Music as a Melting Pot

Blog Post Week 9

 

For this week’s readings, in You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down: Stories by Alice Walker, we learn about a woman named Gracie Mae who had a knack for songwriting. Two men come to her house, J.T. and Traynor, who then proceed to buy one of her songs. This song ultimately becomes a huge hit, leading Traynor to great popularity and fame. He became known as the “Emperor of Rock and Roll.” Gracie Mae may have written the song, but Traynor received national credit for it. It’s like she said herself, “if I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. The children didn’t call it my song anymore. Nobody did” (7). Traynor came to her later because although he had been singing this song all over the country, he still never knew what it really meant. He wasn’t singing something that was his own; he used Gracie Mae’s talent to publicly claim talent for himself. He also followed this in his personal life. He talks about his marriage and describes how “it was like singing somebody else’s record. I copied the way it was sposed to be exactly but I never had a clue what marriage went” (13). Traynor was copying other people because that’s what he thought he had to do; it’s what he was taught. As a result, he felt lost and alone. Once he realized this it made him angry, and when he brought Gracie Mae to perform with him onstage one night the audience didn’t even care. The audience was the same as he had been: naïve and superficial. The real meaning of the song itself didn’t matter, just that it was a hit. He gets upset and exclaims “you need an honest audience! You can’t have folks that’s just gonna lie right back to you” (17). But throughout his whole career he was lying to his audiences, singing songs that weren’t his and the guilt caught up with him.

            In the second reading Ned Sublette describes the popularity of latin music in American culture. In the 1950s Cuban music had a huge impact on what was called “rock and roll” music back then. The hit song “Louie Louie” may have seemed like a major rock and roll hit, but inadvertently it was a play on the latin cha-cha-cha theme. “White” Americans may have coined the term “rock and roll” music but their influence came greatly through African-Americans, and even African-Americans were obtaining their style from latin dance music. Like Sublette said, “without cuban music, American music would be unrecognizable.”

I think what we can take from the readings is that music is something that has changed and evolved tremendously over time. What we call “rock” music now is not what was considered “rock” fifty years ago. When I think of rock music I look to Linkin Park and Green Day: bands that are all male, white and American, with music that people can “jam” out to that is loud and reminds me of teen angst. Back in the 50s rock and roll was stemmed from latin dance beats, African drums, and black soul and jazz themes. Though what we label as “rock” now is a lot different 60 years later, both ideas of rock have some similarities. I think that all music is a play on each other; a push and pull with different instruments, beats, rhythms, and the like. It's takes several people to make a song. From a composer, to a songwriter, to a producer, to a lead vocalist in a band, they all come together to make music. All are influenced by each other. Whether it’s an artist using another songwriter’s work to be famous and perform, or the combination of different cultures to make a common sound and popular hits on the billboard, both use each other consistently. Rock and Roll is a genre that has developed and grown over the years using many different influences to come together. Just like how American culture is called the “melting pot,” American music does the same.