"Feeling Bad for No Reason"

I know nothing about music apart from what I like.  I don't even think I could tell you what (and if there is anything) I don't like.  But lately I've been wondering maybe how I can be a little more specific in my work here, studying African-American expatriates in Paris and I've been giving some thought to what got me interested in African-American culture in the first place.

As a kid who grew up in Los Angeles I spent a good amount of my childhood in a car--in traffic.  You know, I'm sure my parents would report different, but I don't really remember minding, and as a child who grew up in a car--in traffic--my favorite pastime of traveling is still listening to music.  I would lie in the back of the van with my ear next to the car speaker while we were in bumper to bumper traffic listening to my dad's mix tapes and the oldies station.  I never got to choose what to listen to, and I don't think I ever expressed preference--except when I complained that the Classical music made my stomach hurt, which by the way is still the case, and my parents would change the radio station.  But there was one song in particular that was played often on KEARTH 101.1 which I have loved and never tired of.  "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye.  I cried if my father tried to change it.  Alas, when I had no knowledge of skin color, no understanding of race, no preference for one or the other, Marvin Gaye was my first love.

It was years later, probably High School when I found a Marvin Gaye album on my father's shelf and found this song again, and never let it go after that.  My family can vouch for how often Gaye's "What's Going On" album was played in our house that year.  I followed Marvin Gaye straight into the history of Motown, into the legacy that was black music.  It didn't take long to find Big Band from there, and Swing, and Jazz, and for a little while I lost myself in Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.  This, by the way, is a nice place to loose oneself.  But I soon returned to what really got me going.  Duke Ellington and Count Basie emerged.  Then, I continued to pry into the music of African-American culture.  And I was in love again with these voices.  Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, oh, Louis Armstrong, and then I found Fats Waller, Bessie Smith--and I just kept going. Robert Johnson, Josephine Baker.

My sister caught on to the whole thing.  She started listening to some Soul, to some Gospel, and so my family were plunged into the world of African-American music.  I started studying French, and found through a professor here at BYU Ben L'Oncle, a French-Blues singer who I fell in love with.  I came home and stopped listening to anything else, other than this soulful, bluesy stuff that was melancholy and imperfect.  And I was thinking, why is this something I can't let go of?  Why is this something that is so much a part of me that I can't say "I'm going to study African American expatriates" without saying, "You know?  Josephine Baker... Ada "Bricktop" Smith.  And what I want to want is to study the writers, and the intellectuals, but I think I'm going to have to admit to myself sometime that its the collision of France which has always appreciated the melancholic with old African American blues and jazz which has rarely had reason to be anything other than melancholic, that really gets me.

Maybe that gives me a place to start.  I've been wondering--why France?  What's the point in going there?  Who will I talk to?  What will I study?  I don't know anything about music, but could I?  Could I do something right by Marvin Gaye?  Pay  him back for this gift he's given me.  And keeps giving me.

I am white and white is black and black is white and black is black

I need a post to do some thinking, or else the thinking just won't get done.  Lately I've been asking myself what I'm doing this for.  What's the point of doing all this work?  How does it apply to me when I'm looking at history and not necessarily interviewing people?  And who will I talk to, and what will I spend my time doing?  And what do I want to come out of this field study with?  What do I want to know?  Why do I have to go to France to know it?

People have written all sorts of things on the blacks in France, especially those who went there after the Great War.  And I think most of the people who have written biographies or histories of appreciating these people have far more authority and understanding than I do.  I'm not really trying to compete with them on any publishing level, and I'm aware that next to no one will read whatever it is I come up with in the end, but I have to do something that I find worthwhile.

What got me interested in this idea is that I haven't met a whole lot of people who know about the blacks in Paris the way they know about the whites in Paris.  The elephant in the room is Midnight in Paris in which no black expatriates are present apart from Josephine Baker in the back of the room.  Sure you see F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway--all important American players in Paris at the time, but why the hell didn't he talk to Josephine Baker, and where were Ada "Bricktop" Smith, James Reese Europe and Gene Bullard?  Why wasn't he having conversations with intellectuals like Langston Hughes?  Or at the very least, why weren't they present the way they should have been?

This is what American Studies is about for me--why are we so certain that American=white when it doesn't?  What I want for myself is to put these people in an American context as Americans and I don't want the most famous of these people--Josephine Baker--to be a "who's that?" anymore.  Now I guess I can't change anything, and I'm more than aware of that.  So what's the point then?  What do I want out of this given that I can't make a difference?  If this is just a jumping off point, a place where I can learn how to develop some important skills.

More and more I'm thinking maybe I do want to find an African-American community in Paris and talk to the people I find.  In English, in French.  But whose to assume they'll let me if I do find them?  And that's why I want a backup plan.  What I would want to interview these people for is to put the people I'm currently interested in, in context.

Why I have to go to France is a harder question to answer because I could theoretically just study African-Americans in Paris and Paris itself and the 1920s and black history and then apply all the things I want to about American Studies to my book-learned understanding.  The reason I want to go to France is purely selfish.  I want to be an American in Paris.  I want to know what it's like, and I want to know how it differs from the things I read about these people going through.  I want to walk the streets they walked, and I want to learn they language they had to learn.  I want to live in the city that is well-known for racial equality, and I want to know if that's true.  I want to meet people, especially black Americans, and I want to know what life has been like for them in Paris.  Is it like the Paris of the 1920s in any way?  But most of all--what is it about France and Paris in particular that attracted these people?  Is it just the romance of the place, or is it something else?

I never believe that romance jazz about Paris.  Then I went there, and somehow I understood what people meant.  That's why I think I need to go for a longer period of time.  Because you can be told a lot of things about a place, but can you really put yourself in the context of it without experiencing it?  I don't think you can.

Why are we so set on not including the African-American experience in with the study of "America."  We talk about how slavery affected the black American population, but always with the intention of switching back to "white mode" and how it affects whites now.  Who the hell cares how it affects whites now when it's still something that's present in this country for blacks now?

I loved Midnight in Paris, but I remember thinking at the end of that movie, after thinking about how much I thoroughly enjoyed it, that it was still a white-washed American history, even if it was in Paris.  And I KNOW you can't tell every story at once, but I don't understand why it has to be a white story OR a black story, when we've been together, whites and blacks, all this time.  It's the 21st century.  Isn't it about time we started talking about how separate our histories are?  Isn't it about time we started melding them?  After all, I, a white girl from Los Angeles couldn't be American without the African presence, and a black girl from Virginia certainly couldn't be American without the Anglo presence.  That's kind of what makes us uniquely American.  Is anyone else willing to admit that?

This project idea still needs a lot of work, I guess that much is obvious.