11/05/2025
UI professor connects blues to the law
Black musicians turned to the blues to express their resistance to U.S. discrimination against African Americans in the mid-20th Century, a University of Idaho law professor says.
David Pimentel, a UI faculty member since 2015, called music a force for social change in the civil rights era, especially the 1950s and 1960s. He spoke Tuesday to the Malcolm Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium to about 50 students, faculty and community members.
“The blues helped bring about justice in a way that the legal system never could,” Pimentel asserted. While acknowledging he couldn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship, he played songs from the 1920s to the 2020s to illustrate his thesis.
Pimentel played an excerpt of a Fats Waller tune recorded in 1929 by Louis Armstrong, “Black and Blue. Armstrong sang “my only sin was my skin,” referring to his skin color. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” recorded in 1939, described lynchings in grisly detail.
To illustrate how white audiences heard this music, Pimentel showed a clip from the 1956 movie “High Society,” starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. The movie, set in Newport, Rhode Island, showed how white audiences responded to performances by Black musicians at the Newport Jazz Festival.
“The message got out because of the music, and because of freedom of speech protections that meant radio stations could not be shut down for playing it,” Pimentel said. He speculated that when music started reaching white audiences, court decisions such as Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 followed.
“These changes all came on the heels of blues music reaching white audiences,” he argued. “The law was following the change of attitudes, not leading it.”
(Kenton Bird, reporting and photo)
