Kodak’s Hidden History: Frankie Taylor Jones and the Black Appalachian Coal Camp Experience

By: Columnist and Scholar Dr. Emily Hudson

Name:                                   Frankie Taylor Jones         

Date of Birth:                       December 23, 1933                      

Place of Birth:                      Kodak, Kentucky

Date of Death:                    May 11, 2005

Parents:                                Frank and Cassie Taylor

Spouse:                                 Ralph Robert Jones, Sr.

PHOTO DESCRIPTION

Picture taken around 1944 in the Kodak, or Meem-Haskins Coal Camp. Pictured from right to left: Frankie Taylor (Jones), Charlene Jones, Emma Jean Hopkins, and Catherine Jones.

(From Billy and Deloris Jones collection)

I remember well the trips our family took to Kodak, Kentucky when I was a little girl to visit my Daddy’s brother who was a coal miner living in that community. It was always a day filled with adventure for my siblings and me. We looked forward to sailing paper-made boats down the creek, swinging across the creek on an old tire suspended from a rope tied to a branch far up in a tree, playing on the coal train cars, even when we knew better! It was always a treat to visit Uncle Ralph, Aunt Frankie and our cousins there in the coal camp.

Kodak, located near Vicco, Kentucky, was often referred to as Meem-Haskins when I was growing up. It is believed that Meem-Haskins was the last name of the owner of the coal company and was from Dayton, Ohio. According to my research, the Meem-Haskins Coal Company operated in Kodak from 1930 to 1955 and employed 150 workers.

I lived in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 80’s. For at least two summers I drove back home to Hazard and conducted oral history interviews from some of our elder members in the Black community, including Frankie Taylor Jones, Aunt Frankie. I sat down with her in 1983 to collect her story of growing up in Kodak, married life, and life as a coal-mining family. (Her interview is part of my larger article published in “Reshaping the Image of Appalachia”, edited by Loyal Jones, 1986, entitled “The Black American Family in Southeastern Kentucky: Red Fox, Kodak and Town Mountain”.) – Emily Jones Hudson

Frankie Taylor Jones shares her experience of going to school in the coal camp.

We had this one little, old-roomed school. Everybody went to school, and it was so full. Had one schoolteacher, we fought and scratched. We had John Willie Combs; he was teaching then. John Willie Combs taught me when I was in school. The school was a little old brown building... down the lower end, where the cemetery was, it set right there in that bottom.

Did Blacks and Whites go to school together?

No! The White kids had a school on down the road, they had different rooms. Their school wasn’t like our school, we had a little one-room shack.

Was there a name for the Blacks school?

No, didn’t have no name for it. Just Kodak Colored School is what everybody called it. Go up in the Colored holler is what they’d said. All the white people stayed on down below where we stayed. The White’s school, they had about five or six rooms. It was a big gray building on the left side of the road right before you get onto the dirt road going up into the holler. The bridge (right before the dirt road) separated the Blacks from the Whites.

Frankie Taylor Jones shares about family life.

Ralph’s mother (Mabel Allen Jones) taught Sunday school. Ralph’s family had chickens, cows, hogs... we didn’t have any of that... well, we had chickens.

How did Ralph’s family own so much?  I don’t know, I don’t know if Ralph’s father made more money or what, I don’t know. Ralph’s father, Will Jones, was a member of the Masons, if that had anything to do with it.

(Speaking about after marriage.) We had our own garden. We had our own hogs made our own lard. We didn’t have deep freezers, we carried water from a spring. There used to be a pump, but it broke so we used a well bucket and dropped it down there. The kids would go get water before going to school. Played football with milk cans, played Church.  

Ralph worked in the mines. Carl (Ralph’s brother) worked in the mines. Everybody worked in the mines but Billy (Ralph’s younger brother). But Billy was always building. He made all these little fancy chicken coops on the outside the house; they had an outside house, you know, where they stored all their hay for their stuff in the wintertime. Billy would build couches, but Carl and Ralph always worked in the mines. Ralph been in the mines before he went into the army. Ralph spent about three years in the army, then he went back in the mines.

Where the name “Meem-Haskin” came from?

Now I’m going to tell you what they told me. I don’t really know. But they said it was a man that owned all the land, and it was named after him. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But that’s what they say, that’s where the company got its name from this man. And now they call it Kodak Coal Co. But we always got our mail in Kodak. Just the tipple and mines were mostly named after him, but the mail always came to Kodak. The houses and everything up in there belonged to the coal company. They just charged house rent. When they got their paycheck, the house, stores, everything belonged to the same company, they paid so much out of their paycheck. If it was $25, they took out $25 before they even got their check.

They sold the houses; we bought the house we stayed in, but they wouldn’t sell the land. That’s why everybody moved because they kept the land. I guess for coal and this kind of stuff, you know, and we paid $50 a year for the land the houses stood on. If you moved, you had to tear your house down (Ralph and Frankie moved out of Kodak- around 1972). There were only four houses left up there.

Was that all the Black families that lived up there?

Yeah me, Bobbi Jean, Winkie, Aunt ‘Dessa... all kin people.

There were no Black people who lived below the tipple?  Ms. Gussie stayed up on a little hill. The only reason we moved is because they (the coal company) wanted to truck the coal out of the holler. They were wanting to buy Ralph a trailer and set it down there in the flat on the side, but I said I wasn’t going to move down there. I liked it up there (the head of the holler in Kodak) because we could raise our own garden and stuff like that.

Did most of the white families live in trailers?

They had quite a few trailers but most of them, just like we did, owned the homes, but they didn’t own the land. Some of them are still like that up there. Their houses were better than ours; their houses, some were painted, they had nice porches, we didn’t have no big, beautiful houses, you know.

We had Church in the schoolhouse. Through the week was school and on Sunday was Church. We would get up and go to Sunday School and after that have 11:00 o’clock service, just like they do now. We used to have a preacher named Rev. Thomas, long time ago that lived on the camp, him and his wife. They were Baptist, we didn’t have nothing up there but Baptist, that’s all we knew.

Where did the White families go to church? They had their own church, you know where the bridge, where the store used to be up in the hollow? The other street that went the other way from the road that went up into the hollow, well they had church up there, they had a church house. It was quite a few more white people than black. They had a nice church.

Did you all (Black and White) have a hard time getting along?

We used to fight a lot, when we had to go to the store, we had to go down by the white camp to the commissary. Quite naturally they going to throw rocks at us and holler ‘nigger’ at us from their porch. But we used to fight all the time, the parents never bothered us, just the kids.

What kind of things could you get at the commissary?

Prices? They were cheap, we ‘drawed’ script, we didn’t trade with money. Like where Ralph worked at, they had an office that you put a script card in the window, and they’d give you maybe $25 or $30 and you take that in there and you can trade and get your groceries. They wasn’t high, you could buy clothes, we bought all our kid’s clothes at the commissary. They had groceries down one side then on the other side of the store, they had clothes, pants and other, you know, stuff like that. Not the good clothes like they wear now but back then they were pretty clothes. They were cheap, not high like they are now; you could buy cream for 8 cents a can.

Frankie Taylor Jones shares about the life of a miner in Kodak.

Did most of the Black miners who worked in the mines live in Kodak?

Some of them came up towards Breeding’s Creek, like John C. Clayton and his father. That was a long way to come, but they made pretty good money, and you could hardly find work unless you were working in the mines. So that’s why they came up there.

Did Black miners and White miners get along?

Ralph never had no problem. He said that one time he had this boss that was just bad to say nigger. When the big mines closed down- Kodak mines- they closed the commissary down. The mines that are up there now are not the same ones that were being worked during Ralphs daddy’s time. It’s not the same drift mine. The one Ralph and them worked in is closed in. When Ralph worked there, they had trains to come around, all that’s gone. They don’t have a drift mine now, they just take the coal up there and dump it into the tipple. Back then Ralph and them would hand-load cars with shovels. Been over 20-30 years since they closed Meem-Haskins mines. Other mines had contracts with the tipple and continued to truck coal to the tipple augar mines.

Ralph switched to night watching when the mine closed down. There were picketers, all the little tipples were picketing. They didn’t want anyone working the tipples. They were blowing up the tipples, they weren’t getting the price on coal they wanted. They didn’t want no trucks to come in. They blowed up the tipple and coal trucks. One night Ralph was night watching, the picketers came up and ran him off. They dynamite the tipple, and it burned and burned for a long time. Approximately 20 years ago, in the 60’s, they rebuilt the tipple. The mines even tore up the tracks, blowed them up, to keep coal from being bought in. Some of the mines were unrecognized. Some of them weren’t unrecognized; that is what they (the mines) were mad about. They set up there and let the contract run out. They wouldn’t sign it for a pretty good while and maybe they would just take in non-union coal. The union men that got paid good money, they would get mad and wouldn’t let ‘em bring this coal in like that. It was the union men that was picketing. Ralph was in the union, sometimes when they (the mines) come out picketing, they wouldn’t let them work for three or four months. Times really got hard.  

(“Times really got hard.” I can clearly remember how during those hard times, Billy Jones, my dad and Ralph’s brother, would grocery shop in Hazard and deliver those groceries to Ralph’s family in Kodak. Week after week until the mining dispute was settled.)

Here is a poem inspired by my childhood visits to my Uncle Ralph and Aunt Frankie’s home in Kodak, Kentucky. The trips were usually on a Sunday afternoon and that meant sitting down at a supper table prepared by Aunt Frankie.

AUNT FRANKIE’S TABLE

Kodak is filled with colorful memories
Sunday supper at Uncle Ralph’s
Coal wasn’t the only goal
A seat at Aunt Frankie’s table
Was the mouth-watering prize
Fried chicken fit for a king
Every part of that bird eaten
Including the liver, gizzard, and wing
Tomatoes so fresh they bled red
A mountain of mashed potatoes
Buttered from top to bottom
Sprinkled religiously with salt and pepper
Green beans snapped the night before
Seasoned with fatback
Cornbread fried brown in the skillet
A mean side of collard greens
Corn on the cob
Apple cobbler and fresh-squeezed lemonade
It was an honor to have a seat and feast
At Aunt Frankie’s table
On a Sunday afternoon
(Published in HOME, A Collection of Poetic Thoughts and Things, 2024)

Blues, Folklore, and Black Identity: A Legacy of Resistance and Revival

By: Lamont Jack Pearley

Furry Lewis c. 1927

On this day, March 6, we recognize significant moments in both blues history and the broader landscape of Black American folklore. From the birth of blues legend Furry Lewis to the infamous Dred Scott decision and the enduring legacy of folkloric themes in his lyrics, the cultural fabric of Black America is woven with resilience, artistry, and profound storytelling. The recently released film The Blues Society further deepens this narrative by documenting a pivotal moment in blues history, making this an opportune time to reflect on these interwoven legacies.

On March 6, 1893, Walter “Furry” Lewis was born in Greenwood, Mississippi. As a country blues guitarist and songwriter, Lewis was a key figure in the Memphis blues movement. His intricate fingerpicking, storytelling lyricism, and emotive performances captured the essence of the early blues. Though he stepped away from music for a time, he was rediscovered during the 1960s folk blues revival, showcasing the timeless nature of the genre and its ability to reach new audiences across generations.

Furry Lewis’s music is steeped in folklore and sacred symbolism, reflecting traditional Black vernacular and behavioral patterns passed down through generations. His lyrics often reference hoodoo, biblical allegory, and spiritual traditions that survived through oral storytelling. Songs such as John Henry and Kassie Jones recount legendary figures who represent strength, resilience, and the struggle for justice—motifs commonly found in Black American folklore. Additionally, Lewis’s frequent mention of trains, crossroads, and supernatural elements ties into the blues’ long-standing connection to spiritual journeys, transformation, and fate. These lyrical patterns reinforce the idea that blues music was more than entertainment; it was a vessel for sacred knowledge, communal identity, and cultural preservation.

The Dred Scott Decision: A Dark Moment in Black American History

On this same date in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that enslaved people and their descendants were not citizens and had no legal standing in court. This decision deepened the racial divides that would lead to the Civil War, underscoring the systemic oppression that blues music would later express. The blues was, in many ways, born from the suffering and injustices that cases like Dred Scott highlighted—a raw, emotive art form chronicling the struggles and triumphs of Black life in America.

The intersection of Black and Indigenous histories in America is deeply significant. The Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, among other Southeastern tribes, had long histories of interactions with Black individuals—some through enslavement, others through kinship and resistance. However, it is also crucial to acknowledge that some Black individuals are not simply connected to Indigenous communities through external relationships but are, in fact, Indigenous themselves—full tribal members with ancestral ties predating European contact. Many Black Indigenous people maintain their distinct cultural traditions while contributing to the shared musical and storytelling practices that shaped the blues. This history reminds us that the Black American experience is multifaceted and includes deeply rooted Indigenous heritage that continues to shape identity, folklore, and artistic expression.

The Blues Society: A New Film Documenting Blues Revival

Amid this historical backdrop, the recently released documentary The Blues Society sheds light on the blues revival of the 1960s and the role of white enthusiasts in preserving and promoting the genre. It interrogates the complex relationship between race, ownership, and cultural appreciation in blues history. As much as the film acknowledges efforts The Blues Society to keep the blues alive, it also raises questions about appropriation and the erasure of Black agency in defining its own musical heritage.

In this episode of Jack Dappa Blues Radio, I sit down with filmmaker and scholar Augusta Palmer, daughter of Robert Palmer, a founding member of the Memphis Country Blues Society. Augusta and her team worked tirelessly to bring The Blues Society documentary to the public. Also joining the conversation is The American Songster, Dom Flemons, who is featured in the film. Together, we discuss the film’s journey, the legacy of the Memphis Country Blues Society, and the broader cultural significance of blues preservation.

The blues is not just a genre of music; it is a lived experience, a cultural expression, and a historical record of Black struggle and triumph. From Furry Lewis’s soulful performances to the folklore woven into his lyrics, from the injustices of Dred Scott to the contemporary discussions in The Blues Society, today’s date serves as a reminder of how deeply intertwined these narratives are.

As we reflect on these histories, we must continue to honor and amplify the voices that originated this art form. The blues belongs to the people who lived it, and it is our responsibility to preserve, contextualize, and celebrate it within its rightful heritage.

Join the Conversation

What are your thoughts on the legacy of the blues and Black folklore? Have you seen The Blues Society? Let’s discuss the intersection of history, culture, and music in the comments below!

What I Fight For - Change The Game!

By: Dhane Pearley

 A protest is the gathering of a group of people fighting for a shared belief. Depending on the group of people, it can be a peaceful protest, or it can be a violent protest. Most protests are usually peaceful because it is easier for people to hear someone talking than someone yelling at them. Nevertheless, there is always a group that thinks violence will fix the problem because their peaceful idea did not succeed. When a protest occurs, it is usually to help bring light to a situation that is not getting justice or the proper respect. I would protest against something I want to change for my generation and the upcoming generations. My son or daughter should not experience the struggles that I went through at their age. That is why I stand up for what I believe in to make a change. I am a young black man in this world protesting against POLICE BRUTALITY. The black community has been suffering from this for years, and we have not received justice. It is slowly improving but not enough to stop our protest. I will always stand tall when I am protesting against police brutality because WE ARE HUMANS, NOT ANIMALS. 

An example of being treated as animals is May 25, 2020, when George Floyd died at the hands of a Minneapolis white police officer, Derek Chauvin. Officer Chauvin murdered Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 10 minutes until he took his last breath. He killed a black man. That could have been my father or uncles getting strangled to death like that, and there is nothing I would be able to do. So, I stand with my brothers and sisters to protest against police brutality, and I will continue fighting until our voices are heard. Will we ever be equal? Not sure, but fighting for what is right is something I believe. My parents always say to be an honest man and be passionate about my ideology. I will continue to stand with my people, walk with whoever believes in what I do, and change the game.

Shut Up and Play: A Brief History

BY: COREY HARRIS

You've taken my blues and gone —

You sing 'em on Broadway

And you sing 'em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed 'em up with symphonies

And you fixed 'em

So they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what's about me —

But someday somebody'll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me —

Black and beautiful —

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it'll be

Me myself!

Yes, it'll be me.

– Langston Hughes

Shut Up and Play: A Brief History

Back in 2014, when Officer Daniel Pantaleo suffocated Eric Garner in a chokehold one long and hot summer  day in Long Island, New York, scores of professional athletes decided to express their frustrations. Some kneeled while others donned shirts bearing the words, “I cant breathe” as a way to silently but visibly protest the continual confluence of Black death, racism, poverty, and endemic police brutality in the US. Many Black sports fans welcomed this expression of solidarity while many White fans did the exact opposite. The reprisals came immediately: threats to end the athletes careers and public denunciation from the (mostly white) fanbase. “Shut up and play’ seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among a certain sector of the American populace. How dare these athletes ‘get political?’ They really should be thankful. Look at (insert a non-White, right-wing athlete or entertainer here)...why can’t you be more like him? Why do you guys make everything about race? If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to Africa?

As pro-football player (and disgraced welfare thief) Brett Favre confided to USA Today in 2021, “I know when I turn on a game, I want to watch a game. I want to watch players play and teams win, lose, come from behind. I want to watch all the important parts of the game, not what’s going on outside of the game, and I think the general fan feels the same way . . . I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I don’t watch anymore; it’s not about the game anymore.’ And I tend to agree.” Favre was speaking honestly. For a large majority of White Americans, the weekly gatherings of teams of well-paid Black people wearing uniforms should only be about the function that they are to serve for the fans and never about real problems of class division, poverty and police abuse. Pain is compartmentalized and then put on the shelf. Not now, not like this, not like that, this is not the time/how dare you. This thinking can be traced all the way back to slavery, during which the value of the enslaved resided solely in their labor and never in their ideas about freedom or anything else (even though Black ideas were stolen en masse for centuries to create White wealth). ‘The help’ was to provide a good experience for the paying public (to whom they owe so much) and nothing else should matter. Stop bleeding while you’re tap dancing boy; you’re spoiling my fun. 

Many Black blues players have also been told to ‘shut up play’. Considering the beginnings of the modern entertainment industry in blackface minstrelsy of the 19th century, it should not be surprising that blackness is viewed as a commodity that dare not speak for itself or yearn for freedom. Indeed, the first blackface performers were White men, and even later in the century, when Black actors began ‘blacking up’ their faces for their turn onstage they knew that they were embodying a caricature, a White fantasy that could not exist in real Black life. This meant that it would have been ridiculous for them to employ the minstrel platform to speak out on the real issues of Black folk. (They had their own churches, communities, associations and families for that.) In fact, seeing real Black people onstage without shoe polish or burnt cork was considered an anathema, a horrifying insult to the genteel audience. The White psyche simply could not accept black bodies occupying the same space. They demanded a scarecrow. Thus the minstrel, as a creation of the White mainstream, continued to serve as the foundational model for Black performance in the US. Much of our vocabulary in speaking about race has not changed since the days of enslavement: people routinely speaking of their job as ‘the plantation’; your co-worker might boast about being the ‘HNIC’ at the workplace, some jest about being ‘worked like a slave’, while a supervisor is called the ‘overseer’; off-code Black folk are dubbed ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘Sambo’ (we should read Uncle Tom’s Cabin again to realize that Uncle Tom was actually true to his people and an honorable man while Sambo was the betrayer, an agent of the slave master, but I digress). This minstrel mode is still very much with us, in every video depiction of Hennessy swigging, Philly blunt stankin’, crotch grabbing and encrusted-grill-grinning, young Black male rappers on the corner as well as every trope of the twerking, oversexed, long-nails-and-lace-front-hair sister with the tweety bird eyelashes and the loud mouth from around the way (Cardi B and Glorilla…y’all good?). The circus is alive and well. Racism, like Malcolm X said, is like a car. Every year they come out with a new model. Seen in the light of history, our present entertainment industry is only the newest iteration of minstrelsy. The only major difference is the loss of the burnt cork and shoe polish. The outrageous spectacle of Black debasement remains.

So how does one invoke blackness without the blackface? Therein lies the challenge that all non-Black practitioners of Black music in every era have had to navigate. Once the pendulum of social opprobrium shifted and open displays of blackface were seen as relics of a bygone era, all of the behaviors and practices of the former industry continued. Where once the only method of distribution in the 19th century was sheet music, the much faster means of technological repetition (phonograph, radio) and product distribution (air mail) in the twentieth century meant that the minstrel behaviors persisted and multiplied. There was never any break with the minstrel era. This made it possible for an actor like Al Jolson to rise to the heights of fame as a cantor gone bad in The Jazz Singer and be taken seriously, and decades later for Elvis Presley to imitate a Black Memphis swagger (while stealing the songs of Arthur Crudup and Big MamaThorton) that made the girls swoon. To say that the careers of neither of these early and mid twentieth century century artists (and thousands more) would have been impossible without Black music is obvious. I am saying that White artists’ embodiment of various tropes of Black behavior continue to inform and influence the direction of popular music around the world. Moreover, minstrelsy enabled a conception of blackness as merely a learned behavior that can be separated from the people who produced it and transformed into a commodity. Unsurprisingly, as in the minstrel era when the actors onstage were rarely Black and didn’t associate with Black folk, the portrayal of blackness in entertainment has continued to function as a malleable commodity that does not depict a real spectrum of Black life but rather enacts a repetitive material caricature of Black life, a phat and fantastical realm where all the women have long nails and fly-away hair with a BBL and a Gucci purse, and the men rock unlaced Tims and big beards while pushing shiny whips with oversized rims while their pants hang far below their derriere. Indeed, today’s minstrelsy is the prescribed trap house circus that now masquerades as ‘the culture’, streamed endlessly on any device to feed the addiction. The online, mobile, and voracious consumer culture sets the ever quickening pace.

The opening poem by the great Langston Hughes is as much a product of his politics as the disdain expressed for black music by those who like Black expression but don’t like Black folk so much. His reference to Broadway and Hollywood Bowl reminds us that for more than a century, blues music has been employed to spice up the blandness of mainstream American life. The Blues, that Black folk song form of obscure 19th century origins, is nowadays a mere commodity, a product on the marketplace that is bought and sold with as much regularity as water, land or clothing. And like other prized commodities, it is subject to the politics of those who produce, curate, package and sell it. Just imagine what the recorded blues legacy would sound like if every bluesman had been allowed to simply record the songs he knew (and that the folks back home loved) instead of continually being forced to record ‘a blues’ to keep the industrial money mill that was the race records industry running smoothly. The curators of the race record industry in the 1920s decided that no Mississippi bluesman should be recorded playing his version of Broadway or Tin Pan Alley tunes because the segregation of sound dictated that these Black people were isolated and marginalized country folk with little awareness of the outside world (a nod to Karl Hagstrom Miller). Such performances would directly challenge this entrenched view. 

Besides, recorded music came on to the scene as a commodity and not an honest chronicle of Black musicking. These men ran a business to make money and not preserve Black folkways, so the question of ‘who would buy it’ determined their every decision. Even in the days after it could get a Black man swiftly lynched, mixing ‘politics’ with their entertainment was bad for the bottom line. This environment where White owned media, promotion and booking dominate is still the ever-present reality today. Business don’t give a damn about your culture…or your politics. This is a powerful sentiment in a country where Black political power has always been feared, thus it is violated, oppressed and controlled. What forms has Black political power assumed under the oppressive conditions of Jim Crow segregation in the US? As Dr. Greg Carr would remind us, this is an issue of governance. Who should govern Black people in America?

Google defines politics as “the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”

In his classic work, In Search of the Black Fantastic, Black political theorist Richard Iton asserts that Black cultural expression is Black politics. He also has an answer for the question as to why Black culture is so endlessly creative:

Hyperactivity on the cultural front usually occurs as a response to some sort of marginalization from the processes of decision-making or exercising control over one’s own circumstances; what might appear to be an overinvestment in the cultural realm is rarely a freely chosen strategy. American blacks are not “different” in this respect because they have chosen to be but because of the exclusionary and often violent practices that have historically denied black citizenship and public sphere participation as problematic and because of the recognition that the cultural realm is always in play and already politically significant terrain. In other words, not engaging the cultural realm, defensively or assertively, would be, to some degree, to concede defeat in an important—and relatively accessible—arena. (9)

The organizing power of Black culture is precisely why Black political messaging that runs counter to the dominant political discourse is always suppressed or banned. Simultaneously, mainstream media and the political apparatus are not afraid of employing Black cultural tropes and stereotypes via mass entertainment to mobilize the Black vote. Witness the spectacle of Atlanta rappers Trina and Saucy Santana performing in a ‘no voting, no vucking’ video for the Democratic National Committee to understand the extent to which Black mass entertainment, stereotypes of Black promiscuity, and the over-sexualization of the Black body now drive how mainstream (liberal and conservative) Whites view Black folk. This is seen as a valid appeal to Black politics. There is no other constituency that is subjected to such messaging. This is by design. Thus political outreach to Black people assumes the minstrel form: it is portrayed as the White mainstream sees it, and to the benefit of the White mainstream. Like a grinning, shucking, and jiving blackface minstrel, it does not in any way align to real Black life nor real Black politics. The good news is that Richard Iton is here to tell us that the way Black culture is set up, we can do ‘politics’ (meaning address, discuss and creatively solve our own problems) even while we are suffering or having a good time. We don’t compartmentalize our trauma nor our joy. It infuses everything we do. This is in direct opposition to the European mind which goes to Africa and plucks sacred and everyday objects out of the fabric of everyday life, categorizes them as ‘art’, hangs them on the museum wall in the high-rent district back home and charges admission for ones to behold their ‘discovery.’ Such displacement renders the artifact mute. Extracted from context and meaning, it serves the function and meaning necessitated by those who control its new environment. Shut up and play all over again. 

The real sentiment behind ‘shut up and play’ is that Black people should not govern themselves nor exercise political power. Black struggle has always been fueled by culture, by song: the catalog is full of union songs, anthems, gospel songs and protest songs. Judging by the profound impact of Black cultural politics in American life, it is extremely effective. Black entertainment, to the White mainstream, is a respite from the reality that surrounds them, an escape from the banality of their everyday existence. The history of suppressed Black political power in America has determined the modes of its expression. Denied for so long the ‘normal’ avenues of political agency, Black people’s everyday culture necessarily became a legitimate avenue of political expression. The challenge is now who will control and define this culture and to whose benefit. Black blues players who oppose the dominant white construction of blackness (otherwise known as ‘authenticity’) must take heed…and keep infusing their everyday git-down with the political. Because if Black folk don’t speak up, then no one else will.