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C he e r sT r a i l. or g
THE OXFORD AMERICAN’S
SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE, VOL. 22

10
E D I T O R’ S L E T T E R :
THE SOUTH JUST HAS A THANG
by Brittany Howard

ARCHIVE
12

ON THE EDGE OF DIMINISHED LIGHT

Yusef Komunyakaa on Howlin’ Wolf
16

R . E. M. F O R T H E P E O P L E
Elizabeth Wurtzel on R.E.M.

26
N I N A I S E V E RY W H E R E I G O
Tiana Clark on Nina Simone
36

S OU L S E N S AT I O N
Andria Lisle on Ann Peebles
38

D A A R T O F S T O RY T E L L I N ’ ( A P R E Q U E L )
Kiese Laymon on OutKast
42

IS THIS HOME?
Sam Stephenson on Thelonious Monk
ART BY
48

WHOSE SKIP JAMES IS THIS? Derek Fordjour, Anthony Harrison, Brian Smith, Mike Reddy,
Peter Guralnick on Skip James Edward Colver, Diana Ejaita, David Scruggs, Janette Beckman,
Andres Chaparro, Lawrence N. Shustak, Bernard Gotfryd,
52 Richard A. Chance, Isip Xin, Charles White, Tony Abeyta,
THE GOSPEL OF JODECI Mike Rowe, Travis Boyer, Danny Romeril, Lacy Van Court,
Lauren Du Graf on Jodeci Michelle Marchesseault, Aaron Turner, Jason Jägel,
Patterson Hood, Mark Cáceres, Garrett Bradley, Kevin Beasley,
62
Martina Attille, Milton Carter, Three Ring Studio
IF GOD HAD A NAME
Jason Kyle Howard on Joan Osborne
66

E V E RY B O DY K N OW S Y O U Cover: Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1957. Photo courtesy

W H E N Y O U ’ R E D OW N A N D O U T Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo
Amanda Petrusich on Bessie Smith

Copyright © 2020 The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. All rights reserved. The Oxford American (ISSN 1074-4525, USPS# 023157) is published four times per year, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, by The Oxford American Literary
Project, Inc., P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, Arkansas 72203. Periodicals postage paid at Conway, AR Postmaster and at additional mailing offices. The annual subscription rate is $39 for U.S. orders, $49 for Canadian orders, and $59 for
outside North America. (All funds must be U.S. dollars.) POSTMASTER: please send address changes to The Oxford American, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000, or e-mail subscriptions@oxfordamerican.org, or telephone
(800) 314-9051. For list rental inquiries, contact Kerry Fischette at (609) 580-2875 or kerry.fischette@alc.com. Advertising, editorial, and general business information can be obtained by calling (501) 374-0000. “Oxford” and “Oxford
American English” are registered trademarks of Oxford University Press, which is not affiliated with The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. We use the title with their permission. Printed in the USA.

4 WINTER 2020
ICONS ENDNOTES
86 UP ABOVE MY HEAD 108 THE MISSING BLACK NOTES 138 A TOUR OF THE
Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson Harmony Holiday on Florence Price SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
88 THE GODMOTHER OF SOUL 111 QUARE
Rosanne Cash on Poem by L. Lamar Wilson
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
112 I KNOW A PLACE
SONGS
92 ANOTHER SELENA POEM Patterson Hood on David Hood Enjoy playlists curated by your
Poem by Iliana Rocha favorite musicians and writers on
116 LINGERING COULD BE YOUR DOOM
94 ELLIS AT THE CROSSROADS the Spotify app by scanning the codes
David Ramsey on Brother Claude Ely
Gwen Thompkins on Ellis Marsalis throughout the issue. See p. 160 for
`122 THE WAY THEY STRUT instructions on how to use the codes.
102 LONG-HAIRED COUNTRY BOY Alice Randall on LaVern Baker
Elizabeth Nelson on 155 Playlist intros by Brittany Howard,
Charlie Daniels 128 JESSYE NORMAN CISTERN TIME TO Kiese Laymon, Taylor Crumpton,
DRESS FOR FALL Kelsey Waldon, Silas House &
106 LISTENING TO THE (DIXIE) CHICKS Jason Kyle Howard, Rosanne Cash,
Poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
AFTER AMERICA INVADES IRAQ, Cynthia Shearer, Clarissa Brooks,
THE YEAR I CAME OUT 130 ORACLE OF CASTALIA Smithsonian Folkways, and
Poem by Nomi Stone Jamey Hatley on Talibah Safiya Adia Victoria

“Three Bend Deep” (2019), by Derek Fordjour. Fordjour’s exhibition SELF MUST DIE
is on view at Petzel, New York, until December 23, 2020 OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 5

CLARISSA BROOKS is a writer,
journalist, and community orga-
nizer based in Atlanta. She ori-
ents her cultural work in black
queer feminism with a focus on
the abolition of prisons, policing,
and surveillance.
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI is
the author of Rocket Fantastic
and other books of poems. They
live in Old East Durham, North
Carolina, and work at UNC Cha-
pel Hill. Rigorous compassion is
at the center of their practice. It
has been the honor of their life
to know Randall Kenan.
ROSANNE CASH is a Grammy-
winning singer and songwriter,
as well as the author of four
books, including her best-selling
memoir, Composed. She is the
recipient of the 2021 Edward
MacDowell Medal.
TIANA CLARK is the author of
two poetry collections: I Can’t
Talk About the Trees Without the
Blood and Equilibrium. Her writ-
ing has appeared in or is forth-
coming from the New Yorker,
Poetry Magazine, the Washing-
ton Post, BuzzFeed News, and
elsewhere.
TAYLOR CRUMPTON is a mu-
sic, pop culture, and politics
writer transplanted to Oakland,
originally from Dallas. Her by-
lines have appeared in a variety
of publications, including
Pitchfork, Nylon, Playboy, and
Marie Claire.
LAUREN DU GRAF has written
about film, art, music, and lit-
erature for the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Review of Books,
Playboy, and other outlets. She
holds a PhD in English and com-
parative literature from UNC
Chapel Hill. She last wrote for
the magazine about Toro y Moi.
6 WINTER 2020
PETER GURALNICK ’s most
recent book is Looking to Get
Lost: Adventures in Music and
Writing, which was published
in October. His previous book
was Sam Phillips: The Man Who
Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, which
was short-listed for the Plutarch
Award for Best Biography of the
Year in 2015.
JAMEY HATLEY is a Memphian
obsessed with stories in ruin, at
the very edge of being forgot-
ten. She was a Prose Fellow for
the National Endowment for the
Arts, a Rona Jaffe Foundation
Writers’ Award Winner, and the
inaugural Indie Memphis Black
Screenwriting Fellow (selected
by Barry Jenkins).
HARMONY HOLIDAY is the
author of four volumes of po-
etry, most recently Hollywood
Forever and A Jazz Funeral for
Uncle Tom. A collection of po-
ems, Maafa, and a collection of
essays on reparations and the
body, Love is War for Miles, are
forthcoming. In addition, she
runs an archive of jazz and di-
aspora poetics and is working
on a biography of singer Abbey
Lincoln and a film on the writer
James Baldwin.
PATTERSON HOOD is a writer,
musician, songwriter, and pro-
ducer living in Portland, Oregon.
He is originally from Muscle
Shoals, Alabama, and plays in
his band Drive-By Truckers as
well as being a solo artist.
SILAS HOUSE is the nationally
best-selling author of six novels,
including Southernmost, which
was published in June 2018. He is a
frequent contributor to the Atlantic.
BRITTANY HOWARD is a mu-
sician, singer, and songwriter
known for being the lead vocal-
ist, guitarist, and main song-
writer of the rock band Alabama
Shakes. The band has won four
Grammy Awards (with eleven
nominations) and topped the
Billboard 200 with the gold-
certified Sound & Color, the
follow-up to its platinum debut
album, Boys & Girls. Howard has
performed everywhere from the
Obama White House to the main
stage at Lollapalooza, where she
sang with Paul McCartney at
his invitation. She released her
debut studio album, Jaime, in
2019, her most revelatory work
yet, which quickly gained criti-
cal acclaim.
JASON KYLE HOWARD is the au-
thor of A Few Honest Words: The
Kentucky Roots of Popular Mu-
sic and coauthor of Something’s
Rising: Appalachians Fighting
Mountaintop Removal. His work
has appeared in the New York
Times, Salon, the Nation, the
Millions, and Utne Reader, as
well as on NPR. He directs the
creative writing program at
Berea College and serves on the
faculty of Spalding University’s
School of Creative and Profes-
sional Writing.
DANIELLE A. JACKSON is a
Memphis-born writer and the
managing editor at the Oxford
American.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA ’s books
of poetry include Taboo, Dien
Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for
which he received the Pulitzer
Prize), Warhorses, The Chame-
leon Couch, Emperor of Water
Clocks, and most recently Night
Animals. His plays, performance
art, and libretti have been per-
formed internationally and in-
clude Saturnalia, Testimony,
and Gilgamesh. Everyday Mojo
Songs of Earth is forthcoming
in 2021.
KIESE LAYMON is the author
of the memoir Heavy, which
received the Andrew Carnegie
Medal for Excellence in Nonfic-
tion, and the novel Long Divi-
sion. A revised edition of his es-
say collection, How to Slowly Kill
Yourself and Others in America,
was released in November.
ANDRIA LISLE is a visual-art
curator, author, journalist, and
former music biz veteran who
once worked for Ike Turner. She
has toured with the Grifters,
the Bo-Keys, and Otha Turner’s
Rising Star Fife & Drum Band;
driven Pulitzer Prize–winning
playwright Suzan-Lori Parks
across the Mississippi Delta and
taken Sonic Youth to Mississippi’s
Graceland Too; sipped tea with
Al Kapone; slung t-shirts for
Tommy Wright III; and traded
jokes with 8Ball & MJG. Fugazi,
Nation of Ulysses, the Clean,
John Wesley Harding, and the
Cheater Slicks have slept on her
floor. Read more about her ad-
ventures at andrialisle.com.
ELIZABETH NELSON is a song-
writer, journalist, television
writer, and civil servant in the
field of education policy. Her
writing appears in the Washing-
ton Post and on NPR, the Ringer,
Pitchfork, and Lawyers, Guns &
Money, among other places. She
fronts the Paranoid Style, a D.C.–
based garage-punk band once
described by Robert Christgau as
“better than anybody else except
Sleater-Kinney.”
AMANDA PETRUSICH is a con-
tributing editor to the Oxford
American and the author of three
books about music. She is a staff
writer at the New Yorker, an as-
sociate professor at New York
University, and the recipient
of a Guggenheim Fellowship in
nonfiction.
DAVID RAMSEY is a contributing
editor to the Oxford American.
His work has been anthologized
in Da Capo Best Music Writing,
Best Food Writing, and The Nor-
ton Field Guide to Writing.
ALICE RANDALL is the author
of five novels, including The
Wind Done Gone and Black Bot-
tom Saints. With her daughter,
Caroline Randall Williams, she
co-authored the acclaimed cook-
book Soul Food Love, which won
the NAACP Image Award. She is
guest-editing the Oxford Ameri-
can’s forthcoming food issue.
ILIANA ROCHA is the 2019 win-
ner of the Berkshire Prize for a
First or Second Book of Poetry
for her most recent collection,
The Many Deaths of Inocencio
Rodriguez, forthcoming from
Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her
debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald
Hall Prize for Poetry.
CYNTHIA SHEARER is the
author of two works of
fiction, The Wonder Book of the
Air and The Celestial Jukebox.
Her work has appeared in such
publications as TriQuarterly, the
Missouri Review, and Virginia
Quarterly Review.
SAM STEPHENSON’ s work
has been published in A Public
Space, the New York Times Book
Review, Tin House, and else-
where. He won the 2015 Deems
Taylor/Virgil Thomson award for
his Paris Review piece on John
Coltrane’s first biographer, and
FSG published his biography
of Eugene Smith, Gene Smith’s
Sink, in 2017. He was awarded
a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship.
NOMI STONE is a poet and an-
thropologist who has authored
two poetry collections, Strang-
er’s Notebook and Kill Class, a
finalist for the Julie Suk Award.
Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a
Fulbright Scholar, Stone has had
her poems included recently in
Poetry, American Poetry Review,
and Best American Poetry.
GWEN THOMPKINS is a New
Orleans–based journalist and
writer who spent many years as
an NPR senior editor and East
Africa correspondent. She is the
executive producer and host of
“Music Inside Out,” a weekly
public radio program featuring
longform interviews, demonstra-
tions, and performances that
showcase the unusually varied
musical landscape of Louisiana.
ADIA VICTORIA is a gothic blues
artist from upstate South Caro-
lina. She is currently based in
Nashville, where she makes art
and looks out after her good
mind. Her most recent album,
Silences, was co-produced by the
National’s Aaron Dessner. When
not making art, she devotes her
life to her cats, communing with
her ancestors, and minding her
business.
KELSEY WALDON , a proud na-
tive of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Ken-
tucky, took an interest in singing,
songwriting, and playing guitar
as a child. After moving to Nash-
ville, she cultivated a loyal fol-
lowing through frequent touring
across the U.S. and two critically
acclaimed albums. Her persis-
tence paid off when, on stage at
the Grand Ole Opry, John Prine
invited her to join his Oh Boy Re-
cords family. White Noise/White
Lines was released October 4,
2019, on Oh Boy Records.
L. LAMAR WILSON ’s work ap-
pears in two collections, Sacri-
legion and Prime; the stage pro-
duction The Gospel Truth; and
the film The Changing Same, a
Rada Film Group collaboration.
He teaches at Florida State Uni-
versity and Mississippi University
for Women.
ELIZABETH WURTZEL (1967–
2020) is the author of Prozac
Nation, Bitch, and More, Now,
Again, and of the ebook Cre-
atocracy: How the Constitution
Invented America. She was the
pop music critic for New York
Magazine and the New Yorker.
She is a graduate of Harvard Col-
lege and Yale Law School.
ELIZA BORNÉ
Editor
Executive Editor SARA A. LEWIS
Managing Editor DANIELLE A. JACKSON
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Editor-at-Large JAY JENNINGS
Poetry Editor REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL
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ALEX MAR, GREIL MARCUS, DUNCAN MURRELL, CHRIS OFFUTT,
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 THE SOUTH JUST HAS A THANG
journalist asked me once,
“Brittany, how has the South
informed your music?”
At the time, I didn’t know what
the word “informed” meant.
But, even after clarification, I realized it
was a hard question to answer.
See, the South has a thang.
That thang is hard to describe.
I grew up in a junkyard in Limestone Coun-
ty, Alabama. Limestone is rural and pretty flat.
When I think of where I grew up, I see fields
of cotton, large green expanses of pasture,
cows, the hot sun, the fish jumping in the
green water.
I was born to a white mother and a black
father. My grandmothers lived nearby and I
spent a lot of time at their homes learning to
cook, to dance, to shuck corn, to do laundry,
to clean house. You know, the basics.
For my immediate family, the junkyard
was our little oasis. A double-wide trailer
surrounded by just enough grass to support
several farm animals: pigs, chickens, geese,
goats, dogs, and a random turkey. I spent so
much time outdoors. My sister and I would
dress in costumes and use our imaginations in
the surrounding woods or down by the creek
until the sun went down and The Simpsons
came on at 7 P.M. We’d come home tired and
dirty, but happy.
We didn’t have a lot of money. But I had what
I needed: My family loved me, I had plenty of
room to run around, I had my imagination,
and I had music. My mom loved Elvis; my dad
loved Prince. My maternal grandmother, Ruby,
liked the pop hits of the ’50s and ’60s and in
her kitchen I’d learn the words to songs that
came long before me: the Crystals, Wendy
Rene, Dion, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.
I can remember Ruby telling me that “Ruby
Baby” by Dion was written about her and that
she “just knew she’d marry him” when that
song was released. We’d laugh at ourselves
singing and dancing all covered in flour from
baking biscuits. My paternal grandmother,
Helen, introduced me to music by Luther
Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, the Staple
Singers, and Ray Charles. We had a lot of
barbecues in her front yard while listening
Photo of Brittany Howard by Anthony Harrison
BY BRITTANY HOWARD
GUEST EDITOR
to the greats. It was a whole scene. The sun
would just be setting, and all of my uncles
and older cousins would park in the front
yard. The younger cousins and I would bang
on five-gallon buckets, singing along to “Here
and Now” while my uncle grilled the best
BBQ ribs you’d ever taste. Everyone seemed
to have a smile on their face. So relaxed and
so happy. It was just beautiful.
H ow does the South inform my music?
How do I describe the sound that your
bare feet make when they pat the cool, packed
red dust under them? How do I describe the
color of the sky when you know there’s going
to be a tornado? How do I tell you about my
grandmother’s smile when she’s singing old
church songs? How can I even tell you the way
it feels to hear the cicadas sing in the humid
evenings on my great-grandmother’s porch,
or the first breeze of fall after an oppressive,
jungle-like summer where you worked all
week and never got ahead?
How do I relate to you the complications
of an interracial household in the early ’90s
in a small county in Alabama and the joy I
still found there? The freshly picked turnip
greens or poke salad pulled from the front
yard? The pecans we picked up from under
a giant, ancient pecan tree to turn into pie?
I would shuck corn with my grandma, snap-
ping peas from her garden; her hard-working,
worn hands were like sculptures to me. How
do I describe the sorrow of a summer funeral
where your sweat and your tears gather on
your collar? How can I describe the unhurried
rhythm of life here, the slow-drip of progress
or the resilience of generations of folks in my
family that taught me to believe “everything
is gonna be alright”? How do I quantify the
“soul” in our food or the experience of find-
ing delight and beauty in a place with such a
complicated, convoluted history?
How does that inform my music?
It’s just life here.
You see, the South just has a thang.
It gets INTO you. And there is no historian
like the music created here.
T he musicians covered in this issue of the
Oxford American are all important voices
in understanding what this thang is, and I’m
honored to get to be this issue’s guest editor.
In picking the “best of the best” of the maga-
zine’s more than two decades of music issues, I
couldn’t help falling in love with Tiana Clark’s
story of her trip to Tryon, North Carolina,
where Nina Simone grew up, because it re-
minded me of my grandmothers and their love
for and belief in me. I also love Kiese Laymon’s
homage to OutKast, who always made me so
proud. The way they told stories about grow-
ing up in Atlanta—I could definitely relate. I
feel the same complicated feelings about my
hometown in Alabama. I found some connec-
tion to all of the stories inside this issue. And
when the poet Yusef Komunyakaa wonders
if Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” is
about “a smokestack, a place, a woman, or a
state of mind,” I remember that it is impos-
sible to talk about the South without poetry.
I want to welcome you to this issue in hopes
that you will find more than you expected
about the musicians who call the South their
home. That you’ll understand that the diver-
sity here is what truly makes us great.
Here is what I believe: the South’s natural
beauty has inspired masterpieces. I know we
can all agree time runs differently here. It has
its own time signature with its own rhythm.
The beat doesn’t really land on time; it’s just
a little bit behind. And there is something in
that space that gets into you and everything
in the natural world here. It’s a place where
scars can heal and progress can be made.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 11
ON THE EDGE
OF DIMINISHED
LIGHT S
S U E 7

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’ve been listening to the wall, past my bedtime, I could hear music let her husband talk her
Howlin’ Wolf since I on the other side of the garden, beyond the into his “devilish ways,”
was seven or eight. At pear trees: Bobby “Blue” Bland, B. B. King, where the jukebox filled
first, his voice entered Dinah Washington, Little Esther, Muddy Wa- the woods with the sounds
me almost through os- ters, and Howlin’ Wolf. of the blues. She’d lapsed
mosis, a feeling in the “Smokestack Lightning” immediately as an usher at the Tree of
night air, bloody moon- struck me, recalling the Magazine Lumber Life Baptist Church—that
light falling through the Company’s smokestack that reflected across old conversation between
trees on the outskirt of our lives daily. Perhaps moments like this the sacred sorrow songs
Bogalusa, Louisiana—a later brought me to poetry, knowing a phrase and the devil’s music. She
wooded section known could mean more than a single thing, innu- argued with herself.
as Mitch. This is where endo under the skin of language. Out of the voices that
men plowed their small swarmed over Red’s Place
farms and big gardens Ah oh, smokestack lightning on weekends, Howlin’ Wolf was one to hold
with horses and mules in the 1950s, a half- Shinin’ just like gold my feet to the fire. I don’t know why, but I im-
step into the past and a half-step into the Why don’t ya hear me cryin’? mediately believed in the bigness of his voice;
future. In this green limbo, a world between A whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whooo . . . I knew this had something to do with the
worlds, my grandmother Elsie and her sec- soil I walked on, something shaped by hard
ond husband Wesley Pittman operated a Now, I wonder, is the song about a smoke- work, and by the Southern rural landscape.
small, one-room juke joint called Red’s Place. stack, a place, a woman, or a state of mind? The voice was rooted in the earth, in sweat
It was open on Friday and Saturday nights. “Whoa oh tell me, baby / Where did ya stay and blood, and was hard to forget—thunder
They sold whiskey and beer, Nehi orange and last night?” The phrases seemed to collide, in a whisper. It sang the country, the deep
strawberry sodas, hot dogs, fish sandwich- creating tension essential to the blues shaped woods, the Delta mud, a place and mood I
es, fried chicken, and potato salad. And, of around the timbre of Howlin’ Wolf’s voice, knew by heart.
course, a jukebox of pulsing neon rainbowed which perhaps echoed the familiar robust
through the place. Those weekends at Mama presence of a deacon I’d heard at church. Oh the dogs begin to bark, and the
Elsie’s, as I lay in bed counting shadows on Perhaps this paradox is why Mama Elsie hound begin to howl

12 WINTER 2020
 Oh dogs begin to bark, hound begin
to howl
Ooh watch out strange kind people
’Cause little red rooster is on the prowl
If you see my little red rooster, please
drag him home
If you see my little red rooster, please
drag him home
There ain’t no peace in the barnyard
Since the little red rooster been gone . . .
Back in Mitch, everyone was kinfolk. Few
strangers ventured among these backwoods
people. Red’s Place beckoned a few customers
from across town, but not enough to keep the
“business” in the black. In fact, it had always
seemed like a hobby, and poor people can’t
afford hobbies that cost money and time.
Red’s Place closed, but I took more than
the blues with me, because I’d learned the
art of signification, how to speak slantwise.
And I also learned something about surreal-
ism—how that “little red rooster” became a
symbol in my imagination for Texas Red and
other characters in the know—before I even
understood what it was. Often, in attempting
to find the human voice inside the guitar and
master the classic twelve-bar, three-line,
AAB structure, the bluesman would bend the
logic of language into music, into something
personal, and he responded mainly to the
logic of feeling.
More than a decade later, when I first
visited my estranged mother in Phoenix,
Arizona, breaking bread with music in the
background on the turntable, I was surprised
to hear Howlin’ Wolf. The power of his voice
still towered over other voices and blues-
sounds, so far away from my childhood, so
close to everything I knew.
Chester Arthur Burnett was born in White
Station, Mississippi, in 1910. According to the

Photo of Howlin’ Wolf (Manchester, England, 1964) by Brian Smith. © Brian Smith, from the forthcoming book
Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom – American Rhythm & Blues in England – 1962-1968 (Easy-On-The-Eye Books, Sheffield, UK) OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 13
documentary The Howlin’ Wolf Story, his I think it is important to note here that How- He was uneducated, and perhaps being in
parents separated when he was young; his lin’ Wolf, although illiterate, questioned some Chicago accentuated this. Even some mem-
mother, Gertrude, threw him out as a boy, and of the tunes written for him, as Willie Dixon bers of his band called him stupid behind
he moved in with his uncle, Will Young, who underscores in his memoir I Am the Blues: “The his back; of course, they wouldn’t have con-
mistreated him. At thirteen, he ran away to join one Wolf hated most of all was ‘Wang-Dang fronted him face-to-face, disconcerted by his
his father’s large family in the Delta, and it was Doodle.’ He hated that ‘Tell Automatic Slim substantial ego and physical stature.
here that he was happy for the first time. On and Razor-Toting Jim.’ He’d say, ‘Man, that’s Despite feeling deprived of an education,
his father’s farm he learned the rituals akin to too old-timey, sound like some old leveecamp he bragged about leaving Memphis and
the soil, and it is said that even after he began number.’” However, British and American rock driving himself from the Delta up to Chi-
playing music regularly, he would return each bands later covered many of these songs. cago, along the Blues Highway, with nearly
year to work the farm beside his father. And it wasn’t easy to deny or overlook four thousand dollars in his pocket. At the
By 1928, he met Charlie Patton, a Delta the source—the blues tradition. This new time, this was unusual for a bluesman. It
blues legend, and learned songs such as “High recognition and popularity brought Howlin’ was also unusual that someone like Howlin’
Water Everywhere,” “Pony Blues,” and “A Wolf to the American Folk Blues Festival Wolf would enroll in reading, writing, and
Spoonful Blues”; he adapted his guitar style tour produced by German promoters Horst arithmetic classes when he was almost fifty.
and showmanship from Patton. Traveling Lippmann and Fritz Rau in 1964. This bluesman paid his musicians decent
through the South salaries, and pro-
during the 1930s, vided for his family,
Howlin’ Wolf made without any of the
a living perform- vagaries surround-
ing solo and with ing many of his ilk.
bluesmen such as Big and basic,
Honeyboy Edwards, down-to-earth, How-
Robert Jr. Lockwood, lin’ Wolf seemed driv-
Willie Brown, and en by the existential
Son House. necessity of the blues
He was drafted to the end. His art de-
into the U.S. Army fined him.
in 1941, but was In 1970, he cut The
discharged in 1943 London Howlin’ Wolf
because “he found Sessions for Chess,
it difficult to adjust” with musicians such
(I wonder if this has as Eric Clapton and
anything to do with Bill Wyman, along-
the fact that he was side his guitarist
illiterate, or perhaps Hubert Sumlin and
his inclination to- harmonica player
ward individuality Jeff Carp. Still sing-
made his relationship Issue 75, Winter 2011 ing and playing from
to the military a dif- the gut and heart, he
ficult compromise). cut his last studio al-
This bluesman stood 6' 3", and his voice, The following year, The Rolling Stones bum for Chess in 1973, The Back Door Wolf,
swollen with passion and power, was a unique were scheduled on the TV show Shindig! and fewer than three years before his death.
instrument shaped and fueled by insinuation. the group insisted that he appear with them, Perhaps, due to illiteracy, his lyrics, on
He was close to the classic blues, still located probably because they had covered “The Red their own, lack a degree of complexity
on the cusp of the field holler and jug band, Rooster” and it had paid off. that we see in other songs of their time,
almost one step away from the sorrow songs. Also, in I Am the Blues, in an interview, and perhaps they even exist on the verge
In 1951, Sam Phillips signed him with the Scott Cameron says, “When Led Zeppelin II of sentimentality. Yet the authenticity and
Memphis Recording Service, and the same came out, Arc Music brought a claim against immense power of his voice—which seems
year his first recording sessions were cut for them that ‘Bring It on Home’ was Willie’s to exist with an innate opposition to senti-
RPM Records and Chess Records. song and that ‘The Lemon Song’ was Wolf’s mentality—along with his gift of delivery,
Two years later, he was in Chicago, the ‘Killing Floor.’ They had a settlement, all of lend ethos to his songs. He always stayed
home of Chess Records. In 1962, his Howlin’ this without Willie’s knowledge.” close to signifying, to the politics of the
Wolf album featured Willie Dixon (a bassist When Howlin’ Wolf referred to “Wang- blues. And from the first howling note to
and songwriter also from Mississippi), along Dang Doodle” as an “old leveecamp number,” the last, the listener feels that Wolf, initi-
with others, and had cuts like “Wang-Dang one wonders if he was indirectly attempting ated by the simplicity of everyday existence,
Doodle,” “Going Down Slow,” “Spoonful,” to question his own foundation, the bedrock knows something about getting his hands
and “The Red Rooster.” of his sound, the so-called primitive blues. into the soil.

14 WINTER 2020
 DISCOVER OUR

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16 Illustration by Mike Reddy
R.E.M.
S U E
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FOR THE
PEOPLE
By Elizabeth Wurtzel
17
When I was in college
in Massachusetts
in the late eighties,
what I remember most about the early
spring-fever days was the way the dorm-
room windows would be flung open to reveal
that the student body seemed to be listen-
ing to one band and one band only: R.E.M.
Indeed, you could walk across the budding
grass on the campus green and hear one
R.E.M. album blasting out of a building on the
right side—say, the opening chords of “Radio
Free Europe” from Murmur—and hear a
different R.E.M. song—maybe the exuberant
“Exhuming McCarthy” off Document—com-
ing from somewhere off the left.
Now, mind you, I attended one of those
northeastern schools-with-attitude where
the political consciousness and intellectual
pretentiousness of R.E.M. would seem to fit
in well with the mood of the times—this was
back when people were building shanties in
the middle of the main quad to protest South
African apartheid—so the band’s popularity
was hardly surprising. But, amazingly, R.E.M.
had sizable followings at all sorts of schools,
even at southern campuses where Reagan
Youth drove BMWs, where sorority girls
and homecoming queens ruled the social
18 WINTER 2020
scene, and business-majors with country-
club backgrounds would be prone, if they
didn’t know these guys were rock stars, to
spit on the members of R.E.M. for looking
like hippie trash. By sometime in the middle
eighties, R.E.M. found themselves occupying
that strange rock & roll realm where they
were idolized by people who, in real life,
would never have invited them to rush their
fraternities. The sad rule for most of us is that
our reach almost always exceeds our grasp,
but R.E.M. was grasping and holding onto an
awful lot more than they were reaching for.
The point is, for most people R.E.M. had
their breakthrough success two years ago
when Out of Time, their seventh album (not
counting the collected b-sides on Dead Letter
Office or the anthology called Eponymous),
made it to #1 on the Billboard charts. But
to me, the band was successful beyond the
point of no return when the girl who lived
next door to me my freshman year, someone
called Libby who hailed from Greenwich,
Connecticut, declared R.E.M. to be her favor-
ite band on earth and played her collection
nonstop. With just a wall to separate us I got
it all—a steady diet of Murmur before break-
fast, Reckoning at dinnertime and Fables of
the Reconstruction late into the night. Since
that could make even the meekest among us
long for some Black Sabbath, there hardly
seemed to be any reason to get into the band
myself. Long before any R.E.M. albums went
gold or platinum, the band’s omnipresence
on the college scene made them as much an
oppressive force in bookworm circles as the
“mainstream” music they were supposed to
be an “alternative” from was to the rest of
the world.
Listening to R.E.M. also seemed to be a first
step toward declaring yourself a member
of some strange special interest group, or
becoming a category in some marketing
expert’s demographic study that would re-
port that you, say, bought clothes at the Gap,
drove a solar-powered car, lived in Seattle
or Santa Fe, ate Terra Chips, drank Rolling
Rock, subscribed to the Utne Reader, and
would be likely to purchase reusable diapers
once you started having babies. Or something
like that. All this is to say that R.E.M.’s music
became popular about the same time that
a standardized, commercial notion of an
alternative lifestyle was developed, so that all
the bric-a-brac and bohemian touches that
college students invented for themselves,
and thought were just theirs, actually
became something that could be bought at a
shopping mall anywhere in America. For me,
it was a sorry enough thing that without even
trying I: had paisley-patterned tapestries
on my ceilings and walls, took courses in
post-structuralist literary theory, spent
Photo of R.E.M. (1984) by Edward Colver
afternoons attending Eric Rohmer double
features at the nearby revival house, tended
to date men with long hair who wanted to
be filmmakers—all of this was stereotypical
enough without adding the R.E.M. imperative
into the picture. Better to listen to Bruce
Springsteen and be thought of as a mall-rat
from New Jersey (then again, that amounts
to slumming, a whole other cliché) than fall
any deeper into earthy-crunchy collegiate
reverie. And just as an alternative lifestyle
began to pick up steam as a statement that
could be exploited commercially (hence,
you were suddenly able to buy jeans with
holes already punctured in the knees, or
to purchase fishnet stockings with runs
already snagged up the sides), if you follow
the trajectory of R.E.M.’s career, you can map
out the development of college radio from a
minor and mostly ignored student endeavor
to an actual growth industry. Because R.E.M.
became rock stars via the support of college
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 19
stations, record companies suddenly realized
that promoting at the university level was a
marketing technique worth trying. Student
disc jockeys tend to be passionate about
music, they’re willing to talk up new bands
that they’re hot for, and they’re an excellent
tool for creating a band’s buzz. Their
audience may be small, but if you get all
the college radio listeners together, you’ve
got a groundswell—enough people to get an
album on the charts. R.E.M. had built itself
up to multi-platinum status through gradual
and incremental growth, and had maintained
a base of deeply loyal fans throughout,
mainly because their following began at
the grass roots. Using R.E.M. as a model,
record labels realized the importance of
artist development and slow growth. They
realized that the big hype might sell a million
albums once but it won’t build a band for a
long-term career.
It seems reasonable to say, then, that
R.E.M.’s success taught some record labels
a few honorable lessons. But it also skewed
the term “alternative” to define a new branch
of commercial music with its own set of stan-
dards and indicators that defied the norm to
create a norm of its own—usually, anything
that might be described as “quirky” or “abra-
sive” or both could qualify. While alternative
music had always happened by accident—a
band would discover somewhere along the
way that they just didn’t fit into any pre-
existing categories—suddenly “alternative”
itself became an anti-category category: re-
cord labels set up alternative departments,
and even bands that have become utterly
mainstream—like R.E.M. and U2—can still
be found on the alternative charts. Because
of R.E.M., the oddball music that used to
The band has always created a jingle-jangle
guitar-based prettiness that is simultaneously
sweet and edgy, mixing the lush Rickenbacker
folk-rock of the Byrds with the dark,
dour alienation of the Velvet Underground
to produce music that is really quite catchy.
20 WINTER 2020
just barely subsist on the margins of pop
music culture is now marketed as aggres-
sively, and expected to sell just as well, as
Michael Bolton.
All of this would be fine, except that what
works for R.E.M. is not likely to work for
most other “alternative” bands. Despite some
strange notion developed somewhere out
there that R.E.M. is offbeat and different, in
truth the band has always created a jingle-
jangle guitar-based prettiness that is simul-
taneously sweet and edgy, mixing the lush
Rickenbacker folk-rock of the Byrds with the
dark, dour alienation of the Velvet Under-
ground to produce music that is really quite
catchy. Playing off a guitar arpeggio and
staccato drum beats that make a song sad
and boppy at once is a really great idea—but
it’s not one that is difficult for an audience
to grasp. In fact, one of the most enjoyable
aspects of R.E.M. is that the music combines
so many pre-existing elements of the musical
vocabulary that it’s always instantly familiar
and easily digestible.
It was R.E.M.’s ability to sound like a pop
band and still address an audience of hipsters
that set them up for the kind of success they
are now enjoying (just last year, Nirvana
used the same formula: highly likeable pop
songs combined with a grungy bad attitude).
If R.E.M. became the ultimate college ra-
dio band—and along with U2, they most
certainly were the underground airwaves’
strongest crossover success story—what
it mainly served to prove was that college
students are basically conservative and
conventional in their musical proclivities,
and that after years of a steady diet of punk
rock—or of cacophonous, screechy noise
music of one underground movement or
another—they were probably quite pleased
to find that something as melodious and
pleasant as R.E.M. could now be passed off
as alternative. By this account, if sound alone
were all that counted, R.E.M. could have won
me and millions of other people over years
ago. Even though I never much cared for
the band, I could always admit that certain
R.E.M. songs were astonishingly beautiful—
the gorgeously layered guitars on “Fall On
Me” and the willful, fitful steadfastness of
their cover of a minor sixties hit called “Su-
perman,” both of them on Life’s Rich Pag-
eant, were undeniably catchy. And “Stand,”
“Pop Song ’89” and “Orange Crush,” all off
of the major-label debut Green, were great,
dance-happy fun. But I just couldn’t stand
Michael Stipe’s lyrics. I don’t even mind that
he slurs his words so much that they’re im-
possible to understand (Murmur has been
jokingly referred to as Mumble); I just hate
that Stipe is too deliberately obscure and
too fixated on ecology and other politically
correct stances to bother writing songs that
the less right-minded among us could actu-
ally fall in love with. In a recent article in the
magazine Pulse!, Stipe’s bandmates Mike
Mills and Peter Buck were so stumped by
questions about the songs’ meanings that the
writer Ira Robbins concluded that decipher-
ing the lyrics is “a task for which membership
in R.E.M. apparently isn’t much help.”
Now, of course, for some people not
knowing what Stipe’s talking about is the
whole point. I’m sure there are listeners
who like the way many of his songs are
deliberately nonsensical, and I know there
are many others who consider Stipe to be
something of a hero because he doesn’t write
sappy, silly love songs that pander to the
lowest common denominator. But I always relationships with an emotional depth that or an attempt to say goodbye to all that. I
thought that R.E.M.’s maverick musicality requires some semblance of adulthood. And don’t mean this in thematic terms—Auto-
could be combined with a simple, pretty not long after Out of Time was released, U2’s matic marks Stipe’s return to his usual global
set of thoughtful romantic lyrics to concoct album Achtung Baby came out, marking the ponderings, alongside many more intimate
sappy, silly love songs that were, somehow, first time that band produced an album that songs—but musically this is definitely an
not so sappy and not so silly. I always thought had nothing to do with apartheid or civil war album that was recorded sparingly and in
that if Michael Stipe would just play the game in Ireland or world peace or political strife a minor key. It is moody and introspective.
a little bit, R.E.M. could create a masterpiece or much of anything other than Bono’s girl Even though John Paul Jones, best known as
of a pop album. troubles. It cannot be a coincidence that the only member of Led Zeppelin not to make
That’s precisely what happened with Out two bands whose careers have followed a a pact with Satan, was brought in to do string
of Time, which was an R.E.M. album for the similar trajectory would come to the same arrangements—which would seem to imply
rest of us, for all the people who just didn’t creative point at about the same time. And it all sorts of grandiose orchestration—any use
get it. Although Out of Time opens with “Ra- also cannot be a coincidence that these were of violins and cellos and whatnot is extremely
dio Song ’91,” a bit of social commentary both bands’ best albums to date. simple and organic. Without reading the
that includes a quick rap from Boogie Down So where do they go from here? It will credits, you might not notice the strings
Productions’ KRS-One, the ills the song ad- probably be a few years before there are at all. (I mean that as an extreme compli-
dresses—the stupid- ment to Jones—the
ity of pop radio—are world does not need
a bit more, shall we another rock album
say, run of the mill with turgid, orches-
than the usual. But tral aspirations.)
after that, with the Automatic opens
exception of the ominously with the
irritating, nitrous- strumming acoustic
oxide giddy “Shiny guitar of “Drive,”
Happy People,” Out the album’s first
of Time is an album single, which many
of love songs. From have noted bears an
the groping uncer- eerie resemblance to
tainty of “Losing David Essex’s glam-
My Religion” to the rock classic “Rock
loneliness of “Half On”—although I
A World Away” to think David Bowie’s
the desperation of “Space Oddity,”
“Low” to the ecsta- which is about be-
sy of “Me in Honey,” ing alienated in the
for the first time ever most literal sense, is
R.E.M. was creating a more accurate ref-
penetrable, human Issue 3, Winter 1993 erence point. Begin-
songs. This was real- ning with the mono-
people music deal- tone chants, “Smack
ing with real-people problems. new signs of life from the U2 camp—it might / Crack / Bushwhacked,” it’s clear that this
There are plenty who felt that Stipe’s new take Bono that much time to recover from is meant to be a downbeat battle cry for
concern with relationships, and his move how foolish he looked in that leather lamé our times. The song by itself is a powerful,
away from the abstractions and wishy-washi- suit on the Zoo TV tour—but R.E.M. didn’t forceful statement that makes the most of
ness that had marked previous material, was go on the road after Out of Time, and the Stipe’s deadpan delivery, but taken with the
a form of selling out—but I’m pretty sure that follow-up appeared just a year later. Auto- accompanying video it is absolutely startling.
it was just a way of growing up. R.E.M. must matic For The People, despite the Marxist, The clip is very raw—shot in grainy black
have known it was time to make an adult agitprop ring of its title—it’s actually named and white, it shows Stipe in a flesh pit being
record. Simple logic would seem to dictate for a Georgia restaurant—is a sober, somber passed around over the heads and hands of
that it is adolescent to be hung up on love affair that almost completely lacks the verve a huge throng of kids. Many of the frames
and infatuation, and that it is much more and energy of its predecessor. It seems to are all arms and flashing light—with Stipe’s
grown-up to be concerned with the World, be the decompression after the tremendous striped boxers occasionally peaking out of
but R.E.M. proved that the reverse is often inflation of Out of Time. In simple terms, Out his shorts. Every so often, the camera cuts to
more true in the land of rock & roll—this is a of Time was a great, big, sweeping album, a shot of another member of the band, lost
band that has best expressed its maturity of clearly R.E.M.’s bid for a magnum opus, and in the crowd, which is getting watered down
thought not through astute social commen- Automatic has a much narrower, softer fo- and broken up by fire hoses. Most people
tary, but in an ability to write about love and cus, as if it were a zonked-out afterthought, in R.E.M.’s audience will not remember the

22 WINTER 2020
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scenes of police officers hosing down the
civil rights protesters in the early sixties, and
they may only know cinematic reenactments
of anti-war marchers being tear-gassed by
the National Guard a decade later, but this
new R.E.M. video creates the perfect image
of a white riot, nineties style: here kids are
gathered in a crowd, a crowd that seems to
go on and on, a crowd protesting nothing
at all, a crowd that’s just causing a distur-
bance for its own sake. As Stipe is passed
around, he looks gaunt and sickly, and with
his arms spread out, he seems to be playing
with the image of Jesus on the cross. But
giving this video that kind of meaning would
be extremely over-determined: the point is
that this is a meaningless mass. “What if I
ride / What if you walk / What if you rock
around the clock / Tick tock,” Stipe sings,
and for once his non-sequiturs seem to have
a purpose; life is reduced to its central and
repetitive futility. You want teenage Arma-
geddon? The video seems to ask. Well you
can have it! In the meantime, Stipe’s voice
acts as an inciter. “Hey / Kids / Shake a leg
/ Maybe you’re crazy in the head.” Hey kids,
this is your wake-up call! But everyone is
too busy passing Stipe around, living in the
daydream nation, to even think of waking
up. As the clip spirals to a close, images of
a creepy, passive violence flash and linger.
Every time I’ve seen the “Drive” video, I
have found it embarrassingly mesmerizing,
but it is quite clever, and will probably re-
main so—although once MTV got it rolling
on the heavy rotation juggernaut, it began
to deteriorate into parody. Just the same,
it serves as a fine reminder of the stunning
visual charisma that allowed Stipe’s strange
white-boy arm-flinging dance in 1991’s “Los-
ing My Religion” video to stick out in so
many people’s minds. It’s unfortunate, given
this quality, that the band once again won’t
be touring, although the subdued nature of
this album probably would not work well
live. Other than “Drive,” Automatic’s prima-
ry masterpiece is the low-key “Everybody
Hurts,” a ballad about caring and empathy
which pushes Stipe’s voice almost into a
falsetto range that makes the song sound
an awful lot like “Bridge Over Troubled
Water.” In fact, “Everybody Hurts” is an
anthem in precisely that vein, and it’s so
sweet and sad and sorrowful and heartfelt
that it would be kind of hokey if it weren’t
so beautiful. To keep the song in balance,
R.E.M. used an old metronome-like drum
machine instead of real drums, giving the
24 WINTER 2020
beat a wooden, mechanical quality, in jux-
taposition to Mike Mills’s languid keyboards
and Stipe’s earnest singing. The idea, Mills
explained in an interview, was for the sound
to be “human and non-human at the same
time.” And “Everybody Hurts” is unique
for R.E.M.’s body of work in that it offers
one of the rare moments when Stipe seems
to lose control, seems to be stretching his
voice to allow emotion (as opposed to ru-
mination) to get the best of him. Normally,
R.E.M.’s touches of vulnerability have been
provided by Mills’s background singing—
and his vocal trade-offs with Stipe give the
song real tenderness—but on “Everybody
Hurts,” the elements are reduced to so little
instrumentation that it is up to Stipe to
provide all human depth, and he performs
the task admirably.
On the other hand, “Try Not To Breathe,”
which has a winding, waltz-like pace, is the
picture of Stipe in complete control. He
seems to be contemplating suicide, per-
haps Dr. Kevorkian style, and claiming he
can take control of the most difficult task
of all—the ability to stop breathing (“I will
try not to worry you / I have seen things
that you will never see / Leave it to memory
/ And dare me to breathe”). The song itself
has a rolling, lilting quality that’s R.E.M.’s
signature sound, which is why it seems calm
and contented, despite the subject matter.
Of course, mortality is a big topic on this
album—sometimes dealt with in a humorous
light, as Andy Kaufman and Elvis Presley,
along with the “horrible asp” that troubled
Egypt, are imagined in the afterlife in “Man
on the Moon” (“Let’s play Twister / Let’s play
Risk / I’ll see you in heaven if you make the
list”), but more often in the mournful tone
of the dolorous, heavy “Sweetness Follows.”
The nonsense quotient on this album is up
to Stipe’s usual levels—on “Monty Got a Raw
Deal,” Stipe even confesses that “nonsense
has a welcome ring”—although perhaps,
after all this time, it’s gotten so that I ac-
tually appreciate the seemingly random
references to black-eyed peas, Nescafé and
ice, Dr. Seuss, fallen stars, and The Cat in
the Hat that Stipe makes in the wacked-out
“Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” which seems,
in the final analysis, to be a song about a
diner payphone (don’t ask). I think that
after the practice of actually writing lin-
ear, straightforward songs for Out of Time,
Stipe’s gibberish has gotten better. But I’ll
be damned if anyone can figure out what’s
going on with all the sampled voices in “Star
Me Kitten,” which is really supposed to be
called “Fuck Me Kitten” (as in “**** Me Kit-
ten”). At any rate, when Stipe finally asks,
“Have we lost our minds?” it seems he’s at
long last on to something.
Perhaps Stipe’s loveliest lyrics—which
are almost old-fashioned and quaint in
their way—are contained in the narrative of
“Nightswimming,” an elegiac reminiscence
of youthful skinny-dipping—of youthful ev-
erything—with images so strong you can
taste the longing in Stipe’s voice:
Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I’m not sure all these people understand
It’s not like years ago
The fear of getting caught
The recklessness of water
They cannot see me naked
These things they go away
Replaced by everyday
Sadly, from a musical vantage point,
“Nightswimming” is one of the less interest-
ing songs on the album, pretty but plain, all
strings and piano, but the nature of nostalgia
is often more pleasant than exciting. And the
ability to look back and evaluate the past
in a thoughtful, unsentimental fashion was
the one missing element in the emotional
growth R.E.M. tried for on Out of Time. That
was an album so firmly grounded in the
present tense that it never surprised me to
find out that there were people—my step-
mother, for instance, or kids under the age
of consent—who actually thought Out of
Time was R.E.M.’s first album. It had all the
forward-thinking energy of a debut—and
all the spit and polish you’d expect from an
experienced group of players. There’s no
doubt that Out of Time will always mark a
climactic moment in the band’s career, and it
will probably be a touchstone for everything
that follows—that’s just the way it always is:
everyone’s still waiting for Joni Mitchell to
make another Blue, for Bob Dylan to come
up with another Blood on the Tracks, for
the Violent Femmes to match the fucked-up
genius of their debut, and for AC/DC to do
another Back in Black. It’s admirable that,
rather than balk under the pressure or try
to duplicate the success, R.E.M. decided
to make a good, solid album that suits the
place and creative space they’ve arrived at
now. Automatic For The People sounds like
an album by a band with a strong, illustri-
ous history—and, one hopes, many good
years ahead.
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26
 U E 1
S

NINA
S

0
3
I

8
W

1
N

I
0
T E 2
R

IS
EVERYWHERE
I GO
Finding the artist by facing
the damage that made me

By Tiana Clark
Illustration by Diana Ejaita 27
 wanted to start with the wild weeds and
the creaking wood on the front porch,
walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood
home in Tryon, North Carolina. I want-
ed to start where she started, imagining
her daddy playing jazz standards on
the piano, her mama cooking some-
thing good and greasy in the cramped
kitchen with siblings zooming around.
I envisioned myself, like Alice Walker
looking for Zora Neale Hurston’s un-
marked grave, shouting Nina in the
derelict home, hoping somehow she
would appear, gloriously phantasma-
goric, and answer all of my incessant
probing questions.
It didn’t happen. In 2017, four Afri-
can-American artists—Adam Pendle-
ton, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson,
and Julie Mehretu—bought her house
as an act of political preservation after
the 2016 presidential election. Several months ago, when I decided
to take a trip to North Carolina, I sent a long email to the artists
explaining my intent—to look for Nina, to locate my ancestors—and I
received a swift reply that read: I’m afraid the house is not accessible.
All the best for your project. I was devastated, but it felt as though
Nina were already testing my resolve. She had faced countless closed
doors during her career. Now what was I going to do with mine?
As an artist, processing rejection is part of the contract. And I had
often heard this defiant refusal in Nina’s music: wavering inside her
signature contralto like grit-dark silk, unlocking a broader notion,
to me, about the psychological mood of disallowance. What does it
mean for me, as a Black writer, to not have acute access to the source
of my inspiration? I’ve never been to Africa, and yet, the handprints
and rhythms of the continent saturate all of my poems. And doesn’t
Nina’s voice seem as if it comes from everywhere, entirely Southern
but also diasporic, ancient even, as if it were already present, hover-
ing above the waters before the world was built like the face of God?
What does it mean to see yourself everywhere and not know
where you come from? What does it truly mean to be from a
place—to be from North Carolina? For Nina Simone, born as Eunice
Waymon, Tryon was a beginning, where her origin story started,
where she learned to play Bach and Beethoven from Miss Mazzy, a
white lady who lived a mile away in the Gillette Woods and had no
children, but treated Simone as a daughter. But Tryon was a closed
door, a place that couldn’t contain her dazzling, global future. A
place she had to leave so she could start. And for me, North Carolina
was a type of Southern Mecca, a sacred site I knew I had to reckon
and wrestle with by making a pilgrimage, paying homage to my
family’s slave roots, facing the damage that made me.
I took a cue from Simone’s life and went to Tryon anyway,
without permission.
T hree years ago, when I arrived at Vanderbilt University for my
Master of Fine Arts in poetry, I felt less than, like an impos-
ter—inadequate because I hadn’t majored in English during college.
28 WINTER 2020
“Where are the gaps in your reading?” a professor asked me dur-
ing a recruitment weekend reception while I stuffed a giant chilled
shrimp, doused in cocktail sauce, into my mouth. “Everywhere,”
I mumbled, exposing myself before I would be exposed. So in an
effort to learn more about the traditional Western literary canon, I
undertook an independent study on British Romantic Poetry with
Professor Mark Jarman, utilizing close reading and textual analysis,
and writing weekly poems in response. I wanted to know the rules
before I broke the rules. We began with the “Preface to Lyrical Bal-
lads,” in which William Wordsworth writes:
. . . poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the
emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tran-
quility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that
which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
This idea was new to me. I had made a habit of rushing and push-
ing through poems. And reading Wordsworth’s famous statement,
I realized that I had believed the psychological state necessary for
writing poems was in opposition to tranquility. I decided to try a
new approach. What would happen if I wrote out of a tranquil state
of mind instead of chaos?
Empowered by this insight, I understood that through stillness I
could access trauma. My scholarship at Vanderbilt had generously
afforded me time and space to chase my obsessions, to read and
write endlessly. So when it came time to respond to Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” my poem “The
Rime of Nina Simone” unfurled as I feverishly wrote twelve pages,
devouring my entire weekend in the spring of 2016. I had recently
watched the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?,
and like Coleridge’s weary sailor, returned from sea with his story
to tell, Nina haunted me. She was everywhere. Nina became the
ancient mariner in my life, interrupting me, warning me about
her pitfalls and passions. Her presence captivated me and wouldn’t
shake loose till she became a central character to my desires on
and off the page.
In the poem, I tried to locate my truth as a poet—specifically a
Black, female poet—in the biography of another artist and activist.
The poem begins with an invocation:
How a Slave Ship was driven by capitalism and racism
inside the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade;
and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner
Nina Simone came back from the deadto her own Country
to stop a graduate student on the way to workshop.
While the lessons of formalism were important in the initial com-
position of this piece, they were inadequate in capturing Simone’s
signature sound, an amalgam of the traditional and the modern. I
broke away from the strict rhymed quatrains and improvised with
the placement of my lines in tandem with the driving symphonic
nature of her capacious music. I created something that felt fresh
by pushing forth the idea of the ballad. I could feel the twin claims
of form and freedom converging, creating a hybrid poem inspired
inside and outside of the myopic canon, just as Nina’s pirouetting
fingers smashed together Bach and Baldwin and the blues.
 I have conversations with the dead, especially dead Black women.
By doing so, I locate my story and myself within the past. Galvanized
by Coleridge’s poem, I found myself in a dialogue, engaging with
Nina as a way of having a conversation with myself:
Come here, she says.
Sorry, I can’t—I’m late. I’m—
I need to tell you something about yourself.
Listen, little girl:
For every pain
there is a longer song.
The body pours
its own music.
I wanted
to play Bach
and Beethoven
for endless encores. But
they wouldn’t let me
and they won’t let you.
Things have changed, Miss Simone.
I have a scholarship. They want me here.
They want my poems. They want—
Do they want you,
she says, sucking
her ghost teeth,
or your Black pain?
What’s the difference? I say.
B efore I began writing “The Rime of Nina Simone,” I tended to
resist identification as a Southern writer, but a line from the poem
pinpointed a larger compulsion about my life: “I can’t talk about
the trees without the blood.” This line articulated a truth for me. I
cannot look at or engage with the landscape of the South without
seeing the trauma of the past—I will always see blood on the leaves.
The poem enacts aspects of African-American history and politics,
while also establishing a platform from which I could examine my own
complex connections to race and gender through the ancestral violence
of slavery in the South. This geographical perspective was vital: I was
born in Los Angeles but moved to Tennessee when I was seven years old.
The move lent an outsider’s perspective to my Southern roots as a writer.
Every writer has his or her own set of obsessions, or flood subjects,
as Emily Dickinson would say. For me, trees will never be just trees.
They will also and always be a row of gallows from which dead Black
bodies once swung. This is a governing image that I cannot escape,
but one that I have learned to lean into as I continue to write poems
that delve into personal and public histories around race.
I listen to the trees
humming through the poplar leaves
and Southern magnolias. Bloated faces,
these beauteous forms, still swinging,
limp pendulum, waxy bleach-white blooms,
egg whites inside hardboiled eyes
sway and rock, roll forward, fragrant.
I’m ready to find the ruined churches.
(In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.)
I have a second stomach now. Now
I can look at my dead and listen.
Listen, I’m transcribing the soaked,
splattered leaves—
I transcribed my rage into poetry because I wanted my rage to
be useful and even beautiful. Maya Angelou interviewed the High
Priestess of Soul in 1970 for Redbook magazine, writing “life has left
keloidal scars on her voice.” And yes, it was Nina’s exhausted throat
I heard weaving through the lynching trees. I read news reports of
mass graves being uncovered in Nashville, and I couldn’t escape her
protest songs or the burbling, Southern Gothic landscape underneath
my feet teeming with tombstoneless slaves. This grotesque imagery
was superimposed over every segregated church, every oxidized
Confederate statue, every tattered flag of hate, every plantation
wedding. I continued to face the damage that made me, but my
wrath wrecked me. I wanted to ask Nina how she kept going, how
she held it all—the movement and motherhood, her piano, money,
and broken men—even when it was all unspooling.
“I think my mom’s anger is what sustained her,” Lisa Kelly Simone
says in the documentary. After I arrived in North Carolina and drove
around the mountainous landscapes, I repeated this sentence to
myself over and over. I repeated it when I woke up in the morning
in my hotel room, and when I walked around the sloping streets in
Tryon, chanting it even as I paced around the perimeter of Nina’s
house. I wrote it again in my journal, underlining “anger,” hoping
to unlock the abstract concept with an image as a cipher, and then
my mother’s face appeared, this time from my childhood. I remem-
bered how the anger transmuted her countenance, her shoulders,
tighter each time a bill was overdue or after a bad shift at Shoney’s,
dropping coins like hail on the kitchen counter. Growing up, every
Black woman I knew was exhausted.
Some say Black love is different. Once, I asked my mother why
she always yelled at me when I was little. She said I never listened
to her when she spoke to me in hushed tones like a white mother
would; soft volume is a privilege. My mother screamed when she
lost me in the mall once. I followed my name until I found her. The
music of her rage sustained me.
What is the price of maintaining fury? What is the difference
between fearlessness and recklessness in art and in life—and is
there enough of a difference? How do I protect my mental health
in conjunction with my activism? What is the price of protest as an
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 29
artist? Have I made another myth of Nina Simone? I have too many
questions I want to ask of the dead.
As a writer, I know I can’t sustain one note, and that poems can be
mighty containers for empathy, especially for the people who have
hurt us. But again, I want my anger to be useful. I want my anger
to give me permission to write what I need to survive. I learned this
from Nina. She is everywhere I go, giving me permission to persist—
a tenacious ontological resolve, built and bred from struggle and
resistance. I recognize my own identity in that searing paradox:
growing up as the only child of a single Black woman who worked
several jobs to make sure that I could have the best education possible.
Because of this, as a child, I spent a lot of time creating worlds
within the solitary space of my imagination, which became an es-
cape hatch for me. My early years were spent speaking back into the
silences that filled our apartment when my mother was absent. As
I waited to hear my mother’s keys unlock the door so I could sleep,
this impulse to create and dream was building a type of survival.
T ryon is touted as the “friendliest town in the South.” It’s gorgeous,
vibrantly green and lush in the summer—verdant trees, squished
and stacked, decorate the road as Hogback Mountain looms large
from the west, a giant sentinel protecting the small, tucked-away
town from the brunt of Mother Nature. Kudzu spills down every
hillock, climbing up telephone poles and wires: blankets of kudzu,
wild and seemingly everywhere, unstoppable.
Looking at Nina Simone’s statue in downtown Tryon, I recite the
end of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which
reads, “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must
change your life.” Rilke wrote the poem while staring, entranced, at
a headless statue from Auguste Rodin that dazzled him to the point
of imperative transformation. Now, almost exactly one hundred
years later, I am standing in front of the eight-foot bronze statue
of Nina Simone.
She is gigantic, and I know the metal cast is not alive, but I swear
the skin is vibrating, belling inside me. Her alchemic presence
must have felt this enormous in real life. I reach out and caress her
fake heart, trying to sweep and gather the duende-drenched spirit
emanating from the statue’s chest, where a portion of her ashes
are interred. More magnolia trees and pastel-smeared hydrangea
bushes encircle the statue, with train tracks in the background,
right off South Trade Street in the Nina Simone Plaza, across from
the little Tryon Theater, where construction workers are outside,
gnashing on a piece of wood, a man wielding a giant buzz saw,
the sounds of which fill the air with loud razors—a cacophony. A
busted pickup truck drives by and a white man hollers something
indecipherable at me. I do not know if it is a catcall, a friendly
howdy, or a racial epithet. My confusion feels familiar: toggling
delight and dismay.
Nina sits wearing a long dress, her hands playing a floating wave
of piano keys suspended in front of her. Someone has laid an orchid
and dried lavender in a tiny, tied bunch on the keyboard. Someone
has placed fake pearls around her neck and conch-shaped hairdo.
Her skin has tiny artistic cuts, or rather, etchings, almost as if it
has been scarified; her eyes are hollowed out, little dark teacups
staring across the street to a sliver of Southern Gothic paradise. At
first, it seems like a trompe-l’oeil, because the Eden-like square is
30 WINTER 2020
cut, painted almost perfectly, between a row of historic downtown
storefronts—a theater of wilderness, appearing just for Nina. In the
center of the scene is a vine-choked telephone pole with an American
flag whipping wildly in the wind. The red-white-and-blue symbol
of American freedom shines right in her sightline, her gaze fixed
and immutable.
Nina’s statue stares down the flag with that famous Midtown glare,
the one she pierced through people who were drunk and disruptive
when she first started performing at the old Midtown dive bar off
the Atlantic City Boardwalk. She would stop singing and playing the
piano, freeze and stare, like some Black Medusa, until the rabble-
rousers became stone silent or were kicked out of the club by her
more serious fans. But here in Tryon, her statue’s truculent glare is
still palpable and large. I can sense her rage and exhaustion from the
tumult of the sixties, of Black revolution, her dead friends: Lorraine
Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Jimmy Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael
. . . Of finding and failing at love on a loop, from endless touring
and constant tax troubles, and from losing her beloved daddy, John
Divine Waymon.
“I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning feeling dissatisfied,” Nina
Simone writes in her autobiography. “These feelings just became
more and more intense, until by the time the sixties ended I’d look in
the mirror and see two faces, knowing that on the one hand I loved
being black and being a woman, and that on the other it was my
colour and sex which had fucked me up in the first place.” I know
this rage personally. I felt this bitterness too after the violent public
deaths of Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter
Scott, the Charleston church shooting, Nia Wilson—the list of Black
names continues, and so does the bitterness that follows me on this
trip. The horror is constant.
W hat I love most about Nina Simone: how she responded and
translated the hard world around her. “An artist’s duty, as far
as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times,” she said.
I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. . . . I
choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself.
That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives,
when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter
of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young
people, black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved
in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be
molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have
a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
That to me is the definition of an artist.
This manifesto is present in “Mississippi Goddam,” her first civil
rights song, which she wrote after the 16th Street Baptist Church
bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers. She wanted to make a
zip gun and shoot someone, anyone, but her most effective weapon
was her music—and the song shot through her, becoming a conduit
for her wrath:
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
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 This manifesto is also present in me. Nina teaches me how to carry
my anger, how to pour the pain into a poem, how to enrapture an
audience, how to carry myself like a Black queen even when I feel
shattered, even if I have to strain for it. I’ve got to use it all to sing.
I often get asked: What are you? Where are you from? People are
asking about my origin, but what they really want to know is
that my dad is white and my mom is Black—I’m mixed. Often, as a
Black person in this country, I don’t know where I’m from, where
I’m really from. Curious people want to trace and place me—and
yet, their questioning is a subtle and subconscious way of putting
me in my place. The brain likes to make patterns and associations
by chunking similar and dissimilar things into separate categories.
And I know that, for most, I present a conundrum with my skin tone.
Of course, I gather that most of me is from Africa, but that word,
that place, that landscape is loaded, freighted and thrown around,
often haphazardly, until it
means nowhere, only exist-
ing in the Western imagi-
nation. It seems as though
Africa is mostly referred to
as a continent and rarely
by its countries, thereby
relegating the vastness to
one monolithic idea, eras-
ing the diversity of people
and cultures that live and
die and thrive there. I gath-
er that most of me is scat-
tered across the Black parts
of Africa, maybe a part of
me is from somewhere off
the west coast known as
the Slave Coast, along the
Bight of Benin as noted on Issue 103, Winter 2018
the maps of Negroland from
the transatlantic slave trade.
But who can narrow it down from there?
After Nina Simone visited Africa for the first time, in 1961, with
the American Society of African Culture, she wrote in her autobi-
ography: “All around us were black faces, and I felt for the first time
the spiritual relaxation any Afro-American feels on reaching Africa.
I didn’t feel like I’d come home when I arrived in Lagos, but I knew
I’d arrived somewhere important and that Africa mattered to me,
and would always matter.”
Before my trip to Tryon, I spit into a tube to find out where I
come from. My saliva was sent off in a little box, and six weeks later
I found out I was right—I’m 41.3% Sub-Saharan African. I took the
DNA test as a way of knowing myself and trying to answer some
questions that seemed unanswerable about my past, especially
about my white father, whom I have never met. But beyond my
blood, I wanted to grapple with my inheritance, with what it means
to come from slaves, from the South, from church folk, from single
women raising babies, from Black women singing in choirs, from
North Carolina. What does it mean to see yourself everywhere and
not know where you come from?
32 WINTER 2020
Simone wrote, “Sometimes I think the whole of my life has been
a search to find the one place I truly belong.”
A ll my grandparents are dead, but I still have Joycene, my oldest
living relative and second cousin. Joycene is eighty-four years
old and still lives at the bottom hem of Warrior Mountain in Lenoir,
North Carolina. Joycene’s mom was Pansy, my grandmother Toy’s
closest sister. Joycene says her mom and Toy were inseparable
until Toy went off to the Air Force. She lives on the same land,
close to where my grandmother was born and raised by my great-
grandmother, Freelove.
This trip is my first time to visit North Carolina, my first time to
visit my family that has lived here for more than five generations.
As I drive east on I-40, voluptuous, creamy clouds smudge the sky
above my silver Honda. I slice through the base of Black Mountain
with Pisgah National Forest to my left and an endless loop of teetering
tractor-trailers to my right.
I feel a weird combination
of anticipation mixed with
caution and joy. I review my
questions for Joycene out
loud in the car. Would any
topic be off limits? Would
she be happy to see me? I
last saw her at my wedding,
seven years ago, and that was
a wild blur of champagne,
sweet-potato cupcakes,
and the “Cupid Shuffle.”
I reached out last minute,
and Joycene was kind
enough to switch her shifts
at the liquor store to make
sure she could visit with me.
I take a sharp left turn
and slope down Warrior
Road, passing mobile
homes and kids without shoes and old Black men with baseball
caps smoking on porches. Joycene greets me with a hug on her porch
decorated with plants and Black bric-a-brac. She is elated to see me.
I notice Joycene has my grandmother’s exact hair—mottled with
streaks of snow and slate, it seems to sparkle when the sun slides
through it. It’s a bit frizzy because of June’s sweltering heat and the
pre-storm soupy air, and the small circumference of her short bob
swells, a salt-and-pepper corona. I keep on staring at and around
her scalp, scooping her up, thinking of my grandmother, or, rather,
thinking what it would have been like to have a grandmother to
stare at from across the living room—any room—listening to her
mellifluous voice, aged and alto, woven with a soft squeak, like the
movements from fast fingers on the neck of some dark folk guitar
shifting from string to string. Joycene’s rough-honeyed voice oscil-
lates with the rattling air conditioner jutting out of the window in
her living room—and yes, it’s true, I see so much of my full face in
Joycene’s face, some fifty years difference, especially in her cheeks
and almond-shaped eyes, thinning eyebrows, full lips, and the cara-
mel color of her skin, like coffee with a generous portion of cream.
 “What was Freelove like?” I ask, sitting across from her on the
couch, with my phone recording.
“A boss,” Joycene chuckles. “We called her Boss. Everybody called
her Boss, even her children.”
“Why?”
“Well, we use to call her Mama Freelove, but then she just bossed
everyone around. You couldn’t do nothing without her bossing you
. . . that’s not the way . . . no, do it this way and bluh bluh bluh!”
“Seems to run in the family.”
“She was bossy, just like your grandmother and mother!” she
exclaims while still laughing, and I’m giggling, too, because I know
I come from this resilient line of bossy Black women, Bible-reading
women, women whose faces have known too much pain from racism,
from hard men and even harder labor, from paycheck to paycheck,
from prayers on knees. I start with these four women: Freelove begat
Toy and Toy begat Verna and Verna begat me.
My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is woolly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
inflicted again and again
—“Four Women”
Being around Joycene is wonderful, but every few minutes I want
to weep, because I keep forgetting she is not mine. She is not my
grandmother. I keep sniffing back tears, hoping to push the persis-
tent stream down to my gut for later, save this specific sorrow for
the drive back to the hotel in the deep-dark through the pockets
of fog each time I swerve around the waist of the mountain. She
reminds me of Toy, or what I remember of my grandmother, but
in a woebegone way, because I’m trying to grasp at some sense of
belonging, some family bond, some familiar idea, some matriarchal
juju for the simulacrum of my grandmother, because I didn’t have
a chance to know my real grandmother before she passed away. By
the time I arrived into the world, all ten pounds and no daddy, she
was already clutched in the claws of Alzheimer’s—blurring before I
was born. But I have these scant memories of us together: me a little
girl, and her, a part-time ghost—lucid, then disappearing again.
My favorite and most vivid memory is learning to make my first cake
with my grandmother. I was five on a stool in the kitchen and watched
as she tapped and broke the thin membrane of eggs against the lip of
the ceramic bowl. No recipe for her, just muscle memory from years
of making yellow cakes. Her pruned skin moved through the ritual of
ingredients like dancing marionette hands, except she left the empty
eggshells in the bowl and crunched them into the sticky batter. In
expectation, I watched our cake rise like a mountaintop through the
oven door window. The buzzer went off and we waited for our cake
to cool. My grandmother proudly sliced out a wedge for me. I bit and
the eggshell shrapnel slid between my gum and tooth; I bled.
Now that I’m a woman more familiar with the effects of Alzheimer’s,
I often think about that bright blood in my mouth, that gift: that
moment when she forgot to throw the eggshells away. I think about
little-girl me peering over the counter at my grandmother’s swift-
moving cinnamon-stained hands, stirring with a centrifugal force I
want to gather when I feel small, the smell of wet sugar in the bowl,
the wafting smell of her perfume, something with lavender, I think,
34 WINTER 2020
and I don’t remember the rest. The DNA test I took also revealed that I
don’t have the İ4 variant for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease—I exhaled.
B ob Dylan said, “The purpose of art is to stop time,” and this is why
I love writing poetry: to stop time for the length of a poem and
become myself again and celebrate the gift of blood in my mouth. I write
to access that same pulse, that blood-jet, that wine-dark optimism, the
beating heart of the poem, the punctum: “that accident which pricks,
bruises me,” Roland Barthes once said. I’m hoping to glean and stretch
the personal and universal implications with some lingering resonance.
I want a little sugar in my bowl
I want a little sweetness down in my soul
I could stand some lovin’, oh so bad
I feel so funny, I feel so sad
—“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”
When I look at Joycene, I start to think I might come from some-
where. When I look at Joycene, I start to think it’s okay that my
grandmother is gone. She tells me not to wait till I’m too old to move
back home like she did, because all her friends are dead now. She has
pictures strewn about her couch and coffee table, pictures filled with
faces I do not know. She points and says, “This is your family. . . . This
is Pansy here in the white dress. This is Toy and Aunt Vi. This is John
Wesley. This is . . . ” She keeps putting pictures in my hands, showing
me my people, my large, extended family, pointing as if to say, this is
where you come from. Here, look. Look. I’m looking down, trying to
make these static images sing.
I stare hard and study the faces, trying to find my features again: my
almond eyes, my wide nose and slender hands. They all had such slender
hands—piano fingers, I think. Joycene sits back down in her periwinkle
recliner with a zebra robe and house slippers. Above her on the book-
shelf is a Black doll whose legs are dangling over her head. Above the
doll is a portrait of Obama, which I’ve also seen in my auntie’s house.
There is a way in which the women of this family handle papers that
begins to feel like an inheritance, stacks of letters and bills, receipts and
ephemera, and Joycene goes through such a stack as I ask her questions.
“Do you know where she got her name from . . . Freelove?”
“You know, I have no idea. . . . I assumed it was from some of the
slave owners. I thought it was a nickname. ’Cause who names . . . who
names somebody that!” Joycene cackles.
Later, we go to her back porch and she points past her manicured
lawn (that she still mows when she has the energy) to a large thicket, a
few hundred yards away, bisected by several voltaic power lines, buzz-
ing. She points to the start of my family, to the house where Freelove
lived and reared ten children, alone. I imagine my grandmother as a
little girl running around the Southern wildness, and somehow I am
brought back to Nina’s birthplace in Tryon, eighty miles away, which
is set in a landscape so similar to my own roots: a little house crammed
with children, a matriarch, some chickens, lots of trees, and God.
I’m standing at the start of my origin story, off Warrior Road. I’m
looking at the overgrown plot of land where my family began, the
dried-up creek where Joycene tells me they once pulled up water in
pails to drink and draw baths from. I don’t want to romanticize the
land, but damn, it feels good to be from somewhere, feels rich to look
at something rough and green and feel a sliver of ownership. Even if
it ain’t fancy where I come from, I got a place on a map that I know
is mine. I’m from somewhere. I know where I start now and I’ve got
Joycene, too, and my other cousin Dee, who lives right next door. Dee
says next time I come to visit Lenoir I need to give her some warn-
ing—they want to have a cookout for me, “go all out,” she says, roast
a whole pig on a spit in the front yard and everything.
Joycene is not my grandmother, but she is the asymptote, so that
from far away I can’t see how the two women—one alive and one
dead—don’t intersect. I pretend that she is my stand-in grandma, just
for that day, talking to me about where I come from—
“Do you know how we ended up in North Carolina?” I ask Joycene.
“Okay. Slavery,” she pauses for a half breath. “When the slaves were
freed, my grandmother said they gave them Warrior Mount—they
were way down in the woods somewhere—and when the slaves were
freed, somebody gave them Warrior Mountain, which is this big ol’
mountain right here in front us. And they lived up there, and she said
they all practically starved to death . . . because, well I guess, because
of the conditions up there. And then somebody . . . I don’t know how
they . . . Anyway, they settled here.”
Y ou always know when a Nina Simone song spills out of a speaker.
The temperature changes, the mood and muscles relax, and
everyone at the party seems to pause.
It was April in Minneapolis. My first blizzard. I was there for a
reading, but it had been canceled due to the inclement weather.
Michael Bazzett, a friend and wonderful poet, decided to throw a
mescal party. He had two kinds: one that tasted like junipers, pine
cones, and a freshly cut garden hose; and another that engulfed
the roof of my mouth with smoke and ash and lava splatter—but
then instead of being rough, the finish was surprisingly sweet, with
hints of sea salt caramel taffy, smooth as it slipped over my tongue
like loud syrup.
The snow was relentless and piling up outside of Michael’s windows.
Cars were gradually disappearing into white mounds as we chatted
about poems and puppies, each of us trying new adjectives to describe
the fabulous sensations in our mouths. I don’t remember which Nina
Simone song it was that started playing from his speakers, but the
music was familiar to my bones and everyone at the party slackened
just a bit. I remember thinking Nina is everywhere I go. Something
warm loosened in my stomach, maybe from the mescal, but I started
humming along. I think it was “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
I saw her again when I watched and re-watched Childish Gam-
bino’s iconoclastic music video for “This Is America,” which portrays
Black joy with flashes of Black violence, constantly switching back
and forth: grief and gratitude, dance with death, Black minstrelsy
with hip-hop. I heard her singing “Lilac Wine” during an interlude
in Beyoncé’s powerful 2018 Coachella performance.
A t the foot of her bronze statue in Tryon, North Carolina, I’m
brought back to my knees. I touch my hands to her hands; I
climb to reach my ear to her ear. I listen for the Atlantic Ocean. I
must change my life.
I stare at the American flag across the street from her statue,
whipping wildly in the wind, and sing:
Love me, love me, love me, say you do
Let me fly away with you
For my love is like the wind
And wild is the wind.
—“Wild Is the Wind”
I put Nina’s birthplace in my phone’s GPS, and as I grow closer to
the destination my whole body hums with anticipation. Even my
bones feel as if there is some kind of metal detector inside them,
beeping louder as the miles shrink down and through and up the
winding, snakelike roads. I take hard left turns and even harder
right turns, unfolding tiny vistas before me. Nina said, “There was
the special nature of Tryon itself,” and that “there wasn’t a black
side of town: it was more like a series of circles around the centre
with blacks or whites living in these circles . . . it was a checkerboard
type of living . . .”
I drive around another sharp loop: then right onto Grady Avenue,
left onto Markham Road, then left onto East Livingston Street—and
there it is, a shining city on a hill, except there is no sheen to it, just
a small, derelict house with moldy wood siding, the color of creamy
jade, and a peeling tin roof. The bottom of the house is exposed and
lifted on chunks of brick cinder blocks that puncture the red dirt
underneath. Nonetheless, the house radiates, a sacred space.
A giant magnolia tree with two waxy, white blooms enshrouds
the back half of the property. I’ve always adored magnolia trees
for their flamboyant bigness, and it seems this one, in particular,
is protecting the house, covering the battered roof with irregular
patterns of shade, slivers of daylight spilling through its natural
canopy. Trees know, and I could tell this one remembers the Black
family that once lived here.
There is a NO TRESPASSING sign stapled to the front porch, and
I am too much of a rule follower to see if the front door will open.
I don’t need to anyway. The house itself is bursting with Simone’s
intensity, maybe even her ghost, and my churning heart thumps as I
peer and try to peek through the clouded and dirt-caked windows. I
imagine little Nina entangled under her mama’s legs in the kitchen,
her dad playing on the pump organ, her seven siblings zipping and
shimmying around the tight corners.
I conjure Nina’s first memory, from the outside looking in to what
I imagine is the kitchen: her mother singing “I’ll Fly Away” as she
helps Nina cut out disks of wet biscuits by pressing down and gently
twisting the glass rim of a mason jar. I sing along softly under my
breath as I walk around the perimeter of the house, absorbing the
landscape in circles, hoping the house will crumble like the walls
of Jericho, revealing the diorama of Nina’s early life.
I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die, Hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away
There is a charge inside the sticky Southern air. Sure, you could
say it’s from the bloated storm clouds brewing overhead, but that
soul-rich electricity isn’t from the fluctuating ions bouncing around
the atmosphere, invisible.
Nina is here.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 35
SOUL
E
S U 4
S

0
I

01
JU
Y

0
L
/A 2
UGUST

SENSATION
BY ANDRIA LISLE

hen Ann Peebles and Gene producer and chief operating officer. She
“Bowlegs” Miller first had consulted with her father first, and to
crossed paths at the Rose- her delight the choirmaster responded en-
wood Club in South Mem- couragingly: “I knew that eventually you was
phis, neither would have going to head for the bright lights because it
called it destiny. As Miller saw it, Peebles was in you. If I try to hold you back, you’re
was just another persistent young woman going to do it later on, so I would rather see
determined to sit in with his band. The vet- you go now and try to start that career.” With
eran horn player was a session man involved his blessing, Peebles cut “Walk Away,” which
in Memphis’s burgeoning soul scene, and by became a top thirty r&b hit.
1969—the year he met Peebles—he’d seen Her debut album, This Is Ann Peebles, fea-
and heard the best performers in town. tured both “Walk Away” and “Steal Away,”
“Well, can you sing?” Miller asked. “Yes, I alongside interpretations of bigger soul hits
can sing,” was the unruffled reply. After all, of the day, including Otis Reddings’s “Re-
Peebles had grown up in her father’s gospel spect,” Don Covay’s “Chain of Fools,” and the
choir in East St. Louis and had spent her Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing.” But it’s her
free time posing in front of a mirror with an version of Little Johnny Taylor’s “Part Time
imaginary microphone. Without hesitation Love” that hit pay dirt—the song eclipsed
Peebles took her place in front of the Rose- every other Hi release up to that point, break-
wood Club bandstand, ing into the r&b Top 10
chose Jimmy Hughes’s and establishing Peebles
“Steal Away” as her de- as a rising star.
but, and proceeded to Peebles and Mitchell
astound both musicians had a dynamic working
and audience alike. Con- relationship. She could
trolling her gritty voice translate raw emotion music, a click that he had.” With bassist Leroy
like a professional, she into sweet soul lyrics Hodges, Jr., organist Charles Hodges, drum-
whispered some lines, while he provided the mer Howard Grimes, and guitarist Teenie
shouted others. Miller lavish aural backdrops Hodges, Mitchell’s team—later known as Hi
booked her for a Hi Re- for her voice. “He was Rhythm Section—was unbeatable.
cords session the next like a father—fussy, Six more albums for Hi followed: from
day. demanding, giving you Part Time Love, released in 1971, to 1979’s
At the studio Peebles a note to try,” Peebles Handwriting Is on the Wall, Peebles churned
signed a contract with remembers. “But I liked out a decade’s worth of primal soul. But it
“Papa” Willie Mitchell, Issue 40, July/August 2001 the way he arranged the was her 1974 LP I Can’t Stand the Rain that

36 WINTER 2020
 weather. “One night we were
at the house getting ready to
go to a concert later that eve-
ning, and it was just pouring
down with rain, and thunder
was cracking,” Peebles told
the Memphis Flyer in 1994.
“All of a sudden I popped up
and said, ‘Man, I can’t stand
the rain.’ And Don looked at
me and said, ‘Ooh, that’s a
good song title!’” The con-
cert forgotten, they finished
the song that evening.
“I Can’t Stand the Rain”
opens with a unique, per-
colating timbale raindrop
sound, courtesy of Mitchell.
Halfway through the second
bar, Peebles utters the first
unforgettable line; moments
later the groove arrives.
Merely a sad song in lesser
hands, Peebles’s version is
defiant, almost rebellious. By
the time she hits the chorus,
she all but dares the rain to
pour down and remind her
of a former lover. Broken-
hearted, yes, but certainly
not broken-down.
The song hit number six
on the r&b charts, crossed
over to the pop top fifty, and
netted Peebles a Grammy
nomination. In Europe John
Lennon called it “the best
record since ‘Love Train,’”
making it even more popu-
lar. Peebles bought her first
house and toured for three
years on the strength of “I
Can’t Stand the Rain,” but
her position at Hi was al-
ready surpassed by another
Mitchell protégé, Arkansas
native Al Green. Ironically,
most soul aficionados re-
made Peebles a soul sensation. With eight hits Earl Randle, lent two of his compositions for fer to Peebles these days as the “female Al
to her credit, and her marriage to Hi song- the project—“If We Can’t Trust Each Other” Green.”
writer Don Bryant, an experienced Peebles and the seminal “I’m Gonna Tear Your Play- After her retirement from the music busi-
was poised on the brink of stardom when she house Down.” ness in the late 1970s and her subsequent
began work on her finest album. Yet it’s the album’s title track that is the return more than a decade later, Peebles
Seven of the ten tracks on I Can’t Stand the real masterpiece. Cowritten by Peebles, Bry- still finds herself in the spotlight. It’s been
Rain were written by Peebles or Bryant; their ant, and Bernie Miller, a local disc jockey, “I over thirty years since Bowlegs Miller asked
lyrical and instrumental input provides a Can’t Stand the Rain”—like Peebles’s initial Ann Peebles if she wanted to sing and she
cohesiveness seldom found in soul albums of Hi session—came as a whim after the trio responded, “Gee, that’s all I ever wanted
the same era. Another Memphis songwriter, improvised on an offhand remark about the to do!”

Photo of Ann Peebles by David Scruggs (1977). Courtesy Fat Possum Records / Hi Records OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 37
DA ART
OF STORYTELLIN’
(A PREQUEL)
BY K I E S E L AY M O N
rom six in the morn-
ing until five in the
afternoon, five days a
week, for thirty years,
my Grandmama
Catherine’s fingers,
palms, and wrists
wandered deep in the
bellies of dead chick-
ens. Grandmama was
a buttonhole slicer at
a chicken plant in central Mississippi—her
job was to slice the belly and pull out the
guts of thousands of chickens a day. Grand-
mama got up every morning around 4:30
A.M. She took her bath, then prepared grits,
smoked sausage, and pear preserves for us.
After breakfast, Grandmama made me take
a teaspoon of cod liver oil “for my vitamins,”
then she coated the area between her breasts
in powder before putting on the clothes she
had ironed the night before. I was ten, stay-
ing with Grandmama for the summer, and
I remember marveling at her preparations
and wondering why she got so fresh, so clean,
just to leave the house and get dirty.
“There’s layers to this,” Grandmama often
said, when describing her job to folks. She
went into that plant every day, knowing it
38 WINTER 2020
was a laboratory for racial and gendered
terror. Still, she wanted to be the best at what
she did—and not just the best buttonhole
slicer in the plant, but the best, most styl-
ized, most efficient worker in Mississippi. She
understood that the audience for her work
was not just her coworkers or her white male
shift managers, but all the Southern black
women workers who preceded her and, most
importantly, all the Southern black women
workers coming next.
By the end of the day, when the two-tone
blue Impala crept back into the driveway on
the side of our shotgun house, I’d run out to
welcome Grandmama home. “Hey baby,”
she’d say. “Let me wash this stank off my
hands before I hug your neck.”
This stank wasn’t that stink. This stank
was root and residue of black Southern pov-
erty, and devalued black Southern labor,
black Southern excellence, black Southern
imagination, and black Southern woman
magic. This was the stank from whence black
Southern life, love, and labor came.
Even at ten years old, I understood that
the presence and necessity of this stank dic-
tated how Grandmama moved on Sundays.
As the head of the usher board at Concord
Baptist, she sometimes wore the all-white
S
S U E
9
1
I
5
W
1
N
I
0
T E 2
R
polyester uniform that all the other church
ushers wore. On those Sundays, Grandmama
was committed to out-freshing the other
ushers by draping colorful pearls and fake
gold around her neck, or stunting with some
shiny shoes she’d gotten from my Aunt Linda
in Vegas. And Grandmama’s outfits, when
she wasn’t wearing the stale usher board
uniform, always had to be fresher this week
than the week before.
She was committed to out-freshing herself,
which meant that she was up late on Saturday
nights, working like a wizard, taking pieces
of this blouse from 1984 and sewing them
into these dresses from 1969. Grandmama’s
primary audience on Sundays, her church
sisters, looked with awe and envy at her
outfits, inferring she had a fashion indus-
try hook-up from Atlanta, or a few secret
revenue streams. Not so. This was just how
Grandmama brought the stank of her work
life into her spiritual communal life, in a way
that I loved and laughed at as a kid.
I didn’t fully understand or feel inspired by
Grandmama’s stank or freshness until years
later, when I heard the albums ATLiens and
Aquemini from those Georgia-based artists
called OutKast.
 O ne day near the beginning of my junior
year in college, 1996, I walked out of
my dorm room in Oberlin, Ohio, heading
to the gym, when I heard a new sound and
a familiar voice blasting from the room of
my friend John Norris, a Southern black
boy from Clarksville, Tennessee.
Photos of André 3000 and Big Boi by Janette Beckman
We don’t contribute to your
clandestine activity.
My soliloquy may be hard for some
to swallow
But so is cod liver oil.
You went behind my back like Bluto
when he cut up Olive Oyl.
Two things I hate: liars and thieves,
they make my blood boil.
Boa constricted, on my soul that
they coil.
I went into John’s room, wondering
who was rapping about cod liver oil over
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 39
reverbed bass, and asked him, “What the of finding “your voice.” It always confused me the repeated moan of one about to wail. I’d
fuck is that?” It was “Wheelz of Steel,” from because I knew we all had so many voices, heard that moan in the presence of older
ATLiens. Norris handed me the CD. The so many audiences, and my teachers seemed Southern black folk my entire life, but I’d
illustrated cover looked like a comic book, only to really want the kind of voice that never heard it connecting two rhymed vers-
its heroes standing back-to-back in front of sat with its legs crossed, reading the New es. Art couldn’t get any fresher than that.
a mysterious four-armed force: Big Boi in a York Times. I didn’t have to work to find that
letterman’s jacket with a Braves hat cocked cross-legged voice—it was the one education
to the right, and André in a green turban necessitated I lead with.
like something I’d only seen my Grandmama What my English teachers didn’t say was
and Mama Lara rock. Big Boi’s fingers were that literary voices aren’t discovered fully
clenched, ready to fight. André’s were spread, formed. They aren’t natural or organic. Lit-
B y the mid-nineties, hip-hop was an estab-
lished art form, foregrounding a wide,
historically neglected audience in completely
ready to conjure. erary voices are built and shaped—and not new ways. Never had songs had so many
John and I listened to the record twice before just by words, punctuation, and sentences, words. Never had songs lacked melodies.
I borrowed my friend’s green Geo, drove to but by the author’s intended audience and Never had songs pushed against the notion
Elyria, and bought ATLiens for myself. Like a composition’s form. It was only after lis- of a hook repeated every forty-five seconds.
Soul Food by Atlanta’s Goodie Mob, another tening to ATLiens, discovering Toni Cade Like a lot of Southern black boys, I loved New
album I was wearing out at the time—their Bambara’s Southern Collective of African- York hip-hop, although I didn’t feel loved
song “Thought Process,” or imagined by most of it.
which featured André, When André said, “The
had nudged me through South got something to
the sadness of missing say and that’s all I got to
Mississippi a year earlier— say,” at the Source Awards
ATLiens was unafraid of in 1995, I heard him saying
the revelatory dimensions that we were no longer go-
of black Southern life. ing to artistically follow
Like Soul Food, ATLiens New York. Not because the
explored the inevitability artists of New York were
of death and the possibility wack, but because disre-
of new life, new movement, garding our particular
and new mojo. stank in favor of a stink
But something was dif- that didn’t love or respect
ferent. us was like taking a broken
I already knew OutKast; elevator down into artistic
I loved their first album, and spiritual death.
Southernplayalisticadil- With OutKast, Dre and
lacmuzik, in part because Big each carved out their
of the clever way they in- own individual space,
Issue 91, Winter 2015
terpolated funk and soul and along with sonic con-
into rap. ATLiens, howev- trast—Big lyrically fought
er, sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard American Writers, and reading the work and André lyrically conjured—they gave us
or imagined. The vocal tones were familiar, of my Mama’s former student, the hip-hop philosophical contrast. When Dre raps, “No
but the rhyme patterns, the composition, the journalist Charlie Braxton, that I realized in drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear
production were equal parts red clay, thick order to get where I needed to go as a human as day,” I remember folks suggesting there
buttery grits, and Mars. Nothing sounded being and an artist, in order to release my was a smidgen of shade being thrown on Big
like ATLiens. The album instantly changed own spacey stank blues, I had to write fiction. Boi, who on the same album rhymed, “I got
not just my expectations of music, but my Toni Cade, Charlie, Dre, and Big showed me an ounce of dank and a couple of dranks, so
expectations of myself as a young black it was possible to create and hear imaginary let’s crank up this session.” If there was ever
Southern artist. worlds wholly fertilized with “maybe,” “if,” shade between them back then, I got the
By then, I already knew I was going to be and “probably.” sense, they’d handle it like we Southern black
a writer. I had no idea if I would eat off of I remember sitting in my dorm room un- boys did: they’d wrassle it out, talk more shit,
what I wrote, but I knew I had to write to be der my huge Black Lightning poster, next to hug, and come back ready to out-fresh each
a decent human being. I used ink and the my tiny picture of Grandmama. I was sup- other, along with every artist who’d come
page to probe and to remember through posed to be doing a paper on “The Cask before them in the making of lyrical art.
essays and sometimes through satire. I was of Amontillado,” but I was thinking about OutKast created a different kind of stank,
imitating, and maybe interrogating, but I’m OutKast’s “Wailin’.” The song made me know too: an urban Southern stank so familiar with
not sure that I had any idea of how to use that there was something to be gained, felt, and indebted to the gospel, blues, jazz, rock,
words to imagine and really innovate. All my and used in imitating sounds from whence and funk born in the rural black South. And
English teachers talked about the importance we came, particularly in the minimal hook: while they were lyrically competing against

40 WINTER 2020
each other on track after track, together Big
and Dre were united, railing and wailing
against New York and standing up to a post–
civil rights South chiding young Southern
black boys to pull up our pants and fight
white supremacy with swords of respect-
ability and narrow conceptions of excellence.
ATLiens made me love being black, Southern,
celibate, sexy, awkward, free of drugs and
alcohol, Grandmama’s grandbaby, and cooler
than a polar bear’s toenails.
Right out of Oberlin, I earned a fellowship
in the MFA program at Indiana University, to
study fiction. For the first time in my life, I
was thinking critically about narrative con-
struction in everything from malt liquor
commercials to the Bible. It was around that
time that Lauryn Hill gave my generation an
elixir to calm, compete with, and call out a
culture insistent on coming up with new ways
to devalue black women. In The Miseducation
of Lauryn Hill, I saw myself as the intimate
partner doing wrong by Lauryn, and she
made me consider how for all the differences
between André and Big Boi, they shared in
the same kind of misogynoir on their first
two albums. (Particularly on the song “Jazzy
Belle”: “Even Bo knew, that you got poked /
like acupuncture patients while our nation is
a boat / Straight sinkin’, I hate thinkin’ that
these the future mommas of our children.”)
Miseducation had me expecting a lot more
from my male heroes. A month later, OutKast
dropped Aquemini.
Deep into the album, the song “West Sa-
vannah” ends with a skit. We hear a young
black boy trying to impress his friend by call-
ing a young black girl on the phone, three-
way. When the girl answers, we hear a mama,
an auntie, or a grandmama tell her to “get
your ass in here.” The girl tells the boy she
has to go—and then the boy tells her that his
friend wants some sex. The girl emphatically
lets the boy know there is no way she’s hav-
ing sex with him, before hanging up in his
face. This is where the next song, “Da Art of
Storytellin’ (Pt. 1),” begins.
In the first verse, Big rhymes about a sexual
experience with a girl named Suzy Screw,
during which he exchanges a CD and a poster
for oral sex. In the second, André raps about
Suzy’s friend Sasha Thumper. As André’s
verse proceeds, he and Sasha are lying on
their backs “staring at stars above, talking
about what we gone be when we grow up.”
When Dre asks Sasha what she wants to be,
Sasha Thumper responds, “Alive.” The song
ends with the news that Sasha Thumper has
overdosed after partnering with a man who
treats her wrong. Here was “another black
experience,” as Dre would say to end another
verse on the album.
Hip-hop has always embraced metafiction.
In the next track—“Da Art of Storytellin’
(Pt. 2)”—Big and Dre deliver a pair of verses
about the last recording they’ll ever create
due to an environmental apocalypse. We’ve
long had emcees rhyming about the potency
of their own rhymes. But I have never heard
a song attribute the end of the world to a
rhyme. In the middle of Dre’s verse, he nudges
us to understand that there’s something more
happening in this song: “Hope I’m not over
your head but if so you will catch on later.”
Big Boi alludes to the Book of Revelation,
mentions some ballers trying to unsuccessfully
repent and make it to heaven, and then rhymes
about getting his family and heading to the
Dungeon, their basement studio in Atlanta—
the listener can easily imagine it as a bunker—
where he’ll record one last song. The world is
ending. He grabs the mic: “I got in the booth to
run the final portion / The beat was very dirty
and the vocals had distor-tion!” Of course, this
ending describes the very track we’re hearing,
thus bringing the fictional apocalypse of the
song into our real world.
I was reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred
at the time Aquemini came out. Steeped in
all that stank, I conceived of a book within
a book within a book, written by a young
Southern black girl whose parents disappear.
“I’m a round runaway character,” was the first
sentence my narrator wrote. I decided that
she would be an emcee, but I didn’t know her
name. I knew that she would tell the world
that she was an ellipsis, a runaway ellipsis
willing to do any and all things to stop her
black Southern community from being writ-
ten off the face of the earth. I scribbled these
notes on the blank pages of Kindred while
Aquemini kept playing in the background.
By the time the song “Liberation” was done,
Long Division, my first novel, was born.
I thought about interviewing André and Big
Boi for this piece. I was going to get them
to spend the night at this huge house I’m
staying in this year as the Writer in Residence
at the University of Mississippi. I planned on
inviting Grandmama, too. Between the four
of us, I thought we could get to the bottom
of some necessary stank, and maybe play a
game of “Who’s Fresher: Georgia vs. Missis-
sippi.” But the interviews fell through, and
Grandmama refused to come up to Oxford
because I’m the only black person she knows
here, and she tends to avoid places where she
doesn’t know many black folks.
I kept imagining the meeting, though, and I
thought a lot about what in the world I would
say to Big Boi and André. As dope as they
are, there’s nothing I want to ask them about
their art. I experienced it, and I’m thankful
they extended the traditions and frequencies
from whence we came. Honestly, the only
thing I’d want to ask them would be about
their Grandmamas. I’d want to know if their
Grandmamas thought they were beautiful. I’d
want to know how their Grandmamas wanted
to be loved. I’d want to know how good they
were at loving their Grandmamas on days
when the world wasn’t so kind.
The day that my Grandmama came home
after work without the stank of chicken guts,
powder, perfume, sweat, and Coke-Cola, I
knew that her time at the plant was done.
On that day—when her body wouldn’t let her
work anymore—I knew I’d spend the rest of
my life trying to honor her and make a way
for her to be as fresh and remembered as
she wants to be.
Due to diabetes, Grandmama moves mostly
in a wheelchair these days, but she’s still the
freshest person in my world. Visually, I’m not
so fresh. I wear the same thing every day. But
I am a Southern black worker, committed to
building stank-ass art rooted in honesty, will,
and imagination.
This weekend, I’m going to drive down to
Grandmama’s house in central Mississippi.
I’m going to bring my computer. I’m going
to ask her to sit next to me while I finish
this essay about her artistic rituals of labor
vis-à-vis OutKast. I’m going to play ATLiens
and Aquemini on her couch while finishing
the piece, and think of every conceivable
way to thank her for her stank, and for her
freshness. I’m going to tell Grandmama that
because of her, I know what it’s like to be
loved responsibly. I’m going to tell her that
her love helped me listen, remember, and
imagine when I never wanted to listen, re-
member, or imagine again. I’m going to read
the last paragraph of this piece to her, and
when Grandmama hugs my neck, I’m going
to tell her that when no one in the world
believed I was a beautiful Southern black
boy, she believed. I’m going to tell Grand-
mama that her belief is the only reason I’m
still alive, that belief in black Southern love
is why we work.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 41
IS THIS HOME?
BY SAM STEPHENSON
Silence one of Monk’s languages, everything
he says laced with it. Silence a thick brogue
anybody hears when Monk speaks the other
tongues he’s mastered. It marks Monk as
being from somewhere other than wherever
he happens to be, his offbeat accent, the odd
way he puts something different in what
we expect him to say. An extra something
not supposed to be there, or an empty space
where something usually is.
—John Edgar Wideman, “The Silence of
Thelonious Monk,” from God’s Gym
n Friday, May 15,
1970, fifty-two-
year-old Theloni-
ous Monk and his
wife of twenty-
three years, Nel-
lie Smith Monk,
flew into Raleigh-
Durham Airport
and took a cab
to a local hotel.
In that day’s edi-
tion of The News and Observer a photo of
Monk ran with a caption heralding “Star
Returns” and text stating:
Pianist and Composer Thelonious Monk
returns to his native North Carolina
for a 10-day run at Raleigh’s Frog and
Nightgown beginning Friday Night.
The Rocky Mount native, long in the
avant garde of jazz, has written several
standards, including the well-known
“’Round About Midnight [sic].”
The existence of a successful jazz club
in Monk’s home state in May of 1970 was an
anomaly. Woodstock (August 1969) marked
the era and Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Si-
42 WINTER 2020
mon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, and the
Jackson 5 topped the charts. Jazz clubs were
closing in bigger cities across the country
while Raleigh, with a population of 120,000,
wrestled with integration. But Peter Ingram—
a scientist from England recruited to work in
the newly formed Research Triangle Park—
opened the Frog and Nightgown, a jazz club,
in 1968 and his wife Robin managed it. Don
Dixon, a house bassist at the club who later
gained fame as the co-producer of R.E.M.’s
first album, Murmur, says, “It took a naive
Brit like Peter to not know that a jazz club
wouldn’t work in 1968.”
The Frog, as it was known, thrived in a
small, red-brick shopping center nestled
in a residential neighborhood lined with
nineteenth-century oak trees. Surrounded
by a barber shop, a laundry mat, a conve-
nience store, and a service station, the Frog
often attracted large crowds; lines frequently
wrapped around the corner. Patrons brown-
bagged their alcohol (the Frog sold food,
ice, and mixers), bought cigarettes from
machines, and some smoked joints in the
parking lot. Ingram booked such jazz icons
as Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Zoot Sims,
Art Blakey, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and
Stan Getz, as well as lesser-known but ad-
venturous musicians like Booker Ervin and
Woody Shaw. Due to its mixed clientele, the
club came under threat of the Ku Klux Klan,
but Ingram never blinked, and the Frog held
on, exceeding all odds.
S ix weeks earlier, Monk postponed his
originally scheduled engagement at the
Frog because of pneumonia, which hospital-
ized him from March 16 to March 31. He spent
the month of April and the first half of May
convalescing in his apartment in New York
S
SU E 5
8
I
7
F
A 0
L L
2 0
City. He probably had no business traveling
anywhere for ten days, much less playing
three sets a night, but the Frog offered his
standard rate of $2,000 per week and Monk
needed the money.
Despite two decades of recordings that
made him a cornerstone of jazz, Monk’s life
and career were spiraling downward in 1970.
Columbia Records dropped him from the
label and he was nearly evicted from his
longtime New York apartment. Moreover,
as he battled various illnesses and chronic
exhaustion, his schedule became unpredict-
able, making it difficult to hire and keep
musicians in his band.
On the morning of May 15, 1970, with
the flight to Raleigh later that day, Monk
still didn’t have a saxophonist for the trip.
Monk’s old friend and bassist at the time,
Wilbur Ware, first called alto saxophonist
Clarence Sharpe but he couldn’t make it. He
then called tenor saxophonist Paul Jeffrey,
who jumped at the offer. Jeffrey tossed a
portable Uher tape recorder and a new box
of reels into his bags and met the band at
LaGuardia Airport. “Part of the reason I got
that job at that time,” says Jeffrey, a native
New Yorker who had been considered for
the Monk quartet before, “is because a lot
of cats were afraid to go down South then.
I’d toured the South in B. B. King’s band in
1959 so I knew the ropes. Plus, I wouldn’t turn
down the opportunity to play with Monk if
the gig had been on the moon.”
Over those ten days, Jeffrey recorded
much of the music the quartet made at the
Frog and Nightgown, and his tapes are rem-
nants of Monk’s only major engagement in
his home state. Jeffrey remembers the open-
ing night:
I was nervous. I mean, this is Monk we’re
talking about and his music isn’t easy.
“SAINT MONK” (2018), by Andres Chaparro OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 43
 I remember the first night like it was
yesterday. It is emotional for me to think
about now. We played “Blue Monk,”
“Hackensack,” “Bright Mississippi,”
“Epistrophy,” “I Mean You,” “’Round
Midnight,” and “Nutty” in that order.
Jeffrey’s recordings reveal a band in good
form, driven by bassist Wilbur Ware’s famil-
iarity with Monk’s shifting rhythms. Follow-
ing a blistering, four-minute solo on “Nutty,”
Jeffrey expresses a warm, deft sound on the
ballad, “’Round Midnight,” bearing the in-
fluence of Dexter Gordon. Drummer Leroy
Williams provides a rhythmic platform for
the band. No matter his physical condition,
Monk sounds remarkable.
M onk’s arrangements blended gospel,
blues, country, and jazz influences with
a profound, surprising sense of rhythm, often
using spaces or pauses to build momentum.
The idiosyncrasies of his music made it dif-
ficult for some fans and critics who consid-
ered his playing raw and error-prone. But
those criticisms came from classic European
perspectives in which piano players sat still
and upright in “perfect” form. Monk played
with flat fingers and his feet flopped around
like fish on a pier while his entire body rolled
and swayed. In the middle of performances,
he stood up from the piano, danced, and
walked around the stage, then rushed back
to the piano to play, sticking a cigarette in
his mouth as he sat down.
In a remarkable 1963 appearance with
Juilliard professor and friend, Hall Over-
ton, at the New School in New York, Monk
demonstrated his technique of “bending”
or “curving” notes on the piano, the most
rigidly tempered of instruments. He drawled
notes like a human voice and blended them
(playing notes C and C-sharp at the same
time, for example) to create his own dialect.
Overton told the audience, “That can’t be
done on piano, but you just heard it.” He then
explained that Monk achieved it by adjust-
ing his finger pressure on the keys, the way
baseball pitchers do to make a ball’s path
bend, curve, or dip in flight.
Influenced by his devoutly churchgo-
ing mother, Monk’s music was born out of
black gospel. When he was sixteen years old,
he dropped out of New York’s prestigious
Stuyvesant High School, where he had gained
admission on merit, and soon embarked on
44 WINTER 2020
a two-year tour playing piano for a female
evangelist. This experience solidified his ex-
traordinary musical architecture. The pianist
Mary Lou Williams first met Monk in Kansas
City while he was traveling with the evan-
gelist and she reported that he was already
playing the music he later brought to the
jazz scene in New York.
The syncopated Harlem Stride style is
said to be the foundation of Monk’s music
and that’s not false. It’s just not the deep-
est root. Here is how the father of Harlem
Stride, Willie “the Lion” Smith, described
his own music:
All the different forms can be traced to
Negro church music, and the Negroes
have worshipped God for centuries,
whether they lived in Africa, the South-
ern United Stares, or in the New York
City area. You can still hear some of the
older styles of jazz playing, the old rocks,
stomps, and ring shouts in the churches
of Harlem today.
Lou Donaldson, a member of Monk’s band
that recorded “Carolina Moon” in 1953:
My father was an AME Zion minister in
Badin, North Carolina, and the Albe-
marle area and one of the reasons I was
so drawn to Monk’s music was because
I recognized right away that all of his
rhythms were church rhythms. It was
very familiar to me. Monk’s brand of
swing came straight out of the church.
You didn’t just tap your foot, you moved
your whole body. We recorded “Carolina
Moon” [in 1952] as a tribute to our home
state, with Max Roach on drums. Max
was from Scotland Neck.
The seventy-nine-year-old saxophonist
Johnny Griffin, who played with Monk often
in the 1950s and ’60s, says today, “I never
knew a musician whose music was more
him—I mean him—than Monk. His music
was like leaves on a tree. His music grew
from nowhere else but inside him.”
T he jazz books agree that Monk was born
in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917,
but beyond that his family background is
mostly unknown. His Frog and Nightgown
engagement is treated as merely another
entry in scholarly chronologies of his career,
no more significant than gigs in Michigan or
California. From the research of Gaston Monk
(a retired school principal and NAACP leader
in Pin County, North Carolina, whose grand-
father was the half-brother of Thelonious’s
grandfather), Erich Jarvis (a neurobiologist
at Duke whose mother, Valeria Monk, was a
cousin), and Pam Monk Kelley (an educator in
Connecticut, whose father Conley Monk was
a first cousin), some of Thelonious Monk’s
roots emerge.
The white patriarch James Monk came to
North Carolina in a wave of migrants from
Scotland around 1770. In 1824, his son, Ar-
chibald, married another Scot, Harriett Har-
grove, in Newton Grove, North Carolina.
In 1829, Harriett’s father gave his daughter
and son-in-law a young female slave named
Chaney, and six years later he gave them
a male slave named John Jack. It is prob-
able that Chaney and John Jack—or their
parents—came from West Africa and were
traded in the markets in Wilmington, North
Carolina, before being brought up to Newton
Grove.
By the 1860 census, with the Scotch accent
fading into a Southern Anglo-Afro drawl,
Archibald Monk, then in his sixties, listed
nineteen slaves in his possession, ten males
and nine females. Among them were John
Jack’s young sons Isaac and Hinton. Isaac
and Hinton would become the grandfathers
of Gaston and Thelonious respectively.
After emancipation Archibald Monk’s
son, Dr. John Carr Monk, founded a Catholic
church in Newton Grove. Newly constituted
Methodist proclamations disallowing freed
blacks from attending Methodist services
(after being allowed to attend as slaves)
angered John Carr. The resulting biracial
Catholic church, Our Lady of Guadalupe,
was consecrated in 1874 by Bishop Gibbons
and still stands, its walls decorated with turn-
of-the-century photographs of both black
and white members of the church. (While
conducting interviews with Monk elders in
the 1990s, Erich Jarvis identified a number of
Thelonious Monk’s relatives in these photos.)
In 1880, Hinton Monk and his wife Sarah
Ann Williams named their first son after his
father, John Jack, and in 1889 they named
their seventh child Thelonious. Biographer
Robin D.G. Kelley, whose book Thelonious: A
Life is forthcoming from the Free Press, sug-
gests the unusual name could have come from
a Benedictine monk named St. Tillo, who was
also called Theau and Hillonius. Another
theory is that it derived from a renowned
black minister in nearby Durham, North
Carolina, Fredricum Hillonious Wilkins.
T helonious Monk, Sr., moved with sev-
eral relatives to the tobacco and railroad
hub of Rocky Mount, in the 1910s, where he
met his wife Barbara Batts Monk, who gave
birth to one of the most original musicians
in American history, Thelonious, Jr., on Oc-
Photo of Thelonious Monk by Lawrence N. Shustak
tober 10, 1917. The family lived in a neighbor-
hood called “Around the Y,” named for the
Y-shape intersection of the Atlantic Coast-
line Railroad roughly a hundred yards from
their home on Green Street (later renamed
Red Row). Henry Ramsey, who grew up in
“Around the Y” before becoming a judge in
Oakland, California, is writing a memoir in
which he describes black railroad workers
lighting campfires outside boxcars, playing
harmonicas and guitars, and singing blues
tunes—all marks of a tradition carried on by
such North Carolina country-blues musicians
as Sonny Terry, Blind Boy Fuller, and the
Reverend Gary Davis. Thelonious, Sr., played
harmonica and piano in almost certainly this
Piedmont rag style. Three and four decades
later, Thelonious Monk would write composi-
tions mimicking train sounds such as “Little
Rootie Tootie” and “Locomotive.”
The Monk family struggled. Jim Crow
was in full force and, by all accounts,
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 45
Thelonious, Sr., and Barbara had problems
with their marriage. Barbara moved to West
63rd Street in New York City in 1922 and
took Thelonious, Jr., and his older sister
Marion and younger brother Thomas with
her. Thelonious, Sr., tried to join the family in
New York later in the 1920s but returned to
North Carolina for, to us, unknown reasons.
After 1930 his direct family apparently lost
contact with him. Rumors in the family
indicate that he was beaten beyond recovery
in a mugging or, having a wicked temper,
participated in a violent beating himself,
or both. In any case, according to various
extended relatives Thelonious, Sr., spent
the last two decades of his life in a mental
hospital in North
Carolina before
dying in 1963. Many
relatives visited him,
but not his wife and
kids.
Monk, Marion, and Barbara. “He was lucky
that he lived with [us],” Marion said once.
“You’ve got to have somebody behind you
when you are following one road, because
otherwise you can’t make it. All artists have
to suffer—unless they’re at home.”
Monk lived with his mother until she died
in 1955, when he was thirty-eight years old.
Another pillar emerged for Monk in the
1950s in the form of the Baroness Pannonica
de Koenigswarter, a descendant of the Eng-
lish branch of the Rothschild family, who
was a patron of many jazz musicians. The
Baroness’s role, like those of the other women
in Monk’s life, paralleled the role Theo van
Gogh played for Vincent.
Monk’s royal-like aura made him an ef-
fective bandleader. Musicians weren’t sure
how to act around him, so they followed him
seemingly spellbound, often learning to play
music they didn’t know they could play. But
Monk’s demeanor sometimes worked against
him in the conventional world. In 1951, police
discovered heroin in a car occupied by Monk,
his friend, Bud Powell, and two other pas-
sengers. Monk silently took the rap for the
heroin, which by all accounts, except the
cops’, wasn’t his. He spent sixty days in jail.
“Every day I would plead with him,” said
Nellie in an interview in 1963, “‘Thelonious,
get yourself out of this trouble. You didn’t
do anything.’ But he’d just say, ‘Nellie, I have
to walk the streets
when I get out. I can’t
talk.’” When Monk
got out of jail, his all-
important New York
City cabaret license
was revoked and he
wasn’t allowed to
play in clubs for six

B arbara Monk
was an only
child and both of
years—all during the
1950s jazz heyday.
He recorded several
her parents died masterpieces dur-
before she moved ing this period, but,
away from Rocky without the license
Mount at age thirty. to play in clubs, he
The pain of those had limited oppor-
losses is one explana- tunities to promote
tion for her moving them. Nobody ever
to New York—to get heard him complain.
away. But Barbara After the Baroness
was a North Caro- helped Monk regain
linian through and Issue 58, Fall 2007 his license to play in
through. Her accent, 1957, he held a leg-
the food she cooked, endary six-month
and, most profoundly for young Thelonious, Freed from commercial pressures, Monk engagement at the Five Spot Club with fel-
the churches she attended with the family in was able to wait for the listening public to low North Carolinian John Coltrane. But in
New York were steeped in Southern culture. catch up to his unorthodox music. 1958, Monk lost his license again. He and the
The Monks weren’t the only family in their saxophonist Charlie Rouse were riding with
neighborhood with ties to the South. The the Baroness to a gig in Baltimore when they
1930 census shows that of the 2,083 people stopped at a hotel in Delaware to get a drink
who lived in the immediate vicinity of the
Monks’ apartment on West 63rd Street, M onk rarely emerged from his apartment
in New York without wearing a suit and
480 were born in North Carolina, South tie and an exotic hat. (And according to Time
of water. The hotel staff didn’t like something
about Monk (they probably didn’t like that
two black men were traveling with a white
Carolina, or Virginia. Another 489 were magazine, Monk often wore a “cabbage leaf” woman in a Rolls Royce) and they called the
born in other Southern states, the rest in lapel pin. Though he would have called it a authorities. When the police arrived, Monk
the West Indies and New York. The census collard green.) “Even when Monk and Nellie sat stoically in the driver’s seat of the Rolls,
also shows that the Monks had a boarder were living like paupers,” says his longtime refusing to take his hands off the steering
named Claude Smith who was also born in manager, Harry Colomby, “he always looked wheel, muttering he’d done nothing wrong.
North Carolina. like a king. He was only about six-feet-tall The officers proceeded to beat him while
When Nellie joined the family in 1947, she but the way he dressed and carried himself the Baroness screamed at them to protect
moved into the three-room apartment with made him look six-foot-nine.” his hands. The Baroness rook the rap for

46 WINTER 2020
the marijuana found in the trunk, but the
scandal forced Monk to lose his license for
another two years.
W hen judged by the workaday world—or
even by the working jazz musicians
of his day—Monk’s personality and social
habits were eccentric. Some observers be-
lieve Monk suffered from manic depression,
with tendencies for severe introversion, and
perhaps some over-the-counter dependen-
cies (alcohol, sleeping pills, amphetamines).
One of Monk’s bassists, Al McKibbon, told a
story about how Monk showed up at his house
unannounced and sat down at his kitchen
table and didn’t move or talk the whole day.
He just sat and smoked cigarettes. That night
McKibbon told him, “Monk, we’re going to
bed now,” and he and his wife and daughter
retired. The next morning when they awoke,
Monk still sat at the kitchen table in the same
position. He sat there for another day and
night without moving or talking or seeming
to care about eating, just smoking. “It was
fine with me,” said McKibbon, “it was just
Monk being Monk.”
O n a national front, Monk’s return to North
Carolina in May of 1970 coincided with a
period of historic chaos during which Ameri-
can casualties in Vietnam officially totaled
over 50,067 dead and 278,006 wounded,
and college campuses, from Georgia to New
Mexico, erupted in protest and violence.
On the local front, meanwhile, two white
men shot and killed Henry Marrow, a twenty-
three-year-old black Vietnam veteran, in
broad daylight in Oxford, North Carolina,
on May 11. On Saturday May 23, the last
night of Monk’s engagement at the Frog
and Nightgown, seventy African-Americans
were marching forty-one miles from Oxford
to the State Capitol in Raleigh to protest
the passive judicial treatment of Marrow’s
murderers. On May 24, the day Monk flew
back to New York, the caravan of protest-
ers, led by a mule-drawn wagon carrying a
symbolic coffin, grew to four hundred people
and passed two blocks from the Downtowner
Motor Inn, a four-story hotel near the State
Capitol in Raleigh where Peter Ingram put
up the Frog’s visiting musicians.
Neither Leroy Williams nor Paul Jeffrey
recall the political events of 1970 as being on
their minds during their Frog engagement.
The attendance in the 125-seat club was, by
most accounts, solid but not overwhelming.
Bruce Lightner, the son of a funeral home
owner and Raleigh’s first black mayor, Clar-
ence Lightner, came home from mortuary
science school in New York that week and was
stunned to find Monk playing in Raleigh. “The
night I attended the band was on, really on. I
took a date and we got to shake Monk’s hand
and it was a thrill,” says Lightner. Paul Jervey,
the son of the owner of the black newspaper
in Raleigh, The Carolinian, remembers the
audience as being mixed but predominantly
white. Henry M. “Mickey” Michaux, a black
state legislator from Durham, remembers
Monk wearing a medieval robe and boots
that had pointed toes that curled upward.
He recalls the Frog being about half full for
the set he attended.
Leroy Williams recounts the night the
Frog’s staff presented Monk with a white
homecoming cake ornamented with a fez
in honor of Monk’s famous passion for odd
hats. “It had icing that said ‘WELCOME HOME
TO NORTH CAROLINA,’ and Monk was very
enthusiastic about it,” Williams says. “He was
smiling and he said, ‘Thank you. I’m from
Rocky Mount. Thank you.’ Monk loved it.”
M onk’s trip to Raleigh seems to be the
last visit he made to North Carolina
and it was one of only a handful of times,
at most, that he returned to his home state.
That spring, just thirty-two miles from the
Downtowner, Monk’s ninety-year-old uncle,
John Jack Monk, was living near Newton
Grove. Seventy miles away in Pitt County
lived Monk’s cousin, Gaston. ln Raleigh,
maybe seven miles from the Frog and Night-
gown, were cousin Almena Monk Revis, her
husband, and their seventeen-year-old son.
These are just a few of the many relatives
who lived near Raleigh at that time. When
Gaston Monk inaugurated the annual Monk
family reunions in 1979, four hundred people
showed up. But there is little or no evidence
that any of Monk’s relatives attended the Frog
and Nightgown shows, or that Thelonious
and Nellie sought out the family.
M onk’s North Carolina relatives appar-
ently knew more about him than he
knew about them. Reggie Revis, the son
of Almetta Monk Revis, remembers being
eleven years old and reading an issue of Time
magazine in their family living room in Ra-
leigh. The issue, published in February of
1964, featured a cover story on Monk, the first
black jazz musician (and one of the first black
people in general) to get that placement. “We
subscribed to Time, Life, and Newsweek and
I read all of them each week,” says Revis. “I
was reading the article on Thelonious Monk
and there was a big spread of pictures and
my mother walked by and said, ‘You know
he is our relative, don’t you?’ I was shocked.
Nobody had ever mentioned his name to
me before.”
Biographer Kelley says that at this point in
Monk’s life he normally spent the entire day
in bed resting for his gigs. But one wonders
if it occurred to Monk or Nellie to try to track
down family members in eastern North Caro-
lina while in Raleigh. The relatives may have
seen the STAR RETURNS write-up in The News
and Observer or they may have seen Peter
Ingram’s newspaper advertisements for the
Thelonious Monk Quartet or his fifteen-second
spots on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. On
Sunday, May 17, Monk and Nellie may have
had time to attend church and get back for
that night’s gig at the Frog and Nightgown.
M onk died in 1982 after a long, infirm
seclusion in the New Jersey home of
the Baroness, where only a few people such
as Nellie, Paul Jeffrey, and another close mu-
sician friend, Barry Harris, had any contact
with him. He was sixty-four years old.
Soon after his death, Nellie and Monk’s
sister Marion began attending Gaston Monk’s
annual family reunions in Pitt County, North
Carolina. Gaston’s son, William, picked them
up at the train station in Rocky Mount, the
same station where the five-year-old Theloni-
ous had left for New York with his mother,
sister, and brother in 1922.
During the mid-1980s, one of the Monk
gatherings was dedicated to the late Thelo-
nious Monk and his family. While working
on his Monk genealogy, Erich Jarvis inter-
viewed many Monk elders, including Nel-
lie, in 1993, when she was seventy-two. (She
died in 2002.) “Nellie started coming to the
reunions,” says Jarvis, “in order to feel a
closer connection to her dead husband. She
also knew it was important to him or else
she wouldn’t have done it. She was closing
a circle for Thelonious.”
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 47
48 WINTER 2020 Photo of Skip James (1965) by Bernard Gotfryd/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
WHOSE
SU E
S
I
S
P
R 9
I 1
N G
SKIP
JAMES
IS THIS?
BY PETER GURALNICK
first met Skip James at Dick Waterman’s apart-
ment in Cambridge in the summer of 1965. I
sought him out because, quite simply, his music
had overwhelmed me: the blues that he had
recorded for Paramount Records in 1931 on
piano and guitar, four of whose sides had been
reissued on collectors’ labels in the early ’60s,
had struck me as unfathomably strange, beau-
tiful, and profound. Then in June of 1964 the
singer himself was rediscovered in a hospital
in Tunica, Mississippi, and when he appeared
at the Newport Folk Festival some five or six
weeks later, his music was just as haunting,
just as profound, his pure falsetto floated out
over that festival field with all the ethereal power of the records
but with a new and eerie reality. When, a year later, he was booked
into Club 47 in Cambridge and I found out that he would be staying
with Dick Waterman, who managed Mississippi John Hurt and Son
House at the time and would very shortly take over Skip’s booking
1
and management, too, I felt an obligation to seek
6
him out. I’m not sure what exactly emboldened me.
I didn’t know Dick, except as one of the blues elite
7
who could hang out backstage at Newport or stride
9
past the waiting lines at Club 47 and walk right in
the door. I certainly didn’t know Skip. And at twenty-
one, I was temperamentally disinclined to approach
anyone outside the realm of my immediate circle of
acquaintance. But I felt, not without an ironic recog-
nition of my own foolishness and insignificance—for
no other reason but my overwhelming admiration
for his work, the scope of his imagination, I simply
felt compelled to do it.
I had never formally interviewed anyone before.
The closest I had come was when I went to see the
English novelist Henry Green two years earlier under
similar circumstances, and for much the same rea-
sons. He was a writer I admired so much that I wrote
to him when I arrived in England and asked if I could
come visit. When he wrote back and agreed to my
importunity, I was panic-stricken—but I remained
committed to my belief in art. So I summoned up what
little courage I possessed, overcame every existential
scruple I had about actually declaring myself (I was
a fully signed-up member of the mumbling school
of self-effacement), and spent an excruciatingly
self-conscious, gloriously transcendent afternoon
listening to Henry Green expound upon his views
of life and art.
That is more or less what I did with Skip. I called
up Dick and told him that I wanted to interview Skip
for an article in Blues Unlimited, an English fanzine
which was the first—and, with Jim and Amy O’Neal’s
Living Blues, which didn’t come along until 1970,
probably the most adventurous—of all the blues
periodicals. Now, I should explain that at the time I
had not yet seen Blues Unlimited, which had begun
its mimeographed publication two years earlier. I had in fact only
recently learned of its existence, through a Nat Hentoff column in
The Reporter, and I had been in touch with its two editors, Simon
Napier and Mike Leadbitter, by mail for the past six months without
ever having received the first issue of my subscription. It came as
something of a surprise, then, when Dick expressed skepticism that
Blues Unlimited should want to undertake another story on Skip
so soon after completing a three-part series. I’m not sure just how I
recovered from that, but in the end I found myself sitting in my car
on Concord Avenue nervously contemplating my future. I was in
fact trying to decide whether or not to take the bulky Norelco tape
recorder that was sitting on the front seat beside me out of the car
and down the street to Dick’s apartment, and it was a spirited inner
debate. My father, who had been the editor of his college newspaper,
had urged me to leave the tape recorder at home, a real reporter
relied solely on his notes, he said—but that was not my primary
consideration. What really disturbed me was a much simpler issue:
How could I walk in and introduce myself to someone carrying all
this baggage? In the end I left the tape recorder in the car, squared
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 49
my shoulders, and marched in to meet my fate, to present myself
to Skip James, unencumbered if not unafraid.
The man that I met was gracious and reserved, quietly observant
but somewhat amused, too, and patient with my foolishness. I knew
at the time that the questions I had put together were tiresome both
in their obviousness and in their abstraction, but I couldn’t think
of any others, and Skip dealt with every one of them in a dignified,
almost ceremonious way. He would counter the naive wonderment
of a twenty-one-year-old with the concrete experience of a man forty
years my senior. Why’d he quit? “I was so disappointed. Wouldn’t you
be disappointed, man? I cut twenty-six sides for Paramount in Graf-
ton, Wisconsin. I didn’t get paid but $40. That’s not doing very good.
Wouldn’t you be disappointed?” At other times he would brandish
a polysyllabic vocabulary at total odds with the stereotype of the
“primitive” bluesman but very much in keeping with what I took to be
the dark secrets of his music. When I left, it was with the same sense
of conflicting excite-
ment and relief that
I’ve come to recognize
from countless subse-
quent interviews over
the years: the feeling
that I had done it, I
had escaped without
revealing myself as a
total fraud, but with-
out having gotten to
the heart of the mat-
ter either.
I saw Skip James
several dozen times
over the next few
years. His comeback
was truncated by ill-
ness (he died in 1969)
and was not in any
case a major marker
of success. Generally
there would be twenty Issue 16, Spring 1997
or thirty people at his
performances, sometimes less. Often one felt an obligation to attend,
if only out of loyalty. As Dick Waterman observed: “He was a man
of intense pride in his ability. He was a genius, and he knew it.” He
was also aware, Dick pointed out, that “his good friend Mississippi
John Hurt’s music was much more widely accepted, that John played
to wider and larger audiences, that John was an artist in demand,
that John made more money. That, however, did not under any
circumstances alter his appraisal of John’s music. Which was that it
was play-party, ball-less, pleasant music, good music for dances and
country reels but not to be taken seriously as great blues.”
You could see the effect on his music: it appeared to be hampered
not just by the cancer that was eating away at him but by disappoint-
ment, and the unquestionable seriousness with which he took himself.
The first time I saw him play after Newport, in the fall of ’64, he was
booked for a week into a folk club, the Unicorn, in Boston with John
Hurt, and they sang just about everything you could imagine, from
Jimmie Rodgers yodels (on which they would duet) to Skip’s knocked-
out versions of “Lazybones,” “Silent Night,” and “Girl of My Dreams”
50 WINTER 2020
at the piano. Later on he would grow visibly more constrained,
seeming to view his bookings almost as concert recitals, patiently
instructing his audience about a way of life and a musical tradition
with which they could not possibly be familiar, in a manner that was
both disconcertingly and almost touchingly formal. (“As I first said,
it’s a privilege and an honor and a courtesy at this time and at this
age to be able to confront you with something that may perhaps
go down in your hearing and may be in history after I’m gone.”) He
never failed to sing his trademark number, “Devil Got My Woman,”
the inspiration for Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (it is
a peculiar footnote to history that Skip James, whose Paramount
releases were among the most obscure “country blues” sides, should
have provided the impetus for two of Robert Johnson’s blues, and
that his greatest song should have been the inspiration for Johnson’s
greatest), which he played in the hauntingly dissonant “cross-note”
tuning that made Skip’s music sound so supernally and indisput-
ably itself. It would be
a rare evening that he
did not play his chill-
ing Depression-era
blues, “Hard Time
Killing Floor,” or the
mournful “Cypress
Grove.” Generally he
would present “I’m
So Glad,” his “little,
tiny” children’s song
that Cream covered
in 1966, at least once
during the evening,
explaining that while
he could no longer
play it as fast as he
once had, in “sixty-
fourth” notes, he
could still perform it
in “thirty-seconds.”
He would then take
the song at breakneck
speed and smile at the
applause that washed over him. When I wrote to the editors of Blues
Unlimited about my recent blues experiences, I always mentioned
Skip and cited him as one of my favorite “live” performers. It was
always edifying in one way or another to see him—there was never
any question that you took something away from the performance,
even if it was only a melancholy sense of human limitations, as
reflected both in Skip’s music and in his increasingly dour mien.
I n 1994 a biography of Skip James appeared. It was called I’d
Rather Be the Devil after his most famous song, and it proposed
to offer “new insights into the nature of the blues, the world in
which it thrived, and its fate when that world vanished.” To do that,
the author, Stephen Calt, proposed to demolish the “myth” of Skip
James and, by extension, the romantic myth which he suggested
had grown up around the blues; he would tell the true story of a
bluesman, and the blues milieu, unvarnished and unembellished.
 This would certainly be a worthy enough project taken at its face;
it is one which was undertaken admirably, for example, by Jeff Titon
in his Early Downhome Blues, which explores the origins of the
blues, both folk and commercial, and the inevitable intersection of
the two in the vernacular culture of their time. Mike Bloomfield’s
Me and Big Joe, which tells the tale of the young white guitarist’s
adventures and misadventures with Big Joe Williams, would be
yet another corrective to the romantic view, cast in a first-person,
scatological account not suitable to every taste perhaps but utterly
convincing in its mix of love and confusion.
This is not the course that Stephen Calt chose to follow. Instead,
he produced a book written out of what appears to be little but
fear and loathing. He sets out in fact to systematically attack not
just Skip James, a figure with whose achievement the world is
scarcely familiar enough to justify such heavy-duty demolition, but
everyone whose life Skip James ever touched. Skip himself is, in
Calt’s view, “a figurative white man trapped in a black skin,” “cold-
blooded,” “obsessive,” and the possessor of a “delinquent lifestyle.”
He is misogynistic, “a shameless braggart,” “emotionally stunted,”
a gangster and bootlegger who was the plantation equivalent of “a
successful drug dealer in a modern-day housing project,” a “rank”
exaggerator, “jaundiced,” “humorless,” “predatory,” hypocritical,
mendacious, pretentious, and just plain bad.
Lest you think that Skip James was any exception to the general
rule of knavery and tomfoolery that was abroad in the land, here
are just some of the characterizations that Calt offers of some of the
book’s other characters. In the course of the few pages surrounding
Skip’s 1964 Newport appearance, we discover Robert Pete Williams
“looking like a caricature of a pimp,” a “buffoonish” Hammie Nixon,
an “embittered” Jesse Fuller, a “bleating” Fred McDowell whose
unnamed wife “had a pop-eyed deranged look,” a “boorishly brag-
ging” Reverend Robert Wilkins, and a “dim-witted” Son House, “a
surly drunk [who was] the laughing stock of his neighbors.” (Son
House, as much as anyone the inspiration for Robert Johnson’s and
Muddy Waters’s style, appears to be a particular bête noire of Calt’s.)
And believe me, this is only skimming the surface. On other pages
Ishmon Bracey, a contemporary of Skip’s who produced a handful
of matchless pre-Depression sides, is a “shameless name-dropper”
and a “pest,” Skip’s fellow Bentonia, Mississippi, native Jack Owens
an “unwitting bearer of another set of false pretenses” and, perhaps
worse, a “derivative amateur”; Skip’s father was “a man of primitive
anger,” Bukka White lacks personal and musical integrity, Missis-
sippi John Hurt is another hopeless amateur, without any real talent
or pride. And that’s not even getting into all the white people who
discover and represent all these “criminals” and buffoons and are
even more lacking in integrity and seriousness themselves. Every-
one is dismissed, from John Hammond and Alan Lomax to blues
record collectors in general (effete “wine sniffers” and “connivers”)
to folklorists (racists all) to the Beat Generation (if you want four
ways to recognize a beatnik, turn to pages 257–259) to the whole
folk movement (greedy, stupid, “pretentious,” and “nonsensical”)
to the entire U.S. (“No country could be more inhospitable to the
[already dismissed] values of folk music scholars than the com-
mercially oriented society of America, in which what was obsolete
was valueless.”)
What are we to make of all this? Why even bother with it at all?
you might ask. Well, I suppose for me it was the seriousness with
which the book was taken in many quarters—and for that I have no
explanation at all. About two-thirds of the way through, though,
we begin to catch glimpses of what it is all about, as suddenly the
author himself appears, an awkward, “gawking,” eighteen-year-old
blues enthusiast, on his way to Newport in 1964 to see his idol, Skip
James. In retrospect, he declares, his “infatuation with blues was a
solitary, thoughtless preoccupation.” And while he is “intoxicated”
when he first hears Skip sing, years later he recognizes “the senti-
mental, juvenile nature of my joyous excitement [at] the soap-opera
triumph of an impaired performer.” The final, chilling judgment?
“Had I known how our lives would intersect over the next four years,
I would not have initiated that first conversation.”
Is this a “thorough, clear-headed, and insightful” view, as one
review had it, “the best book on the subject of country blues for the
layperson”? Is it, as even some negative reviews have tended to sug-
gest, a book deserving of respect because it unflinchingly reveals a
truth at odds with observation, decency, and common sense? I don’t
think so. Not because the book that Calt purportedly set out to write
would not have been a fascinating one. And not because there are
not occasional nuggets of information, glimmers of idiosyncratic
truth as presented in Skip’s own words and views throughout. But
the entire book is so colored by the language of indiscriminate rage,
the sense of imagined slights so infects its very marrow, that there
is nothing left but bile, universal loathing, and utter, and abject,
self-contempt. In the end this is a terribly sad book, not because of
its subject but because of its author. It may perhaps be deserving of
our pity but surely not of our attention or respect.
S o don’t look to this book for a picture of Skip James. Look to the
music instead. And if Skip, whose work never ceased to proclaim
the beauty of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “all things counter,
original, spare, [and] strange,” found himself set apart both from the
world of his peers and, in later years, from the moment of time into
which he had somehow inexplicably slipped, well, so be it. That was
his self-acknowledged lot in life: engrossed in his music, he seemed
well aware that he was destined never to fit in.
As Skip himself once declared:
“Now you know sometimes it seem like to me that my music seem
to be complicated to some of my listeners. But the one thing that
seem to be complicated to me, and that is that they can’t catch the
ideas. Now I have had some students that are very, very apt—they
can catch ideas very quick—and other children, you cannot instill
it in them, I don’t care, no matter how hard they tried. Well, there
are some people, they just don’t have a calling for it. Now I might
have wanted to do some things I’ve seen other people do and are
prosperous at it, and I would like to take it up myself. But it just
wouldn’t fit into my life, it wasn’t for me. So the thing that a person
should do, seemingly, while they’re young, is to seek for your talent
wherever it is at, and then when you find where it is most fit to put
it in execution, do that. Well, for myself, I been out traveling ever
since I quit school. I’ve had quite an experience at different ages and
different times. And that’s the best teacher I found. That’s something
they cannot take away from you. Personal experience.”
“Whose Skip James Is This?,” originally published by the OA in 1997, appears
in this slightly revised form in Peter Guralnick’s new collection, Looking to Get
Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing, which was published on October 27, 2020.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 51
THE
E
SU 1
S

0
3
I

8
W

1
N

I
0
T E 2
R

GOSPEL
OF
JODECI
Sex, money, God, and slow jams

By Lauren Du Graf
Illustration by Richard A. Chance 53

y perverse interest all my life has been the
moment an artist crosses that line from ob-
scurity to celebrity,” said Lyor Cohen, global
head of music at YouTube, on The Breakfast
Club radio show in August. “And I’ve seen it
go so haywire so many times that I like to be
there to help them understand what’s impor-
tant,” added Cohen, who was former head of
Def Jam Recordings and 300 Entertainment,
the label that launched Young Thug, Migos,
and Fetty Wap. “You understand there are a
lot of evil forces out here for young kids who
have just got on.”
The particular perversion of music execu-
tives like Cohen is, of course, inextricable
from capitalism. The desire to counsel the
industry-naïve as the dizzying cataclysm of
fame hits is, even when cast in benevolent
terms, good business. Newly minted celebrity
musicians must also reckon with the hubris
of their own perverse interest—namely their
desire to be a salable commodity. Musicians
are accomplices, and often architects, of their
own objectification.
For gospel artists who make it as secular
musicians, the ordinary perversities of capi-
talism and celebrity tangle with the wounds
of religious betrayal and abandonment. To
one’s church family, the shift from sacred to
secular may be interpreted as vain ambition,
the prostitution of God’s gift to the devil,
blasphemy. In African-American church
families with roots stretching back to plan-
tations, the choice to leave religious music
behind may reanimate the historical traumas
of slavery, said Rev. Thomas Rhyant Jr., a
veteran gospel singer with the Fantastic Vio-
linaires, a quartet once led by Wilson Pick-
ett before he crossed over to secular. “The
church brought a certain amount of control
on the black folks, because the Bible told the
slaves to love their masters. When musicians
begin to think on their own, they’re saying,
‘I don’t need a master,’” said Rhyant over the
phone in September from Europe, where he
was touring in a revue of the music of Sam
Cooke, who encountered backlash after he
went from performing songs like “Jesus Gave
54 WINTER 2020
Me Water” to “She Was Only Sixteen.”
Among the stars of American popular
music, some of the brightest have been
burnished in this crossover—Cooke, Pick-
ett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Donny
Hathaway, the Staple Singers, Ashford &
Simpson, Whitney Houston. But none crossed
over—from relative obscurity to celebrity
and from gospel to secular—so boldly, in-
deed, so perversely as the hip-hop–driven
soul band Jodeci, who released one platinum
and two multiplatinum albums in just a four-
year span from 1991 to 1995.
Jodeci comprised two sets of brothers
raised in and around Charlotte, North Caro-
lina: Don Jr. “DeVante Swing” (the musical
mastermind of the group) and his younger
brother Dalvin “Mr. Dalvin” DeGrate, and
vocal powerhouses Cedric “K-Ci” and Joel
“JoJo” Hailey, the band’s moniker a syllabic
mélange of their names. (In the late nineties,
Cedric and Joel began releasing music on
their own as the adult-contemporary duo
K-Ci and JoJo.) The DeGrate and the Hailey
brothers were raised in Pentecostal and Holi-
ness churches in which sacred music served
as a primary vehicle for theology; both of
their families were nationally prominent on
the gospel scene and were featured on the
Billboard charts.
But as Jodeci, the DeGrate and the Hailey
brothers fashioned themselves anew, epito-
mizing the sound and personae of the horny,
slow-jammed nineties. When the band ap-
peared on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, the
first thing the host said was, “Somebody ex-
plain how your parents are affected by what
you are doing.” On Martin Lawrence’s show
the following year, the comedian parodically
accompanied the band while blabbering and
gyrating in a sleeveless undershirt to quasi-
orgasmic denouement, an unfastened belt
slackened from his sagging pants. By 1995,
the band had fully cashed in on their image
as insatiable freaks; their third full-length
album, The Show, The After-Party, The Hotel
(a “groupie opera,” wrote the Washington
Post), featured tracks such as “DJ Don Jer-
emy.” They appeared on the cover of VIBE
magazine that year; the article tagline: LIFE-
STYLES OF THE RICH AND SHAMELESS.
The internet abounds with documentation
of the personal and professional turmoil that
has followed members of the group from
the beginning—imprudent business deci-
sions, abusive behavior, convictions on gun
charges and for sexual contact, erratic live
performances, shot vocal cords, onstage col-
lapses, and gravely debilitating health and
substance addiction issues, chronicled in K-Ci
and JoJo’s 2010 reality show Come Clean.
But for a time in the nineties, they seemed
invincible, their youthful insouciance only
bolstering their sex symbol status. Wrote
Touré in the New York Times: “Perhaps no
other group has been linked to as many fa-
mously sexy women as Jodeci.” At the time,
DeVante was dating Madonna, Dalvin was
linked with T-Boz of TLC, and K-Ci was seeing
Mary J. Blige. Blige would later describe the
relationship to a BBC reporter as “Ike and
Tina of the nineties on the low” and a “pri-
vate hell.” (After an eighteen-year recording
hiatus, Jodeci came back, repentently, in
2014 with the anti-domestic-violence track
“Nobody Wins.”)
When asked, members of the band say
they never broke up. But it’s hard to say that
they are together anymore. DeVante rarely
appears in public. K-Ci and JoJo aren’t follow-
ing each other on Instagram. “Knowing what
I know now, I don’t think I would have been
in Jodeci,” JoJo told Sister 2 Sister magazine.
The friction between band members plays
out in passive-aggressive social media posts.
K-Ci, JoJo, and Dalvin assiduously market
themselves as solo artists. “Don’t know what’s
up with Jodeci right now. Still my brothers
though,” K-Ci told his Instagram live audi-
ence on August 15. On August 17 in San Jose,
Jodeci took the stage with only two of four
members, JoJo and Dalvin. K-Ci was sup-
posed to appear, but canceled. “It’s about
business at the end of the day,” he explained.
“The promoter did not have my money. Y’all
can understand that.” He added, “There’s
an Oko Yono in every Beatle. Read between
that.” The following month Dalvin posted a
magazine spread of himself mounted on a
motorcycle with the caption, “u don’t always
need 4 wheels on your vehicle to reach your
destination sometimes 2 works just fine!!!!”
The band may be in a protracted state of
decay, but their music is experiencing some-
thing of a renaissance. Among hip-hop taste-
makers, Jodeci references are trending. Migos
and Fetty Wap nod to Jodeci in their lyrics.
Drake, the band’s most aggressive contem-
porary interlocutor, self-consciously situates
himself within the same musical tradition; he
builds songs on their samples (“How About
Now”), weaves in intertextual allusions (“I
think I’d die for you / Jodeci ‘Cry for You’”),
and, on the song “Jodeci Freestyle” even
included a snippet of a phone call with his
father, Dennis Graham, whose words are
evidence of Drake’s longstanding devotion:
“I remember you loved Jodeci. I mean like
studied, you even made me a CD . . . ”
Jodeci wasn’t the first group to adapt the
classical tropes of soul music—lust, yearning,
and begging—to hip-hop; such a project was
already well underway, pioneered by New
Jack Swing acts such as Bell Biv Devoe and
Guy. But Jodeci’s gospel ingredients took the
recipe to the next level, juxtaposing churchy
chords and riffs against freaky-deaky lyrics,
drawing out the tension between the illicit
and the sublime.
The eroticism of their songs took a dis-
turbing charge from a proximity to violence
and madness. The video for “Feenin’,” a nar-
cotically metaphored ode to erotic obsession
from their sophomore album, Diary of a Mad
Band, features band members as patients
in an insane asylum, donning straitjackets
and convulsing from electroshock therapy
as the band sings, “I can’t leave you alone.”
Then–Death Row CEO Suge Knight, who once
gave K-Ci and JoJo’s mom a $37,000 ring
for Mother’s Day, has a cameo in the video
as an orderly bringing in a tray of food. (It
was Knight who introduced Jodeci to Tupac,
resulting in some of the finest collabora-
tive work of the rapper’s career. “How Do
U Want It” features vocals by K-Ci and JoJo
and production by Dalvin. DeVante made the
beat on “No More Pain.”)
The climax, if you will, of their aesthetic
comes in their masterpiece, “Freek’n You,”
a song that (along with Silk’s Keith Sweat–
penned “Freak Me”) helped transform the
word freak into a verb. It begins in the dark.
There’s the sound of a thunderclap, the angel-
ic arpeggiation of a glockenspiel, chanting,
and a first line that sounds like the beginning
of a bedtime prayer:
Every time I close my eyes
I wake up feeling so horny
I can’t get you outta my mind
Sexin’ you be all I see
Ginuwine, then an affiliate of the DeVante-
helmed Swing Mob music collective along
with Timbaland and Magoo, Missy Elliott,
Tweet, and Static Major, was around during
the composition of “Freek’n You.” “[DeVante]
locked himself up in his studio for about a
week. And when I say locked up, I mean he
was sort of like in jail. He wouldn’t come out
the room,” Ginuwine told YouKnowIGotSoul
in 2016. “He’d come out of the room to go
to the bathroom I guess and come back in,”
said Ginuwine, whose monster hit “Pony”
was first written and recorded in DeVante’s
studio in Rochester.
The effect lands somewhere between heav-
en and the bordello, sacred and infernal,
the dark complexity of DeVante’s produc-
tion a potent counterpoint to K-Ci’s sancti-
fied vibrato. One is hard-pressed to recall
a more emphatic musical utterance of the
word horny, the line’s final foot unabashedly
punctuated by a heavy spondee.
Perverse? Yes. Blasphemous? Maybe. But
not irreconcilable. To contemplate the mean-
ing of Jodeci is to grasp at the intersection of
religion and excess, of devotion and abandon,
of agape and eros—a space where holiness
and hedonism coincide. Sacred and erotic
poetry, after all, are not dichotomous, but
rather the most intimate and ancient of bed-
fellows, from Sufi mysticism to Ovidian elegy.
The meme may be “If the Love Doesn’t Feel
Like ’90s R&B I Don’t Want It,” but literary
history knows that Jodeci’s ars amatoria
continues a millennia-old poetic program
that welds the object of affection to some-
thing of the divine, a slippage between the
beloved and the god, which the poet-scholar
L. Lamar Wilson describes as “sacrilegion,”
a never-ending hunger for the unattainable
object of erotic perfection.
My obsession with Jodeci began in middle
school; at the time, the lyrics to “Freek’n You”
were an intoxicating abstraction. In high
school, my friend had a cassette single of
their rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Lately”;
we wore it out on off-campus drives to lunch.
I returned to the band’s music as an adult,
drawn in by nostalgia, seduced and repulsed
by the fantasy of complete erotic possession.
Jodeci’s vision of romance was sublime, but
suffocating. “Stay,” the first song on their first
album, opens with the line “Don’t talk, just
listen.” It’s a line that has always bothered me.
But I held my nose, beckoned by the music;
for years, their first two albums stayed in
heavy rotation in my car’s five-disc changer.
My interest in the band deepened in the
summer of 2012, when I met Robert Joines
at an unassuming bar in Washington, D.C.’s
U Street corridor called, as chance would
have it, JoJo. I’d gone with some friends to
hear live music, and Joines was helming a
grown-folks cover band called Just Us that
played songs by Kool and the Gang, Rick
James, and a fifteen-minute James Brown
medley. In between sets, Joines shared that
he was from the Charlotte area and an uncle
of K-Ci and JoJo. The Haileys, I knew, were
kin to American Idol winner Fantasia Bar-
rino, who grew up an hour and a half north
of Charlotte on I-85 in High Point. I never
spoke with him or heard his band again,
but the evening raised the possibility in my
mind of understanding Jodeci as more than
a distant artifact of their era, but as people
with families I could meet in places that I
could touch.
Jodeci’s origin story has often pivoted
around their Cinderella moment, when
DeVante, Dalvin, K-Ci, and JoJo arrived
in New York City in the DeGrate family
Ford Escort after a twelve-hour drive from
North Carolina with three hundred dollars
and nowhere to stay. The band memorial-
ized the trip in their 1993 song “Success”:
Way back in 1989, I believe it was
We packed up DeVante’s car and
headed up north
A little money in our pockets, but that
didn’t stop us
We had to leave
Leaving a family behind back home
It was so sad that we said “Mama,
we’re gone”
We were leaving in a rush—Mama,
don’t fuss
We just wanna succeed
...
We rolled around the Big Apple all
night long
Every time listening to our demo song
Not a place to sleep, nothing was
cheap
But we still drove on
They found the address for Uptown Re-
cords in the phone book and showed up
without an appointment. They were signed
by Andre Harrell that day. Harrell put the
band up in his old apartment in the Bronx;
Al B. Sure finessed their songwriting and
production; and Puff Daddy massaged their
unsophisticated country edges into a mar-
ketably rugged aesthetic, putting them in
combat boots and slipping the beat from
EPMD’s “You’re a Customer” behind the
crush-serenade “Come and Talk to Me.”
But starting the story in New York had
put too much emphasis on Uptown. It was
in North Carolina that the band had written
and recorded a demo of nearly thirty songs,
a number of which ended up on their first
album.
What was Jodeci like before they signed
to a label, before they crossed that line from
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 55
obscurity to celebrity, before they became a
commodity, before they succumbed to the
excesses of fame?
I wondered what their families were like.
I wanted to visit their churches.
C harlotte, North Carolina, sits at the inter-
section of money and God, and is there-
fore a quintessentially American city. It’s
the site of the nation’s first gold rush, home
to megachurches and big businesses, Bank
of America and Billy Graham, and Lowe’s
Hardware. For a time, Charlotte was home to
televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s
The PTL Club; the acronym was intended
to signify “Praise The Lord” but would be
derisively recast as “Pay The Lady.”
Jodeci is inextricable from this terroir.
DeVante and Dalvin’s father, the Reverend
Donald DeGrate, was himself a televangelist;
after working as a talent coordinator for The
700 Club, he hosted his own show on CBN
called Right On, which ran for a few years
in the 1970s and was aimed at a black audi-
ence. When Dalvin and DeVante performed
with JoJo Hailey for the first time, they were
part of a Christian band playing backup for
Tammy Sue Bakker, Jim and Tammy Faye’s
daughter. The Bakkers were good friends
with the Reverend and Mrs. DeGrate. At the
time, DeVante was dating Tammy Sue.
In late June, I visited Christ Tabernacle
Pentecostal Church (formerly known as
Christ Gospel), the church Rev. DeGrate
founded in 1974.
“We pray with the lights off,” the usher
advised, showing me to a pew near the back
for Sunday morning service.
The dark sharpened my ears. I tuned in
to a layered, omnidirectional sea of wailing
and prayer. Bodies knelt in the shadows,
prostrated over pews. A young girl with a
questioning gaze found my eyes, peeking
over the back of a pew.
Back in the day, the likes of Puff Daddy,
Missy Elliott, and Aaron Hall passed through
the church’s doors. Robert Duvall even vis-
ited the church as he prepared to make The
Apostle, a film about an eccentric Southern
preacher. But the church has gone through
some changes and things aren’t the same as
they were, I’ve been told. The lights came on
to reveal evidence of absence. Drum sets with
no drummers. No band, no choir. Twenty
parishioners in a church designed to accom-
modate many more.
56 WINTER 2020
Choir or no choir, the show must go on.
And Rev. DeGrate produced a seamless show
in June. He’s the pastor, the lead vocalist,
and the DJ. He cued up backing tracks on
a MacBook, opening with a soaring ode to
the unrecognized virtue in traumatic wear
and tear.
Scars are a sign of healing
Like the rainbow that follows the rain
Wounds that are open, feel the most
pain
But the scars are a sign of healing
Behind the pulpit, the Reverend exposed
his scars. He talked about the shame of losing
his wife’s family home, being without a place
of their own to cook Thanksgiving dinner.
He lost his way, he said. He preached about
repentance and self-loathing, beginning with
a reading from the Book of Job, “Wherefore I
abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
When the sermon felt irretrievably bleak,
he sprinkled in a dash of comic levity. “Don’t
be bringing that r&b in the house, unless it’s
Jodeci!” he joked.
The women in the church were all wearing
white and had removed their shoes. One of
these was Mrs. Mary DeGrate, DeVante and
Dalvin’s mother, who played the tambourine
with the joyful authority of a church mama.
Noticing my presence, she ran up in tube
socks and greeted me with the warm smile
of a long-lost friend. She whispered to her
husband, who called upon me mid-service
to introduce myself to the congregation.
After the service, Mrs. DeGrate approached
me again to ask what brought me to the
church. I explained that I was a writer, and
she and the Reverend invited me into his of-
fice to talk. DeVante used to keep something
like fifteen to twenty keyboards to the right
of the altar, Mrs. DeGrate told me. Those
drums? Those were Dalvin’s. The young girl
staring at me during the service, I was later
told, is DeVante’s granddaughter.
The Reverend had the chance to cross over
to pop music like his sons. But in his twen-
ties, he made the choice to stay in gospel, he
explained. He had a spot lined up for him at
a Motown revue at the Cow Palace in San
Francisco. He made it all the way from Texas
to California, but once he arrived, a voice
spoke to him, offering a bit of holy scripture
he had never before read: “For what profits
a man if he gains the whole world but loses
his own soul.”
The Reverend and his wife were living
in Virginia when he met the conservative
Christian televangelist Pat Robertson for
the first time. Their church choir appeared
on Robertson’s television show, and as the
choir prepared to sing, the voice of the Lord
told Rev. DeGrate that somebody was going
to offer him something. “We were broke,” he
said with a chuckle. After the performance,
he and his wife lingered until they were the
only ones left in the studio. That evening,
Robertson offered him a job as a salesman
on radio and TV. According to his son Derek,
Rev. DeGrate was the first black person Rob-
ertson hired. (Like his father, Derek made
the choice to stay in gospel music. For years,
he was hounded by questions about why
he didn’t join his brothers’ band. But he’s
not bitter about it. “That’s how God had it
worked out.”)
As Rev. DeGrate’s career at CBN took off,
so did his recording career. He moved to
Charlotte and, recording as the Don DeGrate
Delegation, landed a hit in 1979 with the
bouncy dance track “I Wanna Be Ready.”
Produced by Nashville disco mainstays Moses
Dillard and Jesse Boyce, who had spent more
than thirty years playing bass for Little Rich-
ard, the track went on to achieve national
acclaim. He later signed a deal with WORD
Records out of Nashville, an accomplish-
ment that he in part attributes to bringing
tapes from recording sessions into his prayer
closet, which is exactly what it sounds like—a
closet with “no clothes, no shoes, just prayer.”
“Everybody in the church has one,” he said.
Don DeGrate’s gospel albums stood out for
their time for their stylistic innovation and
production quality, said recording engineer
Mark Williams, who worked on a handful of
albums with DeGrate at Charlotte’s now-
defunct Reflection Sound Studios. “He made
the quartet sound less bouncy and country
and more uptown,” said Williams, who es-
timates he has worked on more than five
hundred gospel records since he started at
Reflection in 1980. At the time, most gospel
albums made at Reflection were recorded
and mixed in a single day, he said, but Don
DeGrate preferred to take his time in the
studio. Williams remembers DeVante, too,
as the “kid with the big feet and big hands
messing around on the saxophone on his
dad’s album,” adding that “he was a bit odd
to deal with, and kind of into his own trip.”
Rev. DeGrate’s ambition, rigor, and fusion
aesthetic left a mark on his sons, especially
DeVante, who wrote and produced nearly
every Jodeci song. “People kind of forget
about the stuff [my dad] was doing way
before Jodeci,” said Derek. “But it was the
same thing—they were taking the gospel
vocals and just putting them over r&b-type
melodies.”
The Reverend’s sons played in their father’s
band from their early high school years. That
is, until DeVante and Dalvin went to New
York.
“Well, you know that story,” interjected
Mrs. DeGrate, smiling.
“They drove my car. We didn’t know they
were gone,” added the Reverend.
I asked them what they think of Jodeci.
“We’re not r&b people,” said Rev. DeGrate.
“I don’t listen to it as a rule. But DeVante did
change the sound of r&b music.”
Mrs. DeGrate pointed to DeVante’s
mentorship of Missy Elliott, Ginuwine,
Timbaland (whose nickname was given to
him by DeVante), Static Major, and other
members of the Swing Mob collective as one
aspect of their son’s legacy that has not been
adequately acknowledged. “He didn’t get any
credit for it,” she says. “Timbaland is what
he is because of DeVante. He took care of
Ginuwine. DeVante helped those kids.”
(Timbaland would describe living under
DeVante’s roof differently. In a chapter of
his memoir titled “Diary of a Mad Mentor,”
he recounted an environment of systematic
abuse in which musicians were expected to
produce under a constant threat of violence,
and, although they received free studio time,
were given little to no money and fed a mea-
ger diet—sometimes nothing at all.)
Mrs. DeGrate is a proud mother, taking
care to find the best recent picture of Dal-
vin to show me. She took a picture of me to
send to him, too. She gestured to a framed
photo in the Reverend’s office of her sons with
James Brown (“You know who that is, don’t
you?”) and told me about the time Michael
Jackson called her to tell her how talented
DeVante was. “I don’t like to think about that
conversation because I didn’t get the chance
to mention Jesus.”
L ike his father, DeVante found inspiration
in the dark.
Earl Vernon remembers the first time he
met DeVante well. Back then, Vernon was
performing with Little Cedric and the Hailey
Singers, the Hailey family gospel band. They
were working out of Charlotte’s Tryon Mall,
58 WINTER 2020
where the band’s manager had put together
a studio for them to prepare their fourth
album. Some members of the band, includ-
ing Cedric and Joel, lived in the mall, in a
makeshift apartment adjacent to the studio.
Vernon, who auditioned DeVante for the
band in 1987, recalled him as a precocious vir-
tuoso. “I’m listening to him, like everything
he says, I’m not believing it,” Vernon, now
a minister of music at a church in Gaffney,
South Carolina, recalled in a phone conversa-
tion in September. “He was just a little kid
walking around just talking about music.
He said, ‘My name is Don, you can call me
Lil Don, but when I make it big, my name is
going to be DeVante.’”
When he came back to the Haileys’ studio
for an official audition, DeVante brought
about eight keyboards with him, a momen-
tous step in bringing his musical laboratory
beyond the confines of his father’s church.
“He said, ‘Cut the lights off,’” Vernon re-
counted. “I said, ‘Cut the lights off?’ He was
like, ‘Yeah, man, I like to cut the lights off, I
like to play in the dark. I like to get a good
feel for what I’m doing.’
“The music was out of this world; I’ve
never heard nothing like this. I cut the lights
on and his hands were going everywhere,
I mean just flying and he all of a sudden
stopped. He said, ‘Hey man, why you cut
the lights back on?’ I said, ‘Man, I had to see
this to believe it.’ He was like, ‘Man, I was
just getting ready to get into a groove.’ I said,
‘What?’ He said, ‘I really want to impress you
because I really want to play for y’all.’ I said,
‘Bro, you’re hired.’”
Little Cedric and the Hailey Singers had
been formed in Baltimore, but the Haileys
had returned to their hometown of Monroe,
North Carolina, a rural town twenty-five
miles south of Charlotte, when the boys were
in high school. During Cedric and Joel Hai-
ley’s early years in Monroe, “gospel music was
really the only type of entertainment that was
going in town,” said Walter Gibson, who for
thirty-two years has been proprietor of Jam-
pac Records on Main Street. Back then, the
tight vocal harmonizing of gospel quartets
was still in high demand, and the Charlotte
area, an early gospel recording hub, was fa-
mous for its local groups. The gospel quartet
style, according to UNC Chapel Hill folklorist
Glenn Hinson, “incorporated the close har-
monies of workers singing in the fields, the
falsetto of the hollers, the bass phrasings of
the rhythmic worksongs, and the syncopated
beat of congregational handclapping into a
unique musical sound that is still the basis
of modern gospel music.” Elvis Presley hired
quartets as his backup singers, and sing-
ers like Pickett, Cooke, Johnnie Taylor, and
Lou Rawls got their start in quartets like the
Violinaires, the Soul Stirrers, and the Holy
Wonders. For a time, Charlotte was home to
the most famous of them all, the Golden Gate
Quartet, a group that, at Eleanor’s behest,
performed at FDR’s 1941 inauguration.
The Hailey family band performed quartet-
style arrangements to enormous success; Lit-
tle Cedric and the Hailey Singers’ 1983 album
Jesus Saves hit number four on the Billboard
Top Gospel Albums chart. The band was built
around young Cedric’s prodigious vocals; he
was called the Michael Jackson of gospel,
and if you listen to recordings of the band,
you’ll hear why. In a review of Little Cedric
and the Hailey Singers in February 1985, the
New York Times wrote of future K-Ci, then
aged fifteen: “Young Mr. Hailey delivered
songs with conviction; his voice rose over the
band’s vamps in rasps, shouts, and long cries.
He also delivered the gospel message with
stylized, preacherly declamation—although,
as with many child performers, the manner-
isms seemed self-conscious.” (K-Ci recently
returned to gospel, contributing vocals to
two tracks on Snoop Dogg’s gospel album,
Bible of Love.) Little Cedric and the Hailey
Singers could often be heard on WQCC, then
Charlotte’s biggest gospel station, and one
of the only music stations allowed in the
DeGrate household.
Not long after DeVante’s audition, Ver-
non recalled, the group abandoned gospel
and began working toward Jodeci. Over the
phone, Vernon sang some of the original
versions of the songs that he worked on with
the group. The origins of the song “Stay,” he
told me, can be traced to a gospel song he
wrote called “The Time Is Now,” which was
originally intended to be on Little Cedric’s
fourth album. Vernon said he appeared on
anywhere between five and eight songs on
the demo that would help land the band at
Uptown Records. For a time, the band was
called Jodek-ci, Vernon told me. “Jo was for
JoJo, D was for DeVante, E was for me. K-Ci
was for K-Ci. But they took the ‘K’ off.”
He sang me an early iteration of the song
that would become “Forever My Lady,” which
he described as the band’s theme song. (The
lyrics to the chorus: “When you think of love,
you think of Jodeci. Together forever. And
this is one thing.”) “Now, you got to hear
how much we sound alike,” he said, laughing.
Indeed, Vernon’s voice would have merged
beautifully.
Nearly thirty years later, it still stings.
(“They’re my friends. I love them, and when
they see me, we ain’t missed a beat and every-
thing. But it would not be Jodeci if it wasn’t
for me.”) When the band made that fateful
trip to New York, Vernon stayed behind in
Charlotte with his pregnant ex-girlfriend.
JoJo promised to keep him in the loop, and
after they got signed, Vernon was told he’d
be able to stay in the fold. But Uptown Re-
cords, seeing the marketability of two sets
of brothers, didn’t care, Vernon suggested.
It was too late. The band never came back
for Earl Vernon.
I n 1996, Tupac died in a drive-by shooting
in Las Vegas. Tupac had asked K-Ci to go to
Vegas with him on that trip; the day before,
K-Ci and JoJo had been with the rapper,
shooting the music video for “Toss It Up.”
Jodeci’s unofficial hiatus began around
then. K-Ci and JoJo started releasing music
as their own entity separate from the DeGrate
brothers, trading horny gangsterism for adult
contemporary. The Hailey brothers, who just
a few years earlier had provided vocals for
a “groupie opera,” now vowed, as K-Ci and
JoJo, to “never fall in love with a stranger”
on “All My Life,” which spent three weeks in
the number-one spot on the Billboard charts
in 1998. K-Ci and JoJo was a band that their
mother, Anita Hailey, could finally listen to,
JoJo told the New York Daily News in 2000.
“With Jodeci, she wasn’t at a lot of our shows.
Now, she’s there whenever she can be.”
To understand the lineage of the Hailey
family vocalists, one must hear Anita. I found
her on YouTube, a shaky phone video taken
of her singing in church at her granddaugh-
ter’s graduation. Her voice was piercing and
doleful, its tone like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.
She sounded like her son K-Ci, but deeper—
broken but resilient. She had one of the most
beautiful voices I had ever heard in my life.
Beyond a few articles noting her wish that
her sons would return to gospel music, I
found little written about her. I had heard
she had recorded music in Baltimore, but
turned up no evidence of these recordings.
For weeks, I had reached out to members of
the Hailey family and was ignored or flatly
rejected. She briefly appeared in K-Ci and
JoJo’s reality television show, Come Clean.
In late July, I went to Charlotte’s Mission
Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, one of the
churches that was featured in the TV show,
intending to absorb what I could.
Aaron Raley, the preacher, is a cousin of
the family. He told stories of miracles, of
things beyond one’s control, of how the hand
of God will show up. He railed against gos-
sip (“You know how people talk,” he said a
few times that day) and was an energetic
fundraiser. A sign at the front of the church
announced how much had been raised for a
building project. He tallied up the high price
of each renovation: each door, he told the
congregation, costs three thousand dollars
to replace. Over the course of the day, he
changed outfits three times—a shiny blue
suit in the morning, a leisure outfit during
lunch, and another suit for the afternoon
service. The funds for his finery, he assured
the congregation, didn’t come from church
coffers. “What belongs to God stays with
God,” he said.
My visit coincided with the church’s forty-
first anniversary, a day full of sermoning and
singing from morning until evening. The
church already had four or five choirs on its
own, but additional visiting choirs and pas-
tors were on hand for the day of celebration.
My attention waned until Anita grabbed the
mic and brought down the house.
Afterward, no fewer than ten members of
the congregation approached me with mes-
sages of welcome. They hugged me, kissed
me, sweated on me, and made me feel seen.
They asked me where I came from and what
brought me there. I traveled from D.C., I said,
because of the music; I told them that I had
seen a video of Anita singing on YouTube. I
tried to be discreet, but it was no use. They
rushed to introduce me to Anita and tell her
who I was and why I came. She held my hand
and said that it was a blessing to meet me,
inviting me to lunch.
I waited for the right moment to introduce
myself fully, but I was uncovered before I
could find an in. The first to notice me was
Tiffany Hailey, K-Ci and JoJo’s baby sister.
“Are you the writer who has been trying to
get in touch with my daughter?” asked Tif-
fany. “How did you find us?”
As I waited in line in the buffet, whispers
of my arrival were carried up the chain. I sat
and ate with a few longtime parishioners,
wondering what would happen next. As I
prepared to leave, Anita gestured toward me.
“Sit down, I have something to say to you.”
“Tell me what you’re really here for,” she
said, smiling over a plate of food. To her right
was Tiffany, and another cousin. They waited
for my next move, as if we were playing a
game of chess.
I explained that I am a writer, working on
a story about Jodeci. I told them that I came
to observe the service and hear the music. I
said that I hadn’t been able to get a hold of
anyone in the family for an interview, but
that I still wanted to see the family’s church.
“That’s right, because you wouldn’t have
been able to get to them if it wasn’t through
me,” she replied. “You see, you kind of mis-
led me.”
Tiffany asked if I had tried to get a hold
of Dustin, K-Ci’s manager, about interview-
ing him or other members of the band. I
explained that I had, and that he referred
me to an attorney in New York.
“Now you’re speaking my language,” said
Anita. “You see, it has to be done the right
way. You did right by reaching out to the
manager. You tell the people that sent you
here that you have to do this the right way.
You’re welcome to stay here and experience
the culture all day long. But you’re not getting
an interview. It all stops with me. You have
to understand, I have to protect my family.
But if you do it the right way, I might even
let you write my book.”
The lawyer never returned my call. Later
that evening, I heard from Tiny, JoJo’s wife,
who asked what I was doing in church. As
I talked, I heard Tiny talking to JoJo, who
eventually got on the line. He is the only
member of Jodeci I would get a chance to
speak with during the course of reporting
this article.
JoJo liked the idea of doing an interview
for a story about the band’s gospel roots.
But his mother had been upset by my visit,
he explained.
“But I’m going to make it real easy for you,”
JoJo said. “I really want to do this interview.”
He said he’d talk to Dalvin and get back
to me.
The following morning, I got an email
from Tiny:
“Good morning, the gentlemen are choos-
ing to decline the interview.”
I returned to Charlotte in August. There was
one more church I wanted to visit.
I learned from their reality show that as
boys, Cedric and Joel Hailey attended Tiny
Grove Holiness Church in Pageland, South
Carolina, a sundrenched farm town about
an hour south of Charlotte.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 59
 Pageland is known for its watermelon and questions about my family.” She’ll tell every- approach would only offer easy truths, both
hosts a yearly festival in its honor. Before the one about me, she warned. She called me a about the band, and about myself.
service, I stopped to buy one on the side of the “sneaky little thing.” She screamed. She told As postcritical scholar Rita Felski has writ-
road. The cashier told me the farmers are hav- me never to call her again and said that she ten, “We can be taken hold of, possessed,
ing a hard time; the weather has been unreli- was blocking my number. And she hung up. invaded by a text in a way that we cannot
able, and government subsidies are a necessity. Her cousin later told me that the word is out fully control or explain and in a manner that
Tiny Grove is located just past a tractor that I’ve been snooping around and that I’m a fails to jibe with public postures of ironic dis-
dealership, fields of feed corn, and a Walmart nuisance. Others who said they were willing passion or disciplinary detachment.” Pounc-
distribution center. The nearest McDonald’s to talk suddenly wouldn’t return phone calls. ing on Jodeci’s contradictions would distort
is twenty-four miles away. The church itself Someone else in town, unconnected to the how I tended toward them, how I wanted to
is modestly sized and humbly appointed with church, told me that the best thing for me to succumb to them. I assented to the sound
wood paneling, popcorn ceilings, threadbare do would be to pack up and leave. of voices joined in harmony promising to
upholstery, and fraying carpet. It used to I was frustrated, but I understood. Over worship me like a sexual goddess and give
be heated by a wood stove and was smaller the phone, I felt the same unmediated ache me whatever I wanted like a Disney prin-
before the remodel, I was told. Fittingly, the that made me want to cry when I heard her cess. I bathed in the materialism of “Feenin’,”
sermon that day was full of when K-Ci says “take my
agricultural references, of money, my house, and my
learning to endure in be- car.” I relished the erotic
tween rains, of learning to appeal of “Freek’n You,”
be patient in the dry place, the song’s elegiac begging
of learning to withstand a charged with the holy spir-
financial drought by believ- it, the sacred braided into
ing in God. The service was the profane. As Teju Cole
backed by a smartly dressed wrote, “I can oppose white
trio of teenagers; children supremacy and still rejoice
of no more than four or in Gothic architecture.”
five years played with tam- The promises of nine-
bourines in the pews. ties r&b, I know, are as
After the service, I was flimsy as any narrative in
warmly greeted by mem- resolving the anguish of
bers of the congregation. one’s existential condition
It seemed everybody there, of isolation. (Prayer alone
including the preacher, will not prevent eviction.
either grew up with the Nor will music permanent-
Haileys or was a cousin ly mend a restive heart.)
Issue 103, Winter 2018
or an aunt. The seemingly Yet such fictions fill us with
interminable number of a temporary plenitude, a
Hailey cousins I met made more sense after sing, the same bottomless grief that gave her respite from reason, an occasion to surrender
I learned that Anita is the daughter of one voice its agonized transcendence. to absorption. I think of Simone de Beauvoir,
of three sisters, all ministers, who married In the end, what else was there to know? who went to the cinema up to three times a day
three brothers. Rebecca Raley Seegars, their during the Vichy occupation of France. While
cousin, remembered that Cedric was about traveling alone in New York, she wandered in
four years old when he began singing in one of and out of cinemas, looking for a sense of com-
the church’s choirs. That experience must have
made him bold to sing out later, she imagines. W e live in a time when we must all ac-
count for our complicity in a culture
Our conversations were engaging. But that ennobles the unbridled sexual desires
fort and belonging. “I go into another movie
house,” wrote Beauvoir in America Day by Day.
“The black-and-white screen is like morphine,
brief. Shortly after the service ended, sev- of men. Over the course of writing this essay, and the actors’ American accent moves me.
eral of the family members retired to a back this thought occurred to me repeatedly. (On The film is entertaining—Lady in the Lake. But
room for a meeting. I made plans to talk later the day I finished it, Christine Blasey Ford when I leave, I’m disappointed again.”
with a few of them. recounted the details of a sexual assault she By visiting Jodeci’s churches and families,
That evening I got an ominous phone call endured in high school in her testimony in I imagined, I might scale these myths into a
from a cousin of the Hailey family whom I front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.) relatable dimension, drawing closer to their
met in church. “K-Ci and JoJo’s mom says How could I devote so much attention to a roots so as to make my affinity for their music
you need to call her.” band whose music and biography exalted an integrated part of my being. But I found no
“Listen to me,” said Anita when she the uncontrollable libido at a time like this? holistic cure among the faithful. Yet in writing,
picked up, her voice unrecognizably angry. I felt I should reckon with the band’s mi- I flout the edict of Jodeci’s first line, “Don’t
“I’m speaking to you from the bottom of my sogyny. Yet reading Jodeci through the flat talk, just listen.” My voice hovers as a descant
heart. You will not go into my church, asking lens of sexism felt lazy and dishonest. Such an over a music contingent on my silence.

60 WINTER 2020
 No matter where you are, you can keep your

EYES ON THE SOUTH

A sitting area along the pathway of the Fairy Trail at the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Cassadaga, FL.
The trail is lined with statues and figurines of fairies, gnomes, salamanders, and mermaids
which visitors can see from sunup to sundown. Cassadaga is home to the oldest Spiritualist community
in the American South and has come to be known as the “Psychic Capital of the World.”
(PHOTO BY SCOTT MCINTYRE)

The OA’s weekly online photography series.

CURATED BY JEFF RICH

OX F O R DA M E R I C A N . O R G / E Y E S
IF GOD
E
S U 9
S

9
I

7
W

1
HAD
N

I
0
T E R 2

A NAME
BY JASON KYLE HOWARD

f God had a face, what
would it look like? It
was something I had
wondered for as long
as I could remember,
when my parents first
taught me how to pray
Now I lay me down to
sleep, kneeling beside
my bed on the blue
shag carpet. Sometimes
I thought of him as a se-
vere old man, imperious, a
mighty sword at his side, his hair and beard
a brilliant white and flowing down the steps
of the platform that held his throne. But
other times I pictured him in the guise of the
Southern Baptist preacher from my child-
hood—ginger-haired, freckled, and rotund,
always ready to pull you close in a secure,
loving embrace. These two disparate images
volleyed in my mind. The wrathful old man,
ready to cut me down when I was wicked; the
loving father, offering his chest on which to
lay my head. Back and forth, back and forth,
these two conceptions of God and his nature
battled, a war between fear and love.
Fear was usually the victor. At fourteen, I
joined the Pentecostal church, and like most
people who find themselves subsumed by
fundamentalism, I was profoundly afraid
of hell. I was gay and closeted, terrified of
what would happen if I admitted the truth
of who I was to my family and community.
Instead, I would petition God for healing and
deliverance, both on my knees at the altar
and sitting at a black-lacquered baby grand
piano, where my furious chords joined with
acoustic and bass guitars, the jangle of tam-
bourines, and the backbeat of drums—always the mood that had fallen like the gloaming
the drums—to pound out a song that caused in some mountain hollow.
the congregation to clap and dance in ecstatic It was 1995, the year Joan Osborne’s
time. The Holy Ghost moved along with that “One of Us” was released, the end of my
rhythm too, and I watched as the tongues fell eighth-grade year, in rural Kentucky where
and smoldered like tiny flames in the mouths homophobia was—and continues to be—
of people across the room. Sometimes they rampant. My secret boyfriend and I—the one
would rage in one person and the music I had kissed in darkened classrooms after
would cease, allowing everyone to hear the Science Olympiad practice, his blond scruff
message being delivered directly from God chafing my freshly shaved cheeks—had bro-
in strange guttural syllables. A translation ken up. We were bullied and threatened in the
in the English of King James, peppered with hallways at school, and gossiped about when
thees and thines, would usually follow. Then we passed notes between classes and had
the music might start again, just as loud and lunch together. I ache for those two boys now,
urgent, or slow and soothing, depending on for the normal acne-scarred romance they

62 WINTER 2020
were never allowed to have. I bear the shame
of my own actions that came after I joined
the church, of sending him a bitter farewell
letter that spewed the very same judgment
we had grown accustomed to receiving.
This is what religious fundamentalism
does: it sullies loveliness, it plants a malig-
nant fear in pure hearts, it deadens souls to
the beauty of art and song. It blinds people
to all the names and faces of God.
I f God had a name, what would it be?
God’s names, I knew from my early years
Illustration by Isip Xin
in the Southern Baptist church, were many. I
had won dozens of scripture drills and verse
contests by memorizing them, along with
characters from the Bible and all the titles
of its sixty-six books in order from Genesis
to Revelation. But in the Pentecostal church,
the names of God were not considered mere
facts to be studied and recited. No, instead
they were oaths on which to stake one’s very
life, promises he had given on which one
could depend. Alpha and Omega, The First
and the Last, I Am That I Am, The Beginning
and the End. Preachers thundered them from
the pulpit and singers invoked them from
the stage in song, releasing a storm of emo-
tions—hope, fear, wrath, awe—that swept
through the crowd.
He is Jehovah, one of our singers, a flame-
haired alto, boomed in a voice as vibrant as
her tresses. Over a rapid backbeat and a tune
dominated by minor chords, she flung a list
of names across the congregation—Lord God
Almighty, The Balm of Gilead, The Rock of
Ages—along with Hebrew titles from the Old
Testament: Jehovah Shalom, the God of Peace;
Jehovah Jireh, the God of Provision. And then
she returned to where she had started: He is
Jehovah, the God that healeth thee.
A promise. Jehovah Rapha. Of all his
names, this was the one I clung to the most.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 63
God the Healer. I sang along as I played, my
fingers bounding and contorting over the
keys, praying that he would make good on
his word.
But the God I served could not be reduced
to the status of a mere mortal, stripped of
his divine powers. After all, he would then
not be big enough, powerful enough, to do
what I had been promised he would do—solve
my problems and cure me of the secret af-
fliction I was fighting with every ounce of
revelation comes from secrets. That there
are traces of God in all of us, that doubt is an
essential part of faith. That art is but another
of his many names. That the greatest songs—
the greatest art—often offer a challenge, and
it is up to us to accept it. Mine was that I had
to embrace and become what I once most

W hat if God was one of us? More than

the question she asked, I found Joan
Osborne herself threatening when I first saw
her iconic video on MTV. She was unabash-
edly herself, comfortable in her own skin,
something I was not. I worried about how I
walked, how I talked, how I laughed, how I
dressed—normal teenage angst, one might
say. But I had long since been put on notice
that, try as I might to hide, people knew
who I really was. And that it was unnatural,
an abomination. I needed to police myself,
deny myself, change myself. I needed the
deliverance that only God could provide. This
“slob” and “stranger” she sang about could
not offer that. He could never be reduced to
those lowly identities, of that I was certain.
To even entertain the notion was near to
blasphemy.
She looked like a radiant heathen—glori-
ous, I see now, with her wild waterfall of
blond corkscrew curls and a prominent nose
ring that looped around her right nostril.
But back then—back when I was burying an
essential part of myself down in my soul’s
hidden crevices—all I could see was world-
liness and carnality. I had no idea that, like
me, she was from a small town in Kentucky.
She seemed so of the world—intelligent,
liberal, and gamine, reveling in her pulsating
sensuality while singing about God.
But her God was not anything like mine. I
knew this from the lyrics, which were every-
where—on the radio, on MTV and VH1, on the
lips of nearly all my friends in high school.
The song started promisingly enough, sam-
pling an old Alan Lomax field recording of a
mountain tune titled “The Aeroplane Ride”
that warned of impending judgment. This
old world’s gonna reel and rock, warbled the
Pentecostal singer Nell Hampton from Saly-
ersville, Kentucky, in a worn voice, before the
song transitioned to include the twang of an
electric guitar, the steady tap of a high-hat,
and then Osborne’s rich, textured voice. Writ-
ten by her songwriting partner Eric Bazilian,
“One of Us” posed a simple, childlike ques-
tion that, to quote Rolling Stone on Osborne’s
delivery, “astutely conflates the sacred and
profane”: What if God was one of us? / Just
a slob like one of us.
my thin body. feared: a doubter, a believer, a searcher, a
gay man, a lover of this world.
Years after I discovered the beauty in “One
of Us”—and in the rest of Joan Osborne’s
I f God had a name, what would it be?
Although I no longer have a taste for un-
dignified religious ecstasy, I have retained
musical catalogue—I interviewed Osborne
for a book I was writing on Kentucky musi-
cians. We spent three hours together, shar-
my love for divine mystery. And as anyone ing spicy lamb, hummus, and mint tea on
recovering from a fundamentalist upbring- a humid May evening in the courtyard of a
ing surely knows, I am still learning to love Mediterranean restaurant in Brooklyn. We
the questions themselves rather than the spoke of our shared love of Walt Whitman,
answers, as Rilke tells us in a passage from of the spiritual nature of urban life, of her
Letters to a Young Poet that I hold sacred. transition from small-town Kentucky to New
Yet the grand names ascribed to God con- York, from a strict Catholic upbringing to
tinue to enthrall me with their splendor, a spiritual practice she defines simply as
solemnity, and enigmatic layers of meaning. I “compassion.”
have long since added two less formal terms But I never told her of my own backstory
to my vocabulary: slob and stranger. I think and how it intertwined with her most famous
on them sometimes as I sing my favorite song. I never told her how “One of Us” had
hymn, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer,” challenged me, how it helped me to love the
from my pew in an Episcopal church, which world below and all its charms as much as
has become a welcoming spiritual home for the one above. I never told her how, after
my searching heart. Pilgrim through this we had parted, I took the subway back to
barren land, reads Peter Williams’s eigh- Manhattan and, looking around the car at
teenth-century English translation from the my fellow slobs and strangers, I saw all the
original Welsh, a line that seems to capture shining faces of God.
my own journey and that of the
narrator in “One of Us.” Like her,
I have been trying to make my
way home.
I am still enough of a believer
in the mystical to consider that
“One of Us,” the song I had re-
jected, was in fact some sort
of prophecy. It had initially
seemed as foreign as one of the
tongues I encountered in that
Pentecostal mountain church,
but by my early twenties, when
I had given up on changing who
I was—who I had always been—I
was finally open enough to re-
ceive the translation in plain
English. With Joan Osborne as
my interpreter, I listened to the
song with ears that no longer
rang with threats of hellfire
and eternal damnation, and I
fell madly in love.
Here is what I heard: that
questions are welcome, that Issue 99, Winter 2017

64 WINTER 2020
 THE FUTURE
of E N T E R T A I N M E N T , M E D I A & M U S I C B U S I N E S S

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MUSIC BUSINESS • CREATIVE & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY STUDIES • SONGWRITING

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destined to be headliners in their field. Learn more at BELMONT.EDU/HEADLINERS
 SU E 8
S

3
I
EVERYBODY

3
W

1
N

I
0
T E 2
R

KNOWS YOU
WHEN YOU’RE
DOWN AND OUT
By Amanda Petrusich
“Bessie Smith” (1950), by Charles White. © The Charles White Archives 67

here is a remarkable story tucked halfway
through Bessie, Chris Albertson’s biography
of the blues singer Bessie Smith, in which
Smith approaches a circle of robed North
Carolina Klansmen, places one hand on her
hip, and begins shaking the other in the air.
She hollers obscenities at the men—who
were disassembling the tent her touring
company had erected earlier that night, in
a particularly childish bit of public dissen-
sion—until “they finally turned and disap-
peared quietly into the darkness.” This is
the sort of tale that stinks of apocrypha (in
1927, lone black women did not escape such
confrontations alive), but is nonetheless a
useful encapsulation of Smith’s particular
prowess: shouting darkness into darkness.
Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga,
Tennessee, on April 15, 1894 (her birthday
has never been properly verified, but this
was listed at least on her marriage license),
and grew up in a decrepit little cabin on
Charles Street, in an impoverished, west-side
neighborhood then known as Blue Goose
Hollow. Smith’s father, a part-time laborer
and Baptist preacher who oversaw a small
mission, died when she was still an infant,
and Smith lost her mother when she was just
eight or nine. Smith’s oldest sister, Viola—
a tough woman, who periodically trapped
Bessie in the family outhouse for hideous
overnight stretches—was left to care for all
six kids. Smith started hustling early, singing
and dancing on street corners while her older
brother Andrew plucked a guitar. She shout-
ed delightful things like “That’s right, Charlie,
68 WINTER 2020
give to the Church!” whenever someone
flipped a coin into her cup. Eventually,
Smith auditioned for the Moses Stokes
touring company, a raggedy vaudeville
troupe, and began performing profes-
sionally in 1912. She worked alongside
her older brother Clarence, a come-
dian and master of ceremonies for the
company, and a blues singer named
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, who ultimately
became a mentor.
In 1920, a Cincinnati-born vaudeville
star named Mamie Smith sold more
than 100,000 copies of “Crazy Blues,” a
song she’d recorded for Okeh Records
(it’s widely considered the first vocal
blues recording by a black performer),
and white executives were suddenly on
the hunt for comparable talent doing
comparable material. Smith auditioned
for Columbia in the early 1920s. How
she was brought to the label remains
somewhat unclear (as Albertson tells it,
the story’s only been sullied by time and
“mythical embroidery”) but Frank Walker,
who would eventually run Columbia’s race
series—one of the first major imprints dedi-
cated exclusively to recording and selling
black artists to black fans—affords himself
the most credit, claiming to have seen Smith
sing at a “low-down dive” in Selma, Alabama,
around 1917. Smith had since settled in the
Northeast, performing at cabarets in Atlantic
City and Philadelphia, and had taken up with
a night watchman named Jack Gee, whom
she would eventually marry. Gee accompa-
nied her to New York for her first recording
session (he pawned his uniform and pocket
watch to help finance a new dress for the
occasion), and the couple stayed at Gee’s
mother’s house on 132nd Street in Harlem.
Her first double-sided 78 rpm record—“Down
Hearted Blues” / “Gulf Coast Blues”—was
issued in 1923, and when Columbia decided
to launch its race series later that year, ex-
ecutives chose Smith’s “Cemetery Blues” as
its inaugural release.
Certainly, neither Smith nor Columbia
Records can be held accountable for the seg-
regated experience of art, but with the launch
of commercial race records series (soon, most
labels had established some version of the
premise), that separation was institutional-
ized in a particularly odious way. “The ra-
cially segregationist distribution strategy of
the recording industry implicitly instructed
white ears to feel revolted by the blues and,
moreover, to assume that this sense of re-
vulsion was instinctive,” the scholar Angela
Davis wrote in her book Blues Legacies and
Black Feminism.
That aversion has since changed shape, be-
come stranger, more veiled. Even now, nearly a
century out, the way blues music gets written
about by white scholars indicates a certain
discomfiting distance, a kind of quasi-intuitive
detachment that often manifests as a very
peculiar type of hyperbole (a blind exaggera-
tion of the music’s “rawness,” for example).
Check out Frank Walker, in conversation with
the producer George Avakian, explaining the
first time he saw Smith sing: “I had never heard
anything like the torture and torment she put
into the music of her people,” he declared.
That was the early narrative, the default pre-
sumption. Pain. Her people.
I n the 21st century, if “the blues” has any
face, it’s Robert Johnson’s, or, more typi-
cally, a Johnson-esque silhouette, dark and
downtrodden: slumped, itinerant, devas-
tated, male. He has usurped all the torture
and torment, a fantastical incarnation of a
fantasy. That, in the 1920s and ’30s, commer-
cial artists like Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and
Bessie Smith were the dominant figures of
the genre has become irrelevant to the myth
of the blues as it’s been written by collectors
and critics. Smith was phenomenally success-
ful—a stout, outspoken black woman in a fur
coat and pearls, stuffing theaters—and her
success so directly contradicts a more ro-
mantic saga (the-blues-as-marginalized-cry)
that she’s been nearly excised from its telling.
The conventional blues myth is a portrait
of alienation that appeals, in some ways,
to the types of folks who write those sto-
ries, either via the collection of rare 78 rpm
records or the composition of essays and
books (it is appealing to me, certainly, as a
confirmation that loneliness and marginal-
ization are excruciating things to feel, and
that those feelings can be transmuted into
something beautiful, even redemptive). It
implies that the culture is not a meritocracy,
and that genius is not always recognized in
its time. It lionizes and martyrs the outlier,
and incentivizes anguish.
It’s not Bessie Smith’s story, not really. She
got what she wanted by working hard at it,
finding new ways to profit from a cultivated
skill. Which is not to imply that her work is
artless—it’s not; often her delivery of a line
feels truly unprecedented, as if she has just
invented a new way to sing—only to point out
that she is an astoundingly precise vocalist.
Some of the notes she hits are so robust, so
fixed and powerful, listening to them feels
like walking directly into a sliding glass door.
You are stunned and embarrassed, looking
around to see who else saw. Her forcefulness
just sneaks up like that.
In the 1920s, recorded music wasn’t con-
sidered an end in itself; performance was still
the thing, what music was. The only extant
moving footage of Bessie Smith performing
is from the 1929 film St. Louis Blues, which,
in sixteen minutes, tells the story of a woman,
played by Smith, whose lover takes up with
a younger, more glamorous girl. Early on,
Smith is shown splayed across a wooden floor,
pouring herself a shot of liquor from a glass
bottle. She wears a hat. “My man, my man,”
she sings. It’s hard to describe precisely what
her voice is doing here, the heaviness of it: “My
man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.”
In his review for the New York Times,
the critic Mordaunt Hall praised St. Louis
Blues for being “effectively recorded,” but
expressed other reservations: “It is . . . a sor-
did study in which there is a decided vein of
vulgarity. It may be realism, but it is spoiled
by being distasteful. The ‘blues’ are chanted
as a result of a negress being deserted by her
paramour, a light-footed, slick specimen.
The negress is heard singing her mournful
melody, first in a room after a drink of gin
and subsequently at a bar in the cabaret.”
That melody, “St. Louis Blues,” was writ-
ten in 1914 by W. C. Handy, the Memphis
bandleader many consider the forefather
of the blues, insomuch as such a figure can
be appointed or verified. There are lots of
beautiful parts, rhythmic and otherwise—
Smith was phenomenally successful—a stout,
outspoken black woman in a fur coat and pearls,
stuffing theaters—and her success
so directly contradicts a more romantic saga
(the-blues-as-marginalized-cry) that
she’s been nearly excised from its telling.
Faulkner even pilfered the phrase “That
evening sun” (“I hate to see that evenin’
sun go down / ’Cause my baby, he done left
this town”), using it to title a short story in
1931—but those first few seconds are uncom-
monly harrowing. Handy would later say he
overheard the opening line, the one Smith
sings a capella on the floor with her head
slumped to the side, on a St. Louis street
corner, mumbled by a woman mourning her
husband’s departure. It’s a devastating lyric.
It takes a minute. The first implication—that
his heart is heavy, sinking—is too optimistic.
It’s that his heart is lost. She lost it.
What I’m saying is that it’s worth doing,
watching that scene: there’s something that
passes over Smith’s face the second time she
sings it, when her voice jumps an octave on
the word “man.” It’s a kind of resignation—
not a miming of agony, not the broad evoca-
tion of some grand, emotional collapse. It’s a
smaller kind of dying, and truer to the way
heartbreak feels. After you’ve cried and hol-
lered and tossed some stuff in the trash and
kicked the bag of trash down the street, you
are quiet, your face goes slack. Smith knew
what it meant to lose someone. You’ll see it in
the way her eyes glance upward. “My man.”
Now, St. Louis Blues is the closest any-
one can get to knowing what it was like to
see Bessie Smith perform, and we should
be grateful it’s around at all. “There was
a time when it was believed that only one
print existed,” Chris Albertson told me. “The
NAACP tried to have it destroyed, finding the
content to be stereotypical and demeaning.”
I’d written him, wanting to know more about
Smith than what was caught on her records—
something about the way she moved. “One
thing everybody seemed to agree on was
that her movements were sensuous, slow
and subtle,” he said. “When Linda Hopkins
portrayed her in a Broadway show called
Me and Bessie, she got it all wrong. I took
Alberta Hunter to see it and she said, ‘Oh,
my God, that woman needs to stop!’ Bessie,
she said, did it all with a slight shift of her
hips, a raised eyebrow. [The jazz musicians]
Danny Barker and Zutty Singleton called her
slow performances mesmerizing—it was like
being in church, Danny told me.”
A ll of Smith’s work is imbued with what
gets called “feeling,” in a lexical failing
of grand proportions, but it is not especially
overcome by it, and her vocals never slip into
the wildness typically associated with pre-
war country-blues performers like Charley
Patton and Skip James, both masters of the
careening, imperfect keen. The aesthetic
differences between these two strains of the
blues are inarguable. Bessie Smith didn’t
have time for that street-corner shit. She’d
transcended it. So much of her strength was
in her control, her professionalism, itself
a product of the endless competitions and
antagonisms of the chorus line. “I ain’t gonna
play no second fiddle / ’Cause I’m used to
playing lead,” she sang in 1925.
There is also the matter of her
material legacy. Her records have been
comprehensively reissued and now occupy
rack space near the checkout lines of mega-
bookstores, alongside the boxed chocolates
and mini book-lights and compendiums of
wisdom from dogs; unlike, say, Geeshie
Wiley or Mattie Delaney, outlier blueswomen
whose extant 78 rpm records hover in the
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 69
three-known-copies realm, Smith’s 160 sides
were widely distributed and have never
been under threat of loss. There is periodic
speculation that Smith recorded for the
Emerson Record Company before 1923—a
tiny entertainment item in a 1921 issue of
The Chicago Defender errantly suggests as
much—but those records have never been
found, and were likely never recorded.
She is not a specter, underappreciated and
awaiting detection by some enterprising
crate-digger. She is canonical, understood.
There is also something familiar, to mod-
ern ears, about the way Smith sings, the
undulations and cadences of her delivery,
her particular system of breath. Insomuch
as anyone turns to old records for a sense of
discovery, to hear some essential humanity
articulated in an exotic or alien way—and
here, both Wiley and Delaney offer their
seekers many unnameable pleasures—the
technicality of Smith’s performances feels
intuitive, almost rote. What I suspect is hap-
pening is that Smith’s vocal style has been
aped and assumed by so many female pop
singers in the 76 years since her death that it’s
now just presumed, a kind of default mode of
expression, shorthand for a certain type of
emoting: this is the way women sing, the big,
burly notes, the gentle swing, the trembling
melisma. The idea that Smith was crucial to
its development, that no one sang like this
before her, has gotten lost.
Her ingenuity is arguably best expressed
on “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down
and Out,” a blues standard published by
Jimmy Cox in 1923 and popularized by Smith
in 1929 (it was released, somewhat seren-
dipitously, just weeks before the Wall Street
crash that incited the Great Depression: “So,
if I ever get my hands on a dollar again, I’m
gonna hold on to it ’til them eagles grin / No-
body knows you when you’re down and out,”
it presages). About two minutes into Smith’s
version, the trumpeter Ed Allen completes a
particularly mournful solo, and Smith heaves
back into the chorus with a hum: “Hmmmmm
. . . Mmmmmm . . . When you’re down and
out,” she sings. It’s one of the smartest, most
effective nonverbal communicators I’ve ever
heard employed in a pop song, and I think
of it every time Mariah Carey launches into
one of her infamous runs, or anyone closes
their eyes and gives up on lyrics. What goes
unspoken is what lingers the longest and
hurts the most.
Were Smith to reappear in late 2013 and
listen to a couple minutes of pop radio, I
70 WINTER 2020
bet hearing the thick and craven moans of
Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé or Lady Gaga
would feel a little bit like gazing directly into
a funhouse mirror. Those vocal cartwheels,
that particular kind of feminine bravado,
now exaggerated and however many genera-
tions removed (in the 1960s, Janis Joplin told
friends she believed she was “Bessie Smith
reincarnated,” and freely admitted that she
learned to sing by listening to Smith’s re-
cords)—that’s Bessie.
I bet she would get real mad and tell them
all to fuck off. To stop pinching her style.
A lmost immediately, Smith’s records were
big sellers (it’s been said she helped
bring Columbia out of bankruptcy), and
she eventually became the highest-paid
African-American entertainer of her time.
People—both black and white—wanted to
hear her sing, and they wanted her 78s to take
home and play in their parlors at night. She
did something special for black audiences.
Smith’s songs “helped to forge for northern
African-Americans a collective consciousness
rooted in memories of the South but rear-
ticulated,” Angela Davis writes. “The forging
of this consciousness was critically important
as a buffer against the often traumatizing
effects of the migration northward.”
What I imagine displaced Southern blacks
heard on Smith’s records in the 1920s—some
sliver of home, some essential Southernness,
the suggestion that assimilation might not
also require a total relinquishment of self—is
not so dissimilar to what I hear, which is a
woman singing about being exactly who
she is, and not giving a shit if anyone else
likes it. The fear of being in a place that is
not your place, is not where you come from,
can incite a deep existential rattling. Which
often leads to a disingenuous reinvention: a
bending of your own rules, a fudging that
ultimately makes you lonelier.
There is something about the way Smith
occupies space that indicates a preternatural-
seeming confidence. She didn’t concede to
place, or to the mores of the day; she didn’t
yield to anything. If Smith was born into hard
circumstances, if she endured unspeakable
suffering, if she was fundamentally misplaced
or mistreated in some way, she appropriated
those scars in a way that reads as strength.
I don’t hear sadness or regret in her voice.
Instead, there is a sureness of footing. She
is frank about who she is and the context
she was born into and the ways in which
she has both escaped and not escaped. As
Davis points out, Smith directly addressed
“the circumstances of black women’s lives:
work, jail, physical abuse inflicted by male
partners, and other injustices” in her songs;
Davis also contends that Smith’s “blues at-
titude foreshadowed the later development
of feminist consciousness during the late
1960s and early 1970s.”
“Feminist consciousness” is a complicated
thing to define (and especially to pre-date),
but Smith’s embrace of impertinence cer-
tainly challenged long-ingrained constructs
of femininity. Her song titles indicate a famil-
iarity with certain vices—“Me and My Gin,”
“Careless Love Blues,” “Gimme a Pigfoot and
a Bottle of Beer,” “Need a Little Sugar in My
Bowl,” “’Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do”—and
she indulged them when and however she
saw fit, with little regard paid to mediating
those desires.
Her wants were specific, and they were
met. Even after Prohibition ended she pre-
ferred moonshine of any sort to its store-
bought analogues, and insisted “anything
sealed” made her sick. Her niece Ruby, a cho-
rus girl in her show, told Albertson that Smith
goaded her whole company into sipping “bad
liquor,” preferably procured in Atlanta from
“a man who lived under the viaduct, near the
boardinghouse where we stayed.” She had to
have it by the half-gallon, ladled into a jug.
Her dancers called it “Walk a block and fall.”
There were other indulgences. In the spring
of 1925, she holed up for a few days in a Har-
lem hotel room with a musician who worked
under the bandleader Fletcher Henderson;
by way of explaining her extended absence
to Gee, she pretended she’d been hit by a car
and taken in by strangers. To sell the story,
she heaved herself down the flight of stairs
connecting the first floor of the hotel to the
lobby. Smith also maintained sexual relation-
ships with several of her chorus girls, and
frequented “buffet flats,” which, according
to Albertson, were private houses hosting
“erotic shows that featured sex acts of every
conceivable kind” and empty rooms where
patrons could freely reenact what they saw.
(Albertson notes here that Smith was par-
ticularly intrigued by “an obese woman who
performed an amazing trick with a lighted
cigarette.”) Gee was not a faithful partner
either, and Smith often became enraged
when she suspected him of some indiscre-
tion (one time she chased him around her
private railroad car, unloading all the bullets
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from her gun and hollering “Come out, you admitting that he wanted to stay and play came barreling down the road at around
motherless bastard!”). In a conversation with cards; she threatened to find another driver. 50 miles per hour, slammed into the Chev-
Albertson, her former chorine Bucher Swan I imagine it was one of those late-night argu- rolet, slammed into the Packard, slammed
recounts a story that ends with Smith hurling ments between couples: endless, exhausting, into a ditch. Now there were three bodies
a chair across the New Star Casino, a dance irrational on all sides. You start wanting to splayed on the side of the road: the couple,
hall on 107th Street in Harlem. “It took three win more than you want the thing you’re and Smith’s. Eventually, ambulances arrived;
strong men to get her out of there—she was arguing for. Around 1 A.M., they pulled out Smith was taken directly to G. T. Thomas
a powerful woman and she could cuss worse of Memphis in Smith’s old wooden-roofed Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale.
than a sailor,” Swan said. Packard sedan. An hour or so later, Morgan For decades, tales about Smith having been
Reading Smith’s tour stories—high-order drove the Packard into the back of a parked refused care at a white hospital—delays that
sexual debauchery and bouts of violence, or very slow-moving National Biscuit Com- ultimately resulted in her death—persisted,
fueled by the consumption of gallons of pany truck on the east side of Highway 61. but according to Albertson’s biography, those
dubious liquor—reveals a decadence not Smith was catapulted from the car. Mo- stories are unfounded. Bessie Smith was de-
so dissimilar from the depraved antics joy- ments later, Dr. Hugh Smith, an intern at the clared dead at 11:30 on Sunday morning. “We
fully described in gave her every medi-
Mötley Crüe’s The cal attention, but we
Dirt. If it is said that were never able to
the British rock & rally her back from
roll bands of the the shock,” Dr. W. H.
late 1960s borrowed Brandon, the physi-
generously from the cian who signed her
musical traditions death certificate,
of American blues wrote to the folk-
singers, let it also lorist John Lomax
be said that they in 1941.
approximated Bessie Smith’s relation-
Smith’s fondness for ship to the story
impiety while out on of the blues has
the road. only gotten more
complicated in the
decades after her
death, when a blues

B etween 1925
and 1935, Smith
continued touring
revival led, in part,
by 78 rpm record
collectors saw to
for Columbia. But the escorting out
between the pangs Issue 83, Winter 2013 and feting of many
of the Depression of her rural, acous-
and Northerners’ tic brethren. Around
growing disinterest in Southern blues music Campbell Clinic in Memphis, and his friend then, it all started to feel overwhelmingly
(and their burgeoning interest in swing), her Henry Broughton—who were gearing up for male. (And intellectually insular: the rural
career was winding down. a couple of hours of predawn fishing at a blues as a grand, countercultural statement.)
In the fall of 1937, Smith took a gig with nearby Mississippi lake, their tackle stowed Smith’s influence on contemporary pop is
a touring company—she’d landed a feature neatly in the back of Dr. Smith’s Chevrolet— even more muddled. In the great untangling
role in Winsted’s Broadway Rastus, a roving came upon a frantic Richard Morgan, who of American song, it often becomes hard to
minstrel show. By all accounts the company was flapping at them wildly from the median. know whose thread is whose.
had been doing “good business” in Memphis, According to Dr. Smith’s report, the whole A funeral was held in Philadelphia on Oc-
and the first road date was set for Sunday, scene was “a horrible mess.” In addition to tober 4. Around 7,000 mourners swarmed
September 26th in Darling, Mississippi. By other injuries, Bessie Smith’s forearm had the auditorium of the O. V. Catto Elks Lodge
then, she and Gee were estranged but not been torn loose from her upper arm at the at Sixteenth and Fitzwater Streets, pressing
divorced, and Smith had taken up with a elbow. The three connecting nerves remained through police lines, pawing at her coffin.
man named Richard Morgan, whom many intact, “lying there like telephone wires,” Dr. Smith was buried in an unmarked grave at
considered her common law husband. That Smith later said. Broughton ran to a nearby Mount Lawn Cemetery (33 years later, Janis
Saturday night, Smith became agitated, and home and called for a colored ambulance, Joplin and Juanita Green, Smith’s old house-
demanded Morgan drive her the 75 miles which did not arrive quickly. Dr. Smith was keeper, finally purchased and saw to the
south from Memphis to Clarksdale, so that clearing the backseat of the Chevrolet to erection of a proper monument). According
she would arrive in Mississippi in advance drive Smith to the hospital himself when to The Philadelphia Tribune, “The casket slid
of the rest of the cast. He rebuked her, later another car carrying a young white couple down into the grave. A woman screamed.”

72 WINTER 2020
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 UP ABOVE MY HEAD
W W
hen Sister Rosetta Thar-
pe died on October 9,
1973, at 58, she was liv-
ing in Philadelphia with
her third husband, Rus-
sell Morrison, and on
the cusp of a comeback.
It would be one of many
throughout her long recording career, which
had started in 1938 when she cut “That’s All”
and “Rock Me” during her first sessions for
Decca. After many years as a diabetic, Tharpe
had suffered a major stroke in 1970 and had a
leg amputated due to the illness. Her biogra-
pher Gayle F. Wald writes that the operation
left Tharpe “depressed and weakened,” and it
understandably interfered with her jubilant
and physically demanding stage show. After
a period of recuperation, she returned to
performing, though she probably shouldn’t
have. There was financial pressure to con-
tinue working. Tharpe’s last major concert
was at Lincoln Center’s Soul at the Center on
July 23, 1972. A series of readings and musical
performances connected to the Black Arts
Movement, the event ran over several days;
James Cleveland, Nikki Giovanni, Esther
Phillips, and Nina Simone were also on the
bill. Tharpe sang “Precious Lord” and “Just a
Closer Walk with Thee.” Her show was strong
enough to garner the interest of a producer
who negotiated a new record deal on her be-
half. But she suffered another massive stroke
the next fall, fell into a coma, and passed
away within a matter of hours. It was the day
after she’d been scheduled to re-enter the
studio. Gospel vocalist Marie Knight, who’d
performed with Tharpe earlier in her career,
and Marion Williams, formerly of the Ward
Singers, sang at the funeral. The great artist
was interred at Philadelphia’s Northwood
Cemetery in a grave that remained without
a headstone until 2009.
Wondering what organizers meant when
they named the Lincoln Center events “Soul
BY DA N I E L L E A . JAC KS O N
at the Center,” Wald asks, “What if soul—and
what if gospel as the soul of soul—consti-
tuted the soul of American culture?” In other
words, what if it is our center? This “greatest
hits” edition of the music issue, dedicated
as it is to remembering and recuperating
the best of Southern music, is indelibly in-
fluenced by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose
raucous style of gospel singing and shred-
ding and effervescent showmanship was,
as contributor and musician Rosanne Cash
puts it, “copied by legions of rock guitar-
ists.” Southern music has helped us to define
ourselves. And Tharpe, who recognized her
own sound in the many soul and rock & roll
acts who came after her, who gave “Little
Richard” Penniman his first paid gig—we
should always say her name first.
It vexes me that she would lie in an un-
marked grave for decades. It forces me to
remember that funds had to be raised to bury
Zora Neale Hurston, who was laid to rest in
a segregated cemetery in Florida without
a marker when she died in 1960, her work
then out of print. What do we lose when
we don’t remember? In 2009, unperformed
and unpublished symphonies by Florence
Price turned up in an attic of a home on
the outskirts of Chicago, more than five de-
cades after the composer’s death. Tharpe
and Price were both born in Arkansas; Price
gave music lessons in Tharpe’s hometown
and might have been one of the women who
taught her piano. Both musicians fled to Chi-
cago in search of more fertile ground for
their dreams. In “The Missing Black Notes,”
Harmony Holiday writes of how Price, like
Tharpe, mined sacred songs in the creation
of her own sound: “a Black experience trans-
lated to the symphonic.” It seems both artists
absorbed the best of what they got from
home and fashioned a new way of making
music, a new way of being, and we all learned
to follow along. Perhaps there is a kind of
creativity that is far mightier than the grave.
hen I moved back home to the South, I
had no idea that a pandemic would stir
and the brittle peace of generations of racial
conflict and compromise would again erupt.
Twenty-one years before, I’d left Memphis for
school, and for dreams, I guess—for a life I was
sure I wouldn’t be able to make at home. Some
of that was about independence, and therefore
neutral and natural. Some of that was because
I’d overlooked all the music in the trees: the
richness of everything my mother told me; my
childhood of lessons learned at our Mission-
ary Baptist church—from the podium and in
the choir loft and out back, in the graveyard
amongst our own dead. I had no idea there’d
been a community of artists down the road
from Brinkley, Arkansas, where my father was
born, who’d made American music what it is.
All I saw, back then, was dust.
These are questions of inheritance. Beyond my
eye, beyond the death and decay of matters
left behind and unsettled, the music ringing
up above my head told a thousand stories of
bounty and belonging, and it glimmered in
the light.
“I have lived a mostly soft life, a lucky life,
with so many blessings. Which can make it
hard to look squarely at this difficult season,”
writes David Ramsey in “Lingering Could Be
Your Doom,” his homage to traveling Pente-
costal preacher, singer, and guitarist Brother
Claude Ely. As I write this, more than 225,000
Americans have died of coronavirus; states in
the South and Midwest have a higher rate of
daily infections than the rest of the country.
We lost John Prine, Bill Withers, and Ellis Mar-
salis (memorialized in “Ellis at the Crossroads”
by Gwen Thompkins) in a single year—guiding
lights all, the best of what we can be. If the ru-
ins teach us anything, let it be how to rebuild.
“The center of anything can be very large,”
Alice Walker wrote of wading through the
weeds of Hurston’s graveyard, “and a grave is
not a pinpoint.” May we remember that death
cannot suppress our creativity.
87

THE GODMOTHER OF SOUL
S
he traveled the world and left
it scorched with her fearless-
ness and musical originality,
inspired fierce devotion from
an audience who thrilled to her
enormous gifts and her per-
sonal excesses, and shook the
celestial rafters with the force
of her artistic character. She was also my dad’s
favorite singer. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born
in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, at the edge
of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, one hundred
and twenty miles northeast of where my dad
was born seventeen years later in Kingsland,
Arkansas. Sometimes he would shake his
head and muse during odd or inexplicable
events, “Strange things are happening every
day,” which was a nod to the title of her most
famous song. “Strange Things Happening
Every Day,” a traditional African-American
spiritual, was a hit for her in 1945 and reached
No. 2 on the “race” chart in Billboard maga-
zine, the precursor of the Rhythm and Blues
chart. She was a musical prodigy who sang,
played guitar, and performed gospel songs in
the Black Pentecostal church from the age of
four, then traveled with her mother around
the South, performing in churches as Little
Rosetta Nubin, billed as the “Singing and
Guitar Playing Miracle.”
She became Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1938,
after divorcing her first husband, Thomas
Thorpe, repurposing his name, and moving
with her mother to New York City, by way
of Chicago. The first songs she recorded on
Decca in New York, “My Man and I,” “That’s
All,” “The Lonesome Road,” and “Rock Me,”
were instant hits and made her the first com-
mercially successful gospel artist. She started
performing in nightclubs and at the Apollo
Theater in Harlem, and for all-white audi-
ences at the Cotton Club, where she played
88 WINTER 2020
I C O N S
BY R O SA N N E CAS H
gospel songs with a wicked, emancipated, jaw-
dropping confidence. She wielded her guitar
like a weapon and distorted the sound: a guitar
technique that was completely original at the
time and would be copied by legions of rock
guitarists in the decades after. Her voice was
like a freight train in its power and a poem in
its expressiveness. A woman playing guitar,
singing spiritual songs in nightclubs that har-
bored all manner of vice, was unprecedented.
Gospel singers just didn’t “cross over” to secu-
lar music. You were one or the other. She did it
anyway, and Black churchgoers, the devoted
core of her original audience, were shocked by
her nightclub appearances, and shunned her.
More than a decade later, mixing secular and
spiritual music was still so unacceptable that
the great Sam Cooke recorded his first pop
song under an alias, in order not to alienate
his gospel fan base.
In 1946, Sister Rosetta saw a singer named
Marie Knight perform with Mahalia Jackson.
She was so taken with her that she showed
up at Marie’s door a couple of weeks later to
ask her to go on the road. Marie and Sister
Rosetta were almost certainly lovers. They
toured together for several years and re-
corded a couple of hit records together: “Up
Above My Head” and “Gospel Train.” Marie
eventually broke with Sister Rosetta to pur-
sue her own career.
Sister Rosetta married a few more times.
Her third marriage, to her manager Rus-
sell Morrison, was held in Griffith Stadium
in Washington, D.C., in front of 25,000 de-
lighted paying customers.
She “played guitar like a man,” people
told her, as a compliment. Dozens of musi-
cians and performers credit her as a major
influence, from Chuck Berry to Elvis to Keith
Richards to my dad, who must have felt as if a
spell had been cast on him as he sat glued to
his family’s battery-powered radio and heard
her voice pierce the gloaming over the cot-
ton fields. The Black churchgoers eventually
forgave her and found their way back into her
audience. In 1998, the United States Postal
Service issued a commemorative stamp to
honor her, and then in 2017, forty-four years
after her death, she was elected to the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame.
I ’m a musician and a performer. I’m white,
from a privileged background, with a fa-
ther who was a musician and performer,
and whose name created extra interest in
me and my songwriting. My world was set
up for me to do what I do. I didn’t have to
deconstruct an entire destiny and create
a new one out of whole cloth, like Sister
Rosetta did. I signed with a major record
label at the age of twenty-three, and op-
portunities fell into my lap. I made albums,
toured, sang, and played guitar, and I lived
the life that so many other songwriters and
singers wanted. And I tormented myself. My
confidence careened from bottom to slightly
above bottom for those first difficult years,
and longer than was reasonable. I couldn’t
stop the self-editing and the internal critic or
the judgments about the notes I missed, the
rhythms I played out of time, the lack of feel-
ing or too much feeling, and the audiences I
perceived to be disappointed or bored. This
was the constant background noise of my life
as a performer. It didn’t matter if it was real
or true, which, honestly, it mostly wasn’t. I
lost so much time, for no reason.
Then, around fifteen years ago, while wan-
dering online through a procession of great
blues and gospel performances by Maha-
lia Jackson, Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta
“Todas Las Guitarras (Que Nunca Deberías Haber Vendido)” by Tony Abeyta. Courtesy Altamira Fine Art OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 89

James, and more, searching for inspiration, I
found the source of the Source. I came across
a British film, which, given its near cult fol-
lowing, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen before.
There in black and white, with her uncom-
mon strut and wail, Sister Rosetta pulled me
up and taught me to let go, and it took her
all of fifteen seconds.
In the mid-1960s, Sister Rosetta toured the
UK and other places in Europe with great
soul and blues legends—Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny
Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, and oth-
ers. The audiences were worshipful. In May
1964, Granada Television in the UK filmed a
performance by Sister Rosetta at a deserted
train station in Manchester. The producers
arranged a cheesy, faux-“down home” en-
trance for her. She pulls up in a horse and
buggy, and New Orleans jazz singer Cousin
Joe Pleasant helps her out of the carriage. She
was very large by this time, and she is wear-
ing a white coat with a loose tie-like sequined
collar and high heels, as if she were going to
church. As Cousin Joe helps her out, into the
chilly rain, to escort her across the platform,
the microphone is live and picks her up say-
ing, “Oooohh, this is the wonderful-est time
of my life.” Then she struts across the edge
90 WINTER 2020
in her Sunday best with
her close-cropped, finely
styled hair. She doesn’t
care that it’s raining or
that she is performing in
a Brit’s weirdly conceived
idea of the rural South,
with wagon wheels and
rocking chairs, or that the
audience is sitting tightly
packed on the other side
of the wide expanse of the
unused railroad tracks,
shivering in the cold rain.
She is not thinking of her-
self, or them, or about
how to play the chords
or the words of the song,
she is not thinking of her
last note, or the next one,
or how her shoes look or
if her hair is in place, she
is not embarrassed that
she started the song in
the wrong key a couple
of minutes earlier, she
doesn’t care how awk-
ward that horse and
buggy arrival was. She’s
not thinking of anything
of the platform, with a little shimmy in her at all. She is a vehicle of musical ecstasy. She
step, talking all the way about how fine the is, as Muhammad Ali said, “floating like a
people are, how happy she is, how sweet butterfly and stinging like a bee,” but with
everyone is. The band on the platform is chords and tone and rhythm. Her distorted
vamping and the crowd is clapping in time. Gibson and a voice that echoed from the
She picks her guitar up, where it is resting center of the earth floated out of a lifetime
in what appears to be an empty washbasin, of holy and carnal exaltations into the future,
straps it on, and hits a couple of notes, in and changed the trajectory of rock & roll,
the wrong key. She calls to the band to ask blues, and soul music, as well as affecting
for the right key and then—she brings it. My individual lives—like those who borrowed
God, she brings it. She launches into “Didn’t from her musical freedom, and Tina Turner
It Rain” and it is transcendent, chilling, thrill- and Aretha Franklin, who both cite her as
ing, and everything music is supposed to be. a major influence, and singer-songwriters
Then comes the moment, two minutes like my friend Sam Phillips, who wrote the
and forty-nine seconds into the film, the song “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” and
few seconds that are a master class in per- Brittany Howard, who gave a sartorial nod
formance, which I have watched dozens of to the white coat in the UK film by wearing
times. She makes this little move that I’ve a flowing white dress when she inducted
seen her do in other performance clips, but Sister Rosetta into the Rock & Roll Hall of
there is something particular about this one. Fame, and so many musicians who struggle
She is playing her solo, and she lets go of the to settle into their own potential, like me.
guitar and holds her hand up in front of her Strange things happen every day, but
chest and leans forward, rocking back and in my life, few things have been as beau-
forth a little, as if the strings are vibrating tifully strange as the inherited repercus-
through her body. Her face is inscrutable. She sions—father to daughter, cotton field to
is, as they say, filled with the spirit. To me, city streets—of seeing, hearing, and being
she looks to be in a numinous, otherworldly forever changed by the godmother of soul,
place. She is incredibly graceful, decked out Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1964. Photo by Mike Rowe. Courtesy Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
 G RE ATEST H I TS
M US IC ISSU E
PARTNERS

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 I C O N S

ANOTHER
SELENA POEM
BY ILIANA ROCHA

Oh, oh, baby: the door opened making new, irregular

air, startled into the shape of Texas. Blood behind each syllable,
as if my body recognized touch & pulse before a hand
had ever laid there. She made love to vowels while I

hated the sound of my own name, each i & a

their own kind of irrevocable aches. She turned Iliana
inside out, stretched it into something almost
delicate but still strange. Amor prohibido: nothing less than

homesickness & its inverse—the more cumbia,

the further language ran from me. More ranchera, closer
she came. Distance between unfamiliar & familiar
shorter than a bullet’s reach, light tripped over light to warm

her silhouette in wounds, & something about her ass

that’s already been said a million times & better.

“Los Angeles Light Box” (2017), by Travis Boyer. Courtesy Travis Boyer and SIGNAL.
92 WINTER 2020 Photo by Kyle Clairmont Jacques
The Roots of
American Music
Run Deep in
North Carolina.
OUR MUSIC TRAILS
TELL THAT STORY.
Discover where our music
was born at ComeHearNC.com
 I C O N S

ELLIS AT THE
CROSSROADS BY GWEN THOMPKINS

94 WINTER 2020 “Bigger music” (2020), by Danny Romeril. Courtesy the artist
T here was a moment in 1958 when
the future of jazz took an extraor-
dinary turn that would be imper-
ceptible to the world for another
quarter century. That’s when Ellis
Marsalis Jr., freshly discharged from the U.S.
Marines in Southern California, drew his
mustering-out pay, loaded up his car, and
decided which way to go.
He could head north and then east, along
the old Lincoln Highway, all the way to New
York City. That’s where he wanted to be,
knowing he could find like-minded people
who loved bebop as much as he did. He could
build a career playing piano among many
of the same musicians he’d heard first on
WMRY-AM in New Orleans, people like Dizzy
Gillespie and his big band wending through
“A Night in Tunisia,” or taking flight for the
exhilarating falconry of “Things to Come.”
Or, he could point his car south and then east,
along the old U.S. Highway 80, and return
to a place that seemed the opposite of New
York in almost every way. New Orleans was
full of music, but at the same time the city
was fallow ground: No mid-century, forward-
looking jazz scene. No record labels for jazz.
No schools for jazz. Segregated bandstands.
Segregated everything.
Marsalis was a single man, a tall ’n’ tan
ex-Marine with a college degree, his own
car, and fingers full of talent. He could do
whatever he wanted. And for reasons that he
spent the next sixty years wondering about,
he went home.
“I think that I was being spiritually guided,
above and beyond the decisions that I was
making, which turned out to be the best
thing for me to do,” he told me in a 2017
interview for my public radio show, Music
Inside Out. “At the time, I wouldn’t be able
to say that—but, you know, I do. I think a lot
of times we have some idea. And we do some-
thing different, without fully understanding
why we did something different. Especially
if it works out.”
Happy endings don’t happen often dur-
ing a novel coronavirus pandemic. Marsalis,
eighty-five, died in New Orleans of compli-
cations from the virus on April 1. But when
the crying is over and Marsalis gets the jazz
funeral he deserves, even the most sober
study of his contributions to music might
begin with a celebratory cork popping from a
bottle of champagne. Jazz spoke to him early,
in a way that no music had before, and in its
service, his character was revealed. Success
by any measure was a long time coming.
But Marsalis became so beloved as a teacher
and musician that, in his later years, music
lovers in nearly every room he entered in
New Orleans leapt to their feet. The applause
and acclamations were like Hollywood end-
ings, sometimes formal, as when the black
people rise for Atticus Finch as he leaves
the courtroom in To Kill a Mockingbird. At
other times, they more closely resembled
the toast to George Bailey at the end of It’s
a Wonderful Life. Like George, whose money
was never his most valuable asset, Ellis was
the richest man in town.
Actual hoopla accompanied what became
Marsalis’s last performance at his epony-
mous center for music in the Ninth Ward.
On Tuesday, March 3, New Orleans drum-
mers Shannon Powell, Jason Marsalis (also
on vibraphone), and the ever-versatile Herlin
Riley, who for many years played with Wyn-
ton Marsalis and drove the Jazz at Lincoln
Center Orchestra, were nearing the end of
their rousing joint concert when Ellis sent
word from the audience that he wanted to
join the fun. It was as if someone had hit a
giant piñata and cracked it wide open. The
surprised crowd stood and cheered, while
Ellis, with the help of his walker, made a
slow progression to the stage. Kyle Roussel
gave up his seat at the piano.
The band swung hard on the first song, the
next was heartfelt, and the evening ended on
a funky note. With Jason on drums, Powell
and Riley moved downstage, beating their
tambourines and singing the New Orleans
call and response “Tootie Ma Is a Big Fine
Thing.” (Response: Ooh nah naaaay, shake
that thing!) Jazz doesn’t often buckjump,
but Ellis played along. He stayed with the
melody on the right side of the piano and
Roussel returned to play rhythm on the left.
“Tootie Ma” always gets an audience singing,
but that performance jolted people onto
their feet—Ellis’s son Mboya and extended
family had their backfields in motion dancing
around the room, just like all of the other
locals, visitors, and staff members. The cen-
ter quickly booked a reprise performance
for Tuesday, April 28. That was before the
Louisiana governor’s shelter-in-place order
and before Ellis went into the hospital.
Looking backward, most people’s lives
can appear triumphant, despite the disap-
pointments and the missed opportunities
and the dreams that never caught fire. Those
fortunate enough to reach old age often have
succeeded in finding the way around ob-
stacles, so as not to be defined by them. In
retrospect, they reframe their life’s jour-
ney, finding a kinder, wiser narrative to tell.
Or, at least, their obituary writers do. But
looking forward in life to the uncharted de-
cades ahead is another matter entirely. For
a young, black, working musician driving
home to the Deep South in 1958, the only
way forward was to improvise, adapt, and
overcome—which, coincidentally, are what
jazz and the Marines are all about. Marsalis’s
long Hollywood ending of celebratory pomp
and fuss was founded in a number of pivotal
decisions he made in the mid-to-late 1950s.
He met a series of crossroads back then and,
in each instance, took the only propulsive
path. In Southern California, he accelerated
through a geographic crossroads. But at yet
another crucial moment, in 1956, the only
way forward was to stop. He put down the
tenor saxophone.
WHO’S BETTER?
I t happened at the Dew Drop Inn, perhaps
the city’s best-known African-American-
owned music venue, which for much of its
history catered, by law, to black audiences,
black touring stars, black up-and-coming
musicians—and once, reportedly and defi-
antly, Frank Sinatra. The Dew Drop’s com-
pound, now defunct, is still on LaSalle Street
in the Central City neighborhood of New
Orleans, near the old Magnolia Housing
Project. The property’s weatherboards are
weathered and the plaster’s plastered. But
its vertical sign—two white discs on a red
L-shaped arrow—looks surprisingly good,
like an oversized hair barrette. There’s often
talk of re-opening the Dew Drop. Memories
of the good times are just that strong. Ray
Charles rarely failed to mention the fried
chicken he ate there as an aspiring artist
in the 1950s and, later, as a star. Thanks in
part to the Dew Drop’s chicken batter and
seasonings, Charles donated a million dollars
to the historically black Dillard University
in New Orleans in 2003, for the study of
“African-American culture and foodways in
the South.” Others in the city who played at
the Dew Drop, or ate there, or rented rooms
there, or got haircuts, or snagged profes-
sional bookings from the agent/owner, en-
joyed being part of the magic. Maybe they
thought as fondly of other clubs in the city,
like Tiajuana nearby, or The Hideaway in the
Ninth Ward, where Fats Domino got his start.
Or Club Desire. But after hours on Saturdays
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 95
and on Sunday afternoons, the Dew Drop’s
jam sessions were where musicians went to
find out who’s who, who’s new, who’s good,
and, perhaps most importantly, who’s better.
“I’d frequent the sessions on Sunday just to
see who was there and who was playing and
I’d sit-in on piano,” Marsalis recalled in 2017. “I
remember the first time I saw Ray Charles, he
was sitting-in at the Dew Drop Inn. A trumpet
player named Renald Richard was in his band.
He was telling me, ‘Man, he’s from Florida.’”
By 1956, Marsalis had earned his music
education degree at Dillard. As the child of
motel owners living a notably middle-class
existence in nearby Jefferson Parish, he had
studied piano, as had his sister Yvette. But El-
lis Jr. also embraced the clarinet and in high
school took up the tenor saxophone. Mastering
the solo on the 1948 Roy Brown smash “Good
Rockin’ Tonight” was a game changer, he said.
“When you can play those current pop
solos like that, the girls start to look
at you. That was not lost on me.” But
in retrospect, he didn’t know exactly
why his renderings worked. “I had
no theoretical understanding of that
solo, even a blues, or any of that. That
would come later.”
Marsalis had had private piano
teachers along the way, and,
sometime after college, intended to
return to the second, Jean Coston
Maloney. But before that could
happen, she had married and left
the city. So, in 1956, he was a tenor
saxophone player who also could
play piano—not the other way
around. In school, he and his friends
had studied bebop on the down-low because,
back then, no college music department
in the state would allow jazz to be played
on its instruments. The academics said
the music wasn’t serious enough. Without
formal instruction in their specific field of
interest, Marsalis and his autodidact friends
were muddling through on their own, with
varying levels of sophistication. Once, while
playing the upright piano with drummer Ed
Blackwell at Blackwell’s aunt’s house in the
city, Marsalis asked why Blackwell chose him
for the session. And, in one of the teeniest
compliments Marsalis would ever receive,
Blackwell said, “All the other piano players
is tied up!”
And yet, by 1956, something in Marsalis
suspected that, despite the jobs he was get-
ting, maybe he wasn't a saxophone player.
Saxes were everywhere at the time. Mid-
96 WINTER 2020
century New Orleans was throbbing with
blues, r&b, and early rock & roll, featuring
players from home and away. The multi-
layered rhythms that came to be known as
the “New Orleans Sound” made ample room
for saxophones as both percussive and solo-
ing instruments. Fats Domino, the producing
mastermind Dave Bartholomew, engineer Co-
simo Matassa, and drummer Earl Palmer—all
future members of the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame—had perfected the sound, along with
a range of sidemen who regularly played gigs
and jam sessions at the Dew Drop.
Marsalis had been getting work around
town playing r&b and blues covers. “I’d play
a job here, a job there, sometimes on piano,
sometimes saxophone,” he recalled. “It was a
real disorienting, disorganized, helter-skelter
kind of lifestyle.” But a Sunday afternoon jam
session on LaSalle Street brought clarity in
Marsalis became so
beloved as a teacher and
musician that, in his
later years, music lovers
in nearly every room he
entered in New Orleans
leapt to their feet.
the name of “Nathaniel Perrilliat.”
During peak hours, the Dew Drop was a jazz-
free zone. Owner Frank Painia showcased co-
medians, ventriloquists, exotic dancers, blues
acts, r&b acts, rock & roll acts, big band stars,
a gender-fluid emcee, and the New Orleans
Gay Ball. He offered a delicious plate of red
beans and rice with a pig tail for twenty-seven
cents. But he did not promote jazz, particularly
bebop. Unlike the academics, he thought the
music was too serious. Too esoteric. But on
Sunday afternoons, business was slow and
the musicians weren’t getting paid anyway.
Marsalis heard saxophonist Nathaniel Per-
rilliat play at a Sunday afternoon jam session
on LaSalle Street. Really play. “When I went
to this piano session and heard him, I knew I
wasn’t going to play like that on saxophone,
and piano was it,” he said in 2017. “So that is
when I really started to think more and more
about playing the piano as a main instrument.”
Perrilliat became best known as a side-
man in Domino’s band and a regular session
musician for the arranger and songwriting
producer Allen Toussaint. He was a reliable
technical player, and then some.
“He could read fly shit on paper,” said New
Orleans band leader Deacon John Moore,
a guitarist and singer who also played for
Toussaint as a session musician. “Everybody
compared him with John Coltrane. Toussaint
wouldn’t have a recording session without
him. ‘I’ve got to have Nat in there to play,’
he’d say. ‘Even if he plays only two notes.’ He
wanted him just for inspiration. [Perrilliat]
was a first-call player for recording sessions
and gigs. We all looked up to him.”
Soon enough, Marsalis did, as well. He
wasn’t receiving first calls from potential em-
ployers. An unwitting Perrilliat, playing the
tenor for free on an ordinary Sunday
at the Dew Drop in 1956, had pushed
him to an existential crossroads. Mar-
salis knew jazz was his calling, but
he also knew that he only would be
impersonating a jazz musician while
holding a saxophone in his hands. He
wanted to be the real thing.
“I didn’t really grow as a saxo-
phone player,” he said nearly sixty
years later. “When I say that, what I
mean is the tenor saxophone was an
introduction for me into the work-
space of music and musicians.” The
instrument he’d carried since high
school had served its purpose but
could do no more.
For Marsalis, the experience
was not exactly a tragedy. He was young
enough and confident enough to make the
change, and committing to a single instru-
ment brought balance to his “helter-skelter”
lifestyle. But his assessment of the tenor
saxophone’s limited usefulness was a typi-
cal Marsalis analysis, revealing his gift for
draining sentiment from an experience, find-
ing the lesson, and moving on—as steady
and calm as a musical, mystical astronaut.
Throughout his subsequent teaching career
with high schoolers at the New Orleans Cen-
ter for Creative Arts, and later on the col-
lege level, he didn’t mind telling students to
put down their instruments for others that
might suit them better. “We weren’t teach-
ing music, we were teaching kids,” he’d say.
That may be why so many students trusted
his judgment—not only Terence Blanchard,
Donald Harrison Jr., and Harry Connick Jr.,
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Twelve-song twelfth record from Rhett Miller-led
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but students like Loston Harris at Virginia
Commonwealth University, who switched
from percussion to piano at the age of twenty.
Then there were the many young people
under Marsalis’s sway who never became
professional musicians at all, including Ellis
Marsalis III, who played guitar and flute while
in school, then realized he was a poet. That’s
the kind of self-awareness and adaptability
that Ellis Jr. encouraged.
“Most everything has a good and bad side
to it,” Marsalis told me in 2017. “Sometimes
we can’t see it, even if we are a part of it. . . .
I know a friend of mine’s wife got upset with
him and took a hatchet and chopped up his
instrument. Philosophically, he said, ‘Well
man, you know, I needed another instru-
ment, anyway.’”
T H E A M E R I CA N
JAZZ QUINTET
R emember those young, self-taught jazz
mavens Marsalis had been hanging out
with—the autodidacts? Their story starts—
as so many in New Orleans do—in elemen-
tary and middle school. Around 1946, Ellis,
a tween, met the slightly older Alvin Batiste
and Ed Blackwell, friends who would go
on to illustrious careers of their own. Ed
became best known for his work outside
of New Orleans as a drummer with Ornette
Coleman, Randy Weston, and Ray Charles.
Alvin, who also played briefly with Charles,
became a clarinetist, composer, and re-
nowned educator, and—like Marsalis—a
beloved standard-bearer for jazz in New
Orleans. But back then, all three boys were
playing clarinet and taking music lessons
wherever they could—privately, at school,
and in the Junior Orchestra of the histori-
cally black (and Catholic) Xavier Univer-
sity. As teenagers, Ellis, Alvin, and Ed were
listening to the same radio programs and
to the same jazz recordings, titillated by a
new post-war sound that was neither big
band nor Louis Armstrong. Bebop was the
thing. Charlie Parker’s 1945 blues “Now’s
the Time,” featuring Miles Davis on trumpet,
Dizzy Gillespie on piano, and Max Roach on
drums, “lit me up for the rest of my life,” Al-
vin would later say. He and Ellis and Ed were
trying to emulate a genre that promised
little by way of wages, or even accolades, in
the city. But they were undeterred.
“See, the thing about jazz is like a kid
playing basketball,” Marsalis said. “If you
98 WINTER 2020
don’t have a team, you can stand in your
backyard with the hoop and shoot all day.
I worked on a lot of things based on what
I heard on the recordings.” In 1949, those
recordings came to life when Gillespie and
his orchestra played the Booker T. Wash-
ington High School auditorium—a preemi-
nent venue in Central City for traveling
black performers, and a rehearsal space
for the all-white New Orleans Symphony.
Suddenly, like-minded devotees could look
around the audience and find the makings
of a brotherhood.
Enter Harold Battiste Jr. As a young saxo-
phone player in the late 1940s, Harold had
already been working small, quasi-profes-
sional gigs around town with Ed and Alvin
and the bassist Richard Payne. But in 1951,
when Marsalis began Dillard University as a
freshman, Harold was a senior, and theirs
was a bromance that lasted. “Harold was
like a mentor to me for a long time,” Mar-
salis recalled in 2017, “not just while he was
at Dillard.” Indeed, Harold was a dynamic
character in New Orleans and Southern Cali-
fornia, as a player, talent scout, producer,
arranger, record company executive, and, fi-
nally, teacher. That’s his arrangement on Sam
Cooke’s “You Send Me,” Sonny and Cher’s “I
Got You Babe,” and countless other hits. In
1968, Harold also produced Gris-Gris, the
first album recorded by Mac Rebennack as
the “Night Tripper,” Dr. John.
In the early 1950s, however, Harold and
his compatriots in jazz were not so much
young lions in music as they were unusu-
ally aggressive house cats. In the absence of
lesson books, they wrote their own compo-
sitions and treated them as case studies to
understand jazz theory.
“The only system I know of is autodidactic,”
Ellis’s son Branford said recently. “It’s think-
ing. Thinking your way through problems.
‘What makes this song successful? What makes
this song unsuccessful?’ The regular musician
starts talking in technical terms. The person
I’m interested in talks in sonic terms. Because
there is no mathematical equation to creating
a sound that makes someone cry.”
Some of the early songs the group made
were misshapen—the equivalent of the first
pancake on the griddle. But others, like Har-
old’s “To Brownie” (written for the trumpet
player Clifford Brown), or Alvin’s “Chatter
Box,” or Ellis’s “Toni,” were finely made, ev-
ery detail an artistic and pedagogical insight.
“Toni” exemplifies Marsalis’s promise as
a piano player and composer, as well as his
“early skill and gift for melody and harmony,”
Harold later wrote.
His melody is pure and plain, void of
awkward intervals and accidentals. Yet,
it is very effective in expressing “with
distant admiration” (which was at, one
time, the expression instructions on the
music). The harmonic progression never
strays too far from home. It stays within
the tonality of the C minor/E major
scale without even a brief modulation.
The B, or bridge, section was marked
“with optimistic hope” . . .
Writing like that makes it easy to see why
Ellis chose Harold as a mentor. And yet,
Harold also wrote that jazz can neither be
taught nor understood unless it’s heard, a
point that Branford echoes. “The magic of the
music is not in the notation, but the sound.
The schools cannot teach you how to hear.
What my dad and those guys did was play
music informed by the sound of the music
they loved most.”
Together, the young musicians took a leap
that would introduce them to new horizons
in jazz. In November 1956—more than a year
after Ellis had graduated college—he and the
others joined Harold in the French Quarter
at Cosimo Recording Studio, an undisputed
mecca of American popular music. Cosimo’s
was the next iteration of the famed J&M
Studios, which had produced the original
releases of “The Fat Man,” “Tutti Frutti,”
“Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Let the Good Times
Roll,” “See Ya Later Alligator,” “My Ding a
Ling,” and “I Hear You Knocking,” among
many other hits. There, Marsalis and his co-
hort made their first recordings. They called
themselves the American Jazz Quintet and
pulled off ten original songs in the session,
including “Toni.” They also recorded a ver-
sion of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays.”
Recording those songs meant that the quin-
tet members were moving up in the world.
They’d crossed over from being talented and
largely self-taught neophytes to professional
recording artists. For Marsalis, the Cosimo
session was also a culmination of thousands
of decisions he had made to not only choose
jazz, but to choose friends and fellow musi-
cians who cared about the genre as much as he
did. And their bond wasn’t confined to music.
After all, when Alvin eloped with his fiancée,
Edith, she tossed her clothes out of a window
for Ellis to catch. But because their bond was
founded in music, that made it eternal. Thanks
to that 1956 session—the first recordings of
any Charlie Parker–inspired, contemporary
jazz act in New Orleans—the American Jazz
Quintet made history.
Too bad no one heard it. Technically, the
California label Specialty Records owned the
masters. But Specialty’s man Bumps Blackwell
(no relation to Ed) reportedly never paid for
the session, leaving the masters with the stu-
dio. It would be another twenty years before
Harold could claim and release them. The
original four-album set, called “New Orleans
Heritage Jazz: 1956–1966,” is no longer in print.
But in 1991, Harold and Kalamu ya Salaam
re-released the material on an AFO Records
CD called In the Beginning.
“If I had to sum up in one word what
[Marsalis] did in that early point of his career,
I would say that one word would be ‘integrity,’”
the Chicago Tribune jazz and classical music
writer Howard Reich told me. “Even as his
piano style changes over the decades and
becomes more distilled, and more clarified,
and saying more with fewer notes, it never
panders. It never seeks the audience. It just
seeks to express itself, as far as I hear it. There’s
this elegance and cohesion.”
Marsalis’s professional crossroads at
Cosimo Studio could have seemed like a
failure, but likely to him it was more of a
damned shame, not to be internalized be-
cause it wasn’t the quintet’s fault. Shortly
after the session, he joined the Marine Corps
and served two years in the band, primar-
ily in Southern California. Then he got out
and jumpstarted the rest of his life. On the
very last day of the decade—New Year’s Eve,
1959—he married Dolores Ferdinand, joining
her big Creole musical family, and commit-
ted to having children of his own. (Branford
came first, then Wynton, Ellis III, Delfeayo,
Mboya, and Jason.)
Had Marsalis gone to New York City from
California, or even after he’d married Dolo-
res, there’s no telling what might have hap-
pened. Maybe he would have found out that
he wasn’t ready for the competition. Maybe
he would have found out that he was. He was
plenty tough, and Dolores, by all accounts,
was even tougher. Her musical standards
and personal grit are evident in their chil-
dren, who conjure her—and not Ellis—when
they’re at their most fierce. “I will dress a
motherfucker down,” Branford, who now
heads the Marsalis Music label, said. “I’m
like my mama.”
And yet, if the Marsalises had settled in
New York instead of New Orleans, “Branford
and Wynton wouldn’t have happened,” Jason
told me. “I’ve long believed that decision
changed the course of jazz.”
A “ N E W JA Z Z AG E ”
A profound change in jazz—rooted in deci-
sions Marsalis made in the mid-1950s—
became evident to the world in the 1980s,
when his sons and other students began sell-
ing records. Lots of records. They also be-
gan winning Grammy Awards and becoming
ambassadors of the music. TIME magazine
called what was happening a “new jazz age.”
Wynton, in particular, demonstrated an
early virtuosity, and—in a kind of contra
flow to fusion, funk, and other electrified
tastes of the day—his ensembles remained
unplugged. He agitated for more reflection
in jazz, encouraging his fellow musicians
to connect the titans of the past to current
and future iterations of the music. Branford,
meanwhile, was appearing with his father’s
early heroes Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.
He performed with Sting at Live Aid in 1985,
formed his first quartet, and collaborated
with Spike Lee on School Daze and Do the
Right Thing. In 1984, long before he began
writing scores for Lee’s films, Blanchard won
his first Grammy as a member of Art Blakey’s
band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1989, Con-
nick topped the Billboard jazz chart with a
soundtrack of standards for the film When
Harry Met Sally, an album that sold two mil-
lion copies. New Orleans was suddenly at the
center of jazz again, and the industry took
note. Musicians trained by other members
of the American Jazz Quintet were also on
the rise, including pianist Henry Butler. But
so many of Ellis’s students signed contracts
with the Columbia label that he joked he was
the company’s A&R man.
“When you think about the famous
teachers in jazz and classical music, they
are measured by what their students went
on to do,” the critic and author Reich said.
“If you haven’t heard of the students, you
really haven’t heard of them. Ellis Marsalis
brought a whole new generation of jazz stars
from New Orleans into the world. Through
his students he reclaimed the importance
of New Orleans being something not just
locked in the past, but as being a source
of perpetual reinvention and of progress.
Is there a greater trumpeter in the world
today than Nicholas Payton? I don’t know of
one. Is there a more influential thinker and
advocate of jazz than Wynton? I doubt it. Is
there a jazz musician who has reached more
millions of people through movies than Ter-
ence Blanchard through Spike Lee’s movies
and others? I can’t think of any. You can’t even
calculate the influence of all those people and
their recordings, their films, their lectures,
their audiences.”
In 1997, Reich was on the jury that chose
Wynton’s work Blood on the Fields to win
the Pulitzer Prize, the first Pulitzer that was
ever awarded in jazz, or indeed in any music
category outside of classical. The Pulitzer
board also changed its future definition and
entry requirements for music awards, more
pointedly allowing for improvisation. Let
Freedom Swing, Reich’s 2010 book of his jazz,
blues, and gospel writing, offers context to
the Pulitzer board’s decisions. In a nod to New
Orleans, he asked Ellis to write the foreword.
Of course, musicians often have more
than one mentor—and their own ideas about
what’s right for their careers. But Marsalis’s
lessons seemed to linger with his students,
as when he called jazz a “homeless music”
without a grand performance space ever
having been built for it. In 2004, Jazz at Lin-
coln Center—under Wynton’s artistic direc-
tion—opened the performing arts complex
Frederick P. Rose Hall on New York City’s
Upper West Side.
“I was there when this was only a vision in
Wynton’s head,” the drummer Herlin Riley
remembered. “When I joined the band, he
said, ‘We have to do more things that have
an impact on jazz. We have to do books on
jazz. We have to do videos to teach people
how to play. We have to create a big band
competition . . .’ The last thing he said to
me is ‘We have to build a hall for jazz . . .’ All
those things came to fruition.”
Ellis’s students continued to conjure him
when they had important decisions to make.
In 2014, Connick spoke on The Late Show
with David Letterman about his role judg-
ing contestants on the TV show American
Idol:
CONNICK: You know Ellis Marsalis?
He’s the father of Wynton Marsalis and
Branford Marsalis. [Applause.] Yeah,
and he was my teacher. And he would
sit there and he would listen to me play.
He wouldn’t smile. He wouldn’t applaud.
He wouldn’t stand up. And he would
basically say, “That’s one of the worst
performances I’ve ever heard and you
need to go home and practice.” And you
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 99
 would go home and practice. It was very,
very direct and very blunt. I don’t like to
be that blunt. I think the honesty part
is always great. Being honest is being
honest. But I think it’s nice to say, “Hey,
look you’ve got great potential.”
LETTERMAN: If your instructor is Ellis
Marsalis, you’ve already been given a
great stamp of approval . . .
Not everyone was a fan. Beginning in the
1980s, critics of the Marsalises and their New
Orleans contingent were often vicious in print,
calling their contributions to jazz “nostalgia,”
“indistinguishable,” “too conventional,” and
even “boring.” In 1988, a music writer alleged
that Branford (not yet twenty-eight years
old) had failed to deliver on his potential
and called Wynton’s sensibilities “anachro-
nistic.” And yet, even the most derisive critics
acknowledged the magnetic effect that the
Marsalises and their fellow New Orleanians
had had on jazz worldwide, attracting new
audiences—including consistent waves of
young people. As a new generation of jazz
teachers, Ellis’s students helped shaped jazz
studies programs not only at Jazz at Lincoln
Center, but also at the Thelonious Monk (now
Herbie Hancock) Institute of Jazz, Juilliard,
Northwestern University, and the University of
New Orleans. Not bad for the man who in 1988
had been described in the Atlantic Monthly
as “the obscure pianist Ellis Marsalis.”
S I LV E R B O O K
S ometimes, Marsalis unconsciously in-
spired efforts in the service of jazz. He
did it in 1987, when he unknowingly put his
old mentor Harold Battiste to work on a sin-
gular undertaking that would outlive them
all. At a tribute to the former American Jazz
Quintet drummer Ed Blackwell in Atlanta,
Ellis mentioned that the recordings he’d
made with the group remained essential to
his own career playing music and, perhaps
by extension, the success of his many past,
present, and future students.
“As we got ready to rehearse, Alvin [Ba-
tiste] gave me the lead sheets that he had
copied out and put them on the top of the
piano,” Marsalis recalled last year at the Ninth
Ward center that Branford and Connick had
built in his name. “I said, ‘Man, everything
that I really know about music is in these
songs right here.’ And even though those lead
100 WINTER 2020
sheets were just a few, Harold thought about
it . . . and started to assemble the Silverbook,
based on that retrospective. The history of
the Silverbook started at that point.”
A musical workbook published in 1989,
Silverbook — Modern Jazz Masters of New Or-
leans, includes sixty-one songs composed by
Marsalis and other members of the quintet,
as well as members of Harold’s New Orleans–
based, African-American, musician-owned
AFO label. The book features every origi-
nal song from the playlist that the quintet
recorded in 1956 and then later taught to
generations of students. Marsalis had con-
tinued to play Silverbook songs on nearly all
of his own recordings dating from the 1960s
and in live performances for the rest of his
life. Recently, the drummer and band leader
Herlin Riley has committed to showcasing
Silverbook songs in his sets from now on.
The Marsalis Center hired me in 2019 to
interview Ellis about the Silverbook, which
instructors there and at the University of
New Orleans still use to teach up-and-coming
players. Harold, Alvin, and Ed were long dead
by then. So Ellis was left to tell the tale of
how bebop originated in the city—a story
that may seem inevitable to most people, and
yet was anything but to the brotherhood of
musicians who made it happen.
“When it comes to the human beings
that have contributed to your personal
development, you only can do that when they
pass away and you reflect on what it was like
when you knew them,” Marsalis had said earlier.
It was a rare moment of introspection for him,
during which he seemed tempted to share his
feelings about those friends now gone. But
the moment passed quickly, and he decided
not to. He seemed typically Ellisian that day—
analytical, detached, without sentiment.
And yet, that wasn’t always the case. When
asked what song he’d like to perform at the
end of our radio interview, the year his wife
Dolores died, he didn’t hesitate. Marsalis
lowered his head, lifted his hands to the keys,
and began playing with an unmistakable,
romantic fullness, “Do You What It Means,
To Miss New Orleans?”
POSTSCRIPT
M ore than sixty years after Marsalis made
his drive home from Southern Califor-
nia, there’s still speculation about why he
chose to plant a flag for his kind of jazz in
New Orleans, where music lovers prefer the
dancing rhythms. Kalamu ya Salaam, who co-
produced the 1991 CD version of the American
Jazz Quintet’s historic recording session, said
he thought Marsalis’s decision had to do with
“optimism.” After the U.S. Supreme Court
struck down segregation in its 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education ruling, ya Salaam said
there was a palpable feeling of anticipation
among black locals, an expectation that better
times were imminent. Others wonder whether
Marsalis was thinking of the young Dolores
Ferdinand, whom he would later marry. But
no one seemed as gladly baffled as Marsalis
himself. He said that it was his choice and his
alone. Both paths required constant work at
the highest level just to survive, and perhaps
that’s better done in a place where people
know how to make a 1-2-3-4 cake, stuffed
mirlitons, and crawfish étouffée. Ellis Mar-
salis III, the poet who now lives in Maryland,
captured his father’s work ethic in “The Man
and the Ocean”:
What a more apt metaphor for this life
Than the journey toward this music
Not mythically ideal
But soup-stained and pock-marked all
the way in
Whether Marsalis did more to contribute
to jazz as a musician or as an educator is a
matter that remains open to interpretation,
particularly among his sons.
“Somebody asked Delfeayo and Jason,
‘How do you see your dad?’” Ellis once told
me. “Delfeayo said as a ‘player’ and Jason
said as a ‘teacher.’”
“He was both,” said Branford, who, aside
from near-constant touring, also teaches stu-
dents in North Carolina. “He wasn’t teaching
people how to play their instrument. He was
teaching people how to think. His teaching
is not about music. It’s about self-discovery.”
Ellis III agrees with Jason about their fa-
ther’s focus on teaching. “I heard my dad
give a music lesson over a telephone,” he
said recently. “A kid called him and said he
played a gig in St. Louis and got lost. My dad
puts the phone on speaker and he goes to
the piano and says, ‘Tell me what you were
playing.’ And he proceeds to give this guy
a lesson over the phone and on the piano.
I tell my daughter, ‘A teacher knows what
they’re doing. They can teach regardless of
the medium. In a cave. With a flashlight. They
say, ‘I can show you.’”
Turns out, Marsalis showed everybody.
One crossroads at a time.
 The Sound of LEGENDS

If you listen closely, you might just hear strains of music as you
explore Shelby, NC, the birthplace of legendary musicians.
Come experience
the music heritage, live music
and enjoy eclectic shopping,
craft beer, gifted artisans
and local food.
Photo by Jim McGuire
You’ll be glad you did!
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LONG-HAIRED COUNTRY BOY
C
harlie Daniels was a musical
genius and a human charm
offensive. This is the best
available explanation for the
scarcely credulous, Zelig-
like life that saw him write
for Elvis Presley, become a
crucial sideman to Bob Dylan
and Leonard Cohen, befriend Beatles and
presidents, and invent an entirely novel
form of country boogie over the course
of a five-decade career in music. An in-
strumentalist of wildly diverse talents and
little training, Daniels lacked the technical
proficiency of the formally educated and
was perceptive enough to make it a virtue.
His specialty was knowing just what weird
chord shapes to strike and which mood to
evoke, however idiosyncratic. You know the
queasy string arrangement and overall vibe
of Leonard Cohen’s 1969 standard “Bird
on a Wire”? That’s Charlie Daniels. Or the
stately but strange guitar and bass on Bob
Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and New Morn-
ing? That was Daniels, too. He lost part of a
finger on his right hand in a middle school
shop accident, and his unique four-fingered
strumming style became the hallmark of his
playing. His signature hissing fiddle sounded
like no one before or since.
He was always unique. Indeed, he was the
first “Daniels” in his family. When he was
born to LaRue and William Daniel in Wilm-
ington, North Carolina, in 1936, a paperwork
error resulted in an extra “s” being added to
his surname, an anomaly within the extended
clan that stuck. He was raised religious and
with music. Where the music ended and the
evangelism began was difficult to discern and
ultimately immaterial. In his youth he learned
gospel songs like “Kneel at the Cross” and
railway blues like Waldo O’Neal’s “Hobo Bill’s
102 WINTER 2020
I C O N S
BY ELIZABETH NELSON
Last Ride,” which reduced him to tears when
his father performed it for him.
Like a lot of kids brought up during the
pivot point between recovery from the De-
pression and the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
Daniels developed a profound sense of pa-
triotism coupled with a provincial suspicion
of the big banks and speculators that had,
in some faraway distance, nearly destroyed
the country. This was and is a complicated
cocktail. It confers a knee-jerk love of the
military, along with a quasi-rational con-
tempt for the government that makes their
marching orders. To parse that particular
contradiction is to understand something
crucial about contemporary American life.
P eople think about hippies and they think
of Woodstock or California. That’s not re-
ally true. Like bison, they were once all over
America. The counterculture of the 1960s
South was fraught with cross-pollination and
contradictions. Radio programmers would
soon enough sort the “rock” and “r&b”
genres into separate, racially coded catego-
ries, but that process of untangling took
longer in the regions between Jacksonville
and Memphis. The Atlanta International Pop
Festival in 1969 drew a hundred and fifty
thousand with a bill featuring Booker T., the
Staple Singers, CCR, and Zep.
Charlie Daniels was, in one very real sense,
hippie to the core. The Charlie Daniels Band’s
first hit was a novelty song called “Long
Haired Country Boy,” the opening stanza of
which went like this: “People say I’m no good
and crazy as a loon / ’Cause I get stoned in
the morning / And get drunk in the after-
noon.” Having grown up around segregation,
Daniels’s conceptions of hierarchies based in
race and class were a hard-wired factotum.
He knew that he had been privileged ahead
of Black Americans, and he also knew he had
been condescended to by wealthier white
ones. Pain recognizes pain, even if it doesn’t
always react palliatively.
The Jesters, one of his first real outfits, was
a four-piece cover band known for energetic
takes on tunes by Fats Domino, Lloyd Price,
and Little Richard. They were good enough
to be in demand throughout the competi-
tive mid-Atlantic touring circuit and to get
booked on a USO tour of an army base in
Greenland, where for a handful of weeks
they entertained blitzed GIs in endless all-
night blowouts at what felt like the barren
edge of the known world. By the mid-1960s,
Daniels was already a hard-luck veteran of
the roughest margins of the music biz, having
spent more than a decade playing in distin-
guished, itinerant boogie bands without any
apparent future.
More or less out of the blue in the mid-
1960s, his old friend and legendary producer
Bob Johnston called to see if he wanted to
move to Nashville to be a session player. Dan-
iels packed up the family and moved straight
away, and the next thing you know he was
being prominently featured on Dylan’s Nash-
ville Skyline. Daniels was conscripted for a
four-hour session, to be replaced afterward
by another session man. Dylan and Daniels
tracked together and when Daniels got up
to depart, Dylan asked Johnston, “Where is
Charlie going?” Johnston told him Daniels
was leaving but another guitarist would take
his place. Dylan responded: “I don’t want
another guitar player, I want him!”
Daniels called it “the nine little words that
would affect my life from that moment on.”
With Leonard Cohen, he toured the Old
World, performing in Europe to massive
Chainstitch embroidery by Lacy Van Court, Die Trying TX. Design by Milton Carter OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 103
crowds. Daniels was amazed at the scenery
and the scene—the way in which throngs
responded to the uneasy music of a complex
spiritual seeker. For a small-town kid from
North Carolina with a rapacious curiosity,
the mindfuck was thorough but consensual.
Daniels’s conception of things became big-
ger. He obsessively studied world history.
The mythic elements that would come to
characterize his later work were undoubt-
edly influenced by Cohen’s wry and wordy
Talmudic passion plays.

F inally, following years as a dues-paying

studio hand, he achieved fame front-
ing his own group, the Charlie Daniels
Band. The hell-and-brimstone chooglin’ of
1974’s Fire on the Mountain extended their
reach from regional Southern favorites to full-
time national attractions, abetted by tours
opening for Joe Walsh, Eric Clapton, and
Lynyrd Skynyrd. Their following grew or-
ganically via diligent work, but the real
breakthrough was the single “The Devil
Went Down to Georgia” from the 1979 LP
Million Mile Reflections.
A novel reversal of the Robert Johnson
crossroads tale, the proto-rap epic tells the
story of a country boy named Johnny, who,
encountering Satan himself, gets lured into
a battle of musicianship—fiddle against
fiddle—Johnny’s soul wagered against the
devil’s golden violin. Each party eloquently He soldiered on with new records and performing some of his most moving vocals
testifies and expertly plays their instrument. labels, ever the indefatigable workaholic on spirited and utterly sui generis takes on
Johnny sounds like Bob Wills. Satan sounds committed to his music, even as it drifted everything from “I Shall Be Released” to
like John Cale. It’s all very tense. But in the further from the mainstream. With the sort “Tangled Up in Blue.”
end Johnny wins. He calls Satan “a son of a of gumption that would have no doubt made In his memoir, Never Look at the Empty
bitch” and proclaims himself “the best that’s his timber salesman father proud, Daniels Seats, Daniels reflects on the album with
ever been.” It is, by any reckoning, a great willed his way back to solvency and then pride, saying of Dylan: “Always a leader.
American song. some without ever losing heart. The events Never a follower. He was an innovator who
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s Daniels’s of 9/11 essentially radicalized him, and going shunned Tin Pan Alley and single-handedly
fortunes rose and fell. Charmed and charm- forward, Daniels was a reliably blinkered changed the face of popular music. By inspir-
ing as he could be, he had a penchant for source of unclever takes on political correct- ing all serious artists who came after him, he
misfortune. In 1980 he busted his arm in three ness and its related outrages. Eventually, like introduced a freedom of lyric and unconven-
places trying to operate some landscaping a loved but fading uncle, he came to espouse tional approach to chord structure.”
machinery—Daniels conceded that he should the full menu of modern conservative griev- Daniels saw a lot of himself in Dylan, and
never, ever touch tools—setting into motion ances on guns, terrorism, abortion, and the as it happens the recognition runs both ways.
a torturous recovery. President Carter took rest of the shuck, though never with much “I felt I had a lot in common with Char-
time off from managing the Iranian hostage resembling true malice. His convictions may lie,” Dylan wrote in his own 2003 memoir,
crisis to call him in the hospital. Eventually he have been real, but he wasn’t made from or Chronicles, Volume One. “The kind of phrases
found himself $2,000,000 in debt, resulting for these times of nuclear contempt amongst he’d use, his sense of humor, his relationship
from a tangled web of back taxes, poor man- those who disagree. to work, his tolerance for certain things. Felt
agement, and ill-considered investments. In The last great Charlie Daniels LP was a like we’d dreamed the same dream with all
2001 he battled prostate cancer. This all was tribute to his hero: Bob Dylan. The ten-song the same distant places.” A dream so strange
the flipside to his extraordinary good luck, Off the Grid: Doin’ It Dylan from 2014 fea- you can hardly describe it. Charlie Daniels
and he received it with faith and stoicism. tures the then seventy-three-year-old Daniels went out and made it all true.

104 WINTER 2020 Charlie Daniels performing at Gilley’s in 1979

106 WINTER 2020 Drawing by Michelle Marchesseault
 I C O N S

LISTENING TO
THE (DIXIE) CHICKS
AFTER AMERICA
INVADES IRAQ,
THE YEAR I CAME OUT
BY NOMI STONE

Driving by kudzu, under oblong leaves

of live oaks as their roots knuckle up,

past the trawlers, who dredge pretty pink shrimp

from the belly of the coral-lipped sea,

war’s on, whether we say yes to it or no. “Let’s go

for a ride, Earl, hey,” sings a girl

on her softball road trip: turn the radio up!

And doesn’t she feel it’d be good to kill

that bad Earl if he hurt her friend, to fly

on a red-eye home to hold her hand?

And doesn’t she feel it’s good to vote red

like her daddy when he tells her it’s good

to be good like daddy? Years later, fire licks

the oil fields on TV, “Push on,” the President says,

and everybody on this bus claps, turn the radio up.

But when the song comes on, it hurts her

and us—hey, hey, hey—how this nation lays welts

there and here, wherever a big man touches,

raising the flaming circle of his face

above us like an idol. I was ashamed

for loving it: the swagger, the sugar, the diesel

in my big tank on the big, open, take-what-you-want road.

I loved it as much as I hated

who I became in it, taking or being taken. The last time I lied

under a man and didn’t want it was in the back

of a pick-up truck, and it was in the South.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 107
 I C O N S

THE MISSING BLACK NOTES

On Florence Price’s Mississippi River Suite

B Y H A R M O N Y H O L I D AY

108 WINTER 2020 “Studio Floor #2” (2018), by Aaron Turner

C
omposer Florence Price was
born in Little Rock, Arkan-
sas, in 1887 to a middle-class
family. Her father, like Miles
Davis’s father, was a dentist,
the only Black dentist in town,
and with that role came airs
of respectability and upward
mobility that other Southern
Black families might not have fathomed. As
a child, Florence received her earliest piano
lessons from her mother because none of the
white instructors in town would accept Black
students. She played her first piano recital
at the age of four, and her first composition
was published when she was just eleven.
By fourteen, having graduated high school
early, Florence went on to attend Boston’s
New England Conservatory of Music, one of
the only music schools accepting Black stu-
dents at the time, though on the advice of her
mother she masqueraded as Mexican when
applying. She received degrees in organ and
piano performance and promptly returned to
the South, where she taught music at Clark
College in Atlanta before returning to Little
Rock. There she started a family with her hus-
band, Black attorney Thomas Jewell Price,
and began teaching music. She was refused
entrance into the all-white Arkansas Music
Teachers’ Association so she established her
own, only to be pushed out of her hometown
by the imminent threat of lynchings and race
violence in 1927.
We speak of the Great Migration of Black
people from the South to the Midwest, the
East, or farther west as a mass departure
motivated by a search for jobs, but relocation
was also a matter of physical survival. Black
people ran away from the threat of death,
escaping the unchecked white violence that
reigned and terrorized in Southern towns
and cities. Under relatively less siege in still-
segregated urban centers where the need for
laborers outweighed attempts to completely
criminalize Blackness, Black creative energy
found ways to survive as well as audiences
who were less likely to base their tastes on
race alone. In Chicago it was a little less
dangerous to be a Black composer. The music
scenes in Chicago and New York at the time
attest to this tenuous moment of aperture;
we fled with our sound and toward it and
through it, and it opened and cracked doors,
establishing venues for our music in these
new Black cities. It was in Chicago that Flor-
ence was able to establish some semblance
of a career as a composer, keenly aware
that being both Black and a woman made a
meteoric rise to prominence as a so-called
classical composer less likely. Her aware-
ness of her position can be found in her
letters and heard in her sound, which plays
between the spiritual and the symphonic,
forcing them to confront one another, forc-
ing traditional Western classical notation to
touch and mingle with and become Black
classical music. Florence knew how to re-
appropriate her spirit from her training or
indoctrination, how to use what she knew
to place Black tones where they have always
been in this world, trapped within the self-
important and ever-dominant concepts of
whiteness, and how they sing so freely you
almost forget they’re restrained.
Black music is fugitive music. It often oc-
cupies the sound and space of escape, of
running away, denying, rejecting, moving on,
walking by. Coding this fugitive sensibility
in more widely accepted religious traditions
gives us Negro spirituals, but it does not
change this sense of the thrill of departure
and veer that animates our music. “Black
classical” music, the music of composers who
have been trained in Western musical tradi-
tions, never abandons the radical quality of
all Black sound and music, but it is often left
to flounder in an unnamed and segregated
territory between popular art and high art,
not invited into the landscape of Western
classical music where it might trouble the
racialized essentialism that lurks within the
subconscious of that sound. Elitist notions
about who is capable of making a symphony
or commanding an orchestra, which really
dictate who is allowed to make a living cre-
ating music, result from this. Sun Ra, from
Birmingham and also working in Chicago
around the time Florence Price was, is an ex-
ample. He was a composer, trained in West-
ern forms. He had his own orchestra, yet he
lived in economic precarity to keep it afloat.
There was no grant or fund to recognize
his version of classical music. His audience
was not respected for its impeccable taste,
because he performed his music in bars and
clubs, never symphony halls.
For centuries, Black musicians have been
reminding us that they are often composers
too. Nina Simone was a classically trained
pianist; she only took up singing when the
owner of the bar in Atlantic City where she
was playing piano to put herself through
music school demanded she sing along with
herself. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus,
Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Julius East-
man, Thelonious Monk, the Art Ensemble of
Chicago, Sun Ra—all demanded to be called
composers and were critical of the term jazz
as dismissive of their training, avoiding all
market-driven genre categorization in music.
However, their assertions have done little to
change the workings of industry and there’s
still the palpable sense that white audiences
believe Black talent derives from pure luck,
natural rhythm, and the soul that comes
with suffering oppression, instead of the
product of discipline, training, and a deep,
unbending commitment to a form.
Black composers have responded in fugi-
tive glory, learning to flee and improvise
on the forms that try to deny them entry.
Jazz music is born of quoting Western folk
and classical forms just to expand on them,
prove them inadequate by making them
better. Black music makes space for more
notes, polyrhythms, interstitial tensions,
so that even orchestral music is forced to
bend to the Black imagination. And with that
bending, new attitudes become possible and
Black people access the parts of ourselves
that cannot be oppressed into oblivion yet
have no analog in Western verbal language.
In this way music is as important as speech
to Black life, and grammar is determined
by sound first.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER SUITE
A s we improvised on sound, so too we
improvised on land, remixed location
and sentiment, reinvented spaces that op-
pressed us as spaces that could heal and
sustain us. The Mississippi River, one such
space, is haunted and empowered by Black
vitality, by signs that there was life beyond
Delta and plantation land that could be
reached, and if it could be reached it could
be imagined. Langston Hughes wrote I’ve
known rivers . . . my soul has grown deep
like the rivers, because those paths to a less
horrific elsewhere loomed and taunted Black
people so, became a part of our fantasy and
a route to what we dreamed freedom might
be. We love a river. We go down by the river
and compose our blues. We hold our private
conferences, drum together, fall in love, hide,
sometimes jump in to swim or boat or never
return. The way voices travel on and near
water, the way bodies reflect and heave and
loosen above or in it, the way every visit to
a natural body of water carries echoes of
some endless desire for baptism, for soul
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 109
and spirit cleansing, the way water heals
and refuses to do any less—the aggressively
soothing Mississippi River Suite is mimetic
of this way, is the music of voyage.
When Florence Price was finally given
some respect as a composer, her debut
works improvised on her journey toward
that recognition and expressed the exhilara-
tion and terror of transit between versions
of the self. Her Mississippi River Suite was
composed in 1934, when she had been liv-
ing in Chicago for several years. The way
James Baldwin explains time and again in
essays and interviews how he could only
make sense of his Harlem upbringing once
he had escaped it and fled to France, it’s clear
that Price could comprehend the southern
United States and its pull on every aspect of
her consciousness only now that she lived
in a northern city, now that her
migration had begun.
The twenty-eight-minute
song cycle opens in the still of
the night, with tones of vigil and
arrival, swooping strings mellow
to tiptoe. Nothing is shrill—star-
like glimmer bends the strings.
A harp flutters like a muse. And
then the sound deepens, dark-
ens, awakens to the danger of
embarkation, the very reluctance
Florence may have experienced
in the face of her own ability and
mobility. Prancing harp chords
offer a cheerful refrain shoul-
dering us through pivots of in-
tensity and drama. If music can
be gendered, there’s a feminine
quality, a whimsical frolic always
undercutting terror-driven tones, loosening
them. The territory is still down-by-the-river,
and play and escape are its defining gestures,
sometimes both at the same time, until we
reach a flute-driven moment of pure, smooth
riding so vivid you experience the relief as
you listen. Horns announce some overarch-
ing good, something like autonomy bloom-
ing—safety, rebirth. This is our music, this
is our river, our Mississippi and our forced
departure from it, through it. The luxury of
the natural world, and a love of it, is clear
in this suite, a spirit that refuses to look
away from what she finds beautiful simply
because the society she finds herself in wants
her experience to narrow and choke on race
and class and gender.
And then, a doomed delight springs forth,
the kind of joy that knows there’s sorrow on
110 WINTER 2020
its heels: Florence quotes nobody knows the
trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow,
for strings, improvising on the standard
with the whir of the harp, forcing it to spiral
up toward the daze of a happy ending and
then into a clanging of cymbals, a war or
alarm call, a clamor of interruptions. It’s
riveting and a little jarring, being yanked
from church to battle like that; it’s a Black
experience translated to the symphonic.
Leaving the spiritual, the sound sways
toward lullaby and is interrupted again by
a swarming underbelly, an awareness that
everything we’ve heard up to this point
is illicit, could be undermined, must be
savored. The trumpets elongate notes like
water overflows and threatens harvest, and
that excess is as much comfort as threat.
We realize this can be a shared experience.
Price’s tonal universe is capacious enough to
be a gathering point. Mississippi River Suite
is achingly generous, hospitable without
being corny. The music invites you in but
refuses to change what’s there for the sake of
a new, possibly white, audience. Great Black
music is that which isn’t trying to impress
or entreat or even necessarily communicate
with a white audience—or any audience.
Instead, great Black music works to retrieve
what Rahsaan Roland Kirk called the miss-
ing Black notes: the sounds and calls and
rhythms and cries that colonizing languages
submerge, reconstituted of the very lexicons
that would have liked them to vanish from
sound and memory.
O pposing moods compete for the fore-
ground throughout Mississippi River
Photo of Florence Price. Courtesy Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville
Suite. Moments of skipping rhythms that
open onto romance quickly turn skeptical
of themselves, more careful and cerebral.
The capriciousness isn’t dizzying, however;
it allows us to feel with the composer, a sense
that everything is at once ominous and tran-
scendent, that beauty and form are always
embattled, that life is as likely to triumph
as it is to end or turn against the current.
For the Black spirit channeling its depth
in Western forms, it’s perilous to long for
the past when the past is enslavement and
your erasure. Every bit of nostalgia harbors
some guilt for calling back as much peril
as it does comfort in the familiar. Can Flor-
ence dream of her childhood in Little Rock
without the acrid memory of being denied
music lessons, or of her early adulthood
there without the memory of her peers be-
ing lynched and murdered? Can
her music praise and meditate
on the Mississippi River without
drowning in the Black trauma
coexisting with its undeniable
beauty as emblem of liberation
and renewal? Nobody knows. The
spiritual returns, in hints, as if
to ask, does the trouble, always
concealed and impossible to
confess, make for better music,
a truer understanding of pace, of
how one sound is always about to
displace another? Choosing to let
them clash and spar is a Black
classical technique. We hear it
in Mississippi River Suite as we
do in Monk or Eastman. The ca-
cophonous pushing us toward
an ecstatic or revelatory quiet,
giving us space to navigate a place words
cannot reach or even trace, a place that is
a rhythmic structure first, a way of mov-
ing through space and time that amounts
to Black survival.
The suite concludes with a subdued, al-
most smirking alertness to what it has ac-
complished and conjured. As a population
held captive and given no land upon release
to a mercenary lifestyle, we hear our in-
heritance in Florence’s sound, how we know
and occupy this land, have worked to make
it fertile and sustainable, and memorized
its grooves and tones. How you can’t bring
up the Mississippi River without bringing
up Black people, the blues, Black music,
which is tuned to the natural world and not
the white world, against every attempt at
making it otherwise. I cannot listen to the
suite without feeling like I’ve been given access to a secret shore
where I can listen to the river run and churn, see the ghosts of my
family’s Mississippi Delta roots, and hear their vicissitudes, their
paths away and back, the solace they take in handing their howls
and whispers down on strings. The suite helps break up calcified
thought patterns that amount to fear of remembering that past,
and then it lets us forget where we are and inhabit secrets we don’t
even know we have about our time in places we want to forget we’ve
been to even as we love them.

D ancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham

was also working in Chicago at this time, and in 1936, a couple
of years after Mississippi River Suite debuted, Florence scored Dun-
QUARE
ham’s afro-ballet Fantasie Nègre, further proving Florence Price’s BY L. LAMAR WILSON
sound kinetic, somatic, and belonging to and in the body. It is the
acoustics of Black movement, whether that be escape or celebration
or pause before leap or playful mocking turned serious in an instant. ~after Herman “Sun Ra” Blount & Ralph Waldo Ellison,
Katherine Dunham’s dances were rituals full of intrigue, and a col- with thanks to E. Patrick Johnson & Sharon P. Holland
laboration between her and Florence Price repairs a circle of Black
music and dance where it might have been ruptured, alienated from A man is a woman inside
itself. Two Black women who were told that their classical training Waiting to come home.
was nothing but a stain on their natural propensity to folk forms, A man inside a woman is
coming together to prove a defiant elegance beyond form. A mother-of-pearl, a wading
When several boxes of unseen, unheard music composed by Price Handmaiden, inside a man
were discovered by a white couple after they purchased her aban- Made prison, prism of light.
doned summer home in 2009, a buzz erupted. Lost Black sounds are At the end of that tunnel: new birth.
in vogue now, easy to package and commodify as “exotic,” “rare,” New berth? Tunnel to that end,
newly discovered. What really happened is similar to the story of Light the prism, prison-break
writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins and countless others whose Everyman’s woe. Inside
names we do not know. The work of a Black woman who happened Every man lies. The seed of
to be a composer was not valued while she was here, and so left to Mother’s tears petaled, pearled.
rot somewhere down by the river. Seven weeks whole. Wonderfully
I don’t want to be part of a repackaging of Florence Price into She. Made us a beauty. Inside. Ascend.
someone Black and excellent who it’s hip to consume or know about Ussin. Us/sin. Us>sin. Us>skin.
and never care about, name drop, lament. I want her music to be Us skin & sin less & iridescent.
heard with no disclaimer or qualifiers, played in symphony halls, All spirit, no shade, no shame.
in ballet classes, in the halls of academia, and down by rivers under Liminal. Limn it all. One nation
stark starlight, because the frequency she reaches is not one of a Undone. God<less. Now what?
woman deprived of an audience; it’s we who are deprived of her O Amma, may I eye inside
sound. Hearing her, as a Black woman listening, is the experience of The we we was! Decode the cipher
finally feeling invited into the form, finally having a witness there. We forgot: To Whom It May Concern,
Hearing her, as a Black woman who grew up dancing classical bal- Keep This Nigger-Boy Running. O
let, is finally hearing classical music that I might choreograph to Woe man-cum-woman hater,
and feel mirrored in after all that indoctrination in the standards O nacre, O negus—never nigger—
set by countless rigid white men. Cry out & She will rise. Inside us.
Mississippi River Suite is the music of a woman with so much She’s waiting, black (wo)man,
range she has nothing to prove, everything to demonstrate. Places Stop running. Come home.
I thought I was afraid to feel sonically, places that feel too close to
madness to be so precise and efficient and honest, Florence reaches
and makes irresistible, so that we all remember where the bones
are buried and where the balm rests beside them, humming, string-
ing us and them along toward our better destiny. It is not shocking
that Florence is a Black woman from the South and is this great at
Western classical composition, but it is tradition to act as if it is,
to pretend to be naive to Black potential, as if for every Florence
Price there aren’t thousands of Black girls who don’t know their
beauty because they heard sounds coming off the river and were
never taught to translate them past rage or acceptance.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 111
 I C O N S

I KNOW
A PLACE
Growing up Muscle Shoals

B Y PAT T E R S O N H O O D

112 WINTER 2020 “On Ajoute Des Choses (no.8)” (2020), by Jason Jägel. Courtesy Gallery 16, San Francisco
I was riding in the backseat of my
godmother’s giant Oldsmobile
Delta 88 with Sissy, my beloved ma-
ternal grandmother, at the wheel
and my godmother, Ann Coldiron,
in the passenger seat. The radio was on Q107,
the 100,000 watt Top 40 station owned by
Sam Phillips that blasted my hometown of
Florence, Alabama, with all the hits during
my childhood (it’s still there, blasting away).
The song was “I’ll Take You There,” the No.
1 song in the nation at the time. The song is
rightfully adored. Prince covered it many
times during his performances. He was not
alone. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the
song at 281 in their list of the 500 Greatest
Songs of all time. It was the nineteenth-
biggest-selling song of 1972. That year, I
was in second grade.
“I’ll Take You There” sings of a heavenly
place where the troubles of its day are swept
aside. It’s a simple song structurally. A vamp
with the title repeated numerous times over
an irresistible groove. A reggae-like bass
line (influenced heavily from a song called
“Liquidator” by the Harry J Allstars) and a
very funky beat. The Staple Singers, a long-
time family gospel group who had provided
music for rallies and marches for Dr. Martin
Luther King, were the vocalists. The song
provided them with their first crossover
secular No. 1 single. The backing group of
musicians consisted of a bunch of Alabama
white boys who called themselves the Muscle
Shoals Sound Rhythm Section. They later
came to be known as the Swampers.
I guess it was Sissy who told me that
it was my dad playing bass on that song
on the radio. In the car that day, I asked
her to turn it up and she did. One minute,
fourteen seconds into the song, lead singer
Mavis Staples introduces the band during
a musical breakdown. Barry Beckett plays
a brief but enchanting piano solo as Mavis
says, “Barry, Barry, Barry, play your piano
now,” followed by a short and tasty guitar
solo where she calls out her father, Pops
Staples, on lead guitar, even though on that
particular recording, the lead guitar was
actually played by session guitarist Eddie
Hinton (her father would be playing it when
they performed live). Then the song seems
to transform as the bass player goes up an
octave and Mavis calls out, “David. Little
David. Easy here, help me now. C’mon Little
David. Alright.”
I was eight years old when I realized that
Little David was my dad.
I n the northwest corner of Alabama, there
are four towns, three of which, Sheffield,
Tuscumbia, and Muscle Shoals, sit nearly
connected on the south side of the Tennes-
see River with only a sign to tell you when
you have left one and entered the other. The
fourth one, Florence, sits on the north side of
the river. It is the biggest of the four towns,
although the combined population of the en-
tire metropolitan area is barely 200,000. That
is probably close to twice what the popula-
tion was back in the ’70s and ’80s when I was
growing up there.
Locals can tell you in depth the differences
between the four towns (and why they can
never unify into one sizable population center
that would carry far more political weight in
state affairs). But to most outsiders, the entire
region is better known as the Muscle Shoals
area (or the Quad Cities).
Although it has come a long way, inching
toward some sort of progress, the Shoals area
that I grew up in consisted of two “dry” coun-
ties (Lauderdale and Colbert), meaning that to
buy a beer you either went to a bootlegger or
drove fifteen miles to the Tennessee state line,
where you could find a few package stores and
honky-tonks. To buy liquor you had to drive a
good bit farther, an hour, to the closest towns
that sold such things. Or, go to the bootlegger,
of which there were many.
The Shoals area was as Bible Belt as it got,
essentially controlled by one or two churches
that worked hard to keep progressive ideas
(on race, or gender, or sexuality), liquor, and
any semblance of fun at bay. It was also the
home of a musical miracle.
Between 1965 and 1982, hundreds of records
were cut in Muscle Shoals at one or more of
the several studios scattered around. Many
of those records became hits, which led to
an amazing array of major artists coming
to my sleepy hometown to record at one of
the humble little recording studios that had
popped up there in the wake of a couple of
regional soul hits that had come from FAME
Studio. In 1966, Percy Sledge recorded “When
a Man Loves a Woman” and sold millions of
records. Shortly afterward, famed producer
and Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wex-
ler brought Wilson Pickett and then Aretha
Franklin to town, where they recorded classic
hits like “Mustang Sally” and “I Never Loved
a Man (the Way I Love You).”
The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bobby Wom-
ack, Etta James, Paul Simon, Simon and Gar-
funkel, Rod Stewart, Willie Nelson, and Traffic
all recorded hits there, as did a slew of soul
acts and later country stars. In the late ’70s a
sign went up declaring Muscle Shoals the HIT
RECORDING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, as more
hits were cut there per capita than anywhere
else. A record that probably still stands today.
The backing musicians on many of these
hits were a bunch of country boys (mostly
white) who had learned their instruments in
one of the cover bands that played the SEC
college circuit in the early ’60s. Over time the
better players gravitated from frat parties to
one of several groups of session players with
names like the FAME Gang and the Muscle
Shoals Sound Rhythm Section. My father was
the bass player in the latter.
He began playing bass guitar profession-
ally in 1966, just a couple of years after I was
born. He wasn’t quite twenty-three when he
played on Percy Sledge’s top-five hit “Warm
and Tender Love.” Soon he was playing ses-
sions, backing up the likes of Aretha Frank-
lin, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, and Clarence
Carter. If my dad’s career trajectory seemed
unlikely, that paled in comparison to the odds
of such a thing occurring at all in a small dry
county in the Bible Belt. That so many of the
most beloved soul hits of the civil rights era
came from an integrated group of players
just two hours north of Birmingham, where
firehoses and police dogs were used against
King’s marchers, is the kind of plot that’s too
far-fetched for fiction and too unbelievable
to be told without corresponding proof.
I guess I had been told from time to time
that my dad was some kind of musician, but
I’m sure that it had never quite registered
until that fateful ride in the Oldsmobile, even
though I had always loved music, especially
the Beatles, whose song “She Loves You” was
the No. 1 song the day I was born and whose
breakup I heard about on the radio around
the time I turned six.
I remember my dad’s stereo in the den
of our house and a record collection that
seemed to be at least a thousand strong. Our
house had a piano and a Wurlitzer electric
piano, a bass guitar and an acoustic guitar,
but I never saw my dad playing anything at
home besides his records. Men of his time
didn’t tend to take work home with them. In
that way, he was definitely old school.
E ven though, on paper, it might seem that
I have followed in my father’s footsteps,
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 113
my place in the music business is almost on
an opposite end of the spectrum. I play in a
touring band that performs our own songs,
many of which I write. I play one hundred or
so shows a year in multiple continents and
have done so for a couple of decades now.
My dad, on the other hand, went to work
every day at the same studio, sat in the same
chair, and played bass on other people’s songs
for whatever artist came to town to hire him
to do so. He got paid by the hour, usually
something on the union scale. He played on
many songs that sold in the millions of cop-
ies, but he almost never got “points” or a
profit share of those hits. “I’ll Take You There”
was a massive hit record and has since been
used in movies and television commercials,
but Dad once figured out that he’d been paid
less than $2,000 total for his part—the most
recognizable instrumental part of the
song and one of the most beloved bass
parts in modern music. Such is the life
of a session player.
In the second grade, I was classmates
with the son of one of my dad’s partners.
Dale and I were best friends that year. I
can remember him standing up before
the class in show-and-tell and telling
everyone that his father was the great-
est drummer in the world. His father,
Roger Hawkins, is indeed widely con-
sidered one of the finest drummers of
all time. In addition to the hits he played
on with my father, he also played on
“When a Man Loves a Woman” recorded
by Percy Sledge and “Respect” recorded
by Aretha Franklin. Jerry Wexler, who
discovered Ray Charles and was respon-
sible for naming the “Rhythm and Blues”
chart, shared Dale’s assessment of Roger’s
drumming.
Unfortunately, Dale’s proclamation led
to a good pummeling on the playground,
and I made a note to myself that I wouldn’t
talk about my dad’s occupation at Harlan
Elementary School.
M y hometown was the kind of deeply con-
servative place where, upon meeting
someone new, often the first question asked
was, “What church do you go to?” Most of
my classmates had parents significantly older
than mine who were culturally of a very dif-
ferent time and place. To all but my very
best friends, what my dad did was a secret,
best left unsaid.
114 WINTER 2020
Not that I knew much about it. I’d occa-
sionally get little hints of who was in town,
usually from my mom, but my dad shared
few details about his work and the things that
were going on at the studio. I can count on my
hands the number of days I spent over there
during my childhood. There were memorable
exceptions. Linda Ronstadt recorded part of
her self-titled solo album in Muscle Shoals
and ended up coming over to the house one
evening. She and my mom hit it off and stayed
in touch for many years, including when she
was one of the biggest stars in the world. (I
came home from sixth grade one afternoon
to find Linda sitting in our den, drinking
beer with my mom.) When Bob Dylan came
to town (the first time) I had a playdate with
his son Jesse, who was probably about seven.
Another time, my family had dinner with
If my dad’s career
trajectory seemed
unlikely, that paled
in comparison to the
odds of such a thing
occurring at all in
a small dry county in
the Bible Belt.
Bob Seger, who recorded many of his biggest
hits with my dad and my dad’s partners. Cat
Stevens once came by the house to pick up
something from my dad.
As I got older, I became obsessed with
music, rock & roll in particular, and I wanted
to find out as much as I possibly could about
this secret world that was happening right
under my town’s nose. I began hanging out
at the two local record stores all I could,
endearing myself to the clerks there with
my precocious thirst for musical knowledge.
I would pocket my lunch money every week
and do odd jobs around my uncle’s farm to
get the latest releases from Elton John, Pink
Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Todd Rundgren. I
had well over a hundred albums before sixth
grade and more than two hundred and fifty
by the time I entered junior high.
The record store clerks were my true life-
line to all of what was happening. Two in
particular became sort of professors in my
own personal school of rock. Jay Leavitt ran
the cool little record store in Muscle Shoals
about a block from the original FAME Studios
that saw the recording of the classic Aretha
and Wilson Pickett sessions. Jay was the one
who turned me on to the Rolling Stones and
explained what a special occurrence it was
having the biggest rock & roll band in the
world record three songs—“Brown Sugar,”
“Wild Horses,” and “You Gotta Move”—at
my dad’s studio. Jay also introduced me to
Bruce Springsteen and took me to my first
R.E.M. concert. Now, he owns Deep Groove
Records in Richmond, Virginia.
The other record store guy was Terrell
Benton, who was an assistant manager at
the Record Bar in the mall on the Flor-
ence side of the Tennessee River. Terrell
hired me to work at the store for my
first job, and he exposed me to more
musicians than I can count. He currently
works as a tour guide at the old Muscle
Shoals Sound Studio that has recently
been renovated and reopened. All these
years later, I still count Jay and Terrell
among my closest friends.
M y dad was never rich from his
work as a session player, but we
were comfortably upper-middle-class
in a blue-collar town with a struggling
economy. We lived in a neighborhood
of older families, so I didn’t have many
kids my age to play with on my street. At
school, I was far more interested in writing
my songs than participating in sports, so I
was frequently bullied by the other kids. By
high school I had found close friends and I
also grew six inches in one summer, so the
bullying stopped. We built a house out on
Shoals Creek (also known as Shoal Creek),
and my high school years were generally fun.
As tensions from the civil rights era calmed
down, my dad’s work became less secre-
tive, although I think most of the townsfolk
were still somewhat oblivious to it all. Q107
might mention that a song they played was
recorded there, but I’m not sure that actually
registered with most of the people listening
in their cars on their way to work, going
about their lives. This probably explains how
people as world famous as Mick Jagger, Bob
Dylan, or Rod Stewart could stay at our lo-
cal Holiday Inn and slip in and out basically
undetected.
In 1982, the same month that I graduated
from Coffee High School, the Ford plant an-
nounced that it would be closing. This began
a domino effect that wrecked our hometown
economy so bad that it has taken decades
for it to rebuild. At about the same time,
trends in music changed enough to essen-
tially shut down the majority of our local
recording scene. Many of the top
session players moved north to
Nashville or west to L.A. seeking
greener pastures and better gigs.
My dad was one of the holdouts
who stayed behind to try to keep
it going in Muscle Shoals.
By the time I dropped out of
college and began playing full
time in my own band, the record-
ing scene at home was dying off.
As a dry county, we never had
a live music scene other than
a few cover bands playing Top
40 or country hits at one of the
rough-and-tumble bars up at the
Tennessee state line. When voters
finally approved legal liquor sales,
I had visions of a live music scene
starting up like the celebrated
one in Athens, Georgia, that was
spawning bands like R.E.M. and
the B-52’s. Instead, we basically
just got the same bars from the
state line opening up in town. It
was a dismal place to try to oper-
ate a punk band that only played
the songs I was writing.
I moved away in the early ’90s,
eventually settling in Athens,
where I was able to form the band
that I still play in today. More and
more young people left for better
opportunities elsewhere. My dad
and the other holdouts who refused to move
away stayed on, doing the best they could
amongst fewer and fewer bookings.
A few years ago, a couple of filmmakers,
Greg Camalier and Stephen Badger, made
Muscle Shoals, a documentary about the
musical miracles that occurred there. It was
a critical and commercial success and helped
spark a renaissance of interest in this unique
music scene. The film release coincided with
a loosening up of restrictions from the local
Photo courtesy Patterson Hood
governments that enabled more new local
music venues to exist.
Downtown Florence, which had been fast
becoming a ghost town in my youth, is beau-
tiful and revitalized. More and more young
people are forming bands and have a sense
of pride in my hometown—one I never could
have imagined growing up. In 2015, Lincoln
Center hosted a Muscle Shoals tribute show
that drew thousands of fans.
My dad turned 77 this September. He is
thankfully in great health and still plays at a
level comparable to his prime. He was never
a fancy type of player, he didn’t “solo” or
“thump” like some of his more flashy peers
from the funk era. His signature is far more
subtle, a matter of tone, of which he is con-
sidered a master, a melodicism in his playing
that combines with a sort of minimalism to
give him his unique and special sound. His
Muscle Shoals sound.
I never played music with my father growing
up. Whether it was a form of rebellion or just
the times I came of age in, I gravitated toward
a more unhinged and less disciplined sound in
my own music. My early years as a player were
spent trying to replicate a sound I heard in my
head and to play the songs I was writing, and
my dad often thought I was misguided in my
early attempts at being a professional musician.
Even though we both have the same basic oc-
cupation, we’ve always been on very different
sides of it, and it wasn’t until much later that
we began to bridge that gap musically.
In more recent years, my dad
has played on two of my solo
albums and has sat in with my
band on stage in some wonderful
venues, including the legendary
Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I played
with my dad at premieres of the
Muscle Shoals documentary in
New York City and Seattle as well
as the Muscle Shoals tribute at
Lincoln Center in 2015. We also
formed a band called Dickinsons
+ Hoods with legendary producer/
keyboardist Jim Dickinson and
his sons Luther and Cody (of the
acclaimed and wonderful band
North Mississippi Allstars) back
in 2007. Jim passed away before
we could complete the album we
started, but last year we finally
completed tracking it and hope
to put it out in the next year.
Both FAME and the original
Muscle Shoals Sound Studio are
open for recording and as tour-
ist destinations, complete with
guides. The past few years have
seen thousands of visitors from
nearly every continent touring
those tiny studios. With their mid-
century furnishings and accom-
panying color schemes, they still
look exactly as they did in the late
’60s. And a new generation of mu-
sicians from the surrounding area is coming
up—artists like Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes,
Dylan Leblanc, and the Secret Sisters, as well
as my own band Drive-By Truckers. I suspect
there will be more to come, all of us staking
our own claims to musical immortality.
Visit oxfordamerican.org/playlists or scan the Spo-
tify code to listen to Patterson Hood’s “Growing Up
Muscle Shoals” playlist. Need help scanning the code?
See p. 160 for instructions.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 115

LINGERING COULD BE YOUR DOOM
The Gospel According to Brother Claude Ely
I
t begins like a rumbling storm.
Brother Claude Ely, surrounded
by a gathering of the Pentecostal-
Holiness faithful who have come
to hear the traveling preacher lead
a revival meeting at the Letcher
County courthouse in Kentucky,
gently plucks the guitar strings and
intones the first three syllables: “There . . .
ain’t . . . no . . .” And then the flood: The word
“grave” drags and rattles in Ely’s throat as he
116 WINTER 2020
I C O N S
B Y D AV I D R A M S E Y
slaps out percussive chords on his acoustic
guitar, “an up-and-down, up-and-down-type
rhythm like you’re painting a house” as a
musician who played with him would later
put it. Backup singers—likely young women
from Ely’s family and followers of his minis-
try—join in the frenzy. To say they’re sing-
ing doesn’t do justice to the noise they’re
making; they sound like pilgrims in distress.
Ely, a former coal miner, sounds like he’s
hollering from the bottom of a cave. The
assembled worshipers begin to clap, on the
off beat in the Pentecostal way, punctuated
by the yips and whoops of the faithful. More
than seven decades later, cooped up in my
house in the midst of a plague, I am yipping
and whooping along. It’s a holy ruckus, a
whole lotta shaking, the sacred music of the
mountains and the hot fever of boogie. Ac-
cording to the Book of Acts, on the day of the
Pentecost, a sound came from Heaven like a
violent wind and filled the room where the
“Crossroad” by Mark Cáceres
apostles were gathered. And there appeared
unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and
it sat upon each of them. And they were all
filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak
with other tongues. It was in this spirit that
Claude Ely sang.
“There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body
Down” was recorded on October 12, 1953, by
King Records—the upstart label from Cincin-
nati that initially specialized in white “hillbilly”
music (“If it’s a King it’s a Hillbilly,” the logo
boasted) but soon began branching out into
r&b. King’s talent scouts had showed up in-
cognito to revival meetings to hear Brother
Claude Ely, a white country evangelist that
some listeners would later mistake for a Black
singer when they heard him on records or the
radio. Ely agreed to let King record a worship
service, and the local judge lent the court-
house as a venue for a revival.1 The building
was packed with worshippers, with the crowd
extending out to the front steps and the lawn.
They could catch the spirit down there, too. It
T hey called him the Gospel Ranger. He had
was hot and stuffy in the courthouse, so the
windows were open. You could hear Ely’s voice
from three streets away.
I first came across Brother Claude Ely and
“Ain’t No Grave” some years back in a piece
by journalist Jimmy McDonough on Gary
Stewart, the honky-tonk crooner born in
Letcher County, one of my all-time favorite
singers. McDonough described a “scratchy
old King gospel 45” that Stewart cherished.
“Stewart used to belt this number out in a
manner that would give pause to even the
most fervent Holiness snake-handler,” he
wrote. “One day he tore through it on the
acoustic and then hissed, ‘I can do ANY-
THANG! Even crawl out of the damn GRAVE
if I want to!” Well. I found the song. Once a
vinyl rarity, it was re-issued on a 1993 CD
from Ace Records, compiling Ely’s King re-
cordings, and is now easily findable online.
Ever since, I have played it over and over
again. By my lights, it is one of the great
American recordings of the century.
Sounds like a train, according to my three-
year-old daughter, who stomps and stamps
and struts through the kitchen when I put it
on. It is one of those songs that commands
motion, that seems to be pulsing not so
much in your ears as in your blood. “What’s
a grave?” she asks me. I don’t answer and she
keeps stomping happily.
1. The October session has sometimes been listed as taking place in a church that Ely pastored, or at a service held at a radio station; after extensive research, Claude Ely’s great-
nephew and biographer Macel Ely concluded that it took place at the courthouse, the first of two services held at the courthouse that Ely recorded for King. Wherever the location of
the October event, King recorded the service uninterrupted, preserving a kind of field recording of Pentecostal worship. King edited out the preaching for the singles issued at the
time; the first 78 sent to radio stations boasted on the label that the “sides were recorded at an actual revival service.”
“Ain’t No Grave” is a resurrection song,
which we might consider a spiritual matter;
think of Paul writing to the Corinthians, “it
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual
body.” But Ely’s performance is so undeniably
physical. He grunts and yowls and bangs,
like a cornered animal. The rapture in Ely’s
hands is a sweaty tumult, an athletic feat.
This is a song about death, but I know of no
performance that so viscerally captures the
endurance of being alive, breath by sacred
breath. It gives pulse and beat and fury to
the words, again from Paul, that everyone
who came to see Ely preach and sing would
have known by heart: Death is swallowed
up in victory. O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
little formal education, only a rudimen-
tary ability to read. But that hardly mattered.
He had heard the call. He had been saved
and sanctified, moved by the Holy Ghost.
He knew the Bible, knew the Word, and for
decades he traveled from town to town to
deliver the good news. He was a big man
with a valorous belly. He had an easy smile,
with an extra glimmer when the light caught
his gold front tooth. He wore a cowboy hat
and a white suit. When he got to town in his
Chevy, he’d drive down the main drag, one
hand on the steering wheel and a bullhorn
in the other: “I’ll have a tent set up . . . come
out and experience the fire and Holy Ghost.”
He was a preacher and a healer. Brother
Claude Ely. They knew his name in the high
country, in the backwoods hollers and moun-
tain towns and coal camps. They came out
to hear him, the way the Gospel came alive
in the way he spoke, frenzy and truth. Come
out and experience the fire. They came to
hear the music that he made, only it wasn’t
his music, he swore—it came from another
place. They came to hear the ferocious shuffle
of his guitar. They came to hear the ragged
ecstasy of his tenor. A taste of Heaven, they
said, so much presence of the Lord. Backslid-
ers would run through the aisles hollering,
believers again. Ely might be so moved that
he would sing a single song for near an hour
straight. He would shimmy and gyrate across
the stage, his shirt soaked through with per-
spiration, young acolytes hopping up to wipe
the sweat from his forehead. The Pentecos-
tals call it getting happy, this delirium and
grace. A woman who saw Brother Claude Ely
when she was a young girl at camp meetings
in Barbourville, Kentucky, recounted later,
“When he would get happy it would be like
just like a river of joy coming out of him.”
“He wasn’t by any means the best singer
that ever lived,” one pastor who preached
with him at revival meetings recalled, “but
he was truly one of the most anointed.”
“Claude had the Holy Ghost on him,” his
wife Rosey said in a 2005 interview, “and
people knowed that.”
Countless such testimonials were col-
lected by his great-nephew Macel Ely, who
published a biography of Ely in 2011. Oth-
ers who remembered Claude Ely fell back
on a common slogan of mountain religion:
“better felt than told.” Among those who
were present for Ely’s performances at the
Letcher County courthouse, some swore that
the recordings do not come close to cap-
turing what took place. One of my favorite
stories about Brother Claude Ely involves a
legendary service at a fellowship meeting
in Wichita, Kansas—three separate record-
ing devices malfunctioned during one song,
which people there figured was a sign that
Ely’s anointed singing was too powerful for
mere technology to keep ahold of.
But we do have these records—from ser-
vices that lasted several hours, King was able
to capture nine songs in October 1953 and then
another six in June 1954 (Ely later put out
LPs recorded in a studio for King and other
labels, which have some gems but lack the
untamed velocity of the early “live” recordings
of Pentecostal-Holiness worship). Ely’s perfor-
mance of “Ain’t No Grave” was included on the
treasured gospel collection Goodbye, Babylon
compiled by archival record company Dust-to-
Digital; in a review for the Weekly Standard,
Matt Labash wrote that Ely sang and played
“with a ferocity that suggests he was getting
sawed in half while performing.”
Asked why so many converted at Ely’s
revivals, one woman who attended the Oc-
tober service told Macel Ely, “When he sung
. . . it was like he was gonna shake it open
right there.”
“There is something ennobling about
watching fallible man . . . stumbling around
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 117
to find God in the dark,” wrote Labash in his
review of Goodbye, Babylon. “Meanwhile,
we are left with the documentation of their
struggle, the bottleneck slides and jug blows
and handclaps of those who left the next
best part of themselves behind on scratchy
vinyl, pointing the way for the rest of us, still
stumbling around in the dark.”
For me, there has been something vivid
and almost hallucinatory about listening to
Ely now, in this time of ambient dread and
what feels like Old Testament scourge.
In June, COVID-19 began to spread at the
assisted living facility where my parents live.
Locked in their room, they gave us updates
on the numbers—those infected, those who
died. They were spared. I did not tell my
parents I was praying for them, because that
is not the way we talk. But I could have told
them that. It was true.
In August, a tropical storm hit and knocked
our power out for the better part of the week.
Out of the mouths of babes, the psalmist says:
My daughter took a look around and told us,
“First there was the sickness. Then there was
the darkness.”
There are so many things I cannot explain
to my daughter. There are so many things I
cannot explain. Just about any account you
read about the development of religion in Ap-
palachia will mention the difficulty of life and
the proximity of death in the impoverished
region. But we might keep in mind that as
far as Claude Ely was concerned, resurrec-
tion and rapture were not metaphors. I am
not saying I’m a convert, I’m just saying that
his voice is in my head: There ain’t no grave
gonna hold my body down. When I hear that
trumpet sound, I’m gonna get up out of the
ground. ’Cause there ain’t no grave gonna
hold my body down.
C laude Ely was born July 21, 1922, in Puck-
etts Creek, a rural Appalachian hollow in
Lee County, Virginia. Population (then and
now): around 145. A good deal of what we
know about his life is thanks to the efforts
of his great-nephew Macel Ely and his book
Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother
Claude Ely, much of which is an oral history
based on interviews with family members and
more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian
and Pentecostal-Holiness communities who
had memories of encountering Ely.
Claude Ely’s great-grandparents settled in
the Appalachian region from Ely, England.
118 WINTER 2020
It was rugged and remote country; accord-
ing to local lore, one early settler in the Ely
clan raised his family in a giant hollow tree.
In 1920, Daniel Ely married Daisy Cooper
and they began attending the Pucketts
Creek Baptist Church, the only church
in the hollow at that time. Daniel had a
Christian upbringing in line with a strain
of the Restoration Movement tradition that
had spread through the American frontier in
the nineteenth century, which looked down
on untamed expressions of emotion (and
musical instruments) in church. Like many
in the community, he was highly suspicious
of the new radical religious movements that
had begun spreading through charismatic
revivals in the early twentieth century,
deriding the outbursts of “holy rollers.”
Macel Ely recounts that “by 1921, several
of the women and a handful of men in the
hollow began experiencing fits of shaking,
dancing, screaming, and speaking in un-
known tongues during the church’s altar
services.” At some point, Daisy—who was
raised Baptist but had family connections
to the Methodist church and had grown up
hearing stories of fiery revivals and camp
meetings from the old days—fell in with the
holy rollers and started attending their small
meetings, full of clapping, shrieking, and
wild music. As she explained to Macel Ely,
at one of these prayer meetings, God “put
fire in my bones” and she began speaking in
tongues and hollering and dancing in a fit
of religious ecstasy. Daniel was so alarmed
by his wife’s behavior that he locked her in
the house, partly in fear that he might catch
whatever was afflicting her.
Eventually, they came to an agreement:
Daisy could attend the Holiness prayer meet-
ings if Daniel joined her. They went to an all-
night prayer meeting, where Daisy testified
that the Lord “sanctified me real good, and
yes . . . filled me with the fire and Holy Ghost
just the other night. It’s something this old
world couldn’t give to me, and I ain’t about
to let the world take it away.” She again fell
into a fit, only this time, Daniel felt the same
spirit. Overcome by warmth and shaking, he
began speaking in tongues.
From that night on, Daniel was a holy
roller, too. A few months later, Daniel and
Daisy had a child. They named him Claude.
W hen Claude Ely was around twelve years
old, he became sick with tuberculosis
and the country doctor told him he would
not survive. Here is how Claude Ely described
what happened next, in the liner notes for
an LP he recorded for King Records in 1962:
“I was taken ill with T.B. and was given up
to die by the doctors. They told my father to
take me home and let me have my way and
trouble me in no way. Around about a week
later, as I laid on my bed, I felt the pains as
they left my chest and body and I turned on
my side and went to sleep.
“I had never played any music or sung any
before, but as I awakened the next morning
I heard the sound of music. Someone in the
house was playing a mouth harp. I asked for
it as a child would and wanted to play and
sing. They gave it to me and I began playing
music on this harp. My uncle had ordered a
guitar from a mail order catalog and he got
it on the same day after I had received my
healing. . . . He brought it to my bed and laid
it across my chest and by the hand of God
my fingers began to play the chords and a
voice came in my mouth to sing. From that
day to this I have been playing the guitar
and singing.”
Ely’s survival and musical gifts were seen
as a miracle among the local community,
Macel Ely reports: “They believed the very
hand of God must be on the child, whose pur-
pose and calling were much larger than life.”
It was during this time, the story goes, as a
bedridden adolescent facing death from tu-
berculosis, that Claude Ely composed “There
Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.”
(One family friend recalled that when the
family was gathered to Ely’s bedside, “he
said, ‘I’m not going to die.’ And he started
singing the song.”)
This is the story that Ely told his whole
life—a story memorably featured on a long
segment on Ely and “Ain’t No Grave” on NPR
in 2011—and there is no particular reason to
doubt that something like that happened.
But the song’s origins are murky. Variations
of the phrase in the song’s title may well have
been used in Negro spirituals dating back at
least to the nineteenth century, and several
versions of “Ain’t No Grave” were recorded by
Black singers in the 1940s. Folklorist Stephen
Wade—who spent years studying the song for
the 2015 book The Beautiful Music All Around
Us, his magisterial investigation of a selection
of Library of Congress field recordings—iden-
tifies a 1933 hymnal from the Church of God
in Christ, a predominantly Black Pentecostal-
Holiness denomination, as the earliest known
appearance of the song in print.
Explore McKinney
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 The first time “Ain’t No Grave” appeared
on a record came when folklorists Alan Lo-
max and Lewis Jones recorded Bozie Stur-
divant, a domestic worker likely then living
in Helena, Arkansas, singing “Ain’t No Grave
Can Hold My Body Down” at the Silent Grove
Baptist Church in Clarksdale, Mississippi,
in July 1942. The Sturdivant recording was
released as a 78 the following year as part of
the Library of Congress compilation Negro
Religious Songs and Services. Five days be-
fore recording Sturdivant, Lomax and Jones
also recorded the Friendly Five Harmony
Singers, a gospel group from eleven miles
north of Clarksdale, singing a traditional
jubilee gospel rendition, “There’s No Grave
Can Hold My Body Down,” which wound
up in the Library of Congress Archive of
American Folk Song.
Sturdivant’s version, a fervent blues with
dazzling vocal flights and dips, is a remark-
able and beautiful recording in its own right.
Backed by the quiet humming of gospel quar-
tet singers, Sturdivant’s performance—while
rooted in traditional sacred singing—brings
a cosmopolitan flair to the Delta church. The
Library of Congress liner notes describe it as
jazz singing, but it’s really a kind of proto-
soul music. Wade documents that Sturdivant
had previously encountered the Chicago
sound of the Soul Stirrers—listen close, and
you can hear the seeds of Otis Redding or
Sam Cooke (at one climactic falsetto turn, I
even thought of Michael Jackson).
For all of Sturdivant’s stylized bending of
the notes, his rendition is subtle, marked by
austere Baptist restraint. Two other versions
of “Ain’t No Grave” released in 1947—first
by the Two Gospel Keys, then by Sister Ro-
setta Tharpe—begin to feature the more
demonstrative incantations of the Church of
God in Christ style, and conjure some of the
shuffling rhythms that in Claude Ely’s rendi-
tion reach a crazed gallop. Wade also notes
a more obscure recording, an unpublished
field recording made in 1946 in Winchester,
Massachusetts, of a daughter of a former
slave—a tantalizing hint, if not proof, that
the “Ain’t No Grave” song refrain has much
deeper roots than we know from the histori-
cal record.
These various recordings have significant
musical differences from Ely’s rendition,
but the songs seem to draw from the same
well. Some aspects of Ely’s verses and lyrics
are divergent (whereas others feature the
resurrection of Jesus, Ely instead includes
additional details in his vivid depiction of
120 WINTER 2020
the rapture; Sturdivant’s version uniquely
includes a scene of Jesus on the cross). Ma-
cel Ely reports that hundreds of people he
interviewed remembered Ely singing the
song in the 1930s. Claude Ely’s relatives from
the time told Macel that Ely’s boyhood song
spread quickly in the Pentecostal-Holiness
community, and Macel told me that the Ely
family had close ties to the Church of God
in Christ, which produced the 1933 hymnal
(when Claude Ely would have been eleven)
that was sold by mail from a church elder
in Arkansas.
Macel Ely argues that “the songs may
have been birthed from the same idea, but
Ely’s and Sturdivant’s compositions are not
the same song.” Wherever a listener falls on
this question, it is difficult to conclude that
Claude Ely’s “Ain’t No Grave” was a wholly
original composition. Wade believes that
the appearance of the song in print in 1933
suggests that it circulated in the oral tradi-
tion long before that. But he was at pains to
clarify that he is not disputing the truth of
the Ely family stories. Such stories, after all,
are themselves an invaluable piece of the
folk tradition.
For me, the force of Ely’s originality—the
pepper and electricity of his rendition of
“Ain’t No Grave”—is, in any case, not di-
minished if the source material came from
tradition. Wade agreed. “Due to Claude Ely’s
extraordinary, high voltage interpretation,
it found a whole new life in tradition,” he
told me. “So this song about renewal found
rebirth all over again.”
It’s ultimately unknowable whether Ely
encountered Sturdivant’s or other versions or
whether others encountered Ely’s. I would say
that the safest guess is that “Ain’t No Grave”
was, in some form, a traditional sacred song
that served as a kind of template around
which singers could come up with their own
riffs—or you might say preaching.
In Bozie Sturdivant’s hands, it was a song of
hope for Black Baptists in the Delta that shim-
mered with new sounds and new possibilities.
In the hands of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who
learned the song from her mother and sang
it at her funeral, it was a jukebox scorcher, a
raucous sound that seemed equally at home
in the pulpit and at the medicine show.
And in the hands of a young boy on his death-
bed in a hollow in Pucketts Creek, it was a
wild spark of life—a message, he believed,
from God—that became a defiant anthem in
the Pentecostal-Holiness community in the
death-haunted mountains. And the early sound
of rockabilly, though that wasn’t a word yet,
which would travel much farther still.
I n 1940, at eighteen, Claude Ely enlisted in
the United States Army, ultimately serving
in World War II (where, at least according to
family lore, he developed a friendship with
fellow solider Joe Louis, who would eventu-
ally become heavyweight boxing champion
of the world—Ely later told a cousin that
Louis “teached me to use my fists real good”).
While in the army, he had begun exchanging
letters with a friend of his sister’s, a redhead
named Rosey. He called her his “Virginia
Rose,” and they married during one of his
stints back home. When he left the service in
1945, he returned to Pucketts Creek and went
back to the same job he had before the army,
working in the coal mines. In September of
1946, Claude and Rosey had their first child.
Claude Ely believed that he was called to
go into full-time ministry. He felt that upon
his return home, he had been “baptized
real good in the Holy Ghost and fire,” and
the Lord was asking him to go out into the
world and preach. But he worried about
whether he would be able to support his
new family. Around this time, there was an
accident at the mines, and Ely was rescued
from a collapsed cave. When he was carried
out on a stretcher and came to, he saw his
cousin praying and speaking in tongues
over his body. Ely believed that his life had
been spared for a purpose. In the spring
of 1947, he was ordained as a minister at a
Holiness church in Stoney Fork, Kentucky,
and he soon began his career as a travelling
evangelist and singer.
Ely’s ministry began with his fellow coal
miners. “He was one of us,” one miner re-
counted to Macel Ely. “We knowed he loved
us and cared about us. Sure, he preached the
hell and brimstone to us, but he also got our
toes tapping when he’d sing to us. We loved
him for doing it.” Ely traveled throughout the
region to sing and preach, including to coal
mining camps that few others reached. He
began preaching and singing on local church
radio stations, and eventually started doing
spots for secular stations as well. In 1953, he
started hosting a weekly half-hour Sunday
show, The Gospel Ranger Show, at WTCW,
a new station just outside Whitesburg, Ken-
tucky. In addition to performing at WTCW,
Ely also did episodes recorded live at church
services in Cumberland, Kentucky, via a wire
running to a local station. After the notoriety
of the King recordings and “Ain’t No Grave,”
which proved an unexpected hit, The Gospel
Ranger Show was syndicated widely on sta-
tions throughout the region.
Ely eventually pastored several churches in
the area, but he was best known for his work
as an itinerant evangelist, holding revivals
throughout the South and later across the
country, by his account preaching in all forty-
eight contiguous states, as well as Alaska.
Macel Ely reports that among those sure to
come out and see Ely when he came to town
was Gladys Presley, Elvis’s mother, who also
sent correspondence and financial support
to Ely’s ministry, according to Rosey Ely.
Some remembered Gladys bringing Elvis to
Ely’s tent revivals in his youth, a story that
gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it.
These accounts are based on recollections
told to Macel Ely, both from people who were
there, including Elvis’s boyhood pastor, and
people like Sleepy LaBeef, the late rockabilly
musician, who heard stories about Ely from
Elvis himself. Some recounted Gladys and the
young Elvis being blessed at a revival by Ely,
who laid hands on them and prayed for them;
others recalled that Elvis was moved to shake
by Ely’s music. LaBeef long shared such tales
that he heard from Presley. He was quoted
in a British music magazine in 1983 stating
that, as a youth, “Elvis followed Claude Ely
from one tent meeting to another.” LaBeef
told Macel Ely that Presley often told a story
about a late night after a show in Texarkana
in the 1950s, when Presley brought Jerry Lee
Lewis, Johnny Cash, and June Carter to see
Ely lead an all-night Holiness singing at a
revival on the outskirts of town.
As with all things Claude Ely, it’s hard to
know precisely where the line is between
fact and folklore. At the very least, Elvis and
Gladys apparently owned Brother Claude
Ely 45s, which remain in the private collec-
tion housed at Graceland, including “There
Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down”
and “There’s a Leak in This Old Building,”
which may have been the source material
for Presley’s “We’re Gonna Move.” Presley,
like Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, came
up in or around the Pentecostal church, and
Ely was well known in that community. They
likely encountered his music; they certainly
were saturated in his style of worship (one
of Johnny Cash’s last recordings before his
death was a cover of Ely’s “Ain’t No Grave”).
“It’s sanctified singing like Ely’s that we hear
echoes of in Elvis and Little Richard, in James
Brown and especially in Jerry Lee Lewis,”
writes New York Times editor Dana Jennings in
his book Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and
Country Music. “But not a one of them ever
burned on record, not even Jerry Lee Lewis,
the way that Ely burns on these recordings.”
Amen. Few singers of the time so chan-
neled the ecstatic fire that was destined to
change the course of music and culture. You
can hear the boogie in the brimstone, the fe-
rocious country spirit, the rollicking rhythm.
Here I must tread lightly. Ely himself un-
derstood his music as gospel. As Jennings
put it, “The main difference is this: Most
musicians were merely called by fame, by
the Opry. Brother Claude Ely had been called
by God.” He never claimed to have a hand in
rock & roll, and was himself deeply skeptical
of secular music (Ely turned down King’s
requests to go on tour with secular artists,
reportedly including the Famous Flames,
featuring James Brown). Be that as it may.
The way Elvis moved his hips was not so
different from what he might have seen at a
Pentecostal revival; the way Little Richard
shouted and wailed is not so different from
ecstatic worship. You can hear it in Bozie
Sturdivant and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and
Claude Ely. You can hear it coming.
But let us not get lost in antecedents, in
projecting a future onto the past. Brother
Claude Ely was a comfort to so many, in his
time. And he is a comfort to me. I have lived
a mostly soft life, a lucky life, with so many
blessings. Which can make it hard to look
squarely at this difficult season. Is it the spirit
or the Spirit that throttles me when I play
“Ain’t No Grave”? I do not know. I can only tell
you that when I play this song, I feel somehow
that I am there at that old-time revival, I feel
like dancing, feel like getting happy, and I
do—there in the living room, my troubles
and my fears small but still troubling, still
fearful—and I am unburdened in the char-
ismatic revelry of this song, that something
is released in me, something hopeful that
endures. That I feel like new. And then my
toddler tells me to play it just once more, to
turn up the volume this time. Louder, she
says, and she’s right: Play it loud.
W hen Brother Claude Ely was ordained,
a woman known as a prophet in the
mountain community told him that she had
a message from God—that his days would be
numbered. Certainly, he lived his life as a man
in a hurry. Death is coming, get right with
God. He hustled as far and wide as possible
to spread this message, as forcefully as he
could. “Lingering,” he preached, “could be
your doom.” That urgency and acceleration
ring clearly in his music, which helps explain
how the sound of his ministry hitched itself to
an altogether different revival: rock & roll. A
happy coincidence, perhaps. The Holy Ghost
moves in mysterious ways.
On May 7, 1978, Ely was performing the
gospel standard “Where Could I Go But to
the Lord?” at Charity Tabernacle in Newport,
Kentucky, when he had a heart attack and
fell off the organ bench. “He was just play-
ing the organ and singin’ and just fell over,
I reckon,” Rosey Ely told Macel. “I couldn’t
get to him, ’cause the crowd of people . . . all
I knowed was to scream his name.” Ely was
later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Ely’s final preaching and singing were
captured on an amateur recording by one
of the congregants, and released the follow-
ing year as one side of a vinyl record by Ely’s
family—a harrowing recording that includes
the shocked wails and prayers from the con-
gregation after his collapse. The record was
titled, Where Could I Go But to the Lord?
It does not take a prophet to tell us that
our days are numbered. We know it. The
ancients knew it, too: For it is soon cut off,
and we fly away. . . . So teach us to number
our days. This is our baffling predicament,
our cosmic joke: We have been gifted this
utterly remarkable life, housed in a body
that will not last.
In what may have been the first of Paul’s
letters, he wrote to the Thessalonians, nearly
2,000 years ago: For the Lord himself shall
descend from heaven with a shout, with the
voice of the archangel, and with the trump
of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise
first: then we which are alive and remain
shall be caught up together with them in
the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and
so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore
comfort one another with these words.
Claude Ely would have struggled to read
that ancient text on the page, but he knew
those words, in the mannered meter of King
James’s translators. Such words were as much
a part of the folk tradition as music, part of
the tapestry of everyday lives. Ely sang, in
absolute conviction, this gospel, this wild
news about our souls. And how he sang! More
than forty years after he died, I am filling my
own numbered days with his song. Can’t no
grave hold him down.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 121
 I C O N S

THE WAY
THEY STRUT
BY A L I C E R A N DA L L

Still from America, by Garrett Bradley. Bradley’s exhibition Projects: Garrett Bradley
122 WINTER 2020 is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from November 21, 2020–March 21, 2021
M aps can tell lies. Let us consider
the ways: How a Southern blues
map that only includes spaces
east of the Mississippi River,
south of the Mason-Dixon Line,
does not tell the whole story. How a Black
music map that only sounds like the blues
and what that genre birthed misses some
things.
That kind of map keeps us from noticing
that Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin played
on “Blue Yodel #9” when Jimmie Rodgers
recorded it in California. That kind of map,
focused on a country-soul triangle of Nash-
ville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals, keeps us
anchored in a place where the white audi-
ence dominates and white economic power
controls Black aesthetics.
But now is a time of reckoning. It is a time
for reclaiming Black art aesthetics and ac-
claiming lost, erased, and overlooked Black
artists, who daily and historically endured
emotional, physical, and economic assaults
while (ironically) sustaining others with their
sound.
Every time I listen to Chicago-born LaVern
Baker’s extraordinary 1958 album, LaVern
Baker Sings Bessie Smith, I start thinking
about Smith singing “Nashville Women’s
Blues.” Soon I find myself nodding as Smith
proclaims, “The way they strut it really ain’t
no bluff.” Then quick as Joe Louis’s fist, I
am thinking about how both Baker and her
aunt and mentor, Memphis Minnie, moved
to Detroit to make a home among, and music
for, a powerful Black audience composed
largely of Black factory folk, many of whom
were, just like Joe Louis (who Minnie im-
mortalized in “Joe Louis Strut”), straight
up from Alabama.
After that listening, I start plotting new
points on a new map: a country-soul five-
pointed star. I start thinking about “up” South.
I f I know you well and you ask me where I
was born, I proudly declare Detroit, Ala-
bama. The government identifies Michigan
as my birth state. Michigan is printed on
my birth certificate and on my passport.
Michigan is my “government state.”
The term “government name” is used in
certain circles to indicate that the name that
is printed on your Social Security card and
other state-issued documents may have no
bearing on the lived experience of the real-
ity of your life.
When I was playing on my grandmother’s
lawn on a Detroit street called Hazelwood, an
open-bed truck piled high with watermelons
would roll down Hazelwood with little brown
boys sitting atop the produce sing-song an-
nouncing they were selling “juicy fruit, juicy
fruit,” a slice for a nickel or a dime, depend-
ing on how big the slice was.
When it was time for me to take an after-
noon nap on a patchwork quilt at my grand-
mother’s, someone would put an album on
the stereo to soothe me. My favorite toddler
tune? Big Maybelle on the stereo talk-singing
about “kicking in the barn.” And when I
sang along it was in the round, soft, Black
Alabama drawl I inherited from my family.
Up South, even children knew Big Maybelle
sang “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” before
Jerry Lee Lewis.
My first taste of solid food was yellow
cornbread crumbled into warm milk and
baked in a skillet that had been toted north
in a suitcase, a skillet slicked with bacon
grease. My first swig of pop was Coca-Cola
and if I wasn’t hungry for breakfast, Dear,
my father’s Alabama-born mother, served
me the breakfast of hardworking Black Up
South champions. No, it wasn’t Wheaties; it
was a swig of Coke and an aspirin.
My Detroit was a place where grandmoth-
ers called Dear and Ma’Dear cultivated rose
gardens, and froze flower petals and fruit
into the ice they floated in their sweet tea
after digging little goldfish ponds to create
a landscape that looked something like the
land they left—because they had to leave,
because the South, sweet as it could some-
times be, refused to stop oppressing them.
You come Up South to build a better
South. You come Up South to celebrate a
reality that is almost impossible to celebrate
or often even see down South—that Afri-
can and African-American aesthetics are
the backbone of three great Southern arts:
preaching, food, and music.
A better South, the Up South, insists that
Black artistry and industry be recognized
for their excellence, and that the measure
of Black art be located in the pleasure of
Black audience.
Nobody knew this better than LaVern
Baker and no place provided a more sig-
nificant Black audience than the Up South
metropolis that was the Motor City.
T oday, call me an author, call me a biog-
rapher, call me a country-soul cartog-
rapher, and then follow me to some new
geographies. I’m talking Chicago. I’m talking
Detroit. I’m talking as far as the Philippines.
The best way to get the message right is to
tell a story.
The works of early blueswomen inspired
me to use my fifth novel, Black Bottom
Saints, to shine light on notable Black
women singers and songwriters who func-
tioned as public intellectuals but were not
recognized as public intellectuals: notably
Ethel Waters, Eartha Kitt, Della Reese, and
LaVern Baker.
Black Bottom Saints is written in the fic-
tionalized voice of Ziggy Johnson, a real-life
Detroit tastemaker, emcee, educator, and
entertainment columnist for Detroit’s great
Black newspaper the Michigan Chronicle.
Please sit back and let Ziggy tell you a story
about LaVern Baker, patron saint of: globe-
trotters, the robbed, the resurrected, and
seekers of resurrection.
THE SOUND OF HER
Excerpted from Black Bottom Saints
T here are all kinds of theft. Sometimes
petty theft can be pretty. And there
are lazy little larcenies with killing sting.
Sometimes it’s just calling a theft petty that
bruises. And every different kind of theft
leaves a different taste in the mouth. My
dear friend, my sweetest girl, LaVern Baker
knew so much about theft, the sound, the
sight, the taste, the feel, the scent of theft,
one day she stole herself. She left Detroit,
left Motown, stole away to freedom, via a
Far East Asia USO show.
Everybody knows about Josephine Baker,
and I knew her too, but my La Baker was
LaVern, who started off in show business, in
my first business, as Little Miss Sharecrop-
per. Lord have mercy, today! LaVern Baker
started off as Little Miss Sharecropper and
she won’t make it home from the South China
Sea to say goodbye to me. But first and for
a good long while singing from the stage of
the Flame she was the toast of Detroit City
when Detroit was Black Camelot.
LaVern Baker’s kiss, that is a girl kiss I will
miss. When she started gigging, she was mak-
ing three dollars a week. I lived to see my La
Baker banking five hundred dollars a week.
I lived to see her have children completely
unrelated to her named for her. I lived to see
Al Green manage her or come as close to
managing LaVern as anyone could do. I lived
to see her opening in New York at the Baby
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 123
Grand Lounge. Al got that for her and he got
her a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955,
just before Christmas. November 20, 1955,
was the date. The event was so important to
me even the fog of illness doesn’t shroud that
date, and that’s without keeping a TV Guide
clipping. I see clearly those four dresses,
gorgeous garments, her devoted friend Al
Green had made for LaVern, just in case Sul-
livan put her in one more spot on the show
than she was promised. Or Sullivan kept her
around to play the next week. But Ed Sullivan
never did right by LaVern the way he did by
Della Reese. Our LaVern wore the hell out of
those dresses even if she didn’t wear them all
on network television. Even if you had to be
in the smoky room to see her, to hear her, to
dream, only dream, of touching and tasting
her. LaVern, she didn’t give nothing away,
often or easy, except her sound.
The sound of her. That’s where the trouble
began and how, eventually, somewhere in the
Far East, maybe Thailand, maybe Vietnam,
maybe the Philippines, the trouble ends.
She has a thrilling voice. Even at the begin-
ning as Little Miss Sharecropper, it was a
voice that froze and thrilled a room. I had a
dream once (bet the number based on the
dream, and the number hit) that featured
LaVern picking cotton, a girl of ten or eleven,
working in an Alabama field, and as she
and the others around her worked, LaVern
started to sing high and loud and everyone
stopped picking cotton. And then they got
beat for stopping and she got beat for sing-
ing. But LaVern kept singing and the other
hands kept listening, swaying and crying,
because LaVern’s voice was what we called
then “true.” Those Negroes thought they
were hearing one of God’s own bright and
brown angels right in the middle of a hungry
and dusty Alabama acre.
LaVern was troubled by the theft of her
beauty. The sun had burned lines into her
face, poverty had mangled her teeth and
mottled her skin. I’ve seen her look into a
mirror and say right out loud, “I got robbed.”
If she got robbed, she must have started
off richer than rich. I tried to tell her many
times she was so beautiful. But all she would
believe was that her voice was beautiful and
maybe sometimes she believed she was her
voice. Oh, my dear girl, my Little Miss Share-
cropper, my La Baker, my LaVern: You were
so much more than your amazing, stolen
voice. You are my favorite act of self-inven-
tion and self-reinvention. You are my North
Star and you vanished when I needed you
124 WINTER 2020
most—insisting, dear liar, that I didn’t need
you at all. You are gone and I am dying and
I am not sure that is a coincidence.
And I am glad you are gone. Glad you
did what you needed you to do—not what
someone else, even me, needed you to do.
You became, in this last iteration, a flashing
light of self-determination. I imagine one
of my girls from the dancing school, one
of my ballet babes, leading the kind of big
and adventurous life that may one day lead
across the world, to the South China Sea
to kiss your cheek for me. When that kiss
comes, LaVern, let it matter.
Let yourself remember sending me breath-
less postcards from Italy with directions to
the postman, “D . . . liver . . . D.letter.D . . .
sooner D better.” You made your preferences
known. You gave instruction. It was not an act
of spoilage, it was a generosity; the postman
was included in your conversation.
Somewhere in Europe you picked up a
title. You came back calling yourself Count-
ess. In that phase of your manifestations,
Al Green gave you $200 to buy a French
poodle. Twelve hours later you were crying
because the French poodle had run away. I
thought he had been stolen. Nobody wanted
to tell you. Better to think the pooch had
run for her freedom. You got a new dog
and named him Tweedle Lee Dee and I can
remember you walking Tweedle Lee Dee
down the John R. You never let that pooch
off his leash even inside.
You didn’t cry over the large and obvious
larcenies like in 1958 when Al Green died.
God stole him from you. So many times, that
man saved you from yourself. When you
came back from Italy and you were playing
the Apollo Theater and you hired a maid
and a butler and I came to see you in your
dressing room and had to explain to two
strangers, the maid and the butler, who I
was. No one could see you until they got past
them. Then Al showed up and fired them. Al
saved you from your pretensions.
And before that there was Georgia Gibbs.
I hate Georgia Gibbs like I hate chitterlings
that don’t get cleaned right. Georgia Gibbs
singing LaVern’s notes and inflections are
dirty chitterlings (something that should
not exist, but does exist) that nauseate me.
Georgia Gibbs was a white woman who
called herself a singer who copied note for
note LaVern’s songs and made more money
copying LaVern than LaVern made being
LaVern. Georgia Gibbs stole LaVern’s sound.
Stole her songs. Said they were her own.
LaVern hated Georgia Gibbs almost as much
as I did. But not as much. She was mad as
hell at her. But she felt the compliment in the
theft. If she had hated her as much as I did,
she wouldn’t have been so agile in rebuffing
her. Hate makes you stiff.
In 1957 LaVern took out a life insurance
policy and named Georgia Gibbs the ben-
eficiary. Then my dear lady wrote Georgia
a letter and called her out by her first name.
“Dear Georgia, insomuch as I will be flying
over quite a stretch of blue water on my
forthcoming Australia tour, I’m taking out
an insurance policy and making you the
beneficiary. If I die. Your career dies.” But
my baby didn’t leave it at the humorous
jab. She sued in court. She didn’t win but
she sued for copyright infringement. That
is my LaVern. Most singers have no idea of
what intellectual property is, or that their
phrasing and singing creates something that
they own. LaVern Baker understood this.
LaVern, in her own way, tone and range,
was a singer of the caliber of Ella Fitzgerald
or Sarah Vaughan, my Sassy. But she didn’t
get the acclaim they deserved and got. Two
years ago, I was supposed to go to Sassy’s
show. I wrote in my column that Baby Doll,
Little Miss Office Worker, after a full day in
the Executive Suite had managed to come
home and fix ham hocks, string beans, and
cornbread. After I had eaten my fill, while
waiting to go out, I turned on The Big Val-
ley to catch a little Barbara Stanwyck and I
was off to slumberland. The point was, and
no one got it, Stanwyck couldn’t keep me
interested. If LaVern had been on the TV, I
would have stayed awake.
After her Al Green died, she moved from
the Orchid Room in Kansas City to the Flame
Show Bar and then on to a homecoming of
sorts at Roberts Lounge in Chicago—but it
was a peripatetic and increasingly frustrat-
ing time in my LaVern’s life.
Like when Rudy Rutherford had his clari-
net stolen and he wanted the mouthpiece
back and didn’t get it. And in 1967, the year
of the rebellion, I had a record player and
speakers stolen from the school. I took it as a
sign. I didn’t take it in my stride like LaVern
had taken all the thefts she had experienced.
Until she didn’t. LaVern took off. I’m
not sure how it was she had heard of the
Philippines but that’s where she told me she
was truly headed when she left on that USO
show. She had worked abroad, Australia and
Italy, but I think it was a Black serviceman
who told her about the Philippines and
 W o odl and
Garvan ens
Gard

ARKANSAS IS THE NATURAL CHOICE FOR SCENIC BEAUTY. BUT THAT'S JUST THE BEGINNING.
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the good life she could have there. It was
some strange kind of do-over. She would
have servants that she could actually afford
and new clothes all the time because help,
clothes, and food were cheap, cheap, cheap
in the Philippines. In search of an easier
street, she went globetrotting.
She quit us. Chasing a place where Geor-
gia Gibbs couldn’t hear her. She quit us.
She stopped recording. People in Detroit
counted on LaVern to turn theft to beauty.
And she quit us.
She returned to singing in a room full of
uniforms like she had done when she was first
starting out and the soldiers were dressed for
or returning from World War II. She found
and discovered belonging in a place where
war always seemed right around the corner,
and a revolution, and a world of spies, and
Muslims and Christians, a place more differ-
ent than many from Alabama would think
possible. A place where she could forget
Georgia Gibbs, forget sharing a bill with
Little Miss Cornshucks, forget once being
Little Miss Sharecropper.
When she first started singing she per-
formed in overalls and a strawhat, in the
clothes she had worn when she worked the
fields, to honor those still working in the
fields who she refused to forget.
I am forgetting. My name has been printed
on thousands upon thousands of poster-bills.
I have a single poster-bill in the apartment I
share with Baby Doll. It advertises the Flame
Show Bar. At the top is the word Flame in
those bold burning letters and then the ad-
dress 4264 John R at the corner of Canfield.
The Flame was right down the street from
the Gotham Hotel. The name Tamara Hayes
in the biggest letters, then Andre D’Orsay
and Nellie Hill and Leonard and Leonard.
My name is in a box, Joe “Ziggy” Johnson,
Comedy MC. Our Host was Morris Wasser-
man. Just above my name the letters that
read: Little Miss Sharecropper Back from a
Coast-to-Coast Tour. And there was a num-
ber to call for Reservations. Back in that day
people came out in droves to come see us.
Don’t let this get forgot.
We were an us, LaVern and I. We were an
us. I wish I could see you one last time before
I go upstairs. Slappy White says you’re dead.
I know he’s lying. If you were dead, I would
feel it in my bones, the way you are going
to feel it when I die. We are an us. One of my
girls, sometime not soon, will go out roving
in the world, like I am teaching them to do,
using you as an example, and she’s going to
126 WINTER 2020
stumble on you, and hug your neck one last
time for Ziggy. Kiss my child for me. Did I
say that already? Let me say it again. Kiss
my child for me.
J ust look at LaVern Baker’s map. From
Chicago to Kansas City, from New York
to Australia, from Detroit to the Philippines,
her country-soul cartography re-shapes
her music’s center around the power and
promise of the Black audience. Around the
sustained and sustaining achievements of
Black blueswomen who went globetrotting
far beyond Dixie, taking their aesthetic of
strut and witness with them.
A few years before I published my first
novel, The Wind Done Gone, in 2001, Angela
Davis published, in 1998, Blues Legacies and
Black Feminism, a groundbreaking analysis
of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holi-
day, in which she states, “the blues categori-
cally refrains from relegating to the margins
any person or behavior.”
And listening to Rainey, Smith, and Hol-
iday after reading Davis, I heard that an
aspect of feminist blues performance was
a willingness to witness, a willingness to
carry forward language, observations, and
history that would be lost, stolen, distorted,
if some Black woman did not make a place
for it in her art.
Reading Angela Davis, I determined I
would become, or die trying to become,
a blues novelist. For me a significant part
of that tradition is shining a light on blues-
women before me. I made a space for LaVern
Baker in my art inspired by the space she
made for Bessie Smith in her art.
The first song on LaVern Baker Sings Bes-
sie Smith, “Gimme a Pigfoot,” is a complex
celebration of female desire. Desire for coun-
try food, beer, and corn liquor. Desire to hol-
ler and to whisper coexist in this song, even
as desire to disarm evolves into desire to de-
mand and control (“check all your razors and
your guns”). Competing desires get purred
into an invitation to “shim-sham-shimmy”
that announces both a desire to dance and
the presence of a woman unashamed to want.
She is taking up space in the world and
making space in the world by naming what
she, body and spirit, wants.
LaVern hollers, growls, whispers, talks,
mini-scats, and swings. LaVern’s voice, fol-
lowing the map of Bessie’s genius phrasings,
is an instrument capable of complex and
rapid rhythm change-ups, and the creation
of true dulcet tones.
Bessie’s brilliant original is crowbar steel,
calico, and burlap; LaVern’s version is silk
and burlap. For me, the contrast without
contradiction in LaVern’s performance is
a magnificent vocal enactment of the Up
South blues truth that life is bitter and sweet.
Syllable and sound LaVern builds on
Bessie while paying tribute, copying little,
honoring all, transforming the original, ac-
knowledging the original, while matching
Smith’s originality with her own. This is both
profound call and response and profound
calling out of the singer, Georgia Gibbs,
who copied LaVern without acknowledg-
ing her and without adding anything to the
cultural conversation. Before the battle was
declared, LaVern Baker fired an important
shot in cultural appropriation wars.
LaVern Baker Sings Bessie Smith should
be studied as a significant text on the line
between honoring and appropriation. And
LaVern’s days in the Philippines should be
acknowledged as proof of a global south.
I n 1986, after moving from Motown to Music
City (with stops in D.C. and at Harvard in
between), I arrived in the Philippines as a
young bride of a foreign service officer.
The touches of home I discovered so very
far away from Up South or down South?
Aretha Franklin’s raised-in-Detroit, record-
ed-in-Muscle-Shoals voice on albums and
cassettes toted halfway ’round the world by
every variety of American and other expatri-
ates; and epic tales, told by a wider variety
of folk, of nights listening to LaVern Baker,
Memphis Minnie’s niece, sing jazz, blues,
and her own early rock hits, and scat along
to “Strutting with Some Barbecue” live in an
officer’s club way up on Subic Bay.
I determined to make a pilgrimage. When
I drove up to Subic, not sure if LaVern Baker
would be performing or not, I was certain of
this: if LaVern was strutting ’cross the stage,
Little Miss Sharecropper, Memphis Minnie,
Bessie Smith, and Lil Hardin were strutting,
too. Looking for LaVern I found a larger world,
where love is the strut and hate is the stumble.
The old map lost LaVern when she landed
in the Pacific. Consider this an invitation to
go exploring with a new map in hand.
A portion of this piece is excerpted from the book Black
Bottom Saints: A Novel by Alice Randall. Copyright
© 2020 by Alice Randall. Reprinted by permission
of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Find your match.
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128 WINTER 2020 “Queen of the Night” (2018), by Kevin Beasley. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York
 I C
JESSYE NORMAN CISTERN
TIME TO DRESS FOR FALL
B Y G A B R I E L L E C A LV O C O R E S S I
for Randall Kenan
“The best of friends are sure to part one day.”
I can’t remember who said it but it’s true. I wish
the little church next door was there in person
so I could hear them singing. I really do.
I took my light body out to see and marveled
at the white clapboard and the door. The red
shingle roof’s covered with moss since no
one’s here to see it. Dust to dust. Or shingle to
moss. The chimney’s leaning towards the ground.
We didn’t know if they would like us, me
and Angeline. Little church next door in
North Carolina. Pentecostal. I invited the pastor
and his wife to tea. Like my grandmother taught me.
Turns out we like each other very much.
Randall, I was supposed to write another poem.
But let’s be honest we know I haven’t written
in two years. Or maybe more. I’ve been trying.
I’ve been taking the bus and listening to Jessye
Norman. This is where I’m supposed to acknowledge
the pandemic. And how long it’s been
since I’ve ridden the bus. Two friends
have died in the last three weeks and neither
one from COVID. What a stupid sounding
word to cram into a poem. One time my
grandfather told me how Jessye Norman
sang so well that all the cast behind her
was crying in…was it Vienna? I was really
young. He used to drive me on the tractor
while we listened to her singing on the outdoor
speakers and I’d think how nice it would be
to be so good at something you’d make
everyone stand still and cry. For joy. For
wonder. I’ve been trying what seems my
whole life since I stopped writing to describe
the feeling of waking up in the darkness
to the feeling of my grandmother’s mink
coat tickling my cheek. Her leaning down
to kiss me after her four-hour drive home
O N S
from the opera. You would not tell me, Think
about the minks. Though we would of course
know about the minks. Time passes. If I said
she smelled like Oscar de la Renta you’d know
just what I mean. And I could tell you how I
sat behind my grandfather on the tractor
listening to Les Troyens and you’d know
just what I mean. I’d say, “What is happening now?”
at the top of my lungs. Not knowing French.
And my grandfather would say, “Everyone’s dead
but the ushers.” Or: “Things are going from bad
to worse.” His voice rising over the engine. Which he’d
cut at just the right moment so we could sit
in the stillness and listen to her. Still alive.
“Cassandra on the wall.” He’d say. And I’d say,
“What’s that?” And he’d say, “That’s when
no one will listen.” The smell of late autumn
grass in my nostrils. I’d rest my head on his
back. It must have been a replay or a recording
because she sang that in winter. Or maybe
it’s been so long I just don’t remember right
at all. I used to sit on the bus and listen
to Jessye Norman before the world got sick.
But the world’s always been sick. As long
as I’ve known it, I mean. I texted, “Do you
know when she sings that song, ‘The Summer
Knows’?” And you said, “I do.” I’d wait
up as long as I could for her to come up
and kiss me. But I was always surprised.
Little minks. Horrible. But also. I’d do
anything. Literally anything to feel my grandmother
kiss me again. I’d ask, “Was she wonderful?”
And she’d say, “We’ll tell you in the morning.”
I miss everyone and feel so lonely it’s
like an empty opera house inside me.
Like all the chandeliers just shattered
on the floor. I figured I’d just speak plainly.
It’s time to dress for fall.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 129
 I C O N S

TALIBAH
SAFIYA:
ORACLE OF
CASTALIA B Y J A M E Y H AT L E Y

O U R F E M M E O F P L AG U E S

W
MEMPHIS MINNIE

hen I interview musician Talibah Safiya, Memphis and the world are
months into a global pandemic and political protests against all manner
of oppression. The world is different for us, but the world has been here
before. Most certainly Memphis has.
When it is time to get ready for my interview, I try to work my usual rituals—
take notes, research, listen to every piece of music, read every interview, clothe myself in
the armor of preparation. But nothing comes from those old rituals, so I surrender. I do an
old-fashioned Van Van floor wash, gather yellow paper and pencils and notecards, light
yellow candles. And keep doing as I am led until my spirit is calm. I have been talking a
lot about ancestral technologies in this time of pandemic, and “people” needing to heed
them. I was people. People was me.
These are the things you don’t talk about in essays—the strange things, the magic
things—but this is what this essay is about. Memphis, music, women, and magic. To find its
shape I go to the river, drive around to the falling down or disappeared houses of greats,
drink whiskey, cry over a heart that isn’t sure if it is breaking or becoming whole, pass
my days as a daughter, a writer, a lover, a fighter, a woman making magic and wonder
and wander the way forward. If such a thing as forward even exists now or ever has.
I think about our Memphis Minnie, born in Algiers, Louisiana, and how brave she was
at thirteen to run straight toward her dreams and keep running toward them. Who wore
her fine dresses and expensive jewelry, but would beat you down with whatever weapon
available—her immense talent, a pistol, a razor, or even her guitar—if you dared to try her.

130 WINTER 2020

Corinne Skinner Carter as Ms T in Dreaming Rivers (1988), written and directed by Martina Attille
for Sankofa Film & Video. Photo: Christine Parry. Courtesy Women Make Movies OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 131
I prepared the way I was moved, and when in
a reversal, I tell Safiya “off the record” about
my preparations, I’m not surprised to learn
that she’d lit yellow candles on the day we
speak on the phone.
The new ritual that is forming sends me to
water. I sit and watch the Mississippi River
from a spot called Martyr’s Park, after the
devastation of the yellow fever epidemics
in Memphis. I think about how this time is
also being called an apocalypse. The root of
apocalypse is to uncover, to reveal. I wonder
if now is the time where this city, this country,
will see itself true and do what is required to
begin its repair with whatever tools required.
OUR FEMME OF HAINTS
RUBY WILSON
M y friend Natalie Diaz and I were once
talking about ghosts, and she told me
that the word “haunt” comes from home.
Aren’t all ghosts looking for a home that they
can no longer access in the way they were
used to? It made sense, in the way that a poet
telling you something makes that thing both
clearer and more mysterious. When I first met
Talibah Safiya, I was a haint. After a decade
gone to Louisiana, I suddenly found myself
back in Memphis, helping to care for my
“olders.” When I look back, the language of
my return home is filled with death. A friend
said I talked about my former home of New
Orleans like a widow. When people asked how
it felt to be home, I would laugh and say that
I felt like a ghost, haunting myself. Indeed,
at any moment I could encounter any of the
selves that I had been over the entirety of my
life, sometimes those selves layering quite
unevenly over each other.
I had become a strange, wild thing away
from home—even to myself. When I realized
that much of my family was shocked that I
had returned to care for my parents, that
my leaving had been some sort of proof of
my waywardness, I was wounded by their
surprise. I was wandering, but not lost. I
had only become strange through the gaze
of others, others I thought knew me.
When I returned to Memphis from New Or-
leans, my best friend Caprice often indulged
me on journeys where I searched for corners
of my hometown that I hoped would remind
me of the self I had been creating. One of these
outings was a pop-up in a place that the city
was now calling the Edge District in a build-
ing that I once knew as the Hattiloo Theatre,
where I had seen an adaptation of Toni Mor-
132 WINTER 2020
rison’s The Bluest Eye on its opening night.
Now the place was emptied out and trying to
become something new—and so was I. People
my age mostly still call it “The Old Hattiloo.”
I met the pretty bull that day. Safiya is also
a jeweler and maker, and the Pretty Bull is
the name of her jewelry business. She was
tall and beautiful and warm in that drafty
building. The kind of person who emanates
her own light.
She had been away in New York and was
considering making her way back to Mem-
phis, her home. There was so much light in
her eyes about her return.
She told me that she was a singer and she
had a show that night. I asked what time. Like
11 at night? I laughed, oh no. That is way too
late. I bought brass bracelets and a clip-in
septum ring—talismans that made me feel
more like myself.
If you ask me what being a Black woman
writer in Memphis feels like most days, I
might direct you to the video of Johnnie
Taylor singing “Last Two Dollars,” where I am
subject, or backup, or audience. I am there
in the room, but almost never at the center.
But every now and then, I’d direct you to a
clip from the 1990 documentary All Day and
All Night, where B. B. King, Mr. Rufus Thomas,
and Miss Ruby Wilson, the Queen of Beale
Street, sing King’s hit “The Thrill Is Gone.”
“The Thrill Is Gone” is classic B. B. King. Wilson
takes the lead on the song, and from her very
first note the men know they best catch up.
King himself shakes his head and says, “You
think I’m singing behind that, you crazy.” On
his own song. It is brilliant to watch.
I saw Miss Ruby at a performance at the
Stax Museum right before she passed. She
actually was stepping in for Bobby Rush, who
could not make it. She was moving slower,
but was still Miss Ruby—big hair, full make-
up, nails, jewels, sparkle, and voice. She told
stories in between songs, but that voice made
a whole world. She filled the room and made
it holy. She brought down all the ancestors
who had played in that space. Little did we
know that she would soon be among them.
Miss Ruby brought me with her that night.
After she passed, I pondered her catchphrase
from an iconic commercial for a Memphis
law firm: “Miss Ruby sings the blues so you
don’t have to.” We were left to sing the blues
for ourselves now.
It was in this same room at Stax where
I first saw Talibah Safiya live. I knew then
that a rare, rare thing was happening that I
was blessed to witness. She was a whirlwind,
a storm, a creatrix of worlds and herself.
She was a haunting creating home. And she
brought me with her.
A few months after Miss Ruby passed, my
friend Marco Pavé asked me to record some
interludes to his album Welcome to GRC
LND. Once again, I was a ghost of myself—
the twenty-something young woman who’d
thought she might be a music executive one
day. He was recording in a renovated stu-
dio in a building I had once sat in listening
to other people try to make their dreams
come true. After I recorded my meditations
on Memphis and took off the headphones,
I asked, “Did I sound like Ruby Wilson to
y’all?” The people on the other side of the
booth confirmed what I had heard. Like du-
ende, Miss Ruby had crawled up through
the soles of my feet. I had been carrying her
along with me all the time.
T H E CA N DY L A DY
VA L E R I E J U N E
I n Black neighborhoods in Memphis, the
Candy Lady is a tradition. In communi-
ties where the ice cream truck might not
roll, if you can scrape up enough money,
the Candy Lady is sure to oblige you. Chips,
candy, pickles, and the like bought in bulk,
but also sometimes food from the kitchen
stove or a line of crockpots. Nachos, hotdogs,
or freezecups where their brilliant color is
the name of the flavor. Sometimes there is
a table set up across the inside of the door
to make a counter, dividing commerce from
homespace. The table is a barrier to the kids
(even the Candy Lady’s own) running back
and forth through the streets, so only so
much sweetness can be grabbed at once. Only
now do I know the loneliness that could exist
on the other side of that door. As children run
into the neighborhoods drunk on sugar and
salt, after the door is closed against the dark,
the Candy Lady is counting her coins to see
if the money will cover the gap of some bill
or another. To find some way to sweetness
for herself and her family.
When Safiya tells me that Valerie June
is a big influence, this doesn’t surprise me.
I remember that when I could not build a
bridge in my mind to what a Black artist
could be, there was this woman so much
younger than me who seemed to be figur-
ing it out. She worked in a local herb shop
and sang at coffee shop open mics. I’m not
sure if I had even started to write a word
of my own yet, but June’s voice was full of
country candy sweetness, the kind where
you know that there is more underneath.
That’s Valerie June.
The first songs that I listened to by Talibah
Safiya had this soft, sweet, plaintive qual-
ity. There is something else underneath if
you listen a bit closer: a little loneliness. The
knowledge that this sweetness is fleeting.
Even though these first songs that I listened
to maybe didn’t sound like the blues (one
streaming platform calls the tunes Millennial
Jazz), the blues was certainly riding under
the skirt of that sweetness. In this time of
pandemic, I’m especially interested in the
various ways that people seem to be feeling
their loneliness or running from it. I wonder
if that is something that I am projecting onto
Safiya’s Memphis, her music:
Loneliness. It’s something that I have
sat with a lot whether I was by myself
or with other people.
And it has definitely inspired the cre-
ation of my music, so much so that I
was resistant to allow myself to not feel
lonely because I was concerned that I
wouldn’t be able to create from a space
of truth without it.
It has been a driving force into a con-
nection with my truest self. Because then
you can tend to your wounds, you know?
And feel less alone.
I feel that’s where the music has come
from at different times. But it’s crazy
that I don’t feel as lonely now.
The loneliest I’ve ever felt was leaving
New York and coming back home to my
ancestral turf and having family close.
It challenged my delusion of loneliness
because I was still feeling it being close
to my family. Seeing myself as lonely
while in community challenged my
relation to the concept.
We talk about the ancestors guiding
us, [using] incense, burning certain
candles or making coffee or leaving
honey or pouring a shot of whiskey out.
That directly conflicts with loneliness.
If you believe, you can’t really believe
in both at the same time fully. One con-
cept challenges the other. Right now,
I’m not feeling that lonely because of
the listening and feeling.
The greater communication that’s hap-
pening that’s not just people that I see,
touch on the daily, but the idea of com-
municating with something, with some
forces you can’t see. It’s so comforting
for me right now.
T H E L A DY S H A R K
ARETHA FRANKLIN
O ne of the enduring, swaggering arche-
types of Memphis is that of the pimp.
Memphis is a city of many separate selves,
so some of its citizens may be surprised at
the varied history of the pimp mythology. Of
my era, the acronym M.E.M.P.H.I.S. is a kind
of shibboleth of time, race, and class. If I
hear “Making Easy Money,” I expect it to end
with “Pimping Hoes In Style.” The era of the
pimp was probably most notably depicted
in the 2005 film Hustle and Flow, written
and directed by Craig Brewer and starring
Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson. The
song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” by
Memphis rap legends Three 6 Mafia, won the
Academy Award for Best Original Song. But
this swaggering pimp history goes further
back than that. While in school I was taught
that Robert Church Sr. was the South’s first
Black millionaire. He helped fund the work
of journalist Ida B. Wells and composer W. C.
Handy. According to Beale Street Dynasty
author Preston Lauterbach, “Church be-
came the wealthiest black man in the South
due in large part to his whorehouses that
employed white women.” The source of his
money may have been hidden from view in
the textbook version that I learned, but his
power certainly was not.
In Memphis, “pimp,” though not com-
pletely divorced from its original meaning,
definitely has a colloquial meaning of a busi-
nessman, with ostentation, grace, and almost
mystical powers of protection. For the most
part, though, pimp equals male. Many of
Safiya’s songs take this image of the swagger-
ing pimp and turn it on its head. In her song
“No. 50,” the female main character of the
Pimp does battle with an archetypal “Lady
Shark” in a black Caddy who has given the
Pimp’s lover a potion that will subdue her
and keep her off her goal of getting money.
In the first line of “No. 50” (the name of the
debilitating potion), the character croons, “I
keep my feelings in a jar, latent from the rest
of y’all, ’cause I’m a pimp.” The jar spell is a
common one in the practice of hoodoo, one
that can be used for any number of purposes,
but noted for its ability to use common in-
gredients and hide in plain sight. A jar spell
to sweeten a situation could make use of
honey or sugar. A jar for strife would perhaps
contain vinegar or ammonia, rusty nails or
the like. The Pimp has likely shut her feel-
ings in a jar full of protective elements. The
struggle of the Lady Shark and the Pimp is
one for power. The male lover is the heartsick
one, seeking the help of the powerful Lady
Shark with the means to control his powerful,
indifferent lover.
It’s Aretha Franklin both demanding her
payment in cash and taking that purse full
of cash onto the stage with her and throwing
down her fur coat. And the Aretha that takes
Otis Redding’s hit “Respect” and makes it
hers. At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967,
Redding introduced “Respect” this way:
“This is another one of mine. A song we like
to do for everybody, love crowd. This love
song is a song that a girl took away from
me. Good friend of mine [exhausted laugh].
This girl, she just took this song, but I’m still
gonna do it anyway.” Redding’s version is a
plea of a man to his woman, even though he
calls her a little girl in the song. He gives the
usual male offerings of money and flattery
in exchange for respect when he gets home.
The Franklin of our current imagination is
“The Queen of Soul,” but when she recorded
her version in 1967, she was only twenty-
five years old. While well known in gospel,
and touring regularly, she had yet to gain
commercial success with her secular record-
ings. Franklin’s new arrangement flipped
the gender roles, added interplay with the
background singers, and spelled out R-E-S-
P-E-C-T. This expanded the territory of the
song. It was a remaking, a dismantling; she
transformed a love song into a protest song,
and put the world on notice. An anthem ripe
for the struggle for women’s and civil rights.
OUR FEMME OF THE
B I G W AT E R S
LIL HARDIN ARMSTRONG
E very Fourth of July, my parents and I
would listen to the Sunset Symphony on
television, mainly to hear James Hyter sing
“Old Man River.” We would wait until the
very end to hear Mr. Hyter’s powerful voice
ring out among a mostly white symphony
against the background of fireworks. I still
remember being confused as to who was
the Old Man River. It certainly couldn’t be
the Mississippi River, but so much of the
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 133
language of this city is gendered male. Both
the “Father” and “King” of the blues made
their marks in Memphis, the jookin’ dance
culture, Memphis rap, the grit and grind
motto all present mostly male. Also: “mane,”
the most Memphis greeting, description,
insult, compliment is undeniably male. This
directly contradicts the feelings that I have
about water. Perhaps my ideas about water
were formed by the Mother Board of a Mis-
sissippi church that was founded in 1867,
merely a few years after the end of enslave-
ment. When those women sang a hymn of
the salvation and saving grace of water, the
trials and tribulations of water, their voices
became water for me.
Talibah Safiya’s music is full of water. Of
the Mississippi River, she says, “The river is
my home. I find a nook where I can get close,
and I sit and I breathe and I leave new.”
In Safiya’s song “Like Water,” the charac-
ter asks if a partner only loves her because
her insecurities make him feel powerful.
Even though the intelligence of her body
screams for her to leave, his charms make
her reconsider.
I want to liquify and let you drink
me up. Like water, like Kool-Aid, like
soda, like whiskey, like white wine . . .
In “Healing Creek” the main character, done
with making another the center of her world
and worth, sets off to drink from the “Healing
Creek.” In “Imagine That,” the singer asks,
“Would you believe your paradise looked like
the bottom of the ocean?” Water shifts through
all of its forms—you can heal or drown or per-
haps learn to breathe underwater.
Lil Hardin, another one of Safiya’s favor-
ites, reminds me of water. Born in Memphis in
1898 to a very religious mother who wanted
desperately to keep her from ruin in raunchy
Memphis, she became an outstanding com-
poser, pianist, and bandleader, even though
she is mainly known as the wife of Louis
Armstrong. Hardin was always making and
remaking herself, as well as her husband’s
look, music, and career. I was late to learn
of Lil Hardin and her immense talent and
influence in a male-dominated world.
Hardin’s polished, refined swing jazz
style clashed with Armstrong’s big, country
charm, as many have noted. Although she
was one of the early women jazz compos-
ers, at one point she put music to the side
and trained as a tailor, making a tuxedo for
her famous ex-husband as her graduation
134 WINTER 2020
project. She returned to music, however, on
many projects, including work as accompa-
nist for another Memphis legend, Alberta
Hunter. In her essay “The Site of Memory,”
Toni Morrison said, “All water has a perfect
memory, and is forever trying to get back to
where it was.” At her end, Hardin was like
water. She collapsed at her piano during
a tribute to Armstrong, a month after his
death. She passed in the ambulance on the
way to the hospital.
T H E L A N D L A DY
K O K O TAY L O R
S egregation required all manner of busi-
ness adjustments. There were guides such
as the Green Book and local directories to let
Negroes know where it was safe for them to
travel. Also, because Blacks were not allowed
to try on clothes or makeup, mail order was
important for daily living. These realities
intersect at Memphis’s Eureka Hotel, called
both “The South’s Oldest and Best Colored
Hotel” and “The Hotel of the Dead.” The
Eureka Hotel was a block down from the
more famous Lorraine Motel, where Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
My short film, Always Open, the Eureka
Hotel (where Safiya makes a cameo as one
of the shapeshifting Landladies), opens and
closes with Safiya’s music. Only a scheduling
conflict kept her from being one of the stars.
In Memphis, seemingly incompatible things
keep close company, such as the secular and
sacred. The Lorraine Motel was the choice of
politicians and preachers. The Eureka was the
place for musicians and people looking for a
little more colorful time in Memphis. When
I ask about Safiya’s early days in music, she
mentions the same powerful forces colliding
to shape her style.
“The truth of it is that I grew up in a
very Christian city of Memphis not a Chris-
tian. When I went to church, the thing that
grasped me was always music. I have always
felt spiritually connected to and moved by
music, and because we didn’t have a place to
go to for me to express myself in that way, I
knew that music was the way to express that
fullness in me spiritually,” says Safiya.
I didn’t really think that it was possible
because I hadn’t seen any examples of
that type of lifestyle. I went to school for
theater because I knew I wanted to sing
on stage. But this isn’t what I wanted
to do, for real. I wanted to write and I
wanted to sing and I knew it. I said, I’m
going to read as many books as I can
and I’m going to listen to music all the
time until I feel like I’m a good song-
writer. You know, it’s been a practice. I
said to myself, I just want to be a part
of this incredible tool for connection.
This is my shit.
Part of the Memphis sound is exactly that
collision. In my imagination, all of the up-
right-presenting “good Negroes” who might
stay at the Lorraine Motel would make their
way up Mulberry Street to the Eureka and
have what Shelby County’s own Koko Taylor
would call a “Wang Dang Doodle.” This is
another instance where a remake has become
the definitive version. Although originally
written by Willie Dixon and performed by
the legendary Howlin’ Wolf, “Wang Dang
Doodle” is all Koko Taylor to me. The song
itself is a litany of characters invited to the
function.
All art takes practice. Singing, composing,
playing, magic. Making all types of magic is
work. And sometimes the most important work
is to pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.
T H E O R A C L E O F C A S TA L I A
S afiya’s great-grandfather bought a house
in the South Memphis neighborhood of
Castalia in the ’50s. Her father was raised
in this house. Safiya and her brother were
raised in this house. Her brother is raising
his family in the same house. Safiya and her
partner live about five houses down.
“I walk the streets of my ancestors daily,”
she says.
“So how does that kind of spiritual con-
nection, do you think, influence your work?”
I ask.
“I think it’s always been there. I think it’s
always been what even allows me to connect.
I have this really deep desire to be respectful
to music almost like it’s a deity to the point
where I have had difficulty with acknowledg-
ing my desire to be compensated for what I
invoke in music. It’s felt like the focus was to
show my respect for the art itself, show my
respect for my life through the art, and find
my confidence and strength through situa-
tions that might have temporarily caused me
to doubt the truth of who I am. I would use
it as a means to reconnect, right?” she says.
“Right,” I say.
“Almost like prayer or something,” says
Safiya.
 Exactly like that.
Exactly like that.
I realize when she says this that when my father made the
small migration from Mississippi to Memphis, he and his
siblings lived in Castalia, too. I have always loved the name
Castalia. With a Memphis accent it is even more beautiful.
Stretched out on a South Memphis tongue it sounds like
cast-tell-ya. If that’s not a spell, I don’t know what is.
I realize as I started to think about speaking with Safiya,
I am trying to make a map. Like the haint I was when I first
met her, I am still trying to find my way to a home in my
hometown.
Still on the phone with Safiya, I decide to look it up: Castalia.
Those of you who know your Greeks were ahead of me from
the beginning, but Castalia was the water nymph daughter
of Achelous who occupied a spring at Delphi. In some tales
the water is a gift, in some she turns herself into a spring to
escape the advances of some lusty god. Castalia’s gift was
the ability to inspire poetry in those who drank from her or
could get still enough to listen to her waters.
After I read Safiya the description, we both sit in silence.
“Wow,” she says.
“Wow,” I reply.
A few days after our interview, Safiya sends me these
communal meditations that seem to read into my soul. My
life has somehow devolved into a kind of cheat sheet for
the themes she explores in her music. The universe is pretty
literal these days. The last one she sends is named for that
ancestral street in Castalia where she lives.
Baby I don’t want to feel right now, or do you want to know
the real right now . . .
I have been praying and meditating on healing for what
feels like my entire life. Working on it, because our lives should
be our best art. But in this moment, as I struggle to figure
out what and how to write about Talibah Safiya’s art, and
love, and magic, I run right into the place I want to avoid. A
writing professor once told our class that the opening of any
piece of writing should be like a bonsai tree. A miniature of
the piece in full. I start with Our Femme of Plagues because I
know that this is a big enough, worthy enough grief to carry.
Memphis Minnie and Safiya make Memphis theirs in a way
that continues to elude me. This is an undeniably worthy start.
What Safiya’s music and the music of all of these Memphis
women uncover are the parts of me that I want to write out of
the story—my sad parts, my fickle parts, my angry parts, my
bitter parts, my heart that doesn’t know why it keeps trying
to love ghosts, the part of me that isn’t quite sure that I am
a worthy place to start. Unwittingly, the music of Safiya and
all of these women wrapped my rooms in mirrors. Started
my own personal apocalypse, a revealing. If I listen to the
ancestral technology that is music, especially all of the Black
women mentioned here, I would know that a single heart,
even mine, is an undeniably worthy place to start.
You said you wanted heal-ing . . . Then, don’t avoid this
feel-ing . . .
It is impossible to avoid now. I am undone. I sit with the
Oracle of Castalia. I listen to her many waters and drink from
her spring.
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OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 135
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138 WINTER 2020 Photo by Milton Carter
 END NOTES

A Relentless Kind
of Listening A Tour of the Southern Music Issue

I
n the spring of 1997, the OA published its first South-
ern music issue. A double issue nearly two hundred
pages long, it was the magazine’s sixteenth volume
altogether, its fifth year in print. Founding editor
Marc Smirnoff admitted to having had an arrested
appreciation for music—it would not be until he was a
young man in California that he’d learn to love the Beatles,
then the Rolling Stones, then the legends of blues each of
those bands worshipped. He described, in the “Editor’s
Box,” his longstanding distaste for country music that
softened during the production of the first music issue
and its accompanying CD, which had twenty-one tracks
and featured songs by Lucinda Williams, Carl Perkins, and
this year’s cover star, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
“I finally began to get beyond the radio claptrap—
which, I learned, is the first thing you have to do to come
near what discerning fans appropriately dub ‘the heart
of country music.’” He went on to recount a relentless
kind of listening, flying on the wings of a righteous cu-
riosity, that insisted on getting to the bottom of things
and exploring what our sounds down here really mean.
A lot at the OA has changed since 1997: the magazine
moved up the road from Mississippi to Arkansas, where
it published, then flamed out, and then published again,
finally incorporating in 2004 as a nonprofit affiliated
with the University of Central Arkansas, a status we
maintain to this day. Editors, producers, and audio
engineers came and went. The method of music deliv-
ery evolved—compilations were delivered on a CD or
two-disc set, via digital download, and now on Spotify.
Through it all, the music issue has remained the maga-
zine’s most popular and beloved project.
Over the years, the mixes have featured examples of
the earliest known recordings alongside contemporary
tracks; songs of all genres; songs recorded exclusively for
the OA; beloved mega-hits and obscure long-lost demo
tapes. “The Oxford American CDs feel like a musical free
for all, but compilations are actually specifically chosen
artists and tracks, intentionally sequenced for the best
effect,” said Rick Clark, who produced ten of the OA’s
compilations, in 2013. “Each song is given a chance to
take turns from being the jewel setting to being the
jewel and then being the setting. It’s all about framing
things in a compelling fashion.”
In 2012, on the occasion of the OA’s twentieth an-
niversary, New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote
that the music issue CDs “practically belong in the
Smithsonian.” His tribute was published a few months
after Smirnoff, who oversaw the first thirteen music is-
sues, was fired after being accused of sexual harassment
and giving alcohol to underage interns.
More than two decades since the launch of the music
issue, the editorial staff has changed; today, the Oxford
American, including the annual music issue, is edited
almost entirely by women. The guiding principles set
forth at the project’s founding in 1997 have endured.
They’ve also expanded, bloomed, blossomed. This time-
line, which features milestones throughout the history of
twenty-two music issues, reflects the project’s evolution.
—the Editors

Visit oxfordamerican.org/playlists or scan the Spotify code

to listen to highlights from every music issue.

Need help using the code? See p. 160 for instructions.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 139

NEWS IN 1997:
President William J. Clinton is inaugurated
for his second term; Titanic is the number-
one grossing film at the box office; Tiger
Woods becomes the youngest golfer ever
to win the Masters Tournament; Princess
Diana dies at age 36
“Through the closed car windows I could hear
her screams: long, deep, circular cries, rising
from the roots of her body, like a train whistle
disappearing into an endless series of tunnels,
like the wrenching Gaelic echoes that hang in the
graveyard, like the hiss that escapes from the
permanently shattered heart.”
—Rosanne Cash on an unforgettable encounter in “The Most Human Sound”
140 WINTER 2020
1997
1ST ANNUAL
SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE
W hen the music issue launched in 1997, critics celebrated its release
and billed it as the first magazine to be packaged with a CD com-
pilation. (“Not only is this the best magazine you’ll find on newsstands
these days, but the 21-song CD that comes inside it is as good as nearly
anything you’ll find in record stores.”) Though the editorial staff had
considered and then nixed a mix made up entirely of bands from the
magazine’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, they decided instead
to focus on Southern music more broadly—though they emphasized
that the issue would not be “comprehensive,” an impossible task: “The
hope is that we have succeeded in reminding you
that there is much to the subject: much to consider;
much to return to; much to learn.”
The year 1997 was one of many turning points
in popular music, with commercially successful
and critically acclaimed r&b and hip-hop releases
from Southern artists such as Usher, Missy Elliott,
Scarface, and Master P earning major crossover
appeal. Yet none of those musicians were featured
within the magazine’s pages. The first music issue
included few women writers or writers of color of
any gender.
Still, there are nods to a multiracial, polyglot, inter-
generational future. In an “as told to”–style interview
with Marc Woodworth, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wil-
son speaks of the “thickness of texture” of Southern
musicians like herself and the global sophistication
of her own sound—the “richness that the Africans brought to this
part of the world,” a comfort with the music of Irish culture, and the
“old time-religion” of indigeneity. Singer-songwriter Dionne Farris,
formerly of the pop/hip-hop band Arrested Development, discusses
her cover of Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” and her move to Atlanta
for its “energetic” music scene. And in a probing, sensitive essay,
Cynthia Shearer goes to Port Arthur, Texas, looking for traces of the
late singer Janis Joplin, but also in search of a history of the city more
complete than the old stories, a history in which the voices of women
speak back and resound.
 1998 1999
2ND ANNUAL 3RD ANNUAL
SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
NEWS IN 1998: NEWS IN 1999:
President Clinton is impeached for Lauryn Hill wins five Grammy Awards,
perjury and obstruction of justice including “Album of the Year” for The
stemming from his affair with Monica Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and “Best
Lewinsky; Matthew Shepard is beaten to New Artist”; Napster debuts
death in Wyoming, the tragedy eventually
leading to hate-crime legislation; Frank
Sinatra dies at age 82

T he sophomore music is-

sue doubled down on the
genre in a number of ways.
It was a double issue (Nos.
21 and 22). The red cover
featuring a banner touting a
new R.E.M. song peeled away
to reveal another red cover
listing features on the Hack-
berry Ramblers (by Michael
Tisserand) and a “Visions of
R.E.M.” art portfolio, and then
that cover opened to a double gatefold with information about
the nineteen tracks on the CD, including songs by Ben Folds Five,
the Mavericks, and Rosemary Clooney.
Inside the magazine, OA associate editor John Jeremiah Sul-
livan, then 24, wrote about his brother Worth’s near-fatal elec-
trocution by a microphone while rehearsing with his band (the
incident appeared on the TV show Rescue 911, in which Worth
played himself): “My brother would have met his Maker in a scene
that played like cutting-room footage from Spinal Tap, except that
it would have left dozens of people devastated and lost.” David
Hajdu wrote about iconoclastic composer Conlon Nancarrow,
a Texarkana, Arkansas, native “who chose to compose music
that human beings cannot play, prevailing by writing almost
exclusively for the player piano.” Rosanne Cash returned to write
about Minnie Pearl, Mark Richard about Captain Beefheart, and
Marty Stuart about Memphis.
A s the century closed, the OA’s Smirnoff focused his introduc-
tory essay on “firsts.” This compilation would be the first with
liner notes, or short essays contextualizing many of the songs
along with reasoning for their inclusion. About “Breakfast in
Bed,” by Dusty Springfield, who’d died in March of that year,
Smirnoff wrote of passing over “Son of a Preacher Man,” the
most famous recording from the artist’s landmark 1969 album
Dusty in Memphis, calling it a “predictable choice.” And he de-
scribed “Turn on Your Love Light,” by Bobby “Blue” Bland, as
his “latest obsession.”
A little bit of obsession alongside a subtle refusal of the fa-
miliar (undergirded, of course, by a somewhat contradictory
but healthy respect for the classics) has gone into the creation
of every compilation since.
The issue is heavy with ghosts and full with reckonings. The
novelist Connie May Fowler’s tender piece “A Long Gone Daddy”
confronts the death of her father, who sang beautifully—first as
a street performer, then in a band that played gigs across the
country—but never made much of a career out of his talent. In
Greil Marcus’s “Who Was Geechie Wiley?” the writer and critic
weaves together scant, disparate facts about the life of the East
Texas–born singer and guitarist who recorded six songs for
Paramount Records in 1930 and 1931, including “Last Kind Words
Blues,” which was featured on the CD compilation. Years later, in
2014, John Jeremiah Sullivan published “The Ballad of Geeshie
and Elvie” in the New York Times Magazine, which included the
latest findings on the elusive artist.

“Now, Muddy Waters was a good fellow, when it comes to being nice to
his family . . . He’d come to our home, call my mother, tell her what he
want to eat, she’d fix it for him, you know. But Muddy never accepted
Christ. That’s going to be the difference.”
—Rev. Willie Morganfield, pastor of Bell Grove Baptist Church, to Tom Piazza
in “Sacred & Profane in Clarksdale”
“Despite my daddy’s sins, I am a faithful daughter. I
keep looking for his voice, trying to rekindle it in the
paltry memories of him that I possess, tending to
that fractured past as if it were a sacred flame.”
—Connie May Fowler in “A Long Gone Daddy”

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 141
 2000 2001
4TH ANNUAL 5TH ANNUAL
SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
NEWS IN 2000: NEWS IN 2001:
Santana wins eight Grammys for Terrorists attack the United States
Supernatural, tying Michael Jackson’s on September 11;
Thriller for most awards in a single night; the War in Afghanistan begins
George W. Bush is declared winner of
the presidential election after the U.S.
Supreme Court rules in Bush v. Gore

O A fans quickly learned to look forward to the music issue be-

cause of the promise of surprise, and the fourth installment,
featuring Jim Herrington’s portrait of a radiant Dolly Parton on
W e leaned heavily upon this issue’s architecture in creating
the 2020 edition. Profiles and meditations on important
Southern musicians and musical moments are collected under
the cover, delivered a particularly moving one with Wilco and inspired section headers: “Ancestors” includes histories of Mis-
Billy Bragg’s previously unreleased track “When the Roses Bloom sissippi Fred McDowell and Charley Patton; “Icon” assembles
Again.” Recorded and mixed for Wil- stories on Emmylou Harris’s “song scouting” and Earl Scruggs’s
co and Bragg’s first Mermaid Avenue three-finger banjo style; “Wanderers” dives into
album—a project built around lyr- the recording of Toots in Memphis, the 1998 album
ics written by Woody Guthrie—the by Toots Hibbert, the “Jamaican Otis Redding”
haunting ballad found its way onto with sidemen Teenie Hodges and Eddie Hinton. In
the OA’s compilation after Wilco Southern Sirens, a collection of pieces about women
discovered that the traditional lyr- singers, Linda Lyndell’s life story and her buoyant
ics had not in fact been written by Stax hit “What a Man” are highlighted. When it was
Guthrie and cut it from Mermaid initially released in the autumn of 1968, it registered
Avenue. (The song eventually as barely a blip on the r&b charts—more a testament
appeared on Mermaid Avenue: to the genre’s bounty, perhaps, than the quality of
The Complete Sessions, the 2012 the song itself. But nearly thirty years later, on the
box set.) heels of a re-release of lesser-known Stax singles,
This year’s twenty-three- Salt-N-Pepa re-recorded it with En Vogue and the song
song mix kicks off with Doc & reached number three on both the pop and r&b charts.
Merle Watson’s bluegrass tune The story of “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” recorded and
“Train That Carried My Girl cowritten by Ann Peebles on a rainy Memphis night in
from Town,” which complements 1973, is the centerpiece of “Soul Sensation” by Andria
an essay by the novelist William Gay, who was named an OA Lisle; the piece is re-published on p. 36.
contributing writer starting with this issue. Gay had traveled to
Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for 1999’s MerleFest. Other highlights
include “I Love You” by Mississippi bluesman Asie Payton, who “Even now there is some contemporary
died two years before Oxford’s Fat Possum Records released his
Robert Johnson, some painter, some poet, some
album Worried in 1999, and “Louisiana 1927” by Randy Newman,
which poet Anthony Walton names “the most beautiful [song] unacknowledged novelist, performance artist, musician,
ever written by an American.” waiting to be discovered, and if we are fortunate enough
In 2004, Cynthia Shearer published her novel The Celestial
to make that discovery, we are uplifted by it. But our
Jukebox, which takes place in the fictional Delta town of Madagas-
car, Mississippi. The 2000 music issue—at 208 pages, one of the presence in the room makes not the slightest difference
thickest music issues in OA history—includes an excerpt from that to the creation of the work.”
novel. Shearer writes about her accompanying playlist on p. 157. —Peter Guralnick in “Robert Johnson and the Transformative Nature of Art”

142 WINTER 2020

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NEWS IN 2003:
The U.S. and Britain launch
a war against Iraq; Apple
introduces its iTunes
Music Store, with songs
downloadable for $.99;
Johnny Cash dies at age 71
NEWS IN 2005:
YouTube is founded;
Hurricane Katrina strengthens
to a Category 5 and hits
the Gulf Coast; Rosa Parks
dies at age 92
NEWS IN 2006:
Twitter launches; Taylor Swift’s
eponymous album, which
would become the decade’s
longest-charting album on the
Billboard 200, is released
144 WINTER 2020
2003
6TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
P lagued with money woes, the OA ceased publishing in 2002. After a year’s absence, the music is-
sue returned in 2003 from its new home in Little Rock. A gritty black-and-white photo of a belting
Esther Phillips graces the cover, but if we’re to cop to our faults, we admit that this issue was far too
heavy on the testosterone. Of the twenty-eight writers and photographers featured on the contributors’
page, only two were women: Lauren Wilcox (who wrote about Phillips) and Katy Vine (who wrote about
Austin group the Gourds). Subjects were slightly less out of balance, including a Q&A with Ann Savoy
and Linda Ronstadt and pieces about Marshall Chapman and Nellie Lutcher. A highlight of the issue is
Bill Friskics-Warren’s profile of Jerry Williams Jr., the first in-house Black producer at Atlantic Records,
who reinvented himself in 1969 from an r&b opening act for the likes of Chuck Berry and the Marvelettes
into the soul-funk cult legend Swamp Dogg. In “The Collector,” Eddie Dean profiles Christopher King,
the prolific collector and historian of 78s who in later years contributed to the magazine. The American
Society of Magazine Editors gave this edition the “Best Single-Topic Issue” of the year award.
2005
7TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
T he OA was again settling into a new home in 2005, this time in the college town of Conway, Arkan-
sas. After publishing five issues from Little Rock, the magazine folded (again) in 2003, but revived
after teaming up with the University of Central Arkansas. This issue pays attention to the stars—Elvis
commands readers’ attention, perched and ready to jump off the cover—but the editors were also inter-
ested in the forgotten trailblazers, the careers that taper off into near obscurity, the songs and stories
that might otherwise be overlooked. Arthur Kempton sheds light on Erma Franklin’s life in the wake of
younger sister Aretha. Meanwhile, Lindsey Millar traces a different kind of
shadow—the impact of the atomic bomb on the music of the ’40s, ’50s, and
’60s. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of his “Badu-angst,” recounting a memorable
concert appearance when Erykah Badu’s “band was as impressive as her
antics were annoying.” Still, he acknowledges, “I knew I was watching some-
one who’d earned the right to be pretentious and fake. She did it so well.”
2006
8TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
F or the first time ever, this year’s CD included two songs by one artist: jazzman Bob Dorough, whose
“selfless wit opens new paths to the jazz sublime,” writes Paul Reyes, then the magazine’s senior editor.
One of Dorough’s tracks is “Three Is a Magic Number,” which first appeared in the Schoolhouse Rock! series
in 1973. It’s not the compilation’s only song that made its debut onscreen. One of the mix’s standouts is
the rockabilly song “Mama Guitar” by Andy Griffith, originally performed in the Elia Kazan film A Face
in the Crowd (1957). Though the liner notes are rich—Mark Rozzo on Big Star; Charles Yu on the Swan
Silvertones; Ron Rash on Gary Stewart; Carol Ann Fitzgerald (then the managing editor) on Louis Moreau
Gottschalk; Peter Guralnick on cover star Sam Cooke; Daniel Alarcón on Sun Ra—the issue’s masterpiece
is an essay by contributing editor Wendy Brenner. “About a Girl” chronicles her sister’s country-music
fandom. (“Love is always greater than the sum of experiences, but those experiences are all we can see
or touch or hear, the only part of love anyone’s ever been able to chart.”) It reads like a love letter to
anyone who has ever had a musical obsession. Which is to say: anyone who has ever read a music issue.
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 2007 2008
9TH ANNUAL 10TH ANNUAL
SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE
NEWS IN 2007: NEWS IN 2008:
Beyoncé tops the Billboard Hot 100 Barack Obama is elected
Singles with “Irreplaceable”; president; Leonard Cohen and
the iPhone is released Madonna are inducted into the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

W hat’s in a cover? Sometimes, as

Ben Greenman reflects on Eldridge
Holmes’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” featured
on the CD, it’s “when a good singer takes a song that you haven’t
cared for and, through the mix of alchemy and luck that qualifies
as artistry, converts it to a song you love,” a marvel he describes
as “one of the rarest, most welcome phenomena in music.”
Sometimes, it’s “Writers Who Rock,” a section in this issue
that features contributors reflecting on their bygone days as
musicians—a vocational cover, if you will. (Frederick Barthelme
recalls his time as a drummer in alt band the Red Crayola; Pia
Z. Ehrhardt remembers when she, her sister, and her parents all
played in a chamber music quartet.)
Other times it’s a cover star like Thelonious Monk, whom Sam
Stephenson pays tribute to in “Is This Home?,” selected by Brit-
tany Howard as one of the OA’s top ten music essays of all time.
In 2013, an enormous blowup of this issue’s iconic cover—the first
music issue designed by art director Tom Martin—would grace
the walls of South on Main, the OA’s live performance venue.
Monk would go on to watch over acts like Rosanne Cash, Jason
Marsalis, Patterson Hood, and countless others performing on
the Oxford American stage.
“In my experience, the perfect song, like the perfect
short story, isn’t all that unusual: there are many of
them, and they lie relatively common on the ground.
But the perfect album, like the perfect novel, is like
one of those strange translucent creatures from the
bottom of the ocean that are rarely ever seen by the
human eye. It is nothing short of a miracle when one
of them manages to make it to the surface alive.”
—Kevin Brockmeier on Iris DeMent’s album My Life
T he music issue’s tenth-anniversary issue was the OA’s first to
be published with a two-CD set (56 songs!). The discs were
categorized as Future Masters (Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Hamilton,
Elysian Fields), all artists who were making their debuts on an
OA mix, and Past Masters (Eartha Kitt, Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
Erma Franklin), all artists who’d made previous appearances.
Jerry Lee Lewis was featured in a blue-plaid three-piece suit
on the cover, and Peter Guralnick had his second cover story
in three years. His essay “Perfect Imperfection” speaks to the
life and art of the ecstatic and unforgettable musician: “Like
Elvis, like Ray Charles—maybe even like Beethoven!—his vision
encompasses the most dramatic vistas, and he is as likely
to single out Gene Autry, Sister Ro-
setta Tharpe (‘I tell you,
man, that woman could
sing rock & roll!’), Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra,
Tommy Dorsey, or B. B.
King on any given day.”
In his introduction to
the issue, editor Smirnoff
reflects on a milestone edi-
tion: “In their own little
way, the OA’s Music Issues
desire, simply but passion-
ately, to expand the discus-
sion of American music.”
“Of all the adjectives attached to Ella Fitzgerald’s quintessential ballads,
reticence is not among them. But what fascinates me about Fitzgerald
was her ability on some numbers to be the vocal measure of swinging
beauty and, simultaneously, emotionally distant. When singing about
romance in decline, Ella’s allure is the almost aloof elegance of her style.
But when singing about love in ascension, the light-headed feeling of
overwhelming desire, Fitzgerald is both joyous and regal.”
—Walton Muyumba in “Ella Fitzgerald: Making Stories”

146 WINTER 2020

 2009 2010
11TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN 12TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE: ARKANSAS MUSIC ISSUE: ALABAMA
NEWS IN 2009: NEWS IN 2010:
Michael Jackson dies at age 50; The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion
Susan Boyle wows judges on Britain’s dumps an estimated 13,000 gallons
Got Talent with “I Dreamed a Dream” of crude oil per hour into the Gulf of
Mexico; President Obama officially
repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” allowing
gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to
serve openly in the U.S. military

T he OA’s first issue devoted to a state was a behemoth,

because, in addition to plumbing the depths of its home
of Arkansas, it continued to excavate the music of the South
A
labama got the spotlight in
2010. The mix’s earliest re-
corded song is “New Mule Skin-
as a whole. The result was one hundred ninety-two pages, ner Blues” (ca. 1948) by the Mad-
fifty-two songs on two CDs (Southern Masters and Arkansas dox Brothers & Rose, a sibling
Masters), and contributions by familiar OA names like Beth group of four brothers and one
Ann Fennelly (on Caroline Herring), Diane Roberts (on Gil sister known as America’s Most
Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson), and Jamie Quatro (on the Colorful Hillbilly Band. G-Side’s
Gunbunnies) and soon-to-be-better-known names like “Huntsville International,” re-
fiction writers Justin Taylor (on the Esquires) and Sheila leased the same year as the issue,
Heti (on Claudia Whitten). Alice Randall makes her first features a style of Southern rap
appearance in the magazine, writing about Linda Martell, that is—as its title suggests—both
the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. of Alabama and relevant far beyond
Randall returns in the current issue with a piece about r&b “Rocket City.” Odetta’s cover of Bob
chanteuse and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer LaVern Baker (p. 122). Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is featured as well, and
Charles Peterson writes about “Auditorium” from Little Rock– the folk icon is profiled in not one but two liner notes, written
based American Princes’ 2008 album Other People. Magnet by John Uhl and Amanda Petrusich. Of Odetta’s take on Dylan,
magazine had named it the best album of that year, and Peterson Petrusich writes, “Her version . . . is grim and ominous, more a
ended his liner note by declaring, “If rock lives in fear of the past, warning (‘You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone,’
the Princes show it still has a future.” Tragically, the Princes’ she threatens) than a rallying cry. It’s the kind of performance
future was upended when bassist Luke Hunsicker contracted that lingers in the air for days.”
brain cancer in 2009 and died in August 2010. “We’ve always Jamey Hatley, whose essay on Memphis soul artist Talibah Safiya
known, of course, that Luke was irreplaceable as a member of appears on p. 130, published “Hating the Blues” in the Alabama
our band, but it was also clear that he is indispensable,” the band issue. In the piece, Hatley recounts her complicated relationship
wrote in a statement. The next year, the Princes released a final with the ever-present genre and the way her childhood aversion
EP of songs they had been working on for another album at the to blues was countered by her elders. “Y’all don’t like these blues?
time Hunsicker was stricken. Keep living and see if you don’t start to like ’em. Just keep living.”

“The racial tensions that we’ve learned to see as divisive and tedious he
made into art that was at once chiding and joyous, exacting and liberat-
ing, reflective and always much bigger than life. Hewing to American
ideals of pluralism that we still struggle to realize, [William Grant] Still
made music that considered everything and exempted nothing as impos-
sible or unplayable.”
—Erin Aubry Kaplan on the third movement of Suite for Violin and Piano, by
Arkansas-born Black composer William Grant Still
“The music made the horrors of what had been done
to black people in my textbooks real. And ugly. And
alive. I made the blues a convenient container for
everything I was ashamed of. To avoid the nastiness, I
simply stopped listening.”
—Jamey Hatley in “Hating the Blues”

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 147

NEWS IN 2011:
Prince William and Kate
Middleton are married; The
Oprah Winfrey Show airs its
final episode; Osama bin Laden
is killed; Amy Winehouse
dies at age 27
NEWS IN 2012:
Barack Obama is re-elected
as president; Michael Phelps
wins four gold and two silver
medals at the Summer
Olympics in London; Whitney
Houston dies at age 48
NEWS IN 2013:
George Zimmerman is
acquitted in the death of
Trayvon Martin; Patrisse Cullors
re-posts a Facebook message
about the case and appends the
hashtag #blacklivesmatter
148 WINTER 2020
2011
13TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE: MISSISSIPPI
I n his feature on Howlin’ Wolf, Peter Guralnick writes of the bluesman’s particu-
lar charisma: “Accompanied as often as not by little more than a bare-bones
rhythm section, he was able to suggest a breadth of vision, a scope of enterprise that cut across all barri-
ers of time and place.” That magnetism might be particular to Howlin’ Wolf, but it’s a theme that recurs
throughout this issue: a breadth of vision. Tackling Mississippi was a daunting task for OA editors. In
the end, coverage spans the diverse sounds and regions of the state and beyond, as illustrated by Nick
Hornby’s “Top 5 Mississippi Moments from England.” Jamie Quatro chronicles the rise and dissolution of
the Oxford-based Hilltops, the ragtag rock & roll group responsible for “Sidewalk” who shared a fence
with Barry Hannah in the early ’90s. (Hannah also makes an appearance in Cynthia Shearer’s essay on a
mixtape he made for her.) In her essay accompanying the International Sweethearts of Rhythm’s “Jump
Children,” Megan Mayhew Bergman writes of “the first all-female racially integrated swing band, a bevy
of lipsticked radicals ready to blow the world wide open,” who had their start at Piney Woods School.
2012
14TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE: LOUISIANA
“I ’m almost positive that all music, at least all American music, comes from Louisiana,” writes New Orleans–
born, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Rose. Though the New Orleans origins of jazz are widely
accepted, Rose claims that the earliest stirrings of rock & roll, hip-hop, and the blues rumbled throughout the
state—in the “honky tonks of Baton Rouge,” on Sundays in Congo Square, or on Louisiana Hayride, the show
where Elvis Presley made his first TV appearance. Talk of beginnings, antecedents, and origin stories fills the
fourteenth music issue, guest edited by Alex Rawls, which marked the first edition without Marc Smirnoff at the
helm and the first in the tenure of Roger D. Hodge. The issue is sleeker and less unwieldy than earlier editions,
less a grab bag than a measured query into a fascinating subject. Along with extensive liner notes, the issue
features a timeline of key events in Louisiana music history, including the arrival of the first Acadians to the state
in 1764, the city council ordinance of 1817 that opened Congo Square for Sunday gatherings to the enslaved,
and 2004, the year Juvenile’s “Slow Motion” topped the pop chart. It’s an eclectic constellation of comings
and goings that magnifies Louisiana’s heterogeneity as well as the way its music gives voice to its resilience.
2013
15TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE: TENNESSEE
T he Tennessee music issue sold out quickly; OA insiders attribute its success to the cover image taken by
Leigh Wiener, a black-and-white photograph of Johnny Cash with a side part and his right forefinger
pointing—in confrontation? Or collaboration?—toward the reader. For Tennessee, there was a bounty
of musical delight; the compilation, including Cash’s “Monteagle Mountain,” a bouncy travelers’ ode
to a treacherous stretch of highway between Nashville and Chattanooga, spills across two discs. Points
South, the magazine’s front section, reads like a travelogue of the vast terrain of Tennessee sound:
Christine Cooper Spindel remembers the early days of WDIA, when programmers decided the station
should seek out a Black audience; Claudia Perry re-imagines the Fisk Jubilee Singers; David Henry writes
about WLAC, the CBS affiliate whose mix of “late-night blues, r&b, gutbucket
jazz, and gospel” reached a young Bob Dylan. Other features: bassist Norbert
Putman’s remembrance of playing sessions with Elvis, and Amanda Petrusich’s
deep dive into Bessie Smith, re-published this year on p. 66.
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 2014
16TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE: TEXAS
NEWS IN 2014:
Pharrell’s “Happy” tops the Hot 100;
Solange and Jay-Z have an altercation
in the Standard Hotel’s elevator;
Robin Williams dies at age 63;
celebs and others around the
world partake in the ALS ice
bucket challenge
T he OA celebrated the home of the live music capital of
the world in 2014. Jim McGuire’s striking black-and-white
photograph of Guy and Susanna Clark, taken in 1975, serves
as the cover image.
The accompanying CD features Texas legends Willie Nelson,
Janis Joplin (with Big Brother & the Holding Company),
Bob Wills, Waylon Jennings, and Buddy Holly alongside
groundbreakers Barbara Lynn, Ornette Coleman, and Freddy
Fender; Texas stalwarts Kinky Friedman, Guy Clark, Joe Ely,
and Billy Joe Shaver; and contemporary troubadours Ruthie
Foster, Spoon, and Sarah Jarosz.
The issue, which was partially funded by readers via a
successful Kickstarter campaign, was accompanied
by a suite of events in both Texas and at OA head-
quarters in Arkansas. Matthew McConaughey in-
troduced the project at a press conference in Austin
and Rodney Crowell launched the issue from the
Oxford American stage in Little Rock.
Joe Nick Patoski profiles the late Paul English, who,
for half a century, watched Willie Nelson’s back—quite
literally as his drummer, but also, Patoski writes, “as
Willie’s more figurative back”: “Mess with Willie Nelson
and the next thing you’ll see is the wrong end of a gun
and the devil himself, Robert Paul English.”
Poet John Poch immortalizes football, a Texas export
as ubiquitous as music and BBQ, in his poem “Cowboys vs.
Texans”: “Know your basics, the chalk of X and O on slate. /
If Emmitt Smith was free will, Earl Campbell is your fate.”
“What is more universal than heartbreak and rage? When Lydia
Mendoza sings, nothing. Dramatic, sensual, steeped in longing and
pain, this traditional corrido is about a good girl done wrong. In a
vein later mined by many blues and country singers, ‘Mal Hombre’
could easily be a Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, or Bessie Smith song, if
it weren’t in Spanish.”
—Ada Limón in “American Sound”
150 WINTER 2020
2015
17TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE: GEORGIA
NEWS IN 2015:
“Uptown Funk” becomes ubiquitous;
Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color is
released; a white supremacist murders
nine Black churchgoers at Mother
Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston;
the U.S. Supreme Court makes same-sex
marriage the law of the land
E ditor Roger D. Hodge announced his departure from the OA
in May 2015, a few months before the Georgia music issue
deadline, and the junior editors, including Maxwell George
and Eliza Borné, plowed ahead, motivated to make the project
more ambitious, innovative, and inclusive than ever. George,
then associate editor, stepped into the role of lead editor and
producer, inviting Kiese Laymon to write an essay about OutKast;
encouraging David Ramsey to call Little Richard’s cell phone;
and meeting with folks on the ground in Georgia, like Dust-to-
Digital founders Lance and April Ledbetter and Athens producer
David Barbe, all of whom became essential advisors throughout
the issue’s production.
The compilation starts with a false start by James
Brown—who appears ethereal on the cover—and
showcases stars like Otis Redding and the Allman
Brothers Band alongside obscure masterworks like
Alice Swoboda’s ballad “Potter’s Field.” Athens
rockers Futurebirds recorded an exclusive track
for the compilation, their take on Ray Charles’s
“Midnight.” The mix ends with a knockout: a newly
unearthed 1961 acetate demo recording of Henry
Mancini and Johnny Mercer doing “Moon River.”
George would go on to lead every music is-
sue project for five years in a row, working closely with
Borné, who was named the OA’s third editor-in-chief a couple
of weeks before the Georgia music issue went to press. In 2020,
Brittany Howard selected Laymon’s “Da Art of Storytellin’ (A
Prequel)” as one of her top ten pieces of OA music writing.
Ramsey’s “Prayers for Richard” is now the most-viewed piece
of all time on oxfordamerican.org.
“There are miracles everywhere if you know where to
look. And know how to listen: A wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-
lop-bam-boom!”
—David Ramsey in “Prayers for Richard”
 2016
18TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE: VISIONS
OF THE BLUES
NEWS IN 2016:
Donald J. Trump is elected president; a
gunman kills 49 people at Pulse, a gay
nightclub in Orlando; notable deaths
include David Bowie (at age 69), Prince
(57), and Muhammad Ali (74)
I n 2016, we took a break from our
tour of Southern states to stop at
the crossroads for Visions of the
Blues. “Its story,” wrote the great
music journalist Robert Palmer in
his seminal book Deep Blues, “is
an epic as noble and as essentially
American as any in our history.”
(Palmer’s own history was the
subject of one story in this issue,
by senior editor Jay Jennings.) We
highlighted the genre’s broad spectrum of influence by
publishing three different covers of figures from three different
generations: John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, and Adia Victoria.
Elsewhere in the issue, Christopher King listened to Blind Willie
Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” and heard
a lament that reached as far back as ancient Greece. Amanda
Petrusich ventured to Tokyo to plumb Japan’s love affair with
the blues. And Rashod Ollison, who died too soon in 2018 at age
41, recalled affectionately his great-grandmother Ma Rene’s juke
joint in Malvern, Arkansas. The CD’s twenty-three tracks included
old-school blues masters like CeDell Davis and Koko Taylor and
more far-reaching adepts like Mali’s Bassekou Kouyaté on the
ngoni (an internal spike lute) and 1920s Greek violinist Alexis
Zoumbas. Music critic Ann Powers wrote a liner note for a track
from Alabama Shakes, “Miss You,” in which she says that Brit-
tany Howard, the guest editor of this issue, and her bandmates,
show “an understanding of how the blues legacy both enables
the expression of chaotic emotions and streamlines them . . .”
The unmistakable breakout hit of the issue was “Listening
for the Country,” by Zandria F. Robinson, in her debut story for
the magazine. The wrenching memoir sought to understand her
late father, whom she said was “country complex,” through the
music he loved: “You had to listen for the undercurrent, the Delta
lower frequencies, to hear who he was.” The story was a finalist
in Essays and Criticism at the 2017 National Magazine Awards.
2017
19TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE: KENTUCKY
NEWS IN 2017:
Jordan Peele’s Get Out breaks box office
records; the #MeToo movement goes
viral in the wake of allegations against
Harvey Weinstein; neo-Nazis gather
for a deadly “Unite the Right” rally to
protest the removal of a Confederate
monument in Charlottesville
S turgill Simpson’s somber visage on the Kentucky music issue’s
cover belies the wry humor and matter-of-fact perspectives
that characterize many of the magazine’s featured stories and
songs. It’s a contrast that feels suitable for this issue, one that
moves seamlessly between joy and lamentation, often within the
same piece of writing or music. Every track on the compilation
just seems to do more; the Phipps Family’s “Forsaken Lover”
contrasts “a relatively up-tempo melody” with “lonely grief-
stricken lyrics.” Freakwater’s “My Old Drunk Friend” packages
their “savage sense of irony” in lyrics that are at once “weirdly
beautiful, a little bleak, and darkly, deadpan-funny.” These nar-
ratives that meld the bitter with the sweet seem particular to
the Commonwealth.
The tone of this issue is distinctive, though it’s also chock-full
of familiar OA friends, with John Jeremiah Sullivan, Amanda
Petrusich, David Ramsey, and Zandria F. Robinson contributing
features whose subjects range from the history of the “electrifying
percussion instrument known as la quijada, the jawbone” to the
influence of Lexington, Kentucky, on Richard Hell, and, by exten-
sion, the punk aesthetic. Other outstanding pieces include Leesa
Cross-Smith’s tribute to Sturgill Simpson, Harmony Holiday’s
interview with Les McCann, and Jason Kyle Howard’s intimate
reflection on Joan Osborne’s “If God Had a Name,” republished
in this issue on p. 62.
“I hanker for inspiration and find it wherever I can.
I find it in music and words, in the sound of truck
wheels popping through the gravel and the sudden
breezy warmth as the last bit of winter clicks away.
I find it in the infiniteness of God, in the mercy and
uncomprehendingly boundless love of Jesus. I find it
in Sturgill, too. A stubbornness, a hope.”
—Leesa Cross-Smith in “Ain’t Half Bad”
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 151
 2018
20TH ANNUAL SOUTHERN
MUSIC ISSUE:
NORTH CAROLINA
NEWS IN 2018:
Aretha Franklin dies at age 76; Brett
Kavanaugh is confirmed to the U.S.
Supreme Court; a gunman kills
seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida
T he twentieth music issue felt particularly close to home given
the large number of OA contributors who come from the Tar
Heel State. Will Blythe, who grew up in Chapel Hill, recounts a
magical and intimate Christmas gathering in 1970 when the guests
of honor were James Taylor and “Joni somebody,” according to
Blythe’s mother’s recollection. Jill McCorkle shares memories of
dancing to Beach Music, the music she thinks of “as soon as spring
comes to the Carolinas.” Malinda Maynor Lowery recalls the music
of her Lumbee upbringing, songs that “ring with longing and
sometimes nostalgia.” Randall Kenan, in what would be his last
contribution to the magazine before his death in 2020, muses on
“the Doppler effect of jazz” in a meditation on “Crepuscule with
Nellie” (Take 2), by Thelonious Monk featuring John Coltrane.
Fans of Link Wray, the “inventor of the power chord,” got
a treat in “What Will I Do?” by Link and brothers Vernon and
Doug, a homemade demo released publicly for the first time on
the OA’s mix. And just a month before the issue went to press,
Shannon Whitworth went to a studio in Asheville to cut an ex-
clusive recording of “Mill Mother’s Lament,” the protest ballad
by Ella May Wiggins.
Brittany Howard selected two North Carolina essays to reprint:
“The Gospel of Jodeci” by Lauren Du Graf (p. 52) and “Nina Is
Everywhere I Go” by Tiana Clark (p. 26). Jim Blanchard created an
original illustration of Nina Simone for the cover, an assignment
dreamed up by Tom Martin, the OA’s longtime art director. After a
decade-plus run in the role, this issue would be Martin’s swan song.
“Midway, the Trane swoops in with his magic saxophone,
rather like an archangel hovering, in support, but also
adding color and human gravity to a musical quadratic
equation. North Carolina brother backing up North
Carolina brother. Visionary seeing into Visionary.
Remembering the future together.”
—Randall Kenan on “Crepuscule with Nellie” (Take 2)
152 WINTER 2020
2019
21ST ANNUAL
SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE:
SOUTH CAROLINA
NEWS IN 2019:
Jaime, Brittany Howard’s debut solo
album, is released; “Old Town Road” by
Lil Nas X becomes the longest-running
No. 1 hit; Susan Choi and Sarah M.
Broom win the National Book Award
A n astronaut may be an unlikely cover star for a music issue,
but Dr. Ronald McNair, who was the first person to play an
instrument in space—the saxophone—and who died tragically
during the launch of the Challenger in 1986, lived a beautiful,
musical life. In the magazine, Jon Kirby, who is a Grammy-
nominated producer with the reissue label the Numero Group,
chronicles McNair’s life, starting with his upbringing in Lake
City, South Carolina.
In what would be his final introduction to an OA music issue,
Maxwell George writes, “Acknowledging, parsing, and reckon-
ing with this history”—the history and ramifications of enslaved
people arriving in the United States through Charleston—“is
the prominent theme of this South Carolina music issue—as is
celebrating the immense wealth of cultural heritage that has
sprung from this small, proud place.” One example is Zandria F.
Robinson’s essay “Sing Across the Ocean” on band Ranky Tanky,
whose song “Freedom,” which opens the South Carolina com-
pilation, adds “Gullah-inspired voices and sound signatures to
the slate of Black Lives Matter–era anthems.” Singer-songwriter
Marshall Chapman and rapper Benny Starr also contribute es-
says, as does electronic artist Diaspoura, who urges the Oxford
American to cease the practice of obtaining gratis song licenses
from musicians for the annual compilation.
In his introduction to the fourth music issue in 2000, Marc
Smirnoff wrote about the OA’s practice of producing compact
discs: “How long will we be able to keep it up? . . . Considering
the speed at which computer technology is revised, it is probably
unwise to think the same old things we’re doing now—or same
new things—will endure forever.” Two decades later, the 2020
music issue is the first to be published without a CD, though
contributors curated more than a dozen playlists. Likewise, no
gratis song rights were obtained for the production of the issue.
Timeline entries written by Kathy Bates, Eliza Borné, Danielle A.
Jackson, Jay Jennings, Sara A. Lewis, MiKayla Millard, Hannah
Saulters, and Irene Vázquez
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WINDGATE CENTER

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 P L AY L I S T S
Enjoy playlists curated by your favorite musicians and writers on the
Spotify app with the codes pictured throughout the magazine—find instructions
for scanning the codes on p. 160.

Visit oxfordamerican.org/playlists for bonus playlists and extended intros!

brittany howard
“The South Just Has a Thang,” p. 11

How does the South inform my music?

It’s just me.
You see, the South just has a thang.
It gets INTO you. It’s its own thing, its own culture. It
has its own sound. Everything in motion, wrangling to
survive like a tumble of vines. The air, pungent, so thick
with humidity it has a taste, it fills your senses. It’s hard not
to be informed by it when you are breathing it, swimming
in it. Even the way the light shines here is different. The
shadows here are different.

kiese laymon
“Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel),” p. 38

“Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Pre-
quel)” was the second essay I
wrote when I moved back to
Mississippi in the fall of 2015.
My editor Maxwell George
asked for a piece on OutKast to go in the Georgia Music
Issue. I had an idea to write this weird framed essay, but
I wasn’t sure the OA wanted an exploratory essay so I ini-
tially submitted a pretty conventional piece about Charlie
Braxton, the Mississippi legend who taught me how to hear
and write about OutKast. Maxwell said he dug it but he
wanted more. I wrote a piece about Aquemini’s influence
on my vision and art. Maxwell said he dug it but he wanted
more. The day the piece was due, I decided to write the
piece I wanted to write all along, exploring the way my
grandmother’s freshness was part of what made OutKast
so stank. Maxwell felt the draft, and to this day, “Da Art of
Storytellin’” is not only the best essay I’ve written, it’s the
only essay I’ve written that I’m sure is done. The OA gave
me space to fall in a different kind of love with Grandmama
and OutKast and the possibility of finishing art I started.
I’m really thankful for that. This exact playlist is what got
me through the revisions of the piece.

Illustrations by Three Ring Studio OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 155

 Taylor
Crumpton
Dallas Is
Different
Dallas producer and rapper FXXXXY was the
embodiment of the idyllic belief that our music
and culture could be embraced at a national
level—until he died on September 17, at the age
of twenty-five. Uncle Skitz, another star in the
Texas hip-hop scene who was never given his
flowers, died at the age of twenty-six on June 17. In
memory of FXXXXY and Uncle Skitz, I’ve selected
a collection of music by Dallas artists who reflect
the diversity within the city’s scene, in hopes of
giving them their flower while they’re still with
us. The Dallas sound is one of fluidity, yet we’re
all united by one force that inspires us to strive.
156 WINTER 2020
kelsey
waldon
Women of the
Rural Blues
The music on this playlist is what I would consider to be
part of the foundation of what we know as “country”
music today. What is the rural blues, one might ask? It’s
the country blues, the mountain blues, the Delta blues, the
hillbilly blues . . . it is country music. It comes from across
the Southern and Appalachian region from Kentucky, West
Virginia, and North Carolina to Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana. Reaching across all colors, regions, and back-
grounds, this music truly comes from one unified place in
the soul, and most of the time, a similar state of injustice,
struggle, and poverty. The mountain blues is really no
different than the Delta blues at the heart of it, and no
one knows this blues better than the women of its time.
silas house &
jason kyle howard
Our Southern Rivers
As Southerners we have a particular connection to our
rivers and the creeks that feed them. In Southern music,
water is often presented as both savior and villain, and
we know its power. Our Southern rivers have defined us
in remarkable ways—offering places of salvation to drop
a line and laze on the bank while we wait for a fish to bite,
cleansing spaces of baptism, portals to freedom—and
in sinister forms of rising floods, crumbling levees, and
passages to enslavement. In creating this playlist, we have
consciously avoided a quartet of masterpieces that should
show up on a larger comprehensive list: Johnny Cash’s
“Big River,” Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” Ike and
Tina Turner’s cover of “Proud Mary,” and John Prine’s
“Paradise,” although we could not resist including one
of the most famous of all, Louis Armstrong’s recording
of “Moon River.” What we have offered instead are songs
by some of our favorite artists that are more personal to
us, that fit together sonically and thematically—waters we
return to again and again for solace and renewal.
rosanne cash
“The Godmother of Soul,” p. 88
I read a lot of previous music issues of the Oxford American
for inspiration in creating this playlist. I also spent some
time digging into my own library. None of these artists are
completely new to me, but I went a lot deeper into indi-
vidual bodies of work and gained renewed appreciation for
them all. I had barely scratched the surface of Skip James’s
catalog before reading Peter Guralnick’s wonderful 1997
essay on him from the first music issue, which sent me on
a Skip James expedition. It’s been a revelation and a joy
to immerse myself in his music, and that of a few others
who were only familiar to me in a general way, as well as
artists who have been beloved to me for nearly my entire
life, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ry Cooder, and Charlie
Rich. There are some here whom I discovered very recently,
like Erin Rae and Erin Enderlin, a few as close as family,
and some actual extended family assimilated in the list. I
also included a track of my own, “Time,” which was first
released on an album of women singing the songs of Tom
Waits. (Forgive the self-dealing.)
These songs are quintessentially American and reflect
the astoundingly rich tradition of roots music, from soul
to folk, blues to gospel to country, and even one (“Elisha”)
that might be called a hybrid of country and punk. They are
all born out of longing, memory, craving, suffering, injus-
cynthia shearer
Celestial Jukebox
It all seems so quaint now, the idea
that a Rock-Ola jukebox could be a
core sample of human philosophies on
the menu in Mississippi. I came to the blues of Junior Kim-
brough and R.L. Burnside when I was curator of Faulkner’s
home Rowan Oak, playing their juke-joint tracks loud when
the tourists were gone, inside that old drafty house where
he had forbidden his daughter Jill as a teenager to have a
record player. I started my novel about Mississippi music
in the late ’90s about the time the first federal immigra-
tion judge ever to be posted to Memphis, Charles Pazar,
wandered into the home and he told me that people had
no idea of the volume of immigration from Mauritania, an
African country where slavery was still slightly legal. They
tice, and lust, and include
songs of freedom, revelry,
regret, and desire. They are
expressed through prisms
of our shared humanity,
from slave songs to the mu-
sic of the civil rights era, into post-modern country music.
One in particular, the Avett Brothers’ “We Americans,”
speaks to this very moment in our history, this excruciat-
ing season of upheaval and awakening.
We are all “running from ghosts,’” as Erin Enderlin sings,
but sometimes we run right into a beautiful mystery, and
sometimes that mystery, plus rhythm and rhyme, turns into
a song. I’ve collected together some of those mysteries with
backbeats, stories that rhyme, and voices that break your
heart or lighten your spirit, by some great and iconic art-
ists, as well as by those who are on their way to greatness.
Go deep and savor the remarkable gifts of these ex-
ceptional musicians—all you good rockin’ daddies, you
queens and saints, you who were born under a bad sign,
or live on straight street: you, my neighbors.
were settling in the Delta, he said, working hard in the
casinos. One of my first thoughts was of the potential this
had to influence American blues, and I was excited at the
prospect. In those years my friend Tom Freeland introduced
me to a lot of music. As the late, great Jim Dickinson kept
reminding us, world boogie was coming. The first finished
piece of my novel, a story called “The Celestial Jukebox,”
was published in the Oxford American. When the novel
came out, my publisher created CDs as gifts for book reps.
These many years later, I have a playlist that contains most
of those songs on Spotify, which is the real celestial jukebox.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 157
 clarissa brooks
The Heart of Black Disneyland

There is a place in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia, called Black

Disneyland. You can only go there one week a year; some
call it Spelhouse homecoming. It is the momentous return
of more than two hundred thousand alumni of Spelman
and Morehouse Colleges to a sacred corner of Atlanta in
celebration. Homecoming is a space and time that bends
to the world around it. Priorities are shifted and ego is
encouraged. Black modern glamour is the only currency
in this Emerald City replica that comes to life during the
busiest day of homecoming, known as tailgate.
There is a sea of black, all shiny, all robust, and all smil- you get to invent yourself anew or relive the glory days of
ing at you because you belong here. For a full twenty-four college in all of its naive youthful wonder.
hours you are no longer yourself. On this day of our Lord, Every old friend means a scream of high-pitched greet-
you are the ego-self, walking the tightrope between inse- ings for old times’ sake, hugs that restore, and lots of
curity and narcissistic leisure. dancing to the type of black joy that can only happen here.
There is brown liquor everywhere and nothing can go You are somewhere between West End Ave. and Lee St.
wrong today. It is 3 P.M. on a sunny and breezy Saturday in swirling in the delicious pleasure of today. You greet all
late October and you are drunk with your friends, cackling the friends, drink ravenously with people who kept you
about an ex that you haven’t seen since graduation. You alive, and swallow the bits of your beloved HBCU that
make the jokes and ignore the you that needs this moment, almost took you whole.
needs this taste of grandiose otherness here, back home.
This is gluttony on high. Everything is about perception and
this weekend you are going to make a mark. This weekend

smithsonian folkways
Folkways’ Greatest Hits, compiled by Jonathan Williger

With such a diverse the work of both Pete and Peggy Seeger, blues legend Big
archive to pull Mama Thornton, Mary Lou Williams, and the New Lost
from, and such a City Ramblers will walk you through musical history, ar-
rich musical land- riving with the 2019 release of “I Knew I Could Fly,” from
scape at large, the Our Native Daughters. Peppered throughout this playlist: a
act of constructing deep cut from Ola Belle Reed, a folk classic from New York
a “Greatest Hits” native Dave Van Ronk, and a track from Lucinda Williams’s
compilation is no 1980 Folkways debut. Though all of these tracks are folk-
easy feat. Though we centric, we encourage any eager listeners to take a sonic
know you will enjoy some of our tried and trues, such as stroll through the Folkways catalog. You’ll find anything
Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Lead Belly’s from whale sounds in the arctic circle to poetry read by
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” we hope this short list Langston Hughes and Leonard Cohen—and so much more.
is able to strike a balance between the tunes and talents OA
readers know best and a few new gems you’ll grow to love.
Of these seventeen selections from the Folkways catalog,

158 WINTER 2020

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 adia victoria
Not in this Life—Death, Secession, and Belonging in Southern Sacred Music

The South, to the uninitiated
eye, is a land where time ap-
pears to be at a standstill. Its
commitment to conservative
politics, Confederate monuments, and small-town values
occasions the rise of self-righteousness from the rest of the
nation. But those who were born and raised on this land
understand that the South is not a void of progress. It is,
more so, a land of separations and divine transitions. And
nowhere else is the constant desire to secede as pronounced
as in our sacred music.
Growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church in
Spartanburg, South Carolina, I was reminded of my sep-
arateness on a weekly basis. Following the Jewish Sabbath,
our family would turn off all technology, lights included,
every Friday before sunset and watch the light dim from
the sky beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. With the secu-
lar cleared from our grandmother’s home, God took his
rightful place—everywhere.
We brought in the Sabbath with hymns and songs passed
down through our bloodline. These songs concerned the
obedient pilgrim, the faithful Christian soldier facing down
the devil. The hymns filling our lungs were concerned, most
importantly, with the transcendence from this world to
the next. We understood our world as a waiting room, an
unremarkable stopover on the way to eternity.
But for all of my grandmother’s insistence that we were
divinely not of this earth, the very act of celebrating the
providence of our separateness located us neatly on the
trajectory of Southerners, holy and otherwise, whose art
was a reflection of the understanding that life in the South
is rough, often without grace, and, for many, hopelessly
unmoored. From the rambling bluesman dead set on becom-
ing a Baptist preacher so “he don’t have to work no more”
to the choir calling out and reaffirming “I’m going home,”
Southern sacred music is born of the need to belong. Its
lyrics reflect the hard truth that home has not been real-
ized on this land, not with these people and not in this life.
Death is almost summoned throughout the verses; it is seen
as a most-welcomed conclusion to a life that has been filled
with toil, unrest, and uncertainty. This acquiescence into the
arms of death keeps Southern folk apart from the patho-
logical optimism dominating American culture. Perhaps
we toiled too hard for nothing in these fields; perhaps our
belief in something better was worn out against the reality
of unyielding racism, corporate greed, and unscrupulous
politicians. Perhaps our eyes were watching God because
everything else around us made for a snapshot too painful,
too exhausting to rest our gaze upon.
As a child, I had to be pulled into the kind of separating that
the Sabbath required. As a woman whose understanding and
relationship with the South continues to open and deepen, I
understand how this transition from the secular to the sacred
provides an opportunity for understanding. The transitions
embodied in Southern sacred music are not evidence of
backwardness or lack of progress—they are the testimony
of folk who understood that seceding from this world was a
radical act of self-preservation. It allowed space for the kind
of clarity peace requires. Southern secular music is at its heart
a longing for the ceasefire of strife and conflict. In a world of
nonstop rigamarole, it is the desire to lay down one’s burden
down by the riverside. Southern sacred music, much like the
Sabbath, is an invitation to rest away from this world.

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There may not be as many bead-lined streets or second line

celebrations right now, but the culture of Baton Rouge has never
been stronger — because the heart of Louisiana lies within its
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