IF YOU GOOGLE my father’s name, Sonny Curtis, there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon the word pioneer. A search of “Sonny Curtis” + “pioneer” yields 34,000 results — though many of these examples use the word to refer to my father’s teenage friend and bandmate, Buddy Holly.
Growing up, I watched enough Little House on the Prairie episodes after school to understand what that word meant. My father was not Michael Landon driving a covered wagon westward into an uncertain horizon, as his own grandfather had done in the 1920s, but I knew he had been first at something, something big and important. Over the years, I figured out what any half-educated rock ’n’ roll fan has long known. My father and Buddy were pioneers in the same way the Ingalls family were pioneers: whites trailing a path already forged, in this case by Black rhythm-and-blues musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, and Lead Belly. My father and Buddy crested the second wave, the white performers imitating those Black musicians, rendering the genre acceptable for a white audience.
When I began writing about my father’s life and career a few years ago, I did not want to delve too deeply into the topic of cultural appropriation. The truth is, I didn’t harbor judgment for my teenage father’s embrace of Black rhythm and blues. He was a good Baptist son with riot in his soul, and rock ’n’ roll filled a void that Bob Wills did not; just as Eazy-E filled a void for me as a teenager that Madonna did not, and just as Travis Scott fills a void for my white teenage daughter that Taylor Swift does not. Let’s admit it: white culture can be, well, bloodless.
But the harder truth is: I didn’t want to dwell on cultural appropriation because I didn’t want to paint my father as a racist. Like all of us, he harbors conscious and unconscious racism and bigotry, but his childhood was more racially integrated than many people’s, including my own. Born to poor, Texan cotton farmers at the tail end of the Dust Bowl, he grew up alongside the children of Black sharecroppers and Mexican day laborers, all of them running barefoot together through the fields. A Mexican café near his house blared norteño music on weekends, and he loved to stand on his porch at night and listen to the accordions rip through the silence of the open prairie. These experiences with nonwhite culture molded him from an early age, just as they molded other appropriators like Carl Perkins, who learned guitar from a Black field hand on his parents’ cotton farm.