Table Of ContentWhen Music Migrates
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When Music Migrates
crossing British and european racial Faultlines,
1945–2010
Jon stratton
Curtin University, Australia
© Jon stratton 2014
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Jon stratton has asserted his right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
ashgate Publishing Limited ashgate Publishing company
Wey court east 110 cherry street
union road suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, Vt 05401-3818
surrey, gu9 7Pt usa
england
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
stratton, Jon.
When music migrates : crossing British and european racial faultlines, 1945–2010 / by
Jon stratton.
pages cm. — (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2978-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4724-2979-7 (ebook) — ISBN
978-1-4724-2980-3 (epub) 1. Popular music—Social aspects—Great Britain.
2. Music and race—Great Britain. 3. Ska (Music)—Great Britain—History and criticism.
4. Reggae (Music)—Great Britain—History and criticism. 5. Blacks—Great Britain—
Music—history and criticism. 6. taha, rachid—criticism and interpretation. i. title.
ML3917.g7s77 2014
781.64086’91—dc23
2014005010
ISBN 9781472429780 (hbk)
ISBN 9781472429797 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472429803 (ebk – ePUB)
V
Printed in the united Kingdom by henry Ling Limited,
at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, Dt1 1hD
Contents
General Editors' Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 ‘A West Indian? You Must be Joking! I Come out of the East End’:
Kenny Lynch and English Racism in the 1950s and 1960s 17
2 Chris Blackwell and ‘My Boy Lollipop’: Ska, Race and British
Popular Music 37
3 The Travels of Johnny Reggae: From Jonathan King to Prince
Far I; From Skinhead to Rasta 59
4 ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’: Paul McCartney, Diaspora and the Politics
of Identity 79
5 ‘Brother Louie’ and the Representation of Interracial Relationships
in the United Kingdom and the United States of America 101
6 Skin Deep: Ska and Reggae on the Racial Faultline in Britain,
1968–1981 125
7 Rachid Taha and the Postcolonial Presence in French Popular
Music 147
8 ‘Police on My Back’ and the Postcolonial Experience 169
Bibliography 189
Index 209
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General Editors’ Preface
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with
popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment
and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present
the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis
of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings
in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s
popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being
continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the
transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding
of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as
reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational
world. The series recognises and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and
new global fusions, and utilises a wide range of theoretical models drawn from
anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial
studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo &
Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds
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Acknowledgements
Much of the music in this book formed part of the soundtrack of my life when
I was living in England in the 1960s and 1970s. The essays are an attempt, at a
distance of some forty or so years and from another continent, to make sense of
some aspects of popular music culture in England at that time. I grew up on the
south coast where, in those days, there were no ‘coloured people’ with a father
who worked in London and who would tell us almost every Sunday lunchtime
that ‘they should be sent back where they came from’, and with a Jewish mother
who urged tolerance. My father ran a smallish business in Tottenham making
and selling iron fencing posts. From time to time he employed men from the
Caribbean. Indeed, my memory has it that at one time his foreman was one of
these migrants. My father would assure us that these men that he employed who
were hard-working and regular in their habits ‘were different’. His descriptions
of the rest of the Caribbean migrants, their intelligence and their abilities, were
typical of the prejudiced assumptions then current in England.
When I went to university in Bradford in the late 1960s the diversity of the
population was one of many culture shocks I experienced. This book links the
music that I increasingly came to enjoy with the racial politics of English everyday
life at the time. One of my early realizations of the complexity of that politics took
place when I visited the West Indian Club in Bradford with a student friend of
mine of Caribbean heritage. As we were dancing, a man on the club’s governing
committee pulled my friend aside and told her never to bring me there again – she
was setting a bad example for other black women.
Bradford was where I learnt that ‘My Boy Lollipop’ was more than a novelty
song; that ska had deep cultural roots and that it helped make life in Britain more
bearable for the Jamaican and other Caribbean migrants who encountered racism
constantly in their everyday lives. However, like many middle-class students, I
didn’t really start to appreciate Jamaican music until the Wailers released Catch
a Fire in 1973. I still own the copy of the album that I bought then, with the
sleeve made to resemble a Zippo lighter. By that time I was a postgraduate at the
University of Essex and living in Colchester. I and David Guile, Sarah Kerridge
– friends then and now, whose taste in music is often the same as mine and
sometimes different – and also John Davis, my housemate for many years at that
time, listened to a wide range of music, went to gigs and festivals too numerous
to mention here, but including Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Hammersmith
Odeon in 1976, and discussed popular music constantly. I would like to thank
them all, as well as acknowledge and thank John in particular as the person who
Description:When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of in
