Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (PBS-TV “Independent Lens,” 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Masters program on Buddy Guy, PBS ran a 2019 episode of their Independent Lens series called Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, a provocative program about the huge and unacknowledged influence Native American musicians have had on American music and culture. The show was named after “Rumble,” a scorching instrumental hit by guitarist Link Wray in 1959. Wray was born in 1929 in Dunn, North Carolina, a town so dominated by the Ku Klux Klan that a photo shown in the program includes a huge billboard advertising for Klan membership and another one showed doors to three separate restrooms labeled “Colored,” “Indian” and “White.” Though, according to Wray’s Wikipedia page, census records for 1940 and 1950 identify both Wray’s parents as “white,” Wray said his mother was a Shawnee Indian and they were targeted by the local Klan as much or more than the town’s Black residents: “The cops, the sheriff, the drugstore owner — they were all Ku Klux Klan. They put the masks on and, if you did something wrong, they'd tie you to a tree and whip you or kill you.” “Rumble” and a later Wray record, “Rawhide,” became famous not only for the sheer volume with which Wray played and the overall intensity of his sound, but specifically for the distorted guitar sound (which Wray said years later that he had got by using an ice pick to punch tiny holes in his amplifier speaker). Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, said he had got the idea from Wray’s “Rumble” to overload his guitar amp to achieve similar distortion – and both he and Wray himself got notes from their record companies saying all that distortion rendered the records unreleasable. “Rumble” also got banned from radio stations for allegedly being obscene – a strange fate for a song that had no lyrics; Wray said he improvised it one night at a dance when he was asked to play a stroll. He didn’t know any songs in that tempo, so he just made one up on the spot using the stroll rhythm. But, possibly because of the title he put on it, “Rumble” became associated with juvenile delinquency and teen gang violence.

The show begins with “Rumble” and then flashes back to the earliest days of slavery, when white settlers in what is now the United States tried to enslave the Native populations as well as bringing slaves in from Africa. The show pointed out that it was hard for whites to keep Natives as slaves because Native men were used to living as hunters and gatherers and knew the terrain far better than the whites, so they could easily escape. But it also pointed out that 90 percent of the slaves brought in from Africa were male, and since the American slaveowners (unlike some of their brethren in the West Indies and elsewhere in the hemisphere) wanted a self-reproducing slave population, they encouraged Black men to mate with Native women – with the result that, according to the program’s script, 90 percent of modern-day African-Americans have at least some Native blood in their ancestry. The show included a clip of modern Native Americans singing one of their old ritual songs – and damned if they don’t sound like a Black gospel quartette, not only in the way the voices blend but in the call-and-response patterns between the lead singer and the others. Among the major American musical artists identified in the show as Native or part-Native, there were some I knew about – not just the ones like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson and the sadly short-lived Peter LaFarge that publicly identified as Native and made it a major part of their image, but ones like Jimi Hendrix, who was part African-American and part Native American and cited his Native heritage in songs like “I Don’t Live Today” (which Hendrix wrote about life on a reservation) and “Castles Made of Sand.”

There were also a few I didn’t know about, like 1920’s Delta blues master Charley Patton. The commentary argued that Patton would be the consensus choice of blues fans and scholars as the form’s most important pioneer (probably a lot of people would say Robert Johnson, but Patton recorded a decade earlier and set the template for the various sounds that would come out of the Delta) and they played quite a few of Patton’s records, They noted his use of the guitar as a percussion instrument (he often hit the guitar at the end of a line or beat out rhythm patterns on it, which the show explained was derived from the days when whites would not allow either Native or Black people to own drums because they had “talking drum” codes they could use to communicate with each other over long distances and possibly plot an escape from bondage) and also the whoops and hollers that punctuated his singing. Those are usually explained in standard blues histories as the cries of African-American field hands working in plantations and calling out to their mules and other pack animals to move the cotton (or whatever) along, but this show argued persuasively that these are also characteristics of Native singing. At the same time arguments like this can be taken too far, especially since some musicians who have presented as white have incorporated elements of their own people’s folk traditions. I remember hearing klezmer music when it had its brief revival in the early 1980’s and thinking, “So that’s where Benny Goodman got his style! The parts of it he didn’t rip off of Black New Orleans jazz clarinetists came from the folk music of his own people – duh!” Likewise Bing Crosby’s use of melisma – a vocal technique in which one syllable is stretched out over several notes without pause – has sometimes been attributed to his love of Black jazz music, but it turns out it’s also a feature of the folk singing of Crosby’s ancestral homeland, Ireland.

At the same time Bing Crosby had a direct line to Native singing via his first vocal partner, Al Rinker, who was part-Native and whose sister, Mildred Bailey, became a major jazz singer in the 1930’s and a huge influence on future jazz vocalists. This show actually has a segment on Mildred Bailey – which was nice, especially given how many of these music documentaries almost completely ignore anything before the 1950’s – and attributed much of the way she ornamented song melodies to her Native roots (but once again, other singers without discernible Native ancestry, including part-Black, part-Irish Billie Holiday, sang similarly). Oddly, it doesn’t mention quite a few major jazz names who were part Native, including ones who presented as white (like Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden – and this show had me wondering whether the foghorn vocals Trumbauer sang on some of his records might trace back to Native chants) as well as ones who presented as Black (like Charlie Parker – as important a figure in the history of jazz as Hendrix was in the history of rock – as well as Oscar Pettiford and Sonny Rollins). Ironically, a lot of these part-Black, part-Native people owed their existence to a quirk in many of America’s anti-miscegenation laws, which barred interracial marriages only when one of the parties was white (a fact the U.S. Supreme Court cited in 1967 in ruling such laws unconstitutional); the law didn’t object if one person of color wanted to marry a different sort of person of color. Also, the show argued that a lot of dark-skinned Native people fled to places like New Orleans and “passed” as Black, since as bad as Blacks had it under America’s version of apartheid Native people had it worse (maybe because the people running this country wanted Black people around to exploit them for their labor, while they just wanted to get rid of the Natives altogether; as Adolf Hitler told Edward R. Murrow in their interview in 1940, “I’m just doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians”), and suggested that a lot of the roots of New Orleans’ fabled Mardi Gras celebrations, including the feathers and other elaborate costumes, are from Native traditions.

As the show moved into the 1960’s and since it picked up the careers of musicians who were not only open about their Native heritage but wrote protest songs about anti-Native oppression and genocide, including Peter LaFarge – though they claim that LaFarge was signed to Columbia Records before Bob Dylan and he was their first folk artist. Not so: LaFarge made most of his records for the small Folkways label and he didn’t sign with Columbia until 1964 – after the label had already signed Pete Seeger, Carolyn Hester and Bob Dylan. The show mentioned Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears album, a concept album about the oppression of Native Americans Cash recorded in 1964 and included five songs by LaFarge, two by Cash and one, “The Vanishing Race,” co-written by Cash and Johnny Horton. On the liner notes Cash claimed to be part-Native himself – though later DNA tests showed he wasn’t: all Cash’s discernible ancestry was Scots, Irish or German. The show also did a print-the-legend version of the history of Bitter Tears, claiming that Columbia hadn’t wanted to release it at all and that radio stations had banded together to blacklist the album – though Bitter Tears went to #2 on the country music charts and the single from it, “Ballad of Ira Hayes,” went to #3. The show did not mention Peter LaFarge’s sad end: after getting on Columbia largely due to Cash’s insistence and making one album for them, he also got hooked on prescription drugs (this was at the height of Cash’s own drug habit and, as usual, addiction loves company) and he died of an overdose in 1965.

It does mention a later Native American musician who was done in by working with white people and picking up their drug habits: guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who was mostly a sideman and session musician, and whose most famous record is probably the guitar solo on Jackson Browne’s original record of “Doctor My Eyes.” He got hired for Rod Stewart’s touring band at a time when many of its members were doing heroin, took up the drug, got hooked, went into rehab (largely at the insistence of his wife, who threatened to leave him if he didn’t clean up), did a compelling spoken-word album called AKA Graffiti Man in which he played guitar behind Native poet and American Indian Movement activist John Trudell (who was interviewed for this program but must have died shortly afterwards, since the show was dedicated to his memory), then relapsed and died the typical ignominious addict’s death, O.D.’ing and being found on the floor of the laundry room in his apartment building.

There were also segments on Native American musicians who’ve had long careers, including Robbie Robertson and Buffy Sainte-Marie (both of whom are Canadian); after a fair amount of success in the 1960’s Sainte-Marie’s radio airplay and requests for interviews dried up almost overnight, and it was only 20 years later that she found out why: a D.J. doing an interview with her started by apologizing for going along with a letter sent by the White House (she didn’t say from which President, but it was almost certainly Richard Nixon) demanding that stations not play her records or let her do interviews. (Her disappearance coincided with her leaving her first record label, Vanguard, and her signing with MCA, which slapped a self-consciously “sexy” photo onto its cover with the name “Buffy” printed over her ass. I’d always assumed it was this silly and ill-advised image change that sank her career, not literal pressure from the White House aimed, she said, specifically at her opposition to the U.S. government selling oil and gas leases on Native land.) Robbie Robertson became a rock star as a result of his joining a backup band of Canadian musicians that played first behind Ronnie Hawkins and later for Bob Dylan – including on his legendary British tour (well, four-fifths of them anyway: the British Musicians’ Union wouldn’t let them use their U.S.-born drummer, Levon Helm; they were O.K. with the other members because they were from Canada, a British Commonwealth country, but they demanded Dylan use a British drummer, Mickey Jones), where supposedly they were booed at all stops, with Dylan called things like “Traitor!” and “Judas!” by folk-music purists angry that he’d taken up electric guitar and hired a rock band.

Like many music legends, the truth is a bit more complicated; in the 1990’s Columbia issued a two-CD set that supposedly represented the tour’s concluding concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, but was really from an earlier stop in Manchester. Later Columbia released what was billed as “The Real Royal Albert Hall Concert” – where there was no audible audience booing and where, ironically, the whole performance seemed weaker: Dylan actually seemed energized by the audience hostility at Manchester into giving a more intense and exciting show. It’s well known that after touring with Dylan, Robertson and his musicians organized themselves as a separate group and called themselves, simply, “The Band.” The commentary here gives them credit for launching the “roots” movement in American music and turning rock away from the excesses of the psychedelic era, with its elaborate studio effects and long live jams – which ignores that the San Francisco Bay Area band Creedence Clearwater Revival had beat them to it by two years. (It also, not surprisingly, ignores the complaints from other Band members that Robertson was an egomaniac who took sole credit for songs that were really composed collectively.) The final musician profiled was drummer Randy Castillo, who worked in Ozzy Osbourne’s touring band and had an especially spectacular style that included tubular metal drums, allegedly influenced by traditional Native drums, as well as the normal set. He died in 2002 at age 52 but at least it was from cancer rather than drugs. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World was the sort of show that shakes up your perceptions of musical and cultural history and indicates that Native Americans have had a much greater role in creating our musical history than we’ve been led to believe – and despite some overstatements and bits of what I call “first-itis” (the tendency among biographers to say the person they’re depicting was the first one to do something even though there are previous examples), it’s a welcome corrective to the standard cultural history of American music, which acknowledges white and Black influences, pays a passing mention to Latinos and pretty much ignores everyone else.