On Highway 61 Quotes

“BLACK MUSIC DIDN’T stop with the blues in Mississippi but followed the river to its end, to New Orleans, an island in a swamp created by the natural levees the river left behind after centuries of floods. It was the only place for miles around dry enough for Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to stand on and establish it in 1718, naming it for the regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans. Philippe was a truly debauched man who slept late and never worked hard and loved food and sex, and the city has honored his memory ever since.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“Minstrel music was party music, vigorous and sexy in contrast to the prissy bourgeois music of the era. That is why it succeeded. And in succeeding, it established the central role of African American music in American culture, one that has endured to the present, and made a first introduction of African American culture to the greater American culture. The first minstrels violated, distorted, and ridiculed the black man’s music, but they also clearly demonstrated an appreciation for it. They were as confused about race as America has always been, but they loved the music dearly. Some things don’t change.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“if I had known to what use they [Southerners] were going to put my song, I will be damned if I’d have written it.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“Just as Huckleberry Finn was published, the first generation of African Americans raised in the postslavery era began to come of age. Among them were people with musical talent, and at first they went to work in minstrelsy, in the well-worn patterns of show business they’d inherited.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“The truth is that Robert Johnson wrestled a superb art out of the blues tradition, an art that has appealed to generations of both black and white listeners, an art that is an essential element of the ongoing progression that is the freedom principle in operation. Forget the context, the mysteries, and the lies; those twenty-nine masters represent artistic truth.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“Rock ’n’ roll, in fact, would be African American culture’s ultimately most powerful gift to the white children of the ’50s, ’60s,”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“As Stephen Spender put it, “Music is the most powerful of all the idealist drugs except religion.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“While there was plenty of free-floating xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-intellectualism around, what would be called McCarthyism was less a product of the American people as it was the collateral damage inflicted by the return to full power of the corporate world and its right-wing political allies.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“Bechet even briefly played with Duke, and Ellington would take the counterpoint, romance, and beats of New Orleans music and build a compositional cathedral.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“The hoax worked because of the West’s absolute belief in its superiority to people of color; if a savvy Westerner could not explain such a trick, it must be real. The rope trick filled a cultural need—and revealed the gullibility that such delusions of superiority inevitably create.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“The American cultural scales were teetering, with the stable orthodoxy of WASP assumptions being challenged by the unwashed hordes of immigrants, African Americans, and working-class people along with intellectual and aesthetic developments broadly known as “the modern.” Ragtime would help tip the scales.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“Minstrel music was party music, vigorous and sexy in contrast to the prissy bourgeois music of the era. That is why it succeeded.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“The notion that nature was something made for man to dominate was the first of four major elements of the American creed that the nation’s first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, would challenge. (The other three shibboleths were that America was the noble exception to all nations in its moral perfection, that Christianity was the only possible American religion, and that the Protestant work ethic and its implied worship of materialism were desirable and essential elements of any life.)”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“What caused the cultural shifts of the ’60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

“As minstrelsy and spirituals were succeeded by the new musical forms of the turn of the century, increasing numbers of white people began to join Twain and respond to African American life by seeing the intellectual shackles in their own lives and learning the lessons that those at the bottom of the social pyramid had to offer.”
― Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom