Head Butler is a great source for learning about great stuff and when I checked it today these lines about blues musician Junior Wells and his record, Hoodoo Man Blues, jumped off the screen and into my brain’s Seymour Krim arena,
If they sound as if they’re in a club, that’s deliberate; this is pure Chicago blues, raw as the liquor served in those joints and, in the slower numbers, smooth as the lines of sharp-dressed men working to seduce foxy women.
That’s classic cool white Jewish guy appreciation of a certain black scene, but nobody did it better than Krim. Here’s a taste from his 1959 “Ask for a White Cadillac,” about the same sharp-dressed approach,
And through all this street-embattled life ran the perpetual beauty of clothes, threads, duds!—bold, high-style dresses and appointments on the girls (flashing jewelry, dyed platinum-blonde hair over a tan face, elbow-length white evening gloves handcuffed with a fake black-onyx bracelet) while the guys were as button-rolled and razor-sharp as hip clotheshorses stepping right out of a showroom.
And what’s really interesting is an equivalent 1951 observation by the great A.J. Liebling. He sized up and dug a crowd showing up at New York’s Garden to take in a Joe Louis fight.
A high percentage of them were from Harlem, and they were dressed as if for a levee, the men in shimmering gabardines and felt hats the color of freshly unwrapped chewing gum, women in spring suits and fur pieces—it was a cool night—and what seemed to me the prettiest hats of the season. They seemed to me the prettiest lot of women I had seen in a long time, too, and I reflected that if the fight had been televised, I would have missed them.
There’s a lot of vicarious living going on here. And a special Jewish appreciation for what black culture allowed and Jewish culture did not.
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