Quotes from Dennis McNally

Just as Huckleberry Finn was published, the first generation of African Americans raised in the postslavery era began to come of age. Among them were people with musical talent, and at first they went to work in minstrelsy, in the well-worn patterns of show business they'd inherited.

As minstrelsy and spirituals were succeeded by the new musical forms of the turn of the century, increasing numbers of white people began to join Twain and respond to African American life by seeing the intellectual shackles in their own lives and learning the lessons that those at the bottom of the social pyramid had to offer.

The American cultural scales were teetering, with the stable orthodoxy of WASP assumptions being challenged by the unwashed hordes of immigrants, African Americans, and working-class people along with intellectual and aesthetic developments broadly known as "the modern." Ragtime would help tip the scales.

What caused the cultural shifts of the '60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

While there was plenty of free-floating xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-intellectualism around, what would be called McCarthyism was less a product of the American people as it was the collateral damage inflicted by the return to full power of the corporate world and its right-wing political allies.

As Stephen Spender put it, "Music is the most powerful of all the idealist drugs except religion.

Rock 'n' roll, in fact, would be African American culture's ultimately most powerful gift to the white children of the '50s, '60s

There's a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply.

Bechet even briefly played with Duke, and Ellington would take the counterpoint, romance, and beats of New Orleans music and build a compositional cathedral.

if I had known to what use they [Southerners] were going to put my song, I will be damned if I'd have written it.

Minstrel music was party music, vigorous and sexy in contrast to the prissy bourgeois music of the era. That is why it succeeded.

The hoax worked because of the West's absolute belief in its superiority to people of color; if a savvy Westerner could not explain such a trick, it must be real. The rope trick filled a cultural need—and revealed the gullibility that such delusions of superiority inevitably create.

I am not an artist in the independent sense, I'm part of dynamic situations, and that's where I like it.

The truth is that Robert Johnson wrestled a superb art out of the blues tradition, an art that has appealed to generations of both black and white listeners, an art that is an essential element of the ongoing progression that is the freedom principle in operation. Forget the context, the mysteries, and the lies; those twenty-nine masters represent artistic truth.