ABSTRACT
Royalty routinely visit the White House in America, but how often do kings bring a guitar named Lucille to the president’s home? The King of the Blues, Riley “B. B.” King, performed for President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on July 28, 1999, as part of a millennial celebration of American culture. King reigned as the featured performer among four other internationally recognized American artists: John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, Marcia Ball, and Johnny Lang. Later that year, the show was broadcast nationally on public television as “The Blues: In Performance at the White House.” According to PBS, the series was designed “to showcase the rich fabric of American culture in the setting of the nation’s most famous home.” 1
For African American performers like King and Cephas, the signifi cance of the White House performance cannot be minimized. B. B. King and John Cephas began performing blues for Black audiences in the era of legalized racial segregation, which limited access to audiences in White social arenas. Webs of inequitable laws and unjust customs enforced racial division in the United States constructed around a binary: Whiteness in opposition to Blackness. 2 The blues grew from longstanding African American oral traditions shaped since the 1870s by working people, itinerant musicians, and urban migrants in Black social settings. The infl uential music has informed the sounds and lyrics of jazz, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley pop, gospel, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, country, musicals, art music, and hip hop within and without the United States-not to mention poetry, literature, and the visual arts. Throughout the music’s history, acknowledgment of the cultural value of Black vernacular music has been relatively rare in White social arenas, which routinely have diminished Black cultural contributions to “American” arts.
