For the past few years, I have had the good fortune to play in a racially diverse 3-piece blues band.
Our singer and guitarist is Vietnamese.
Our drummer is black.
I am white.
We have had a good measure of success, and we have been greeted with open arms by club owners, festival organizers, and patrons of all colors and creeds, in most cases.

We were booked to play almost all of Chicago's biggest blues clubs on the strength of our most recent CD and on airplay we had recieved and on past engagements at other big name venues.

We got to one club and our gig was immediately cancelled.

Owner to our singer/guitarist: "You can't play here with that band."

"But this has been my band for years! They are my backup, what's wrong w/ them?"

"You and the drummer are fine, but we can't have 2 white people on stage so the bassist has got to go." "You can come back when you have a black bass player."

Needless to say, we lost a bunch of gigs and money.

We have also been harassed by more than a few people (mostly black) who have either told us that white people can't or shouldn't play blues, and we had one strange older black woman tell us that we were "keeping the black man down" because our black drummer wasn't singing. He doesn't want to sing.

All of this is why I think culture should be shared, without prejudice, and should not be hoarded.
Make fun if you will, but this is real, and it really saddens me when certain people, just because of their skin color, are not allowed in the game.

Just giving a little background, my man. Also, if I grew my hair out, total afro. I am part Sicilian.

Ridiculous, sad, but not surprising. You think about how far we've come regarding overcoming bigotry, prejudice, and racism, etc., but then you hear a story like this and it reminds us how far we still have to go to be rid of it. Especially when I go outside of the city limits. I forget sometimes, living in a big city, how close minded the world still is. Sad. <sigh>

It was a credit to our singer too that she didn't ditch me just to play the gigs. And this is a woman who has made music her career, I still have a day job, and she has nothing else to fall back on. The clubs would have looked great on her resume, but thankfully, she had the integrity to laugh in their faces. It gave me even more respect for her, and we have now been together as a band for about 5 years.

She sounds awesome.

i know how you could get into that club:

There are alot of male musicians who badmouth female musicians and say how hard they are to work with, but she is the best bandleader I have ever worked for, out of like 10 bands.



Our drummer has jokingly said he was gonna wear whiteface in some of the southern clubs we played. 6 foot 3, 300 lbs, woulda been funny as hell...

so am i. grow out that afro. people will just think you are light skinned. or puerto rican.

puerto ricans can play the blues, right?

god forbid!

Yeah, fuck that noise, we will start getting requests for LaCucaracha and shit.

Many of the original Minstrel Show performers were black, and they wore Blackface makeup onstage. Before the Civil War a Black man couldn't appear on stage as a black man, he had to come out in Blackface and pretend to be White pretending to be Black. If your drummer had come out in Blackface he would've been in that tradition. I don't know about Whiteface, though. He'd probably look like he was from a Scandinavian Death Metal act.




Damn Sicilians, going around thinking they're all Italian & shit.

That's total horseshit. Especially in the fricking 21st century.

I'm confused--is TKB telling us he's in King's X?

Good call. I would have guessed Dave Matthews Band until he said "on the strength of our latest CD".

Oh please. This reminds me of the Mancow rant I heard on the radio this morning.

Why was I listening in the first place? Good question!

Wrong ethnic mix--his is the Mxlplx version.