Overview
Given the explosion in recent years of scholarship exploring the ways in which disability is manifested and performed in numerous cultural spaces, it’s surprising that until now there has never been a single monograph study covering the important intersection of popular music and disability. George McKay’s Shakin’ All Over is a cross-disciplinary examination of the ways in which popular music performers have addressed disability: in their songs, in their live performances, and in various media presentations.
By looking closely into the work of artists such as Johnny Rotten, Neil Young, Johnnie Ray, Ian Dury, Teddy Pendergrass, Curtis Mayfield, and Joni Mitchell, McKay investigates such questions as how popular music works to obscure and accommodate the presence of people with disabilities in its cultural practice. He also examines how popular musicians have articulated the experiences of disability (or sought to pass), or have used their cultural arena for disability advocacy purposes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472120048 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2013 |
| Series: | Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
George McKay is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Salford, UK, where he is Director of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre.
Read an Excerpt
Shakin' All Over
Popular Music And Disability
By George McKay
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12004-8
CHAPTER 1
"Crippled with Nerves"
Polio Survivors in Popular Music
Even I used to sing, when I was on crutches — because I had the polio thing, which I'm sure we'll get to eventually — I would take the crutch, like a guitar, stand in front of the mirror, and think I was Elvis.
— Saxophonist Dave Liebman, remembering his 1950s childhood (quoted in Kirchner 2011)
WE ARE HERE ALREADY, in polio land. This first chapter is the most historically situated of the book, as well as in some ways the most medically restricted. But it is also intended as something of an overview, to give a sense of the scope of how disability figures in popular music and rock, and it opens some key areas and artists for further discussion later. It focuses largely on the rock-and-roll generation of polio survivors: children and young people from the late 1940s to the early 1950s who contracted poliomyelitis ("infantile paralysis") during summer epidemics in the last few years before reliable vaccinations were widely available (in the West). As Liebman has observed, of his own experience, aged three, in 1949, "I'm the last of the last to get polio" (2012, 7). In using polio as the focusing device I am aware that I may seem to be privileging the medical condition and its consequent disabilities over the people, the artists concerned, and their cultural products. But I am interested in the historical specificity of the disease in the postwar West. The introduction of the vaccines that successfully eradicated polio within a few years made that generation dramatically the last (in the West), while the chronological coincidence of the rise of pop culture would lead in a decade or two to a remarkable generation of pop and rock musicians who had been shadowed by "the crippler," as polio was known colloquially in the United States. I discuss these, and go on to look at the work of Ian Dury (1942–2000), who was for some years the highest profile and most outspoken visibly physically disabled pop artist in Britain. This made Dury "one of society's ultimate 'not me' figures" in the cultural context of the wannabe pop world, of course, but he is of special interest due to his songs around the topic of disability, his inventive and provocative "narratives of corporeal/ cultural difference," in Rosemarie Garland Thomson's terms (1997, 41, 16).
Through the twentieth century, increasing public awareness of polio outbreaks (epidemics in New York in 1916, Los Angeles in 1934, Berlin in 1947, Copenhagen in 1952) caused periodic panic among local populations. As Marc Shell writes in Polio and its Aftermath, "For seventy years, polio traumatized the world. ... An American president suffered from its paralyzing effects. So did sixty million other people worldwide. Even when polio did not kill its victims outright, it often crippled them for life. The survivors were the visible reminder of polio's ever-increasing power to slay, maim, and deform. ... No one knew what caused the disease, and there was no cure" (2005a, 1). But, according to Tony Gould in A Summer Plague, "everything to do with polio in Britain, not least the disease itself, was on a minor scale" (1995, 161). This changed with the epidemic of 1947, in which 7,776 people contracted the disease. Over the following decade some 58,000 were affected, around 4,000 of whom died, and of the survivors 35,000 were left with a degree of paralysis (Balls 2000, 32–33). One medical student working in a London hospital during one outbreak in the 1950s, when hospital staff were themselves coming down with the disease, described this plague-like situation as "absolutely bloody terrifying" (quoted in Gould 1995, 162). At this time, the 1950s being the high point of the "polio zeitgeist" (Gould 1995, 219), the Salk vaccine was available in Britain for young people (by injection), though not yet widely used. (It would be superseded within a few years by the Sabin vaccine, dispensed nationwide to schoolchildren on sugar cubes.) Some early vaccinations malfunctioned, and infected the patient with the disease. Such an iatrogenic family disaster is what happened to 1960s folk singer Donovan as a boy in Scotland, as he explains in his autobiography.
In the disruption following the Second World War, three epidemics hit [Glasgow]: scarlet fever, diphtheria, and polio. The children were hardest hit. The vaccines were too strong, and I was actually given the polio disease this way. So my right leg began to show signs of "wasting." An operation was performed, cutting the Achilles tendon in the foot, and I wore an ugly leg brace for some time after. It was a long boot made of a hard substance that I wore only at night to give the little leg support. Removing the device would tear the hairs and hurt so much that I cried each morning, painful for my mammy and daddy to watch. (Leitch 2005, 3)
Polio is a highly contagious viral disease that can attack the body's nervous system. Transmitted by fecally contaminated food and water, in temperate climates it can be a seasonal disease — therefore, summer swimming in pools and lakes was a childhood activity feared and discouraged by many parents. Also, polio is primarily a disease affecting children. Its characteristic operation is that by attacking nerve cells the virus permanently paralyses the activated muscles. So, while Ian Dury in the early 1970s would write and sing a halting love song, "Crippled with Nerves": a highlight of his band's live set (released as a single in 1975), the title phrase itself was both resonant and neurologically informed: Dury was indeed crippled with (by) his nerves, and the audience saw him perform the singing of that. Or, as Canadian singer-songwriter and polio survivor Joni Mitchell has put it:
Polio is the disease that eats muscles. If it eats the muscle of your heart, it kills you; if it eats the muscles that control the flexing of your lungs, you end up in an iron lung; if it eats the muscle of your leg, it withers, or of your arm, it withers. In my case it ate muscles in my back — the same thing happened with Neil Young. I had to learn to stand [again], and then to walk. (quoted in Matteo, n.d.)
A key early figure here is the 1930s and 1940s music, radio, and film star Connie Boswell, originally of the Boswell Sisters. Boswell fascinates for her crossover solo success in the early 1940s in the visual culture of film, of course, but also for her position as a disabled female popular performer in a predominantly ablist culture and society. Boswell occupied a "unique position as the only visibly disabled 'A-list' female popular entertainer for most of the twentieth century" (Stras 2009, 298) — which also indicates the extent to which we may consider popular musical disabilities so primarily as male phenomena: pop and rock offer masculine prerogatives, as much of this book illustrates. In many of her film scenes, viewers see Boswell sitting on a piano, sitting on a chair near a radio (source of music), using her very active arms and hands as physical manifestation of the melody or lyric, employing regular cutting to or splicing of shots of moving bodies — dancers, a cat — which add visual momentum to her corporeal static-ness. On stage singing live, she could be sitting in an elaborate (disguised wheel)chair, and be pulled by stagehands in the wings and maneuvered to center stage, or she would be apparently standing ready for the audience and the song, curtains opening to reveal her already in position. In these instances an adapted barstool would be used, hidden beneath a voluminous stage dress. Historically, from the theatrical dance tradition of ballet, "postural uprightness and verticality were imbued with connotations of nobility and moral conduct": "the emphasis placed on carriage ... was predicated on a belief in the self-representational potential of the body" (Smith 2005, 77, 76). Yet for Boswell, chaired, or for many of the limping polios, pop stars, and rockers, there have needed to be different self-representational possibilities.
A notable number of other children and young people who would go on to make their mark in various music fields were struck by "the crippler." Table 1 is an incomplete list, but it has value because it illustrates the numbers involved, as well as the geographical locations — and global shifts, as both shifts in music production and vaccination programs impacted — and musical distribution.
As noted, this medical-musical cluster can be partly explained by the concurrence of polio epidemics with the childhood years of an early pop and rock generation, dramatized — or made poignant — by virtue of the fact that many of these young people were among the last ever to contract the disease (in the West). So, broadly speaking, while those who contracted polio in the 1940s and 1950s on this list were in Tony Gould's phrase "born too soon" (1995, 188) in the sense that they were too young to benefit from the imminent introduction of the vaccines, they were also born at just the right time to feel the beat of the rock and pop worlds of youth music, the counterculture, and beyond. (As discussed in the introduction, there is a wider coincidence of polio occurrence and mass communications technologies in the twentieth century.) I look at this claim, and at ways in which they would find in the youthquake's new sonicities and performative practices opportunities to make sense of their own disabled bodies, to accommodate their childhood "changes" (Neil Young), to revisit from adulthood their "dreams of [being] paralysed" (Steve Harley), to sing their medicalized autobiographies: "If they're caring for me why do they boot me and punch me?" (Ian Dury). The validity of such a connection is interrogated in fig. 7.
To historicize a little further though we need also to recognize the medical situations of some countries in the developing world, and acknowledge that the most recent polio and pop expressions are not from the successfully vaccinated West but from less developed areas of the world. In this way polio, even in what we hope is its terminal narrative moment, is still able to demarcate the privilege of access to advanced health services, including vaccinations. So Jamaican reggae and African guitar-based dance music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo constitute the later musical manifestations by polio survivors.
There are important considerations concerning the weakened physical body's capacity to make music for the instrumentalists among these polio survivors — especially for those from blues, jazz, and jazz-tinged musics who valorized instrumental technique as a route to musical individuality. For instance, Joni Mitchell has explained her unusual guitar chord technique, and hence characteristic acoustic sound, as the result of her attenuated muscularity: "My left hand is somewhat clumsy because of polio. I had to simplify the shapes of the left hand, but I craved chordal movement that I couldn't get out of standard tuning without an extremely articulate left hand" (quoted in Houston 2000). What we can view as Mitchell's cripping of technique was bold indeed: she drew on the blues of the past and helped shape the rock of her present by also delving into jazz.
In the beginning, I built on the repertoire of the open major tunings that the old black blues guys came up with. It was only three or four. The simplest one was D modal (D A D G D B); Neil Young uses that a lot. And then open D (D G D G B D), with the fifth string removed, which is all Keith Richards uses. ... Then going between them I started to get more "modern" chords. (quoted in Bego 2005, 29–30)
Mitchell's was a strategy of adaptation, and the resultant music was not heard as an expression of limitation — rather, it was prized by her, her fellow musicians, and her fans as the articulation of an individual voice: "good thing I couldn't [play standard technique] because it came out original" (quoted in Bego 2005, 29). It is estimated that there are "at least 35 unique tuning" innovated by Mitchell in her guitar playing, as well as many minor variations on these (O'Brien 2001, 209). In later life, due to post-polio syndrome causing her further muscular atrophy, Mitchell sought out different guitars on which to continue playing her different tunings. These specially constructed guitars were particularly lightweight, shaped to her body contour, to reduce stress on her back and left arm (see Hecht 2003, 72); intriguingly, bearing in mind Mitchell's folk singer-songwriter origins and the historic controversy around Bob Dylan's electric turn in the 1960s, each was an electric not an acoustic instrument. An added benefit in live performances was that the electric guitar, linked to a computer, could access all of her alternate tunings instantly (O'Brien 2001, 263). Elsewhere, polio forced the blues guitarist CeDell Davis to "rethink" his approach to his instrument, and Davis has remained a controversial figure in the blues tradition in part because of his unorthodox musicality. According to blues writer Robert Palmer, who also produced Davis's 1990s recordings:
[Davis explained:] "I was right-handed, but I couldn't use my right hand, so I had to turn the guitar around; I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kinda swiped one of 'em."
This was the beginning of a guitar style that is utterly unique, in or out of blues. The knife-handle on the strings produces uneven pressure, which results in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. Some people who hear CeDell's playing for the first time think it's out of tune, but it would be more accurate to say he plays in an alternative tuning. (Palmer 2004)
Whether "utterly unique," "out of tune," or employing an "alternative tuning," we begin to glimpse within music an adaptive technique which may be both common across polio survivors more widely and the very route away from the commonplace toward the individual.
The West Coast modern jazz pianist Carl Perkins, whose left arm had residual paralysis from childhood polio, played with this arm parallel to the keyboard, and was known as "the crab" for his sideways-on technique. ("Crab-walk became a common term used by doctors in the 1950s to describe the way that their polio patients moved": Shell 2005a, 146.) As fig. 3 shows, the back-cover photograph on his only album as leader, Introducing ... Carl Perkins, clearly displays Perkins's physically adapted playing position (Perkins 1956). The sleeve note explains that this approach to the instrument has given him "the most unique technique of them all. ... [By] suspending his left arm over the keys and using his elbow to play additional bass notes [he has] a dynamic and exciting new sound" (Perkins 1956). Arguably, with the compensatory introduction of the elbow as part of the playing body, Perkins's physical incapacity has effectively extended instrumental range. Like another modern jazz pianist, Horace Parlan, Perkins challenges the totality of the assumption that, "to claim the title pianist, one must have two functioning hands" (Lerner 2006, 75; emphasis in original) — and more, that these should be "fully, often fabulously, able hands" (Lubet 2011, 54). Parlan recovered from childhood polio but with his right hand and the right side of his body partially paralyzed. This would normally have a greater impact on piano technique than a restricted left hand, such as Perkins's, particularly in jazz, where a bassist was usually also present: many bassists expect a lighter touch from the left hand of a pianist when they are playing together, to avoid the muddiness of two sets of bass notes. It was recommended by his childhood doctor that Parlan take up the piano as a form of physiotherapy. Parlan learned to compensate in his piano playing by using his left hand (which usually plays bass notes and chordal accompaniment) also for mid-range melodic phrasing and soloing. This helped him find the kind of alternate individual voice so prized in jazz instrumentalism, as explained admiringly by the English jazz critic Leonard Feather in his 1960 sleeve notes for Parlan's first Blue Note album.
The fourth and fifth fingers of the right hand are not used at all. The second and middle fingers, and sometimes the thumb, are used to complete voicings of chords that are basically supplied by the left hand. Occasionally, too, the left hand is used exclusively in single-note lines. Incredible as it may seem, along with all of this, the left hand does a normal job of comping in its regular register. (quoted in Wimmer, n.d.)
(Continues...)
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