© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate. Chapter 2 Melting Pot: The Making of Black British Music in the 1950s and 1960s Jon Stratton ‘Melting Pot’ was a song released by Blue Mink in 1969. Very much in the tradition of British pop – that is, catchy and highly melodic with a regular, jaunty rhythm – the lyrics are an invocation to racial mixing and tolerance of diversity. The track, which reached number three on the UK singles chart, was a political counter to Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech which he had made in Birmingham a little over a year earlier. Blue Mink was made up of a number of experienced white, British session musicians. The lead singer was Madeline Bell. Bell was an African American who had begun her career as a gospel singer. She had come to England in 1962 with the African-American musical, Black Nativity, and decided to stay because she felt that there was less discrimination in Britain, and therefore greater opportunity, than in the United States. Bell became a close friend of Dusty Springield and, in addition to singing back-up on many of Springield’s recordings, she also taught her the gospel stylings which sprinkle Springield’s, and other English artists’, solo work. 1 Bell’s impact on British popular music was far greater and long-lasting than her personal success. Markus Coester writes that: In academic studies, the high cultural productivity of African and Caribbean musicians in Britain in the post-World War II decades which partly resulted from the cross-cultural musical interaction and the interplay of West African, South African, Caribbean and British music respectively has hardly been of interest. This omission could be due to a lacking academic interest in the study of African and other minority or diaspora cultures in Britain. Because of the creative possibilities it unleashed, however, the cross-cultural musical interplay of the 1950s and 60s in England, and speciically in London must be considered immensely important for the development of African and Caribbean music, as well as popular music in Britain. (2008a, p. 134) Coester is right. Discussions of black music in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s come from the point of view of the dominant culture – that of ‘white’ Britain. Consequently, with honourable exceptions, black music in Britain tends to be 1 See the important book by Annie J. Randall, 2009, Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods. © Jon Stratton, Nabeel Zuberi and the contributors (2014) From Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi (eds), Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409469131