Rocket City Rock and Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the Sixties Review

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Rocket City Rock and Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the Sixties ReviewLast March--out of the blue--I received a Facebook request from a Jane DeNeefe, who had heard about me through fellow musicians. She told me she had been writing a book about Huntsville, Alabama musicians during the 1960s, and how they helped promote racial harmony in a former southern cotton town that had become "The Rocket City." I responded positively, and let her interview me. As a jazz accordion player, I earned part of my living in Huntsville, Alabama (from 1963 until 1968) by playing in hotels and nightclubs, on radio and television, and at jazz festivals.

Happy to accommodate her, I even sent her some photographs from my collection--photographs of me and fellow musicians, street scenes, and some photographs of membership cards from entertainment venues of the era. Well, the book has been published; I've read it a few times, and am very pleased with the results. I must say, I learned more from reading this book than I had learned during the sixties when I lived in Huntsville wearing the hats of soldier, musician, and television director.
"Rocket City Rock & Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the 1960s" consists of 125 pages packed with history and oral interviews with the musicians who were part of the Huntsville scene during that era. DeNeefe helps the reader understand the social relationships between white and black musicians, and the musical relationships between rock, soul and jazz.

The sixties were an eventful decade in the history of the world, and in Huntsville, Alabama, German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun and his team were preparing America to land on the moon.
But Huntsville is an old southern cotton town that sports a famous-landmark Greek Revival bank (with barracks in the rear where plantation owners used to deposit their slaves--for interest). The 1960s occurred a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction. African Americans had secured only menial jobs in Huntsville's aerospace industry causing Huntsville's doctors, lawyers, and professors to march in front of the New York Stock Exchange as they protested the investments that were being made in a racially segregated space program.

However, there was another group that helped integrate Huntsville: the rock, soul, and jazz musicians. When I was shipped to Huntsville by the U.S. Army Signal Corps (music was not my military occupational specialty), I noticed that native white musicians were playing "corn" or "rockabilly" music; black musicians were playing jazz and soul. Thus, I tended to motivate towards the black musicians. Also...they were the musicians that usually hired me to play their gigs.
During the first half of the decade, white venues would not allow blacks to enter. DeNeefe's book explains that this was a de jure rule. Blacks could get arrested for entering a white venue and vice versa. But things became de facto during the second half of the sixties. White nightclubs required membership cards. Many clubs refused admittance to blacks by denying them membership; however, whenever I entered a black club (which I did numerous times to hear the spectacular music!), I was always treated with utmost respect and made to feel at home.
Black musicians played in white clubs but during the breaks, they were required to sit in the kitchen. Whenever I played in a black club, however, black patrons would buy me a drink during the breaks.

This hospitality led to a major change in race relations in Huntsville so that by 2006, "Black Family Today" magazine voted Huntsville "#1" among American cities for being hospitable to blacks; and four years later, The National Trust for Historic Preservation placed Huntsville on its "America's Dozen Distinctive Destinations for 2010" list.
Jane DeNeefe is an oral historian, and through interviews and historical background material gleaned from an enlightening bibliography, she weaves an extremely interesting, and fast reading, narrative about the climate of the times and the musicians who were part of it. This informative book could be the seed for a video documentary. Although I was in the middle of this story over forty years ago, I did not realize exactly what I was in the middle of--until reading "Rocket City Rock & Soul."Rocket City Rock and Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the Sixties This book puts things into perspective.
--Val Ginter, New York
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