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.ÿþLyndon Johnson pushed through a much tougher act than Kennedy hadever envisioned, he did so in part by packaging it as a fitting memorial tohis murdered predecessor.In so doing, Johnson inadvertently reinforcedthe notion that Kennedy had always been a staunch and indefatigable allyof the black cause, eager for the kind of thoroughgoing civil rights legisla-tion that was enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.In the wide and enduring wake of Kennedy s tragic death, few of thesesubtleties surfaced in the black community.Virtually all of the reservationsabout the nature and extent of Kennedy s commitment to black aspirationsand civil rights disappeared.Most African Americans chose to embraceKennedy, in Son House s poignantly cracked but still defiant words in President Kennedy, as  the best friend we had. The dozens and doz-ens of recordings that chronicled black America s grief about its loss andsympathy for Kennedy s bereaved family were thus important in definingthe way in which the president would be remembered and honored in theblack community and in the larger American culture.The sheer numberand emotional potency of these recordings help to explain why Kennedyhas been widely perceived as a civil rights hero: a man whose image wasdeemed worthy of a place on the wall of many a black home alongsidepictures of the other slain giants of 1960s American political life, MartinLuther King Jr.and Bobby Kennedy.There were other factors involved, tobe sure, but these songs constitute an underappreciated part of the cul-tural apparatus whereby the dead president s place in American memorybecame firmly established.If Guido van Rijn s exhaustive coverage and commentary on theKennedy  death songs adds a new dimension to our understanding of theprocess by which social memories of the Kennedy presidency were cre-ated, this is merely one of the many signal contributions of his book.Wealso catch glimpses of an industry in transition, with many of the oldand largely arbitrary, commercially driven, or plainly racist divisionsbetween musical categories collapsing.Some of the  blues artists, whosepolitically oriented material is discussed here (Hank Ballard, Ray Charles,Bo Diddley, Little Willie John, Wilbert Harrison, and Robert Parker, forexample), straddled the boundaries between blues, rhythm and blues,rock and roll, and nascent soul music.While some invariably whitecritics bemoaned the adulteration of some kind of mythical  pure bluesForeword [ xv ] [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]