A Whiter Shade Of Blues White Entertainers And Fans Now Dominate A Music Style Once Emblematic Of Black Culture

It’s midnight on Beale Street, the world-renowned home of the blues, and B.B. King’s club feels like an old-style juke joint: the smoke, the sweat, the down-home sound.

The house band is wailing out “Hoochie Coochie Man,” the classic Muddy Waters tune, and bodies are writhing over the dance floor. Like the Memphis tourism guide says: “Ain’t nothing like this. If you want the real thing, the genuine article, you gotta come to Beale Street.”

But it’s not exactly the real thing. Beale Street in its heyday was a hub of black social life; the blues created there was the music of a dispossessed people. Seventy years later, almost every black face in B.B.’s club is behind the bar, on the stage, or in a picture on the wall. The thrill of the blues may not be gone, but these days, it’s mostly white people who are feeling it.

“It’s a sad thing, but time changes everything,” said 80-year-old Rufus Thomas, a legendary Memphis musician who hosts a blues radio show in town. “The blues were born black, but they ain’t black no more.”

With its ubiquitous neon signs, historic markers and souvenir shops, Beale Street is often criticized these days as a Disney-style theme park for white tourists. But the whitening of the blues has extended beyond their home.

There are now about 165 blues festivals and 125 blues societies, all but a few dominated by whites.

This month’s International Blues Talent Competition will feature 43 bands; only two are mostly black. And white artists have jumped to the top of the blues charts, often by covering the hits of old black bluesmen.

The big question in blues circles is, have whites taken the blues away, like some double-crosser who steals his friend’s woman? Or have blacks given the blues away, like a lover who takes his woman for granted?

Some critics say whites are exploiting a great black legacy, cheapening a rich black heritage. They say authentic blues have nothing to do with the House of Blues, or the Blues Brothers, or the 60 products that now use the blues in their ads.

But others point out that as young blacks turned to soul, disco, funk, R&B, and now rap and hip-hop, white artists and audiences helped the blues survive by bringing the music to the mainstream. Beale Street, after all, was a ghost town 10 years ago, and the blues were struggling, too.

“It’s too bad that blacks are drifting away from the blues; it’s one of their greatest contributions to American culture,” says Howard Stovall, director of the Memphis-based Blues Foundation. “But let’s face it: If it weren’t for whites, this music might be dead right now.”

Stovall has his own connection to the blues: Waters drove mules on the Stovall family’s 5,000-acre Mississippi farm, and titled his first album “Down on Stovall Plantation.”

To be sure, the music industry has made progress from the days when Elvis Presley could record his version of “Hound Dog” without giving Big Mama Thornton a dime in royalties. Today, Rufus Thomas gets paid every time a Burger King ad or Broadway musical uses one of his songs, and successful white artists like Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt and the young Jonny Lang are relatively quick to give credit to their lesser-known black influences.

But no matter how many “No Black. No White. Just the Blues.” sweatshirts are sold on Beale Street, race is still a divisive issue in blues circles. The white takeover of the blues reminds some of white minstrels who toured the South in black-face in the 1800s singing spirituals they stole from slaves. Even some white blues experts insist that the music is “a black thing,” a cultural phenomenon that whites can never fully understand.

“America has not solved its race problems, and neither has the blues world,” said Larry Hoffman, a white producer who writes for Living Blues, a magazine that does not cover white blues artists. “It’s nice that white audiences and white musicians have brought more attention to the blues. But it’s still black folk music, and I wish people wouldn’t forget that.”

The early bluesmen came to Beale Street from the unforgiving flatlands of the Mississippi Delta, and they found a raucous world of dice games and policy rackets, bootleggers and fortune tellers. They brought their bottleneck guitars and cheap harmonicas to P. Wee’s Saloon, the first and best of the juke joints, the dive where W.C. Handy, the Father of the Blues, wrote his most famous songs. There they created a new American music, with echoes in Africa but roots in the pain and poverty of the South’s cotton fields. They sang simple songs about boll weevils and chain gangs, about loving and drinking, songs that sprang from their hard experience.

Beale Street, to put it mildly, is not what it used to be. Recently, the old P. Wee’s site reopened as The Hard Rock Cafe; Planet Hollywood is also scouting a location. The street now includes more than a dozen gift shops, a few art galleries, and a billboard for Rush Limbaugh.

To blues purists, the new Beale Street is the ultimate metaphor for the commercialization of a pure and noble art form. But the street has its defenders. The old Beale Street, they say, died decades ago, a victim of urban renewal and black migration to the North. The new Beale Street has helped boost Memphis tourism by 70 percent over the last decade, keeping the city’s unemployment rate below 4 percent and putting money into merchants’ pockets. More is on the way soon: Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy is opening a new club, and Gibson Guitar is building a plant with a “family entertainment complex.”

Blues activists and authors, almost all of them white, often make the same argument about the music: They’re just glad people are enjoying the blues again. Of course, successful black bluesmen like Kevin Moore, who goes by the stage name of Keb Mo’, are equally glad those people are buying their CDs.

“It doesn’t bother me that most of my fans are white,” said Moore, whose albums are No. 3 and 4 on the Blues Revue charts. “It just tells you something about what’s going on. Whites are discovering the blues, and they’ve got a lot of disposable income to spend on music. I’m not going to complain about that.”

Moore, a native of south central Los Angeles, sings a traditional country-blues style, 12 bars with a shuffle beat. But since the 1970s, when soul stars like Aretha Franklin and James Brown began singing about respect and black pride, many blacks have seen that kind of blues as a symbol of the bad times before the civil rights movement. Black artists who have turned to the blues have often blended it with soul, funk and even rap, hallmarks of the Southern “chitlin circuit” that still manages to attract black audiences.

“A lot of my friends see the old blues times as bad times, so they don’t want to sing about those conditions,” said Kelley Hurt, 31, a black woman who sings lead for the North Mississippi All Stars, a traditional country blues band. “But I think there’s nothing more important than knowing your roots.”

If you don’t got the blues, the oldtimers used to say, you can’t sing the blues. That is why Hoffman says he stopped playing gigs in 1964, and has instead devoted his career to producing records for overlooked black bluesmen.

White people can play the blues, he says, but they cannot represent blues culture. He says that takes a black man like Rufus Thomas, a throwback in his jaunty black fedora, white bucks, salmon jacket, and yellow paisley tie.

“Folks like me, we’re trying to keep the heritage of the blues alive,” Thomas said. “But we can’t stop the world from changing.”