Jazź & rock'n'roll essentially started in America & was largely learned through listening to records not through reading music scores. So it's kind of inevitable that they copied the voices too.

Jazz in Britain was largely played by white musicians, though there were many Jamaican musicians who came over and played jazz. But British jazz musicians acknowledged their influences; they didn't pretend to have invented the music they were playing.

Cultural appropriation is like a form of plagarism: it doesn't acknowledge sources, it often misrepresents and caricatures its sources. Black & White Minstrels is appropriation; but a British jazz musician, or Dusty Springfield singing soul, is appreciation.

That's the thing about the British blues explosion; they all of them loved the blues. And they acknowledged where it came from and introduced British audiences to great American blues musicians.

We're all influenced by all kinds of cultures; we mix things up without even thinking about it. But when it comes to art, I think it proper to acknowledge sources.

I`m out of my depth on the close details of modern music but accent (and it its connection with modern poetry) interests me...particularly with the increasing growth of spoken poetry events these days.

(in other words; what is the significance of `the way we tell `em`)

In Greggs piece about Dylan I commented on an opinion
by a professor on the speaking voice...This is the other half of that opinion - but now about the the singing voice.

`Singing is different from speaking: it produces a far greater histrionic range; it allows for enormous distortions of spoken stress patterns so as to generate its expressiveness; and the different structures of music provide a backbone for the sung text which it doesn’t have to (though it may) demonstrate in its own compositional mode.`

Dylan was sometimes said to be `talking his way through his songs` (which I don`t think was true)...and yet, you couldn`t exactly call what he was doing singing.

What exactly was it (that managed to get him awarded a Nobel prize) ?

Harry
It was his impact on a couple of generations of the sixties and seventies. Of course it was literature. So many other writers herald him as their inspiration.

I've seen him several times and although the performances varied, the communication was still powerfully strong.

As we move into the 21st C with an increasingly poorly read generation that just wants to press reset when things go wrong, it might only be music that saves them, as long as they can hear the words