CW Stoneking - exploiting African American Poverty?
July 12th 2010 04:07
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There’s been a bit of debate about how appropriate it is for a middle class white guy to be making a career out of mimicking the music born from of the poverty of African Americans.
Critic Emma Hennings writes:
"It’s Stoneking’s voice that disturbs me more and more as this evening’s (very long) set wears on. More than his note-perfect guitar playing, or the commendable enthusiasm of his three-person horn section, it’s his eerie Xerox of a black man’s voice that leaves me doubting the veracity and the much-lauded ‘authenticity’ of his blues revivalism. Taking on a voice the very timbre of which denotes isolated, rural, African-American poverty – everything that Stoneking is so patently not – does not make for ‘authenticity’ any more than would painting your face with boot polish. His shtick is within half a centimetre of a Black & White Minstrel Show."
Read the full article here
The Courier Mail also tackled the subject.
Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic to divide music into black and white. There has always been cross fertilisation in music. Look at Dock Boggs the Appalachian banjo player who played a hybrid of blues and hillbilly music during the depression. Black musicians have also drawn on folk ballads with English origins (e.g. St James Infirmary Blues)
Stoneking has absorbed a range of different influences and melded them into his own style. I guess the musicians that he's influenced by are all dead. There is a bit of separation there and the show has a more of a feeling of reverence than the mimicry of the black and white mistrel show.
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