Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing The Blues?

Abstract

It is unlikely that [the blues] will survive through the imitations of the young white college copyists, the urban blues singers, whose relation to the blues is that of the trad jazz band to the music of New Orleans: sterile and derivative. The bleak prospect is that the blues probably has no real future; that, folk music that it is, it served its purpose and flourished whilst it had meaning in the Negro community. At the end of the century it may well be seen as an important cultural phenomenon-and someone will commence a systematic study of it, too late. Paul Oliver, Blues Off the Record

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