Berserker2c

Your boyfriend is simply wrong. The idea that you have to have been a black slave struggling through life to play the blues is a complete myth that goes back to the way John and Alan Lomax marketed Lead Belly, the way Robert Johnson was mythologized as having sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, or the way Son House was coached to sound like himself 30 years younger. The myths were created in order for bluesmen to be digested by the American mainstream during the "folk-blues revival" of the 50s and 60s (which was really just the white discovery of the blues).

This romantization and exoticization that you had to be a sharecropper to play the blues was proliferated in the media:

"Theirs [bluesmen] was our finest and oldest native-born music, the blues, country-style, pure and personal, always one Negro and a guitar lamenting misery, injustice, but still saying yes to life” (Newsweek)

This notion was proliferated to an extent by bluesmen themselves, as bluesman Big Bill Broonzy said “blues is a natural fact, something that a fellow lives. If you don’t live it, you don’t have it” (Titon, 232).

Benjamin Filene expressed this myth articulately:

"Revival audiences yearn to identify with folk figures, but that identification is premised on difference. Roots musicians are expected to be premodern, unrestrainedly emotive, and noncommercial. Singers who too closely resemble the revival’s middle class audiences are rejected by those audiences as “inauthentic.” Generally, then, the most popular folk figures – those with whom revival audiences most identify – are those who have passed a series of tests of their “otherness.” (Filene, 63).

All these romanticizations and the reclassification of blues as folk created enough distance between the identities of the artist (who is seen as an outsider/other) and the listeners (who seek their own identity), so that the white audience could assimilate this seemingly “authentic” music in order to redefine themselves.

The bottom line is: it doesn't matter how you were raised, what your fortunes were in life, or the color of your skin - anyone with ears and hands can play the blues and folk music. And if you really want to take issue with "appropriating hardship" - a ridiculous idea - you should take issue with the first people to "borrow/steal" that music and get insanely rich off it such as Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, (any white rock and roll/blues band from the 60s/70s.)

Sources:

Filene, Benjamin. "Creating the Cult of Authenticity: The Lomaxes and Lead Belly." Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2000. 47-75.

Newsweek Article, “Looking for the Blues.” July 13, 1964.

Titon, Jeff Todd. "Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival." Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois, 1993. 220-40.

I know you have answered this a couple time already, but I would appreciate some more explanation than just Van Zandt. I am very curious about your influences, specifically old blues guys, if any. Your sound really reminds me of guys like Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt (specifically his fingerpicking technique). Also just want to compliment you deeply. I have told my friends about you with the introduction that if I could actually bring myself to write songs instead of just jam all the time and if I could sing I would basically create exactly the music you make. Oh also what kind of electric hollow-body guitar is that you play in videos like The Water? Thanks!

I live in SF and when my parents visited from NYC we went to Napa/Sonoma where they became wine club members at a winery. Being a member means they receive shipments of wine 4 times a year, sent to NYC from CA. According to you this should not be legal?