Leaving the Blues Behind

Abstract This chapter shows how metal’s defining ideological foundations—its progression toward heaviness and oppositional authenticity—emerged from the racialized ideology of blues in the 1960s, especially White artists’ rhetoric about establishing their own authentic style by departing from or innovating upon the styles of earlier Black American blues artists. The genre label “heavy metal” was originally a synonym for, and quickly supplanted, the term “White blues,” and inherited a sense of oppositional authenticity, and a construction of “raw power” blues-rock that synthesized and departed from country or urban blues of the previous decade. Three versions of “Parchment Farm” by Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Blue Cheer showcase the musical and rhetorical continuities and transformations from Black American blues to White blues to heavy metal. Hudson argues that metal never fully “left the blues behind,” and that more continuous narratives of the genre’s emergence are needed.