Ethnomusicology Project: Journal Entry 2: The Blues Community--Cultural Cohorts and Formations

Correction: An earlier version of this post, undoubtedly completed at the last possible minute, made the dumb mistake of transposing the concepts of cohorts and formations.  Further learning has occured, and the error has been fixed.

One concept I have learned about in my ethnomusicology class is that of cultural cohorts and cultural formations.  A cultural formation is an association that one is inherently a part of, while a cultural cohort is an association that one can join or leave based on one's level of involvement.  A formation is usually something one is born into, like an ethnic group or nationality, or it can be something one enters into through immersion, such as a devout religious community.  A cohort, on the hand, is something that one can much more casually joing or leave, such a sports team's fan base or followers of a certain political philosophy.  In both formations and cohorts, members share a set of basic attitudes, assumptions, and shared experiences.  However, in a formation, these shared characteristics encompass a large portion of one's life and form a major part of one's identity, while in a cohort, the shared characteristics likely only affect a small portion of one's life and identity.

The blues community is an interesting group to analyze from the perspective of cohorts vs. formations because in a way, it grew out of a formation and has now become a cohort.  The blues began in the American South, and in its beginning, nearly all members of the blues community were members of a formation that could be described as "African Americans from the South."  Only members of this formation had the cultural experiences and knowledge to truly fit into the blues community and appreciate what the music about.  Techincally, the blues community was still a cohort because not every "African American from the South" was a member of the blues community, but the members of the cohort were all drawn from this rather narrow formation.

As the blues became more popular and as blacks moved north and began playing the blues in places where whites would be more inclined to listen to them, new members began to join the cohort of the blues community.  Not all whites who heard the blues joined the blues community just by osmosis; rather, those few who put in some effort to understand African American culture and associate with blacks who were already in the blues community were able to join the cultural cohort.

Eventually, the formation that is the blues community underwent a radical shift.  In the late 1960s, young black audiences left the blues en masse for the cooler, more immediately relevant music of soul.  Meanwhile white audiences were learning about the blues because they were hearing it covered by their favorite rock bands.  The door was wide open for whites to enter the blues community just as young blacks were heading the other way.  Entrance into the blues community, which was once based on a shared cultural origin, now was based solely on one's knowledge of and interest in the blues.

Today, anyone can be a member of the blues community.  It has become a widespread cultural cohort that will gladly accept members from any formation.  The shared cultural knowledge is far less of a factor and the only cultural knowledge one must have is an adequate familiarity with the music itself and an idea of the prevailing attitudes among blues fans and musicians.