Abstracts

David Jones
University of Minnesota

"To Be Young, Countercultural, and Black: Becoming a Black Folk-Blues
Musician/Scholar"

This essay describes ways that several trends in youth culture have influenced my personal identity as a black scholar/folk-blues musician. Most of the essay describes apparent contradictions within my personal identity involving "old ways" of rural Christian African American tradition and "new ways" of rock and roll era youth culture. The specific "old ways" which have influenced me most include an interest in working for social justice, a desire
to seek out kindred spirits who also want to maintain ties to African American cultural history, and a rigorous personal spirituality that both revives and resists Christian doctrine. "New ways" I have adopted include a 1960s-related folk music ethic (which draws heavily from black rural blues and proletariat
protest traditions) and an enduring inability to sustain myself using
mainstream middle class models for work, relationships, family, and political participation. While I have developed strategies for negotiating these elements of my identity, friends and associates are often bewildered by the combination of influences that I claim. When I encounter this reaction, I explain my intent to resist the ways that personal identities are raced, gendered, and cultured harmfully, a condition that constrains free expressionand social change.

I close with a few comments on the marketing of hip hop and urban African American style, which has obscured an earlier melding of black style and folk music. During the last ten years, several important black crossover artists (Tracy Chapman, Ben Harper, and Keb Mo) have helped revive a black blues-folk sensibility within popular music, but these artists are often discussed in terms of stylistic contradictions, further segregating black urban style from more pluralist ways that African Americans perform their social identities.