Why Do Whites Sing Black by Mike Daley



Why Do Whites Sing Black by Mike Daley

The rock critic Albert Goldman, who was later to become notorious for his biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, wrote an essay in 1969 for the New York Times called "Why Do Whites Sing Black?" This essay provides a classic framework of essentialism and selective representation in discussing white appropriations of the blues. In the present article, I use Goldman's piece as a framework for a discussion of the 1960s blues revival. I argue that the blues revival depended on a stereotyped representation of black ...