Grazian is blue about the blues--Katie Moore

Grazian talks about “the sliding scale of authenticity,” (2003:13) with an example being that blues performed by black musicians are perceived as more authentic that white musicians, and both are more authentic than the Japanese American performers in Chicago.  But isn’t this assuming a shared baseline of what is authentic? Just as BBQ-lovers have different ideas of “authentic” BBQ (vinegar-based in the Carolinas, ketchup-based in Texas), don’t different audiences have different ideas about what authentic Chicago blues is?  Even as each musician seems to be performing for their audience’s ideas of authentic Chicago blues (or what the performer thinks their audience considers authentic), they are forming this idea of authenticity off of the foundations already set in their own minds.  Similarly, the audience judges the performer’s authenticity based on whatever touchstones they have in their own mind, and how well the performer embodies this, but perhaps these touchstones are different for different people.  Could not the Japanese blues performer be representative of the “authentic” Chicago blues experience in the contemporary city, a place where minorities groups can carve their own identities within a city rooted in the blues of African American musicians.

Race seems to be almost inseparable from public consumption of the blues.  Grazian highlights that while blues popularity has progressively dwindled among black consumers, it has steadily gained popularity in white audiences who, in consuming blues, want to be consumed by the environment and experience of “authentic” musicians: i.e. musicians exhibit blackness in the “right” ways (20).  The bluesy accountant in the below comic, like many white consumers, was probably exposed to blues music through popular culture references like the Blues Brothers, who they can self-identify with, but believe that true blues will be found on stage in the run-down bars of Chicago where “authentic-looking blues musicians, who are generally uneducated American black men affected by blindness, or else they walk on a wooden leg or with a secondhand crutch” tell the stories of lost love and bad luck through the strumming of their guitars (13) .

However, Grazian laments that “the search for authenticity is always a failing prospect” for the true blues expert (whoever that is), much to the dismay of local blues bar-rats nostalgic for what once was (11).  But for the “thrill-seeking” blues tourist, perhaps the few hours of smoke and mirrors and music is enough to satisfy the “authenticity they fetishize” (59).  So who’s authenticity matters most?  Isn’t it, after all, in the eye of the beholder, wherever they lie on that “sliding scale?”