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Black music, white teacher: an apology owed

Mance Lipscomb, via Morehead State Public Radio

We  favor blues musicians without testosterone, without teeth, without sight, without color.

Black women, androgynous white men, and old Black men are safer. Old, scratchy vinyl recordings are safer. But we shy away from the Black man in his prime.

The blues are easy to play poorly yet sound good to white ears. The Stones made a living on this.

I was playing Robert Johnson as the seniors strolled into class on Friday. I’ve gotten in the habit of playing music as the day starts, and Robert Johnson was the morning headliner.

Robert Johnson, photo via NYT

The third marking period started a few days ago. The class just had their first quiz. Most failed, not unexpected given it was the first quiz for seniors that did not count. Senioritis has kicked in.

So I sang an off-the-cuff blues piece about senioritis backed by a harmonica riff lifted off YouTube.

And now I realize this was a mistake.

So tomorrow I will start class with an apology. Not for playing Robert Johnson, a fierce blues man who died far too young. Not for singing, though that may warrant a separate kind of apology.

I will apologize for my lack of respect. Using that art form at that moment to entertain students was wrong. It felt off at the moment, but I wasn’t sure why. I thank Justin of objective opinions for his kind reminder.

(Yes, I will still sing and play the blues by myself for myself–but I cannot share what I do not own.)

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A song is a song only when sung

From four years ago today, because I need reminding
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Dave Keeney is a friend of mine, who happens to be brilliant, though that’s not a word he’d likely use to describe himself. He’s an apple farmer, a musician, a story teller, a mensch.

Dave on the left, Old Town, New Year’s Eve
(photo by Derek Daniel)

First time he met my Dad, my Dad (once a fighter pilot) was in bad shape after a series of strokes that made him pretty much unintelligible. Except to Dave. After trading stories, Dave got out his guitar and sang one of the funniest songs I had ever heard, “John Denver’s Last Flight.”

Later, after dinner, I asked Dave to play the song again. He would not.
“Why not?”
“Don’t remember it.”
“But you just sang it, how could you forget something you know?”
“I made it up.”
I still regret not ever hearing that song again, and Dave never gave it a second thought. The song is a song while sung, and that’s more than enough for Dave, even as I (and I am embarrassed to say it) thought of the song’s potential commercial value..

If the product is the goal, then we lose the “we” in this thing we’re doing, whatever this thing we’re doing happens to be.


Once an object is made, a song sung, a story scribbled down on the back of of an envelope, it’s no longer us, merely an artifact of who we were.

We become machines, we are machines, in our relentless chase to create the perfect product, make perfection a standard in whatever we do. We want everything to be professional, the new code word for standardized.

The us is in the process, the joy is in the doing.
A song is a song only as a song is being sung.



Fuck professionalism, it’s no way to live nor love.
I’m going back to my ancestors’ world of artisans,