The Other ‘Georgia On My Mind’

The year was 1979 and bluesman B.B. King was playing his first riff in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, when a gentleman with thick sideburns stood up from his seat and shrieked with joy.

Gogi Tushmalashvili, a kid at the time, remembers the moment clearly – not just the screaming, but his own shock at what he was witnessing, the throngs swaying and grooving at Tbilisi State Philharmonic.

Suddenly, Soviet Georgia had the blues.

Years later, one fan would reminisce about the concert to the Georgian Journal: “It was like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.”

African American celebrities were making news in the region formerly known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics long before the current political tensions surrounding WNBA player Brittney Griner, the seven-time All-Star currently detained in Russia until at least July 2 for cannabis vapes allegedly found in her luggage. For much of the past century, African American music, from Paul Robeson to Marian Anderson to Snoop Dogg, has risen to become one of the region’s biggest imports.

B.B. King stole the show in Georgia. Prior to his debut, the country’s music menu was paltry, limited mostly to local bands known as Vocal-Instrumental Ensembles whose songs were written and approved by the Composers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. Western music like King’s, and jazz, was stigmatized as a form of rebellion, the “sonic idiocy in the bourgeois-capitalist world.”

Yet in the decades since, Black musical artists from electronic dance DJs to rapper Snoop Dogg have become popular culture celebrities, building a robust fanbase and market for locals and tourists alike in the region. Along the way, natives have discovered, among other things, intimacy through the English lyrics of African American music.

B.B. King’s music brought African American culture to the U.S.S.R.

In the late 1970s, King and his band began touring as part of a U.S. State Department’s cultural exchange program. They became the first bluesmen from America to tour on Soviet soil, performing nearly two dozen times in five cities across the U.S.S.R., including Tbilisi, Georgia.

Georgia is a small country, roughly the size of North Carolina, with a population of less than 4 million. King’s appeal there transcended his soulful crooning. Body swaying and decked out in a plaid suit and necktie, King told a universal story through a wondrous combination of guitar strings, amplifiers, electricity, and, most of all, his aching delivery. The emotionally-stirring notes issued from Lucille, King’s storied black Gibson ES semi-hollow body guitar, would become legendary.

“Black music was the introduction to Black people,” said Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, who studies Black life in the Soviet Union at the University of Pennsylvania. She added: “It was fun, foreign and typically American.”

The music was also frowned upon, but that wasn’t all bad news for King. The government’s campaign against Western music put King in high demand — and his recordings in rare supply. Vinyls smuggled by diplomats, sailors and dance troupes became a luxury, selling for a fortune on the black market. Enthusiasts tuned in to the Voice of America’s Jazz Hour, taped their favorite songs and distributed them among friends. Long hours of illegal taping paid off as familiar tunes by King, such as “The Thrill is Gone” or “Rock Me Baby” were met with unrestrained applause. King himself described his music as “the international denominator for bringing people of all races, creeds, and color together.”

Language and culture: Soviet Georgians found connections with Black music

Flash forward to 1992, almost two decades later. Georgia was newly independent from the Soviet Union, and its capital was plunged into a civil war. Freedom Square, in the center of the city, had morphed into a battlefield of armed supporters of two political movements. Other districts, including the one Levan Kakashvili grew up in, swarmed with street gangs. Violence was common, electricity was scarce and poverty abundant. Kakashvili was 12 years old.

“A friend of my friend’s, who’d escaped to the USA managed to return,” said Kakashvili, an IT specialist and rap enthusiast. “He told us stories about life in ghettos and brought cassettes of rap.”

Kakashvili listened and realized that somewhere, on the other side of the world, there were people who struggled like him. He was awestruck. “It was the time when there was only one radio station broadcasting in the country,” he said. “So I would wait for them to play songs, and I’d tape them.”

One of the first songs he heard on air was from Snoop Dogg’s 1993 album Doggy Style.

Naeemah Rose, a Black woman born and raised in New York, first visited Tbilisi in 2010 as a volunteer English teacher. She returned in 2014 and decided that to make this turn more successful, she needed to learn the local Georgian language. She created a Tinder profile, looking for a language exchange partner. She met Kakashvili.

“He super liked me,” Rose recalled, laughing. “He had a crush on me!” A romance blossomed, and the two eventually married. Kakashvili admitted he had a long way to go before being able to communicate with Rose. “I had never formally learned English, so when I talked to her, I used slang.” That slang-filled English grew from his love for rap music.

Kakashvili would write out words of the songs he heard on the radio, spelling them in the Georgian alphabet just as he heard them. He would then take the gibberish to older friends who spoke English. Together, they would attempt to decipher what Kakashvili had heard. A clumsy translation would follow.

“Then the internet appeared and I had access to more lyrics,” Kakashvili explained. “That’s how I learned English,” His spoken language was reminiscent of what Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Dr. Dre and Warren G had sung to him.

Curse words were common in her husband’s vocabulary. As Rose put it: “His written English still looks like the lyrics of a rap song, and the spelling is atrocious!”

Black music thrives in Georgia these days. From B.B. King’s screaming fans in Tbilisi in 1979, to recorded cassette tapes that doubled as English tutors throughout the 1990s, to Snoop Dogg drawing, in 2015, the largest-ever crowd to a jazz festival in Batumi, Black artists fulfilled the dream of the U.S. State Department when it first sent King across the Atlantic: They brought not only American culture to the Soviet Union but African American culture.

“I’ll be back,” Snoop Dogg tweeted after his last concert in that part of the world. Like the mellow flow of his rhymes informed by the streets of Long Beach, California, it was music to their ears.

This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 9:00 AM.