Clark had it all wrong: This was exactly the kind of music people played in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Sound, which influenced musicians from Janet Jackson to Sheila E., has come to be practically synonymous with Prince, thanks to his classic songs such as “Little Red Corvette,” “Erotic City,” and “Kiss.” But although Prince was its high priest, he was not its author. The Minneapolis Sound was bigger than one diminutive, enigmatic, driven-genius kid from the city’s north side. It was the offspring of ambitious school-based music training put in place by polka-loving European settlers, and the prodigious talents of a small group of black musicians who migrated to the area during the first half of the 20th century. It had been brewing in the small, easily-forgotten black section of a vanilla city for decades. It was the result of a cultural accommodation that was characteristic of the Twin Cities’ unusual ethno-musical heritage, a mix of styles that its vastly outnumbered black musicians—Prince and others—turned to spectacular advantage.

The story began with the region’s first outsiders: Europeans from Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and whites from northeastern U.S. states who poured into St. Paul and Minneapolis in the middle of the 19th century. They were pulled by cheap land and milling jobs on the banks of the Mississippi River, and they displaced the native peoples in the area. By the close of the 19th century, Minneapolis had grown into a sizable city of more than 200,000, one New Deal-era study of the region estimated.

White Minnesotans loved polka music, which borrowed from European folk traditions. Pennsylvania governor and 1964 presidential hopeful William Scranton and his wife courted Republican delegates from the state by dancing the polka. Photo by Paul Vathis/Associated Press.

These Europeans who settled in Minneapolis brought their folk music traditions with them. The musical migration could not have happened at a better time, or in a better place. Early Minnesotans had always placed a high value on music. Ethnic folk music, orchestras, early ragtime, minstrels, brass bands, and vaudeville all were part of Minneapolis’s early music tradition. By the turn of the 20th century, the city had the state’s first symphony orchestra, and boasted numerous music venues that attracted performances by the country’s best musicians.

Polka made its appearance during this time. A combination of different European folk musical traditions, polka or “pulka,” which is Czech for “half-step,” originated in eastern and central Europe in the 1820s, spreading throughout the continent by the 1830s and then, with migration, into the United States. It took hold in northeastern cities and in the upper midwest, as European migrants moved west (the “Polka Belt”), taking up regional variations along the way. Americans loved polka’s energy and vitality, and the ways it connected them to the Old World they missed.

The music thrived in Minneapolis—and inspired a strong commitment to musical education. Around the turn of the 20th century, city leaders institutionalized the town’s love of music through its schools. All public school students in Minneapolis were trained in voice, instrumentation, and music reading. The Minneapolis board of education said the intent was to increase “participation and appreciation of music,” and to provide poor and working class immigrants and their children with the tools to play, read, and write music. This had the effect of keeping alive the folk music traditions that Europeans had brought with them to the state, and would breathe life into the growing polka scene.

The Minneapolis Sound, which Prince and his band The Revolution popularized in the 1980s, was a blend of white and black musical styles. Here, in 1985, the musicians accepted the American Music Award for best single for “When Doves Cry,” in Los Angeles. Photo by Doug Pizac/Associated Press.

But it wasn’t just polka that benefited: Free music education also helped young Prince to lay the groundwork for the Minneapolis Sound. His family, like the European immigrants who invented polka, didn’t have the money to pay for musical instruments or lessons. But with the public schools providing these resources, Prince spent every second he could in his high school’s music room, practicing multiple instruments, honing his sound, and making demos.

Minneapolis’s polka love provided a perfect entry point for wildly creative black musicians like Prince in another way, too: by forcing them to mix with white culture in ways their brethren in other cities never had to. Black people have lived in Minnesota since before the state was founded. Blacks from Canada traded with Native Americans in the 19th century, and slaves (both slaves and escaped former slaves) also were a presence in the state. The first free black settlement in Minnesota was founded along the banks of the Mississippi in 1857, and in the years after abolition, migration increased. Minnesota’s growing liberalism and the state’s willingness to enfranchise black men sent a signal to many that they would be treated fairly in the northern metropolis.

Still, there were never very many black people in the area. Between 1880 and 1930, the black population in Minnesota grew from a negligible 362 to a still tiny 4,276. African Americans made up just 1 percent of the population in 1930; even when Prince was born, in 1958, the percentage of the state’s black population remained in the single digits. (It’s no wonder that the comedian Chris Rock joked in the 1990s that only two black people lived in Minnesota: Prince and Hall of Fame baseball player Kirby Puckett.)

But their small numbers didn’t diminish the impact that blacks had on the music scene—rather, it may have amplified it. While white Minnesotans played their polkas, black music migrated up the Mississippi, with minstrel shows, ragtime, jazz, and the blues all gaining enthusiastic, if small, followings in Minneapolis. Black musicians started thinking of the city as a place where they could live and thrive. Early black musical migrants included Lester “Pres” Young, the talented tenor saxophonist, and the jazz pianist James Samuel “Cornbread” Harris, II (whose son, Jimmy “Jam” Harris, became a well-known R&B songwriter and producer and an important figure in the popularization of the Minneapolis Sound).

Prince’s Yellow Cloud Electric Guitar, 1989. Image courtesy of the Division of Culture and the Arts, National Museum of American History.

Others followed. The parents of producer Terry Lewis (Jimmy “Jam”s’ musical partner), and those of guitarist Dez Dickerson (who played with Prince’s band, the Revolution), migrated to the Twin Cities during this same period. Prince’s parents made the journey too: Mattie Shaw, a singer, and John R. Nelson, a composer and pianist, both moved up from Louisiana in the 1940s. They met through Minneapolis’s small but vibrant black music scene, also known as the “chitterling circuit,” in the 1950s. Like many black migrants, they landed in North Minneapolis, a formerly Jewish area, where Prince was born and raised.

Because the black music scene in Minneapolis was so tiny, black musicians who hoped to make a living by performing played for white audiences whenever possible. Segregation reinforced the musical color line, with most white audiences wanting to hear classical music, jazz standards, polka, or pop music. Black musicians learned to accommodate them, and developed a vast musical range. Cornbread Harris, for example, learned to play “polkas, mambas, salsas, and calypsos,” says Prince biographer Dave Hill. Black musicians’ virtuosity expanded their own community’s musical vocabulary, melding a new family of sounds into the jazz, blues, and R&B they played for black listeners.

Prince’s generation followed the pattern. In the early 1970s, when Prince was a teenager, the numbers of black people in Minneapolis were still “small enough to be ignored,” according to Hill, and white pop music continued to dominate. Prince was schooled in black musical forms like R&B, funk, and soul, but there was still only one small, low-frequency black radio station, so he and his contemporaries also listened to rock and folk artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

Lester Young, 1958. Photo by Herman Leonard. Courtesy of Herman Leonard Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

Prince’s unique virtuosity made it possible for him to forge a new style from the wide variety of white and black genres that he and his city loved. Even as a high school student, he could hear a song in his head and translate it to sound. He played several instruments by ear, including guitar, piano, drums, and bass guitar. He coolly mimicked masters like Carlos Santana note for note. Folk influences like Dylan and Mitchell course through Prince’s work with his first band, Grand Central, which played rock-tinged funk and soul. By the mid-’70s, punk, indie rock, and New Wave—the music that floated around the “vanilla market” in the city at the time—had filtered into his recordings, too. This musical collage is apparent on Prince’s first album, For You, which was less a commercial release and more a statement of what the young musician could do: Minneapolis Sound lite, with flares of the sexually provocative lyrics for which he would become famous.

By the time Prince recorded his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, he had refined the sound. Instead of showcasing his ability to play multiple instruments and diverse musical tastes, as his first release had, Dirty Mind showed Prince’s ability to blend his influences to create an entirely new sound. It was a giant leap creatively. Hailed by critics as a landmark, Dirty Mind put Prince and the Minneapolis Sound on the map. Songs like “when you were mine,” “Partyup,” and “Uptown” (an ode to the bohemian Minneapolis neighborhood that Prince identified with), were punk-funk music, incorporating heavy New Wave and rock overtures smoothed out with R&B. Erotically-charged songs like “Head,” “Dirty Mind,” and “Sister” shocked—and delighted—listeners and critics alike. Rolling Stone said the album was “a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement,” and music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it a “stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock” that “set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s.”

The press anointed Prince the next Jimi Hendrix—the new black rock royalty for the ’80s. In fact, he was more than that. Mining the sounds that reverberated in his unique corner of America, from polka to punk, Prince forged a style that was just right—in spite of, or perhaps because of, its oddball roots in black and white culture. Over the next three decades, Prince released dozens of albums and stored away enough recordings to release two or more albums a year for a century. His was a singular talent, of a sort we’re unlikely to see again. But without Minneapolis’s crazy musical mixture in his past, he might have remained only a prince, instead of becoming an emperor.

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Traditionally Americans haven’t mourned in public. Funerals here tend to be private affairs—an interior scene at a funeral home, a few family and friends, some flowers. Big politicians may have public funerals, but most funerals—even for celebrities—are closed. Traditionally, too, we let the dead be dead: We may speak in whispers at the wake, but we don’t speak of the dead as still living. Instead, we call that “being in denial.”

Mourning online is changing our rituals. Not only do we mourn people we do not know personally, but the Facebook pages of deceased friends have the potential to live on, turning into spaces where friends and family write public messages, expressing intimate details for all to read as though the person were still alive, or just off vacationing in Thailand. Take this recent post on a deceased Facebook friend’s page: “It’s been about a year since you’ve passed and I never got to thank you for being the mentor that you were for the better part of the last decade. I had moved just a couple of weeks prior to your passing and I regret not having paid you a last visit before I’d left.”

These new forms of grieving erode traditional American boundaries between public and private, and the living and the dead. But in fact, this manner of mourning is really old. Public mourning and maintaining connection with the dead were big in ancient Greece (as they are in other countries today). Funerals were spectacles during the archaic period, the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. Mourning was part theater, part opportunity to show off, and part power play. Aristocratic factions made sumptuous displays of their wealth. Groups of women sang dirges over the body of the deceased in elaborate choral performances. Rival families competed to outdo each other with offering baskets to the family of the deceased.

Greek mourners also spoke directly to the dead. In the laments that survive, women directly address their deceased male kin because those relationships gave women their identity in the first place. In Homer’s Iliad, after Patroclus, Achilles’ closest and dearest companion, is killed, a crowd of women sing lamentations. Briseis (Achilles’ war captive) begins. She has watched her entire family die; she has been given over to Achilles to live as a slave. But Patroclus was always kind to her. She will miss his gentle nature, the way in which he provided comfort in a war-torn world. Her lament is a way of readjusting to a world in which he will no longer offer this solace. She mourns the death of a part of herself.

When I read my friends’ Facebook posts about Prince and David Bowie, I hear similar sounds of Greek lament. We tell the world that in our morose teenage years, we were consoled by listening to “Ziggy Stardust.” We remember dancing to “Raspberry Beret” as a bright spot in a tough summer. We mourn the loss of those who shaped us, who provided kindness in a complicated world. We mourn the death of a part of ourselves.

Prince and Bowie were cultural icons who, among their many contributions, questioned typical gender roles. When we listened to their music, we could step outside of ourselves for a little while. Our public manner of mourning these particular figures recognizes (and reveals a kind of nostalgia for) their revolutionary approach to gender 30 years ago. It honors the new ways of resisting constraints on being male or being female that these performers embodied. As we mourn them, we celebrate their subversive messages.

Ancient Greek funerals also carried subversive undertones. Funerals allowed women an opportunity to step outside of their traditional roles. Women had few political rights or even independent identities and funerals were pretty much their only opportunity for public self-expression, so they made the most of them. Ancient tragedies (the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) feature mourning women using their laments as a means of resistance to those in authority. In Euripides’ Helen, Helen (of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships) stages a massive funeral in order to escape the clutches of the evil king Theoclymenus; she pretends to be mourning her husband, Menelaus, who is actually alive, and manages to flee in the boat provided for her feigned funeral practices.

When we post in mourning on Facebook for a celebrity, to some extent we are permitted to step outside of our regular role and display a connection with someone we don’t know. Mourning on Facebook offers us a chance to do something we couldn’t otherwise do. Prince’s family isn’t going to let me go to his funeral. Nor is David Bowie’s.

Like the Greeks, we also sometimes struggle for control over the memory of our heroes. For the ancient Greeks, a hero was an intermediary figure between mortal and immortal, one who had the power to help friends and harm enemies from beyond the grave. The thing is, you usually needed the dead body of the hero buried in your territory in order to make use of its powers. If a deceased individual was deemed a hero, a struggle over the corpse could ensue.

A classic hero in this sense of the term was Oedipus as portrayed in Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus. Because an oracle said his dead body would bring victory in war, his hometown of Thebes tried to get control over his corpse even before he died. To spite them, Oedipus died in Colonus, after announcing that his cold corpse would drink the Thebans’ warm blood. Greek stories include other conflicts over corpses, as when the Spartans stole the body of Orestes to take advantage of his military powers.

Recently, my friends have stopped sharing links about Prince and the Muppets and shifted to posting articles on opiate addiction. Are we digging up Prince’s body and moving it to Sparta when we emphasize his possible struggles with pain and pills?

Of course, times have changed since Ancient Greece. Back then, the state was not a fan of funerals, which sometimes launched disruptive blood vendettas. Grief had the potential to morph into revenge. Think of Procne who, after taking revenge on her husband (he had raped her sister, Philomela, and then cut out Philomela’s tongue), kills her own son, Itys, feeds him to her husband, and is subsequently turned into a nightingale, forever lamenting the death of her son (she sings “Itys, Itys, Itys”). The potential for a funeral to kick off chaos led the Greek state to curtail women’s mourning rights.

In 2016, though, city governments have an entirely different way of dealing with mourning. They use purple lights to show that they’re friendly, that they care, that they’d like to join the cry party. That’s not very Greek at all!

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