Who Has the Right to Sing the Blues? Investigating the Invisibility of Central Avenue

The members who create and consume specific genres of American popular music might well be conceptualized as citizens engaged in a common cultural endeavor. Gatekeepers who man the borders of those communities often practice a kind of aesthetic segregation, allowing entry to those who follow precepts of a given form and denying access to others who transgress those laws.

An extensive body of material produced in post World War II Los Angeles’ Central Avenue district has been either denied status as the blues - African-American popular music - or wrongfully dismissed as unsuccessful manifestations of the genre. Critics, historians and fans have largely excluded such artists as Roy Milton, Nellie Lutcher, Jack McVea and Amos Milburn from the black musical pantheon. In the 1940, a growing cadre of small businesses, many black-owned, released their music for the African-American market with great success. A portion of this material, furthermore, crossed over to the mainstream popular record audiences to serve as a tool of cultural integration.

Central Avenue music and artists were doubly segregated, from the mainstream audiences and in historical retrospect from black music. This paper thus explores the tensions of segregation and belonging in the cultural sphere. While the success of black music supposedly exemplified the consumer democracy of postwar abundance, distribution did not always signal full participation or membership in marketplace, genre or society. The artists examined in this presentation demonstrate that there is more than one way to confront the botheration that excluded communities face whether from their supposed superiors or their purported peers.