David K. Kirby > Quotes

“But the take from February 7, 1956 is the one we know today: Gonna-TELL-Aunt-MARy-’BOUT-Uncle-JOHN! That’s the backbeat entering American popular music.”
― David K. Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll

“Robbie Robertson of the Band said he always knew when they were playing in the south, because that’s where everybody claps on the backbeat. Exactly.”
― David K. Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll

“In another well-written and authoritative study of roots music, Mark Kemp quotes a Crystal Lunsford as saying this: How come you think music’s so good in the South? It’s because black people and white people worked together to make it so damn good, that’s how come. There’s always been black people in white southern music and white people in black southern music. That’s the way it works down here. We wouldn’t have a southern rock & roll without the black influence, but then, I don’t think the blues and rock & roll would have been as accepted if it weren’t for white people down here who backed them and pushed them and recorded them. It took both races. Music has always been a universal thing down here. It goes beyond color. And that goes all the way back to slavery. By the way, Crystal Lunsford isn’t a professor or a music critic. As Kemp explains, she’s a third-generation employee of the Eveready plant in Asheboro, North Carolina who lives by herself in a trailer in rural Guilford County. If you’re the kind of expert who doesn’t look beyond the obvious, you might think the musical world is as segregated as the school systems were back in the day. But if you live out in the woods and you keep your eyes and ears open the way Crystal Lunsford does, then you know there’s more to the”
― David K. Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll

“Everyone who has never been to the South, and especially Northern journalists, are experts on that part of the country. Trained reporters who wouldn’t dare venture an opinion on Iraq or Pakistan because they’ve never worked in those countries are happy to tell you about life in Dothan or Bainbridge, because, well, everybody knows what those people are like down there.”
― David K. Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll

“Georgia’s grandest surviving railroad station; in 2002, it was purchased by the city of Macon and converted to a retail center. Over the northern archway, you can clearly see the words “Colored Waiting Room” carved into the building’s stone surface. Maconites I talked to said it was decided to leave the entryway unchanged as a reminder of a time when an entire race was treated as though they were animals. That wasn’t so long ago, but it was long enough that, to anyone born after 1960, it can seem like something that happened on another planet. My white students play and study with and date black students and vice versa, and to them, the idea of the one race grinding its boot into the face of the other is inconceivable. I envy them their innocence.”
― David K. Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll