Non-Contextual Presentation of An Indigenous African-American Artistic Style As Interpreted by Caucasian Descendants of Former Colonists to A Largely Franco-European Audience, or St. Paul & The Broken Bones in Paris

On the one hand, we could note that the French imported four times as many African slaves to the North American colonies as the British did.  Not only did France first started importing slaves to the West Indies as early as 1540 to work the islands' sugar plantations, well before the British, but they continued the slave trade until 1830, long after the rest of Europe had given it up, and they even kept at it clandestinely after the Civil War, eventually abolished slavery only under pressure from slave uprisings.

Among the many indignities suffered upon the emancipated slaves in North American was the appropriation of their cultural and artistic achievements by white artists, going back to jazz and the blues.  Throughout the history of rock 'n' roll, starting with Elvis Presley and continuing through to the present day, songs and styles first popularized by African-American musicians gained wide-spread acceptance and popularity only after being recorded by white musicians.

It is a challenge not to be somewhat cynical watching the all-white, Birmingham, Alabama band St. Paul & The Broken Bones perform in the style of Sam Cook and Otis Redding in Paris, France, the capital of the first nation that forcibly brought the ancestors of the genre's creators to America, and bestow the gift of the art form to a European audience without any reminder or context regarding how the sound originated in the first place.  

This is not to say that St. Paul and company should not play and sound the way that they do, or that they shouldn't be allowed to earn an income and perform overseas.  And no one wants to sit through a lecture or a guilt trip about historical sins and transgressions.    

So perhaps I should just say here's St. Paul and the Broken Bones in Paris, as recorded by La Blogothèque.