We are under no illusion that music can cure all racial ills, but neither are we blind to its healing, restorative, sometimes almost supernatural power to bring people together, blur lines and create community.
The Riverfront Nights presentation on Saturday by Clark “Deacon Bluz” White and the Holysmoke Band apparently was just such an occasion.
White, who bills himself as “an organic public intellectual bluesologist,” and his band play danceable blues, and some 2,000 area residents – “half black and half white,” according to one Chattanooga observer – thought the evening was just the ticket for such togetherness.
“I was consumed with happiness and pride,” the local observer/emailer said, “that during at least one evening, one special moment, in my beloved downtown Chattanooga, any hint of racial differences was completely vanished. We were all brothers and sisters, one human family.”
The audience, he said, was “made up of all races, hillbillies to inner city folks.” At the last song, he said, “everyone was on their feet, side by side, dancing right up to the edge of the stage.”