Anyone coming to this site for the first time and checking out the available information on me will surely conclude that I make an unlikely conservative. I am a freelance writer - some business journalism and even agricultural journalism, but mostly lifestyle features and arts coverage - and a jazz guitarist. I'm also an adjunct lecturer at a local community college, in an area the school describes as "special topics in music." That means I teach jazz history, blues history and rock and roll history.
I've long since become inured to facial expressions and "you-teach-the-fun-courses"-type remarks that make it plain that my area of academic focus is generally regarded as fluff. And, indeed, that's often the way these courses are structured, particularly rock history.
I have wrestled with the question of whether the state of Indiana ought to be using its resources to pay me a stipend for this activity. I've concluded that, given the powers that be that determine the academic menu at my institution, someone would be teaching this stuff, and pretty much anyone else would teach it in a manner I'd find objectionable.
Indeed, I know of a rock-history instructor - I think he may be a full professor - at the main campus for my institution who is well-regarded by peers and students, a situation I find most lamentable. I came across an article about him some time back that reported on a Pink Floyd tribute band he fronts. He was quoted as saying that plaing "The Wall" in local clubs and auditoriums is an effective way to teach young folks about the "sense of alienation" that that song / album conveys. Sorry, but it looks a lot more like a waste of everybody's time to me. I may mention "The Wall" during the course of a rock-history semester, but it's not likely. My feeling is that it is emblematic of the music-industry bloat and jadedness that signaled the draining of the last vestige of any sparkle from the whole cultural force know as rock and roll.
The text I use for that course is Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock and Roll 1947 - 1977 by Robert Palmer. It was published in 1992. Why would I use a book over twenty years old, when developments in the music have supposedly continued apace, as well as the publication of newer perspectives on the music's history? Because Palmer asserts that by 1977, any developments that were to impart any new elements of the music's defining character had already been introduced into it, and anything that has occurred since has been a recycling of one sort or another.
Tonight is the first class session of the new semester. I basically give the same lecture in the first class for rock history and jazz history, although I bring things a little farther along - to 1945, specifically - in rock history. I start with the Bay Psalm Book and take the class through minstrelsy, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, ragtime, the development of American popular song from Paul Dresser through Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, marching-band music, the beginnings of country (Ralph Peer's pioneering recordings of Fiddlin' John Carson, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers), Kansas City and the territory-band circuit, the contributions of the legendary record producer John Hammond, the founding of BMI and changes in the radio industry, and the effect of World War II's shellack rationing and the draft on American music.
I typically get two types of reactions. Some students' eyes widen and start blinking. They start looking around to see if anyone else is as shocked as they are. Others tend to arch their eyebrows, registering an element of delight in their surprise, indicating relish at the thought of so much discovery.
I love teaching jazz history, because jazz is so closely tied to American popular song, which is the body of musical works that express a real breadth of genuine grown-up human experience. Rock, of course, came along in the very late 40s as a rowdy form of blues-based dance music that provided an alternative to the cerebral turn jazz took with the beboppers. That part of the rock course is fun to teach, in no small part because I get the chance to expose students to the lives of some colorful entrepreneurs - the owners of the postwar record labels - who exemplify enterprise in its purest form. Guys operating on a shoestring out of cramped facilities, building business empires by the seat of their pants. Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic, Syd Nathan at King, the Chess brothers. Guys who loved music and loved to make money.
Around the middle of the semester, I get a little sad. That's when we have to squarely face the point at which the music and the culture got ugly. Radical politics, rampant drugs, the casting of all sexual mores to the wind. The Velvet Underground, The Doors, The Mothers of Invention, The Stooges.
Even at that juncture, though, I have important work to do. I take the class through the development of the New Left, the moral-equivalency doctrine of historian William Appleman Williams, the work of C. Wright Mills and Eugene Genovese, and how these professors' students were the ones who took to the streets in the 1960s, and went to North Vietnam to make common cause with those whose aim was the West's destruction.
In the last week or two of the semester, I find a way to work Diana West's indispensible 2007 tome Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization into the proceedings. I get some blank stares, usually from the ones whose eyes had widened that first week.
In short, I think it's pretty clear by the course's conclusion that I'm no advocate. In fact, I think I probably present my material as impartially as any humanities teacher on my campus.
But I make sure they get all the material. It's quite a story when you take a sufficiently wide perspective.
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