George Hendricks Interview, 2009
Abstract
George Hendricks was born in Alabama in 1942 and moved to Cleveland at the age of 7. He is a singer with The Hesitations and has been performing music since he was a teenager. This 2009 interview discusses his long career as a professional R & B musician in Cleveland, describing the bands and the places in which he played, his struggles to make money playing music, and how he feels the nature of both the musicians and the music industry as a whole have changed since the 1960s. A recurrent theme in the interview is the issue of racism, which Hendricks experienced both in the South and in Cleveland. He argues strongly about the ability of music to bring whites and blacks together, seeing his experiences playing music to interracial crowds as proof of this.
Metadata
Sponsor this interview
Oh no! This interview has not yet been transcribed.
Transcription is expensive and time-consuming. You can support transcription on clevelandvoices.org by sponsoring an interview. As a sponsor, your name – or the name of your family or organization – will become part of the archival record. Donations to the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities are processed via the CSU Foundation and are tax-deductible.
Rock and Roll
This collection of interviews covers topics of race relations and rock and roll music in Cleveland between 1952 and 1966. The interviews were conducted by Dana Aritonovich as she researched her thesis – The Only Common Thread: Race, Youth, and the Everyday Rebellion of Rock and Roll, Cleveland, Ohio, 1952-1966 – in pursuit of a Master of Arts in History at Cleveland State University, which was successfully completed in 2010. Interview subjects are music fans, musicians, and disc jockeys from…