But on the classic-rock station—with the exception of Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy—there were no black artists. This patently exclusionary narrative was drilled into my consciousness before I was smart enough to question it. It had little to do with music and almost everything to do with the biases of gatekeepers. The story of classic rock as told by decades of radio airplay, magazine profiles, and rock books is a saga about white guys, because all other kinds of people have typically been rerouted to other genres, even when they were making rock music.
