Kempton's BOOGALOO:

[Joe]

Nice review (by Luc Sante) to be found at:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16478

Looks to be a promising read.

[ghost of miles]

Yeah, Joe, I read that review too a couple of nights ago when the new issue showed up in the mailbox. I'm particularly interested in reading what he has to say about Thomas A. Dorsey, a figure who's long fascinated me, and about whom little seems to have been written so far.

[Joe]

GOM -- if you haven't already, you might want to check out this book:

Michael Harris, THE RISE OF GOSPEL BLUES: THE MUSIC OF THOMAS ANDREW DORSEY IN THE URBAN CHURCH

[ghost of miles]

Thanks, Joe, hadn't seen that title before.

[jpmosu]

Glad I actually read this thread to see what it was *really* about!

Originally, I mis-read it as "Kenton's Boogaloo" thinking it was about a Stan Kenton re-issue that I'd never heard of (and frankly didn't want to).

john

[Swinging Swede]

Yeah, I first read it as "Kenton's Boogaloo" too! I wonder how that would have sounded?

[alankin]

Yeah, I first read it as "Kenton's Boogaloo" too! I wonder how that would have sounded?

Bombastic!

[ghost of miles]

Yeah, I first read it as "Kenton's Boogaloo" too! I wonder how that would have sounded?

KENTON TOO: TEUTONIC BOOGALOO, maybe?

In any case, here's the review I wrote for the Bloomington Free Press. Feel free to pick it apart--I'm nothing if not a masochist for constructive criticism! (With thanks to Joe Milazzo for turning me on to Allen Lowe.)

Faith Into Funk: Arthur Kempton’s History of Black Music, Boogaloo

There’s a striking photograph of gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey in Arthur Kempton’s new book Boogaloo that connects the beginning and the end of the writer’s narrative at once. In 447 pages, Kempton sets out to tell the history of popular black music in 20th-century America, tracing a line from Dorsey, best known perhaps as the author of “Precious Lord,” to Suge Knight, the thuggish head of the modern-day rap label Death Row Records. The picture of Dorsey, taken when he was young, shows him in his other guise, as Georgia Tom, the bluesman who teamed up with guitarist Tampa Red to produce bawdy Depression-era hits such as “It’s Tight Like That.” The flame from a struck match about to light his cigarette, his coat collar coolly upturned, and his eyes brooding with a languid hint of menace, he suggests, as Kempton says, a caption tht would state Unsaved. Dump the knit applejack cap and he could pass for a contemporary hiphop hero.

Dorsey’s story is the first in a series of biographical tales that Kempton uses to construct his ambitious project, the alpha to Suge Knight’s omega. His early conflict between whether to write popular or religious music eventually resolved into a gospel blues that profoundly transformed the culture of the African-American church. It also embodied the Manichean struggle that is underscored throughout Kempton’s book in other performers and composers such as Sam Cooke, who left the gospel milieu behind to become one of the first black singers to make deep inroads into the heart of white middle America. For Dorsey, though, as for Cooke, the lesson learned and applied was that music was a business; or, as Dorsey put it, “You got to know how to work your show,” whether it was in the name of the Lord or of more earthly powers. Much of the dramatic arc of Kempton’s story rides on the economic machinations of the entertainment figures, like Dorsey and Motown’s Berry Gordy, who brought black popular music to the forefront of American life.

Kempton’s book has arrived this summer replete with glowing reviews from those twin towers of liberal culture, the New Yorkerand the New York Review of Books (to which Kempton is a frequent contributor). Don’t buy it—figuratively speaking, anyway. Boogaloo is a very mixed bag, a work apparently devoid of any original research, drawing heavily on the previous labor of titles such as Michael Harris’ The Rise of Gospel Blues and Rob Bowman’s Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. Given Kempton’s intent to create a panoramic saga of his subject, such a synthetic approach might not matter if it produced fresh insights, but it doesn’t. We already know, for example, from Daniel Wolff’s You Send Me that Sam Cooke had reached an artistic cul-de-sac before his strange and violent death in 1964 (and we’ll doubtless know more when Peter Guralnick’s biography comes out). We already know that Berry Gordy, like many other music industry magnates, was not an exemplar of virtue and loyalty in constructing the empire of Motown.

Ultimately Kempton’s literary sampling yields a decent enough overview of the evolution of boogaloo, assembled in the time-honored manner of Great-Men-of-Music. The achievement isn’t to be taken lightly, whatever one thinks of his methodology, but even within these parameters there are curious oversights and errors: what, for example, is a reader to make of the omission of Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris and the jump blues they popularized, paving the way for both R & B and rock and roll of the 1950s? Kempton leaps from Dorsey to Mahalia Jackson to Cooke, using their involvement in gospel to generate his narrative link. In doing so he leaves untold the important tale of the post-World War II transition in black popular music.

There’s also Kempton’s writing style, which works as jarringly as the tattered synapses of a dry drunk. It’s nearly impossible to make sense at first of sentences such as the following: “Jackson was on television enough to seem a presence when not much else her color was that had any purpose but easing older viewers into a new habit of leisure by serving them up comic stereotypes handed down from movies and radio, or selling fresh music to the consumer class being made of America’s young.” Come again? Or, “In its preparation the native cuisine that Wingate served didn’t filter out as much as Motown did the flavorings used in kitchens on the side of Detroit where Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin learned to cook.” For a book that celebrates the rhythm and groove of musical soul, this prose ain’t exactly dancin’.

Kempton also treads clumsily in matters of racial terminology. He favors the archaic Harlem Renaissance term “Aframerican,” which doesn’t quite trip off the tongue; he euphemistically substitutes “N(egro)” whenever he quotes a black speaker using the more loaded word (sounding particularly fussy when said speaker is the pulp writer Iceberg Slim, whose book Pimp is employed tiresomely as a counterpart to the story of Motown founder Gordy); and he refers to white people twice as “crackers.” As Kempton himself might say, what street did this white boy grow up on?

The academic discomfort suggested by these elocutions may also be indirectly responsible for the book’s larger failings. Kempton has attempted to write a comprehensive history, but by the late 1970s he starts to lose his way, veering back and forth between George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic ensembles and the first rumblings of hiphop, setting up connections that are never really fulfilled. Faced with the rise of first disco (funk on cocaine) and then gangster rap, Kempton seems uncertain of whether to damn or to praise. His liberal sensibility, at ease with the progress of both musical and social history for most of the narrative, distills less efficiently in the atmosphere of what we might call Late Boogaloo; the samples of hiphop are just fragments shored against the ruins, baby.

Such is the result of the monolithic strategy that Kempton has chosen to use. It would be foolish to argue that black popular music—gospel, jazz, the blues, R & B, the oral toasting tradition, all of it—has not been a primary influence on American entertainment and culture. What’s missing from Kempton’s book is the complex cross-pollination that brought us to where we are today, the exchanges and adaptations of form and style tht continue to permutate throughout hiphop, techno, and mashing. Musician and writer Allen Lowe’s underground histories American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo and That Devilin’ Tune represent the roots of that evolution more thoroughly than Kempton’s (although Lowe so far has written mostly about the 1900-1960 era). Still, it would be remiss not to mention some of the many nuggets of reading pleasure that Boogaloo provides, such as George Clinton’s revelation that much of the inspiration for Parliament Funkadelic came from Ishmael Reed’s masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo, or Stax singer Otis Redding’s response to Bob Dylan when the icon of 1960s white American cool asked him to record “Just Like a Woman.” Redding demurred, on the grounds that the song had “too many fucking words.” It’s a funny and ironic moment, the author of the proto-rap “Subterranean Homesick Blues” being dismissed by one of the foremost poets of soul in terms that anticipate Johnny Rotten. Of such odd communions was American music made and unmade.

--David Brent Johnson

[Stefan Wood]

I'm halfway through this book, and while I find many parts illuminating (even if they were drawn from other texts), it is the combination of social, economic, and political issues that make this book work for me so far. I agree that I don't know why (nor have I yet found his explanation) he left out blues, jazz etc., my guess is he feels that gospel needs to be addressed more as an influence on popular music than has been allowed. I haven't read the Sam Cook bio, yet Kempton's interpretation doesn't offend me the way other researchers who try to "get in the minds of their subjects" do.