Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music

321 Pages·2004·1.95 MB·English

by  Gene Santoro

Highway 61 Revisited:
The Tangled Roots of
American Jazz, Blues,
Rock, & Country Music
Gene Santoro
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Highway 61 Revisited
Also by Gene Santoro
Dancing in Your Head (1994)
Stir It Up (1997)
Myself When I Am Real (2000)
Highway 61 Revisited
The Tangled Roots of American
Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music
Gene Santoro
1
2004
1
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2004 by Gene Santoro
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Santoro, Gene.
Highway 61 revisited : the tangled roots of American jazz, blues,
rock, and country music / by Gene Santoro.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–19–515481–1
1. Popular music—United States—History and criticism.
2. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3477 .S21 2004
781.64'0973—dc22
2003024872
Book design and typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Introduction 1
I. Avatars
1 Louis Armstrong 7
2 Woody Guthrie 17
II. The Postwar Jazz Era
3 Mary Lou Williams 33
4 Max Roach 37
5 Sonny Rollins 49
6 Chet Baker 64
7 Miles Davis 68
8 Herbie Hancock 80
III. Rebirth of the Blues
9 The Gospel Highway 93
10 Chess Records 99
11 The Folk Revival 104
12 Willie Nelson 119
13 Lenny Bruce 124
14 Sweet Soul Music 135
IV. In the Garage
15 Bob Dylan 153
16 Electric Blues Revival 171
17 Buffalo Springfield 179
18 Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris 185
19 The Grateful Dead 193
20 The Band 204
21 The Firesign Theatre 216
22 Bruce Springsteen 223
23 Tom Waits 235
V. Possible Futures
24 Ken Burns, the Academy, and Jazz 243
25 The Politics of Music: Don Byron and Dave Douglas 257
26 Cassandra Wilson 265
27 Marty Ehrlich 278
28 New Jazz Fusions 283
29 Ani Difranco 297
Index 302
Highway 61 Revisited
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing
between major and minor ones acts in accordance with
the following truth: nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost for history.
—Walter Benjamin
Music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of
us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we
never suffered and wrongs we did not commit.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Introduction
HIGHWAY61REVISITEDOFFERS, I hope, alternate ways of seeing the evolu-
tion of American pop culture, especially music, over the last century.
It opens with twin chapters on Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie.
In the book’s unfolding narrative, this complex pair of geniuses represent
the headwaters of significant and twisty currents flowing through the last
hundred years of American pop-music history, here separating into
isolated backwaters or bypassed channels, there merging into an unavoid-
able river with many deltas, but always, whether incrementally or with
white-water force, shaping key portions of the cultural landscape. Both
Armstrong and Guthrie began as folk musicians performing for small
marginal groups. Armstrong became the dapper virtuoso who survived
endless varieties of racism while inventing the musical language that trans-
formed jazz from folk music to art, though he never stopped insisting
(unlike many of his more recent progeny) that entertainment was an indis-
pensable aspect of his art; he enthralled a mass multiracial audience, which
made him forever synonymous with jazz as well as rich, though he insisted
on living relatively simply. Guthrie kept his talents deliberately rude, at
least on the surface, because he wanted to dissolve the stage’s fourth wall
by not seeming any more professional than his listeners; he smelled bad
and dressed like the hobo he’d been, dynamited mass success whenever it
got too near him, and became famous anyway, the catalytic icon ener-
gizing the wavelike resurgences of American roots music that have
punctuated every decade since. Armstrong, a black outsider by birth,
wanted in, in his genial way—though thanks to America’s color bar, he
rarely forgot where he stood. Guthrie, a white insider by birth transformed
by family tragedy and Okie alienation and leftist politics, in his brusque
way wanted out. But both challenged many of American society’s cher-
ished imperatives and ideals, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their art,
their opinions, their attitudes, and their lives.
Highway61Revisitedtraces how these dynamics and their corollaries
spool through post–World War II American culture via selected figures
and moments that illustrate the interplay at work in various contexts. In