That’s Right Nate

Sometimes, it feels like the Obama administration is incapable of doing the right thing.  Last night, President Barack Obama hosted an evening honoring the music of the Civil Rights Movement in the East Room of the White House. The event featured a younger generation of musicians as well as luminaries of the Civil Rights era, including Smokey Robinson, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan.  Now I understand that this is Black History Month and of course that means the President is going to celebrate the Civil Rights movement, even Bush did that.   However, despite the appearance of white artists, the other side of the civil rights movement remains again unreported.

In the 1950s and 1960s, while the Civil Rights movement was exploding in the South, a whole generation of whites watched the reports on the news and felt sympathy.   These whites huddled around small black and white televisions and they kept their culture alive with their own musical heritage.   This White House celebration would have been a great opportunity to salute them.  Just think how much it would mean to this country to have the Ray Conniff Singers reunite.  Here are a few suggestions for a more inclusive musical evening next year:

I have been searching for some time for a way to get in touch with my roots as a white person by finding a musical form that is purely white and not influenced by African music and especially soul. Now, this is not racist.   In fact, African-American influence has done so much for music that it’s very difficult to find a musical art form that remains exclusively white and not influenced by other African culture.  Now, it isn’t true that white people do not have soul.  Somebody like say, Van Morrison has a lot of soul.  Here is Jon Cleary, a piano player giving an example of a white guy with soul:

He’s not making fun of black musicians or trying to sound black.  He simply is somebody with a lot of soul.  Unfortunately, the African-American influence is very clear in his piano playing and his singing.   My quest to find a whiter more Caucasian musical style brought me far away from the Creole influence of Jon Cleary’s New Orleans to America’s heartland.    It is here that Celebration Iowa takes incredibly talented high school students and shows them how to sing and perform while removing all remnants of distracting soul from their music.   I believe I have found my cultural heritage with Celebration Iowa 2007′s performance of We Built this City:

I think this is exactly what Michael Steele was talking about.   We need a Republican to do this sort of thing and we can reach out to a whole new audience.  Their website is located here.

The great Jonathan Coulton with his ode to Spring.

I have a fondness for this band from New Foundland.   Some of their music is quite traditional folk.  This song is not.

I mentioned him last year during my White Male of Distinction feature and also in my interview yesterday at Zenyenta’s great website, so when I came across this Youtube video honoring the Edison of Poultry, I thought I’d share it with my loyal readers.