The Sixties, Popular Music, Protest and Confused Messages

The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who continue to gather fans fifty years after they formed. Music is a major part of sixties nostalgia but protest movements were also in full swing, and over contentious issues still reverberating today. This series of blogs looks at how sixties popular music provided another voice to protest groups but also how just music style possibly mirrored disparities more widely found within the internal politics of protest. Besides the bands and music more readily associated with the decade, jazz was highly popular.

Not many people have heard of The Real Ambassadors, an album telling the story of the US State Department funded cultural exchange tours of the late fifties and early sixties, using high profile jazz performers.[1] By choosing a ‘home-grown’ popular music culture the US sought to promote itself to the world as a liberal and ‘cool’ alternative to totalitarian communism. Performers like Louis Armstrong and John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie found themselves wrestling with being representatives of freedom, while at home African Americans suffered racial segregation.

Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo, was loved by many for his music and his gentle, happy persona. In 1957, during the Little Rock Crisis, he angrily told a reporter, much to the surprise of friends and fans, Eisenhower was “two faced” and Faubus, the Arkansas Governor, was an “uneducated plow boy.”[2] Upcoming cultural exchange tours were cancelled Shortly afterwards Eisenhower used troops to force integration, a move rewarded with gratitude in a telegram from Satchmo. Reading Satchmo Blows Up the World, you could become convinced that the actions of a jazz ambassador proved pivotal in the President’s intervention; that might be stretching a point.

In 1964, the political strength of jazz was tested again. Dizzy declared he was to stand for President. Badges advertising “Dizzy for President” were originally sold to raise funds towards civil rights campaigns but this evolved into a ‘light hearted’ election bid to put jazz men in the White House. Miles Davis would have become Minister of the Treasury. Policies included one rule saying, ‘people applying for jobs have to wear sheets over their heads so bosses won’t know what they are until after they’ve been hired.’[3] So, both Satchmo and Dizzy supported a principle but, perhaps, similar to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, they found delivering a completely unified approach sometimes more difficult to sustain.

Musical style exposed differences between the two jazz stars. It went beyond their interpretations of how jazz should sound. Dizzy was instrumental in the creation of Bebop style, a modern, more chaotic form of jazz; Satchmo, who started playing before Dizzy was born, played the traditional stuff. Armstrong’s grinning, humble appearances and songs like ‘When It’s Sleepy Time Down South’ created resentment in Dizzy, who often went along with views that Satchmo appeared to be an ‘Uncle Tom.’ This negative racial stereotype conformed to ideas held by pro-segregationists and was thought to be counter-productive to the civil rights cause.

                                 

In the title track, the ‘The Real Ambassadors’, Satchmo sings, with his unique and soulful voice, about the ‘illegality’ of racial segregation. One hopeful lyric predicts a day when the only difference between people ‘will be in personality.’[4] What a shame that Louis’ personality and style created what seems like unnecessary ill feeling.

Paul Wilson.

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[1] Brubeck, Dave and Iola, The Real Ambassadors. Louis Armstrong and His Band, Dave Brubeck and others. Columbia COL 476897 2, 1962. CD.

[2] Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong an Extravagant Life (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998), p. 471.

[3] Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser, To Be or Not to Bop, First University of Minnesota Press Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 457.

[4] Brubeck, The Real Ambassadors.