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Dean Acheson and the Potato Head Blues; or, Some British Academic Attitudes to America and Its Literature

1990; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 15; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0361233300005834

1573-9090

Robert Lawson‐Peebles,

Race, History, and American Society

I Will Begin with two dates. The first is August 3, 1958. It has – as far as I know – no significance whatsoever, except to me. It was my sixteenth birthday, and a friend gave me a record of Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven. I can still vividly remember, more than thirty years later, the shock of first hearing “Potato Head Blues,” particularly Satchmo's second trumpet solo, which leaps like a golden gazelle away from the stalking stop chords of the band. The British jazzman Humphrey Lyttelton remarked that jazz would never be the same again after that solo. Neither would I. Until then, I had looked with a typically British mixture of amusement and amazement at the American consumer products like Coke, bubblegum, and Westerns which had lightened the rationed gloom of a postwar childhood. After “Potato Head Blues,” not just jazz but America generally became exciting and exotic. I determined to find out more about it.