\n<\/p>\n
THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It\u2019s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri Baraka once defined Black music as \u201cAmerican music expanded past the experience of the average American.\u201d \u201cIt gets down,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is about the life of the downed, yet its dignity is in the fantastic sophistication even at the moment of would-be, should-be humiliation and actual despair.\u201d Giddens, who once described her music as \u201cBlack non-Black music\u201d and now prefers to call it simply \u201cAmerican music,\u201d understands this implicitly. \u201cAll the good things that come from American music [come from] mixture,\u201d she says. \u201cHiding in plain sight in all the different types of American music is cross-cultural working-class collaboration. It\u2019s people making music because that\u2019s what they\u2019ve got.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most powerful folk music has always addressed points of tension: between Black and white, rich and poor, sophistication and humiliation. Cannon\u2019s 1927 song \u201cCan You Blame the Colored Man?\u201d tells the story of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901, the year Washington\u2019s best-selling autobiography, \u201cUp From Slavery,\u201d was published. \u201cCould you blame the colored man for makin\u2019 them goo-goo eyes?\u201d Cannon sings, after describing in detail the lavish dinner at the president\u2019s table. Likewise, today\u2019s best folk music still confronts issues of race and class. In 2019 Amythyst Kiah, now 36, a guitarist and banjo player from Tennessee, joined Giddens, along with Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, in a string-band collective called Our Native Daughters. They decided to excavate American history, going back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to find inspiration for new songs. One of the songs that came of that process was the startling and soulful \u201cBlack Myself<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t pass the test of the paper bag The brown paper bag test, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, was born out of colorism within the Black community, in nightclubs and house parties in New Orleans where anyone darker than the bag taped to the door would be denied entrance. In a song that confronts the experience of being shut out of traditionally white spaces \u2014 such as contemporary folk and country music \u2014 Kiah\u2019s lyrics build toward resistance and joy: \u201cI\u2019ll stand my ground and smile in your face \/ \u2019Cause I\u2019m Black myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Addressing her race so explicitly in her music was a departure for Kiah. \u201cI\u2019ve always written songs in a way where anybody can put themselves in that position,\u201d she says. Throughout her years of playing, she\u2019s subscribed to the theory that the more specific and personal a song\u2019s perspective, the more a listener \u2014 any listener \u2014 will relate to it. Just as Kiah, no poor white Southern girl from rural Kentucky, could relate to Loretta Lynn\u2019s 1970 single \u201cCoal Miner\u2019s Daughter<\/a>,\u201d she says, so she hopes that listeners, whomever they may be, will relate to \u201cBlack Myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
\u2019Cause I\u2019m Black myself
I pick the banjo up and they sneer at me
\u2019Cause I\u2019m Black myself
You better lock your doors when I walk by
\u2019Cause I\u2019m Black myself
You look me in my eyes but you don\u2019t see me
\u2019Cause I\u2019m Black myself<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n