Paris Blues ─ African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960

Paris Blues gives us a sophisticated but unusually lively history of black music and musicians in France. In looking beyond the familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories, it provides an alternative account. Fry does deal with many of the icons (Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, Sidney Bechet), but he asks how they came to be so iconic, and what they hide as well as what they preserve. His five chapters move from Montmartre of the 1920s to Saint-German-des-Pres of the 1950s. He focuses on early jazz and swing, but includes how that music was remembered (and imaginatively recreated) after WW II, creating the illusion of continuity. Meanwhile, Paris Blues is able to capture some of the complexity of cultural politics in France during this period. African American memories of France , he suggests, should be understood as a response to the varied forms of segregation and hostility they faced at home; removed from that context they become a vehicle merely for French complacency. Fry throws new light on an intricate process of cultural mediation, caught, like French society, between conflicting desires: to be ?authentic” to racial and national roots, but at the same time to assimilate threatening differences. Paris Blues, then, provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music, contextualizing it in ongoing debates about race, nation, and culture.

Andy Fry teaches in the Music Department at King’s College London.