A Song From the HeartI
The birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll BY KENNY LEE LEWIS
magine that it’s 9,000 years ago. The ice sheets have retreated, and it’s time to move your family northward to better hunting grounds as the climate warms. You are a member of a nomadic tribe. Whether you are in what would become Europe, the Mideast, Siberia, China or North America doesn’t matter. What
Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson at Bob Dylan Concert, Knoxville, Tenn., Oct. 8, 1965.
you take with you is not so important. You are indigenous and resourceful. You can make whatever it is you need when you get to where you are going. But one portable thing that is definitely going with you is your song – perhaps many different songs that you learned from your ancestors. Maybe you will take that one drum that sounds so good, or your stringed instrument or the rattle your grandfather gave you. When you finally arrive at the promised land you seek, there will be a celebration, a thanksgiv- ing, and there will be singing and storytelling. The beat of the drum, the vibration of strings and the sound of percussion will match the tempo of your heartbeat, and you will be one with creation. All will be well. As a professional musician making my liv- ing in the performing arts, I think about these things and about how far we have all come. In the 1950s when I was born, the “Beat Gen- eration” began to break away from swing jazz and other “conventional” art forms to seek more tribal ways of approaching music and storytelling. The poets inside the coffee houses of Paris, Greenwich Village and North Beach, San Francisco only needed a set of bongos and a pen to get their point across. Then the radio stations in the south began to broadcast Afri- can-American influenced “race music,” and the white suburbs first heard the beat of the drum and the twang of the “tar” in a whole new way.
22 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2015
PHOTO BY ROBERT EDWARD BOLTON, JR. FROM THE ROBERT BOLTON COLLECTION (20408), UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
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