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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert Lawson-Peebles
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 15 , October 1990 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

NOTES

Author's note: Some of the ideas for this essay were first voiced at the 1985 Salzburg Seminar, and its first full version was presented at the Seminar on International Perspectives on American Literature at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy, in December, 1987. I would like to thank the members of both seminars for their helpful criticism and warm companionship; the organizing bodies of the seminars (the Salzburg Seminar and the Rockefeller Foundation) for providing wonderful and supportive settings; and particularly Huck Gutman of the University of Vermont, for arranging the Bellagio Conference.

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