Black Music and the Civil Rights Movement Essay -- Black Civil Rights

On July 5, 1954, forty-nine days after the Supreme Court handed down the decision on the Brown vs. Board of Education case, a nineteen year old truck driver recorded an Arthur Crudup blues track called â€Å"That’s All Right Mama† (Bertrand 46). Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips found the cut and played it on his radio show a few weeks later. He received calls all over from people, mostly white, who wanted to hear more. He quickly located the musician and brought him into the studio for an interview, audiences were shocked to learn that Elvis was white (Bertrand 46). Elvis’s music brought black music into white mainstream pop culture almost overnight. The breakthrough of Elvis happening almost simultaneously with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement was no accident. As any scholar of the humanities would tell you that often times after a great war there exists a time of enlightenment, prosperity and reformation. One such cultural revival took place in this nation after the closing of the Second World War. The progressive thought of the ‘50s nurtured new ideas and cultures including the Civil Rights Movement and the fast spread of rock and roll. In an essay entitled â€Å"Color† written to Esquire magazine in 1962 the essayist James Baldwin describes the revival of white culture after WWII with the following passage: The Puritan dicta still inhabit and inhibit the American body and soul. Joy and sin have been synonyms here for many generations that the former can now be defended only on therapeutic, i.e. pragmatic grounds, necessitating a similar metamorphosis for the latter. Now it is suggested that we Live-a little! (Baldwin, Color 673) The â€Å"Puritan dicta† outlined by Baldwin represents the American ideology ... .... http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0261-1430%28199004%299%3A2%3C151%3ANJTSOS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T Lewis, John with D’Orso, Micheal. Walking With the Wind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. McKeen, William. William McKeen.com. 2004. 9 April 2004 McMicheal, Robert K. â€Å"†We Insist Freedom Now!†: Black Moral Authority and the Changing Shape of Whiteness.† American Music 16.4 (winter, 1998): 375-416. Shank, Barry. â€Å"†That Wild Mercury Sound:† Bob Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture.† Boundary 2 29.1 (2002): 97-123. Yamaski, Mitch. â€Å"Using Rock ‘N’ Roll to Teach the History of Post World War II America.† The History Teacher 29.2 (Feb., 1996): 179-193.