Songs can transcend different community boundaries and have different versions or iterations associated with those different communities.  Each community may construct a different meaning for a song.  This phenomenon raises the question of how we might think about what makes a version of a cross-cultural song seem authentic to the experience of a particular community.  I want to think about this issue of authenticity in relation to two versions of the song often referred to as “In the Pines.”  The first rendition is Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Tonight?”, and the second is its bluegrass version by Bill Monroe. 

With Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” the authenticity is attributed to the song by a white audience.  Lead Belly did not come to largely white audiences unmediated.  John Lomax markets Lead Belly to white audiences commodifying him into an authentic black experience.  To Lomax’s white audience, Lead Belly seems as if he is singing and drawing from his personal experience as a black man.  He adds short interjections such as “Tell me what happened…” adding to the emotion of desperateness of wanting to know what happened.  So he can embody authenticity that the white audience would imagine about the black community or experience, not just the singer himself. 

Was Lead Belly’s performance authentic to the black experience?  Conceivably, African American listeners could react in at least three ways.  One, they could find direct resonance with their experience thus experiencing the song as authentic to their experience.  Two, they could still experience the song as authentic representation of their experience but mainly because of made up images about the black experience existing in mainstream culture dominated by whites.  Or three, they could reject Lead Belly’s performance as unrepresentative of how they experience the world.  The last seems to hold true in this case.  Lead Belly was not at all popular with the black community.  His appearance at the Harlem Apollo Theater was characterized as a flop (Barker and Taylor, 9).  It seems the black community felt Lead Belly’s music did not represent their true experiences or feelings but rather what the white audience expected them to feel or experience. 

Where then does the sense of authenticity in Lead Belly’s performance of the song come from? Lead Belly’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” links to blues traditions, with respect to the way it sounds, the emotions involved in the song, the expression of the song, etc.  Not only has the blues been associated in most mainstream audiences with the black experience since it started as an African American folk style of music, Lomax also worked to present Lead Belly’s brand of blues as unadulterated by outside influence.  Lomax visited many penitentiaries and black communities where “Negros were almost entirely isolated from the whites” (Barker and Taylor, 16) just to find the most authentic and uninfluenced by white music he could find.  Lomax even claimed that Lead Belly was “authenticity personified” (19, Barker and Taylor).  Lomax’s idea of authenticity was having no white influence.  Further, the stripped-down way in which Lead Belly performed the piece, which might have been the result of his learning music in prison, was marketed by Lomax as a kind of primal expression corresponding to primitivist ways of looking at Africans already existing in the culture at large (Barker and Taylor).  Even with Lead Belly’s association with authenticity, he was not the first or the only person to perform a popular version of this song.  Bill Monroe had his own iteration called “In the Pines” as well.  Monroe’s version was in the style of the Appalachian musical traditions drawing on Scottish Irish elements.  We think of it as authentic to the poor white experience because it sounds like bluegrass, or country with more of a yodeling sound.  Monroe takes the song and makes it sound like it comes directly out of the Appalachian tradition.  This demonstrates the malleability of authenticity in a song.  What before embodied authenticity for a black group, now became authentic to the poor white Appalachians by way of connecting it to a musical tradition in America’s past.

Lead Belly connects to blues traditions which speak for the black experience.  Monroe takes and makes it bluegrass which speaks for the poor white experience in the Appalachians.  A single song transcending different cultural boundaries and still representing an idea of authenticity for a particular group of people can go to show that authenticity does not just come ready-made in a particular person, voice, or style but is constructed.  Often times, such sense of authenticity is made possible by way of its connection to either cultural imaginaries about a group of people or existing music traditions deep in America’s past.

 

Comments

[AmyMayper]

You’ve done a great job of examining and critiquing the authenticity of Lead Belly and the Monroe Brothers’ versions. Your comment on the “malleability” of authenticity is especially noteworthy. In the future, please try to include more descriptions of what you hear, specifically focusing on how particular aspects of the songs sound and what meaning they bring to the song overall. Using terminology from lecture is also important, and is a good way to make sure you’re examining how songs sound. If you have any questions in regards to your essay grade, please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail.