While Ford may have said such things on the one hand, he apparently said on the other some pretty nasty things about negro music being foisted onto an unsuspecting (white) citizenry by scurrilous Jews.
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Giving money to black schools doesn’t equal being anti-racist. It equals wanting to keep blacks in their place. Tuskeegee was at the center of the DuBois and Washington disagreement about how to deal with white supremacy, with Washington seeking to accomdate it and have blacks trained for jobs that wouldn’t challenge it, while DuBois advocated for racial uplift and having African Americans engage in all aspects of life and to push for equal rights, with the black elite leading the charge.
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Absolutely true. I don’t think supporting black schools is only about keeping them in their place. but my understanding is that a great impetus for Ford’s relationship with those schools was his decade long friendship with George Washington Carver. At Ford’s facilities, Black workers were paid the same wages as Whites, and the percentage of African Americans hired by Ford was much higher that comparable industries. (Getting Started in the Auto Industry: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918-1947, Whatley and Wright, 1990 )
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Milliefink,
If you read up on the history of country music I think you’d find the blacdetroit argument pretty spurious. For one, the article hints at one of the real reasons country music is so white, that being that African Americans had their own vibrant culture in jazz and blues and other non-white cultural expressions that they were more interested in pursuing. For sure African Americans influenced the development of country music and some stayed involved much longer than others, Deford Bailey being one, and a name I’m suprised isn’t mentioned in the blacdetroit article. Anyway, it’s not a straightforward history by any means but I don’t think that Henry Ford not liking jazz (and being a racist) and promoting country music is proof that he is the one reason that country music is so white, there’s much much more to it than that. I’m definitely not defending Ford, I don’t think he deserves defending, I’m just trying to pushback against this idea that the history of country music is so simple that it can all be explained by one person’s actions. It’s a fairly obvious thing to point out but a complicated, decades long history is never that easy to explain.
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Or they were pushed into making “race” records by the industry maybe? You can’t discount racist structures when trying to understand the music industry, especially with southern musical forms.
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Sure that’s definitely a real possibility. There is evidence that many performers recorded what they felt the record companies wanted to hear, but of course no performer reinvented themself and their songs from whole cloth when they got in front of the microphone. I think a better way to view it is to see Southern culture as a tapestry woven from many many different strands some of them coming from the African American community, some from the various white ethnic groups and some from Northern and even more far flung influences such as Hawaiian. Those strands interwove to create many many different cultural expressions, one of them being country, another being blues, another jazz, etc and within each of those there are cross over elements. And of course racism played a role in how all of that developed, it definitely can’t be discounted or removed from the weave. But, it also can’t be said that one person, no matter how influential, came in after decades of cultural development and somehow rewove the entire tapestry. He certainly influenced some of the designs and presentation and how many of us may have first come into contact with it but he was by no means the sole hand at play.
For anyone looking for a good introduction to the richness of Southern musical expression I highly recommend Alan Lomax’s film ‘Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old’:
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It’s history, actually. The industry marketed hillbilly music (as it was called) to a white audience in the south, especially in Appalachia.
We’re talking about marketing and the music industry, not how people actually engaged with and expressed culture (which was indeed more complicated). It’s clear that these industry categories were no barrier to what people actually listened to and enjoyed, but it was a barrier what people could produce through the industry, which maintained strict segregation when it came to southern music, in terms of production and marketing.
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Mindysan33,
All good points. I suppose I’m more interested in the expression and development of the music as opposed to how it was marketed but as you note that is definitely where this conversation started from so thanks for pointing that out.
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Understood - I think that matters, but I’m not convinced you can fully extract one from the other. The advent of sound recording had profound implications for how we engage with music and how that music is sold and marketed is part of how we experienced music in the 20th century. Plus, we can’t discount social and political structures either.
It’s a messy story and it hits at something that many people care about deeply, music. No one likes to hear something that implies that the music they enjoy is somehow tainted by bad things like racism or baser motivations like profit motives, but it’s a part of the story of American music, I’m afraid, as much as the more transcendental aspects of music. It’s important to acknowledge all of it, I think.
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Except nitpicking that is the problem. You are complaining about something that has nothing to do with the actual premise of the article and instead are complaining about the presentation of the headline of a link to the article. That is the issue I took with my first post. It is classic reactionary rhetoric to complain about trivial mistakes that do not affect the body of work.
There is a real story here. It is in the linked article. You instead are complaining about a title, ignoring the story, and acting as if you are the guardian of truth by doing so.
An apt description of this post.
You didn’t read the article, as it was specifically about how modern square dancing’s “popularity” exists solely because of Ford’s activities. It did not say square dancing was invented by Ford or any of the other wild and idiotic statements people have made in this thread.
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Fair enough, I didn’t read the article, though I’ve read the history behind Ford’s promotion of old time music and dancing in the past. My response was mainly pointed toward the reactions of others to the article and headline which made them think, incorrectly, that the state of country music post-1920s was due entirely to Henry Ford’s activities.
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Get used to it; Cory Doctorow tends to play a bit fast and loose with the facts ^^’.
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Um, no; sorry, but you fail. This is a direct quote from the article above, in Cory’s own words:
“Wonkette writer Robyn Pennacchia went on a brilliant Twitter rant about the strange history of square dancing, which is not an old American tradition, but rather a 20th century hoax that Henry Ford and Dr Pappy Shaw created to get white people to stop dancing to music made by black people.”
Yes, Cory is incorrect, even if YOU are correct about the included link to Robyn Pennachia’s article. It’s not a hoax, that simple, so the claim here on BB is FALSE. Yes, Ford popularized square dancing for his own nefarious ends, but yes, it IS historically apt, for both Europe and the Americas.
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Correct.
So in your view whatever Cory writes is irrelevant and has zero impact, the only thing that matters is what the linked-to article says? You really think that, eh?
And after all the replies commenting on your position and why the critique of Cory’s actual words is worth making, you come back now and imply that “a world of difference” is “nitpicking”?
Whatever. You’ve made your point and several others have pointed out why we disagree, all for pretty much the same reasons.
Good day to you.
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Well, no, it’s a sloppy lie.
I think that what alarms people a bit about this, moreso than it would have a decade ago or so, is that posting sloppy lies has become a bit of a habit with Cory all while the popularity of BoingBoing has grown and his own status as an author has risen dramatically. Yeah, it’s a goofy pop-culture blog, not a news source, but I’d hope that this sort of thing would become less frequent, not more.
I mean, if another popular fiction author – say, Spider Robinson or China Mieville – still made daily posts on what used to be their silly little personal blog, but is now a multimedia empire of sorts, and their posts were known to consistently and eye-rollingly mis-state facts, their readers would be rightfully concerned that it’d reflect on their reputation as an author as well as a public figure. Maybe Cory should take a break.
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What you call nitpicking, is simply others call demanding their news doesn’t contain outright lies to intentionally create sensationalism. I guess some people have a higher bar? Others apparently are fine with the issues they care about being undermined by clickbait headlines and fake news descriptions. I don’t get complaining about the people with a higher standard than oneself.
If an author cares about money more than an issue, they will intentionally create a sensational title and writeup with misinformation. They do this intentionally to get both sides to stir the pot and create the disconnect in discussion, the exact thing you have issue with. Ironically that is their very point and what they are demanding is the only intelligent solution to your complaint… If you understand their point you’ll see they care about the issue more, not less, and they certainly aren’t undermining the issue. They want to discuss it, and are adamantly anti-racist. Your reply indicates a complete misunderstanding of the points they are making.
Clickbait and sensationalism are common and intentional media tactic and one that BB still makes fun of, but now is doing wholesale as well, which is the separate issue some of us have been discussing across numerous threads. BUT maybe you aren’t even aware of the bigger conversation across the threads? Maybe you haven’t been following this discussion over the course of the last few years? Obviously not based on your reply. I think that is the missing context to your understanding what they are asking.
Fact Checking™ used to be a journalistic tool and something any intelligent news consumer demanded.
BoingBoing authors used to bring us the story behind the story, a more intelligent and insightful look into something like this. They used to cull the chaff and deconstruct the bullshit. I remember what articles on this site used to be like, and since I care about this site and have been a dedicated member through thick and thin for ages, i don’t want to give up on it. I guess i just miss what BoingBoing used to be. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(also, fyi, you are conflating the article with the linked twitter rant. pssst. those aren’t the same thing. cheers.)
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Boing Boing isn’t news, it’s not journalism, it’s a cultural blog that covers a variety of things and are under not under the same obligations as news outlets…
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And anyone who arbitrarily just believes whatever they read on the net without questioning the veracity is doing themselves a huge disservice.
Anything I read here (or on any site for that matter) I do some research on before giving it any credence… even if it’s something that’s easily verified, like someone’s death… I still go check it out with other sources.
Surely I cannot be the only person who does this; I’d figured that such a logical practice would be commonplace on a forum like this one…
O_O
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