White, black and blues

Sweat stung my eyes as I stood at Albert King's grave. The summer heat in Edmondson, Ark., was starting to take its toll on me. After criss-crossing Paradise Gardens Cemetery for nearly an hour in the stifling Delta humidity, my face and brain were baking. I needed something to drink.\nI looked down one last time at the final resting place of one of the greatest bluesmen of the 20th century. Albert King was a key figure in the late '60s and early '70s blending of traditional blues and more contemporary soul music. Issuing classics like "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "I'll Play the Blues for You" (a statement fittingly inscribed on his grave), King became a legend.\nAnd I was paying my respects.\nI glanced across the road and spied a little corner store sitting next to the cemetery. Hoping the store had what I wanted -- something wet and cold -- I crossed the road and walked inside. I eyed a cooler in the back corner and picked out a bottle of Lemon-Lime Gatorade.\nAs I paid for the drink, I chatted with the clerk, an older white woman, who told me that I was not alone in my desire to see King's grave. "They come from all over the world," she said.\nShe directed me to the entrance, where Bob Hurt, the owner of the establishment, was hauling stock into the store. I told him where I was from and what I was doing, and he offered a few comments similar to his employee's. Lots of Northerners come to take pictures of the grave and see it for themselves, he said. His next statement rattled me.\n"But," he said, "most of 'em are white, not black."\nHis words shook me, not because they were a surprise, but because they vocalized a painful truth -- that the blues have been all but abandoned by newer generations of African Americans while being lovingly embraced by legions of white fans. The reality is that the average 30-year-old white guy like me is more likely to know about and enjoy Albert King -- or any other blues legend -- than my black contemporaries.\nThat reality is a result of consistent and wholesale white appropriation of African-American music. For the last century, whites have taken black music -- from jazz to blues to rock and roll to hip hop -- and hijacked and whitewashed it.\nThe blues offer perhaps the most telling example. Thanks to the popularity of artists like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin and Stevie Ray Vaughan -- all of whom earnestly loved the blues and wanted only to honor their black heroes and spread the blues gospel -- the blues is now, essentially, a white form of music.\n"The black guys are the ones that started it, but the other people took it over," Texas bluesman Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown told National Public Radio last year.\nAnd in his masterful book "Deep Blues," late music critic Robert Palmer, while trying to stay optimistic about the future of the blues, acknowledged that things have changed, perhaps forever.\n"Blues has lost a lot," he wrote. "It's lost the sense of in-group solidarity that once tied it so closely to its core audience, its crucial context of blackness."\nBut why?\nMany of the young African-Americans I talk to say the blues is simply old-fashioned and unhip. What's more, many young African-Americans identify the blues with a time in America when civil rights were non-existent and lynchings took place on a regular basis.\nAnd, thanks to white appropriation, blues artists are viewed almost as Uncle Toms who grinned and shuffled for white people. Many young blacks think (quite erroneously) that the blues and the people who played it did nothing to protest the African-American condition and failed to advocate for change. The harder, more outspoken tone of first soul, then funk and now hip hop, they feel, is true black music with a social conscience.\nWhile such attitudes are misguided, uninformed and unappreciative of what blues artists did, they are fairly common.\n"It's that whole aspect of how blacks create the beginnings of the music, and then we toss it away," rap great Chuck D told Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis last year. "And then it doesn't mean anything until somebody else goes to the gutter and picks it up and shines it off. … Who the hell is Muddy Waters to the average black kid? But I can go to a 25-year-old white kid, and they might know Waters or Howlin' Wolf."\nSuch thoughts were on my mind in Edmondson, Ark. After chugging my Gatorade and gathering up my energy, I got in my truck and headed out of town, on to the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson, another legendary Delta bluesman.\nBut as I was leaving I spotted a young African-American boy sitting on the railing of a bridge spanning a muddy creek. He was slowly peeling an orange and soaking up the heat, his blue bike propped against the bridge wall.\nI stopped to talk to 15-year-old Bryant Brown, a local resident sporting cornrows, a red shirt and shorts.\n"Do you know who Albert King is?" I asked.\nThe shy teen looked at his shoes and continued to peel the orange.\n"No sir," he said.\n"Do you like the blues?"\n"Some of it," he said quietly. "But I really like rap and R&B."\n"Do you think people around here know the blues?" I asked.\n"Some might forget it,' he said, "and some do."\nI thanked Bryant for his time and help. His comments, like that of Hurt, were depressing but far from surprising. Bryant is one of millions of African Americans who have left the blues and its powerful legacy behind, while I'm one of millions of whites who, for better or worse, have taken their place.