Charlie Christian and My First Exposure of "CRT" Backlash
Years and years before the term "Critical Race Theory" was even invented
I’m too old to go to raves, so please allow an old man to rant.
Rant about a subject I’ve publically ranted about before (you know how old farts are). But it’s been more than a decade since I’ve published anything about this topic, so here I go again. You can’t stop me!
I’m talking about how, as a school kid, I was kept ignorant about a fellow Okie, a bonafide musical innovator and force in jazz, a star with Benny Goodman’s band, who lived, went to high school, and started practicing his art right across town from me in Oklahoma City.
I’m speaking ,of course, about Charlie Christian.
Although I’ve written about this before, I believe it’s even more relevant today than ever, being that we have a presidential administration seemingly intent on erasing big chunks of our cultural history in the name of fighting “Critical Race Theory” (or “CRT” for any Fox News viewers reading this).
Maybe they think that Charlie was a DEI hire by Benny Goodman.
But before I actually start ranting seriously, here’s some biographical info:
Charles Henry Christian was born in Bonham, Texas in 1916, but moved to Oklahoma City with his father and two older brothers, Edward and Clarence, when he was two years old. His mother had died and his father Clarence was losing his eyesight.
The elder Clarence, who also was a musician, encouraged his sons to go busk in the streets to earn cash. At first little Charlie just danced to his brothers’ music. But later, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society, Charlie “learned to play the trumpet before he was ten. By age twelve he switched to the guitar, making his own crude instrument from cigar boxes in manual training class, as novelist and family friend Ralph Ellison recalled.”
Ellison, author of Invisible Man, was another Oklahoma City native. More on him later.
Charlie was “discovered” by John Hammond, the record producer who also was responsible for advancing the careers of Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Big Joe Turner and many more.
Hammond set up an audition for Charlie with another one of his “discoveries,” Benny Goodman, who in September 1939, hired Charlie to be in his band, which included the likes of Lionel Hampton and Fletcher Henderson.
He’d play with Goodman until the year of his death from tuberculosis in 1942.
Here’s a taste of Charlie’s guitar:
Speaking of the blues, here’s B.B. King in Guitar Player magazine:
Of course, Charlie Christian was amazing. I first heard him in 1941 or ’42. He was a master at diminished chords, and a master at new ideas, too. And he was kind of like a governor on a tractor. If a tractor is bogging down in the mud, the governor will kick in and give it an extra boost. Christian was the same way.
When the band would hit the bridge, he would keep the whole thing flying and get it really taking off. …
Guitarist and guitar designer Les Paul would write of the first time he met and heard Christian play — in 1938 at a Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys show in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (I assume he’s talking about Cain’s Ballroom here):
The place [Wills & Playboys] were playing was like an airplane hanger, a big cavernous ballroom. A real cowboy saloon, but huge. And pretty soon we’re jamming with them, having a helluva good time, when I notice this young black fellow standing down below and looking up at me.
We take a break, and this fellow says to me: “Mr. Paul, could I get your autograph?” So I give him my autograph. “I play the guitar,” he tells me.
I say, “Well, are ya any good?” He says, “Yes, sir.”
I ask him his name. “Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Christian.”
I handed him the guitar and he played a little. I says, “Jesus, you are good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”
So he got up and played my guitar with the Texas Playboys. I don’t know whether he even had an instrument at that time.
It was this essay by Les Paul, which were in the booklet that came with the 2002 Columbia Records box set Charlie Christian – The Genius Of The Electric Guitar. Paul’s writing is what first got me angry about the fact that my school didn’t teach us about Charlie.
From my October 26, 2002 column in The Santa Fe New Mexican about the record:
It is inexcusable that no teacher in all those years I went to school in Oklahoma (up to the ninth grade) ever mentioned that one of the true innovators of jazz was from Douglas High School, just across town. No teacher ever mentioned that it was possible for even a poor black kid from OKC to go to the top of his profession, as Charlie Christian did. …
Maybe it’s because Charlie Christian was black. Segregation was dying hard in Oklahoma in the 1960s.
Or maybe it was nothing sinister. It’s probably just that the teachers were too unhip, too thick and culturally crippled even to know that a local kid had grown up to play in Benny Goodman’s band. Still ...
We were never taught about Woody Guthrie in Oklahoma either, which also is a stupid shame, but given the twisted anti-commie paranoia of the day, I can understand that omission far more than I can understand ignoring Charlie Christian.
I mostly blame my ninth-grade Oklahoma History teacher for this failure. This funky dude — let’s call him “Mr. Sturgeon” — did “teach” us a lot of things back in 1967 and ‘68.
For instance, Mr. Sturgeon made sure we knew that Alabama Gov. George Wallace was the best hope for America and would make a great president.
Mr. Sturgeon also was a Pearl Harbor “truther,” who told his students how Franklin Roosevelt knew all about the Japanese attack but allowed the bombing to happen.
Meanwhile, he skipped over some inconvenient facts about Oklahoma history.
As was true in history classrooms across the Sooner state, we did not study the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. I think Mr. Sturgeon might have mentioned the Tulsa “race riot” in passing. But he certainly didn’t go into detail of the bloody 18-hour siege by a mob of white Okies murdered hundreds and injured hundreds more residents of Greenwood — a relatively prosperous black neighborhood, 35 square blocks that used to be described as the “Black Wall Street.” The mob burned homes and churches, looted like a bunch of landlocked pirates, and locked Black survivors in makeshift internment camps. None of the attackers were ever found guilty of any crimes. Following a formal inquiry just a few years ago, a U.S. Justice Department press release described this mob attack as “a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community…”
Mr. Sturgeon also never told us about the Osage Nation murders, which many of us first learned about in Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon, or the 2017 book of the same title by David Ganns. The murders took place between 1918 and 1931, when members of the Osage Nation in eastern Oklahoma got a ton of money from royalties when oil was discovered on their reservation. Though the official victim count is about 60, Ganns’ research shows probably hundreds of natives were killed for oil.
I do recall Mr. Sturgeon saying something about “a lot of Indians got rich from oil,” but nothing about the white people murdering them.
As a little mental break from all that horrific history, here’s another tune from Charlie:
So forget this right-wing idiot teacher and let’s look at a great example of a real educator, one of Charlie Christian’s teachers at Douglas High, Zelia Breaux, who was head of the school’s music department.
Ralph Ellison wrote of Breaux:
Mrs. Breaux was a leader in this [Public School Music Program] movement which did so much to broaden and enrich the nation’s musical culture. She did so by teaching musical theory and by training what became famous marching bands. She organized school orchestras, and she was responsible for the high quality of our music-appreciation program. …
Thanks to Mrs. Breaux … we were being introduced to one of the most precious of American freedoms, which is our freedom to broaden our personal culture by absorbing the cultures of others. Even more important was the fact that we were being taught to discover and exercise those elements of freedom which existed unobserved (at least by outsiders), within our state of social and political un-freedom.
Ironically, Ellison wrote that Breaux “discouraged her students from playing jazz.” But he noted that she also was a part owner of Oklahoma City’s Aldridge Theater, where “one could see and hear the great blues singers, dancers and comedians, the famous jazz orchestras and such repertory drama groups as the Lafayette Players.”
Ellison continued: “… just as she taught Negro spirituals along with Bach and Handel, she provided a cultural nexus in which the vernacular art forms could be encountered along with the classical.”
Now that’s a teacher!
But I am glad Mrs. Breaux was unsuccessful in discouraging young Charlie Christian from playing jazz!
Getting back to my own time of being a student in Oklahoma City Public Schools, I realize that the kids at the time, including me, definitely were not into Benny Goodman or Charlie Christian.
In my imagination I can hear the youthful voices of my old friends and me whining, “Who cares about some boring old jazz guy? We like Paul Revere & The Raiders!”
(Full disclosure: I still like Paul Revere & The Raiders! But that’s not the point here.)
But to any teacher reading this, don’t be afraid of letting your students know about your home-town and home-stare heroes. You never know who you might inspire.
Here’s one more from Charlie:
I had never heard of Christian or Breau. This is enlightening. Breau was from Missouri so she was surely part of the Black creole diaspora from Louisiana. She might even have descended from free creoles of color. But in any event, Ellison's praise speaks volumes. Thank you so much for this vital segment of erased Oklahoma culture!