Criticizing Our Own Music History

When what you don’t know hurts you

I remember the days of sitting in my former therapist’s waiting room. I usually arrived twenty to thirty minutes before our appointment, and he usually ran over. So was I eager? Was he not eager?

He was a Viet Nam vet — a normally gentle soul, though on occasion I could see the fire still lingering in the historical ashes of his thoughts and memories. I wrote about his retirement a while back. I don’t think of him as often as I should, though how often I should think of him is likely one of the reasons why I’m still in therapy.

But what I want to tell you today is what I usually did while waiting for him to emerge from his hobbit-like sanctum:

I scrolled my phone for the latest Pitchfork reviews of what was current in the musical world. And sure, those Pitchfork reviewers could be testy. They skewered, for instance, Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires’ 2014 LP, Dereconstructed. Bains and the Fires were products of my childhood home area of Birmingham, Alabama. I went to Sunday school with Lee’s dad (also Lee), and former lead guitarist Eric Wallace is the son of one of my oldest friends. So clearly I was biased.

And clearly I got pissed when Pitchfork gave the album something like a 4.5 out of 10. Another way to look at this — perhaps the one Lee and Eric and the others in the band took — was that to get reviewed by Pitchfork was an outstanding feat in and of itself.

Therapy will allow a person to see all sides of an issue, including the positive.

But what I want to tell you the most about this story is not so much my sorrow at the demise of Pitchfork, as troubling as I think it is. Rather, what I want most to tell you is about that wonder of therapy I mentioned just above:

Seeing all perspectives and understanding that one bit of music history ending has to be understood in the context of all the other histories surrounding music that are still surviving, still being written, and still being discovered.

And on this subject, Questlove has some encouraging and yet disturbing thoughts:

“If history is only what’s seen, what do we call the rest?…Historians can rediscover previously unknown events, though to do so, they have to see them” (Music Is History, Abrams Image 2022, 53).

All true, but what kills me most about this idea is Questlove’s parenthetical comment right after:

“(In addition to being self-evident, this is a kind of paradox. Previously unknown? In most cases — maybe beginnings-of-the-universe discoveries are the exception — those events were known only to the people who they happened to, and the people around those people, so maybe it is more accurate to say that those events have discovered previously unknown historians).”

So the question is not only which events are discovered by which historians, and which of us reads these historians and so know and understand these particular and previously unknown histories (Whew, glad I got that out), but also:

How many other events, running parallel to the events that get recorded are there? Or again, as Questlove says,

“When a person sees things they haven’t seen before, there are still more they aren’t seeing. And more after that…things are happening all the time. But historians are people, and people know they have a limited capacity, so they pick a place to pause and stop looking for more events…” (53).

For instance, I know something about Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires, and in my own parallel history, near about the time I discovered them I saw another band here in Greenville, SC, opening for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. That band, also from Birmingham, was and still is St. Paul and the Broken Bones. I haven’t read any Pitchfork reviews of them, but I’m betting if there are/were some, they scored better than 4.5 out of 10.

What kills me is that of course there are many other bands from Birmingham that I don’t and never will know, and knowing them might very well have changed my life — WOULD have changed my life because everything we do and learn changes us in some way.

“Whenever there’s a story happening, there’s more than one story happening” (Music Is History 51).

Maybe these changes wouldn’t/won’t allow me to pick up the critical void left by Pitchfork, but they are/would be allowing me to write what I’m writing about right now.

And what I most want to write about is that, just as I mentioned in my previous story about that integrated concert in Birmingham back in 1963, A Salute to Freedom, I knew little-to-nothing about Birmingham’s history of celebrated jazz music/musicians. I did know that both Erskine Hawkins and Sun Ra were natives of Birmingham, and maybe I knew that W.C. Handy was a native Alabamian, born in Florence, AL.

But what I didn’t know is that not only did Handy come to and live in Birmingham for a time, he also found work at a pipe shop in neighboring Bessemer.

Bessemer is the town I was raised in and have written about extensively.

I’m pretty sure I know which pipe shop Handy worked in; it was only a mile or two from my house. These were some of Bessemer’s early days — the 1890s — so of course there are many reasons why I didn’t know this story about Handy, who made a whopping, for him, $1.85 a day at that pipe shop.

What I also didn’t know was that while working in Bessemer, Handy

“…started his first brass band, teaching the players to read and play music. After that, ‘a small string orchestra approached him, asking him to serve as both music teacher and leader’… ‘Folks around Bessemer began calling [him] Professor….’’’

I got this information from Birmingham resident Burgin Mathews’ latest book, Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America (UNC Press 2023). I had never heard of Mathews and his work until I saw the book listed in a catalogue I got from New South Press. Before that, as I said above, I had heard of a few Birmingham-born jazz musicians and I knew pretty much where Tuxedo Junction was located (in Ensley, a community lying between Birmingham and Bessemer).

W.C. Handy got his start in Bessemer.

So what else don’t I know? And please be kind as you answer that question.

My Birmingham-based, and lover of gambling and illegal gambling dens, grandmother once described early 20th Century Bessemer as being “too wide open and dangerous” for her. And yet, according to Mathews’ research, by the early 1900s, Birmingham “claim[ed] a higher murder rate than any American city its size” (15).

From what I hear, Bessemer now owns that title.

And another thing. My father — that same grandmother’s son — worked for decades at a jewelry store located at 1408 2nd Avenue North in downtown Birmingham. And for many summers of my young life, I worked there with him. But a mere fifty years before his business moved to that location,

“On Second Avenue North, around Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, was the Scratch Ankle District, home to gambling houses and boardinghouses, crowded bordellos and raucous saloons. A culture of drink, gambling, dance and sex thrived in places whose names made a poetry of vice…” (14).

Okay, fine. I worked close to the former Birmingham den of iniquity. Who hasn’t?

But the Birmingham of infamy, the city not-too-busy to hate Black people, used to be integrated in this era of the Scratch Ankle District. Black and white people mingled together to drink and dance and carouse and who knows what else, except I think we do know what else given that in my time I saw many people who didn’t look exactly Black or white.

So I knew and saw some things but didn’t see or know so many other things.

And as Questlove says, there are still other things to see, and more beyond those.

So I’ll stop now and keep reading, searching for other sounds to hear, other histories to write.

I hope you do, too.

Thanks to Counter Arts for publishing.