Sustaining Blues, Sustaining Minneapolis

    The uprising in Minneapolis going on this week reminds me of the uprisings and the atmosphere surrounding African and Native Americans 1965-1971 when I lived there. The blues musicians I played with were concerned with survival—their own, and also that of the blues. Their paychecks came from bars, nightclubs, concerts and festivals where they performed. Blues was undergoing a revival then, and the blues audience was shifting in that decade from mostly black to mostly white. Work wasn’t hard to find, but the musicians were worried that the new audience would move on to something else, and they—we—didn’t know when that would be. (It turned out to be around the time Nixon resigned from the presidency.)

Looking back with today’s ideas about musical conservation and sustainability it’s easy to see that we were concerned about blues’s sustainability. My African American friends also were concerned about the sustainability of their lives. Police in Minneapolis were tougher on African Americans even than they are now. It was after all a time when the Civil Rights Movement was becoming militant and turning into Black Power. In 1967 a series of uprisings on Plymouth Ave., on Minneapolis’ north side, involved looting, burning, and shooting. None of my musician friends was directly involved with these uprisings, but the cops suspected anyone and everyone who was black. One of their friends, guitarist Sonny Rodgers—I was barely acquainted with him—was in prison. (His Wikipedia profile fails to mention this.) I don’t remember what charge he was convicted on, but I do know that my other blues friends avoided the cops whenever possible. When Rogers got out of prison, he got back to blues and in 1990 his recording of “Cadillac Baby” won a W.C. Handy award.

But I’m digressing here. It was a time of increasing demands within the black community, then just as now. In 1968 black students at the University of Minnesota occupied the administration building for eighteen days, demanding an African American studies program. The University established a Native American studies program, but African American studies had to wait for a few more years.

Some turned to the arts. Milt Williams, a black activist playwright, put together a musical “revue” that he called “Dat Feelin’,” a history of African American music. It was performed in 1970 in the city's most prestigious venue, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater. He asked our band, led by Lazy Bill Lucas, to represent blues. We were to be stationed in a slave hut, where Bill was to sing a blues song and we were meant to accompany him. I asked Williams if he wanted a white boy (to use the prevailing black vernacular) involved, playing blues in a slave hut. He said yes. He added, not unkindly, that I was a member of the band, I belonged there, and I would have to make the best of it. It wasn’t the first nor the last time I stood out as the only white person in an otherwise all-black group of people.

Minneapolis, 1970. L-R: J. Titon, W. Lucas, G. Buford.

There was other unrest in Minneapolis at this time, especially over the Vietnam War; but nothing like the Plymouth Ave. uprisings that lasted, off and on, for a year. We were on the north side of Minneapolis from time to time, playing blues in all-black bars, but never during the uprisings. Besides, Bill lived on the south side, in an apartment just off Lake Street; and we spent many hours in his apartment drinking Fox Deluxe beer (it cost only $3 a case, including the deposit), eating (fried chicken, mostly), and playing blues. 

It turns out that the Minneapolis uprisings going on this week were on the south side, not the north side, of the city. In fact, the 3rd police precinct building that was burned Thursday night was only a few blocks from Bill’s apartment. This photo of myself (on the left), Bill (center), and George “Mojo” Buford (right), was taken in 1970 in an alley across the street from where Bill lived. Bill died in the last century, but the uprising was happening right in his old neighborhood. I recognized some of the buildings. History repeats itself. Will we learn anything this time?