)
 In “moral deference”, the listener takes the performer to be
expressing moral pain, and in turn bears witness to this
moral pain.
 “[C]andidate blues performances in which whites participate
fail because the BBA adherent is unconvinced that the
performer can properly bear witness to the racialized moral
pain that the blues is about.” (419)
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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)
• Rudinow: How can the blues be about black experience in any
way that exclusively picks out black performers today, who
arguably are as distant from the experiences of the founders of
the blues as are today’s white performers?
 It may be that the blues is about what the contemporary
and historical experiences of being African American have
in common: the experience of being “a member of an
oppressed an downwardly constituted social category,
subject to racialized hostile misfortune.” (419)
 Where Rudinow contends that membership in an ethnic
group confers access to the experience of former members
of that group, in fact membership is partially constituted by
such access. That is, one cannot be a member of the group
unless one has access to such experience.
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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)
• All this said, the reformulation of the BBA is not racist:
 On one level, it is a claim about psychological facts about
individuals.
 On another level, it is a claim about the currency of certain
components of certain racialized discources.
 “When Rudinow says that the essence of the blues is a
stance embodied in sound and poetry, he fails to consider
either who might be taking the stance—a racialized
subject—or what the stance orients one toward—the blues
as a racial project.” (420)
 “White people can’t play the blues” can be analyzed as, “I
can’t properly respond to candidate blues performances in
which whites are the principal participants” because whites
do not have access to the store of common black
experiences.
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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)
• Possible Objection: Generalizing the BBA has unfortunate
consequences—for example, ruling out Denzel Washington in
the role of Hamlet.
 Reply: The blues is a racial project; Hamlet is not.
14
Joel Rudinow: “Reply to Taylor”
• Taylor interprets the BBA as a set of claims not about
performers and performances, but about audiences, audience
members, and their experiences.
• But what are we to make of Clapton’s self-deprecation?
 Clapton seems to be making a claim about his
performances, and about himself as a performer.
 What are we to make of
Buddy Guy’s appreciation of
Clapton’s performances, in
which Guy seems to orient
himself as a listener?
All I want to do is hear him
play. Race, size, color,
nothing matters when a
guy’s got it, and Eric’s got it.
I’m qualified to sing the
blues because of what’s
happened to me; but I still
don’t think I’ll ever do it as
well as a black man.
15
BBA-Adherent Listeners
• If the BBA is a claim about listeners, what does it say about those
listeners?
 It seems to say that they are incapable of appreciating
certain performances on account of the performer’s race.
 BBA1 says that for some listeners the racial identity of the
performer is aesthetically relevant.
 Taylor’s “BBA-adherent listener” must have verified the
racial identity of the performer as a precondition of the
aesthetic experience of blues appreciation.
 Taylor calls the BBA-adherent listener a “subjectivity”—a
socially-constituted being, but however much we are
socially-constituted, we are still human beings.
 We should attend primarily to the music.
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BBA-Adherent Listeners (cont’d)
• Attending primarily to the music doesn’t mean ignoring its role in
the social life of the community.
 Granting that attending to the blues means recognizing it as
a “racial project”, a racial project is “simultaneously an
interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial
dynamics and an effort to organize and distribute resources
along particular racial lines.” (422)
 The blues must surely be seen as evolving as a racial
project, which leaves the question of the authenticity of
white blues open.
• Is white blues (part of) the same racial project as black blues?
 If not, we must consider other questions as well:
1) Is the blues one racial project, or many?
2) Is contemporary black blues (part of) the same racial
project as early delta blues?
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BBA-Adherent Listeners (cont’d)
 Whatever the answers, the question of the authenticity of
white blues remains open pending further argument.
 And this argument will have to do better than merely
suggesting that the blues might be about what
contemporary and historical African Americans have in
common, exclusive of other groupings.
 “It will not do simply to assert in a question-begging way
that there is not anything crucially or universally human
about the blues, nor simply to assume a particular
racialized exclusivist delimitation of ‘the (true) blues
community.’” (422)